The Fifth

I had an idea, at the beginning of summer, to put up a little shelf at the end of the hallway where it opens up into the “big room” of our home. A little shelf with a few plants on it. Small plants. Maybe even just some cuttings hanging out in water.

Sometimes I dream of creating a better, more vibrant, safer world. Sometimes I dream of creating a new place to put a glass of water with a stem stuck in it. The human mind is truly a multi-layered place. The big dreams are exciting. The small ones are much easier to put into practice. Both are energizing in their own ways.

So, it occurred to me to do it and I immediately liked the idea. When I realized I’d already found the perfect glasses (someone left a box of eight perfectly fine ones and one absolutely shattered one in the “free area” of our building,) I loved the idea. I did a little measuring and a little searching and found the shelves online. Great. The only problem was that the shelves weren’t quite expensive enough to trigger the free shipping. And I’ll be damned if I’m gonna pay for shipping. So now there was a sub-task to complete. A little side quest, if side quests were a necessary component of winning the game. I had to find something else to buy. Something I needed, or at least “needed,” that was fairly cheap. It took a little bit of thinking on my part (which can take a lot of bit of time), but eventually, I came up with… Frames? Sure! We had a handful of printed-out photos we were planning on putting up someday. Why not in the next few weeks, potentially? So now all I needed to do was figure out the number, size, color, and material of the frames we wanted on our walls. Fine. Another sub-task. Fathom that. I just needed to collect all of the aforementioned pics, measure them, etc., and then I’d be ready to get my virtual shopping cart full enough to get that free shipping I insist upon having.

Except I really wanted to mount the new TV on the wall first. It felt like I really should make sure the preparatory items were in place before I bought more stuff. What if I’d accidentally discovered the world’s only unmountable TV? What if it turns out that the wood of the walls had rotted away or shady contractors had secretly used styrofoam to build our home? Unlikely, of course, but if any of those things ended up being true I certainly didn’t want a bunch of new frames to deal with on top of a structurally unsafe home.

So I had to buy a mount.

At this point, the more active readers among you may be saying, “hey why don’t you just get the mount instead of the frames?” That’d be a great idea if the shelf and frame place was also a mount place. But it was not. I had to go to the place that rhymes with Shamazon to get the mount, but I like to shop elsewhere when I can, even if it’s less convenient (which in this case it most certainly was).

While I waited for the mount to arrive I got the space ready. A little rearranging, cleaning, vacuuming, and then further rearranging, and soon I’d be ready to mount the TV so I could buy the frames that would get the shelf shipped (for free) for the glasses, with the stem and the water, in the hall, way up high.

Why did I want the stems up so high?

Perhaps I’ll die?

I don’t think I’m unique in needing to get multiple things moving at once in order to get any one of them done. Or maybe I am unique in that. It doesn’t matter because the hurdle here is that I’m embarrassed about what I need to do. I feel dumb about the way I get things done , and I think it’s because it’s my way of getting things done. It has my stink on it. And I instinctively devalue anything identifiably mine, which is (at least in part) why I’m so reluctant to share my art. And that reluctance is, in turn, why I find stand-up to be, not easy to do, really, but a much easier process in those terms. When I tell jokes on stage, I get warm reassurance or cold resistance in the form of immediate and continuous feedback as I create. And that’s something you don’t get from writing— or many other art forms I can think of.

Except maybe bullfighting?

What a gorgeous picture.

But here, 700-odd words into this post, I have no idea who’s still with me. It could be just me. Maybe no one else will ever even read this. Here, writing at the kitchen, it’s impossible to be sure. At least when I do stand-up I know if I have the audience or I’m just alone talking to myself under a picture of a bull.

Welp, when the conversation turns to my love/hate relationship with stand-up, I know it’s time to wrap it up, which I’ll do in the following sentence:

Eventually, the mount came in the mail. I put up the TV, decided the rest of my plan was a go, bought the frames and the shelf, and finished the project.

Ta-da?

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