We also hereby offer an exemption to our No Lionel Ritchie Edict of 1998 — Brick Houses Of The Holy:
(Dedicated to my friend Andy S.)
My wife and I go out for a walk most days.
She goes out more than I do. I have bad feet. Three times a day is common for her. There is a substantial grid of quiet streets near us with sidewalks, and you can simply walk in the road most of the time. Rumford is the county seat, but it’s hardly a metropolis. Whenever I walk, I mostly look at dwellings, and my wife looks for gold finches.
I’ve built a lot of stuff. Houses, too. I’ve repaired more houses than I could count. I know all about them. I repaired houses while the occupants were living in them, especially, so I was privy to exactly how people actually use their houses. I painted the privy, too.
The single-family home is the most interesting thing about the United States, outside of the people who have inhabited it. Well, it was, anyway. Since houses are the sticks-and-bricks manifestation of people’s wants and dreams and desires and idea of comfort and mores and habits and taste and style, they are more telling than any thousand autobiographies would be. People lie to their therapist. What chance does an interviewer have? I went to Mount Vernon and I knew the guy.
Rumford is mostly dreary to look at. It was always a utilitarian place; a big, hulking paper mill squatting over the river was the entire reason for the place, after all. But it was handsome, once, at least part of it. There were whole streets of big Victorians with turrets and bays and rambling porches.
The picture at the top of the essay is the only truly beautiful structure we go by on one of our short walks. It was an animal barn, and is now a garage, but as far as I can tell no one uses it. All the other buildings we pass, dwelling or outbuilding alike, have been so defaced by the occupants “fixing” them that they are only barely recognizable as what they once were. The houses are entirely maimed, and you can trace the evidence of the endless procession of snake-oil no-maintenance energy-saving eco-friendly con-men through time written on their facades, now exposed by the inevitable neglect presaged by the original desire for a free lunch. The layers flap in the breeze like an archaeology dig.
Oh, the durability of paint improved with wonderful lead! If you have spiders, put a slug of mercury in it, too! Cover up that nasty, chalking, lead paint with asphalt tab sidewall shingles! Save energy with our new asbestos siding! Cover up that nasty asbestos siding with space-age aluminum siding! Get rid of that nasty old, dirty, dented, faded aluminum siding and put eco-friendly vinyl siding! Who needs windows when you can have little plastic hatches shoved into the holes where the windows used to be?
It’s such a pleasure to walk by the unusual place where the occupants were too lazy and cheap to even wreck their home properly. I can fix a house that isn’t fixed.
I use an inexpensive MP3 player hooked up to a set of computer speakers to listen to music while I work. Since the entire rig has no moving parts, more or less, it continues working despite the dust and corruption floating around in there. (‘No moving parts, filled with dust and corruption’ reminds me of the Massachusetts Department of Motor Vehicles for some reason)
The machines are noisy and I’m often wearing earmuffs, so I can listen to the same hundred songs a hundred times because I never hear them all all the way through, anyway. I never pay any attention to what is on there, I just sweep whatever’s on the desktop’s desktop into the nasty little device and off I go. All I can attest is that it’s slightly better than the sound of the buzzing ballasts in the fluorescent lights.
There are multiple items from most on there. There’s rather a lot of Mozart and Morrison and Green. The Bach’s on a guitar, the only way I can abide it. Random’s best. There’s just something about Cake followed up by Respighi that should float anyone’s boat.
I’m forced to dabble my finger in the turds of the media looking for kernels, just like everybody else. I’m a businessman and need to know what’s what. I can only find out things by inference or by tough experience, though. No one that gets paid to talk about things knows anything. Even if they did, they can’t write. Even if they could, they wouldn’t write anything but propaganda.
But people can be observed, even at a distance, filtered through the septic tank of the media. I like people. Not ‘people’ in the aggregate. I like persons. The People is a lynch mob on a bad day. I’m a person, and I like other persons.
I especially like American persons. America is the most interesting place in the world because it’s just the whole world in one place. We should abolish the United Nations because it’s too narrow a slice of humanity, and just give America its own reality TV show instead.
So, person to person, I don’t know about you, but I’m weary of being ruled — not governed, mind you; governed is in the rear-view mirror, and fading — ruled by a gaggle of metrosexual car salesmen, slovenly ward heelers, and soi-disant intellectuals that can’t operate an apostrophe, never mind something substantial and commendable like a dry cleaners or a brothel.
