the king of pop and other odd things. (or) michael jackson is dead.
today was a normal day for me. lots of power tools. i normally wear earmuffs, cause i don't want to go deaf like my dad. he worked in a saw mill in his youth, and now he mostly doesn't hear anything unless you're speaking loudly and he's wearing his hearing aids.
my job is sort of strange. i do repairs and such on an old house owned by an old doctor who doesn't practice medicine anymore because she was diagnosed with MS a few years ago. her husband died 6 years prior from a different but equally unforgiving disease. he left behind lots and lots of tools. a garage full of tools, stacked floor to ceiling. you get the feeling that it was all once meticulously organized, but now it's more or less in shambles. you'll find the occasional proof that someone use to love this garage and love these tools, but that is only occasionally.
the
house, the garage, the shed, the front and backyard, every possible space within the small lot and the old house is crammed full of something. mostly tools, mostly useful things, and lots of duplicates. if you misplace a measuring tape, you don't have to look far to find a second or third or fourth. (i counted 23 tape measures one day when i was looking for something else.) today for example i used four different hand drills, two of which i thought were the same drill. i realized later that they were two different drills, just exact copies of each other. extrapolate this concept to every tool, building supply, and scrap of wood, cram it into a small house on greenlake, throw in several old unframed windows, doors, piles of tile, toilets, miscellaneous bits and bops, and you pretty well have it, this is where i work. the frustrating part however, is that it's never static. everything moves. you can make a mental picture of where you last saw something, and without fail it will be gone, found many days later tucked under a spare uninstalled kitchen cabinet and a pile of cardboard. everything moves, the smallest details of the last drawer of screws in the farthest corner, pulled out, sorted, resorted, spilt on the floor, moved to a tin can, then left in the rain the following day to rust, makes it's way to the basement to be resorted to a plastic bottle, placed in a box and stacked in a bedroom, and then back to the garage after the bedroom gets too full. the amount of energy that this takes is staggering, and you can attributed it all to a woman named bev.
surprisingly, there are glaring omissions from the collection. search the house for a pencil or a pen, or a scrap of usable paper to write something down with and you'll be hard pressed to find anything. most rooms have several light fixtures, most of which are missing the bulb. you'll take light bulbs from one room to the next, depending on which project you have been assigned that day. sometimes you'll buy light bulbs to solve the problem, and even they move, from fixture to fixture, fixture to drawer, drawer to box, box that spills and breaks the bulb. the endless shuffling even makes it's way to the yard. plants don't stay planted for more than a few months, soil is dug up and deeply trenched. some days are spent entirely watering plants, digging them up, replanting them, and watering again, only sometimes she forgets to replant, subsequently and quite sadly, there are very few plants that survive the process.
her husband died, leaving behind a largely unfinished remodel job, pipes and wires hang from the ceiling and walls, insulation lay in large bats on the floor. this is where i enter. this is where i dump my heart and soul into a project that has no end. this is where i toil day in and day out on something that i've grown to hate. this has become my life.
today was normal like any other day, only my normal pair of earmuffs have gone missing, so i search through the house for a second pair. bingo. this pair has built in headphones, so you can listen to the radio while you work. you can tell they haven't been used in years, moved and touched many times, but not used. i put them on, turn the on/volume knob, expecting nothing... much to my surprise and glee they work. on a job like this you are starved for any sort of social interaction, even if it's delivered via talk radio.
i listen to NPR now (thanks cat), it makes you feel grown up and smart, and i have no idea why but i have an insatiable love for iran and it's culture now.
the headphones aren't very good. they go in and out of tune when you tilt your head, and if you bump anything with them, which happens more often than you'd imagine, the tuning knob jumps to one of the dozen or so "man hour" KISW rock talk shows that are now broadcasting in HD, i'm just happy to have anything to listen to, so i leave them on. safety first after all, right?
i bumped the tuning knob to a country station by accident, and i must confess, i didn't change the station as quickly as i would have if anyone else was listening. there was just something about how deeply i hate my job right now, and how sympathetic a good country song can be. it's simple music, but it's got heart, i'll give them that much. i bumped my head again and it jumps to a news alert, that "a massive heart attack has taken the king of pop, michael jackson, at 50 years old."
this news came as a relief. i've always felt sorry for him. he had obvious struggles with living, childhood abuse, the plastic surgeries, the child molestation allegations, creepy monkeys for pets, his life was tragic. sometimes, death seems like the best solution.
i just don't like to see people suffer.
i'm at the end of my rope lately. i have too much to do, and far too little time. i find none of it rewarding, none of it exciting, none of it hopeful. cat and i come home exhausted every night only to collapse into each other, sleep a few hours and wake in the morning to repeat what seems like an endless cycle of work. we are however, marathoning lost, because cat hasn't seen it yet, and it's literally the only thing we have energy to do when we get home, in the few spare hours that we get to ourselves, watching TV is no longer a pathetic waste of time, but a godsend. we count the days between disks in the mail, netflix isn't nearly quick enough. all of this is tiring, really tiring, and i suspect it'll change soon, because much more and i'll have a nervous breakdown. there is only so much that an episode of lost can heal in a person.
so there i was. earmuffs. massive heart attack, the king of pop dead. earmuffs. a house in shambles. endless toil. i'm about to give up and just cry. earmuffs. stretched so thin. earmuffs. so tired. earmuffs. michael jackson tribute songs. earmuffs. "i'm starting with the man in the mirror i'm asking him to change his ways." earmuffs...
so instead of giving up and crying, a song changes my day. sometimes hope comes from the least expected places. thanks michael, i owe you one. rest in peace.