Mid-inspection thots

Dear diary,

Yesterday was difficult because the buyer’s official inspection of our apartment was scheduled to take place from 9 a.m. to noon. So not only did we have to leave our house early and stay away till after lunch, but, before leaving, we had to make sure our whole hellscape was shipshape. And although we tried to make the wait pleasant by going to our favorite park to walk, I couldn’t get my mind off the thought that something bad is happening somewhere, which ominous event is out of anyone’s control.

“Who are you? What are you doing in Ruth’s apartment?”

“She’s letting me stay here. I’m her niece; my name’s Betty.”

“No, it’s not; that’s not what she said. Someone is in trouble. Something bad is happening!”

[—dialogue from Mulholland Drive (2001), written by David Lynch]

But why do I always assume that only evil will occur? Haven’t I lived in this here place for eighteen years without any problems? Yes, but there’s more to heaven and earth than is contained in our philosophy, Horatio. And one never knows if the home inspection is going to result in a simple judgment, like “Change the smoke alarms; that’s all,” OR if the request will be more demanding: “Oh I didn’t realize that your apartment has no a sauna in its kitchen—please have a sauna installed in the kitchen, next to the icebox area of the igloo playroom. Wait—where’s your igloo playroom!?”

So when we returned home, there was a business card on the table introducing Inspector Kevin from the outfit Inspectionz Protectionz, whose boast is “Over 70,000 inspectionz performed per moment!” Also there was a neon orange tag hanging from the doorknob of our bedroom’s entryway warning us: “RADON TEST IN PROGRESS”; beneath which was a list of Ten Commandments:

1. Do not open any windows. ALL windows on ALL floors (NOT just the basement) need to remain closed, at ALL times.
2. Do not use your exterior door excessively (brief, periodic entry and exit only).
3. Thou shalt not use any fireplace.
4. Thou shalt not use whole-house fans or high-volume attic fans.
5. Thou shalt not touch, cover, or alter the the Radon Detector.

And in a corner of our bedroom, next to the saint-white dresser, a tripod has been erected. I do not mean a three-legged cauldron, which our ancestors used in ancient days to make offerings to the gods; no, I mean the kind of tripod that you’d employ to support a recording apparatus (audiovisual). And this tripod is topped by a mysterious rectangular contraption—it is neither possible to discern what this obscure object of desire looks like nor what it’s made from, because a vinyl tarp has been draped and snapped around its abdomen. Also extending from the side of this secrecy is an antenna, whose extremity terminates in a semiconductor device, which keeps intermittently emitting bursts of light: about every couple seconds a bright flash illuminates the room, like the bulb of a camera. So my hypothesis is that they installed a time-lapse Polaroid, or some other optical instrument for capturing images. I believe they aim to make a stop-motion night-film of us while we are asleep. So they’re not testing for radon at all – they’re conducting a cinematic experiment.

But our realtor warned us that radon is a problem in Minnesota. Apparently it gets generated “naturally” underground and then seeps into your abode and gives you the cancer. Apparently, if it weren’t for everyone’s unquenchable enthusiasm for secondhand tobacco smoke, radon would be the leading cause of lung disease. So it’s important to test our apartment for radon before the next owners move in; because we don’t want them to die, ever. It’s fine to let ME bathe in a pool of radon for two decades, but now, if the test detects harmful levels of the carcinogen, we’ll have to drill down beneath the concrete foundation of our home, past the frost line, and install a pipe that will run from underground thru the middle of our house and terminate beyond our roof – the idea is to bypass the living inhabitants and blow the harmful gas up out the top of the house. Exactly the opposite of the intention of modern capitalism.

That’s my understanding of what we were told; if I’ve got anything wrong, please understand that I don’t care: I’m not trying to convey any accurate information here; I’m just clicking the keys on my computer, discovering how much of the recent past I misremember, for no other reason than to ruin my own damn morning. For it’s now the next morning. As I said, the inspection happened yesterday, and today I’m relaying all the gossip and rumors to you, as Agent Cooper relays his findings to Diane, via some sort of Dictaphone, in the series Twin Peaks. (I’m talking about the first season, from 1990.) So I picture you as the beautiful woman who lives in my diary. But I’ll never depict you visually—that’d be immoral. The 2017 season of Twin Peaks included Diane as a character visible onscreen, played by an actor: that was a misstep; I say she should always remain unseen. As it says in the Radon Rules:

