Smoke Sticks and The Last of Us

My oil bill was nine hundred and fifty dollars last month.  We don’t have a gas line on our street so your options as a homeowner for heat are as follows:  Oil, oil and oil.  It wasn’t even all that cold during this period of time, temperatures mostly in the upper 30s, lower forties, above average for New England.

The amount of the bill wasn’t any serious surprise.  I live in a 2500sq foot home, I work from home so the heat’s on all day, and heating oil is $5.50 a gallon.  Since I moved into the place a year with my wife I’ve been working on projects to reduce the amount of energy we use.  I had a crew of professionals insulate the attic properly — air sealing around ducts and ceiling lights, blowing cellulose insulation to a certain depth on the floor and so on.  They air sealed the basement, too, but not as well, often missing the line between the foundation and the frame with the line of expanding foam, which is about as useful as wiping your stomach instead of your ass after a session on the toilet.

So I’ve been in the basement slowly sealing the areas they missed, and also fixing parts of the ceiling insulation that were, at some point in the past, mouse infested — I tear it down and let old mouse bedding and droppings rain all over me, then measure and cut new runs from a R-19 bat and affix them.

If you told the 10 year old version of me that I would be doing this kind of work in my 40s, he would have told you to just kill him then and there on the spot.  That kid thought he would have a more interesting life.  He wouldn’t have known what, exactly, it would have been, but it wouldn’t be this.

I did six hours of this sort of work over the weekend.  And I have to say, for the adult version of me, it’s strangely satisfying.  For the first ten minutes I have the usual reluctance to begin a lengthy project — I suit up, put an old hat on, long sleeve crappy project shirt, mask, goggles and wonder if I’m making good use of my time, wonder if I should be doing something else, passingly wish I could be playing guitar or reading instead — but once I’m moving around downstairs I get into the flow of it, listening to music and steadily working, making small decisions about this and that as I progress along the walls, cutting foam board and spraying foam and working with the pink fiberglass insulation that looks like cotton candy and will give you microscopic scratches if you rub your skin against it.  I light little incense sticks and let them burn close to the walls and see if the air moves the smoke, which gives me clues as to where the problem areas are.

It’s the flow of it that I find so soothing.  It’s the same flow I sometimes get into when I’m writing.  Or playing guitar (which I haven’t done in ages… since before buying this house a year ago, practically…)

And I realized:  Most of my life, this is what I’m searching for.  It’s not the thing so much as the flow.  After the basic needs of life are met — sleep, food, human connection — what I crave more than anything else is this state of doing something where I am engaged enough to stop watching the damned clock, where my brain chatter shuts off — the lists of things I have to do recede into the background as I instead focus on this one thing — and that thing can be anything — insulation one day, cooking the next, journaling the following day.

this is what the new-agers mean by being present and living in the moment was one of my idle thoughts on Sunday while cleaning up after my session, vacuuming mouse droppings off the concrete floor, watching sections of it turn instantly from mottled and filthy to uniform gray as the head spun and whirred and the suction slurped everything up off the ground.  this isn’t so bad.

I just wish I could manage the trick of it more often.

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On Saturday my mom came over for ten minutes.  She didn’t stay longer because my wife is still testing covid positive.  Her microwave broke, and my brother is storing a bunch of his old shit in our basement, and some of “his old shit” included a countertop microwave, so my mom figured, well, I’ll just pick that up instead of buying a new one.

She comes down into the basement and I lead her over to the microwave and she comments on all the pink fiberglass insulation all over the place and I tell her about the project I’m working on to improve energy efficiency in the house and she says well there’s definitely some of your father in you with this tone of A) total disinterest in the actual work of insulating the basement — the goals of being more energy efficient and having a neater, mouse-shit free basement — maybe mixed with incredulity that I voluntarily spend my time this way and manage to be interested enough in this kind of mundane work to get it done, when other options on how to occupy my time exist plus B) kind of disapproval of the parts of me that remind her of my Dad, whom she divorced thirty two years ago.  My Dad might have been an alcoholic control freak abusive asshole, but he was a cheap alcoholic asshole — he liked doing things that would save him money, no matter how boring they would seem to an outside observer.  I remember one summer he painted the entire exterior of our house by himself in three days, taking vacation time off work to get it done, drinking schlitz in ninety degree heat the entire time, his shirt off, tanned skin gleaming under the sun. I’d rarely seen him happier.

