get down
Truth is, I hate that fucking house. I was glad to leave it last year, and I'm glad I've sold it now. The whole thing of owning it, watching it degrade because I never had the money for fixing shit that needed fixing, flailing away at unrewarding personal relationships with others who shared the same roof...
...my last tenant will be my mother. She needs a place to stay for two weeks while... something happens. I don't know what. She's finished seminary school, and will now be an ordained minister of the Lutheran church. Or I guess you actually get ordained when a church decides you'll fit the bill for their community. You can't be an ordained minister if you're an unemployed one. That, I guess, is what the word means. She doesn't know yet where she'll end up. In the meantime she needs a place to crash, and I've got an empty house for a few more weeks yet.
This last stretch of ownership, wherein I do my best to meet the conditions of the sale which are remarkably lax yet still somehow overwhelming in the amount of attention they demand from me, is wearing me out. On Wednesday I lugged a dead washing machine up a flight of stairs by myself. I used a dolly, of course, it would have been impossible otherwise - it nearly was at any rate. I'd gotten the thing about halfway up, at great pains, when I realised that the physics of the equation were about to get a lot harder, since the angle against which I was pulling it was getting closer and closer to straight sideways even though I still had four steps to go - I was so frightened I would tire and lose my grip and send it tumbling down into a wall.
Somehow I made it - the last step gave me the same feeling I get when I watch a Canadian figure skater leap twirling madly into the air as my foot slipped a half inch and my biceps shuddered and the possibility that it was all going to end very badly, possibly even with serious physical injury, loomed large. But it came. The mass of metal kershunked its way over the lip of the final step, and I was so moved - moved - I nearly let it fall on my legs in a tumult of emotional exhaustion.
And then I had to figure out how to get it in the back of my dad's pickup. And then I had to do the whole thing over with the dryer, and then with the dead husk of a hot water heater.
And that was just the first of three days worth of the same thing. Ugly and broken furniture, absolutely useless gigantic pieces of trash. This plus I get a message from the person who moved in with the upstairs tenant without anyone asking me in the first place if it was okay, and yes, it matters, making sure I haven't tossed out her fucking board games. Who gives a shit.
The good thing about all of this is that I get to drive to work, unload the truck over the edge of the unloading dock, watch the stuff land six feet below on hard concrete, then go inside on the tip floor and get into my loader and crush, crush, fucking destroy the things. Thank god for heavy duty equipment and the badass men and women who use them to scar the earth and everything on it, or we might forget that we're supposed to be at least a little bit in charge of things. That every once in awhile we can pull up a corner of the earth, reach underneath for the scurrying hellfire demon, and utter to it the last words it will hear before we tear and mangle and smash it for ever: I told you not to fucking move.
...my last tenant will be my mother. She needs a place to stay for two weeks while... something happens. I don't know what. She's finished seminary school, and will now be an ordained minister of the Lutheran church. Or I guess you actually get ordained when a church decides you'll fit the bill for their community. You can't be an ordained minister if you're an unemployed one. That, I guess, is what the word means. She doesn't know yet where she'll end up. In the meantime she needs a place to crash, and I've got an empty house for a few more weeks yet.
This last stretch of ownership, wherein I do my best to meet the conditions of the sale which are remarkably lax yet still somehow overwhelming in the amount of attention they demand from me, is wearing me out. On Wednesday I lugged a dead washing machine up a flight of stairs by myself. I used a dolly, of course, it would have been impossible otherwise - it nearly was at any rate. I'd gotten the thing about halfway up, at great pains, when I realised that the physics of the equation were about to get a lot harder, since the angle against which I was pulling it was getting closer and closer to straight sideways even though I still had four steps to go - I was so frightened I would tire and lose my grip and send it tumbling down into a wall.
Somehow I made it - the last step gave me the same feeling I get when I watch a Canadian figure skater leap twirling madly into the air as my foot slipped a half inch and my biceps shuddered and the possibility that it was all going to end very badly, possibly even with serious physical injury, loomed large. But it came. The mass of metal kershunked its way over the lip of the final step, and I was so moved - moved - I nearly let it fall on my legs in a tumult of emotional exhaustion.
And then I had to figure out how to get it in the back of my dad's pickup. And then I had to do the whole thing over with the dryer, and then with the dead husk of a hot water heater.
And that was just the first of three days worth of the same thing. Ugly and broken furniture, absolutely useless gigantic pieces of trash. This plus I get a message from the person who moved in with the upstairs tenant without anyone asking me in the first place if it was okay, and yes, it matters, making sure I haven't tossed out her fucking board games. Who gives a shit.
The good thing about all of this is that I get to drive to work, unload the truck over the edge of the unloading dock, watch the stuff land six feet below on hard concrete, then go inside on the tip floor and get into my loader and crush, crush, fucking destroy the things. Thank god for heavy duty equipment and the badass men and women who use them to scar the earth and everything on it, or we might forget that we're supposed to be at least a little bit in charge of things. That every once in awhile we can pull up a corner of the earth, reach underneath for the scurrying hellfire demon, and utter to it the last words it will hear before we tear and mangle and smash it for ever: I told you not to fucking move.
posted by gibletquesterrs at 12:25 AM
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