Engineering despair

Dumped my frustration on Steve today. Didn't mean to, but sometimes it just comes out. five and a half weeks ago, we sent our drawings to the engineer for engineering. Engineer Adam seemed like a nice enough guy--lives in the neighborhood, has a couple of young kids, visited the still-smoldering house, seemed to get our situation--but for three weeks after receiving the plans, he keeps telling Steve he's working on them. Then he sets up a meeting at the house , which I attend, with an associate of his who he is "bringing on to help." Loose translation? "I haven't done a damn thing on your project for 3 weeks and now I'm bringing in someone to bail me out."

OK, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. He's not an asshole bullshitting me, he actually got overcommitted, fully intended to get to it but couldn't, and when he realized how in the weeds he was, he threw up a flag for help. I don't know if I believe it, but for this moment, I'll celebrate the innate goodness of humankind.

Whatever the circumstances, at this meeting, the reality becomes quickly clear to me, so I take great pains to reinforce the tick-tock of this project. And I make clear the double-whammy: it's not just the fact that my family is living on a rented bed and drinking from rented glasses on rented chairs, its that as of January 9, 2009, we start paying for This Rented Life to the tune of about $6 grand a month. And that's on top of our mortgage and expenses in our home, call it another $3k. He seems to hear me and promises a 2 week turn around.

Back to the goodness of humankind. Unintended delays happen, sure. He didn't mean to cost me $7500 by dicking me around for 3 weeks. Did he? Did he? Insert Serenity Prayer here. Ooooooommmmmmmmmmmm. 

So here we are, two and a half weeks later, and I may get his work next week.

Here's where I lose my shit. If you lie to me--oops--I mean, cause me an unintended and extremely costly  delay, when you finally get around to picking up my piece of paper, you had better not put it down until you are done. No juggling other jobs, no working bits and pieces, no further delays. I waited in line. I paid my dues. Now deliver. I mean, how many hours could it possibly take to do to my little house whatever it is that engineers do ? 40? 60? 80? 120 hours? I'm going to end up paying these guys something like $6 grand for how many fucking hours exactly? If they worked full time for three weeks, I'd be paying them $50 p/hour, but let me tell you something, there is no fucking way they are putting in that kind of time. I'm going to be generous (here's that fucking goodness of humans shit again) and believe that they are putting in half that, about 60 hours. But at $100 an hour, it takes some kind of fucking gall to delay 3 weeks, cost me an addition $7500 on top of your fee, and then take 3 weeks to do 60 hours work. 

Add in the extra week and a half it's taken to do a week and half's work, and the grand total cost of delay is about $10k. Thanks, Adam. I'll send you my bill.

When is the moment in recorded history when we decided that other people's time is ours to waste? When did respect take flight? Doctors are the worst at this. Why do we bother making a doctor's appointment when the likelihood of the doctor actually seeing us at that time is nill? Doctors decided at some point that their time is more valuable than ours, so go fuck yourself. After one particularly egregious visit, where after waiting 90 minutes I was finally told, after repeated enquiries, that the doctor had in fact left the office on an emergency call 10 minutes earlier, I completely lost it. "When were you planning on telling me?" I fumed. The nurse actually had the gall to be petulant with me, as if I was somehow unreasonable to ask such a question. In the grand Handel tradition of my father, who to his dying, shaky scribbling day, wrote angry complaint letters to major corporations or local politicians or anyone else who pissed him off (another example of a family tendency to look for love in all the wrong places), I wrote the doctor a nasty note and included a bill for my time. He never paid it, but I wrote it off my taxes as a bad debt. 

Take that.

More to the point, the weirdly unique fact of our current situation is that our construction project and our life restoration are inseparable. House and home, as much as I believe they are separate qualities, are in us conjoined facts. We cannot begin to heal the home as long as the house sits dead on its lot. The structure needs sweaty men crawling on it, hammering and plastering their life force back into the denuded skeletal framing before we can psychically feel that we are progressing, that the days of rented placemats and motel artwork will soon be over  (did I mention that they sent rented art along with the rented toaster oven and rented broom?)

Steve and Joe seemed to get this from the beginning, knowing when they took on the job that  they were taking on the responsibility for our lives as well, a far larger task than simply building a house. How astounding. Lesser men would have run.

