Construction and Deconstruction

I've been framing walls for my house this week.

That makes it sound like I know what I'm doing, when in fact I generally just shoot nails or cut boards where my contractor has drawn a line for me. I'm entrusted with dangerous power tools, but not with a pencil. Essentially I'm in the position of being my contractor's boss as well as his least competent employee. Occasionally he'll see me executing a task incorrectly and say something like, "You know, you're really supposed to use galvanized nails on the bottom plate." And I'll shout, "Oh yeah? My house, my rules!"

Then I pull the shiny nails out and put in the un-shiny ones.

Because working for me isn't enough of a caustic experience in itself, I've been slowly burning a pile of brush next to the work site, so the whole crew goes home smelling like smoke. It's a service I provide, free of charge. Come work for me, and smell like camping! The nice thing is that I can throw the scrap construction lumber into the fire. I let the guys think that I intentionally screw up most of my cuts so that I can make a bigger fire. Little do they know that I really am just that incompetent.

"Do you have a permit to burn that brush?" asked one of the guys.

"I have a de facto permit," I said.

"A de facto permit?"

"If they don't catch me, it's de facto permitted." Then I threw in a "Q.E.D." for good measure.

The guys like it when I tend to the fire, because I'm better at burning wood than assembling it into anything that might be of help in building a house. People like me really shouldn't be allowed to build a people house until we've managed to build a bird house that isn't immediately condemned as uninhabitable by the avian building department.

Technically what I'm doing is building an addition, since I'm adding onto an existing house -- although the addition just about triples the size of the house. Of course, adding 2 to 1 is still addition. But then, adding 1 to 0 is also addition, so couldn't you say that any house is an addition? "We're building a house, in addition to the nothing we have now."

"Are you trying to keep up with the neighbors?" asked one of the guys. The neighbor's house has been sprouting additions at the rate of about one per year for the past four years. Currently it's in the process of spawning twin tool sheds. Scientists have not yet plumbed the mystery of exactly how the house produces offspring. The process seems to be asexual, as none of the other houses in the area have gotten close enough to pollinate it.

"That's the idea," I said.

"Their house is still going to be taller."

"Nah, I'm putting on a steeple. Helps keep the Jehovah's Witnesses away."

Actually, having a steeple would probably just attract lightning -- for a couple of reasons -- and not really help with the Jehovah's Witnesses. I don't think there is anything that keeps Jehovah's Witnesses away -- although I bet a nicely timed lightning strike would spook them. My house is on a dead end street, at the end of a 300 foot gravel driveway, behind another house. I even put the front door on the back side of the house for good measure, and the Watchtower folks still find me.

"We just wanted to check whether you had any questions about that literature that we left last time."

"Yeah," I say. "I've got a question for you: what kind of ink do you use? Cuz that stuff gave off some godawful smoke."

Of course I never actually think of anything that clever to say. There is a question that I want answered, but I never have the courage to ask. See, what I wonder about the Jehovah's Witnesses is this: Basically, it's a religion based on the susceptibility of its adherents to door-to-door sales, right? So I always wonder, if you went to the house of a Jehovah's Witness, would you find boxes of girl scout cookies, Shaklee vitamins and a Kirby vacuum cleaner? I bet you would. Although you probably have no more reason to go to their house than I do, because we're normal people who don't sell a worldview as if it were cookies.

I have nothing against Jehovah's Witnesses, of course. I would feel exactly the same way about any group that bases their identity on an English mistransliteration of a Hebrew word, hates holidays and birthdays, has falsely predicted the apocalypse like eighteen times, denies the divinity of Christ and won't leave me the hell alone.

Anyway, while I am surprised that the JWs manage to find my door, in truth I didn't put it on the back to stymie them. It just ended up there as a result of my phased approach to home construction. We are now engaged in Phase 2, during which we will be building the actual front of the house, among other things.

Yesterday a guy was pulling a trim board off the existing house so that we could tie the new construction into the wall. "We could throw this board into the fire," he said.

This started me thinking. I wonder if that's what the pioneers did when they ran out of wood, I pondered. Maybe they would get really desperate and pull their houses apart for firewood. And then the next summer they would swear that this time they would cut enough firewood, so they wouldn't have to cannibalize their house again. But they would be so busy rebuilding their house that once again they would run out of firewood in February and have to start pulling their house apart.

"Break the cycle!" I yelled to no one in particular.

"You know, those are supposed to be galvanized nails."

"Yeah, yeah." I don't have the appropriate attention span for construction work.




I think I originally had a point, but I got distracted by humor-blogs.com.