Wait, never mind, I do know about you. I pay attention to you, the anonymous and the friend alike, because it it my business to know about you. I have to try to understand you well enough to get you to read my writing and put your porridge or your Perrier down on the tables I make. And I’ve never seen everyone as desperate and anxious as they are right now. I’m less anxious and desperate than your average citizen only because everything bad has already happened to me. You’re right to worry, it’s not fun. I lived as an almost-adult in the seventies, and that was pretty bad, but it’s much worse now. The seventies came with its own anaesthetic. We succumbed utterly to malaise. We gave up. No use squirming in the electric chair, after all. Eventually they took the boot off our necks and we had a pretty good run. It’s different now.
The economy is like a traffic jam and an accordion. Most traffic jams have no reason to be. There are lots of cars, humming along. Then someone gets nervous and taps the brakes. Even in a benign business climate, the commerce cars veer from lane to lane, lock up the brakes and exaggerate the effect of the first gentle tap on the pedal from the guy up ahead. The accordion is squeezed, and makes unpleasant noises. Of course they’re unpleasant; it’s an accordion. In a less benign business climate, the driver eating a hoagie and talking on the phone and the woman applying eyeliner while texting crash into each other and things get really bad, really fast. But eventually, if the wreckers and the ambulances sort things out, people get back to zooming along and giving each other the occasional finger. The accordion bellows out. I’ve lived through the accordion going in and out four or five times already.
We’re way past that now. The traffic-jam-accordion is five years in the rear-view mirror. The cars didn’t just tap the brakes and have a fender bender; they left the road and ran over the pedestrians and crashed into the houses and burned down the city. The ambulances were in the shop, the wreckers were up on blocks because their wheels were stolen, and after growing weary of having their four-hour lunches interrupted by the complaints from the people stranded on the highway, the government strafed the survivors instead of helping them. They followed up by napalming their cars, and sending out parking tickets for the burnt-out hulks to any survivors.
Welcome to the new Captain Tammany H. Plutocrat Seawater Economy. Climb aboard the Ship of State, a wholly owned subsidiary of Titanic, Inc, they said. But there isn’t room for everyone on board, and most of us are cast adrift in a rowboat, and there’s nothing but ocean in sight. We sailed until becalmed, rowed until our back gave out, and the map we were given said land was just over the horizon, but of course the horizon, by definition, is always on the horizon. The canteen we were given is dry, but has a Groupon for water in it. The ration cans are filled with nothing but dietary advice. Captain Plutocrat buzzes by from time to time on his cigarette boat, made from the finest flotsam of our lives dashed on the rocks he steered us to, and gives us advice. First it was: You don’t need all your possessions; why not throw them overboard? Then throw the people you don’t like overboard. Then the feeble. Eat the fat ones before they get skinny. Why not chuck the kids in the ocean, too? Finally, when we’re all alone with nothing, he tells us to stop whining and drink seawater if we get thirsty.
Captain Plutocrat has detractors, of course, and their worldview is the opposite of his, but one can’t help but notice they’re on the deck of Captain Plutocrat’s speedboat with him, and their advice if you’re thirsty is to take the seawater rectally instead of orally. Then they bomb off and leave us there.
We drink the seawater and it makes us crazy enough to drink seawater so we drink seawater, and there’s no end to it. It’s our own fault. We tapped the brakes, got in the rowboat; we listened.
Most mornings I wake up my older son by barging into his bedroom and playing Stairway To Heaven. Badly.
I never really cared for STH. I never cared enough about it to loathe it, either. I caution my Intertunnel friends that becoming completely, monomaniacally interested in persons and things you dislike will make you crazy, and make you seem so to others, to the detriment of your original cause. Remember the words of the prophet Lebowski: You’re not wrong, Walter; you’re just an ***hole.
Anyhow, I made my son learn it, and I learned it at the same time to make sure he did. It’s a terrific running joke at our house. He’s a proper teenager, and always asleep when he’s not lying around. He opens one eye and glares at me most satisfactorily while I hack away at it. He used to hate it for its own sake, but now he hates to hear me do it because it’s irritating to hear me slog through it, as he can bang it out effortlessly.
I promise not to get any better at it, son.
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