[Editor’s Note: I added a few paragraphs and a new picture to last year’s New Year’s Eve well-wishes. How many new ideas about New Year’s were you expecting, exactly?]
{Author’s Note: There is no editor.}
It’s the ancient stuff that gets us going. We paste our modern concerns over contemporary fetes and whoop it up, but it all goes back to the cave.
Hallowe’en. New Year’s Day. Christmas. Easter. Mardi Gras. Sometimes it appears you’re peering into a closed up shop through a grimy window, and way across the room, past the dust of centuries that lays on every surface, through the dim sepia light, you see another window grimier still. Through that one, who knows what you’d see? It’s lost to pen and ink, but it’s written in our marrow somehow.
Here are the goddamn words, by the way:
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind ? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne ?
CHORUS:
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp ! And surely I’ll be mine ! And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne.
CHORUS
We twa hae run about the braes, and pou’d the gowans fine ; But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit, sin’ auld lang syne.
CHORUS
We twa hae paidl’d in the burn, frae morning sun till dine ; But seas between us braid hae roar’d sin’ auld lang syne.
CHORUS
And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere ! And gies a hand o’ thine ! And we’ll tak a right gude-willie-waught, for auld lang syne.
CHORUS
It’s Burns. Robert Burns. But he didn’t make any bones about it. He told everybody he was just writing it down, that it was old, old, old. Auld, really. The title doesn’t translate readily into modern English. The closest idiomatic doppelganger I like is “For old-time’s sake.” In Japan, maybe you could drink old-time sake and sing along.
You can go to Wikipedia and get a translation, if drunken roaring latin/gael mishmash isn’t your thing or your Manx talkin’ friends don’t come over:
Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind ? Should old acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne ?
CHORUS: For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne, we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne. And surely you’ll buy your pint cup ! And surely I’ll buy mine ! And we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne. CHORUS We two have run about the slopes, and picked the daisies fine ; But we’ve wandered many a weary foot, since auld lang syne. CHORUS We two have paddled in the stream, from morning sun till dine; But seas between us broad have roared since auld lang syne. CHORUS And there’s a hand my trusty friend ! And give us a hand o’ thine ! And we’ll take a right good-will draught, for auld lang syne.
Everyone forgets the words, and belts it out any old way in a drunken, misty, stentorian bellow. That’ll do. But the thing they forget, the thing that really matters, are the question marks.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind ? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne ?
Go ahead. Ask a sane person: “Would you like a charming 1920s three bedroom craftsman?” Yeah, people hate charming, I’ve noticed. It’s right up there with free money and slender women with large bra sizes and tall, muscular men among things people hate. Free beer’s a non-starter too, I hear.
Now let’s look at the three things he says old houses can’t accomodate: -Updated electrical. Huh? To update the electrical in most older homes, it’s the service that gets changed from a 50 or maybe even 100 amp service panel to maybe 200 amps, if you have airconditioning needs or something. All of that happens between the pole and the service panel. 99% of that is outside. The other 1% is a new service panel in your utility room or basement or garage. It wouldn’t matter if your house is 500 years old or 500 minutes old. And is it convenience outlets that are in short supply? Well, if the bill for an electrician to install that — which is the first thing you learn to do when you’re an apprentice besides buying coffee for everybody — is too daunting, you need to buy a fainting couch and some candles. And if you mean “electronic” instead of electrical, a Cat 5 wire is about as complicated as telephone jack. -Solar Power Double huh? Where were you planning on installing those solar panels, HouseLust Dude? In the living room in lieu of a Persian carpet? It goes on the roof, and is basically never installed as original equipment on any house. Strike two. -Flexible Plastic Plumbing We’re way past “Huh? and into WTF? territory here. An old house can’t accomodate flexible plastic plumbing? Flexible plastic plumbing was invented for the EXPRESS PURPOSE of installation into existing housing. If you have to replace old copper plumbing (which is superior in most regards, by the way) you can snake plastic plumbing through the walls without disturbing existing walls or ceilings. And to hook up new plastic plumbing to any existing copper pipe all you need is a spade fitting sweated to the the existing pipe and off you go.
I’m back to considering hanging myself on the shower curtain rod reading this stuff. Let’s move on to the subtext.
“And once the paint dries inside a new Spanish colonial-style McMansion, running additional pipes, conduits, or wires necessary for an upgrade creates an ungodly mess — and a shocking bill. “It can be done, but you really need to want it,” says Kermit Baker, a Harvard economist who studies the remodeling market.”
We’ll skip right over the word that’s become a sort of hood ornament on the snob’s lexicon-Prius for someone else’s house: McMansion. We’re sniffing around the real reason people want a new house: The old one’s too small. They want and can afford a bigger house which doesn’t have a leaky roof. It has nothing to do with the author’s weird ideas about why people do things. The author hates that idea so he uses a pejorative to describe it. Look at who he goes to to get his advice on remodeling: A Harvard economist. Watch as the light dawns over two Marbleheads. Skilled labor is expensive. Who knew?
