wherein I meet Ben Katchor and Jacob Kornbluth

By some quirk of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, Bus Line 24, I arrived a full 20 minutes early to see Josh Kornbluth interview Ben Katchor at the Jewish Community Center.

Ben Katchor live and off the page! Josh Kornbluth live and on purpose! All this, and dessert too. It's no quirk that I arrived early.

Since I was alone, I was able to secure a plum seat in the middle of the 4th row. I’m not sure why it’s important to sit close to the stage; it’s not like you’ll get a hand up to dance with Bruce Springsteen or Oprah will toss you the keys to a BRAND NEW CAR. Nope. Not going to happen. Still, there’s something exciting about being in the 4th row.

The auditorium was almost empty when I took my seat; being so early made me feel over-eager and squirrelly. I busied myself by filling out the survey the usher had handed me when I wandered in. How did you find out about this show? Ah. That’s easy. They didn’t keep it much of a secret. That’s how I found out about it. I filled in the bubble next to ‘Postcard’ with the miniature golf pencil the usher gave me. I was buzzing in anticipation of the show; it was all I could do to color inside the lines.

Ben Katchor live. How cool is that?

C110 seemed like a really good seat, a seat with a clear view of the two big chairs set up for the interviewer and the interviewee. I concentrated on the survey. How many events have you attended during the last 12 months? After some reflection, I lied. It’s embarrassing to admit how seldom I leave the house. Unless you count my trips to the market. But isn’t going to the market an event of sorts? For me it is. I exed out my original answer of less than 6 and colored in the greater than 24 bubble.

Why does my survey look so messy?

The audience began to file in. So where was that really tall guy going to sit? Keep going. Keep going. Keep going: I willed him to keep going. He sat down directly in front of me. I knew it! Not a chance that I’d be sitting behind one of the countless short wide Jewish ladies who smelled of Nivea and secured used Kleenexes up the sleeves of their cardigans. Nope. The Bill Gaines look-alike—a compact fire plug of a man—took a seat three to the left. The neurotically thin Yoga ladies who were season ticket holders? They weren’t sitting in front of me.

No, I was sitting behind the tallest man in the room, and next to a young blond spiky-haired guy who awkwardly held a skateboard to his chest. You could tell he was thinking, “What are all these old Jewish people doing here? This is about comix.” He sat nervously, as if the whole audience was going to turn around and yell at him not to skate on their sidewalk and to pick up the trash.

It was exactly the audience that he—and I—should have expected.

Then the two men, Ben Katchor and Josh Kornbluth, walked out. The audience, which was surprisingly quiet for hard-of-hearing older Jewish people, became even quieter. The man in front of me sat up even straighter. He was probably 7 or 8 feet tall and had unspeakably good posture. I shifted in my seat, trying to look around him.

I’ve seen Ben Katchor before; it was when he was touring in the wake of his MacArthur Foundation genius award (which, incidentally, is taxable). That time he was reminiscing about the golden age of museum cafeterias. It’s true: museum cafeterias have become too good. I often go to the Berkeley Art Museum’s Café Muse just to eat the sustainably grown Raw Vietnamese Mushroom Salad with Cilantro, Scallions, & Almond Vinaigrette. I don’t even look at the museum’s exhibits. I eat lunch and leave. Someday I hope to be satisfied by just reading the menu.

Ben Katchor was right.

I squirmed in my seat again, trying to get a good look at the setup on the stage. The skateboarder made his best effort to shift left and get further away from me.

I’d forgotten how much Ben Katchor looks like Mark Bernstein. He looks a lot like Mark Bernstein. Surprisingly so.

Josh Kornbluth looked even less like Ben Franklin than I’d remembered. Perhaps it was the red socks that were bunched up at his ankles; I never picture Ben Franklin wearing red socks. (I still think Josh Kornbluth looks like Jay Sherman, who might well wear red socks with failing elastic).

Using a Sharpie, I wrote on my Muni pass: perhaps JK is a BK character. That would work. Josh Kornbluth looks drawn, as if he’s jumped off of the page of one of the Weekly Strips. The one about the chiropodist, perhaps.

His experience as a talk show host has served him well: Josh Kornbluth is a fine interviewer. He asks good questions and mostly gets out of the way and lets Ben Katchor talk.

I could listen to Ben Katchor talk as long as he felt like talking. That’s how good he is.

The first piece he reads is about modern apartments, about a man who moves every year so he can live in ever more up-to-date surroundings. The same mythical Eastern European movers transport his furniture year after year. One of the movers has a hernia, but nonetheless is able to horse the man’s grandfather’s delicate antique armoire out of the back of the van into the next of the series of more improbably-modern apartments.

Until…

The man finally goes digital and no longer has belongings to move. In the final frame of the story, the irrelevant armoire is hefted into a dumpster. Done and done. Gone digital.

My feet are dangling. If the springs in a theater seat are sufficiently strong, the seat begins to fold up on me, so that I’m folded in half, as if caught mid-crunch. My mini-backpack forms an uncomfortable lump between my top half and my bottom half.

It is then—after a particularly restive series of shifts and folds, peering around the 8-feet-tall guy and fighting against the theater seat spring—that I begin hearing voices. Well, not really hearing voices like a schizophrenic person but rather, hearing voices like someone has their radio on. Yes, there is a muted voice of a radio commentator. How rude!

Who on earth is listening to the radio? Is it feedback from someone’s hearing aid?.

At some extreme point in my contortions, my ear is in close proximity to my mini-backpack. Aha! That’s the noise: it’s my own MP3 player. I must’ve pressed the ‘on’ button by accident. Those tiny tinny voices are from the Slate Political Gabfest. With great discretion, I put my hand inside my backpack and turn off the player. Ben Katchor must not discover that I’ve disrupted his reading with my $39 earPod. Shoot.

The second piece is even more arresting than the first. It is about condiment packets and how they are replacing the more human-scale shared service containers that preceded them. The sociable metal creamers have given way to personal handfuls of Mini-Moos; the mustard jar has been superseded by mustard packets with an unimaginably small amount of condiment within.

Not only are the packets an unrealistic size (how many for the average hot dog? 10?); they’re also uniformly difficult to open. One wrong move and a Mini-Moo will give you a creamy facial—a Mini-Moo money shot, if you’re in the mood for an obscene tongue twister. The ever-inventive Mr. Katchor suggests that young men will rent out their packet-opening services—they’ll accompany you into a restaurant, and will open all of the necessary condiments for you.

With such help on call, you can go wild. Five tubs of syrup cascade down your short stack! A lavish squiggle of catsup ornaments your fries!

Such a good idea. Condiments are certainly a topic I can warm to; I think about them a lot. In fact, there’s not much in our refrigerator except a wealth of condiments: Uncle Chen’s chili garlic sauce; Aztexan Habanero Supreme hot sauce; Hoisin sauce; Tiparos fish sauce; Heinz Catsup in the ultra-large bottle with the customized label; Safeway Spicy Brown Mustard; and other bottles and jars too numerous to list (although I’m very tempted to alphabetize them).

The condiment shelves are packed. Packed! A comic about condiments is very nearly perfect.

But really, I can’t object to the packets on any but aesthetic grounds: I was recently saved from impending starvation by a stray peanut butter packet that I’d stashed in my suitcase. I was in a hotel room, late at night, in a strange city, and I came upon this miracle cache of peanut butter. I scrabbled around in my briefcase until I found airplane pretzels. Pretzels and peanut butter: Is that not a complete meal? It is. Most food groups are adequately represented. It was kind of like the original Hanukah, except with peanut butter and pretzels instead of oil.

But I digress. Being in the Jewish Community Center with all these little old Jewish people (and the 9 foot tall man sitting in front of me) is clearly having an effect.

The Crumb Trap is the title of Ben Katchor’s third story. It is about the New York Department that goes from apartment to apartment (an entire building in an hour!), emptying toaster crumb traps. After a sufficient portion of the city’s small appliances had been emptied—saving residents from potential toaster-fires and cockroach invasions—the crumbs are sorted and used for different functions. Some are fine abrasives; others are Thanksgiving filler; still other crumbs are fed to the city’s songbirds.

Really his ideas are quite practical. I greatly admire them.

I wish I had ideas like that. I could’ve listened to lots more stories.

