One of the first jobs I ever remember an adult telling me I should do was to be an architect. I like to build things. I dreamt of the day I'd be able to buy my own box of blocks we used to have in daycare, so I could spend all day creating new castles and not be compelled to destroy them when my mom came to pick me up. Me, her, and my brother putting together Legos are some of the few times I think we ever really got along.
I was just trying to build something now. I had an idea to put a tarp up on poles that I set in little buckets of cement. At first I conceived on them as being in full-size buckets with PVC. I started to consider how heavy a bucket full of cement would be, and thought about it breaking or the PVC not being able to stand up to the weather. I discovered metal rods that were cut to the same longest lengths that they sell PVC. I found smaller paint can-like buckets. I bought a couple bags of cement, and 2 PVC pipes just to run the experiment, and to create a taller middle pole.
You may have noticed, but it's never going to stop raining. When it accidentally stopped, I poured water/gas residue (as I only had a gas can to carry water in and forgot I had an unused one in the moving truck), and set the poles down in while pouring cement over the sides. I discovered less water made for a more “cementy” look and feel, and adjusted the recipe down the line of buckets. I set them against the house and they all hardened appropriately over the next few days.
I got home today, and thought on the way that I might grab the giant tarp, and finally see about setting it atop the poles. I sit and watch a little TV and dick around online instead. A couple hours later, I get the urge, and head outside. Me, not thinking things through, thought I should thread the grommets on the tarp with the string and create a kind of running line around the edges. I thought, I guess, that there would be a way to tighten the rope around the poles to secure each corner, and allow me to leisurely walk each one to where I wanted. It took about 30 variations on a “slip the fuck right off” theme before I got the bright idea to wrap the cord around the tarp itself and secure a little knot that fairly-enough reinforces itself as the pole gets tugged.
When I finally decide to apply that method to each corner, I begin to actually see the thing rise. What I've left out, is that it's been raining the majority of the time I'm attempting to do this. This means muddy and slippery escapades hanging off the back of the moving truck, where the tarp is also setting, and slapping myself with the wet and muddy paracord I'm undoing and redoing. I got a brief sense of what it will be like to be able to open my door, and not have rain pouring in. I dug holes, deep enough ones the 10th time around, for the buckets to be dropped into, and now it'll be a matter of inching and reinforcing and resetting where I want the corners.
I discovered I could tuck two of the poles under the mother's attic portion of the truck. I found my newly extra-secured camera is in exactly the wrong place and the kind of internal curse of good intentions from my builder struck again. I saw a small frog living in my bathroom roof. I realized I'll probably need a few more poles, and will have to spend a concerted amount of time securing a tennis ball to the PVC so it doesn't rip the tarp. I've got all kinds of scratches and bug bites. I can see the tarp drearily hung over the truck as two other poles couldn't take the amount of water coming down. But it's a start, and I learned a few things, and I got dirty. I was playing, and building, and not clenching my jaw as I suffered a hundred different defeats.
I think the spirit in the kind of fun I have in building things is lost on people. I was chastised for not wanting to approach some of the land projects “properly,” and not “simply” renting a machine to do some trenching, or not sitting down and putting together a whole plan to ensure we'd be done exactly on the hour necessary. Do I think you should be particularly ill-prepared and wanton in your approach to landscaping or otherwise projects you're not familiar with? Of course not, and I see the reasonableness of estimates and parts lists and working theory of how you're going to approach. But also, for most things in my life, that hasn't been my experience as working...basically ever.
I've sat and put together business plans, and then I ran a business. Nothing matched, and my main take away was a handful of new excel calculation tricks I've since forgotten. My day job would love for me to have “100% timely initiations,” and guess what? Everyone I haven't seen in 2 weeks wants to meet between the same 3 hours at the end of the day Friday, or to push what needs done until after the, of course, holiday weekend so it's extra late. This house is, literally, less than a week's worth of effort with 2 people and fair weather conditions, and it's taken me two years to bring you this message, and I still can't use my water.
You have to do. You have to find the value, joy, lessons, and pain while you're doing. You have to get rained on, and find the resolve to try again tomorrow. You have to be told, a hundred or thousand times, “we'll get to it tomorrow,” and figure out what you can get done in the meantime, because tomorrow never comes. Am I itchy and trying not to think about how I'm not going to get to shower until the morning? Sure, but I've slid another small piece of the puzzle together as to what I want the land to look like. I want to be able to work in the never-ending rain. I want to know how deep to dig, how much cement and water to mix, how to tie better and smarter knots, and to know every moment that went into making even visually unimpressive things functional triumphs.
That's what I'm inviting people out to the land for. It's not to necessarily “help” me in random or seemingly arbitrary ways I may go about things. It's to find people to play with. It's to see what you might create with a little too much time, money, space, or someone to help you hold something up while the rest falls down.The point is to have fun with it, to experiment, and to be so engaged that you don't think about how wet you are or the bugs. Most of my experience is otherwise dominated by varying swarms of bugs.
I'm reminded that I'm a kid. I'm a 30-year-old child who would rather play in the mud than necessarily pick up a paycheck. You need balance, and I like to eat, but even getting consistent positive feedback at work, and knowing I bring a calm head and respectful influence into a field wrought with hammy emotions and power trips, I need to work for me. I learned my general cool disposition for me ( I was even told by the quintessential “cool black guys” hanging outside of Millennium Station, “Now there goes a cool dude, I'd like to hang out with him, smoke some weed”) in case you thought it wasn't official. I own the fun I had at the parties everyone grew to resent. I retain the positive memories with every long-lost friendship or fuck buddy. I know where I need to be in order to offer without expectation. I still don't know what people expect from themselves, but it hasn't been to try and enjoy what I've put on the table.
I hope you're having fun, because without this giant perpetual mess to fix, rearrange, and point to as something that exists outside of my head, I rarely am. If you find company in the general misery I think my writing suggests, consider that creativity, productivity, and muddy also enjoy company.
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