I was working the evening shift at Taco Bell last week when a weird thing happened. A succession of more than a dozen customers came in. Each and every one of them carried Chihuahuas in their arms. Ever since the successful ad campaign a few years back though, this happened a lot.
Some of them were of Asian descent, each in the outfit of his or her chosen trade. One was a nurse…another carried a feather duster in a back pocket and her dog in a bucket suspended from a mop. Still a third had a laptop and a ledger. A young Jewish data analyst in the line wore a Yarmulke and was being nudged along by an evil woman, clearly from New Zealand. There was a Sikh, sporting a turban, and a cowboy in a ten gallon hat, chaps and spurs. There was a priest, clerical collar and all, followed by a clown, followed by a Native American in full headdress. Next was a red-headed construction worker, lugging not only his dog, but a jackhammer. An African American lawyer with his dog in a custom briefcase, a combat pilot in his pressure suit and a stereotypical bimbo starlet stretched the line all the way to the door, where a mime, whose dog was painted silver, anchored the crowd. Not a single one of the customers appeared to be ethnically of Mexican or South American descent.
Again, I was not particularly surprised, since this is a country with a hugely diverse ethnic spread. We have historically welcomed peoples from all across the world. The words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty embody what all freedom-loving peoples strive for. And while it felt like I was watching the Village People…(I expected the strains of “Y.M.C.A.” to flow forth from the radio.)…that still wasn’t what made it so strange.
Each and every one of them ordered Nachos. They all asked for exactly the same item and all ordered with thick Latino accents. There was no variation, no doubt due in large part to the same cute advertising campaign of a few years ago. And ordering Nachos on a Tuesday wasn’t unusual. Our manager had made Tuesdays a “Special Day” for them. But you had to pay extra for the peppers, so usually; few people ordered them that way. Today, everyone did. Wasn’t that odd?
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Saturday, April 19, 2008
The Latest Last Straw
As a general rule, I’m not a purist about most things. I have my preferences to be certain, but not many things push enough of my buttons to put me into full-on outrage mode. Still, it does happen on occasion, and generally it is politics that turns me into a raging fanatic. The wasteful ways our elected representatives deflate our lives and fortunes with self-serving decisions is so outrageous, it makes my blood boil. But this isn’t about politics. This is much closer to my heart.
When my wife came home last night from the supermarket, she had lox and cream cheese and bagels for me. Lox and cream cheese are a real treat. Growing up in the Bronx, with my grandfather as my mentor, I developed a real appreciation for Smoked Salmon…belly lox, sliced fresh from the neighborhood fish store and cream cheese right from the dairy store’s churn. Of course, it doesn’t come that way anymore. It’s sliced and packaged Nova lox from the market and whipped Philly in a tub. But I can live with that. The hand-filleted stuff is pretty much only available at delicatessens nowadays and costs more than a luxury car by the pound.
Bagels are a whole other animal. I remember my grandmother trudging six blocks each way, early on Sunday mornings, to the bakery, where she would get a dozen assorted egg, salt and onion bagels. They were hot, fresh and had this baked-on shiny crust that most resembled the fender of a new car. That was then. This…is now.
I don’t blame my wife. She’s a San Fernando Valley girl, born and raised. She didn’t mature in the bagel Garden of Eden. This is not to say she can’t tell a good bagel from a bad one.
Her family did indulge in the best that L.A. has to offer, “Western Bagel.” These are every bit as good as my childhood memories. But they are a tad harder to come by in our little hamlet of Simi Valley. It’s a nine mile commute to the nearest outlet. Even Grandma would have drawn the line well before nine miles.
So, we are forced for the most part to live with the supermarket variety. These can range from acceptable to shameful. There are lots of bagel brands out there, and I’m not partial to some of them, but I will begrudgingly eat many of them. I’ve devoured salt bagels, rye bagels, sesame bagels, egg bagels and onion bagels…though the latter leaves my breath deadly. I’ve even been known to shmear some peanut butter on a blueberry bagel, though I don’t really consider it a bagel…too sweet. And I’ve invented all manner of post-modern deli sandwiches, using that little boiled and baked ring of dough. But what happened yesterday broke the camel’s back.
When I withdrew the pre-packaged, plastic sleeved, Sara Goyisha Lee bagels from the bag, they were whole wheat! That is not a bagel. It’s a…a health donut! WHOLE FREAKING WHEAT!
Okay, breathe. Calm down Burton. That’s better.
For God’s sake, doesn’t the Sara Lee Bakery have any conscience? What are they, tree hugging health food freaks? The thing is too soft. It’s like a slice of bread with a hole in it. There are little flakes of stone-ground-something particles sprinkled on it and to make matters worse, the damned thing comes pre-sliced. What must they think of their buying public? Are we all senior citizens with dentures who have lost the ability to handle a knife?