But subcontractors are a different story. To them, it's just another job, to be managed as best it can, doing a "good enough" job without pissing off too many people. 

Nothing makes us feel more powerless or more despairing. Every day now is a mental slog to twist the mirror's reflection of hopelessness into a stalwart Pilgrim belief in the eventuality of success. But like water from a thick towel, no matter how hard you twist, a bit of liquid bitterness always remains.

Nothing to fear...

"We shape our dwellings. And afterwards our dwellings shape us." - Winston Churchill

Soapstoned

We are soapstone people. In the world of kitchen countertop materials (and you didn't know there was such a world, did you), soapstone is a lover, something you just can't help but reach out and touch. People admire their granite, are pleased with their corian or ceasarstone, think their tile is pretty, and love their soapstone. Reading posts on our favorite remodeling community website, GardenWeb, you can hear in the voices of contributors their rapture every time they slice an onion or burn some toast. the passion is palpable.

We want that. We want our space to be a living expression of our lives, not a picturesque shell that contains them. perhaps it is because I spend so much time at home. Writing and living in the same space, I can go days without leaving the house. But E feels the same way (I think). We seek that sense that the house is an extension of what is valuable to us, and that tends to express itself less like objective beauty (What lovely granite!) and more like something that is itself alive (This room feels so warm!).

We also want a house that ages in beauty. You can read into that whatever you like ;-)

Upstairs in the master bathroom, we are considering a unique Moroccan concrete tile (made in Thailand...what a wonderful world) whose color is pressed into the wet concrete under tremendous pressure

 before it is fired. the result is a soft, matte finish tile in those powdery colors one associates with Greek islands and north african mosques. Like saltillos, very soft and inviting.

Driving home from the airport this evening, lamenting being once again in the habitrail of the los angeles freeway system, I started wondering why we were so enamored of all these soft, erotic, and sensual materials. Our last house had none of it. Lots of colorful mexican glazed tile work, talavera sinks, and hand-painted stuff, certainly, but nowhere near the obsession we now seem to feel for building materials you want to touch. 

I think we might be afraid, on some deep level, afraid of the house, of houses in general, and in our attraction for soft comforting materials seek a home of warm embrace, a home we can walk around on and have every surface respond gently to our step or touch, a home not singed by a sharp tongue of flame or grinding grit of charcoal and ash. 

Burnt wood is cold and desolate. think of the logs left cold the next morning after a campfire. it is as if we want our house to be as enveloping as the white egyptian cotton spa robes Elicia loves so much and quickly replaced (as anniversary presents) last week.

In architecture and design, the phrase they use to describe the style of highly detailed repetitive patterns--usually in tile-- that cover every available inch of moorish-style buildings is horror vacui, latin for "fear of empty space" or more poetically, "fear of emptyness." As the Artlex artists dictionary defines it:

horror vacui - The compulsion to make marks in every space. Horror vacui is indicated by a crowded design.  Some consider horror vacui one of the principles of design. Those who exclude it from their list of principles apparently interpret it as posessing an undesirable, perhaps obsessive quality, in contrast to the desirable, controlled principle of limitation, or perhaps to that of emphasis or dominance.

When you live next to the Sahara, a fear of empty space is a rational response.

I think we suffer (without suffering) from something else, a fear of deadness perhaps, or more generally, plasticity. Horror mortis, perhaps? Having seen our home reduced to a dead thing, we want to restore it to life--our life--with surfaces that though inanimate are nonetheless alive to the touch, breathing in their softness and sensuality, and warm in their spirit. 

if the house could, like some mushroom-fueled shimmering mirage, respirate of its own accord, we would, I think, wish it.

Epigraph 3

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” - Charles Darwin

Spring has sprung

Spring came to the house as if it didn't matter if we were there or not. It's startling. The Australian tea trees ( left) have never looked lovelier and all the butterfly bushes E planted (right)  look like inviting pollen factories for our migrating Monarchs.

David next store slips by every once in a while and waters things, a kind and delicate gesture. i do as well when i go to pick up the mail.

Before the fire, we had just removed a beautiful Altissimo vine rose from in front of Montezuma's window to make way for the new lawn. After the fire, all of our burnt possessions were piled on the front lawn for weeks, effectively killing whatever grass was not destroyed by the firemen. it left our front lawn a hard packed patch of ash and cinder, liberally mixed with pieces of glass, metal lathe, 90 year old nails, charlie's marbles, melted plastic,and whatever else got dragged outside. the watering system was wholly destroyed of course, and so the former lawn dried to a Bonneville Salt Flat firmness.

As March came in like a lion (well, more like a puddy cat in LA), not one, but three stalks of the aforementioned rosebush poked their tender shoots through the clay and sprouted green leaves. 

Tenacious little bugger.

Holmes is Where the Heart Is

About a month after the fire, my brother-in-law Gene, a commercial contractor by trade, tipped me to a home renovation show called Holmes on Homes. It was, I think, his sly way of preparing me for the renovation to come. General Contractor Mike Holmes, a Canadian cross between GI Joe and Mr. Clean, hosts the show. His gig is simple: he shows up at homes whose construction projects have gone awry and "makes it right.”


It’s a simple but effective formula. Each week, Mike corrects the evils done by some previous contractor, and restores all that is good and right in the world. First we hear the heart-rending tale of woe, then Mike gets to work. Walking through the home, this bulldog in denim overalls affects a convincing air of disgusted outrage over the failure of others and mixes it with a fair measure of exasperation that he alone, among all of god’s creatures, must now make it right. Then he tears the place apart. Every misplaced socket or irregular cabinet spacer is an excuse to pour a new foundation, rewire an entire house, and tear the kitchen to shreds. “Look at that paint!,” he yells, shaking his exasperated head. “It’s all gotta go.” And the next cut shows his crew dutifully ripping everything to the studs.

I exaggerate about the paint, but you get the idea. In the black and white world of Mike Holmes, nothing is good enough.

Each show concludes with the mandatory “reveal” when the grateful homeowners get to oooo, ahh, and weep over the miracles of granite and drywall Mike hath wrought. The show’s measure of added charm lives in the fact that most of the homes are modest suburban tract homes in which the most pedestrian of appliances gleam like Vikings. Mike gets hugged a lot. It’s the show's mix of horror and fascination--coupled with a firmly Protestant sense that there is a right way and a wrong way to do things and the way is clear -- that wins the hearts of anyone who’s ever had a handyman cut a corner. I love it.

Strangely, Charlie does too.

He walked in while I was watching an episode one day and became engrossed with the whole thing. What in a nearly-seven year old boy would care about the trials and tribulations of witless homeowners eluded me, but I suppose all the hammering and crashing of walls had its own adolescent attraction, and I’m so happy when I can just kick it on the sofa with my kid that as long as it isn’t some incomprehensible and terribly loud cartoon, I’m fine. Any discernable narrative will do.

Charlie then took to watching the show without me. Dutifully using his new found literacy (the wonders of first grade, when the world opens like a unfussed Mimosa), he would scroll to it on the TiVo and punch it up on a lazy Sunday morning, in between episodes of Ben10 and Smashlab (another show that glorifies in destruction and mayhem, this time in the name of science.)

The year of the house stretches on, and while Elicia and I dream of kitchens to come and collect samples of Saltillo floor tile and soapstone counters, Charlie goes about his first grade life in seeming peace, at ease with the impermanence of it all and the strangeness of this rented American life.

Today, though, as he and I curled up in the light of the setting sun watching Mike deliver a tiny little kitchen to another hugging wife, he quietly turned to me and said, “I wish he would come to our home.”

That’s all. Nothing more.

Charlie is not one who easily speaks his feelings. But if I listen carefully enough, sometimes he speaks volumes.

I quietly ruffled his hair and assured him that we would one day soon have our home back.

I said that we didn’t need Mike Holmes because we had Steve Pallrand. The name is not as poetic, but the hopes, now much higher.

you must demolish that which you want to rebuild

weeks of waiting, though it wasn’t really that long. The tick tock started when we came home, and lurks in the background of every day. We have 12 months to get back in the house before we have to start paying our own way. The contractors keep mumbling about longer , so the fear sets in.

so after two weeks of waiting, I just pulled the trigger and authorized demolition to begin. Within a couple of days a crew showed up with the first of what I am sure is many dumpsters and began ripping the plaster from my walls. As they did, the skeletal shadows of the bare walls began to revel themselves, like some finely striped shirt, the horizontal lathe remained on the walls.