But the ‘in-conversation’ format has one unfortunate characteristic. The part where the author speaks is always too short, and the part where the audience asks questions is always too long. I’m not sure why they let the audience ask questions at all. Josh Kornbluth already asked questions, and he did fine. The audience will not do fine; they are bound and determined to ask stupid questions.

Some of the questions are like Jeopardy questions: they’re the answer in the form of a question and they’ve only been asked because the asker wants to demonstrate that he’s actually met the celebrity before. Or that the question-asker is a minor celebrity in his- or her own mind. Yuck.

Did I hear someone ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” Someone must’ve. It’s as if you could subscribe to ideas like you would the Harry & David Fruit-of-the-Month Club. In January, you get 12 Royal Riviera Pears and a half-dozen good ideas about, say, small appliances.

All too soon, it is over, and we must shuffle from the auditorium as a bovine group. Shuffle. Shuffle.

On the second floor, there is a reception and the author will be signing books. It is a Jewish Community Center. I know that a proper reception cannot be conducted on an empty stomach. And I am right. There are crudités and macaroons. Brie and celery sticks (nature’s dental floss!). Petits Fours and cheese balls. People are milling around, eating compulsively and talking volubly.

And Stacey’s has set up a table. Forgot to bring a book for the author to sign? You can buy one from the nice lady.

I find myself buying a book: Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District. And edging my way through throngs of older Jewish men and women eating reception food (“oooh. Did you try the macaroons? I wonder where they bought the macaroons? So moist!”) until I got to Room 209. There were only a few faithful fans in line when I got there, real comix-lovers. Odd looking men and women with bulging backpacks and stacks of books. Not just one or two books that they’d purchased at the Stacey’s table, but big hulking stacks of books. As if they’d brought half their home libraries for Ben Katchor to sign. Anthologies that already have other signatures in them. Everything they could think of.

Book signings are horribly awkward. It’s like making small talk at a party if you’re not out to get laid, but just trying to make benign conversation with strangers. Just words to fill the dead air and demonstrate you’re a teeny bit smarter than the neon tetras in the aquarium you’re standing next to and a teeny bit more appealing than the decrepit old family dog that has wandered into the room. At best, you leave without the need for an apology.

When I reach the front of the line, I start out poorly, haltingly. I allude to something he’d admitted about his books, about how they were almost too much to be taken in all at once. It seems like a stupid opening line when you’re asking someone you admire to sign a just-purchased copy of their book. He frowns.

Quick! Must say something else. Must redeem the conversation. Because I do read his comics on the web, I ask him about his web site. He is momentarily pleased and says he put it together himself—and that it’s nothing. That he used to be a typesetter.

Ben Katchor is gracious; he draws me a small cartoon guy in spite of the non-conversation we are having. I console myself: this is a transient blip in his day, and even though he’s really smart, there’s no way he’ll remember his brief encounter with me.

Up close, he still looks like Mark Bernstein. In some hard-to-quantify way.

Does he know Mark Bernstein? He might know Mark Bernstein. Yeah. He could know Mark Bernstein. Mark Bernstein gets around.

I stop myself before I ask him. Phew. That was close. It is something my mother and I do, this looking for momentary cosmic alignments—shared friends, shared schools, shared towns—but many people are less crazy about that kind of coincidence.

And just like that, my turn is over. My chance to make a positive impression has evaporated. Ben Katchor has drawn a little cartoon guy for me to puzzle over; I have thanked him; and now I shuffle out of the room, back toward the food tables. The signing line has grown long while the first few of us have had our turns. I am still flustered.

Maybe it is because I am flustered that a guy with a hand held video camera, a nice one, approaches me. Now I will say something stupid and it will be immortalized. Bits that’ll come back to bite me. A sudden panic grips me; I am beyond flustered. Yet I’m drawn to the camera.

We all want to be celebrities. We can’t help ourselves.

“Hi,” he says. “I’m Jacob Kornbluth, Josh Kornbluth's brother. Is it okay if I ask you a few questions? I’m making a little documentary about Ben Katchor for Josh’s TV show.”

If I were smart, I’d realize that this is the guy who co-directed and co-wrote Haiku Tunnel. This is a professional and he’s not making a home movie. But I’m not smart. And not only have I already missed a critical cue; my mind is rapidly going blank. The microphone in my face is making it worse.

Jacob Kornbluth doesn’t look at all like Josh Kornbluth. For one thing, he’s got a disarming smile; Josh Kornbluth seems to have gotten all of the frowny angst and Jacob Kornbluth has that easy-going charm. He’s cute. For some reason, the way he introduces himself makes me think he doesn’t really do this for a living, that he’s just come along because he hasn’t got anything better to do on a Monday night in May. That he’s doing this as a favor for his brother.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Walk away! Walk away! Run! Dive under the macaroon table! Hide among the crudités! Camouflage yourself as a wheel of Brie! Act inert!

Jacob Kornbluth starts asking me questions about comics, and I am immediately sucked into a mammoth mental vacuum. Any problems I have remembering names when I’m on the spot are exacerbated and I give him absurd answers, answers that he won’t even have to take out of context to make me look foolish. For some reason, the only artist I can remember is R. Crumb; I can’t even remember Aline’s name, even though they draw comics together in The New Yorker, comics I read again and again. I can’t remember that Mary Fleener went to PV High and surfed at the same beaches I knew. And what about Julie Douchet? And Daniel Clowes? Why can’t I remember a single name of the artists I like? Why can't I come up with any details about their ouvre?

I can’t even come up with Art Spiegelman’s name. I once started a whole project because of a piece Art Spielgelman did about the New York Public Library’s picture collection.

The wall outside my college dorm room had an S. Clay Wilson panel that Adam Melch meticulously copied from a Zap Comix. Surely I could’ve come up with ONE two sentence anecdote about comics.

Jacob Kornbluth is asking me easy questions but I can’t answer them. Good god! Do I really have no favorites in the comics world? Do I really have no favorite Ben Katchor comic? I listen to words coming out of my mouth that even I don’t believe.

At the last minute, I remember the Ben Katchor story I like about the chiropodist, although I say “podiatrist”, which makes it less funny and makes me seem like less of a fan. It’s not my favorite either, but at least it’s something.

I flinch even now, embarrassed to recollect my performance in front of the camera.

I am so NOT ready for my closeup.

Now I wish I’d even said, “I can’t remember a darned thing. My blood sugar must be low.”

Instead I grab one of the moist macaroons and shove it in my mouth. I have clearly seen too many Twix commercials, but it works. Jacob begins chatting with the lady standing next to me and I flee.

In retrospect, I think all he was looking for a fan. Someone who would say that they were a fan. I don’t even think he was looking for a ‘good’ fan, one of the fans who memorizes whole stories and can quote ad nauseam. He was just looking for someone who’d say something admiring, something interesting and not too stupid.

I did none of the above, even though I admire Ben Katchor’s work a great deal.

I’m hoping I’ll end up on the cutting room floor.

I walk out of the San Francisco Jewish Community Center into the May night. The reading has newly sensitized me to the odd window displays and neon signs on California Street. Pregnant mannequins look less like pregnant mannequins and more like a small army of Nicole Richies shoplifting basketballs. Ben Katchor has changed what I see, just as any artist worth his or her salt should.

I get on the Number 24 Muni bus and head back across town.

flying slugs and sloppy stucco

I shouldn’t still be thinking about our new roof.

The roofers finished replacing our old roof more than three weeks ago, not long after we wound up our fraught dealings with Wooden Window.

You'd have thought we'd have had enough homeowner trauma for the time being, that we'd be content to stare out of our new windows at the San Francisco skyline, that we could continue to ignore the paint slowly peeling off the wall in big sheets where the roof leaks during the rainy season.

It's not apt to rain again until November; why bother replacing the roof? Didn't we learn anything from our experience with the windows?

But no. We're slow learners. We ran right out and found a roofing company that would replace the roof right away. This wouldn't be nearly so disruptive as the window work; all we had to do was move a dozen or so potted plants off the lightwell (which is technically part of the roof) and that'd be it.

"Will they be coming in to use the bathroom," I asked the roofer after we'd received the final bid and were signing the contract.

"Oh, no," he said. "They're like camels."

I decided to pursue the question no further.