Even my wife offered the opinion that they seemed like bread in a different shape. She justified her purchase by saying that there wasn’t a whole lot of choice. The “Lenders,” the other Sara Lee varieties, which we would have accepted, and even the Johnny-Come-Lately, “Thomas’ Bagels” simply weren’t on the shelf. There seemed to be a run on the better bagels, and she has a major distrust of house brands. Though after this experience, I suspect she will happily sample the Vons bagels before ever venturing into the world of whole wheat again.
So, what this all comes down to is really quite simple. If faced with ever eating a whole wheat bagel again or searching for an alternative platform for my lox and cream cheese, I’d rather use a Pop-Tart.
When my wife came home last night from the supermarket, she had lox and cream cheese and bagels for me. Lox and cream cheese are a real treat. Growing up in the Bronx, with my grandfather as my mentor, I developed a real appreciation for Smoked Salmon…belly lox, sliced fresh from the neighborhood fish store and cream cheese right from the dairy store’s churn. Of course, it doesn’t come that way anymore. It’s sliced and packaged Nova lox from the market and whipped Philly in a tub. But I can live with that. The hand-filleted stuff is pretty much only available at delicatessens nowadays and costs more than a luxury car by the pound.
Bagels are a whole other animal. I remember my grandmother trudging six blocks each way, early on Sunday mornings, to the bakery, where she would get a dozen assorted egg, salt and onion bagels. They were hot, fresh and had this baked-on shiny crust that most resembled the fender of a new car. That was then. This…is now.
I don’t blame my wife. She’s a San Fernando Valley girl, born and raised. She didn’t mature in the bagel Garden of Eden. This is not to say she can’t tell a good bagel from a bad one.
Her family did indulge in the best that L.A. has to offer, “Western Bagel.” These are every bit as good as my childhood memories. But they are a tad harder to come by in our little hamlet of Simi Valley. It’s a nine mile commute to the nearest outlet. Even Grandma would have drawn the line well before nine miles.
So, we are forced for the most part to live with the supermarket variety. These can range from acceptable to shameful. There are lots of bagel brands out there, and I’m not partial to some of them, but I will begrudgingly eat many of them. I’ve devoured salt bagels, rye bagels, sesame bagels, egg bagels and onion bagels…though the latter leaves my breath deadly. I’ve even been known to shmear some peanut butter on a blueberry bagel, though I don’t really consider it a bagel…too sweet. And I’ve invented all manner of post-modern deli sandwiches, using that little boiled and baked ring of dough. But what happened yesterday broke the camel’s back.
When I withdrew the pre-packaged, plastic sleeved, Sara Goyisha Lee bagels from the bag, they were whole wheat! That is not a bagel. It’s a…a health donut! WHOLE FREAKING WHEAT!
Okay, breathe. Calm down Burton. That’s better.
For God’s sake, doesn’t the Sara Lee Bakery have any conscience? What are they, tree hugging health food freaks? The thing is too soft. It’s like a slice of bread with a hole in it. There are little flakes of stone-ground-something particles sprinkled on it and to make matters worse, the damned thing comes pre-sliced. What must they think of their buying public? Are we all senior citizens with dentures who have lost the ability to handle a knife?
Even my wife offered the opinion that they seemed like bread in a different shape. She justified her purchase by saying that there wasn’t a whole lot of choice. The “Lenders,” the other Sara Lee varieties, which we would have accepted, and even the Johnny-Come-Lately, “Thomas’ Bagels” simply weren’t on the shelf. There seemed to be a run on the better bagels, and she has a major distrust of house brands. Though after this experience, I suspect she will happily sample the Vons bagels before ever venturing into the world of whole wheat again.
So, what this all comes down to is really quite simple. If faced with ever eating a whole wheat bagel again or searching for an alternative platform for my lox and cream cheese, I’d rather use a Pop-Tart.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Taken By Aliens
It all began innocently enough but the bitter taste in my mouth will never fade and I'm not sure who I can trust anymore. Witness my tale and decide for yourself.
Out of the blue, I received an e-mail from an old friend. His memory had long since faded into the background of my thoughts. But here he was, alive and kicking as they say. We exchanged several e-mails in the ensuing weeks. We talked about what we've been doing for the last 15 years. He gave up acting to become a real estate professional in a rural area of Wyoming. I studied philosophy and have been a Chinese herbalist in Los Angeles for the better part of a decade. We talked about the movies we'd seen, the books we'd read. (I've read far more than he had, though many were herb or health-related.)
We had been good friends since high school, roommates in college, confidants and each other's excuse during a time when students always needed some sort of alibi. Then came graduation and the barges that ferried our lives drifted in different directions. But our e-mails revealed that neither one of us ever felt the other had dropped the friendship. This is just the way life works. People simply grow apart.
It was great to relive some of the high points of our youth and it had been good to catch up. I'm certain that I am not alone in the need for some connection to my past. It rounds out ones' life. Still, as we continued e-mailing back and forth, I came to realize that he was holding something back...something intangible...something he wanted to say but I think, was moved to avoid. Initially, I didn't press him on certain missing details out of a concern that he might unilaterally end the communication. And I was truly enjoying his e-mails. But something was definitely being glossed over on his side of our exchanges.
