As my blog has become a barren wasteland of Detained chapters and … nothing else, I thought I’d start a new series of posts here called ME, A WELL-KNOWN IDIOT. Because if age has given me anything resembling the gift of wisdom1, it comes in the form of an increasingly horrified knowledge of my own stupidity.
There was a time when I imagined myself smart. If you knew me between the ages of 14 and 35, you are probably nodding bitterly to yourself. I once had the jaunty, Dunning–Kruger-esque confidence of the true moron2, because I was praised a lot as a child and my brother, Yan, has the physical skills of a box3. These two factors certainly gave me confidence — terrible, misplaced confidence. Especially when it came to any sort of physical task, because I was pretty used to outclassing Yan without breaking a sweat. And also because for a brief period of my childhood I’d been the fastest kid on my block. I took on all comers in a footrace, and I beat them all, bubba4.
When my wife and I bought our house, like most men I instantly imagined myself the master of my domain. This meant that whenever I encountered minor repairs to be done, I’d tackle them myself. I was not going to be one of those people who farmed out home repairs to strangers, like a sucker. Also too we had just bought a goddamn house, so money was in short supply, because buying a house is like alchemically transforming all of your money into wood and sheetrock, which, as it turns out, you can’t easily exchange for goods and services5.
Having made a long-term bet on the stability of Western Civilization which seems like an increasingly bad bet (ha ha it’s fine IT’S FINE), I immediately patrolled my new domain, knocking on walls in search of secret passages. It’s remarkable how little time you get to spend in a house before and during the buying process. We’d decided to buy this place after approximately 15 seconds:
REALTOR: This is … a house.
ME: Look! A skylight!
THE DUCHESS: Sold! Take our monies (dumps fifty million pennies on the floor).
Once you put in an offer on a house you don’t actually own it, so you can’t just wander over any time you like. Access is limited. You get to ave a home inspection done (usually), and we did. But our home inspection went like this:
INSPECTOR: This is … a house. Appears to not be actively collapsing. I’ll test for radon, but you should be good to go.
US: Should we worry about that hellgate in the crawlspace?
INSPECTOR: … there’s a crawlspace?6
So there I am wandering my new kingdom, and I notice the windows in our bedroom are pretty old, and the sills are very soft and obviously rotted. In fact, I push several holes into them without really trying hard. Since the immediate months after buying a house leave you selling blood and dancing for nickels7, this is where I transform into Professor Big Brain and decide that I will effect a temporary repair instead of paying the scandalous demands of the window installing mafia for new windows. I had rotten wood. Rip it out, replace it with something. What would be better than wood putty?
MOAR PUTTY
Anyone even casually familiar with my idiocy knows where this is going. Like Jerry Seinfeld shaving his chest hair, once I started carving out the rotten wood and replacing it with putty, I very soon no longer had window sills. I had gelatinous rectangles of putty that would certainly never harden. Current Jeff cannot explain the thinking of Past Jeff in this scenario8 — whatever thinking was happening was certainly magical in nature, and involved that putty somehow solidifying into something durable and wood-like.
This was, in other words, a Close Encounters-mashed potatoes kind of freak out, with me muttering to myself as I kept discovering more rotten wood, into which I would stuff increasingly absurd amounts of putty.
When it became clear that moar putty was never going to solve this problem, we hired some professionals to come and replace our windows. And my comeuppance was swift. I went up to check how things were going and the crew foreman looked at me and smiled.
“You that put all that putty in there?” he asked.
I retreated in shame. Which has become a familiar and comfortable strategy for me. Hiding from the contractors the rest of the day, I had plenty of time to contemplate my failures and see where I’d led myself into trouble. Clearly, I hadn’t used enough putty. I vowed to never make that mistake again9.
- Author’s note: It has not.
- I know this because of my expertise in moroncy, hard-won over a lifetime of tripping over my own pants after they’ve fallen down with a comical whistling sound.
- A slightly damp box.
- The idea that I ever ran voluntarily confuses and horrifies me.
- If you were able to sign over the deed of a house like you can with the pink slip on a car, I would now be the proud homeless owner of some magic beans several times over.
- Am I saying that buying a house is a totally sketch process? I am saying that. Save yourselves.
- To be fair, I always dance for nickels. Also, pennies, compliments, and mild encouragement.
- Or Even Paster Jeff, who wore denim jackets with jeans, like some kind of monster person.
- Writing this post required six tubs of putty, most of it eaten. I feel woozy.