“A shocking bill.”
I can see these two clutching their pearls, horrified that unlike all the illegal immigrants they have cooking their meals, painting their house, mowing their lawn, and maybe wiping their children’s bottoms, an electrician and a plumber and a general contractor must be licensed by the state of Massachusetts where they live, and they’re legit, and insured, and can earn a decent wage — and under no circumstances do these champions of the little guy want to write them a check for doing something they themselves don’t understand. They make their living dispensing information with an eyedropper, and charging like it was a firehose. It’s anathema to them to pay anybody anything for hidden information — which normal people just shrug and call “expertise” and write a check for.
I’ve built and remodeled hundreds of houses and talked to thousands of people about it. And there really are only two kinds of people in this world. People who like to buy things, and people who like to have people make things for them.
The first group constantly talk about “evil corporations” but will never work in any setting or purchase any item which does not come from the corporate setting. I know the Harvard guy thinks Harvard is a sort of intellectual hot-dog stand, but it’s one of the most rapacious entities you could name. Its endowment dwarfs the entire budget of the state it resides in. And I noticed the author ain’t hardly self-publishing. The non-corporatism is of the “not in front of the servants” variety. When it’s time to write a check for the $60.00 an hour to the self-employed electrician to put in a convenience plug, don’t the arms get short? And you with those pockets so deep. And you’ll have to talk to the ruffians when they come over in a truck, and they haven’t even read Naomi Wolf’s latest book!
You can buy a great big flat-screen for your house made in a factory in Korea for $750.00 and hang it on the wall. It is a tremendous value, after all. But to the thing-based mind, shelling out any additional funds — egad! to a person — to wire a convenience outlet for it and install a dimmer switch in the room it’s in is like taking money outside and burning it.
I was always careful to put every bill to the pious wealthy in the form of a flat number. Any reference to the amount of time or the wages involved would never be featured. If you want this – it cost that. Period.
Those people in those McMansions? They were always nice. They lived as decently as they could afford, which is very decently indeed compared to my Kennedy-Johnson-age youth, it’s true. They aren’t made of money, and often do things themselves to save some, or just for the love of their home, which is, after all, an expression of their most profound ideas about life, family, and citizenship. And they were always glad to find anyone competent to help them realize their dreams for home and hearth, even if they are a tad ham-handed, and gladly paid those contractors to help them.
How dare the architects roaming the earth when Warren G. Harding was president not know that you wouldn’t be able to decide where to plug in your iMac from week to week. Something must be done!
I know all about you, Mr. HouseLust and your merry band of Harvard economists. You tell people someone should make furniture here in Massachusetts. Then you shop at IKEA.
Look, I know I’m supposed to be pleasant. But I’m having a hard time. Maybe I should commit ritual suicide instead of complaining.
Get the big knife Crissy!
I read an article at Wired called Home Sweet Gadget: How Our Technolust Helped Bring Down The Housing Market by Daniel McGinn, and it struck me as so profoundly shallow and ill-reasoned and ill-informed and… and… oh dear God in heaven forgive me but do they allow you to have a laptop on the short bus? The author is a BC grad and has an MBA. But I don’t think his family should let him out of the house without a helmet on.
Let me save you some time. His supposition is that “the US housing market is experiencing its sharpest downturn since the Great Depression,” and “Of course, the desire for high tech isn’t solely responsible for the bust (low interest rates and insane lending practices, anyone?), but it is surely a contributing factor.”
It’s a fool’s errand to try to torture his tortured logic in a coherent argument to laugh at; the whole thing reads like little more than a melding of pop-culture nonsense buzzwords like “bust” and “McMansion” and “technolust” mixed in with nursing home monikers for anything remotely electronic like “gewgaw” and “gadget.” Then he trots out “Dr. No” like it’s a cutting edge reference.
If I followed it through correctly, no one wants to live in a “charming 1920s three-bedroom craftsman..” because it ” …wasn’t built to accommodate all these new devices, much less modernized subsystems like updated electrical, solar power, or flexible plastic plumbing.” So according to him, builders haven’t built enough homes that have speakers in the walls, or some utility vaguely worthy of a 2.0 at the end of its name, and simultaneously no one bought those houses because there are too many of them. He didn’t explain exactly where everyone went, since they refuse to live in their old house but refuse to buy the new ones as well. I guess the WiFi signal under the bridge is so good that everyone is living there now, while bankers mow the lawns of their abandoned houses.
He’s got a book. Here, let me summarize: Snobs don’t like it when average people get their hands on decent stuff and big houses, and think they should know their place and go back to ranch houses with formica counters and two bedrooms. Also, if you go looking for neuroses out in the landscape, you’ll find them, especially if you bring along an ample supply of your own. The End.
