Dear diary,
We knew that yesterday was going to be the last warm day here for a while. By “warm” I mean above the point where water freezes. (I live in MN.) So we decided to go outside, to enjoy one final look at the things that exist. But the problem was that the forecast said it might rain. By “it” I mean the welkin. This meant that we could not ride our bikes. (It’s bad to ride a bike in the rain, because the chain gets rusty.) (The bike’s chain, not the rain’s. The rain’s chain never rusts.) So we fired up our motor-coach and drove to a faraway park that we’d never seen before. The place was gorgeous.
That’s all I have to say about our morning. It was uneventful, which means it was good.
There was only one other human at the vast, beautiful park. He was roller-blading around the car lot in circles. He didn’t acknowledge us. He was wearing sunshades. He kept his hands bolt forward as he coasted, as if he were in a warehouse where the electricity just got cut, so the lights went out, and nobody can see where they’re skating, so there’s a pileup at the roller derby. And at one point I saw the fellow jut both arms up in the air, as if he’d won the race. So who knows what was going on in that guy’s mind.
Then we got home and ate lunch. We had our standard: we eat the same meal every single day: boiled potatoes and a salad made from spinach leaves.
After lunch, the weather was still very nice. By “very nice” I mean passable. It was raining, but the temp was still warm. Yet to go on another walk did not appeal to us. Then I saw, out of the corner of my eye, in a newspaper ad, a photo of a huge stack of ugly supplies for home repairs, which reminded me of one of our many unfinished projects. So I said to my sweetheart:
“Why don’t we install that weather flashing, or whatever it’s called—those strips of vinyl that flap around the sides of the garage door? For winter is coming, and this way we can keep the mice out in the cold where they belong; I’m tired of them nesting on our property, they’re like Wall-Street protesters who think they actually deserve to share the same planet with us one-percenters; in fact, those rodents don’t even possess a soul: they’re like fish or cows or chickens, created by GOD for the purpose of being ruled by corporate lobbyists. Moreover, the weather forecast says it’ll freeze tomorrow; so it’ll be pleasanter to do that job this afternoon.”
And I was both right and wrong, regarding that last sentence: it’ll freeze tomorrow; so it’ll be pleasanter, etc. I was right, in that the welkin did indeed freeze. (For I am writing this on the morning after the described event. Therefore, spoiler alert, I did not die.) But I was wrong, in that the job was not very pleasant.
Everything about installing garage door weatherstripping is easy, except the part where your sweetheart purchases the wrong screws. That’s my thesis statement. Now I’ll provide some definitions and background, and then I’ll flesh out the argument:
First, why even embark upon a journey into the unknown? Because weatherstripping will keep your garage’s contents safe from the elements by providing a tight seal around its threshold: as any pamphleteer will tell you, it is “designed specifically for preventing dust, debris, and pests from getting in. Or human protestors, if you’re a billionaire living in an Age of Inequality… ancient Egypt; Belle Époque France; modern Earth… By the way, on eastern Long Island’s South Fork there is a string of seaside communities known as the Hamptons. I suggest you move there. For there are only two types of people in this life: those who move to the Hamptons, or those who storm it with pitchforks. It is the perfect destination for affluent New York City residents. And by ‘New York City residents’ I mean any corporate oligarch, domestic or foreign; especially the brutal dictators of the free world, known as ‘democratically elected leaders’.”
So, being sold on the idea of replacing our old, worn, frayed, ragged, tatty stripping with fresh stuff, I asked my sweetheart to stop and pick up supplies on her way home from music teaching: We needed one strip for the top of the garage and two for the sides; and plus some sort of fasteners so as to fasten them. My true love came home with three long strips of white vinyl, and a box of screws. I looked over the purchase and said, “The strips look great; but these screws are for inside jobs, we need exterior fasteners (maybe nails?); plus there’s not enough—there’s only 33 and we need 41.” (Coincidentally the same words uttered by our Heavenly Father in preparation for the crucifixion, yet with those last two numbers referring to years of life.) But my sweetheart assured me that the guy at the store, let’s call him Peter—better yet, Saint Peter—assured her that these were the very best fasteners for the task. So I said OK, and we began:
First we measured the old wooden boards that were there already; and we transferred these measurements to the new vinyl, marking its precious white surface with our greasy pencil. Then we cut into the flesh of the vinyl with our utility knife, following the markings we had made. Next we pried away from the garage frame all the old wooden boards that had elastic rubbery flaps nailed onto them: this ugly amalgamation would be replaced by our single vinyl mold. Finally we hoisted the first long plank of new stripping over the top of the frame, and fed the first screw halfway…
But the screw became stripped.
