Insane in the Brain
So I helped my dad paint the trim on my parents’ house the last two weekends. In Las Vegas. In over 100 degree heat. In-sane.
He belongs to a homeowner’s association, who decreed that it was time for him to get his fascia boards re-painted (a horizontal board covering the joint between the top of a wall and the projecting eaves...not that you care...). He’s had other stressful things to deal with lately, so he hadn’t been able to gather his wits or resources to do it in the cooler springtime. He couldn’t afford to hire a painter, at this point in time. When I volunteered to help him paint, it was at the tail end of spring. I didn’t think that the weather would be slowly gathering steam and heading into a rolling boil so soon. In LA, the weather has been Sybil-esque: “I’m hot”, “No, I’m cold”, “Now I’m balmy”, “Oh, I’m so rainy today!”...The difference between states simply did not occur to me. I love painting, I love sanding and scraping, I love fixing things. I’m the son my dad never had. I thought it was a natural that I would go to help him—we’d do the job, we’d talk a little bit about life, we’d male bond, like we used to. I thought it’d be FUN.
I got out there on a Thursday night. I’d brought my bike, in order to ride it twice a day, keep the leg muscles sharp. My plan: get up early, ride my bike for half an hour, eat breakfast, head out and sand/scrape the old paint off. I rode my bike (the sun wasn’t that far above the horizon yet). I ate breakfast. I went out to sand and scrape, and someone had turned up the volume of the sun! Whoa!! It was maybe 8:00 in the morning. We had to get logical, starting where the sun still hadn’t hit yet, and then moving as it moved so as not to be blasted onto our asses by the intensity. Although there were times when we had to be in the direct sunlight, because we got out there too late or the job took longer than we thought. It was purely mind over matter, at that point. Lots of water breaks, and thoughts of cool water and standing in front of open refrigerators and taking my mind away from the actuality of the situation. After that, I was declaring that I’d scrap riding my bike, we’d wake up at 5:00, get out there at sunrise, have about 4 hours of relative cool in which to slam out the sand/scraping. Which is not easy work, mind you. It is, however, a great arm workout. But my noble plans did not always work, for my dad and I are not early risers by nature. We are vampires. I have to say, though, I was better at getting up at the butt crack of dawn than he was. But we did the best we could manage.
At the end of four days, we had sanded/scraped most of the paint off most of the boards. He still had the roof fascia to do by the time I had to go. We had gotten the highest peak in the back of the house scraped AND painted with the requisite two coats, with me holding the extension ladder for him—that had been his Goliath. We knocked it down, allright. He is one tough cookie, my dad is. He’s got my mad props. But I had only gotten to paint one measly coat on one measly little side of the house. HALF a side, since he had done the other half. Gypped...GYPPED, I tell you! THAT was supposed to be the FUN part. So I went home slightly disappointed, and also hating that I was leaving him to finish what was still a huge job alone—I’m not COMPLETELY self-absorbed—but I had to go back to work. He promised he’d go slow, doing only a little bit a day. But still...it was still a mountain.
Enter my sister. We kept calling him and checking his progress throughout the week. By the end of it, he’d gotten all of the sanding & scraping done, so all that was left was to paint. She suggested we go up on Friday after work, paint all day Saturday and Sunday, and leave Sunday night—neither of us could take more time off work to do it. We’d knock it out, the three of us, and just get it DONE, so he wouldn’t have that hanging over his head for however long it’d take him. I said, yeah, let’s do it.
So that’s exactly what happened this past weekend. Wisecracking and making comedy all the way through, Dad and I showed her the ropes, and the three of us braved painting on the surface of the sun, and we got it done in ONE DAY. Two coats on each of the three sides of the house. We are folk heroes, y’all. They should be writing songs and telling stories about us. I am amazed that we are still alive to tell the tale. But as my sister stated, our parents “didn’t raise any pansy-asses”. We come from working while our friends were playing, late in the summer, chopping and stacking firewood for our fall and winter supply—we heated only by woodburning stove for eight years. We come from spring and fall cleaning, from cleaning out the cellar on entire Saturdays, from raking leaves in the fall, shoveling snow in the winter. And as much as we hated—HATED—it then, that hard work made us the tenacious adults that we are today. And goddamn if we aren’t proud of that fact. And yeah, grateful...