For a week, we lived in a drum, with camel-like roofers clattering over our heads and the acrid smell of tar in the air. Friday afternoon rolled around and they were done; they offered to help me move the potted plants back into the lightwell, but I demurred. They were anxious to leave and I was anxious to have the house back.

I was pleased with the new roof for an interval of about 4 hours. For four hours, I lived with the blissful thought that we were done with the roof. Done. Checked off the list.

√ Windows.

√ Roof.

Four hours was the length of time between the departure of roofers Carlos and Orlando and the arrival of Mark. It was an exceptionally brief bout of euphoria.

It was dark when Mark got home. He peered out the kitchen window into the lightwell.

“Did they tell you they were done?” Mark asked me.

“Yeah. They left around 4:30.”

“Oh, really. And they definitely said they were done?”

I knew trouble was brewing. I told him that—yes—they were definitely done, and that in fact they stayed longer than they thought they would have to, and were bummed to be joining Friday afternoon Bay Bridge traffic.

“They were bummed,” Mark echoed. “They. Who’s they? Who worked on the stucco?”

I told him that I didn’t know, because in truth I avoided looking out the window at the workmen, even when I was in the kitchen a few feet away from where they were spading globs of wet stucco onto the metal netting. It’s too weird watching someone through a window at that distance; it’s like you’re looking into a goldfish bowl. And the goldfish are REALLY BIG. And they’re eating sunflower seeds. And talking and laughing.

But I knew where the “who’s they” line of questioning was going, and it wasn’t good.

“I can’t believe you were standing in the kitchen and you don’t know who did the stucco.” Mark said.

I don’t want to say that he said this accusingly. But he did. He said it accusingly. And I felt appropriately chastised: guilty as charged. Even though I wasn’t sure who worked on the stucco, I was reasonably sure that the roofing guys did the stucco themselves, that the special super-duper stucco specialist had not been called in to complete the job. We had been promised the super-duper stucco guy, and like Lady Elaine Fairchild, the stucco-man had turned out to be part of the Land of Make Believe.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I knew in my heart of hearts that Carlos and Orlando did the stucco. And that “Carlos and Orlando” was not the right answer to Mark’s stucco question.

“And you don’t see anything wrong with it?”

“The stucco, you mean?”

“Yes! The stucco. What do you think I’m talking about?”

Stucco, as it turns out, is not so simple to do. Lots of people think they know how to stucco a house, to smooth it and create a texture so it blends with the rest of the wall. So that it sticks to places where it’s supposed to and doesn’t sag at the bottom or stick out at the edges.

I think it’s safe to say that stucco is an art.

It’s about as difficult to do an aesthetic stucco job as it is to get 6-pack abs.

Our stucco, unfortunately, looked flabby, out-of-shape. And its complexion didn’t look so hot either. The edges were ragged and messy. It looked bad, and although I didn’t say anything, I also knew that the only way to fix it was to knock it all out and do it again. All over again.

Stucco is an art AND a science. And as nice and careful and competent as Carlos and Orlando were, they were not stucco guys.

Indeed, when I told my colleague Michael this story, he said, “you should listen to Danette go on about stucco. She is certain that it is stucco destroying America (™), not gay marriage or flag burning...”

So Mark is not the only one; he has company. I have enormous respect for Danette. She works for NASA; I think she might even be an astronaut. And if she says that bad stucco is destroying America, I will take her at her word.

That was three weeks ago.

I think I’ve mentioned my other houseplants before. I’m sure I have. What’d I put the count at, 37? Something like that. There may even be more; I try not to maintain an accurate count.

Since the lightwell is the view out the kitchen window—and since I stare out the kitchen window while I’m doing the dishes—before we had the roof done, the lightwell was home to even more houseplants. I thought it’d be nice to stare out at the hardier of my houseplants when I looked out the window.

Those hardy houseplants were not counted as part of the 37.

Carlos and Orlando moved some of them, the giant pots of mint and horsetails and the giant fern, out to the back of the house.

I hesitate to tell you what I did with the others, the 5 pots of succulents, the 2 cymbidiums, the large, top-heavy cactus, the date palm, the sago palm, a Lyman fern, a small pot of horsetails, and a smallish pot of great spiral rushes (aka “curly grass”). They all looked pretty healthy and happy (except the ragged spots where something had evidently tried to eat them).

So… I brought them into the house. Thirteen more houseplants. Mark covered the guest room floor downstairs with a big sheet of plastic that the window guys had left behind.

Although I didn’t really have any place to put them, thirteen more houseplants didn’t exactly seem problematic. Ah, what’s a dozen or so more houseplants anyway?

I’m not sure how those slugs got up onto the roof.

How would a slug get onto the roof?

How could a slug get onto the roof? Are these special flying slugs?

There are flying squirrels. There are flying fish. There are flying cockroaches, even. Mammals, fish, hard-shelled invertebrates (inverts, as someone I know used to call them. Inverts). You see where I’m going with this. These are special, super-duper flying slugs.

I didn’t know there were slugs living in the pots until I watered them. Around a week after I brought the plants inside, they commenced to look dry. Mighty dry. If we were going to wait until the stucco was redone—and I could tell we were—there was absolutely no sense in moving the plants back out onto the lightwell. And they weren’t going to stay alive unless I watered them before I put them back out there.

So I poured a cupful of water on each of the succulents and on the palms and ferns and on the cymbidiums and on the pot of curly grass. “Drink up, guys,” I said. I convinced myself that they looked pleased and well-nourished. Beads of water sparkled where the succulents’ leaves converged into little cups. Water drained into the plastic catch-pans underneath the plants. “Lookin’ good,” I told the roomful of plants and gave them the thumbs-up as I left.

The next time I went downstairs, I realized to my horror that there was a good reason why the cactus had scars and the cymbidium flowers looked so tattered. A REALLY GOOD REASON.

“Ewwwww!” I said, perhaps louder than was necessary. “Ewwwww!” But was involuntary.

I realize that slugs don’t bite, don’t sting, and they’re a great deal smaller than I am. They’re not that menacing. I was in no particular danger. But—ewwwww—they’re gross. Snails at least have the great good sense to wear some kind of outer garments.

Should I have bought the slugs some kind of Ghillie suits? You know, just for aesthetic reasons. Kind of like the stucco—they might look better. For those of you unfamiliar with this type of outdoor wear, a Ghillie suit is an outer garment that Jon Foote alerted me to not long ago—it’s kind of like wearing bad shag carpeting or rolling in pond scum. It’s something that hunters wear to amuse their prey to death. No kidding. The forest animals literally laugh themselves to death.

If I put little Ghillie suits on the slugs, they’d at least be cuddly. They’d still be a nuisance, but they’d be more like squirrels, and less like slimy inverts.

Little furry flying slugs.

It’s an idea.

I couldn’t bear to just squish them. I’ve never been very good at squashing insects. Even when our apartment in Pasadena was overrun by giant cockroaches, I couldn’t squish ‘em. The best I could manage was to dissolve one using Dow Bathroom Cleaner with Scrubbing Bubbles. If you spray that napalm-like cleaning product on a cockroach, it turns the bug into a brown puddle, which can then be swept down the drain with a blast of water.

I know it might be inadvertently interpreted as Buddhist, but I just can’t spray chemicals on bugs any more.

So what should I do with the infestation of slugs?

Believe it or not, we’ve had an indoor slug infestation before. When we lived in Mountain View, in an apartment we lovingly referred to as “the cave”, slugs—big ones—would come in under the dishwasher during the night. You’d turn on the kitchen light, and instead of cockroaches scattering, a giant slick and slimy (fat and sassy) slug would continue its steady march across the kitchen, undeterred by the startling flood of fluorescent light (“Does this light make my complexion look bad?” I thought I heard one ask).

In the morning, we’d find fresh slug trails sparkling across the brown shag carpeting and up the back of the couch. Thank god we hid the TV remote.

That time, I dealt with the slugs with a determined course of benign neglect. That’s right: I just ignored them. Occasionally, I’d find a desiccated slug nestled in the carpeting, a victim of a bad sense of direction. But usually, they made it back out to wherever they were actually going without further notice.

This time, benign neglect made less sense.

And besides, our housecleaner just gave me a new cymbidium; its flowers were pristine and beautiful. I owed it to him to try to protect the cymbidium flowers from the mucusoid invaders.

