feather2pixels

You should realize that I have the best of blogging intentions. Not only am I usually thinking of great ideas for posts, but I constantly find myself toying with concepts for simple flourishes that I’m confident would accumulate to the astonishingly rich digital archive of my dreams. Man I’m telling you, in a certain imagining of my life there’s something delightful posted about every cognitive-behavioral event I experience.  You would log on every day and I would knock your socks off. Woe is me that somewhere along the way, the gap between my ambition and my lack of follow-through comes to bear.

For example, take this screen drying cabinet I just built.

While depicting no overstatement in an account of my true feelings, I can honestly tell you that I would feel so much more complete and validated if I:

• told you the story of how I very grudgingly decided to build this myself once my carpenter leads dried up.
• chronicled my 10 day evolution from shamefully bad to very bad woodworker.
• described the notably not worth it sense of accomplishment I felt upon completion.

Seriously.

I am just a closeted, self-loathing product of of my time and place.

But anyway, in practice I guess I suck at this.  Basically the main idea is that now I know how to build a wooden box on wheels.

…Kind of.

…It’ll come in handy.  (Thanks to Jake R. and Jesse B. for the invaluable advice on this.)

I have a new nemesis and it has no name.  In fact the foe that torments me does not even possess life, for it is an inanimate object. What  anonymous item with no intelligence with which to outsmart me provides me with so much grief nonetheless?

The answer is an eight foot wall.

I am in my third week of constructing this simple dividing structure, quite possibly the simplest thing one could build, and yet it is still not done.  The reasons reveal too much stupidity to get into (for example: did you know that walls don’t not fall down on their own?), but the seemingly endless struggle to erect this wall is seeing all my other concerns slowly fall by the wayside and is contributing to a mounting sense that everything is a series of ever more futile tasks.  At this point, I don’t even care if the wall is a metaphor for life or life is a metaphor for the wall–I just need a god damned 300 square foot enclosure.

The wall frame

(Thanks to Vik [pictured above]for helping me out).

Earlier this week, the 24th Street Project was finally ready to be installed at the new Local Mission Eatery. So I bought a 6 pack, rallied some friends, and we spent six hours fastening a grid of 350 wood tiles to six enormous slabs of MDX.  Three days later the industrial grade glue still hasn’t come of our hands, but I have a warm feeling from knowing how dedicated my friends are in my time of need.

Thanks to:

• Jim
• Erin
• To-Shi-O
• Cat
• Yaron (owner of Local Mission Eatery)
• Laser

And now you shall witness the proceedings on this third rate video I made.  (Pay attention to the second part of the time lapse and you can see the inimitable Phil–proprietor of the legendary Philz coffee shop two doors down–look on with questionable approval)

[flv:24_install.flv 480 360]

So after the screen printing area at Cellspace was ransacked by a former employee (once upon a time Cellspace had employees), I was given the opportunity to put my woodworking skills to the test.  The test in question was successfully building a new lightbox with which to expose screens, about a one half on the carpentry difficulty scale from one to ten, and I am ashamed to say that I could barely manage it.