The Mysteries of Time

carpenter bee rescued
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

It is a complete mystery to me, now that I'm unemployed, how I ever managed to get anything done with my actual life and home while I was holding down a full time job. Since I've worked for the better part of 30 years or so, I must have gotten something done - I'm not really sitting around in a smoking ruin, I mean, not more than usual anyway. But as it stands now, it seems as if all I do is run around like crazy trying - with about a 50% success rate - to get things, vital things, utterly important things, done.

Last summer or fall my friend Adam put a new faucet hose bib mysterious plumbing thingie in where the old one leaked. Then in the middle of the winter, despite or perhaps because it was supposed to be patented freeze proof, it duly froze and split and leaked water all through Miles' closet and then was turned off. The other outside faucet is in the wall behind where the iBoiler now sits and somehow, while that was being installed, all access to that faucet was removed. So I have no outdoor spigot anymore and, since it is shaping up to be a hot dry summer, that's a problem. Carrying buckets of water out the front door to the vegetable garden gets old surprisingly fast and also it turns out that most of my buckets, dear Liza, dear Liza, *have a hole or six in them. Annoying as fuck when you're rushing them through the living room, let me tell you.

Therefore I went to Lowes last night to purchase what a friend told me existed: an adapter that will make a garden hose mate seamlessly with a kitchen faucet. The first Lowes guy I met had no idea what that might be so he took me to the Lowes Plumbing Gnome, a grizzled and friendly soul with a long white beard down practically to his hips. "You need to go and get the aerator from your faucet," he told me paternally, "And bring it back here to me."
"That's the little screen-y thing, right?" I said, wondering if that little screen still existed or perhaps had been removed for other uses at some point.
"Yes," he said, "The little screen-y thing."
This morning, therefore, I duly removed the little screen-y thing, which was still there, after I had finished hooking up and unhooking the dishwasher. For some reason my dishwasher must (if you wish to use it, and who doesn't?) be hooked up to the sink with a white plastic adapter thingie that you sort of jam on and squiggle and then the water must be turned on so it can leak sulkily a bit and also wash the dishes. You do not, I have found, want to run the dishwasher without water. Just FYI, in case, you know, you ever wondered.

Anyway, I took the end of the faucet to Lowes where I was saddened to find that the Plumbing Gnome was gone but another older and similarly grizzled plumbing expert guy hooked me right up with a nifty adapter which I brought home and put on the faucet. Then I threaded the hose through the living room and voila, watered the garden and lo, it is all modern conveniences around here again more or less.

This all took up an inordinate amount of time.

It is all in how you measure it, though. I have never entirely understood how people who don't have children measure time, because if you have kids you can kind of count back through the years and think, well, she was six or so that year, so it must have been 1989 when we were in New York. Shorter times than years can be measured by periods - I have been known to think to myself, well, I've had two periods since then, so that's two months - another way in which being male must be baffling and lead to a sort of constant temporal disorientation. But, male or female, you can always kind of count time backwards by the music you were listening to, which is how, on looking last night at a Kenny Scharf image, I ended up listening to Haircut 100 and the Specials for an hour or so, remembering ska. Now if I could just remember what I was listening to when I moved my phone charger, I could get all kinds of things accomplished.