Lessons from houses #1: Life begins in destruction. you must demolish that which you want to rebuild.

A side note before i get all philosophical again: remodeling is all about portapotties. It is almost the first thing that a contractor decides on. When will it arrive, and when will it leave. Like a day or a life, construction is singularly defined by how and when we begin to evacuate our bowels and when we cease.

More prosaically, your home belongs to the workmen on the day the portapottie arrives and does not become your own again until it leaves. This is not metaphoric—they own it. they park in your driveway, use your power and water, do what they like, generally, and hope that you, the homeowner get in the way. When it happened, i thought it was natural enough, but I’m starting to see it as the leading edge of a far more profound experience.

At the risk of sounding banal, i think i have begun to see the difference between a house and a home. It started as a small idea. As i was walking around the burnt rooms, trying to imagine this spectacular floor-plan that i have been drawing and walking through in my 3D home design program, i began to think that the house looked rather small. No matter how “open” our new floor-plan looked on paper and in 3D rendering, the actual space seemed a little cramped.

At the time, i couldn’t figure out why, thinking that perhaps the dimensions i was working from were off somehow and incorrect, and that i would resolve it later.
Then a couple of days ago, i brought charlie over to see the now denuded house. Most of the upstairs rooms were stripped to the wooden lathe, walls and ceiling, giving the space an eerie geometric sameness, as if we were trapped in one of those puzzles my mother used to buy me from the Museum of Modern Art in the 1960’s. The first floor was basically intact.

He walked through the house, the downstairs mostly still black, and I think mostly keyed into the darkness and spookiness, and then he followed me upstairs. We walked into my office, the room I have spent virtually every day in since he was born and which he too knew as if it were his. Looking at the wooden walls, he asked, “What room is this?” I answered before I could register how strange the question was, a strangeness that fully hit me when we walked into our bedroom and he asked it again. “Who’s room is this?” It was, i can only imagine, Charlie’s first really dislocating life experience. This house that he took for granted, that was the only house he had ever known and therefor never had reason to question or look at critically, was suddenly something else, an object. Not his home at all. He had walled these floors in perfect ego self-centeredness for all these years with full trust that the house just was, had always been, and will always be. Suddenly, it wasn’t.

We walked into his room. “My rug!” he said, recognizing the now sodden, black, and disintegrating Berber that used to lay, white and cozy, on his bedroom floor. This was, perhaps with the exception of the kitchen cabinets, the only thing left in the house that was a thing, and that he had a relationship to. He had rolled, played, slept, and I think, peed on it, and its presence today grounded him somehow, brought back for him the sense that this wooden shell was a place that was, at one time, something more.

Back in the car, I asked him what he felt about seeing the house. “It's so small.” He said. So small. The words rang in my head. Just as I had thought days before. This place that we had slept, ate, made love, and pet cats in for 12 years seemed suddenly a small empty box, and even a 6 year old noticed it.

Here’s where we get to the house/home part. A house is a wooden box, walls and floors, staircases and rafters that can be easily apprehended in a glance. It has width and length and height, shape and form and scale, and is simple as a child’s building block. The distance between where our couch used to sit and our dining room table is no more than 10 feet, which, in an empty house, is ten feet.

Yet we used to sit in the dining room while charlie sat on the sofa and we felt worlds away, deeply enmeshed in different experiences. Because a home cannot be apprehended in a glance. It is a narrative. You don’t walk from room to room, you walk through it, each step past one thing or another, each thing the carrier of a history, form, and beauty (or uglyness) that become the narrative of that journey. A living room calls forth a concentration and attention different than a dining room. The journey up a stairway is a journey from the public to the private, from the presentable to the most unmentionable. And that narrative, that succession of experiences works on you,. They fill those ten feet with meaning and richness. That door is not a door, it is an expression of exclusion following its angry slamming. That sink is not a sink, it is the place that rinses vegetables and washed soiled babies.

