Late afternoon sun, just below the brim of my baseball cap.

The hat and sunglasses aren’t enough.

I use my hand to shade my eyes from the glare,

So I can see the signal, miles away.

No heatwaves rise from the road.  I don’t know why.

In the distance, the sky is white, overhead, it’s faded blue.  No clouds.

The signal turns.  I walk.

My head is down, so my head will block the sun.

Two right-hand turn lanes, going to highway 15,

Two lanes continuing north on Ruffin Road,

Two left-hand turn lanes for Claremont Mesa Boulevard,

Two lanes headed back south on Ruffin Road.

I’m surrounded by impatient, shiny metal.  Gleaming boxes as tall as me.

Halfway across, the red hand blinks.  Engines rev.

A solid red hand.  I haven’t made it.

A pedestiran died yesterday in Chula Vista,

Just trying to cross the street.

How did we accomplish this?

Why are human-made places so inhuman?

I took Peggy’s question as a rhetorical one and didn’t answer.  The truth was, though I pictured myself in Peggy’s eyes as a man’s man - the kind of guy who knew, instinctively, how to build and repair shit with a crowbar in one hand, a Coors in the other, and ready to carry on a casual conversation all the while - she had nearly startled the poop out of me.  I had been concentrating so hard on the creaks.

You see, I had discovered that I couldn’t pull the walls together with my bare hands after all.  After the eye-bolt scare (see Garage Fun, Part One), I went though a chain phase.  I decided that it was too risky to attach a cable ratchet to the walls, so I bought massive chains to wrap around the garage’s most warped wall beams.  That way, nothing would tear loose and ricochet around the garage like a stray bullet.  Using the chains, the walls would either pull together, the ratchet itself would break under the strain, or the individual wood beams would be wrenched in half.  It’s this third option that I saw happening when I decided to abandon the wall-pulling idea altogether.

On to the next option - raising the sunken roof to bring the walls back in.  Though I had never bothered to look before, I figured that there were spare tires and jacks in both of our cars, and those careful American carmakers didn’t disappoint.  I set these tricky little contraptions up in the middle of the garage, found 2 x 4s that reached to a few inches below the peak of the roof, and started jacking with my hands.  Hard.  Up and down it went, repeatedly, as I tried to figure out which way was up.  Longer and longer the jacking lasted.  Ohhhh, it was so good.

The whole process made me jumpy.  The 2 x 4s could jack right through the roof.  They could slip from the jack at a crucial moment, bringing beams and shingles crashing down to the spot where I squatted.  At every creak, my heart skipped a beat, I held my breath, and my eyes darted around the rafters above me, looking for the precise source of the noise.

The 4 x 4 that had been supporting one of the crossbeams, and thus holding up the entire structure, came unlodged and started to fall incredibly slowly, like it couldn’t fathom its new, purposeless existence.  When it reluctantly admitted that it could no longer stand on end on the sloping concrete, the 4 x 4 hit the ground with a hollow explosion, and I fell to the ground, covering my head with my arms like those oh-so-effective, cold-war-style, nuclear attack drills.  At least my head would be protected in the instant of vaporization.  At the next half-turn of the jack, there was a splitting sound like a gunshot, and I bolted to the open garage door.  It took all my courage to go back inside, so it’s understandable that I was at wits end when Peggy’s voice turned my bowels to jelly.

Eventually, the car jack method worked, though I didn’t have the cajones to continue raising the roof to the point of perfect alignment.  I reinforced the old crossbeams as soon as I could, slapped up some new ones, and removed - permentantly, I hope - the 4 x 4 and tabletop structural supports.  The walls are still bowed.   The floor is still humped.  The roof still leaks.  I need to continue the project.  But the garage now stands on its own, and I have to admit that jacking the erection beside the house satiated that desire for a little while. 

In a successful attempt to save the warped garage from collapsing, some previous owner grabbed a mouldy 4 x 4 piece of wood and a 6-foot-long tabletop to prop up the unsecured crossbeams.  The 4 x 4 and upended tabletop must have prevented generations of owners from utilizing the garage properly.  It has become a den of spiders and discounted webs.  Rat shit is cemented on the rafters.  A healthy green blackberry bramble found it’s way throught a crack in the siding and lounges comfortably against the back wall.  It would be possible to cultivate vegetables on the roof if only the water didn’t pour right through. 

I had a very big problem, however, with actually demolishing and replacing the garage - a fifteen thousand dollar problem.  So, I decided to combine my zero years of experience in structural engineering with my inability to hit a nail squarely on the head in order to fix the damn thing myself. 