When I asked him how he came to be in Wyoming, he danced around the question, blathering loosely about aimlessly drifting and ending up in this desolate but beautiful area. He claimed that the breathtaking beauty of the locale saved his very soul. It was all very poetic. And it was all a carefully contrived camouflage. Then he abruptly changed the subject. He was also clearly reluctant to be specific about a certain three year period, instead bending the timeline so that the years around it sort of filled it up, like water pouring in from all sides of a hole in the sand, seeking its own level. From my point of view, it was in fact, a gaping hole in his life. I tried to get him to open up about it, but he was resistant. The more he resisted, the harder I tried to pry it out of him. The harder I tried, the stronger was his resolve to remain tight-lipped, until I finally gave up and decided not to press him for more detail. But I determined to solve the mystery of the three year gap on my own.
I began by Googling him and found that there were lots of references to him, 843,678, if you counted all the other people with his name. As I got better at it, narrowing the search parameters, I found several dozen web-sites that talked about him. And every one of those web sites was concerned in one manner or another, with alien abductions. The other thing that I didn't know until I Googled him, and which he took great pains not to mention to me, is that he had been reported missing by his family, some 12 years ago.
When I contacted them, (being cautious to only inquire as to his whereabouts as an old friend) I learned from his sister that his mother and father had passed on some years back and that she didn't know where he was or even if he was alive. She told me that he had disappeared under a cloud of suspicion about his involvement in an embezzlement scam. In the interim, he had been cleared. She had heard the theories about him being abducted by aliens because of the mysterious circumstances of his disappearance, but she had discounted them. She thought that he had dropped out of sight to avoid prosecution. So now I had all the pieces...and they fit. My friend, wrongly accused, had taken the line of least resistance and simply disappeared to begin a new life in a new state. I decided to e-mail him and tell him that I knew it all. His response floored me.
He said he hadn't run out on the embezzlement case. He actually claimed that he had been kidnapped by aliens, and that he feared that they would be coming back for him if he left Wyoming. So, he decided to stay there. But why Wyoming? His extremely curious answer was that the area, in which he now resided, had been the site of numerous cattle mutilations in the 1980's. The place was crawling with government agents and Ufologists. Because of that, he said, the aliens had shifted their operations elsewhere. Then he told me something that would have frightened me had I believed a word of what I was hearing. He said that he feared for me.
He believed that the aliens had hacked his e-mail and had my e-mail address and could easily find me. He said I could be in danger now that I knew his story. He suggested that I come up to Wyoming where I'd be safe. Stalling for time, I told him I'd think about it. But when I shut down my e-mail that night, I had pretty much decided that my old friend was a wacko. And I decided that I wasn't going to e-mail him anymore. What happened later that night made me change my mind.
I was sound asleep when around midnight, when a sound...a hum, that I can only describe as a low-pitched ringing in my ears, awakened me. It reminded me of the time I was struck in the side of my head with a softball and suffered tinnitus for a week. I sat up in bed, groggy. There was a light glowing in the center of my room. It seemed to have no source, and while it was fairly intense, it didn't hurt my eyes and faded to inky blackness at its edges.
I thought I was having a nightmare, but soon realized that I was wide awake...and further realized that if I was awake, I was also terrified. Mercifully, the glow faded, as did the hum and I seemed none the worse for the experience except I'd peed in my pajamas.
The very next day, I boarded a flight for Wyoming, not knowing what I might be facing. When my flight landed at the South Bighorn County Airport, outside of Greybull, I was greeted at the gate by my old friend and a limo driver named Gabor. We collected my bags and I was ushered to a Town Car with the name "Safe Harbor Realty" printed on a magnetic sign on the door. We headed north, away from the town. As we drove along in silence, I observed that the car's headliner was made of what appeared to be aluminum foil. My friend informed me it blocked the alien mind probes. This was getting crazier and crazier. And yet, I could not get the terrifying hum and light of the previous night, out of my head.
Presently, we arrived at the middle of a desolate nowhere. And there, plunked down on thousands of acres of nothing was a sign that read: "Safe Harbor Estates." We drove past an unattended guard shack and down a black-topped entry street to a small neighborhood of one-story homes with aluminum foil-skinned roofs.
Then came what would have under other circumstances seemed like a high-pressure sales pitch. My friend asserted that for my own safety I had to move here. He told me to pick from any of the fifteen unoccupied units that remained among the twenty or so houses in the neighborhood. I was in such a daze throughout that I went along with everything, no questions asked. My friend handled everything and assured me that he was feeling extremely guilty about getting me involved in the mess to begin with. He removed his commission from the sale and convinced the developer to include upgraded carpets, landscaping, new appliances and tile floors in the purchase price. And he arranged for me to live, rent-free, in the new house until escrow closed. Over the next couple of weeks, with my friend's help, I sold my home and business back in Los Angeles, and closed escrow on the house in Wyoming. If this was L.A., I'd have felt it was all a scam. But here...here my life was being saved.
