Executive sweet

On Monday, my new desk arrived. Since 2001 I had been working at a cramped student desk I bought off my nephew, and it was getting hard to locate the mouse underneath the drifts of disks, peripheral electronics, scribbled notes and unfiled paper. I try not to sweat the small stuff, a category under which I tend to include all logical forms of organization. But my new desk should solve all that. It is a multi-level dog-legged monstrosity of steel and tempered glass. In order to accommodate its executive dimensions, everything else had to be shoved off into the corners of the office. Things are no better organized, but they are much farther away. I can now contemplate them with lordly dispassion across the shining plain of my spotless work surface.

Having a formal dinner engagement, I also wore a suit on Monday, something I do so infrequently I have to Google “Four-in-Hand” for a pictograph in order to successfully tie my own necktie. My 1976 leather-elbowed tweed jacket has graduated from out-of-style to vintage fashion. It looked sweet behind the desk. But Monday gives way to Tuesday, and now to Thursday. Stuff—and things—are starting to creep onto the outer edges of the desk. I see a coffee ring. It matches the stain on my blue jeans and untucked shirttail. And shaving appears to be among the other things on my to-do list that have just slipped by me. Maybe a bigger office would do the trick--and a wardrobe assistant.

Uneven wear

Last week concluded five years of The Listening Post--yikes! In the spirit of new beginnings, my kitchen and bath are being gutted to the studs while Terry and I remake our acquaintance with dishwashing in a plastic tub, spit baths, hot-plate cookery, laundromats, and the complete inventory of fine dining establishments throughout the region. I knew that NCPR MemberCard would come in handy.

Memory resides most strongly in the sense of smell, I am told. Certainly the ever-present aroma of plaster dust is putting me in mind of past home devastation projects: "Sir, we had to destroy the building in order to save it." As they peel the onion, layer by layer, every bone-headed home handyman shortcut comes back to haunt, each budgetary compromise revealed in the full light of its squalor. Ugglee!. But this is as close as we could come to Plan A, as formulated by Terry: "Let's bulldoze it into the cellar-hole and build out back," or my own variation: "Let's open the gascocks and throw in a match."

But eventually, we'll have something out of it, besides a crippling debt-load and a renewed appreciation of modern amenities. We'll have a shiny new state-of-the-art kitchen and bath that make it blindingly clear just how low-rent and disheveled the rickety remainder of the homestead really is.