Kees de Goede: Studie Innerworld Outerworld I/, Naar Mug Stegner
[Study Innerworld Outerworld I/, To Mug Stegner] (1987)

" … I'll be faunching to get moving again."

A certain cadence profoundly influences every activity on this planet, or seems to. Time, as some wag noted, prevents everything from happening at once, but little prevents anyone from occasionally getting far ahead of themselves. This usually happens for all the proper reasons, with good intentions often contributing more than their fair share. Whatever the cause, the effect, if not permanent, does tend to be relatively immediate. A brick wall steps sideways into traffic. An unanticipated force field steals momentum. We get directed to head BackAlmostToGo without collecting our two hundred dollars. We seem incapable of seeing these experiences coming, even though they most often occur like a proverbial slow-moving train. After, we complain about how our senses must have left us behind, about how we must have become temporarily blinded. We're wary for a while after, sensing that our senses hide something essential from us. Our senses were never not withholding much of our experience from us. We register only tiny fractions of the perturbations around us, and we ignore many of those we experience as trivial or unimportant. Importance comes later if, indeed, it ever comes at all.

My latest fall came with the first inspection, a visit The Muse and I invited when it really should have been the contractor inviting. When we picked up the building permit, the clerk told me not to worry about inspections because the contractor knew when to call and could be relied upon to take care of those. Ours didn't. My story explains that he got too far ahead of himself. Like with any team, his first priority was to build up a sufficient head of initial steam to power his way into the effort. Teams lacking sufficient steam seem to progress in frustratingly slow motion. How much more reassuring to witness a team coalescing from near the very beginning, to watch them move forward with unstoppable momentum, but even the ancient Romans understood the critical importance of hastening slowing at the beginning, lest one get too far ahead of themself in the morning, lest one get sent BackAlmostToGo for their efforts.

He'd poured the footings before scheduling an inspection; the sole means an inspector has of influencing construction before mistakes get set in concrete. I offered photos of the rebar placement, but they needed more detail. Further, and even more critical, Pablo, our concrete contractor, had failed to set the footing deep enough to satisfy "code," which means "god." What should we do once the inspection was complete, and we'd yielded a FAIL? We retreated to separate corners. The Muse to ponder and me to wonder. I exchanged some emails with the inspector. From his perspective, we needed to remove last week's work and replace it. I called the consulting engineer to ask about standard remediations. The inspector said he'd approve anything the engineer recommended.

As of this moment, I am still determining what happens next. We received the most significant blow imaginable but still hold hope we might succeed. What great success didn't experience some massive failures along the way, none of them precisely engineered into the experience? They just seemed to happen, like that proverbial slow-moving train. We've sworn to become more careful and to attend more faithfully to plans, specifications, and drawings. Unsurprisingly, we see that we were not seeing the same beast before us. Even the idiot who wrote the book about blind men and elephants can count himself as one of the blind men; just another inevitable cast member in the same eternal performance.

Pablo will fix the problem once we hear from our engineer. The Muse will draw more pictures so we can test concepts on paper rather than in concrete. I'll try to be more attentive. We will continue being who we always were, little different following this latest shocking experience. I told Pablo that I intended to finish this project in a way that we would still be friends after. He took my offered hand, and we shook on that notion. I don't know what happens next other than that we bleed off some of that excess momentum that guided us BackAlmostToGo. I expect the universe to remain impassive, tapping her cadence with infinite patience. It won't be long before I'll be faunching to get moving again.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz