I do not “get out much” on the Internet anymore. At least not as much as I used to. But I couldn’t help but notice that many of my Internet confreres have included me in the “tell me what’s on page leventyleven” book meme.
I am gratified, of course, to be thought of. But of course I can’t just cooperate. I’m a weirdo. If you must know, my house is like a nest of books. There are piles of them everywhere. Shelves depend from the ceiling; rise up from the floor. These stalagtites of text, stalagmites of print, and encrustations of illustration are too loopy to be of much interest to anyone else, I imagine. And the one gaping void has always been the same for me: I don’t read fiction. I practically never have. That’s what you’re all interested in, I know it, and I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. I do not have a subscription to any newspapers or magazines, either, now that I think of it. We own screens, but we can’t watch broadcast or cable television on any of them. I told you I was strange, but you don’t listen.
But there were many that expressed an interest. Let me see if I can be of some help. That first picture shows you the pleasantest where where you can read at my house. You should have a place like that in yours. A place of quiet contemplation, with the world just over your shoulder out the window. A light and a clock and a place for your drink. My wife reads here often while she listens for her child to fall asleep down the hall. Here’s what’s on the shelf over it.
My older son is in the seventh grade. He’s interested in most of the things his peers are. He’s very popular, which I can’t figure out. Must be like his mother; everybody likes her.
We cobbled together a computer out of busted and obsolete PCs we had in various closets for him and his brother to use. I found him heroically trying to produce animation with stick figures in Pivot, and then trying to compile them in off the shelf Windows Media. He had no help. Amazing. He is happy as a passenger on the ones and zeros bus, playing Halo with his friends, but I can see he wants to drive the bus already, too.
We used my computer, which is decidedly not well-equipped to produce video– but at least has a processor from this century in it– and we made a video together after his little brother and his mother went to sleep last night. Stayin’ up late making things.
Top o’ the morning to ye, Sippicanite. Or Sippicanette, as the case may be. If you use that third bathroom at the alternative bookstore, please write to me and tell me what suffix to use to greet you properly, too. We’re nothing if not mannerly around here.
It’s a long road that has no turning, as they say, so let’s turn the corner on this window box thingie, and get back to despoiling the internet landscape with our opinion on other matters, shall we?
Well. Well, well, well. Now you’ve had plenty of advice, up to now. What with me grinding away, your neighbor coming over to critique your sawhorses, and the helpful teenager at the Big Orange Place explaining to you politely that he doesn’t think they sell four inch long, galvanized screws that are already bent. Of course, if you like, he’ll get on the intercom, and summon someone in charge to ask. You can always tell who’s in charge down there, they’re the only one amongst the clerks who can shave, either their chin or their legs, respectively.
You think you’ve gotten advice up to this point? Hold on, dear reader, for the onslaught of unsolicited opinion, for you are about to paint something.
Now people who are willing to help you paint something are a smaller proportion of the population than even the people who need that third bathroom I mentioned earlier. But everyone is ready to tell you how to do it. Actually, that’s imprecise. They mostly are prepared to tell you how you did it wrong, and ” back in ‘______’ we don’t do it that way,” after you’re done. And you missed a spot.
Now I used to paint things for a living, mind you. Small, quotidian things at first. Big, elaborate things later. And believe me, I’ve heard it all. I once painted a trompe l’oleil mural, in a mansion, and the roofer came in, filthy, unshaven, swearing, with a cigarette sporting two inches of ash dangling in the corner of his mouth, and he offered me advice. Now I suspect that his experience with two point perspective and faux marble might have been, how do I put this politely, not absolutely top shelf.
But shame on me. Perhaps I’ve got two many preconceived notions about folks who use @#$! as a verb, a noun, an adjective, an adverb, and the object of a prepositional phrase, all in the same sentence. Maybe I should have given him the benefit of the doubt. I might have missed the day he was on the Today Show and got his Lifetime Achievement Award for Decoration, along with his honorary degree from the Sorbonne.
“Why the #$%! is this like this?” He said . “I wouldn’t do this in my #$%!-ing house.”
Really, do tell. The one in the south of France, or the other one?
So take it from someone who’s been paid to render an opinion on paint. Everyone’s going to offer an opinion for free. And I doubt anyone is going to give you the counsel I’m about to.