It is, in the end, this that makes a home. Not the sentiment of history nor the experiences it contained, but rather the way each step through it creates a narrative of experience, how each item is like a black mark on a white page that you read anew with each step, or skim past in that way that you find yourself three-quarters of thee way down the page of a novel to realize that your mind has wandered and you don’t know what you read. Though you don’t remember, you still read, and that wandering daydream-like the wandering through a house in which you’ve lived for a dozen years-was still a narrative act that occurred in that book.

A home is a book that you read again each day, the sound of whose words resonate through you, and whose narrative reflects each moment you live within it (or now, for us, without it).

epigraph 2

"The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become." -CHARLES DUBOIS

All the spaces created by the fire will be filled.

Speaking with Debra Howell, more on the presence of absence.

Since college, never felt that objects supported me. Fulfilled my needs, made life more comfortable, brought aesthetic pleasure, yes, but never a casonic support. Hence in their absence, I don’t feel that the ground is gone beneath my feet nor that I am lost or unmoored from the world. However, in following from the thoughts above, there is meaning in absence, especially of certain things, and perhaps that meaning comes from thespace that their absence defines.

All the spaces created by the fire will be filled. Now they are being filled reactively, with objects of need and sustenance. Telephones,spices, milk, shoes, band-aids, crock-pots. And I can foresee the next level in which we replace those things that we had come to rely on for the things we love to do. Good knives for cooking, and espresso machine with which to greet the morning. These are the [practical fillings, ones that we know o well and have chosen so consciously to this point, that it is merely a matter of time and cash flow before we replace them.

But the profound part perhaps lies in those spaces that now must be considered anew, to which a conscious choice must be applied as to whether to fill them or not, whether they can indeed be filled, and if so, how?Would we by another wood carving depicting an intertwined couple, one resonant of the Belizean piece we stretched to buy on our honeymoon? This was not a sentimental piece (although it certainly seems that in the writing). We were vaguely ironic about its symbolism, but were genuinely captured by its beauty.Beauty, history, and occasion get so intertwined in some things that it is impossible to unknit their meaning. And so how do you replace it? what did it mean (we never had to think about it and decide, it was enough that it was there, sitting on the shelf over the floor furnace, glowing warmly in its crowd of similar figurines)?

Looking forward it is these spaces, perhaps, that have the most to reveal in their filling, these objects that will end up saying the most about our journey forward.

And still to come, the filling of the house. Furniture,appliances, bedding…all had been assembled collage-like over time, as they could be afforded or as opportunity provided. Will we embark again on a courseof temporal accumulation, or choose to design a new life, one that matches andcoordinates? Will our live gain an overall conception, a codification ordistillation of its narrative, or revert once again to its meandering eclecticways? Is life a picture of desire, or an historical record of having lived?

Nothing is more vulnerable than a house that leaks.

Nothing is more vulnerable than a house that leaks.

It goes against all that is house. So vulnerable and exposed. We trust our houses to keep out the elements. It is why we build them, why we think of them as haven. As the otherwise welcome rains fall in drought plagued Los Angeles, the house has leaks in its roof, small drippy breeches through which the water penetrates with slow destructive power. It soaks the cellulose insulation I had blown into the attic to keep us warm, old recycled newspaper fibres that sealed out the 1920’s drafts. Now the besotted weight will pull down the ceiling over where our bed used to sit. I picture a crew with shovels, loading yet another dumpster with the detritus of the fire.

It would be better, I think, to begin the demolition, the tearing out of the shards of clinging plaster and exposed untapped wallboard to expose the studs and rafters behind. At least that destruction has purpose, intention. It is destruction that is constructive, part of the journey to being once again a place to rest our heads, in dry, warm comfort. This slow, piecemeal and random destruction, the destruction of neglect and elements, feels, as Elicia suggested, like something from a Garcia-Marquez novel, time inexorably wearing down the best intentions and efforts of those that live, turning the inanimate back to the jungle from which it sprung. It is as if, uninhabited and scarred, the house has reunited with the forces of entropy, of disassembly and component-ness.

Is that what a house is? Components held together in a system of organization by the daily presence of humans who generally take it for granted? Does a house remain a house because of the million lightbulbs that get changed and floors that get mopped and pipes that get tightened or replaced. Is it the accumulation of small actions, unnoticed at the time of their completion, that accrete into the idea of house? Or is there some metaphysical force, a living energy, that by its very presence just keeps the parts related?