On the day escrow closed, my friend came to visit me, final papers in hand. It was then, as I sat, initialing the final page in my new kitchen, that I learned the horrible truth. My friend morphed into a hideous and unearthly creature. He was himself, an alien. He then told me that my friend, the real one, had been abducted several years back and his mind had been probed for what he knew. But he had died, regrettably, in the process. This alien and his pals saw this as an opportunity to replace my friend with an otherworldly doppelganger and make some money at the same time.
I had just closed escrow on a worthless piece of dirt in Wyoming that would never appreciate because no one in their right mind would want a tin foil house, 50 miles from civilization.
The alien's laugh still reverberates in my memory as I recall the moment he scooped up the papers and vanished in the same light I had seen in my bedroom all those weeks before. What a fool I had been. My savings were gone. I now lived, a Chinese herbalist, in the absolute middle of cowboy nowhere with no prospects and no recourse. I had been taken...taken by aliens!
Out of the blue, I received an e-mail from an old friend. His memory had long since faded into the background of my thoughts. But here he was, alive and kicking as they say. We exchanged several e-mails in the ensuing weeks. We talked about what we've been doing for the last 15 years. He gave up acting to become a real estate professional in a rural area of Wyoming. I studied philosophy and have been a Chinese herbalist in Los Angeles for the better part of a decade. We talked about the movies we'd seen, the books we'd read. (I've read far more than he had, though many were herb or health-related.)
We had been good friends since high school, roommates in college, confidants and each other's excuse during a time when students always needed some sort of alibi. Then came graduation and the barges that ferried our lives drifted in different directions. But our e-mails revealed that neither one of us ever felt the other had dropped the friendship. This is just the way life works. People simply grow apart.
It was great to relive some of the high points of our youth and it had been good to catch up. I'm certain that I am not alone in the need for some connection to my past. It rounds out ones' life. Still, as we continued e-mailing back and forth, I came to realize that he was holding something back...something intangible...something he wanted to say but I think, was moved to avoid. Initially, I didn't press him on certain missing details out of a concern that he might unilaterally end the communication. And I was truly enjoying his e-mails. But something was definitely being glossed over on his side of our exchanges.
When I asked him how he came to be in Wyoming, he danced around the question, blathering loosely about aimlessly drifting and ending up in this desolate but beautiful area. He claimed that the breathtaking beauty of the locale saved his very soul. It was all very poetic. And it was all a carefully contrived camouflage. Then he abruptly changed the subject. He was also clearly reluctant to be specific about a certain three year period, instead bending the timeline so that the years around it sort of filled it up, like water pouring in from all sides of a hole in the sand, seeking its own level. From my point of view, it was in fact, a gaping hole in his life. I tried to get him to open up about it, but he was resistant. The more he resisted, the harder I tried to pry it out of him. The harder I tried, the stronger was his resolve to remain tight-lipped, until I finally gave up and decided not to press him for more detail. But I determined to solve the mystery of the three year gap on my own.
I began by Googling him and found that there were lots of references to him, 843,678, if you counted all the other people with his name. As I got better at it, narrowing the search parameters, I found several dozen web-sites that talked about him. And every one of those web sites was concerned in one manner or another, with alien abductions. The other thing that I didn't know until I Googled him, and which he took great pains not to mention to me, is that he had been reported missing by his family, some 12 years ago.
When I contacted them, (being cautious to only inquire as to his whereabouts as an old friend) I learned from his sister that his mother and father had passed on some years back and that she didn't know where he was or even if he was alive. She told me that he had disappeared under a cloud of suspicion about his involvement in an embezzlement scam. In the interim, he had been cleared. She had heard the theories about him being abducted by aliens because of the mysterious circumstances of his disappearance, but she had discounted them. She thought that he had dropped out of sight to avoid prosecution. So now I had all the pieces...and they fit. My friend, wrongly accused, had taken the line of least resistance and simply disappeared to begin a new life in a new state. I decided to e-mail him and tell him that I knew it all. His response floored me.
He said he hadn't run out on the embezzlement case. He actually claimed that he had been kidnapped by aliens, and that he feared that they would be coming back for him if he left Wyoming. So, he decided to stay there. But why Wyoming? His extremely curious answer was that the area, in which he now resided, had been the site of numerous cattle mutilations in the 1980's. The place was crawling with government agents and Ufologists. Because of that, he said, the aliens had shifted their operations elsewhere. Then he told me something that would have frightened me had I believed a word of what I was hearing. He said that he feared for me.