Once my mom is gone, having taken the jet black microwave and driven off, I tell Jennie about the conversation with my mom.  Her only comment is Your mom needed to make the insulation about more than the insulation.  She tries to tie everything in life to family, to meaning and purpose and identity.  That’s how she makes sense of everything.

And I have this sudden insight — that’s why I do this myself.  That’s why I think so much about why I am doing what I’m doing — that’s why I pore over family history and search for my own motivations, looking for clues that might help with future direction, like looking at chicken scratches in the dust and hoping for a map to materialize from the random patterns.  My mom does this.  I must have learned this from her.

I don’t know why I haven’t realized this before.

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Jennie and I are watching a show on HBO called The Last of Us.  It’s based on a video game.  We watched episode 3 on the couch together.  It’s set in a post-pandemic world where the pandemic causes people to be, essentially, zombies.  (Warning I am about to ruin this show if you haven’t seen it and are planning on it.)

Episode 3 is a standalone episode.  It starts with one character, Bill, who is a bunker guy — sometimes also called a prepper or a doomer.  He lives in his own house and has completely it secured from intruders — fences, trip wires, explosives, flame throwers — he’s stockpiled guns and ammo and fuel.  Nothing can get through his defenses.  He’s safe.  Once he’s finished securing his property, he makes dinner for himself — he’s a fabulous cook.  Steak, braised carrots, some leafy greens, an amazing bottle of wine.  A scene ends with him eating this gourmet meal in a meticulously decorated living room, alone.  The scene clearly communicates the loneliness he must feel — it was designed to tell the viewer There Is No Point To This Life.

Then a man named Frank breaches the exterior defenses.  The two of them meet and realize they each have something to offer the other.  Bill helps Frank survive — Frank has none of the prepper/engineer/bunker mentality.  But Frank helps Bill live.  Frank adds mystery, art, and love to the days — they become partners.

Time elapses, a couple of decades, and we find they’ve grown old together.  Then Frank comes down with some kind of disease.  They don’t say what it is exactly but Jennie and I guess.  Either ALS or Parkinsons.  Frank doesn’t want to go all the way to the end of life this way — the steady, bleak decline of it is too painful especially without the support of doctors or hospitals, which don’t exist in this world.  So he decides to kill himself.

Bill kills himself too.  Says that Frank was his purpose.  I think he remembered back to eating that meal by himself at the table, safe, secure, well fed, but utterly alone.  Then compared that to his life with Frank, which was much, much harder in so many ways — carrying Frank from room to room, feeding another person, making sure he is OK —

And he ran some kind of quick calculus in his head and realized that as hard as it was to be a caretaker for his ailing spouse, it would be harder to go back to a world without love — without connection and laughter and light.

Jennie cries.  It is the first time I’ve seen Jennie cry during a movie.  She has cried before with me but it has always before been about something to do with her real life — a failed IVF cycle, a new and distressing element of care-taking her aging parents, feelings of overwhelm and hopelessness.  I ask her why she’s crying and she says she’s remembering how alone she felt before she met me.  She had been dating for years without feeling any real connection, and was losing hope.  She thought she’d be alone forever, caring for her parents without any support or love from a partner, and she was remembering what that felt like.  We both know there’s a lot of Parkinson’s in my family — I will probably get it — and she says I don’t know what I’ll do if you get it.  She says she can’t be alone again.

I tell her it’s better to be loved and unsafe than safe and unloved.  Nothing is certain.  Maybe I will dodge it.  Maybe there will be a cure in twenty years.  Parkinsons seemed to hit most of my family members around 65 or 68.  That’s at least twenty years away.  And at any rate, we are happy now.  We are going to live our lives Now.  

And we will start by having a few chocolate chip cookies and watching Futurama so we can replace the mental weight of that episode with something lighter.

She tells me I remind her of Bill, the prepper-cook — she says well you are putting solar panels on the house and insulating the basement and you’re a crazy engineer so you’re just like him.  I disagree.  I’m into girls, I tell her. I’m into you, actually.

She brightens, laughs.

Sometimes I manage to say the right thing.