There were a lot of slugs. Not just two or three. A lot. Every time I saw some and donned a rubber glove to bring them outside, when I came back, there’d be a few more waiting for me.

Technically, I don’t think they were actually waiting for me. They were just sliming across the giant sheet of plastic, doing important slug things. Things I really wouldn’t understand. They were on the march. Going somewhere with a great sense of purpose, slug-antennae outstretched. Were they going to the movies? Trying to find a wireless connection? Looking for 4 bars of connectivity on their slug cell phones? Doing slug aerobics?

Who knows why slugs do the things they do.

All I knew is that I didn’t want them to do those things indoors. I wanted them to fly back to the roof.

Be gone, slugs! Fly away, fly away home! Get on the Google bus and join your slug counterparts in our old apartment in Mountain View! Just forgodssakes don’t stay here.

Ick.

13+37=50. Thirteen lightwell plants plus 37 indoor plants. That’d be 50 plants. 50!

Fifty plants are enough that I thought nothing of adopting Margaret’s plants last week so I could take care of them on this side of the bay while she was out-of-town. Houseplants are kind of like kittens. If you have enough of them, they’ll entertain each other; you can let your Netflix subscription lapse and they won’t even mind.

So I went to Berkeley last Sunday night and picked up about a dozen more houseplants. A miniature ficus tree. A Christmas cactus. A cluster of epiphytes, several in bloom. More cymbidiums. A philodendron-ish plant. And several rather large and healthy-looking cacti.

Note to self: Why do you wear gloves to pick up slugs and not to pick up cacti? Why?

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.

I drove across the Bay Bridge late Sunday night, the back of my car full of plants, and the back of my hand full of tiny, painful cactus spines. Cacti with big fierce spines are almost safer than those innocent furry-looking cacti that leave you with a carpet of pain when you brush up against them. At least my mouth wasn’t full of the taboo frisson of raw pork, as it was during another recent drive across the bridge.

While I don’t have 70 houseplants yet, I’m close. What I’m thinking is I should teach them—or the slugs, or perhaps even the cat—how to stucco. I know it’s hard, but it seems like a skill that’s worthwhile cultivating. Local expertise.

Because frankly, I feel guilty about fussing to the roofer about the stucco, even though I know that we’re perfectly within our rights to do so.

The other day, our roofer—a soft-spoken guy named David—came out to talk about the job.

“So tell me exactly what you think is wrong with the stucco,” he says to me. “I can’t see it.”

Can he really not see it? I start feeling silly.

“You know, it’s where it blends with the stucco on the house. See. It sticks up.”

“Sticks up?” David says. “What do you mean?”

Is this a trick, or is he really not seeing that the new stucco is as lumpy as oatmeal where it meets the old stucco? After all, I didn’t notice the problem myself for those four pleasant hours between the workmen’s departure and Mark’s scrutiny, although I was trying not to look.

“Um. You know. It doesn’t blend. We’re afraid that when we paint it, it will look even worse.” I am bluffing, but I do now see how the edge is wrong. We had other stucco work done recently, and I know what it should look like. Besides, over the last few weeks, the stucco has cracked in several places, and has begun to look like the Wilkins ice shelf under the effects of global warming. And I have had a chance to get a good close look at the job; it is at least inelegant if not wholly unacceptable.

I’ve come around to Mark’s dissatisfaction, although not his anger.

Still I feel sheepish. I tell David, “Let’s go out there and look, okay?” I don’t know why I’ve suggested this—if it’s something you can only see up close, it certainly doesn’t argue for a re-do. I can see what there is to see from where we are standing, at the kitchen window.

Yet we crawl out the kitchen window onto the lightwell, both of us. I run my hands over the edge of the offending stucco. “See?” I ask David.

“I’m afraid I don’t,” he tells me.

I try to rationalize this. Perhaps roofers are so used to working outside of aesthetic concerns that they don’t notice anomalies in the stucco work: after all, who goes poking around up on their roof to see if it all looks nice? What you’re supposed to care about is function: does the roof keep the wet stuff (rain and flying slugs) out and dry stuff (the furniture and Toto) in? And I saw the lightwell before they re-stuccoed. It looked like a giant tar bathtub, which is just how you’d want it to look.

Does he really not see it? I think he doesn’t.

But he humors me: “I’ll have my stucco guy come out and take a look. He’ll be able to tell us for sure.”

The magic stucco guy! I’m completely mollified, although Mark is still too angry to participate.

“He doesn’t see it?” Mark rages. “He doesn’t see it? How can he not see it?” And he goes on to tell me that he thinks David might be putting me on, that he must see it. That he’s just trying to manipulate me into accepting the substandard job.

I’m convinced he doesn’t see it, Pollyanna that I am. And I’m convinced that slugs fly and that somewhere in America, people go hunting dressed up like giant moss bogs.

The stucco guy is tactful, but I can see that he’s with Danette and Mark on this one. He says to David, “No offense to your guys, but I think we’re going to have to do this over.”

David grimaces, but maintains professional cool. I almost wish Mark were out there with us; I’m sure he would applaud. But he is still hiding in the guest room, amid the jungle of houseplants, native and temporary, with the few slugs who have been successful in taking cover. Even after a several-week cooling off period, he is afraid his anger will erupt in an unseemly outburst.

I sigh in relief. Even though it means another day of noise, Mark will be happy and I will be through with these awkward explanations.

And sometime, in the far distant future, the lightwell will be re-stuccoed and repainted and I will be able to put a dozen stray houseplants out there, leftover slugs and all.

Thank god roofs last for 20 years.

arts and crafts

I’ve never been the crafts-y type.

In fact, now that Martha Stewart has paid her debt to society, there’s no need for any of the rest of us to dip our own beeswax candles, milk our own Belted Galloway cows, or ice our own cupcakes. No need. Martha’s back in town, filling in America’s crafts gap. Only the institutionalized and socially marginal have reason to weave baskets or make their own potpourri.

The hipper side of the crafts world, MAKE magazine, has never managed to seduce me either. Do I really need to build a kayak rack? Do I want to make my own chocolate sushi? Am I up to the challenge of constructing a butter-pen? Can I imagine knitting a cozy for the TV remote controller?

The answer is always no. For me, tying my own shoes qualifies as a craft. My kayaks can be shoved under the bed with my mukluks, unracked. And a butter-pen is much too much of a commitment: I prefer to use a butter-pencil to keep my cholesterol level competitively high.

Okay. I might've lied about crafts a couple of paragraphs ago. I admit that I did flirt with macramé—but only briefly—when I was in high school.

My string of choice was rough green jute, which stained my hands and shed bits of green fiber onto the carpeting in front of the TV, where I most often worked. Square knots. Double half-hitches. Tying knots for hours on end felt therapeutic and it offered an absorbing substitute for a normal social life. Besides, going to school with green hands made me feel artistic.

I avoided the smaller, less ambitious macramé projects—the belts and handbags—and went straight for the enormous rustic wall-hangings, decorated with bits of driftwood, beads, and stones with holes in them that I gathered on the beach.

My output was prodigious and ugly. So I offered the wall hangings to relatives, who hung them in closets and bathrooms. Garages provided lots of prime wall space too.

For about a year I alternately macramé-d long thin wall hangings and short squat wall hangings. It would’ve been a challenge to find any dimensions I didn’t create a macramé objet d’art to fill.

Although my high school macramé projects were frumpy, they were relatively successful. Certainly there were worse projects. Much worse. Take the Elizabethan Crumster, for example, a crafts project that was a thoroughgoing disaster. The fact that I remember it at all, that it stands out from the general horrors of sixth grade, should tell you something.

In the Crumster, I see an element of prescience.

An Elizabethan Crumster is a ship, a merchant ship. Bigger than a breadbox and smaller than a galleon. You know: Not a sexy yacht or a fearsome gunboat, a sturdy little Crumster.

I’ve never been particularly interested in boats. Nor was I interested in history in the sixth grade, when I fabricated my Crumster out of nothing more than a stack of shirt cardboards and spaghetti. Yes, spaghetti. You can imagine what it looked like.

I can’t remember how I chose such an unlikely crafts project for school, although I can guess why I chose the materials that I did.

The problem was, the other kids built pyramids. They somehow convinced their feckless parents to drive to Vons and buy them multiple boxes of expensive C&H sugar cubes. Glue ‘em together and—ta-da!—a pyramid. Two pyramids. Pyramids on a sand-sprinkled plywood board. Pyramids to go. Pyramids a-go-go. The Great Pyramids at Giza. The Mayan Pyramids of Chichen-Itza.

I was so jealous. These kids had nothing to be embarrassed about and it was even easy for them. Probably fun too.

No way that I was going to convince any adult member of my household to pony up for boxes of those expensive sugar cubes. No way! And what of the ants? Surely that many sugar cubes would become an open invitation to the ants.

Yo, ants! House party!

My father worked in the aerospace industry, LA’s second economy. He wore a white shirt and tie to work every day. Once a week, a cleaner would come around in his panel van and pick up 5 identical dirty white shirts and drop off 5 clean white shirts. Each clean shirt was folded flat around a cardboard rectangle. Shirt cardboards. Free building material. Impossible to work with, but free.

On the first go-round, the Crumster I constructed from shirt cardboard looked horrid, unrecognizable as a boat. If it weren’t so lopsided, it might’ve passed for an Elizabethan chamber pot. Even a brisk application of brown Magic Marker did not help it pass as a ship. Now it was a brown Elizabethan chamber pot rather than a gray cardboard-colored Elizabethan chamber pot.

Drat! I rummaged around, looking for something I could use as rigging, something I could just take without getting into too much trouble. Rigging would surely transform the shapeless cardboard thing into a serviceable galleon-like object.

How can you make rigging without rope? String wasn’t stiff enough to pass muster as rigging. As I sat at the kitchen table, miserable, pondering whether a cardboard chamber pot would float me to C level, I munched on a stalk of raw spaghetti. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

Aha! There was my answer: raw spaghetti. Excellent solution! It never crossed my mind how dorky the raw spaghetti would look. I just saw a simple way to finish the stupid homework assignment, a way to make a chamber pot into an ocean-going vessel.

I glued together port and starboard lattices of raw spaghetti—and two more to match fore and aft—and finished my Crumster; I then stuffed it into a brown grocery bag so that I could transport it to school without answering any questions about what it was. My hope was that I could hide it in plain sight among the numerous pyramids and papier-mâché globes and escape detection. Was a C too much to ask?

How did I think I would get away with such a peculiar-looking artifact?

How on earth did one of my classmates construct a Rand-McNally-quality globe out of papier-mâché? Another classmate’s pyramid looked like he’d marshaled teams of teeny-tiny Egyptian slaves to hoist sugar bricks one on top of the other. Was that really a miniature camel? Did I detect the intervening hand of a competent adult?

No fair! No fair!

There are only three things you can do when you’re the most eccentric and least socially adept sixth grader in the class: (1) throw your shirt-cardboard-and-raw-spaghetti Elizabethan Crumster in the dumpster behind the cafeteria on your way to class and claim that you forgot to do your homework; (2) turn in your shirt-cardboard-and-raw-spaghetti Elizabethan Crumster, but squash it in advance and claim that it used to look a lot better, A LOT BETTER, before some mean seventh grade girl stole it from you on the bus and wrecked it; or (3) brazen it out and act like you deliberately built a crappy-assed shirt-cardboard-and-raw-spaghetti Elizabethan Crumster to make fun of Mrs. Thiess and her crappy-assed crafts projects.

Naturally I chose option (3). After all, I’d spent several hours on the thing and I wanted credit for my labor and creative use of materials. And the word “Crumster” was good. Perfect, even. It seemed to lend itself to classroom buffoonery. In retrospect, option (2) would’ve been a whole lot smarter grade-wise, and option (1) would’ve left me with a shred of self-respect, but (3) presented an attractive element of risk.

D’oh. Another black mark in my permanent record. Even today, I see the results. “Oh, you expected stock options this year? Well maybe you shouldn’t have used an Elizabethan Crumster to make fun of your 6th grade teacher. Ever consider that?”

Some things take more than 50 years of therapy to work out. It’s pretty clear that I have good reason to steer clear of crafts though.

So, knowing what I know, why was I unable to resist a glue gun at Cliff’s Variety? It’s not like I’m a closet scrapbooker or something. Why didn’t I ditch the glue gun and all of the glue sticks before I got to the checkstand? I could’ve just bought the Schultz’s Plant Food and the shower grout that I came for and been on my way. Merrily.

Why’d I do it?

I’ve had the glue gun for months now—months!—and I’ve been dying to try it.

“What can I glue? What can I glue?” I ask myself.

“What can I glue?” I ask Mark.

Mark has no easy answer, but he just picks up the glue gun (ah, such a pleasing heft) and starts gluing stuff together. Stuff. Anything. Whatever’s at hand on the dining room table. He glues a popsicle stick to another popsicle stick and glues those to some toothpicks and a post-it. Cat hair gets mixed in.

Things stick out at odd angles. The gluey object grows.

Done! Mark has satisfied man’s primal urge to glue. He is left with a wholly disposable assemblage of dining room table detritus. Done and done! He places the sculpture on the dining room table where it sits for several months.

I am left holding a hot glue gun with nothing left to glue, and in fact, nothing that actually needs gluing.

Damn! What can I glue?

What finally catches my attention are the magazines, the magazines I’ve been fretting about ever since I moved everything to the center of the rooms in preparation for the new windows. That was when I came to the stunning realization that our possessions consist of:
65% books and magazines
15% houseplants
10% knick-knacks
4% take-out menus, refrigerator magnets, and Alicia Tam notepads
3% post-its, pens, and other office supplies
2% old autoteller receipts and
1% EVERYTHING ELSE.

It’s a distressing state of affairs.

We have a lot of old magazines. New Yorkers, mostly. It seems so wasteful to just toss ‘em. Besides, there’s always an article or two that I haven’t read yet. And if I keep them for more than a year or two, I completely forget the content of the articles that I did read, and can safely read the whole magazine anew.

I’d originally planned to donate all these magazines to someplace they’d be appreciated. But then I happened upon an article (in a magazine, of course) that said, people who know better—the street vendors who set up shop on the sidewalks of Lower Manhattan—hate, hate old New Yorkers, that you can’t even give them away, that the street vendors accept them only out of pity for the clueless donors. I flinch with guilt and self-recognition.

The thing about these magazines is that I love the pictures—the graphics and photos and lavish illustrations. Love ‘em! Even magazines that were black-and-white a decade ago are now just full of interesting pictures. Cool pictures. Pictures you might like to clip out and…

Tell me, am I too old to collage?

Scratch that question. On second thought, I decide to consult no-one about the wisdom of this project. I think I know the answer. And it’s not the one I want to hear.

All I know is that I’ve got glossy magazine pictures, a glue gun, and a lifetime’s worth of small cardboard boxes that I’ve kept “just in case.” In case of what? In case I decide to return a fetid 10 year old pair of Pumas? In case I want to remember a Valentine’s Day gift of gooey chocolate-covered cherries? In case I suddenly start an eBay business? Why oh why do I have all of these boxes?

Yes. I am having a vision, a brainstorm so dangerous that I dare not tell anyone. The answer to all of my problems is right in front of me. Well, not all of my problems. My problems are manifest and cannot all be addressed by adhesives. But most of my problems.

If hot glue were to solve all of my problems, I’d be applying hot glue to Evert’s friends who have been engaging in excessively noisy sex at 5am every morning and WAKING ME UP. I’m an insomniac; I need whatever sleep I can round up. The walls are thick, but these people are really LOUD. It’s not thumping sex or moaning sex or wailing sex; it’s complicated sex with lots of shouted instructions and noises that are ambiguously situated between pleasure and pain.

Hot glue is not the answer to that problem. I bet applying hot glue would just make the noise louder.

They’d probably LIKE hot glue. It might elicit further shrieks and shouted commands.

So what was that safe word?

If hot glue is not the solution to all of my problems, at first blush it does seem to be the answer to many of them.

Unfortunately, the first thing that I learn, right away, is that glue guns aren’t so swell for gluing paper. The glue I’ve applied is messy and bumpy. Glue guns are apparently for other crafts. Perhaps crafts involving shirt cardboards and raw spaghetti.