Now here is why I usually try to avoid recounting the true episodes of my day and prefer to stick to philosophizing, daydreaming, offering metaphysical speculations, introspective analyses — I’d rather share the THOGHTS that I’m enjoying than explain the actual FIASCOES that I endure: Because I’m in control of my…
No, I only derailed here because I’m annoyed at having to articulate the difference between the two types of stripping: weather stripping and screw stripping (there are no other forms). The “strip” aspect of the vinyl planks that I’m talking about refers to their long, slender quality: like a strip of birch bark or flannel fabric, or a strip of flesh ripped from Christ’s bare back by the whip of the Father. Whereas the “strip” aspect of a screw refers to it losing its grooves: At birth, a screw possesses something like a plus sign (“+”) on top of its head, like the Tau (or “mark”) from Ezekiel 9:4 “And the LORD said unto him, Go through the midst of the city, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof,” or like the sign of the cross, which is a torture device that the Heavenly Father employed to murder his Son (the aforementioned Christ); now this plus sign (“+”) is branded upon the brain-case of the screw, so that a driver with the same shape to its blade (the opposite side of the shank from the handle) may fit inside of the grooves. The tool’s male end fills the void of the female plus, and torque is applied. This act is called screwing.
But if the tip of the tool moves too fast with not enough pressure, it can slip from out of the socket and scrape the walls of the void while it spins, thus eating away at its border until the plus (“+”) becomes an oh (“o”): now there is nothing for the screwdriver to grip.
So here we are, standing outside our garage, and all our neighbors are staring and laughing at us, because there’s this long white strip of vinyl hanging down from the top corner of our entryway, and it’s held by one thin screw—an interior screw, mind you: petite and eminently strippable—the first we tried to fasten. Our predicament resembles that fun parlor game for children called “Pin the Tail on the Donkey,” with our long white dangling vinyl strip as the tail, and our garage as the ass.
Your childhood friend throws a birthday party at his house. On the wall is pasted a picture of a tail-less donkey, also known as a burro, or (in the King James Bible’s nomenclature) an ass. (I used this latter term above, to avoid saying donkey twice in a row: “a domesticated hoofed mammal of the horse family with long ears and a braying call, used as a beast of burden”: jackass, jenny; mule, hinny… Also “a stupid or foolish person”—but that’s alternative, informal…) Each individual attendee, in turn, is handed a shock of hair with a pin at one end, and informed that “Your only purpose in life is to try to fasten this tail to the rump of the beast in the picture.” Then the adult of the house, who is serving as the party’s impresario—in this case, the birthday boy’s mother—blindfolds the contestant and spins him around in a circle, so as to disorient her victim. While stumbling drunkenly about with tail-pin extended, the challenge for this newly sightless vagrant is to avoid stabbing the eyes of…
Long joke. Wrong move. Keep focused: You were telling about your difficulty in unscrewing the stripped screw from the stripping. Remember? The very first fastener that you tried to affix malfunctioned halfway. Just like all those books that you keep trying to read: you listed them in your last entry: you said that you can’t manage to get to the end of any of them, for your spirits have fallen; books no longer appeal to you now as they did in your youth – back then, you could rip through a 9,000-page novel in just an evening: you would read for sixty hours at a stretch… but now it feels like: “What’s the point?” —& YET: When did I start caring about life having a point? This is a pataphysician’s true nadir: to look for a POINT in existence. Recall those lines from Stevens: The bird sings. Its feathers shine...
