Disjointed in anticlimatic

Spring is cruising by at full steam. I have the peculiar (and unexpected) opportunity of working with a man in the same field, who is retiring, and wants to hand off his clients. This on top of my own business on top of my domestic projects has every waking moment blurring together in a slow march of physical progress, and only bits and pieces of time- during brief commutes, or waiting on machinery to collect itself- with which to think openly.

Today I found myself standing in line at the grocery store. There were shorter lines, but I wasn’t in a rush. For a good 5-10 minutes I stood in that line, blissfully zoning out on the far wall and general din of a grocery store near peak business. I saw a married couple share an inside joke communicated entirely with facial expressions. I saw a hippie couple in masks buying an avalanche of unsorted unbagged produce. All the while I’m thinking of something I heard the guy I’ve been working with say, earlier in the day, to the caretaker of one of these particular houses (I’ll get to this house in a moment, it’s fascinating). He said that one of the harder parts of continuing to work, was that he had throughout his life accrued a large list of clients that he also established trust and friendship with, and that almost all of them were dead now.

Got me thinking about the fresh business we are currently growing and the people we have the privilege of working around- or working for- at the moment. Which is too many. More people, at the moment, need our help than we have time to help, and that is difficult to deal with. It’s tough having to disappoint people simply because you just do not have the time to not. How long can I find meaning in work, though? It’s so finite. I suppose accepting the finite is the challenge of life, but that too is hard. I wonder what percent of my life has so far expired in the grand sum of it. Half? The bulk? It’s now one or the other. I reflect on parts of long distant memories and inject myself in various time periods and atmospheres via imagination in as convincing of a moment as my mind can paint. For a second, or two, (enough) it genuinely feels as though I am there. Today, while cooking sauce on the stove, it was an apartment in a midwestern city circa summer 1968…

Like I was saying about this house (the fascinating one), a contractor looked at it recently and gave it 10 years tops before it completely implodes. It looks like a a great house was erected 150 years ago, and then not long after, several cheap and horribly decided additions were added to it over the years 120-110 years ago. At which point production finally halted, and nary was it touched again. The main support columns, which are just old whole trees- are rotten on the bottom. Most of the plumbing is rotting steel, crumbling cast iron, and lead. Much of it is pitched in the wrong direction and leaking. Floors sag. Stairways go to nothing. Bathrooms are hidden in pits here and there. Both top heavy, and leaning- the entire western wing is a second story supported by ancient stilts- hovering oddly out over the yard.

I feel a great kinship with that place, at this particular juncture.

Last updated May 07, 2022