I'd lived in my house for five years before I tried to put Christmas lights on my roof. And I don't remember whether that decision came before or after this other thing, but that was also the year I bought a ladder.
I bought a sexy, sexy ladder. There used to be a ladder commercial on TV with a chubby guy in a polo shirt demonstrating how versatile a ladder could be. *Clunk-clunk* A-fame! *Clunk-clunk* Right angle! *Clunk-clunk* Straight ladder! *Clunk-clunk* Scaffolding!
"This ladder is literally, LITERALLY, one-hundred and thirteen ladders in one! You know how many ladders it took to build the Lincoln Memorial? One-hundred and twelve!
I shuffled back to the ladder and executed my well-rehearsed escape. Once on the ground, I saw my neighbor pick up her things to go back inside. Among them was the receiver of a cordless phone. Whether or not she'd come out just for the entertainment, she would have been the first one to call an ambulance. My spitefulness ran a little cold.
By the time I was 43, I'd joined and abandoned three different political parties. I'd like to think of myself as a centrist, but it would be more honest to describe my current position as 'disengaged'. As such, I don't have any real hatred of either of the two main groups (although I'm easily swayed to the contrary opinion of anyone who uses 'tard' as a pejorative suffix -- and one half of you guys do that much, much more than the other).
And from here, on my mostly non-partisan patio, with my figurative coffee and smokes, I'm watching with rapt fascination while the Republicans, the collective nut on the roof, cope with the shortcomings of their new toy -- and I'm wondering whether or not they might just step off into nothing at all.
The difference is, I don't have anyone to call.
I bought a sexy, sexy ladder. There used to be a ladder commercial on TV with a chubby guy in a polo shirt demonstrating how versatile a ladder could be. *Clunk-clunk* A-fame! *Clunk-clunk* Right angle! *Clunk-clunk* Straight ladder! *Clunk-clunk* Scaffolding!
"This ladder is literally, LITERALLY, one-hundred and thirteen ladders in one! You know how many ladders it took to build the Lincoln Memorial? One-hundred and twelve!
*Clunk-clunk* Now it's a dinette set!"
And although I didn't buy THE sexy TV ladder, I did buy a Mexican-constructed, not entirely self-contained approximation which, in terms of ladder sexiness, was still way up there.
And so it came to be that late November found me in my back yard with a small cardboard box of Christmas lights and my shiny, sexy ladder which I *clunk-clunk* unfolded and extended and locked down into the most majestic of its innumerable configurations: thirty-one linear feet of holy-snot-this-must-be-what-it's-like-to-own-a-helicopter ladderly goodness.
My neighbor to the south, whom I glimpsed from the corner of my eye as I pretended not to notice her, had stepped out into her little patio, ostensibly to smoke. But it was obvious to me that she had been drawn outside by the promise of an unobstructed view of my artful dance with Escalera Del Sexo.
And this is where the trouble started.
If you have a ladder lying on the ground and you need it to be upright, there's nothing to it. There's no instinct to stop and form a strategy. You pick up the end furthest from the house and you pass it, rung by rung, over your head as you walk towards the other end and you do it without asking yourself any of the questions that are, moments later, so obviously important.
Q: "What happens when you pass the midpoint of the ladder?"
And although I didn't buy THE sexy TV ladder, I did buy a Mexican-constructed, not entirely self-contained approximation which, in terms of ladder sexiness, was still way up there.
And so it came to be that late November found me in my back yard with a small cardboard box of Christmas lights and my shiny, sexy ladder which I *clunk-clunk* unfolded and extended and locked down into the most majestic of its innumerable configurations: thirty-one linear feet of holy-snot-this-must-be-what-it's-like-to-own-a-helicopter ladderly goodness.
My neighbor to the south, whom I glimpsed from the corner of my eye as I pretended not to notice her, had stepped out into her little patio, ostensibly to smoke. But it was obvious to me that she had been drawn outside by the promise of an unobstructed view of my artful dance with Escalera Del Sexo.
And this is where the trouble started.
If you have a ladder lying on the ground and you need it to be upright, there's nothing to it. There's no instinct to stop and form a strategy. You pick up the end furthest from the house and you pass it, rung by rung, over your head as you walk towards the other end and you do it without asking yourself any of the questions that are, moments later, so obviously important.
Q: "What happens when you pass the midpoint of the ladder?"
A: You become the fulcrum of a big aluminum teeter-totter.
Q: "Where should your arms be?"
A: Over your head, as if you're supporting something heavy -- rather than out in front of you, as if you're pushing a big cart or something.
Q: "Why?"
A: You'll see.
The ladder fell onto my head.
When I came to (I don't mean 'came to' to imply that I lost consciousness... I mean it to mean after I stopped walking around in circles with my eyes closed rubbing my head and saying things like "mother fuckfart") my error seemed screamingly obvious. So I propped the base end against the house and tried again.
The ladder reached to just below the eves, so getting on the roof would be very difficult. Getting off of the roof would be either nearly impossible or terrifyingly swift and violent.
I dragged the ladder into the back yard and *clunk-clunk* reconfigured it into an offset A-Frame that put its apex right against the roof of my kitchen. I carried the box up, climbed onto the kitchen, hauled the ladder up to the roof with me and set it against the top of the house. Noisier than you'd think.
In a bit of foresight that was, for me, beyond remarkable, I rehearsed the mounting and dismounting of the roof several times before committing to it. Upper body on the roof, now back to the ladder. Upper body and one knee, back to the ladder. Torso, one leg, one knee... back to the ladder. Remember those Cat Chow commercials from the seventies? This was much like that.
But finally, all of my experimentation had paid off and I was up. For the first time, I was standing on the roof of my home. I looked out over my neighborhood, blocks and blocks of roofs with no one standing on them, no one else's arms raised in triumph under a gray and unobstructed November sky.
Looking south, I saw that my neighbor had, in the course of my ordeal, made herself a cup of coffee and dragged a kitchen chair out to the patio. She'd also put on a jacket. She was starting directly at me and smoking what might have been her third cigarette. "Yeah? Well, gawk away, Smokey. This is what victory looks like."
I shuffled along the top of my roof until I got to the front and looked down the slope to the corner where I planned to start stringing the lights. I tried to imagine crawling down there, downhill, with all of the gravity and doom tugging at me. It was too much. If you knew how vividly I was able to imagine what it is like to fall off of a roof, the sickening panic of miscalculation as a wayward step find nothing but air, the surreal tilt of the earth's plane, the wild arms desperately clutching and then futilely bracing, the crescendo of the wind in your ears... you would think I'd done it a hundred times.
The ladder fell onto my head.
When I came to (I don't mean 'came to' to imply that I lost consciousness... I mean it to mean after I stopped walking around in circles with my eyes closed rubbing my head and saying things like "mother fuckfart") my error seemed screamingly obvious. So I propped the base end against the house and tried again.
The ladder reached to just below the eves, so getting on the roof would be very difficult. Getting off of the roof would be either nearly impossible or terrifyingly swift and violent.
I dragged the ladder into the back yard and *clunk-clunk* reconfigured it into an offset A-Frame that put its apex right against the roof of my kitchen. I carried the box up, climbed onto the kitchen, hauled the ladder up to the roof with me and set it against the top of the house. Noisier than you'd think.
In a bit of foresight that was, for me, beyond remarkable, I rehearsed the mounting and dismounting of the roof several times before committing to it. Upper body on the roof, now back to the ladder. Upper body and one knee, back to the ladder. Torso, one leg, one knee... back to the ladder. Remember those Cat Chow commercials from the seventies? This was much like that.
But finally, all of my experimentation had paid off and I was up. For the first time, I was standing on the roof of my home. I looked out over my neighborhood, blocks and blocks of roofs with no one standing on them, no one else's arms raised in triumph under a gray and unobstructed November sky.
Looking south, I saw that my neighbor had, in the course of my ordeal, made herself a cup of coffee and dragged a kitchen chair out to the patio. She'd also put on a jacket. She was starting directly at me and smoking what might have been her third cigarette. "Yeah? Well, gawk away, Smokey. This is what victory looks like."
I shuffled along the top of my roof until I got to the front and looked down the slope to the corner where I planned to start stringing the lights. I tried to imagine crawling down there, downhill, with all of the gravity and doom tugging at me. It was too much. If you knew how vividly I was able to imagine what it is like to fall off of a roof, the sickening panic of miscalculation as a wayward step find nothing but air, the surreal tilt of the earth's plane, the wild arms desperately clutching and then futilely bracing, the crescendo of the wind in your ears... you would think I'd done it a hundred times.
I shuffled back to the ladder and executed my well-rehearsed escape. Once on the ground, I saw my neighbor pick up her things to go back inside. Among them was the receiver of a cordless phone. Whether or not she'd come out just for the entertainment, she would have been the first one to call an ambulance. My spitefulness ran a little cold.
And this... is what defeat looks like.
* * *
By the time I was 43, I'd joined and abandoned three different political parties. I'd like to think of myself as a centrist, but it would be more honest to describe my current position as 'disengaged'. As such, I don't have any real hatred of either of the two main groups (although I'm easily swayed to the contrary opinion of anyone who uses 'tard' as a pejorative suffix -- and one half of you guys do that much, much more than the other).
And from here, on my mostly non-partisan patio, with my figurative coffee and smokes, I'm watching with rapt fascination while the Republicans, the collective nut on the roof, cope with the shortcomings of their new toy -- and I'm wondering whether or not they might just step off into nothing at all.
The difference is, I don't have anyone to call.
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