Crap. The first few glue gun efforts reveal that I am building yet another Elizabethan Crumster. I can tell. Shit. I am not 10 years old. Why did I start a crafts project? Why? Don’t I have any common sense?

Mrs. Thiess is smirking from her grave. SMIRKING.

I might’ve learned something over the years though. I hustle myself down the hill to Walgreens and—contrary to my usual impulse toward cheap-i-tude—I eschew the Wal-hesive, Wal-goo, and Wal-stick-um and head straight for the archival quality 3M scrapbooking glue.

Scrapbooking. Did you know that Scrapbooking was a multi-BILLION dollar industry? Either did I. Multi-BILLION. Who’d have thought? Scrapbooking. Jesus.

But this is the best glue I’ve ever used (not counting the kind you huff from paper bags). This glue is great. This glue is all-powerful and forgiving. You can’t go wrong.

You can even leave the cap off of this glue and the applicator will keep on working.

I can’t say enough nice things about this glue. It’s life-changing.

I spend hours pondering my clippings as if they were an elaborate jigsaw puzzle. I stare at them, trim them, rearrange them, glue them, Mod-Podge them.

And—just as you’d expect—they proliferate. First there’s 1 box. Then 2 boxes. Then 4.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that Valentine’s Day comes only once a year. There are but so many heart-shaped boxes that I’ve stashed away. And I haven’t even started on the shoeboxes yet.

You do have a lot of empty wall space, don’t you? I know what you’re going to get for Xmas.


If you’ve been really nice to me, I won’t give you two.

a windows upgrade

I have the soul of a renter.

When the windows get too dirty, I have to fight an overwhelming urge to pack up and move on. Or maybe not even to pack up, just to move on and leave behind all of the detritus we’ve accumulated over the last 9 years: 21 American Express and Capitol One refrigerator magnets (and one featuring the lovely Alicia Tam, Realtor). 41 houseplants. A decrepit brown corduroy-covered futon couch. An entire library of Chinese take-out menus. 100 pounds of pennies. A cupboard full of jelly jars that we use as drinking glasses.

Have we lived here for 9 years? Holy Moses! How did that happen? That’d explain all this shit

When we moved in, a friend said, "Don’t do anything to the house for at least 2 years. Just live in it as if you were renting the place. Then you’ll know what you want to remodel."

He needn’t have warned us this way. We’ve had no problem doing nothing. No problem at all. Everything’s fine.

I’m still using a stack of Xerox boxes as a bureau; there’s still the shadow of Josephine’s now-absent crucifix above the mantel, even though Josephine’s been dead for over a decade. Everything’s exactly where it was when we moved in

9 years. That’s a long time. I could’ve relived the worst part of elementary school and junior high in that much time and removed the blemishes from my Permanent Record.

And I could’ve just kept going for another 10 years. Really I could’ve. There’s nothing wrong with the house. Oh sure, maybe the paint is peeling where rain leaked in from the light well. Maybe there’s some moss growing on the roof. And maybe the stack of appliances and clothes to bring to the Salvation Army is becoming truly formidable (this is partly because the Salvation Army in San Francisco accepts only Sub Zero or Kitchen Aid appliances and couture clothing in excellent condition, but that’s a story best left for another blog post).

But apart from a few signs of wear and tear, there’s nothing at all wrong with our house. Nothing I couldn’t ignore for another decade or so.

Somehow a startling decision was made when I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe I was watching The Colbert Report. Maybe I was doing a late-in-the-week New York Times crossword puzzle. Whatever it was, I must’ve been distracted from matters at hand: apparently we decided that we’d replace the aluminum windows with real wooden windows, the kind the Sears salesman convinced Josephine to ditch in the heady burst of modernization and streamlining so characteristic of the early 1970s.

Once there was some momentum, it was easy to get behind this course of action; several of the old windows didn’t close any more and others didn’t open. I feared locking myself out on the light well (I normally crawl through the kitchen window to get there) or on front balcony while I was waving to tourists, pretending to be the Pope.

Face it. The house would look much better with nice wooden windows. Much better.

Or, as I’ve learned. Windows: You should upgrade.

You’re still running Windows 1970? You should be running Windows 2008! Don’t you know how buggy Windows 1970 is?

It’s true. Often on summer nights, whole swarms of tiny bugs breach the living room windows to fry themselves on the lamp (purchased at Lamps ‘R’ Us, circa 1988).

Once you decide to do something like that, put in new original-looking windows, the next part is easy. It seems that every other house in San Francisco has been through an extensive remodel during the fat years of subprime second mortgages. Every other house has been gutted and redone. So it’s not hard to get a recommendation for a contractor to address something as simple and ubiquitous as windows.

Windows? Just click here to install.

At first, it seemed like a relatively straightforward proposition. The window guys came out and measured. We chatted briefly. This side needs to open; that window needs to be laminated. The window guys eyed the American Express refrigerator magnets, houseplants, decrepit brown futon, stack of Chinese take-out menus, and collection of jelly jars skeptically. We wrote a big check.

Then they left and all was quiet. I felt good: we’d fixed up the windows.

Of course, we still had the old aluminum windows, but we’d demonstrated our intentions to upgrade. To make the place look a little less like it was inhabited by a nest of particularly messy urban scavengers, squirrels in graduate school or crows on holiday.

Everything was fine.

Every once in a while, I thought about the new windows, especially when I struggled to open or close one of the old windows or when the light hit the nose prints on the living room window just so.

“It’s really a good view” I’d explain to a visitor. “If the windows weren’t so dirty, you could see stuff like City Hall, SFMOMA, the skyline, Candlestick Park. It’s AMAZING.”

“Awesome,” the visitor would agree skeptically, examining the city lights dimly visible through the patina of nose grease. “It’s an awesome view.”

Finally there was no need to feel guilty about not washing these windows. They’d be gone soon.

That was the best part of our Windows Upgrade: the part after we’d paid the first big lump sum and before the workmen showed up to begin installing the first window, that period when anything was possible and you knew it would just get better. It was a great excuse for sloth and indecision.

“Go through that pile of stuff on my desk? No. I’ll just wait ‘til the new windows are in.”

“Get rid of those ugly metal venetian blinds? No point until they’re done with the windows.”

“Wash the dishes. Nah. They’ll just mess things up when they’re doing the windows.”

But then the honeymoon was over. The window guys scheduled a week in early March to come out and install our new windows.

“It probably won’t take all week.” That’s what Dawn said when we settled on a date for the work to begin.

Yep. Less than a week. Just backup the files, click on setup, and give it a couple of hours. And voila! New Windows.

It turns out that it’s not like that for real windows. Not like that at all.

I didn’t understand how disruptive installing windows would be, really. I mean, windows are more or less on the edge of a room, in the walls. That shouldn’t have anything to do with the middle of the room, right?

How naïve I am! Mark knew that was not the case. Not at all. So the night before the workmen were due to arrive, I found myself packing stuff into boxes and moving it away from the wall.

It’s surprising how much junk is in the periphery of our house. The houseplants, for example, seemed to be near the windows. What little furniture we have was clustered under windows. And we didn’t just have to move the furniture. I’d forgotten that all that furniture offered untold horizontal real-estate upon which to pile things. Magazines. Credit card receipts. Old laptops. Paper clips and rubber bands. Reminders of hobbies gone bad. Shredder oil. Shoe laces.

You know: stuff. The million quotidian things we accumulate in the name of everyday life.

Darn that furniture! Darn it!

How many magazines could possibly have been published between 1999 and now?

The trouble with going through old magazines is that it’s almost impossible to not start reading them. And if they’re old enough, I guarantee you that the articles will be just as good as they were when they were fresh, especially if you’re like me and avoid news magazines. New Yorker cartoons? No matter how funny they were then, it’s likely you won’t remember them and will be able to enjoy them afresh. I can’t throw away old magazines without taking a second look at them. And after I take a second look, I’m sucked in for hours.

Just how disruptive could it be to move everything into the middle of each room, away from the windows?

Oh, it doesn’t sound bad, but figure it out. Let’s say we pack everything up that’s five feet or less from the windows. If a window is 6 feet wide, we lose the 30 square feet in front of the window, plus the 5 foot penumbra radiating out to the side; let’s say that’s 2 quarter circles with a 5 foot radius, or 3.14*5*5*2/4. Which is another 39.25 square feet per room (although, of course, some of that falls outside of the wall, but I’m going to ignore that nicety; that’d make the numbers much less dramatic).