Thou shalt not make unto thee any image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above; for I, the LADY in the Radiator (which is, being interpreted, any diary or journal, including the everlasting palimpsest: imagination) from the film Eraserhead (1977), unlike the LORD, am not a jealous God (Exodus 20:4-5) but an introverted Muse. So I’d prefer, whether you paint me nude and reclining, or descending a staircase, that you hide the masterpiece – hollow out a portion of the wall of your apartment, slide the artwork in there, and reinstall fresh gypsum board over the top. Mud it and sand it, then paint it. Nobody will guess that your abode is hiding a treasure. It’s like the human skull: not even its owner knows what potentials it holds. Now sell your apartment and go live somewhere else. Buy a place in, say, West Bloomington – all the houses there are fine. And when you sit in your new living room, meditate on the portrait of me which you created, and which you secured away from the vulgar world. It’s more exquisite as a remembrance than it would have been, had you mounted the thing like a pair of turkey spurs. Text alone is worth saving, because its substance only exists in each individual mind. Its physical properties—book, ink, figures—are simply coordinates that lure curious ghosts to that location in the wall, so they can pass thru and marvel.

The reason I had my muse direct me to purchase a house in West Bloomington is that that’s where we went to walk yesterday (during the home inspection): I’d never really studied that neighborhood before; but we had a lot of time to kill, so we went to and fro, and strolled up and down among its residences. And I realized that THAT’s my most beloved city. Until yesterday, I didn’t have a favorite. We’re trying to remain close to Burnsville, because of our cursed jobs; and everywhere else we looked had some problem or other. One place had, in between every house on each block, ancient apartment buildings with wooden panels in their windows. And another city vaunted decent houses, but they were all just a little too enormous, and they were spaced so that there was less than an hairsbreadth between one dwelling and the next. And there was one mini-mansion in our price range, and it was located at the end of a cul-de-sac in a ritzy neighborhood; but all the other homeowners were out manning the ends of their driveways when we drove past to look, and I could tell that these affluent elders do nothing all day but stand and stare and judge; so if we bought that nice big house, we’d be asking to be positioned upon a pedestal before the rest of the townsfolk: and they’d say things like “You missed a spot, over by that rock, when you were mowing your yard-hill today,” and that variety of torment doesn’t appeal to me.

But West Bloomington features nothing but single-story houses, all with flat roofs (easy to maintain), and the spacing between the dwellings is passable (not ideal, but I’m willing to accept it), and the yards are mostly flat and not too expansive. And, depending on which house we manage to nab, we might end up living directly across the street from Kingdom Hall!!!!! That’s what Jehovah’s Witnesses call their mosque. So I could visit them daily & offer them a free copy of my own holy scripture which I wrote all by myself and inquire of them if they’d mind if I stopped by again, later today or tomorrow, to talk to them about this important literature.

Yes, I like West Bloomington so much that I’d even participate in its local politics. If let into their zone, I’d be the best of citizens: First I’d run for city goose-whisperer. Then I’d tame all the atheists and give them wilder hairstyles…

Tame their soul and enwild their hair? What am I promising—the merely possible? I just mean to confess to you, dear LADY, what I remarked to my sweetheart when we were walking around the bend at the end of the block and had almost reached the place where our hybrid was parked (the saint-white chariot that we employ to hunt down real estate)—I said: “Not till now could I grasp why someone would run for office in a town and declare ‘I am seeking such-and-such office because I love this town and want to serve its people’ – yet now I understand this impulse wholly: for I could say, without irony, that I’d gladly accept any position in government that the people would vote me into, and I’d serve them earnestly, without compunction, because I really like the layout of this parish.”

And I was pleased by the fact that I did not see very many pets—no barking dogs in the lawn or even kitties in the window. (Not that I dislike living creatures, but I think that pet ownership is a type of slavery, so it makes me sad to see it.) There was only one animal on the front step of one of the domiciles—it was not chained or leashed; it seemed calm and at will to roam yet content to loaf—and it was unclear exactly what species this beast belonged to: it was tall as a man, and thin—its thighs were about the thickness of a python—yet it stood on all four limbs like a horse; and its large round eyes were as black as twin starless moons; and its face presented a melancholy expression, as if it had just finished reading one of Wordsworth’s “Lucy poems”. And before it passed beyond our field of vision, I saw it move – one at a time, its appendages sashayed with natural ease, very gracefully, like the legs of a model of nightgowns.

And what else? It seems like there were more things that I loved about the city. Ah, now I remember: I liked the silent streets: zero traffic, zero cars. And the sidewalks were curvaceously unorthodox. And the streets are named in alphabetical order, thus making their navigation a cinch, by which term I do NOT mean a tightly fastened gird but rather an easy task, a simple job, a walk in the park, a dead certainty, a sure thing: a doddle, a pushover.

And there were very few shops. Which is good, for I hate shops.

Lastly, out of the ten thousand dwellings that we passed on foot, we encountered just one single soul working outside her house. She was crouching at the street corner, holding a garden tool, digging dirt. When we approached, she smiled & said “Hi!” Now this is the type of behavior that I like to see in a community: politeness.