|
|
|
blood on the ceiling
Monday, October 3 2011
The humidity of the late summer has resulted in an ongoing mold abatement project. It's mostly in the basement, but I've also had to address the drywall ceiling of the garage for some reason. Mold is easily eliminated with dilute bleach, but it's not a fun job and I'd rather the mold wouldn't be there in the first place. The other day I'd bought some supposedly mold-suppressing paint, but before I can apply it, I need to fix some of the problem drywall.
There's a delaminating drywall seam in the ceiling of the master bedroom, so today I finished what entropy had begun so as to fix the ceiling. What I revealed beneath the drywall tape was a small patch of mold and two dark red spots that looked like blood. Had some vicious varmint fight happened in the intra-joist space overhead? If I were a superstitious person, I might take the "blood" (but what else could it be?) as a sign that ours is a haunted house, at least to the extent that a 17 year old house can be haunted. As I just suggested, though, there are a number of wild but fully corporeal being living with us in our house. I hear them wrestle and chase each other and it's obvious what is going on. Sometimes there are loud isolated clunks and other times you'll hear a long series of tiny footfalls. But there is no need for extraordinary claims. You can imagine, then, my dismay the other day while listening to a podcast of To the Best of Our Knowledge in which a journalist (Steve Volk) failed to consider this most obvious explanation for the haunted house of his childhood. Volk related how he and his family kept hearing a variety of strange noises in various parts of the house. Instead of pausing to consider the possibility that there was squirrel nest between the studs, his family brought out a priest to bless the house. Now I find myself wondering why more people don't imagine their houses to be haunted.
I actually have some hard evidence of at least one of the wild animals that shares our space with us. I've been seeing progressively larger and larger snake skins in the boiler room, usually rubbed off on equipment whose warmth a snake might find comforting. Today I found a smallish black snake wrapped around a set of conduit pipes and cables (all of which are slightly heated by the small transformer at the bottom center of the picture).
Like most lefties, I've been despondent for years about the absence of outrage at the crazy rightwing shit that has been dumped into mainstream American discourse. I expected mobs with pitchforks to march on the disgraced douchebags behind Enron back when that shit went down in 2002, but nothing happened. I really wanted Dick Cheney to rot in a dungeon beneath the Hague, but Obama wanted to "look forward, not backwards" and so Dick Cheney is running around with a book to sell while somehow avoiding even the modest insult of rotten tomatoes. More recently, of course, the entire economy proved to be a house of card concocted as a fleecing machine, but nobody went to jail and the few rules that passed to prevent a repeat are in danger of being repealed. Most galling of all, is was the astroturfing project known as the Tea Party that finally rose up in outrage, but it was more of a polite expression of racism than anything else.
So you can imagine my delight that finally the left has found its footing and is occupying (as best they can) Wall Street. It doesn't have to mean anything; it's an embodied expression of rage at all the shit we've had dumped on us. Best of all, unlike the Tea Party, it's spontaneous. (Fox News isn't endlessly promoting it.) It's been a long time since there's been a government capable of carrying out sensible policy in this country. Sure, we have a Democratic president, but the only thing the government can agree to do is cut taxes and regulations, both steps to an uglier, meaner society.
Here are some of my ideas for Occupy Wallstreet Signs and Street Theatre:
- A sign reading: Impeach Clarence Thomas and his Conflicted Interests
- A faux counter protest with signs reading such things as Back to your Nintendos and Cheese Doodles, Kids!
- A sign reading: Make Stuff, not Money
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?111003 feedback
previous | next |
