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covered in dust
Sunday, October 20 2002
setting: rural Hurley, New York
With the local National Public Radio station as my soundtrack, I toiled ceaselessly all day at my home repair assignments, ultimately finishing the sanding of all of the cloying wallpaper ring from half of Gretchen's new office. Multitasked with that, I finished installing all the scraps of recycled drywall necessary to rebuild walls at the places where I'd demolished a wall. Unfortunately, it never crossed my mind that wall drywall is actually thinner than ceiling drywall, so my ceiling was left with a trough in it, one I couldn't fill with one session of spackling, especially given my strictly amateurish spackling skills.
I also finished removing the last of the wallpaper from the two bathrooms so afflicted.
The NPR station's programming today featured short stories and news in the afternoon and then bluegrass in the early evening. I found bluegrass had a unique capacity to keep my mind focused on the task at hand. It's appropriate to this new life I'm living: out in the middle of nature, perpetually covered with dust, fingers worn smooth and turned to leather from continual marinating in toxic household chemicals, and back aches and joint stiffness from 16 hour days of continual industry. For some reason I don't even miss the internet. Indeed, I actually get a fairly web-like experience as I jump back and forth between multiple simultaneous brick and mortar projects.
When the day is done, I head off to the massive bathtub in the basement bathroom I call "the Roman Bathroom." It's the only bathroom in the house that didn't contain any wallpaper. It did, however, contain some floral imagery, but it's discreet and constrained to single rows of tiles. By discreet, I mean the flowers are small and rendered in black and white. If you squint your eyes, the floral designs come to resemble frescos of charging Roman chariots. This, as well as the abundance of marble, is the reason I call it the Roman Bathroom. Bathtub reading materials these days are restricted exclusively to magazines about household repair.
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