So, as I mentioned yesterday, we’re buying a house. A real house, with plumbing and a foundation and a yard and a driveway and electricity and water and everything else that can go wrong in horrible and expensive ways.
I’m looking forward to it, in a way. I’ve always wanted to walk into the house carrying power tools with dust-lust in my eyes. Attack! Drill! Mitre! Saw! Destroy! Destroy!
Maybe that’s not the best attitude to have. I should love my house, not be looking at ways that I can possibly make more holes in it. It’s a beautiful house. Really. But there’s something about those smooth, uninterrupted expanses of wall that are just BEGGING to have holes smashed in them in the name of “renovation”. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with them, per se. They just need to be violated.
The basement of our soon to be home is filled with all sorts of groovy wood paneling and red carpeting. I look at the wood paneling and groan. It’s so . . . old. It makes me feel like an Irish guy circa 1963 who decides to finish his home and sasy, “why that wood paneling complete with marks for knots would be perfect! Let’s party.” Granted, I am an Irish guy. Only it’s forty years later. It should be dry wall painted in a smart Learning Channel approved color.
And yet, I also look at that wood paneling and start daydreaming about the gaudy decorations of yesteryear. I want to buy a gold velvet couch. I want to hang Sputnik Clocks (thanks to Cory for having the only impressive collection on the web), I want to have shag carpeting and play Henry Mancini albums. I want to drink martinis out of tinted plastic glasses and eat hotdogs off of toothpicks and discuss the merits of allowing women to wear pants. I want to wear avocado sweaters and ugly pants. I want Elvis glasses. And everything in the house will be fake. Fake everything. Plastic everything. It’s the future you know! And I’ll call my wife Muffy, for various reasons.
I’ll also decorate various areas of the house with atomic symbols and Feynman diagrams. That would really mess up the neighbors.
“Um, what’s that picture with the squiggly lines and dots and arrows? Is that some sort of modern art?”
“Of course not. That’s a Feynman Diagram for a Drell Yan process creating magnetic monopoles. And over here you will find a framed print of Dirac’s Equation. Ooh, and that’s the Uncertainty Principle on that wall!”
“And what’s with all the dots with circles around them?”
“Those are designs from the fifties that illustrate the atom. Very retro-chic. Would you like to see my collection of Esquival albums? Are you into Space Age Bachelor Pad music? It’s groovy. Let me get my smoking jacket and Keds and we’ll go down in the basement to check out the grooves.”
“My kids can’t play with yours. I’m sure you understand.”
Most of all, I want a house that Darian Sahanaja would be proud of. One that he could walk into and automatically feel like he’s in Esquival’s bizarre kitsch brain in the midst of a fever dream. Something that, when you walk in, you can’t help but say, “My, this is certainly . . . groovy.” But not in a Brady Bunch sort of way. More in a Perrey-Kingsley or Richard Wattis sort of way.
Not that Darian Sahanaja would ever step foot in my house. The invitation is there, of course. We can share our love for sixties pop over a cup of Costa Rican Pea Berry. But, I doubt he’ll show up. Darian, give me a call. We can groove to Esquival together.
But I know for a fact it won’t happen. We’ll decorate it in a tasteful, but unique, modernity that will satisfy our creative urges without scaring the crap out of our neighbors.
Sigh. We always take the easy way out. Oh well, maybe I’ll blast Nick Cave at the neighbors on Sundays. That’ll freak ‘em out.
Either way, I won’t believe any of this house business until the loan check is in the hands of whoever gets it and I have the keys. (By the way, getting a home loan is about as pleasant as getting anally raped by a raging group of monkeys who are strung out on Ecstasy and Ludes.)
Discuss
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