Putting a longtime dream above sanity and any consciousness of intercity traffic patterns, Eilene and I took a wild gamble and enrolled in the only intensive sixteen-week furniture upholstery class in North Texas. Held in an airplane hangar near a not-even-close-to-local community college two counties over, the class became so demanding on time it meant throwing all else on the back burner one night a week and making a two hour drive in 5:00pm traffic.
We were two hours late to the first class. And although we could choose any variety of projects separately, we focused on starting a single project together. Our donor piece was a ratty, threadbare $20 deceased-old-lady Craigslist project chair we’d stored in our family room for a few years in hopes of just such an opportunity.
We set out to deconstruct the existing upholstery in sections and label each piece, the goal being simply to recreate the old pattern identically with newer, more modern fabric.
After marveling at the unbelievable number of tacks and staples that needed to come out in order to clean up this chair, we were then squarely confronted with the long and winding history this piece of furniture brought with it. The gaudy blue fabric we saw on the outside covered two prior upholstery jobs, the original being a disgusting dark gold 1970s fabric, followed by an odd light-colored almost-carpet substance. On the inside of the frame, in very faint pencil, were the words “To Caroline”.
We were indeed a bit taken by the inscription and obvious intention and emotion that went into the work. But on further deconstruction, our romantic wonderings were replaced with the realization that Caroline’s thoughtful upholsterer did one of the most fantastically horrible reconstruction jobs we could have asked for. We were forced to ditch the old pattern, and a few weeks into the semester it was apparent we needed to create an entirely new pattern completely from scratch. Having thus far worked together on the same piece successfully and not yet murdered each other, Eilene and I added our own little inscription.
We also made rightfully sure, once we got the ball rolling, we stayed super-serious and stuck to the task at hand.
The next ten weeks saw a lot of cutting, re-cutting, stapling, re-stapling, and even a few acknowledgements when about to leave home at 6:30pm that we’d never make it in time to make progress (and either staying home or playing hooky to go hit the movies).
Beginning the class brought with it a host of fears and insecurities related to the possibility of trying and failing. Some weeks saw us procrastinating or stuck in stagnation, sometimes almost paralyzed for fear of screwing up the next phase in the reconstruction of something beautiful out of the drastically imperfect bits and pieces with which we began. We were at times disgruntled and argumentative, especially when progress was poor, or a roadblock proved difficult or intimidating. It’s easier to risk failing when we just avoid trying or can blame some external circumstance like lack of time, rather than face the risk of failure after truly exerting some honest effort.
As the course progressed, so did the level of setbacks we experienced in this first time working side by side on a creative endeavor. The more we attempted to make progress toward the overall goal, the more it seemed we were plagued by mismatched expectations of each other, communication breakdowns, unfair needs for mind-reading, and issues of leading versus following, amongst a host of other problems. There were moments when our hope was renewed with small bursts of progress and connectedness, but mostly we were landsliding toward the question of whether or not we’d ever be able to even work together on anything, or whether all our efforts were just going to fall apart at the seams.
Things tend to be darkest before the dawn. Our complications reached a crescendo just near the end of the course, and it became painfully obvious our issues and stumbling blocks in the project were less about the project and more about the issues and stumbling blocks we had with ourselves and each other.
Sometimes things need to be deconstructed in order to be put back together in a way that looks beautiful. Occasionally, the original pattern can’t even be used, everything needs to be reconstructed from scratch. But in reworking what’s salvageable and discarding what’s broken, the end result can eclipse even the brightest and most generous expectations.
I wish we could say that after sixteen weeks, we knew all there is to know about upholstering furniture. Hell, I wish we could even say that after sixteen weeks, we finished our chair. But neither is true. What we learned from our own project and watching the projects around us in class was that pieces of furniture are individual, as are the processes by which they are reconstructed. Only continued practice and dedication will bring different and specific challenges to light, and bring exposure to the ability to work through them.
When we made the drive out to the hangar for our last date with the chair, we arrived having moved past all our prior working difficulties. We were not only completely comfortable with each other, we were comfortable with ourselves and our own walk through the process of giving something a good try without having to reach perfection. In the end, giving it a shot was all that really mattered. We had a great last class, and enjoyed our stopping point of being halfway through the chair’s upholstery job.