And like childbirth, now that the hardest part is over, what I remember about this painting job is that it actually WASN’T that bad. It actually WAS kinda fun...
He belongs to a homeowner’s association, who decreed that it was time for him to get his fascia boards re-painted (a horizontal board covering the joint between the top of a wall and the projecting eaves...not that you care...). He’s had other stressful things to deal with lately, so he hadn’t been able to gather his wits or resources to do it in the cooler springtime. He couldn’t afford to hire a painter, at this point in time. When I volunteered to help him paint, it was at the tail end of spring. I didn’t think that the weather would be slowly gathering steam and heading into a rolling boil so soon. In LA, the weather has been Sybil-esque: “I’m hot”, “No, I’m cold”, “Now I’m balmy”, “Oh, I’m so rainy today!”...The difference between states simply did not occur to me. I love painting, I love sanding and scraping, I love fixing things. I’m the son my dad never had. I thought it was a natural that I would go to help him—we’d do the job, we’d talk a little bit about life, we’d male bond, like we used to. I thought it’d be FUN.
I got out there on a Thursday night. I’d brought my bike, in order to ride it twice a day, keep the leg muscles sharp. My plan: get up early, ride my bike for half an hour, eat breakfast, head out and sand/scrape the old paint off. I rode my bike (the sun wasn’t that far above the horizon yet). I ate breakfast. I went out to sand and scrape, and someone had turned up the volume of the sun! Whoa!! It was maybe 8:00 in the morning. We had to get logical, starting where the sun still hadn’t hit yet, and then moving as it moved so as not to be blasted onto our asses by the intensity. Although there were times when we had to be in the direct sunlight, because we got out there too late or the job took longer than we thought. It was purely mind over matter, at that point. Lots of water breaks, and thoughts of cool water and standing in front of open refrigerators and taking my mind away from the actuality of the situation. After that, I was declaring that I’d scrap riding my bike, we’d wake up at 5:00, get out there at sunrise, have about 4 hours of relative cool in which to slam out the sand/scraping. Which is not easy work, mind you. It is, however, a great arm workout. But my noble plans did not always work, for my dad and I are not early risers by nature. We are vampires. I have to say, though, I was better at getting up at the butt crack of dawn than he was. But we did the best we could manage.
At the end of four days, we had sanded/scraped most of the paint off most of the boards. He still had the roof fascia to do by the time I had to go. We had gotten the highest peak in the back of the house scraped AND painted with the requisite two coats, with me holding the extension ladder for him—that had been his Goliath. We knocked it down, allright. He is one tough cookie, my dad is. He’s got my mad props. But I had only gotten to paint one measly coat on one measly little side of the house. HALF a side, since he had done the other half. Gypped...GYPPED, I tell you! THAT was supposed to be the FUN part. So I went home slightly disappointed, and also hating that I was leaving him to finish what was still a huge job alone—I’m not COMPLETELY self-absorbed—but I had to go back to work. He promised he’d go slow, doing only a little bit a day. But still...it was still a mountain.
Enter my sister. We kept calling him and checking his progress throughout the week. By the end of it, he’d gotten all of the sanding & scraping done, so all that was left was to paint. She suggested we go up on Friday after work, paint all day Saturday and Sunday, and leave Sunday night—neither of us could take more time off work to do it. We’d knock it out, the three of us, and just get it DONE, so he wouldn’t have that hanging over his head for however long it’d take him. I said, yeah, let’s do it.
So that’s exactly what happened this past weekend. Wisecracking and making comedy all the way through, Dad and I showed her the ropes, and the three of us braved painting on the surface of the sun, and we got it done in ONE DAY. Two coats on each of the three sides of the house. We are folk heroes, y’all. They should be writing songs and telling stories about us. I am amazed that we are still alive to tell the tale. But as my sister stated, our parents “didn’t raise any pansy-asses”. We come from working while our friends were playing, late in the summer, chopping and stacking firewood for our fall and winter supply—we heated only by woodburning stove for eight years. We come from spring and fall cleaning, from cleaning out the cellar on entire Saturdays, from raking leaves in the fall, shoveling snow in the winter. And as much as we hated—HATED—it then, that hard work made us the tenacious adults that we are today. And goddamn if we aren’t proud of that fact. And yeah, grateful...
And like childbirth, now that the hardest part is over, what I remember about this painting job is that it actually WASN’T that bad. It actually WAS kinda fun...
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