He believed that the aliens had hacked his e-mail and had my e-mail address and could easily find me. He said I could be in danger now that I knew his story. He suggested that I come up to Wyoming where I'd be safe. Stalling for time, I told him I'd think about it. But when I shut down my e-mail that night, I had pretty much decided that my old friend was a wacko. And I decided that I wasn't going to e-mail him anymore. What happened later that night made me change my mind.
I was sound asleep when around midnight, when a sound...a hum, that I can only describe as a low-pitched ringing in my ears, awakened me. It reminded me of the time I was struck in the side of my head with a softball and suffered tinnitus for a week. I sat up in bed, groggy. There was a light glowing in the center of my room. It seemed to have no source, and while it was fairly intense, it didn't hurt my eyes and faded to inky blackness at its edges.
I thought I was having a nightmare, but soon realized that I was wide awake...and further realized that if I was awake, I was also terrified. Mercifully, the glow faded, as did the hum and I seemed none the worse for the experience except I'd peed in my pajamas.
The very next day, I boarded a flight for Wyoming, not knowing what I might be facing. When my flight landed at the South Bighorn County Airport, outside of Greybull, I was greeted at the gate by my old friend and a limo driver named Gabor. We collected my bags and I was ushered to a Town Car with the name "Safe Harbor Realty" printed on a magnetic sign on the door. We headed north, away from the town. As we drove along in silence, I observed that the car's headliner was made of what appeared to be aluminum foil. My friend informed me it blocked the alien mind probes. This was getting crazier and crazier. And yet, I could not get the terrifying hum and light of the previous night, out of my head.
Presently, we arrived at the middle of a desolate nowhere. And there, plunked down on thousands of acres of nothing was a sign that read: "Safe Harbor Estates." We drove past an unattended guard shack and down a black-topped entry street to a small neighborhood of one-story homes with aluminum foil-skinned roofs.
Then came what would have under other circumstances seemed like a high-pressure sales pitch. My friend asserted that for my own safety I had to move here. He told me to pick from any of the fifteen unoccupied units that remained among the twenty or so houses in the neighborhood. I was in such a daze throughout that I went along with everything, no questions asked. My friend handled everything and assured me that he was feeling extremely guilty about getting me involved in the mess to begin with. He removed his commission from the sale and convinced the developer to include upgraded carpets, landscaping, new appliances and tile floors in the purchase price. And he arranged for me to live, rent-free, in the new house until escrow closed. Over the next couple of weeks, with my friend's help, I sold my home and business back in Los Angeles, and closed escrow on the house in Wyoming. If this was L.A., I'd have felt it was all a scam. But here...here my life was being saved.
On the day escrow closed, my friend came to visit me, final papers in hand. It was then, as I sat, initialing the final page in my new kitchen, that I learned the horrible truth. My friend morphed into a hideous and unearthly creature. He was himself, an alien. He then told me that my friend, the real one, had been abducted several years back and his mind had been probed for what he knew. But he had died, regrettably, in the process. This alien and his pals saw this as an opportunity to replace my friend with an otherworldly doppelganger and make some money at the same time.
I had just closed escrow on a worthless piece of dirt in Wyoming that would never appreciate because no one in their right mind would want a tin foil house, 50 miles from civilization.
The alien's laugh still reverberates in my memory as I recall the moment he scooped up the papers and vanished in the same light I had seen in my bedroom all those weeks before. What a fool I had been. My savings were gone. I now lived, a Chinese herbalist, in the absolute middle of cowboy nowhere with no prospects and no recourse. I had been taken...taken by aliens!
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Hell's Closet
I've crabbed about my redecorating misadventures before. But nothing I have experienced in my summer career as a Home and Garden Network novitiate, could ever have prepared me for my "Bedroom Closet" adventure.
Our home was built in 1970 and had a spacious master bedroom, but it came saddled with the Rhode Island of closets, The White Castle Hamburger of dressing suites, the M&M of walk-ins.
This wasn't a small closet. It was more of a minuscule, vertical coffin. Back in the days when college students packed phone booths, it would've held maybe one kid. The shoe rack accommodated a pair, one shoe at a time. There was a shelf above the rod on the far wall. The term far wall is a bit inaccurate. After all, there can't even be a "far" wall in a two dimensional space. This closet had height, width (a barely measurable amount of each) and nearly as much depth as a vapid, Hollywood starlet. If you stepped inside, the tips of your shoes would protrude into the family room beyond that mythical far wall. If you had a pot-belly, fully entering was impossible. It was abundantly clear that the very souls of all those that had ventured into the near reaches of this closet screamed for a remodel.
On a bright, disarmingly sunny morning, I emptied the clothes from the closet. Oddly, this took a couple of hours. And the clothes and shoes and purses and what-not that filled the inches by inches closet space, consumed nearly an entire ten by ten room when finally exposed to air.
I don't think that the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt had that much stuff crammed into their pyramids. I firmly believe that some items might have lasted for thousands of years with the air squeezed out of them. For, as I laid out some of my wife's older skirts and blouses they spontaneously turned to dust.
Brushing off my hands, I faced the demolition phase with the determination of a beaver, eager to build his lodge. This was where the fun started...and quickly drew to a close.
It is strong testimony to the craftsmanship of the men who built this home, that nearly every nail I pulled from the closet took with it a jagged chunk of wallboard. When I finally got the shelf and rods out, it looked as though I had taken the thing apart with a shotgun. There were holes at nearly every height and on every wall. There were even holes on walls that never had a shelf or rod, from the occasional errant back swing.
In addition, the t.v. cable for two rooms was routed through this closet. Loops of cable were stapled to the wall everywhere, because the cable installer made all the lines too long. "In case you want to move your set." That's cable-speak for "I'm too lazy to measure how much I need."
When I pried those staples from the wall, I found I had nearly enough extra cable to make a rope for hanging and a sturdy noose. I toyed with inviting the guy back. But eventually decided that fun would have to wait.
Finally, everything was out of the closet, and I found I could actually move in there...if turning in place can be called moving. I had carefully drawn out plans for putting new, vinyl-coated wire rods and shelving in the closet in the most efficient manner possible. I had purchased and assembled all the materials and lined them up like little vinyl-coated soldiers along the wall of the bedroom.
I'd done the math. With the help of a little quantum mechanics, I might actually be able to open a worm-hole to the closet dimension, and there hang twice as much as before...and still have room to turn in place. But first, I had to patch the drywall and paint the place.
I considered removing the drywall entirely, since most of it was gone already, but decided it was better that the corners of the closet meet than there be places for evil spirits to take up residence. Three gallons of wall-joint compound and 687 feet of paper tape later, the closet looked like what a mummy's wrappings must have looked like...to the mummy.
It was time for a break. My body was telling me it was time to hire someone, but I only have the time for these projects when I'm off work and therefore reluctant to spend money that isn't being replenished. I dined with my lovely wife, who prepared our ceremonial ham and swiss cheese remodeling lunch, while the plaster dried. As I sat, my joints got stiffer and I was reminded of the meaning of pain. And more was yet to come.
Thus began the sanding. When it was done, where there had been carpet, was a wall-to-wall, plaster dune. I could imagine someone cresting the top of it on a quad. Then there was me. My hair, usually salt and pepper, was white. In fact, I was white everywhere. I looked like an Italian Renaissance sculpture; Michelangelo's "Fat Jewish Kid." I got my trusty shop vac and forty tankfuls later, had a dust-free closet. It was at that point that the sun set and my body broke into a million painful pieces.
There are several over-the-counter remedies for the kind of discomfort I was feeling. Chief among them is Scotch. And it's not necessary to spend an inordinate amount of money on the name brands, like Pinch or Johnnie Walker Black. You're just paying for their advertising budgets. For the purpose of killing pain, even the cheapest house-brand of rot-gut on the shelf will alleviate one's symptoms by the third or fourth tumbler. And in therapy is how I spent that night.
By the next day, my vision was fuzzy. My head was pounding and I could barely keep Pepto Bismol down. But I'd made it through the night and after a long, hot shower, I re-entered the urban jungle that called itself my closet.
This time, I was armed with a paint brush and a gallon of white primer. I've often felt that the use of a white primer, when the final coat was also to be white was a waste of time. But as I've tackled these projects over the years, I've found that at cocktail parties, the mere mention that one has primered a wall garners oohs and aahs of admiration. It's sort of like a cute dog being a chick magnet...except that this draws attention from other do-it-yourselfers. The adulation makes the six bucks a gallon and the time spent more than worthwhile.
I spread a drop-cloth on what was left of the carpet, and began to paint with careful strokes. It's important to cover the area as completely as possible, so that you will be unable to tell where you have painted and where you haven't when you go to apply the same color of the final coat later. That way, you will likely have to return and buy a second gallon of the expensive paint to make sure you have covered everything.
No one ever buys both gallons at once. The revelation that you can't see where it's painted and where it's not, always comes as a surprise. I think it's a species-specific thing. We are genetically unsuited to predict that we will run out of paint. The plumbers among us can relate to this. All plumbing projects require at least one extra trip to the hardware store. Even professional plumbers face this. Though for them, they simply charge for the extra time and mileage.
For the rest of us, we have to clean up as best we can and head to the home improvement center, usually smeared in whatever paint or gunk we were using. In the process, we naturally consume extra time and gasoline. The employees at the store giggle and point at the fool who didn't plan. It's kind of like treating the Home Depot to dinner and a show.
So, I washed out the paint brush, scrubbed the drips from my glasses, dragged a comb through my hair to separate the clumps and went off to buy another gallon. Of course, when I bought the first can, it was on sale. This time it cost me six dollars more. This was quickly becoming more than a closet remodel. It's scope was approaching a government contract.
For some reason I couldn't explain, the rest of the painting went without incident. And when I was done, I had a beautiful white closet. Of course, it was an empty shell with no shelves nor rods to hang anything.