That’s 69.25 square feet per room. And there are 7 windows that are going to be replaced. 7.

Are you following me? That’s 484.75 square feet of crap that needs to be packed up and dragged into the center of the room, a zone that’s not exactly empty to start with.

484.75 square feet.

484.75 square feet of dreck to be dealt with.

Now the house looks as you’d expect. The interior walls are piled high with stuff and there’s nothing anywhere near the windows.

“It’s just for a week,” I reminded myself as I banged the shit out of my shins trying to get into bed that first Sunday night. “It’s just a week,” I said, stubbing my toe as I rushed to be ready for the workmen’s early arrival on Monday morning. “Just a week.”

Then we confronted the oldest dilemma in homeowner-ing: when the workmen are there, do you stay or do you go? I think songs have been written about it.

“Should I stay or should I go…”

If you stay, you’re kind of in the way. No—scratch that. You’re very much in the way. You’re underfoot. You’re a nuisance in your own house. You’re a first-class pain in the ass. But if you go, you can’t answer questions –this latch or that? Does the house get locked up while everyone goes to fetch lunch? Does this minor glitch need to be fixed or not? And, of course, does some drugstore cowboy get into your stash?

You know what we did: we stayed. Of course we stayed. We stayed and were in the way. We stayed and watched the unfolding drama. We stayed and tried to ignore the pounding and scraping and whirring and grinding and the smelly dump one of the workmen took after lunch.

One afternoon during that first week, Lumpy and I were napping on the futon downstairs while the workmen finished up the day’s work upstairs. Lumpy’s a cat who knows how to nap. He’s the king of naps, a napper of supreme confidence, competence, grace, and style. I don’t usually nap, but I’m an insomniac and accommodating the window installers’ harsh early-morning schedule made me sleep-deprived and nap-hungry right from the start. So there we were, Lump and me, snoozing away on the futon, ignoring the noise upstairs.

The largest and most senior of the window installers, Murph, rapped on the door by way of warning and came in to tell me that the crew was knocking off for the day.

Lumpy sprang into action.

He arched his back and roared like a lion. Like a large, ferocious lion. You’d never have known that seconds earlier he was curled in a compact half-circle, snoring softly, doing a pretty convincing impression of a housecat napping in a sunny spot.

I’ve never seen a housecat so delusionally fierce.

Murph said, “He’s trying to protect you.”

Protect me? Protect me from what? Maybe Lumpy knew something I didn’t. Perhaps he was protecting me from the rather obvious observation that the workmen weren’t done and wouldn’t be when Friday afternoon rolled around.

That the job would drag on and on. The way people had warned me that remodeling tasks do.

By Friday, I’d grown weary of being in the way and had gone to work. But Mark was still home. And after his one outburst, Lumpy was at home too, safely hidden under the futon. Way under the futon, in a place so dusty that he’d emerge in the evening with little bits of cobweb and dust bunny clinging to his luxuriant whiskers and eyebrows. Hardly the guy who’d roared so convincingly earlier in the week.

Around 4:30 Mark called me in my office. “I lost it,” he said. “I lost it at the workmen.”

“What do you mean, you lost it?” I asked him. “Did they finish?”

“No.”

“Well, what’s left for them to do? Are they close?”

“You’ll see.” He said this in a tone so ominous that I decided it might be a good day to work extra-late.

I’d wondered about the measurements the two men had made a few months ago, before they had built the windows; they seemed so, well, CASUAL. Sure, they used a tape measure. But they didn’t do what I would’ve done, checking and re-checking. Saying “Here. You try it and tell me what you get.” It was almost as if they could eyeball these distances, make wild-ass guesses, and the numbers would come out just right.

That’s why they’re experienced professionals, I reassured myself. They can really estimate distances well. They’re like surgeons: you wouldn’t want them to be pulling out copies of Gray’s Anatomy when they’re making the cuts, right? Of course you’re anesthetized at that point. Perhaps surgeons do pull out copies of Gray’s Anatomy. That’s why they give you anesthetic early on: so you won’t see them consulting the textbook.

Maybe these guys needed to give us some anesthetic. That way they could’ve been more careful without us knowing.

But by the time I’d worked through that, the two men had finished their measurements, talked to us about latches and hinges and that sort of stuff, gotten in their white panel van with the company’s name on the side, and left.

That was three months ago.

When I got home, I saw why Mark had lost it: The new French doors in the back bedroom ended considerably before the wall began again. It wasn’t the workmen’s fault either; they weren’t the ones who’d done the measuring. Their boss had measured. Their boss had measured, and now they were stuck at the job site with a psychotic homeowner and French doors that ended considerably before the wall started back up again. There was no denying it: The French doors were almost two inches too short. They took some photos of the problem and slunk back to their workshop in the East Bay, another perfectly good Friday afternoon shot to shit.

It’s just like installing Windows ™. It is. Better wipe that C: drive and start again.

Me, I’m sulking because my cymbidium was about to flower and the flower stalk has been knocked off in the process of installing the new kitchen window. My fault, really, since it wasn’t moved out of the way. But still I’ll sulk. The orchid hasn’t bloomed in the two-and-a-half years I’ve had it and I was looking forward to the flowers. I try to focus on the two inch gap at the top of the French doors and a few other window infelicities instead; I know that this is the time—the interregnum between the putative end of the major installation work and the writing of the final check—to mention gaps, latches, and divots in the wooden frames.

I’m not a very good homeowner; I just wish it was over. Although, after a week, I have grown accustomed to living in the center of all the rooms, well away from the walls.

I’m not yet quite used to living in a fishbowl; we cannot put up new shades or curtains until they’re finished with the work. I tell myself that there aren’t very many vantage points from which you can actually see into the house; yet I know this to be patently false. That to all our neighbors up the hill—including the man who looks suspiciously like Mr. Roper on Three’s Company—we’re a reality show. A reality show that’s too dull to go on into the next season, but a reality show nonetheless.

The next week the boss is out to mollify us. He seems used to all this and it occurs to me that he must go through this disgruntled customer routine all of the time. He’s good. Very good. He even seems to be enjoying himself. He jokes. We’re sheepish. Lists are drawn up. The sales guy, Matt, who has come out to make the rounds with the boss is defensive, but the boss is self-assured. Before it’s over, I half expect us to admit it’s our fault and to volunteer to do the work ourselves.
We show him that the balcony door doesn’t open all of the way.

Matt can’t hide his irritation, “I remember what you said. I have it written down. You said, ‘if someone can’t fit through a 21 inch door, the balcony can’t hold him anyway.’”

I tell him that I remember what I said too, and that he should think about it more carefully: that 21 inches refers to the opening, and that we were discussing whether it should be wider (and thus admit a bigger person), not narrower. That if anything, at the time I was trying to convince him of the wisdom of making the door narrower so that it would open all of the way. Now it does not open all of the way. They did not calculate the width taken up by the hinge’s geometrical offset.

I can see Matt getting hot. He’d like to shout at me, smack me with his clipboard.

I’d rather the door opened all the way, but I’m not going to get into a real lather over this. I already know they can’t fix it without making a new window, and that they have no intention of doing that.

The boss is smooth though, and seems to know I’ll give way on this issue. He smiles and we move on to the next window, which does have a fixable problem. Promises are made and the two men leave.

I’m anticipating that the workmen will be back soon. But they aren’t. We wake up early several mornings expecting a crew, but there’s no-one at the door. I’m getting black rings around my eyes and starting to feel progressively more sleep-deprived.

They finally show up one morning, two workmen we haven’t seen before. Soon the senior one abandons the junior one, who is Hispanic and shy and nice, to do most of the touch up work alone. He tells him that he’ll pick him up at the end of the day.

I watch him pounding on the new window. It is supposed to go back to the shop because one of the edges has been knocked off during the installation process. They did not mention this to us, but Mark caught the gaffe. It is the window we inspected with the boss immediately after the one that doesn’t open all of the way; this one we have been more adamant about after giving way on the other one.

The young workman pounds and pounds. “This will be noisy,” he tells me after he’s been pounding for a while.

“I can tell.”