The first step was to corner our neighbor - some kind of handyman / contractor guy - wrap his brain with my tentacles, and suck out all his ideas about making the garage useful again.  His advice was brilliant; use a cable ratchet to pull the east and west walls into their original postitions.  Then, using wood screws, attach new 2 x 4s to the existing, hanging crossbeams and reattach the reinforced rafters to both walls.  Amazing, unbelievable, stunningly simple advice.

I ran into my first problems almost immediately.  How strong does the cable ratchet need to be, and how the heck do you attach it to the walls?  After a half hour of agonizing indecision at the local Ace Hardware store, I bought a one-ton ratchet and two super, mega, half-inch, ten-dollar-each eye bolts.

Excited to see the outwardly-sagging garage walls yanked back into upright position with my bare hands, I quickly got to work.  I drilled starter holes into the the top wall supports and screwed in the eye bolts with one strength-sapping half turn after another until faint splitting sounds caused me to stop else risk watching a full-fleged rift slowly spread across the boards from the bolts’ entry points. 

I attached the cable and began ratchetting.  As the cable tautened, a new thought crossed my mind.  What if the walls stayed put while the anchors suddenly tore from the wood, flinging one-ton cable and one-pound metal hooks attached to super, mega, half-inch, ten-dollar-each eye bolts around the garage, with me standing in the middle?  That would be bad.  Very, very bad.

I could not bring myself to turn the ratchet one more click, and I spent an entire night pondering the problem.  The next morning, I found myself at the castle of paralyzing vacillation - Home Depot.  After an hour and a half, I walked out with a box of nails, a box of wood screws, some work gloves, and three pressure-treated 2 x 4s to attach to the existing crossbeams, if I ever got that far in the project.

Back home, instead of dealing with the cable ratchet, which had been taut and dormant for almost 18 hours now, I decided to knock down the spider webs and sweep out the rat shit, decaying shreds of paper, corn cobs seemingly left over from Native American trading days, dirt, and dust.

With that job done and nothing else to distract me, I turned back to the ratchet.  I became determined to push the handle just one more click, to witness the walls move under my power.  I called Monica out to watch the walls from the outside, and she forced me to wear my bicycle helmet, like the weird child of the paranoid parents.  Still picturing a metallic cable flinging in my direction, I didn’t put up much resistance.  It’s a good thing my elementary school bully Dwayne wasn’t around, or I would have been in for an ass kicking.   I took hold of the handle and pushed.  Slowly.  Creaks emanated from indeterminate locations.  Were the walls moving inward?  Would the roof come collapsing down?  Were the eye bolt anchors popping out thread by thread?  I’d never know unless I pushed a little more. 

One twentieth of an inch did it.  There was a sound like a tree beginnng to fall in the forest.  The eye bolt wasn’t pulling loose, rather the beam to which it was anchored was splitting.  I hadn’t moved a whole wall myself.  I had moved one half of an ancient 2 x 4.

Back to the drawing board. 

So, some simple updates:

1. Monica’s published!  This article is indicitive of the tone that we’ll see in her memoir - a humorous reflection on miscarriage and stillbirth - when it’s finished.

2. I’m taking at least the fall quarter off from the prison.  Why?  It’s simple: more money for fewer hours of work at a community college 2 blocks away.  Can’t disagree with that, huh?

3. We found out about 2 days after returning from Europe that Dad’s got cancer.  Base of the tongue.  Stage 2.  The prognosis is good, but the whole idea is scary.  I’m trying to get him to take up a chemical-free diet and a steady exercise routine that, ideally, will be built into his lifestyle.  We’ll see.

That’s the news and the reason I find myself unable to write.  I hope the process of writing this little, uninspired bit has gotten the juices flowing so that I can use this space to actually entertain myself and my reader in posts in the near future. 

Oh, how I long for the good old days when my body would, within ten minutes, respond to a strong mug of coffee, leaving me free of worry for the rest of the day. 

Today, we’re taking Tebow for an hour-long walk to the groomer.  Will I be struck, like a punch in the gut, with the uncontrollable need at an inconvenient place and time?  Should I bring a roll of TP in case I’m forced to squat behind a tree or between parked cars?  This journey is the start of an untested, uncertain chapter in my life. 

I guess it’s a little too foul, a little too raw, a little too honest. I guess it shocked her a little bit; it’s not exactly the kind of information you want to hear from your full-grown, well-behaved, married son.

On the phone, she said, “I don’t know where you learned that kind of language. It certainly wasn’t from me!” And that was pretty much all she said on the blog subject. I wonder what she’ll say when she sees my other blog - www.mygraphicsexlife.com

Mom’s comment got me thinking…Where the fuck DID I learn this kind of language? Pardon my language. She’s right – it definitely wasn’t from her.

In my defense, it’s not just me. I hang out with an over-educated, professional crowd of 20-30-and-40-somethings, many of whom have a little kid or two. I can’t think of one who doesn’t freely use creatively foul language in social situations. It’s so rampant, in fact, that when I meet new people in the same social circle, I don’t even feel like I need to feel them out to make sure that they are not offended by certain words or subject matter.

Are we less sophisticated than our parents? Are we more crass? Have I lost all sense of what is appropriate? Should I not have sent the link to my mom???

Please tell me, O Wise Persons.

]]> http://www.kev-lar.com/foul/random/feed http://www.kev-lar.com/a-seattle-mystery/poetry http://www.kev-lar.com/a-seattle-mystery/poetry#comments Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:31:27 +0000 admin http://www.kev-lar.com/?p=42

There are BONES scattered throughout the city

In weeds, in bushes, in very shallow graves.

Birds?  Squirrels?  HUMANS?  Oh, what a pity!

Perhaps they’re children who didn’t behave.

The killer must believe he’s hidden them well,

And he has!  Thousands of people walk by,

But none see.  At murder, this guy excels.

Drop a rib bone here, big toe there.  How sly.

Only the dogs understand the extent

Of our maniac’s bloodthirsty ways.

The organic remains must have such a scent!

The dogs lose all control.  They’re desperate! Crazed!

Without understanding his own crucial role

Our dog aids the butcher’s murderous trip.

Root out, carry, disperse – that’s the goal!

Truly, a symbiotic relationship.

Yo!  Hold on.  That ain’t no human patella.

It’s a pork rib, littered.  Stop dreamin’ fella.

We attended a Christmas party for faculty and staff where excellent soul food was served – collared greens, potato salad, fried chicken. I was uncomfortable, to say the least. I didn’t know a soul. I felt like a zebra who confused my own herd for a herd of horses – instinctually and culturally ignorant, and very, very obvious. I was sure everyone was looking at me.

I commented on the chicken and one of the black male teachers asked me how I fried chicken. I stammered, unsure how to respond. “What?” he asked. “You don’t cook no fried chicken fo’ yo’ woman? Email me. I’ll send you a recipe.”

It’s a line that Monica and I repeat frequently. (Aside) Another repeat-worthy comment is one I heard in a men’s bathroom after a movie. The bathroom was crowded, but no one was speaking. A dude was standing at a urinal, taking a leak. He farted. Audibly. Then he said to the wall in front of him with complete sincerity, “Ah yeah, there we go.”

I’m about to go upstairs to cook some fried chicken for my woman. For any of you zebras out there who are interested, email me. I’ll send you the recipe.

Monica and I met a lesbian in the New York Pizzeria in our neighborhood last week.*  Actually, Monica met her at the bar, and I showed up just in time to make sure the little chat steered clear of any hanky-panky talk.**  Somehow, the conversation turned to the ridiculously-fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants, five-week-long Eastern Europe trip on which we are scheduled to leave in exactly nine days.

The lesbian gushed about my and Monica’s “style of travel”.  She and her partner travel a lot, but it’s always meticulously planned, she claimed.  (Hmmm, I wonder if her partner’s hot.)  They’ve done package diving trips in Fiji and in Belize and in the Turks and Caicos and… (I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit of that action).  It would be so much fun to do something a little less structured. (A spontaneous orgy?)

This conversation got me thinking, not only about lesbianism, but also about our “style of travel.”  Our traveling style can only be described as follows: one or both of us get an idea of a trip and how we hope it will unfold, we prepare and pack quickly and somewhat haphazardly, and we leave with a vow to remain extremely flexible – call it Serendipitous Soujourning. 

My next couple of posts – if I actually get to them – will describe our successful sojourn to Waptus Lake in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness and the current preparations for our hopefully-serendipitous soujourn in Eastern Europe.

Stay tuned, loyal fan(s)!

*Sounds crass, but I had to begin this way.  The lesbian was very nice, and we even exchanged names.  I promptly forgot hers.  Anyway, I need to continue using the word “lesbian” to identify this woman because discerning her sexual orientation was such an odyssey.  The conversation went something like this:

“Well, I have a rental house down the street that I’m managing.  My partner and I used to live there.”

“Oh yeah?  Where do you live now?”

“I bought a condo in Eastlake.  My partner moved to LA for a while. It was a good career move.”

(I’m thinking, “For him? For her?”)

“What does your partner (he? she?) do?”

“Works in the entertainment industry.  You know…”

After five infuriating minutes, Monica finally pried a pronoun from the lesbian’s lips.

**This is facetious.  I, like any sane, young, libidinous man, would listen eagerly and dreamily if the conversation turned thus.