Nothing he wrote makes a lick of sense. How do you get book deals and magazine gigs and write like that? Seriously, I want to know.
Bring me the big knife, Crissy, I’m going to kill myself.
I could jape at him, or poke holes in his logic, such as it is, or cavil about his facts, which aren’t factual, but I’m not going to. I will mention that his suggestion that homes need to be made into a sort of cross between a dorm room and an office cubicle should earn him a sentence of transportation. To another galaxy, preferably:
“Some architectural thinkers have begun to advocate adapting construction methods used for commercial office buildings to the residential housing market — dropped ceilings and raised floors allow for easier electrical and plumbing retrofits.”
Listen, the Victorians through the Eisenhower generation integrated electricity, the telephone, indoor plumbing, the automobile, the radio, television, central heating, and dozens of other more profoundly useful and game-changing utilities into their houses without breaking a sweat. The idea that housing is deficient because you’re such a lotus eater that you can’t find a place to plug in an Xbox is absurd. Most”gadgets” that can’t be integrated properly into the home easily are simply too poorly designed to be integrated with anything else. (You can always tell when someone’s typing on an Apple.) That’s the real problem, if there is one. And the reason there’s a bust in housing, which is nowhere near the apocalyptic size it’s described as, is that the dirt underneath the house is worth less, not the house.
“Some architectural thinkers.” Heh. Try that sentence with the emphasis on “some.”
Some architectural thinkers, huh?
(There’s a fascinating subtext in the article no one noticed. I did. More tomorrow.)
No; sleet. Sleet would finish the tableau. Rain is cleansing. It washes away the dirt and corruption. No snow either; the fat, jolly flakes just hide it all. Snow can make a fire hydrant into a wedding cake. I want sleet.
I want to pull my collar up, and hunch my shoulders as if blows from an unseen and merciless god were raining down on me. I don’t want a Christmas card. I want the Old Testament.
Old, or new – I knew it. Father and mother would open the Bible to a random page and place an unseeing finger anywhere and use it for their answer to whatever question was at hand. They’d torture the found scripture to fit the problem a lot, but it was uncanny how often that old musty book would burp out something at least fit for a double-take. But any Ouija Board does that, doesn’t it?
It was just cold and bracing. No sleet. I didn’t need to be clear-minded right now. Paul’s tip of the hat to the season, a sort of syphilitic looking tree, hung over your head as you entered the bar like it was Damocle’s birthday, not the Redeemer’s. It was kinda funny to see it out there, because inside it was always the same day and always the same time. Open is a time.
People yield without thinking in these situations. It had been years since I had found anyone sitting on that stool, my place. It was just understood, like the needle in the compass always pointing the same way for everyone. Paul never even greeted me anymore, just put it wordlessly down in front of me as I hit the seat. Some men understand other men.
It was already kind of late. I could bang on those machines like a Fury until the sun winked out, but I didn’t feel like working on Christmas Eve until the clock struck midnight. That’s a bad time to be alone and sober.
“I’m closing early tonight,” Paul said, and he didn’t go back to his paper or his taps. He just stood there eying me. I took the drink.
“You’ve made a mess of this, Paul,” I stammered out, coughing a bit, “What the hell is this?”
“It’s Ginger Ale. You’re coming with me tonight.”
I could see it all rolled out in front of me. Pity. Kindness. Friendship.
“No.” I rose to leave.
“You’ll come, or you’ll never darken the doorstep here again.”
Now a man find himself in these spots from time to time. There are altogether too many kind souls in the world. They think they understand you. They want to help you. But what Paul will never understand is that he was helping me by taking my money and filling the glass and minding his own. It was the only help there was. A man standing in the broken shards of his life doesn’t have any use for people picking up each piece and wondering aloud if this bit wasn’t so bad. They never understand that the whole thing is worth something but the pieces are nothing and you can never reassemble them again into anything.
I went. Worse than I imagined, really. Wife. Kids. Home. Happy. I sat in the corner chair, rock-hard sober, and then masticated like a farm animal at the table. Paul was smarter, perhaps, than I gave him credit for. He said nothing to me, or about me. His children nattered at everything and his wife placed the food in front of me and they talked of everything and nothing as if I wasn’t there… no, as if I had always been there. As if the man with every bit of his life written right on his face had always sat in that seat.
I wasn’t prepared for it when he took out the Bible. Is he a madman like my own father was? It’s too much. But the children sat by the tree, and he opened the Bible and placed his finger in there. I wanted to run screaming into the street. I wanted to murder them all and wait for the police. I wanted to lay down on the carpet and die.
“Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”
He put the children to bed, to dream of the morning. His wife kissed him, said only “goodnight” to me, and went upstairs. We sat for a long moment by the fire, the soft gentle sucking sound of the logs being consumed audible now that the children were gone. The fire was reflected in the ornaments on the tree. The mantel clock banged through the seconds.
“Do you want something?” he asked.
“Ginger Ale.”
Month: December 2007
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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