The Bookcase

My book collection was out of control, which meant I was out of control, but I found it easier to spend more money to fix a physical effect than to address its root behavior so fuck it, off I went in search of a Home Depot.

Me practicing my best Mel Brooks' "It's good to be the king" line from
  History of the World Part 1. And yeah, said bookshelf is behind me.

It was one of those home improvement projects that you cook up in a half-delirious phase between the fugue state of not remembering why you went into the kitchen to not being able to commit a sketch to paper for lack of your favorite Levenger pen with the Piper 1000 Ultra-Glide ink barrel.  Excuses, in other words.  Fancy-ass excuses.  And within these walls, as soon as thoughts became cogent and pronouncements were made about this project, the salvo of objections came in early and often: the history.

History has not been kind to home improvement projects in this house.  There was that time I got locked out of the garage and had to break in by crawling through the bathroom window.  People still make fun of that day, cruel, unforgiving people, but it happened many years ago, before cell phones were invented, and leaving the keys locked in the car meant baking one's skin in (where I live) 100-degree heat for the majority of the day, or walking to a convenience store and loitering in air conditioning for the next several hours like a pervert in search of a newsstand with the good stuff on the bottom shelf.  I'd really be stuck, at least until someone came back with the fucking car.  Getting locked out of a house meant being forced to walk the earth and eke out food and drink by any means necessary like in The Walking Dead, I'm not fucking kidding.  Anyway, the point is I had to fix that bathroom window and it still doesn't close properly.  The history, the horror.

The next challenge on my bookcase project was the prep work.  And here is the true secret of carpentry: it involves geometry.  It means measuring with some degree of exactitude.  I took exactly three semester hours of algebra in college and that was all I had to take and I ran like hell from anything that had numbers in it for the rest of my undergraduate studies.  Geometry, trigonometry?  Those were nowhere in sight, not even in high school, and purposely so.  So the handicaps here were set firm and set early in my young-ass life.

 A bookcase has to take into consideration the width of the shelves themselves; the space required for the height variance of trade cloth editions; the oversized aspect of coffee table books because the fucking things still have to be shelved somewhere since there is only ever one coffee table in a living room and you can't stack them forever like some Howard Hughes psychopath; will said bookcase have a toe guard or no toe guard and what the hell does a toe guard serve anyway; and so forth.  You don't just bowl up one day and say you're going to build a bookcase and take up hammer and nail.  You have to sketch the fucking thing out.

Behold the bookcase in its natural habitat...

The next challenge is the visit to the lumber yard.  Here you have to mix it up with hard-eyed, serious men.  Men with worn leather steel-toed boots and dirty jeans and terse, clipped vocabularies that cover a lot of ground with a single, "Yup."  To approach one is to risk exposure, to be revealed as the weekend enthusiast that never fully matured to craftsman or carpenter.  "You gonna use the 5/16 brights on that one, or you gonna go with wood screws?  You gonna need wood putty?"  How the fuck would I know?  So many questions!  So you have to go off on your own and figure out which length of wood board you need, what the fuck is yellow pine and why so many black knots and why is white pine so clean and so expensive Jesus fuck?

If you travel to the lumber yard by yourself, you will need to practice your pose.  Specifically, standing and observing the stacks of lumber as if lost in the deep art of calculations and estimates and not because you have no fucking clue what to buy.  Go up and look at the wood as if inspecting it for fissures or cracks or Kosher labeling, because every minute will be filled with the terror of being discovered.  Every nuance is judged, every verbal utterance is logged and remembered by the Home Depot employees who lurk close enough to note your actions, but far enough to not really be helpful.  Stare too long at the price displays and they will figure you out as nothing but a yellow-bellied novice.  Buying lumber by yourself is a harrowing experience that will require ice water in the veins and a steely determination to make your choices quickly before you betray your limited knowledge and get laughed at by the cashiers with a sneer and a low, cutting comment such as, "He'll be back when he finds out he needed sluiced boards."

However, if you travel to buy lumber with another person, specifically someone of the opposite sex, be prepared, conversely, to undergo a vetting of your knowledge of said project more thorough than CIA screening of potential agents of state-sponsored terrorism.  You will not be free to just buy at the pace of casual whim; every choice, from color and texture to height and width, will be scrutinized and require an oral defense as if your doctoral dissertation is on the line.  Leaving the lumber yard will carry the weight that you survived negotiations to rival peace talks at Helsinki, or the questioning of potential war crimes in The Hague.

The final challenge: the actual work.  Here you toil, again with hammer, again with nail, enduring blisters where blisters have no business being, and the petty barbs of neighbors who privately snicker that they wouldn't trust you to change a light bulb without damaging the wallpaper.  Here the matter cannot be bungled, as Tom Wolfe said about something else entirely.  Here you must drill and saw and chock and measure and drop boards on the ground and slam them into each other like a man possessed of the singular notion to finish the day's labors by the sweat of his brow.  The sheer noise and clatter that you make will signal to everyone that you are not just serious but, like, really serious.  And you will stand arms akimbo at the end of a long, hot day without pause from the heat and dust, and you will look around and think, Shit, all I finished was the frame?

And the inter-challenges will arise: the mundanities of life like trips to pick up kids from football practice or a faucet that sprouted a leak or the neighbor is calling the cops because you vandalized his trash cans again that morning, with malice aforethought.  So you won't get to dedicate the time to the project that you wanted and you won't make the progress that you wanted and this part is important because this is where 99 percent of the weekend amateur carpenters just throw up their hands and give up.  I can't tell you how many times I went back inside the house, plopped down in my favorite chair, felt the welcoming puff of 72-degree comfort cooling, and said, "Let me just finish this next level of Fallout 4 instead."  Embrace these self-induced respites, for they will keep you sane.

What's important is to remember that you've already spent a fuck-ton of money on building materials and even if you end up with a very expensive wooden ashtray, just make some use of your misguided and embryonic efforts.  Besides, the last thing you want is to not finish something so that ya girl go and dog you out when she with her friends, see?  (Apologies to Tupac).

So after failing to slaughter the mutated Deathclaw that roamed the village in Fallout 4, I put down my Xbox controller and went back outside.  I cleared a path for the raw bookshelf to be carried in without knocking down something important or breaking the glass on the sliding door, through which I would perhaps attempt to crawl through again just for old times' sake, just to be wistful, and then I wheeled it inside, shimmying it like I was a smartass warehouseman in Dire Strait's "Money for Nothin' " video.  And I was pretty proud of myself, until I realized I still had to stain the damned thing.

The finished product, i.e. dead trees holding
other dead trees...

Here, then, is where it all falls apart, from the pretty how-to books and video demonstrations to HGTV-propagated bullshit where people, calm, rational people in casual yet elegant weekend clothing from Kohls, carefully review their color selections and discuss their perspectives on cock-ass names such as baroque chocolate or warm sienna.  Because after all that work to put the fucking thing together, all I wanted to do was walk into the paint section and tell them, "I want something that's dark."  Which I did, only to hear them say, "Would you like to look at our color plates" and I scream "NO ASSHOLE I WANT SOMETHING THAT'S DARK!  THIS ENDS TONIGHT!"

So the angry clerk tossed me a can of Minwax inocuously, perhaps generically, called dark cherrywood and he nearly hit my head, but the Home Depot motherfuckers know when you're in a hurry and can do things that take you to within an inch of losing your life without calling the cops on them.  Then I got to my study, laid down some clear plastic covering on the floors and furniture like I was going to reboot the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and what roughly felt like 13 years later, I had a fully stained bookshelf.

I won't even tell you what I went through to get varnish on that thing.