These are the two sides of my mind, of course, the concrete and practical and the imaginative dreamer. Today though, as the rain falls and the ceilings with it, I feel disabled and at a loss. I have no raincoat, nor umbrella to keep me dry. My hoodies, which I wear beneath a borrowed leather coat for warmth, become quickly saturated, and the chill the dripping rain leaves in the small of my back seems unending and inconsolable, no matter how much earl gray tea I drink. “The grieving feel chilled,” Joan Didion quotes, in The Year of Magical Thinking, from Emily Post’s etiquette manual of 1922, “they need soup.”

It is true, I suppose, if grieving is what this feeling I have is, for there are parts of my body, regions immune to warmth, relaxation, medication, massage, or any of the other traditionally healing things that integrate my easily shattered life. Matija’s grandmother promised me chicken soup this weekend .“You don’t make Chicken Soup in a pressure cooker,” she insisted, when I told her of the demise in the fire of my mothers, the 40 year old Presto in which our soup was always made. She seemed vaguely insulted, in that way that only a jewish mother can. Perhaps her soup, sans pressure, will be the cure I need.

Presence in absence. Objectivity in subjectivity. Material in a material world.

I have told the story many times over the last few weeks, so much that it begins to sound like something that happened to someone else. Part of the telling is always my meditation on materialism. Our TL list, total loss, ran 115 pages with 15-20 items per page, some 1700 items that must be individually priced and catalogs for reimbursement by my insurance company. Martha, the woman who runs the restoration crew, remarked on how relatively large this was. “It means you are not materialistic,” she said.

There are, I have come to think four types of things which which we surround ourselves, or rather four types of relationships we form with those things. there are those things which we assume to define who we are, a certain placing of identity in the objects we purchase, my car, my cloths, my watch. Status symbols of just, more modestly (for it takes no money to enshrine an urban hoodies as a piece of one’s identity) those things that, better than we can with words or actions, we choose to l;et express who we think we are. They serve us.

Second are the object we let disable us, those whose service steals from us small bits of valuable time and identity. The boat you always wanted but now spend 10 hours per week (time otherwise spent with family, books, or friends) to polish and maintain. These are the objects that we serve. (“my work!” Alli piped, when I told her this part)

On the opposite side of the fence is the Buddhist ideal of detachment, that we have things around us but into them we place no meaning or service. They just are. I think I think of my self as aspiring to this, with that curious american recognition that I can’t attain it.

Then there are objects that have no meaning except for the fact that they exist in your life, and have done so for some time. These objects just seem to align themselves with you and gain meaning from little more than their continue presence. Existential meaning, if you will. The mug with my name printed on it bought at the Old Towne Mall in Torrance when I was 12, treasured then for the scarcity of items preprinted with my unusual name, a flowering of recognition at a time when I so desperately needed it. the need is long since gone, with the hormones of puberty, but I have carried that mug through all the moves, apartments, rooming houses, coasts and relationship for little reason other than I had it and it didn’t break. It never broke, its still around. And it carries something with it, something unnameable and irreplaceable. Occasionally, with no more thought than it takes to remove it from a shelf, I drink tea from it.

Or my father’s prayer book. I have, in the inevitable shorthand that emerges from the need to tell a story repeatedly to the many people in your life, seized upon the destruction of this book to convey the emotional weight of some of the stuff that burned (silly, it strikes me in reflection, that we kept so much of the important stuff closest to the floor furnace where if a fire were to erupt, it would surely begin). My father was not a religious man. I never saw him pray, nor even knew that his confirmation book existed until it came to me after his death. My father and I were not close. It was simply this book, but had meaning so being. A thing possessed that, for sentimental or historical reasons (all a cliche if one thinks more than a moment about them), you cannot discard. And then it is gone.

In their presence, these were just clutter, the things of life that surround you without plan. In their absence, these objects gain meaning, pieces of you attached like polyps on the coral reef of story that is your life, barnacles on the hull awaiting the scraping you never seem to have time to complete

Presence in absence. Objectivity in subjectivity. Material in a material world.

epigraph

"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death."  -anais nin