Pick out a nice color in a water based, low lustre house paint. Open the can. Stir it until you get bored. Get a disposable 3 inch brush. Slap that paint right on the wood. Twice. you’re done.
The horror! No primer! No sanding! No expensive flag tipped tynex/orel brushes! You visigoth you.
Now trust me, it doesn’t matter. It won’t peel. Let me take that back. It might peel, but if it’s going to, because of the sun and rain and snow, it will no matter how you finish it. Remember, it’s supposed to look weathered and simple, not fussy. So don’t bring fussy into it. But here’s the hard part: Don’t make a mess. Paint never really looks right if you make a mess. Being neat is not fussy. Leave the shrubs and the siding out of it. And don’t paint it a color that competes with the flowers.
All paint brands are about the same, if you compare like for like, product-wise. Gaudy claims from the manufacturers about this or that characteristic are generally true, but one is 99% something or other, and the others are 98%, and it’s not worth worrying about.
Except one thing. Pigment cost money. Both the kind of pigment in the paint, and the very expensive pigment they use to print the sales brochures. And if there’s any difference between the brands that matters, it’s almost always the quality of the sales brochures, and sophistication of the colors. And getting rich, earthy sophisticated tones for paint requires a sophisticated approach to the pigments. Cheap paint makes grey by mixing lamp black with white. It wears well, and applies easily, but it’s Just Grey. Better paint has people educated in color, researching combinations, and using four pigments to achieve Grey. Rich Sophisticated Grey. And you can use their materials to find color combinations that don’t look like they belong in a trailer park. Just stay away from the color chip displays that look bland overall from a distance. You’ll be fine.
First, soak the innards with raw linseed oil. When that soaks in, put in some more. It will keep the water in this box of mud we’re keeping from immediately wicking into the carcass of it and speeding up its inevitable decline. Now, lay a piece of window screening in the bottom of the box, to keep the good soil from slowly sifting out through the neatly drilled holes you put there. Then put a thin layer of something that will keep the drainage good in the bottom so the roots don’t rot. I use a couple of trowels of gravel from the driveway, but anything will do if it lets water drain free. They sell nifty styrofoam pellets now, of the sort that nurseries have been using for years to mix in their soil to keep it from caking. They work well, and don’t weigh as much as gravel. Then the peat and the poop, mixed with good garden soil. And in go the geraniums, and the vinca vine. Or Boston Ivy. Put the vines nearer the front of the box, and it will droop nicely over the canted cap we put on the front of the box for just that purpose. Or you choose the flowers. Who am I to give you advice?
By the way, that’s me behind the flash, mirrored in the darkened window. I think I look great in the photo, don’t you? I should have my picture taken like that all the time. Now you know what I look like.
Now you’re wondering how we chose our color. Well, we chose it because its name, and its delicate tone, conjured up images of ancient babylonian temples, washed by the biblical sun to a delicate ivory; or perhaps the color of the finest cheese, labored over by the flinty Vermont farmer, and seen in the rich, clear beams of the first sunshine of the farm workday, filtered through the mist in the meadow; or perhaps evoking a panorama of wheat, languidly waving in the gentle breeze, stretching to the horizon on the rolling plains of Tuscany, and crowned by the regal Mediterranean sun.
Ben Moore named it “182.” Get some. You’ll love it.
Will you thumb through the pictures when I am gone?
Will my face, made careworn and tired, be restored in your mind’s eye? I cannot know what it was you ever saw in me. I cannot understand how you could know that when I said those things all people say to one another, almost without thinking, that I would really mean them. I said it and only half believed it myself, uttering such extravagant pledges of dubious value. Not for want of them being true. But I am unreliable.
There is nothing in this world but to love, and be loved in return. In a hundred years the most important man you ever met is anonymous. In a thousand everyone is. We cobbled together a life around the table where we break the bread, and for a few thousand times we were as one. I saw your face in our children’s faces. You said you saw mine. The universe passed the plate, and we put in our offering. We are poor, but it’s enough for anyone to give. No man could do more. No man could ask for more.
I remember when I was lying on the bed like a dead thing, and you came into the room and thought I was asleep. I wasn’t asleep; I was gone from sight, and sound, and lost in a fever. I lay there in a puddle of sweat and more; my very life coming out of every pore, leaving nothing but a husk where a man used to be.
And you kissed me. I remember.
Month: February 2008
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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