Rembrandt van Rijn: Peasant Family on the Tramp (c. 1652)

"I might even rediscover who I always was …"

Trump's election as President for the second time left me peering into a dreaded future. I felt curious and confident that he would once again prove himself not nearly up to the task and dreading the inevitable failures he would most certainly produce with his inept attempts. His successful campaign rendered him no smarter or more popular, and it seemed inevitable that he would be dragging his familiar ineptness into everything he attempted to accomplish. I most dreaded that impending bumbling, for he would set about attempting to reinvent wheels his predecessors had already successfully invented, leaving us worse off for his efforts. It seemed a certainty that he would leave us all worse off. We liquidated our stock portfolios and hunkered in, though that's not all we did in response. We also fled IntoFamiliarity as an antidote to the dread.

Finally, almost three years after returning from Exile, I began organizing my tools and basement workshop. They had remained in boxes or random piles on top of my massive basement workbench. With our painter's help, we refinished the flaking workshop walls and eliminated the final vestiges of that awful electric lime green paint. I reoriented the shelving and began repopulating them, seeking some soothing central organizing principle, relishing a future time when I would be able to find whatever implement I might require. I approached this work hesitantly but also enthusiastically, for it occurred to me that I was creating the world I would be inhabiting through whatever came next. In the past, my workbench had served as my refuge, a place I could flee when the rest of the house became uninhabitable, as even the most welcoming home occasionally becomes. I've spent countless hours rearranging pegboard contents and cleaning off the workbench top, returning later, feeling better organized inside, not just on the workbench. In curious ways, the organization of my tools mirrors my internal coherence, and the recent events left me feeling extremely disordered inside.

It's a small space and poorly lit. It needs more illumination, but that will have to wait until I achieve some threshold organization. I know next to nothing about illumination so I can use the lighting effort as a practical first use of my newly organized workspace. I have sometimes been wearing a headlamp to work in the murkier corners. I've been slowly disassembling my jury rigs, hoping the next instantiation might bring some more traditional organization: No more wires snaking across the ceiling to plug into a surge protector. No more turning on the ceiling light by reaching through a snake pit of tangled wires. No more wondering if that hanging bare light bulb might start a fire.

I have been tossing whatever I can. I swore I would not let mere familiarity insist that I keep something in my inventory. I have, at times, even approached heartlessness as I've engaged in a sort of lifeboat drill. I alone determine who I save and kill on my lifeboat, and I have carted out several familiar old friends that had outlived their usefulness. I've decided that I need not pretend to keep an all-purpose shop. I can easily purchase most items I need when I need them, so the inventory of plumbing parts, for instance, should be unnecessary, especially since inventoried plumbing parts are notorious for always being the wrong thread or size when eventually tried in some urgent application. That's where much of the inventory originated in the first place, wrong parts purchased in utter ignorance as a first or second attempt to fix some difficulty myself. As a DIYer, I've chalked up far more failures than successes, so I have some reasonably vast inventories of utterly useless parts in some categories. I've been giving away and discarding many.

This work feels familiar, even though, I know, I've been putting it off for nearly three years., Perhaps The Gods were guiding my hand, a thought I often have when I catch myself procrastinating. Unable to personally justify my sloth, I imagine a guardian angel or The Gods having taken over my judgment, encouraging inaction because they, in their greater wisdom, understand that I'll need that job to distract or focus my attention on some more perilous future time. I vacillate between divine intervention and predestination as the justification for my procrastinations. It's part of every procrastinator's art to deflect personal responsibility for any such glaring of a shortcoming. That skill also seems heaven-sent.

I have been slipping into this familiar cocoon, revisiting my many pasts in the form of tiny boxes of tacks and my two sanding blocks. I play a solitaire Hüsker Dü game, matching likes, and similar classes. The Muse stops in occasionally to check on my progress, but I am not gauging my velocity. I'm just fleeing IntoFamiliarity, soothing myself through grave and uncertain times. I suppose it would not be terrible should the BIG one find me puttering in that corner of the basement. The sewer stack might partially protect me from initial radiation exposure, and the ancient concrete walls should deflect much of the blast. More importantly, I'd be surrounded by my familiar in those awful final seconds. Wherever this impending NextWorld insists I move, I will have my little basement refuge. Its clutter might be eternal, but so will its reassurance value. I have been reconstructing my internal coherence after the discouragements of the recent election. I will not be whole until my workspace seems ready to go into the uncertain future with me. I might even rediscover who I always was lurking in the back corner of one of those familiar boxes.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz