The Epic November
OR
The Long Winding Road To Nowhere
OR
Another Reason Why I Desperately Need An Editor
Thank God it’s finally December. After enduring six weeks filled with visions of handguns, asbestos, canker sores and cannibalism, a few sugarplums will certainly be a welcome change of pace.
It all started back in October as I was gearing up for my favorite holiday. In addition to hiding plastic spiders on Nerdy Squirrel’s person and startling the living shit out of the cats at every available opportunity, part of my longtime Halloween ritual involves watching a horror movie every night for the seven days leading up to October 31st (TNT totally ripped me off, by the way. And I’ve also been told that I have a very actionable resemblance case against their popular Monk character).
For no apparent reason (or possibly a horrible omen), this year my movie choices heavily leaned towards the post-apocalypse, such as 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Normally I’m very big fan of end-of-the-world scenarios, and in and of themselves, these movies always lift my spirits. This time though, I immediately followed up a week of celluloid cataclysm by watching the first season of Jericho (or as I like to call it, Jericho: The Town That Nuclear Winter Mysteriously Skipped; Where A Single Magical Rainfall Eliminates All The Effects of Radiation; And Where Despite The Lack of Food No One Is Getting Any Thinner Except Skeet Ulrich Who Definitely Has A Meth Habit) and reading the all-consuming and wonderfully grim book “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy.
By mid-November, I had stuffed myself so full of Armageddon that I could barely drag myself to the couch to watch football and nap. Fortunately, a few days of watching the Sportscenter is just enough to make me realize the end of the world wouldn’t be all bad. Slowly I began to regain my will to live. Regrettably, I did not wait until my emotional immune system was strong enough to combat my obsessive impulses, and in moving too quickly I succumbed to my longtime narcotic nemesis: home improvement.
Three years ago when we first moved into our house, Nerdy Squirrel, Esq. and I decided we wanted to have an elegant, deep red dining room in which to eat our Chinese take-out and pile unopened mail. Unfortunately our first attempt at red rum…uh, sorry… a red room was a sore disappointment. After two coats of Kiltz primer and four coats of Behr paint, the walls looked like the ass cheeks of a naughty baboon on his way home from a Dominatrix’s dungeon. It was literally McDonald’s red, and when viewed in the context of our bright yellow foyer, had the unfortunate yet predictable effect of inducing acne and imminent diarrhea.
After recently purchasing some new furniture, we decided it was time to repaint the dining room. And since we were repainting, we decided to rip out the unsightly chair rail that had been added by the previous homeowners. And since we were tearing out the chair rail, we decided to upgrade the lighting fixtures. And since we were upgrading the lighting fixtures, we also decided to replace the “updated” crappy aluminum heat and cold-air-return vents with original cast iron ones that we found in an antique store. You get the idea. Oh, and when it comes to the actual work, when I say “we” I mean “me.” The only thing Nerdy Squirrel ever paints is coffee spills and cruddy fingerprints on every conceivable surface.
One more thing, we wanted to have it all done before December 8, the day we planned to erect the Christmas tree.
By the last week on November, the chair rail removal, plaster patching, sanding, re-patching and re-sanding, priming and painting had all proceeded as planned. The vents, rusty little bitches that they are, were another story altogether. (You might say that I’m venting about the vents, but if you did Ohio law says I have the legal right to smash your balls into a crystalline powder with the cryogenically-frozen skull of Ted Williams, a law that makes no sense whatsoever because Williams played for Boston which is in like Vermont or something.).
Anyway, after you’ve done a little home improvement, you begin to understand what I like to call the I-Can’t-Fucking- Believe-I’ve-Wasted-My-Entire-Fucking-Saturday-On-This-Stupid-Little-Fucking-Job Principle. Basically this law of home improvement says, “The seemingly simplest of jobs will turn out to be the most aggravating and require at least three trips to Home Depot,” or for the literalists out there, “…the most fucking aggravating...” So it was with our cast iron grates.
First, due to a modification by the previous homeowners, one of the dining room vents was no longer connected to the HVAC system. It was a dead vent, and should therefore be extremely easy to replace. However, when I began tearing out the vent housing, I noticed a distinctly textured covering and suddenly felt my health insurance premiums skyrocket. Asbestos. Holy fuck me.
Immediately all work was halted and I set to fashioning a makeshift HAZMAT suit and removal container made from garbage bags, duct tape, an Amazon.com cardboard box and some aluminum foil (the foil was mostly for affect, as were the nametag, the multiple “DANGER” signs and the two fun-size Butterfingers I used for captain’s bars on my shoulders). Once the asbestos covered materials were bagged up and left in the highly capable hands of my garbage man via the bin, I blew my nose twice and hocked up three consecutive loogies. This is a little-known but effective field technique for completely removing air-borne carcinogens from the body, brought to you by the folks over at “Duck and Cover.”
Second, the grates we purchased from the antique store (a shop quite reminiscent of the one owned by Fred Sanford) were completely covered in rust and lead paint. And while I’m a big fan of some forms of grinding, the intricate designs on these grates were going to take hours and hours of the tedious, highly-abrasive metal-on-metal type, as opposed to the sweaty, mildly-abrasive (depending on your underwear preference) man-on-reluctant-woman type. Fortunately I am the owner of a computer, an inflated sense of ability and excessive gullibility to highly suspect information. Putting all my assets to use at once, I found an alternative: the homemade Electrolytic Rust Removal Type Thingamajig.
(I spent fifteen minutes at a Christmas party this weekend sucking the life out of a room full of people with a painful description of my wildly successful ERRTT project. I’m not going to make the same mistake twice. Let’s just say that if you are interested, check this out . Oh, and it produces a significant amount of hydrogen gas. You know, the stuff the Hindenburg was filled with.)
All said, by December 1 I had exposed myself to massive amounts of latex fumes, asbestos, lead paint, hydrogen, acrylic spray paint, alcohol (It’s the holidays!) and farty fuselage air, resulting in what can only be called a Extra-Crunchy Chemical Vapor-Induced Sinus Infection with Canker Sores and Blinding Halitosis. My mouth and esophagus has turned into a foul, festering cavern of raw, putrid sores that could open a wide berth through a colony of lepers waiting to buy Hanna Montana tickets for their spoiled, shitty, armless children. It was if I had eaten a pair of Paris Hilton’s underpants, assuming she would ever wear some.
But remember, it’s Christmas, the time of miracles like the Immaculate Reception, the Drive, and The Play. Within a week’s time my illness was miraculously lifted save a single, well-placed canker sore on the business end of my tongue, the home improvement was completed and my grim obsession with the end of the world has ended. And on Sunday, Nerdy Squirrel wandered through the old Christmas tree farm in Concord, Ohio and cut down our very first real Christmas tree, a fine, fat Norwegian Pine. Now our newly-decorated home is filled with the wonderful smell of pine and fond memories of childhood Christmases.
As of this morning, my eyes are puffy and my head is stuffed. I’m pretty sure I’m allergic.