But the thing that bothered me so much about this impasse (I mean the part of the storybook that depicts my sweetheart and me posing like dopes in front of our garage with this comically long, conspicuously bright white vinyl strip flopping roof-to-ground from our non-removable screw) is that it was not my fault, but the whole thing LOOKED like it was my fault. Additionally, just minutes after the error occurred, our neighbor’s garage, which is so near to ours that it shares the same fascia, lifted mechanically, as its automatic opener had been triggered by remote control, and our neighbor soon rolled forth in his silver truck and pulled in and parked; then he got out and said, “What’s up!” and we cast our troubles at his feet, weeping; and he said, “I’ll be right back.” —Now, what struck my ear is that our neighbor delivered that last phrase exactly as Officer Duke says it in the film Wrong Cops (2013) after Officer Rough plays his new track and Duke pans it and Rough disagrees and says he’ll seek a second opinion. The humor of this scene, when you watch it for the hundred thousandth time, is that you realize, after Duke labors himself up off the sofa and tells Rough to expect his return, that he intends to fetch from his police car’s trunk the dying man whom earlier he “shot by accident”—for Duke’s notion of an adequate appraiser for Rough’s new song is this half-conscious fellow, who, when Duke popped his trunk earlier that day intending to “throw the body in the river,” instead of proving dead, proved still alive, and this breathing-yet-terminally-injured citizen asserted sincerely, upon beholding Officer Duke when the car’s trunk opened, that he not only heard but really liked the music that Duke was playing on the radio of his police vehicle. (The insinuation is that therefore this dying man must have pretty good taste.)
Now my neighbor (not the dying man from Wrong Cops but the guy who lives next-door to me) returns and offers me this fantastic metal contraption, which he explains is some sort of portable vice clamp. I didn’t know how to use it, so I fumbled with it when he handed it to me; but my neighbor kindly and patiently gave me instructions, and I caught on quick; but in my nervousness, after clamping the vice to the head of the bald-stripped screw, I turned it the wrong way; so my neighbor had to remind me “Righty tighty, lefty loosey.” This has nothing to do with our political leanings, left-wing right-wing. Tho, on second thot, it could illuminate all the secrets of the Class War as well. But it’s gist is: if gazing down on a screw from Jehovah’s perspective—that is, from on high—so that you are looking at the screw’s head and not at its side, if you turn it RIGHT it gets TIGHT (meaning clockwise, as opposed to counterclockwise) whereas turning left will make it loose. As it is written:
Damn, braces: Bless relaxes.
That’s from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake. But this last proverb has little to do with physical tool-work; it’s more about how we screw each other by being religious bigots.
So the vice clamp did the trick. And we decided to drill holes before trying to affix the new screws. I call these screws “new” because we set aside the interior dainty ones that didn’t work: we decided to use exterior screws made specially for outdoor applications. Sturdy, galvanized, rust-proof.
So by the time we got back from making an emergency screw-run at the old Mega Mall (which is what we native Minnesotans call the Mall of America, which is the largest shopping center in the northern universe), it was dark out. The welkin had closed. Or rather the sun had said fuck this. So we had a dilemma: Do we finish the installation now, when it’s pitch black outside, amid the murderers thieves pimps zombies & rapists who lurk all night outside our abode? OR should we wait until morning to finish the job, when it’ll be bright, as the sun will have once again shouted its gut-felt farewell to the other side of the earth...
“However,” my neighbor was still standing outside while we were deliberating about this, so he offered his council, “it’s sixty degrees right now—practically balmy for this region—and tomorrow will be freezing: I heard low teens.”
Low teens: he was right. It’s twelve degrees now, as I compose this. It’s the morning after. All these measurements are Fahrenheit, by the way (I hope you didn’t think I meant sixty Montague, or twelve degrees Capulet). But now I realize that twelve is not a low teen: it’s one step below THAT: it’s even sub-low teen: for thirteen’s the lowest teen possible. There’s only seven teens, total: nineteen’s the last. So twelve no more belongs to the teens than twenty.
Anyway, we kept on working into the night: we finished the job, and we didn’t get killed. But our neighbors—not the wise handyman above, but the family that lives on the other side of us: to our right, if we’re standing and facing our garage’s new stripping—I say, our other neighbors have more children than Father Abraham, so they get tons of Christmas gifts delivered to their house via different delivery services, all day long—they even left a big sign out in their yard: “Leave all packages inside the gate, thank you!”—so while we were toiling in the murky dark attaching the vinyl to our garage, the mailman pulls up in his familiar boxy white government mail truck, and parks right in front of us, in our driveway, because our neighbors’ cars were blocking their part of the drive, and the mail truck’s headlights blasted us like floodlights: like a spotlight on two criminals escaping from jail. At that instant, I was poised on a wooden ladder, which was designed for use by painters NOT weatherstripping installers, so I’m sure I appeared suspicious; and the cordless drill that I was using as a power-screwdriver looked just like a pistol in my hand.
I wish Edward Hopper could’ve painted us, in that precise moment. But I suppose our tableau contained too much Action and Suspense! to fit among his customary subjects... I live an exciting life.
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