I often spend my days working alone in a 4,000 square foot warehouse-like woodshop studio with poor ventilation and an ancient heating system that makes the back of room, where precisely no one goes and exactly nothing happens, feel like a toasty kitchen on Thanksgiving afternoon. My personal workspace remains somewhere in the low 50s, and I stay comfortable by practicing my moonwalk from station to station wearing four layers of long underwear and Carhartt jacketing.
One day a homeless man wandered in asking for work. This was disheartening, as it had just taken me two hours to figure out how to invert the doorknob on the front door so that the lock was on the inside instead of, quite stupidly, the outside. With the lock on the outside, any silly passerby could have themselves a hearty laugh by locking me into the building, which wouldn’t be so bad except for the poor heating, ventilation, and loneliness.
One day a homeless man wandered in asking for work. This was disheartening, as it had just taken me two hours to figure out how to invert the doorknob on the front door so that the lock was on the inside instead of, quite stupidly, the outside. With the lock on the outside, any silly passerby could have themselves a hearty laugh by locking me into the building, which wouldn’t be so bad except for the poor heating, ventilation, and loneliness.
It’s days when I am gassy when I truly appreciate working alone. And because I bike to work- on a hot pink electric bike that garners much attention because it is so stupid-looking, I am able to pass gas freely as I ride. I experience gratitude as I think of the whole day of flatulence freedom that lays ahead of me, where I will not have to worry about stomach aches from holding it in or fart stigma from co-workers, even though I could probably blame it on a guy. Because no one would think to blame the only girl in the room, am I right? When I ride home on my bicycle after a day of being alone, sometimes I will sing or fart or say aloud big, existential things like, “I will never fully understand life, because my only context for living is as a human on Earth, a tiny percentage of the possibilities for life in this entire universe!”
When I come home from a typical day of working alone I will eat dinner with my girlfriend Ruby, the first and last person I’ll generally have spoken to all day. My word recall dulled and my listening skills limited to hearing Edith Piaf on my headphones and attempting to mimic her French while moonwalking around the shop all day, conversing with Ruby will feel a little like giving a lecture on the definition of the word “irony” while jogging, and will ultimately sound like a mild bout of diarrhea.
An example of this is that I have been told that I often skip proper nouns entirely, moving right along to pronouns. I generally refer to my boss simply as “He,” confusing people and implying a sort of God-likeness on his part. I do not think that God’s vernacular includes the words “retarded” and “numbnuts,” but in the way that he knows carpentry and that he discharges what appears to be an indestructible air of confidence, there is in my boss a tiny pinch of Jesus.
I find myself becoming worse at all of this socializing stuff and wonder, at the delicate age of 27, if it might be the start of Alzheimers. As Ruby proofreads this her eyes widen. She tells me that Alzheimers is not funny and I tell her that I think it sometimes can be. I wrote this whole entry because Ruby thought it would be a good idea for her to actually have an idea about what my days look like, but I think I maybe failed because all I talked about were farts and Edith Piaf and moonwalking, which is what I always talk about.
The truth is, any information about what I technically do, which is woodworking, is generally met with a tilted head and partially opened mouth. Even though it’s a good day for me when I am able to successfully get a beautiful hollow grind on an ⅛ inch chisel, it bores the shit out of people to hear about. See? You don’t know what I’m talking about. And thus, my days spent focusing my attention on creating pieces of functional art are downgraded to me having to talk about my farts, which I guess for now, for Ruby, is something she can at least relate to.
