Child of the West

I meant to post this yesterday, 1/1/2023. Well, I forgot. So I’ve backdated it.

mastodon.social/@autisticompulsive@neurodifferent.me/109606037516558764

— Interview by David Brancaccio, NOW (PBS) (7 October 2005).
Kurt Vonnegut – https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut

Mike Masnick boosted a post on Mastodon earlier today. While I have no intention of making any #NYResolutions this year, the Vonnegut anecdote resonated with me.

See, we bought a house in 2022. Fifty years old, two bedrooms, average condition, small plot of land. And I discovered that I have a hitherto-unsuspected streak of house proudness in me.

Some things needed professionals. The bathroom reno. Sanding and polishing the floors.

But — a great deal of the needed work could be done by me, and is being done by me. Cutting back some overgrown trees and tidying the yard. Pulling up 50-y-o vinyl tiles and their masonite backing, and removing the staples from the floor. Removing a couple of unwanted doors. Building bespoke furniture for various purposes and locations.

The bathroom contractor, seeing me cutting tree branches with a handsaw and clipping them into disposable chunks with secateurs, suggested a chainsaw or hiring a professional to prune the trees and haul the debris away. He didn’t understand why I refused the suggestion.

I grew up in a suburban house, part of a family with five kids. My father had a good income, but raising a large family and paying the mortgage strained our finances. So we all had chores to do. Polishing brass, clearing ashes from the fireplace, mowing the lawn, that sort of thing. Paying for cleaners or gardeners was never an option.

I hated those chores!

After I left home, for nearly half a century, I avoided doing chores until they became pressing.

And then my wife and I bought a house.

That was when I discovered that when you are doing the chores for yourself, to improve your own property, there is pleasure in it. It gives me a pleasant reason to get up in the morning. There is simple mechanical pleasure in using my muscles and joints.

But setting deadlines, or paying to speed up completion, actually takes away from that pleasure!

When you own a house, there is always work that needs doing. No matter how fast you do it, there will always be work that needs doing.

We played a game of what-if one evening. I proposed a fantasy half million dollar budget. We don’t have half a million dollars, I just wanted to remove cost from the picture. The money could only be used to improve the house; we couldn’t use it to rebuild or to buy another place.

What would we do if we had half a million dollars to spend on this place?

A garage, a 20m one-lane swimming pool, replacing concrete in the back yard with a deck, rebuilding the pergola, landscaping under the trees in the front yard, reroofing, restumping, digging a basement, solar panels.

And then we stalled.

We couldn’t come up with a half-million budget for things we actually thought would improve our life here!

Yet even after we ran out of things that need to be done, and things that we would like to do, we still kept coming up with things that will need to be done.

Replacing or repairing the drive, doors, windows, gutters and drains. Pruning and planting. Painting. Building furniture for unanticipated needs. The list expanded as we looked at it.

And many things we could buy with that speculative half million, we could make or do ourselves, and in that making we would take great pleasure.

This is my resonance with Kurt Vonngeut’s little dance of life. We’re here on earth to fart around. Farting around is something we can all do.

And it’s fun.

#happynewyear #lifeis #resolution #kurtvonnegut