Landmine (Blog #1031)

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Today I raked leaves, sixteen bags full, for a client who has a dog. Y’all, I stepped in so much shit. It was like walking through a landmine, bombs going off left and right. You should have seen me slipping and sliding. Crap was all over my shoes, my gloves, and God knows what else. And whereas my client apologized, their dog did not. Rude, I know. Thank goodness I had my poop boots on.

Poop boots are the best.

That being said, it did take me fifteen minutes to clean them in my client’s bathtub before I left because they (my boots, not my client) have deep grooves.

Think about it.

It’s gross, I know. Some things in life are.

Despite all the shit I stepped in today, I actually had a good time raking leaves. Sure, it was manual labor, but considering all the peanut butter I’ve been eating lately, I needed the exercise. Plus, it’s good to be employed, especially at a job where you can work, listen to a book on tape, and get paid all at the same time. This is why I told my client, “It’s okay, the poop is just part of the job.” Not that I loved all the odors or having to clean my boots and gloves later, but it’s not like I didn’t know it was going to be a dirty job. My client told me their yard was full of leaves and poop. Well, in my world that sounds like cash, so I agreed to brave the wilderness.

My point being that since I agreed to the conditions, why complain? Even if I hadn’t known what I was getting myself into, let’s face it. Dogs shit, people step in shit, and shit happens. No matter who you are, no matter where you go, no matter how well you plan. Sooner or later you land in something gross. Life is messy. Okay. This is why God invented soap.

Along these lines, this evening I’ve been thinking about how we so often want our lives to be pristine perfect, anything but messy. But they aren’t. In fact, they’re way messy. For example, for over three weeks (and a good part of my life) I’ve been fighting a sinus infection. And whereas I’ve felt better today, for all I know I could wake up tomorrow sick again. Or fit as a fiddle. Either way, at some point I will feel better and then turn my attention to all the things I’ve let go while feeling gross–my diet, my gym-going, my stack of papers. This is the way of it. We make a mess, we clean it up, we make a mess again. Here on planet earth, nothing stays one way (clean, messy, healthy, sick) for very long.

To me, the idea that nothing stays one way for very long sounds like hope. So often I get discouraged about my health and/or finances. And it’s not that things are so awful right here, right now. It’s that I convince myself that things will never get better. That they’ll just rock along at “blah” level until the end of time (or until the end of my time). This is ridiculous, of course, like thinking that you’re going to step in shit every hour of every day for the rest of your life. Please. There aren’t that many dogs in the world. Even if there were, they’d be no match for a good pair of boots, a bar of soap, and the right perspective. A perspective that says, “I can do this. I can make it out of this landmine alive.”

Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)

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It's enough to sit in, and sometimes drag ass through, the mystery.

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On Possibility (Blog #890)

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Last week I started painting the living room at a friend’s house. Today I finished it. Compared to the other rooms I’ve painted there, it took–I don’t know–twice as long. It was bigger. There were more doors, more windows, more nooks and crannies. The whole room (and the adjacent hallway) took nearly twenty-four hours to complete. Phew. I can’t tell you how good it feels to finally be done.

I didn’t take a before picture, but here’s a picture of the room with one partial coat of white. It used to be brown from floor to ceiling.

Here’s a picture of the finished product. What a difference!

Here’s another finished-product picture, taken from the other side.

Today when I got home my dad said, “It looks like you got more paint on you than on the walls.”

“Accurate,” I said, only half-joking.

Y’all, painting is messy business. If you’d stepped into the room even two hours before I finished, you might have thought, Yuck. What I mean is that was dried paint on the windows, tape on the floors, and no plate covers on the switches and outlets. Plus I had supplies everywhere. But after getting two full coats laid down (and in some places three), then I was able to go to work cleaning up–scraping paint off the windows with a razor blade, pulling the tape up off the floor, screwing the plate covers back on, and moving my supplies. The whole day I kept thinking, I’ll never finish. But eventually I did.

Transformations like this one continue to amaze me. Five weeks ago I started working on this house, and whereas I still have more to do, so far I’ve finished five rooms. Five rooms that used to be all brown (or green or turquoise) are now all white. I guess the whole project feels a bit like what this blog often feels like–overwhelming if you think about it as a whole. A whole house to paint. Over a thousand blogs to write. But if you just do a little bit at a time, sooner or later you start to think, This is possible. I can do this.

Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)

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if you're content with yourself and you're always with yourself, then what's the problem?

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