He takes a different tack and asks me what kind of motorcycle I think he should buy. He has seen all of the bikes in the garage and doesn’t realize that the only one that is mine is the tiny Honda dirt bike, that I don’t ride the big street bikes.

“Have you ridden much?” I ask him.

“No. Not so much. Just a dirt bike when I was a kid.”

“Get a small bike then, a 250 or something. It’ll make you a better rider.” I’m watching him horse the window out of the frame and hope he’s not going to drop the thing. It makes me nervous to picture him on a motorcycle.

Installing windows is loud business. Although to-date our policy has been to be here with the workmen, I’m guessing this young guy’d be a lot happier if I disappeared and went off to work.

At about 3pm, Mark calls me in my office, wondering about my lack of judgment leaving the young workman alone in the house. And he’s right. When I come back, Lumpy is locked in downstairs and is yowling pitifully at my approach. There’s evidence that something’s gone wrong—a clump of wet paper towels, some weather stripping on the floor, a hunk of broken glass (which looks to be part of one of the jelly jars)—but it’s nothing important. And there is no narrative that I can invent out of these elements to weave together a story of what has happened, but the window the workman had been pounding on is gone, replaced by a hunk of pressed board and not much else has happened.

THE GAP is still there, looming as large as ever. But now it has tape over it.

There is a subsequent visit by two of the senior crew members. They have been sent to do something about THE GAP. Although they do something—and it looks credible—they don’t have time to finish and they leave a huge sheet of flapping plastic covering the outside of the French doors.

As if to give us a consolation prize, this time they leave behind an industrial vacuum cleaner, which sits in the corner of the dining room like a watchful space alien.

At least we know they’ll be back. Eventually.

Next Friday, Dawn says when she talks to our answering machine. Next Friday they’ll come back and finish.

I’m looking at the giant sheet of plastic covering the French doors in the back bedroom and the board filling in the dining room window. I’m looking at the missing stops and weather stripping yet to be installed. There’s a lot of work left to do. And I’m reminded of every remodeling story I’ve ever heard.

“It shouldn’t even be a whole day’s work,” Dawn tells us on the phone. For some reason, we still harbor fresh credulity.

“Next Friday,” we echo. “At 7:30. We’ll be ready.”

I’ll be happy when I can plug in my shredder again. When I can reclaim the 484.75 square feet at the edges of our house. When I can sleep ‘til 8am.

Seeing out the windows? Honestly, that’ll be a bonus.

Info for a friend

It all started innocently enough.

Early last week, I got a message from one Nicole B. I almost didn’t open it—the subject line said, “help”, an inauspicious tag line when the message is from a stranger. Usually when a message starts with “help”, it purports to be from a voluptuous 22-year-old Russian beauty who is looking for a date, a date with your credit card number. But the tone is so desperate and her intentions seem so honorable.

How could I say no?

This Nicole B. was not looking for a date; this Nicole B. was looking for what she termed info. Nicole B. was looking for info on the Web. Imagine that! My friend, you’ve come to the right place. Info, info, info. Nothing but info. A veritable sea of info: you could drown in all that info.

This info was not for herself either. Rather it was for a friend. And not just any friend. It was for her best friend:

My best friend is doing a report on Catherine Marshall and I was hoping you could help me find info for her. She’s really scared about this whole project for school, it’s a huge part of our entire semester grade, and if she fails this she fails the class. It’s very difficult to find info on Catherine Marshall. Your help is most appreciated.

Okay. I confess: I almost bit. It seemed so compelling: a scared best friend; a long-dead author of Christian romances; a big assignment; unspecified difficult-to-find info. I toyed briefly with actually becoming that Catherine Marshall, the real Catherine Marshall. She’s been dead for 25 years; I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. I could even type in ALL CAPS LIKE MY AUNT FRANCES to make it seem more realistic.

It’d be a challenge, but I just know I could pass for a 93 year-old writer of faith-based fiction.

But I couldn’t do it; I had the distinct feeling that Nicole B. wouldn’t buy it anyway. I don’t know why I suspected cynicism and suspicion. Maybe it was the apostrophes in her email, correctly and casually deployed. Maybe it was the way she was interceding for her poor BFF—she’s really scared—that put me on edge. Why did she write me? Nicole B. just didn’t seem like the sort of girl who would be unable to dredge up her own info.

When I wrote back to her, I pictured an Amy Winehouse, a tough girl, perhaps with a heart of gold, but perhaps not. Perhaps she was a mean girl who would make fun of a small furry geek girl without any tattoos.

It seemed like a big, fat trap.

I wondered: does she actually think that it’d be normal for a person with a common name to have the inside scoop on her doppelgangers? And why was her friend so fearful? Didn’t her friend have the wherewithal to type Catherine Marshall into some search engine?

Perhaps I was wrong in assuming it was for a high school project. Maybe (just maybe) she was helping her friend with her PhD dissertation. It’d be some post-modern feminist treatise about hegemony in the narrative interstices of the Christian romance novel and her friend, a budding Catherine Marshall scholar, was freaking out. Her therapist was on vacation. Her credit cards were maxed out. Her freezer contained nary an ice cube; the antidepressant bottle in her medicine cabinet, empty. Here she was, on the verge of being the number one Catherine Marshall scholar in the MLA, and she was just freaking out. It was then that her Amy Winehouse-like friend jumped in to the rescue, looking for more primary sources.

Probably not though. We do know that it’s a huge part of her grade, but it doesn't sound like a graduate program. It’s a book report, isn’t it? That’s the genre our Nicole B. is implying. Maybe a 9th grade reading assignment. I envision 4 pages cribbed from the Web equivalent to Cliff’s Notes.

Wait a minute! The Web equivalent to Cliff’s Notes—Isn’t the Wikipedia entry for Catherine Marshall the 4th item that Google returns? There’s something fishy going on here. I should be wary.

But I couldn’t resist. Once again I wrote back to Nicole B.

I played it cool: I just asked her what she’d found so far. And signed it Catherine Marshall. I’m not sure why I did that. I don’t even turn around if someone yells, “Hey, Catherine!” (with the exception of my mother, of course). And I never, ever sign informal email with my last name. Never.

Nicole B. wrote right back—almost too quickly. She’s clearly a girl who expects answers. She said:

A question: I don’t know a lot about Catherine Marshall, but is this really her? I love Christy. I own the book and the movies. =D

Is this really her? I’m such a big fan. The custom smiley. =D

C’mon. She knows I’m not really that Catherine Marshall. How could she have missed all of the bios that reported that this author of “affirmations of faith” bought the farm in 1983? Not a single biography that I saw neglected to mention that she died in 1983. And there are plenty of biographies. Plenty.

Even the People-style website Who’s Dated Who reports that she married Rev. Peter Marshall in 1936 (although it did not warn the casual reader that Rev. Peter Marshall never emceed The Hollywood Squares, which would’ve been my first thought).

Then I clicked on the wrong link.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the repurposed Olan Mills photos yet—someone must’ve grabbed them off the Olan Mills web site, from their portfolio of past work. They're photos like the one on the left, with inventive captions like, Bobbi isn’t the first waitress to fall for her manager, but she and Dale both got fired from Shoney’s.

What, you must be thinking, does Olan Mills have to do with Catherine Marshall?

Here’s what: when I followed a biography link for Catherine Marshall on the HarperCollins website, I found yet another Olan Mills photo, one I hadn’t seen before. This one seems to have been altered with a ball point pen: the eyeballs have been intensified into smoldering black coals and a sinister mustache and soul patch have been penned in.

I don’t think that’s the real Catherine Marshall. I bet someone would’ve mentioned the soul patch by now: “Catherine Marshall: The only best-selling Christian romance writer with satanic facial hair.”

They would’ve said something. Certainly they wouldn’t have kept quiet.

When I saw this, I began to wonder about Nicole B. and her BFF. Was I being had? Am I getting picked on by the mean girls again?

But mean girls and Catherine Marshall doesn’t add up.

I’ll write back to her one last time, I decided. One last time. A short message to dispel the notion that I might be foolish enough—and gullible enough—to fall for that old line about ‘my best friend’s homework’. Honestly!

Yes, indeed, my refrigerator is running. And I have Prince Albert in a can.

There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re the butt of a stranger’s joke. I picture Amy Winehouse laughing so hard that her mascara runs