As for the chair and its fate, we also realized at some point during the course that everything that anyone ever wanted to know about upholstery or anything else for that matter, it’s all available in some random instructional video somewhere on Youtube. But that’s another post, for another time.
When we first met, I took E to the site of an old rave warehouse I was involved in during the late 1990s. We walked around and checked out the grounds, and aside from the sticker still on the door there was no record of anything taking place.
We walked around a bit, and found ourselves down on the other side of the block, where an eerie orange glow surrounded what appeared to be an old mosque. I took some photos, which I keep unretouched.
I had to run out for some food at lunch today, and found myself down in that part of town. I had my camera with me, and decided to stop over for a quick look at what it looks like now. I stopped at the warehouse first, the sticker is still on the door and everything looks almost identical to how it looked over three years ago.
Of course, I wandered down the street to see what had become of the mosque. It was pretty dilapidated, some portions of the buildings were crumbling, and on the building in the second photo the entire roof and side wall had caved in. I would have reproduced the photos identically, but I didn’t expect to be over that way and hadn’t looked at the old photos in awhile.
E and I originally referred to the first series of photos as the “Beirut photos”, not knowing anything about the history of the buildings. In a later conversation with my friend Wes, he related that the owner of the warehouse also owned the rest of the block including the mosque, and it was part of a film set. He sent me this article and this article.
As an aside, I also wanted to shoot some photos of an underpass, which is part of the route taken to get to the warehouse. I crept along the fence separating the top of the road from a truck yard, until I arrived at the top of the cross bridge and was staring at a set of steep stairs descending down to a walkway in the belly of the whizzing traffic lanes. I hopped down a few steps and saw some homeless people slipping in and out of the shadows of the pitch black walkway, and thought better of bringing my brand new camera down into what could end up a bad situation for both parties. At that point I realized that most of what I think is worth photographing exists in bad neighborhoods, and that I should probably stick to taking zebra pics at the zoo.
We just confirmed our plane tickets, we’ll be spending 9 days in New York and Connecticut for Christmas. My sister and E’s father have never met L, and I haven’t been home since I proposed to E last Thanksgiving.
I have no idea what it’s going to be like travelling with the little one, I imagine it’s going to be pretty rough. We went to E’s aunt and uncle’s house outside Dallas for Thanksgiving, and it took us two hours to get out of the house with all the shit we needed to pack.
Hopefully he’ll at least still be in his “sleep all day up all night” mode, since our flights are rationally right in the middle of the day.
E and I took some super cute photos last night after our Valentime’s Day (Observed) hot date night out. I’m absolutely horrible with surprises, but I managed to keep it a secret that I scored some tickets to the Valentime’s symphony at the downtown concert hall. We got dressed up and went out to party with the well-to-do elderly peoples. The music was really just beautiful, and featured an incredibly skilled guest violinist from Israel.
We clowned around with the camera for so long, we wound up both falling asleep with the lights on. It’s been nice having a several-day long celebration of lovey holidays and anniversaries, leaving us just in time for a curl-up weekend.
<3
Things have been really, really good with me and Eilene. Today celebrates eight months of being together (and four months of living together), tomorrow is Valentime’s Day, and Thursday is our super secret surprise night out. We had an extraordinary weekend, and it should be a really nice week.
Eilene and I robbed our first house a few weeks ago.
Well, not quite. We trolled some estate sale listings one Saturday, and found a house in a nice part of town that was having a “pre-demolition sale”. We were interested in a lot of cabinets and countertops, a lot of the stuff was really good. The guy wanted absurd amounts of money for most of it, so Eilene took down his number and waited.
After a few days the house was being turned over to the builder to be knocked down. Eilene then got the builder’s name, and gave him a call. The builder told her to stop by and “take whatever the hell you want”. When asked about payment, the guy wanted none.
So we rented a Penske truck. We started at ten o’clock at night with two crowbars, two power drills, and a box of tools. Though by the time we got there, other people had scoured through a fair amount, we managed to score a load of random doors, enough kitchen cabinets to redo our kitchen, a ton of cabinet doors with great hardware on them, and enough to resell on craigslist to make up for the truck rental.