Then I figured out why the last of the painting had been such a smooth affair. I was being saved for the slaughter. The vinyl-coated wire shelves and other hardware which I had so carefully planned for, would be useless without CUSTOM MODIFICATIONS. I had to cut, trim, bend, twist, drill, hack, cajole and pray for each and every fitting that went into that horrific, white, black hole.
At the close of day two, when my planned project was to have been completed, I had one half of one shelf installed. My hands were bloodied and scraped. My knuckles ached in places I didn't know I had. My body was contorted from working upside down more than half the time, and I lay on the paint-covered drop cloth on the floor of the closet, screaming in agony for my wife to bring me a scotch.
She was outside, lounging by the pool. When she finally heard me and came in, merciful scotch in hand, she reminded me that when I was finished in here, the pool needed vacuuming. All I could do was whimper until I fell asleep where I lay. That night, I dreamed I had gone to Hell. I don't recall all the details, except to say that it definitely resembled a closet. When I awoke the next morning, I discovered I was right.
Day Three - Without food or water, with no hope of rescue, I trudged on through the vinyl-coated forest canopy, praying for the release of a quick death. Section after section of wire-rack jungle grasses fell to the buzz of my Sawzall as I feverishly worked my way towards salvation. Hole after hole drilled and filled with plastic wall anchors. Finally, as the sun was setting in the west, I caught a glimpse of it at the edge of the vinyl-coated underbrush. Civilization was in sight. I would survive! My wife met me at the clearing, ham and swiss reward in one hand and a chaser over ice in the other. She spoke five words to me that made me well up with tears.
"That closet is the bomb!"
Then she had a few more that made those tears flow.
"Eat, then you can put the clothes back. I've gotta meet the girls at Pilates."
Even as I write these words, I can't help but bawl.
Our home was built in 1970 and had a spacious master bedroom, but it came saddled with the Rhode Island of closets, The White Castle Hamburger of dressing suites, the M&M of walk-ins.
This wasn't a small closet. It was more of a minuscule, vertical coffin. Back in the days when college students packed phone booths, it would've held maybe one kid. The shoe rack accommodated a pair, one shoe at a time. There was a shelf above the rod on the far wall. The term far wall is a bit inaccurate. After all, there can't even be a "far" wall in a two dimensional space. This closet had height, width (a barely measurable amount of each) and nearly as much depth as a vapid, Hollywood starlet. If you stepped inside, the tips of your shoes would protrude into the family room beyond that mythical far wall. If you had a pot-belly, fully entering was impossible. It was abundantly clear that the very souls of all those that had ventured into the near reaches of this closet screamed for a remodel.
On a bright, disarmingly sunny morning, I emptied the clothes from the closet. Oddly, this took a couple of hours. And the clothes and shoes and purses and what-not that filled the inches by inches closet space, consumed nearly an entire ten by ten room when finally exposed to air.
I don't think that the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt had that much stuff crammed into their pyramids. I firmly believe that some items might have lasted for thousands of years with the air squeezed out of them. For, as I laid out some of my wife's older skirts and blouses they spontaneously turned to dust.
Brushing off my hands, I faced the demolition phase with the determination of a beaver, eager to build his lodge. This was where the fun started...and quickly drew to a close.
It is strong testimony to the craftsmanship of the men who built this home, that nearly every nail I pulled from the closet took with it a jagged chunk of wallboard. When I finally got the shelf and rods out, it looked as though I had taken the thing apart with a shotgun. There were holes at nearly every height and on every wall. There were even holes on walls that never had a shelf or rod, from the occasional errant back swing.
In addition, the t.v. cable for two rooms was routed through this closet. Loops of cable were stapled to the wall everywhere, because the cable installer made all the lines too long. "In case you want to move your set." That's cable-speak for "I'm too lazy to measure how much I need."
When I pried those staples from the wall, I found I had nearly enough extra cable to make a rope for hanging and a sturdy noose. I toyed with inviting the guy back. But eventually decided that fun would have to wait.
Finally, everything was out of the closet, and I found I could actually move in there...if turning in place can be called moving. I had carefully drawn out plans for putting new, vinyl-coated wire rods and shelving in the closet in the most efficient manner possible. I had purchased and assembled all the materials and lined them up like little vinyl-coated soldiers along the wall of the bedroom.
I'd done the math. With the help of a little quantum mechanics, I might actually be able to open a worm-hole to the closet dimension, and there hang twice as much as before...and still have room to turn in place. But first, I had to patch the drywall and paint the place.
I considered removing the drywall entirely, since most of it was gone already, but decided it was better that the corners of the closet meet than there be places for evil spirits to take up residence. Three gallons of wall-joint compound and 687 feet of paper tape later, the closet looked like what a mummy's wrappings must have looked like...to the mummy.
It was time for a break. My body was telling me it was time to hire someone, but I only have the time for these projects when I'm off work and therefore reluctant to spend money that isn't being replenished. I dined with my lovely wife, who prepared our ceremonial ham and swiss cheese remodeling lunch, while the plaster dried. As I sat, my joints got stiffer and I was reminded of the meaning of pain. And more was yet to come.
Thus began the sanding. When it was done, where there had been carpet, was a wall-to-wall, plaster dune. I could imagine someone cresting the top of it on a quad. Then there was me. My hair, usually salt and pepper, was white. In fact, I was white everywhere. I looked like an Italian Renaissance sculpture; Michelangelo's "Fat Jewish Kid." I got my trusty shop vac and forty tankfuls later, had a dust-free closet. It was at that point that the sun set and my body broke into a million painful pieces.
There are several over-the-counter remedies for the kind of discomfort I was feeling. Chief among them is Scotch. And it's not necessary to spend an inordinate amount of money on the name brands, like Pinch or Johnnie Walker Black. You're just paying for their advertising budgets. For the purpose of killing pain, even the cheapest house-brand of rot-gut on the shelf will alleviate one's symptoms by the third or fourth tumbler. And in therapy is how I spent that night.
By the next day, my vision was fuzzy. My head was pounding and I could barely keep Pepto Bismol down. But I'd made it through the night and after a long, hot shower, I re-entered the urban jungle that called itself my closet.
This time, I was armed with a paint brush and a gallon of white primer. I've often felt that the use of a white primer, when the final coat was also to be white was a waste of time. But as I've tackled these projects over the years, I've found that at cocktail parties, the mere mention that one has primered a wall garners oohs and aahs of admiration. It's sort of like a cute dog being a chick magnet...except that this draws attention from other do-it-yourselfers. The adulation makes the six bucks a gallon and the time spent more than worthwhile.
I spread a drop-cloth on what was left of the carpet, and began to paint with careful strokes. It's important to cover the area as completely as possible, so that you will be unable to tell where you have painted and where you haven't when you go to apply the same color of the final coat later. That way, you will likely have to return and buy a second gallon of the expensive paint to make sure you have covered everything.
No one ever buys both gallons at once. The revelation that you can't see where it's painted and where it's not, always comes as a surprise. I think it's a species-specific thing. We are genetically unsuited to predict that we will run out of paint. The plumbers among us can relate to this. All plumbing projects require at least one extra trip to the hardware store. Even professional plumbers face this. Though for them, they simply charge for the extra time and mileage.
For the rest of us, we have to clean up as best we can and head to the home improvement center, usually smeared in whatever paint or gunk we were using. In the process, we naturally consume extra time and gasoline. The employees at the store giggle and point at the fool who didn't plan. It's kind of like treating the Home Depot to dinner and a show.
So, I washed out the paint brush, scrubbed the drips from my glasses, dragged a comb through my hair to separate the clumps and went off to buy another gallon. Of course, when I bought the first can, it was on sale. This time it cost me six dollars more. This was quickly becoming more than a closet remodel. It's scope was approaching a government contract.
For some reason I couldn't explain, the rest of the painting went without incident. And when I was done, I had a beautiful white closet. Of course, it was an empty shell with no shelves nor rods to hang anything.
Then I figured out why the last of the painting had been such a smooth affair. I was being saved for the slaughter. The vinyl-coated wire shelves and other hardware which I had so carefully planned for, would be useless without CUSTOM MODIFICATIONS. I had to cut, trim, bend, twist, drill, hack, cajole and pray for each and every fitting that went into that horrific, white, black hole.
At the close of day two, when my planned project was to have been completed, I had one half of one shelf installed. My hands were bloodied and scraped. My knuckles ached in places I didn't know I had. My body was contorted from working upside down more than half the time, and I lay on the paint-covered drop cloth on the floor of the closet, screaming in agony for my wife to bring me a scotch.
She was outside, lounging by the pool. When she finally heard me and came in, merciful scotch in hand, she reminded me that when I was finished in here, the pool needed vacuuming. All I could do was whimper until I fell asleep where I lay. That night, I dreamed I had gone to Hell. I don't recall all the details, except to say that it definitely resembled a closet. When I awoke the next morning, I discovered I was right.
Day Three - Without food or water, with no hope of rescue, I trudged on through the vinyl-coated forest canopy, praying for the release of a quick death. Section after section of wire-rack jungle grasses fell to the buzz of my Sawzall as I feverishly worked my way towards salvation. Hole after hole drilled and filled with plastic wall anchors. Finally, as the sun was setting in the west, I caught a glimpse of it at the edge of the vinyl-coated underbrush. Civilization was in sight. I would survive! My wife met me at the clearing, ham and swiss reward in one hand and a chaser over ice in the other. She spoke five words to me that made me well up with tears.
"That closet is the bomb!"
Then she had a few more that made those tears flow.
"Eat, then you can put the clothes back. I've gotta meet the girls at Pilates."
Even as I write these words, I can't help but bawl.
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