There was no electricity or running water in the house as it was scheduled to be knocked down in a few days, so we did all our work thieflike with a couple of flashlights.
There was definitely a sad edge to the whole thing. The area of town is one where a lot of the property values are skyrocketing. It’s seen as an up and coming trendy next-rich-part-of-town section of Dallas, so they are skyrocketing the property taxes and forcing out the elderly who have lived there for 40 years. Their houses get knocked down and replaced with mansions that have about four square feet of yard space and stretch to the edge of their respective lots. It’s disgusting.
The house we plundered was nice. It had huge picture windows, vaulted ceilings, skylights, it was very happy and open, and quite large. We made comments through the night about how depressing it was that it would be levelled in a matter of days. Toward the end of our mission, Eilene got quiet and was walking around looking at everything. When I came over, she just looked at me and asked, “I don’t understand. Why was this house not good enough?”
Last night we blazed up the first fire of the new house, and of the new season. It’s finally gotten a bit chilly here, cold enough to warrant a coat during the evening. Every summer I’ve always wished for cold weather, and every time it’s come I will have forgotten about the raging static electricity and desert magnitude dryness. Then I wish for warmth.
The other night Eilene grabbed me and pulled me outside, happily whispering “you have to smell this”. By the time I was out on the walk I caught that crisp fall smell and knew our brief winter was coming.
Eilene and I ditched out to the northeast for the Thanksgiving holiday, and made the whirlwind tour of all our family and friends. Since a lot of my family is still up in Connecticut, we all spent Thanksgiving day in my uncle’s winter house in backwoods Massachusetts. We then visited Eilene’s dad and a bunch of her friends, who live right outside Danbury.
One of my personal trip highlights was finally getting to meet up with Mike Dodgy D in Bethel. I actually stood in the D’s house and talked to his mom. I’ve not seen either of them since I left Boston in 1999. We ate lots of diner food and caught up on events.
We headed up to Saratoga in upstate New York on the last day, which is where my mom and sister have wound up. Eilene and my mom get along famously.
This was officially the greatest weekend ever.
Eilene and I went out to Colleyville to buy a television from someone who posted it on Craigslist. When we arrived at the lady’s house, we saw a large pen holding a big bunch of turkeys. They gobbled as we drove by. When we rounded the fence into the driveway, there was another pen containing not one, but TWO LLAMAS.
I freaked, and as soon as the lady answered the door we asked to play with them.
It turns out they were both a llama/alpaca mix, which kept them more miniature (and manageable) in size. The lady gave us each a cup of food, we took turns letting them chow down, and snapped a few photos.
I posted awhile back about the discovery of the fact that E’s landlord was routing electricity feeds for publicly-used devices (motorized gate, flood lights) through her personal electric meter and breaker box.
After jumping through several hoops, we found the Texas Tenant’s Union and attended their free weekly workshop. I’m now convinced that the information presented should be “required reading” for anyone renting a property.
The basis for their presentation was that all tenants should know what legal procedure to follow throughout the course of their tenancy even in landlord/tenant communication, in order to prevent situations later in which the tenant, although correct in a dispute, lacks any supporting documentation. The lecture moved through key points of the standard TAA lease and what the legal terminology means in everyday tenancy. Discussion included rights during eviction proceedings, etc.
I was surprised at the number of mistakes I’ve made in the past out of lack of legal knowledge, and E is in the same boat. Both of us have landlords who have been very kind, and with whom we’ve developed a congenial rapport. There have been things I never had properly documented, from existing apartment damage upon move-in, to damage done through violent incidents with drugged out neighbors. My trust rested in verbal discussion and the assurance by the landlord that “It will be taken care of”. What I see now, especially through the degeneration of Eilene’s situation with her landlord, is that it’s very important for landlords to appear congenial and create a false sense of security for the tenant, so that when something blows up the tenant has no documentation of anything and no legs to stand on.
I would highly recommend to anyone that they find a local meeting of a similar organization. It’s worth its weight in gold.
