Adaptive Curmudgeon

Recently I wrote The Snow Shovel Chronicles Part I. Go read it.

You didn’t read it did you? Sigh: I’ve got to do everything don’t I? OK fine, I’ll paraphrase:

“It’s snowing like a son of a bitch. I could get to town but only with a lot of effort. I’ve got the gear to clear the driveway but I don’t feel like it. I think I’ll sip whiskey instead.”

See? That wasn’t so hard.

While I was IGNORING the snow I clicked over to The Munchkin Wrangler. His post The Snow Gestapo caught my eye. Go read it.

You’re back from reading it? So soon? Bullshit, you’re lying! Since you didn’t read it (I can tell) I’ll grab a few quotes from the the initial article at the Boston Globe; “Snow Police On Patrol”.

Let’s begin with an introduction to a petty tyrant:

“In a city where there is too much snow and no place to put it, Sergeant Steven Tankle enforces the rules.”

At first I imagined some nerd cajoling folks to shovel the sidewalk. Instead he comes off like RoboCop but less human.

“Tankle works for the Boston Code Enforcement Police… Think of them as the snow police: They wear badges, carry handcuffs, and make meter maids seem popular. Run afoul of them and face a fine of up to $200.”

Handcuffs? A guy who deals with snow has handcuffs?

Aside from the handcuffs I’m not surprised that there is such a thing as Code Enforcement Police. I knew Boston had eleventy zillion laws. [Note: I haven’t verified this. There may be as few as ten zillion laws.] I suppose it’s logical that some are about snow. What did surprise me is the detail involved:

“City ordinances require residents to shovel their walkways within six hours after a snowfall and specify in nitty-gritty detail that the path cleared be no less than 42 inches wide.”

At least Mr. Tankle is the only clipboard carrying monster out there right?

“Officer Daniel Donovan, on patrol yesterday, issued a $50 ticket…”

So there’s two of them?

“The Boston Code Enforcement Police were out in full force, all 16 of them.”

Sixteen of them? That’s a lot of salaries for keeping an eye on snow. Good thing Boston is doing so well economically:

“Earlier this year, City officials projected a budget deficit of approximately $140 million.”

Oh no! A deficit! What can be done?

“The $140 million gap would have resulted in as many as 1,000 layoffs…”

I know sixteen employees that wouldn’t be missed.

At any rate Boston did some shifting of funds and wage freezes and…

“…these efforts decreased the deficit and saved 446 jobs, the FY 10 budget still projects 565 layoffs.”

So 565 folks got canned but they spared the sixteen I’m thinking about. Apparently 16 guys for snow enforcement is essential for civilization.

Back to the snow and it’s staff of sixteen overseers. (Note: this staff has nothing to do with actually removing snow…just assessing fines on residents.) With all that brass keeping an eye on snow, Bostonians should grab a shovel and get with flinging it right? Wrong! Criminals sometimes clear snow incorrectly:

“A young couple was shoveling snow off their Honda, badly.”

You can shovel snow BADLY? How? In my book, shoveling snow is shoveling snow. How can it be wrong? The best place for snow is “not on my car”. The ground qualifies as “not car”. I’ve never bothered airlifting snow from a car to a nearby lawn. The idea is as foreign to me as FedExing it to Norway.

Luckily the bureaucracy sprang into action to maintain order and keep us safe from our unhinged ways! Snow on the road is bad. Swish snow from a car parked on the street to the ground and you’ll face Code Enforcement wrath! For example; when a Code Enforcement Officer found a band of evil doers he stepped up to the plate!

“He pulled up to the possible perpetrators, three people clearing snow from their cars.”

“‘What are you doing?’ Tankle asked. ‘Clean all this up, or you’ll get a $200 ticket.”’

“Everyone in the group stared at the pile of snow in the street.”

Of course they had a lame excuse:

“Mendes Teixeira, one of the shovelers, said they were not the guilty ones. ‘It was there before,’’ the 25-year-old said, looking perplexed.”

Code Enforcement Officers know that excuses are the work of foolish peons out to subvert authority! Time to issue an order:

“Tankle told the group to move the snow from the street to a snowbank.”

And Code Enforcement Officers know how to make sure peons can’t escape the long arm of the law!

“He said he would come back to make sure they did and took their license plate numbers just in case.”

Ignorance of the law is no excuse either. Remember the first couple with the Honda? Officer Donovan knew what to do with them:

“The couple, who did not want to be identified, froze in shock. They wanted to know what they had done wrong. They said they had no idea about the law.”

Another lame excuse? Don’t they know what’s good for them?

“The woman began crying.”

What’s this? Weakness? Time to boss someone around!

“‘It’s illegal to throw snow in a city street,’ he said before handing them a $50 ticket.”

At least this is rare. Wise men know to use their power judiciously:

“This month’s blizzard has brought a flurry of tickets, 173 yesterday alone, compared with 20 issued in all of December 2009.”

173 tickets in one day? I suppose society needs to be educated about how to properly shovel snow:

“City officials said they have issued pamphlets and brochures alerting residents to stepped-up enforcement.”

At least residents appreciate their work:

“Tankle, an officer for 15 years, said that angry violators have thrown cans of soda at him…”

Well at least things haven’t gotten violent:

“…he has occasionally had to call for police backup when a ticketing turned threatening.”

At least only a trained police officer has that kind of authority:

“…he [Tankle] has never had to arrest anyone.”

He has the power to arrest? Over snow?

…

Let that all sink in. A staff of sixteen? You can shovel snow…wrong? Fines from $50 to $200? Handcuffs? Power to arrest?

Over snow?

I smell a bureaucracy that’s gone too far.

The Munchkin Wrangler did too. He concluded that they were not nice guys. I believe he used the word “blockwart” which is derived from city block level Nazi party operatives.

I disagree. Comparing them to Hitler’s machinery is so passe’. It’s my considered opinion that we have here examples of the common garden variety petty tyrant (see also: bully).

In my next post I’ll explain why petty tyrants should be met with resistance even if it’s merely a matter of deliberately being hard to boss around.

Meanwhile, in Brooklyn…

Despite the raging blizzard outside, Castle Curmudgeon is not snowed in. It’s almost snowed in.

Almost snowed in is when you could get out even as Mother Nature is hell bent on burying you. This means you’ve got equipment (a snowblower/tractor/nuclear accelerator) that can handle snow. Deep snow. You must have adequate fuel and the reasonable assumption that your machinery will start. Your vehicle must be a 4×4 (and if you’re smart you’ve got two of them!).

You also need proper clothing; a jacket which weighs sixty pounds, a hat lined with the fur of a dead animal, and boots which are suitable for use in space. Comfort and mobility are irrelevant.

I meet that criteria. I’m not stuck. If there was an emergency (such as running out of coffee) I could get out to town. I could suit up, fire up something to move the snow, and hammer the snowdrifts until I’ve carved a path to the road.

Shovels are for pussies!

Then I could unearth the 4×4 from under a drift, chain up, and white knuckle it to town where I would get hemmed in by a herd of lemmings.

When travel conditions are sub-optimal, smart people stay home.

Or…

I could sit here in front of the wood fire with a glass of whiskey and a good book.

I could get out there and shovel snow until my arms fall off. Yeah right...

The snow looks real pretty when it’s on the other side of the window. The pantry is stocked, and I don’t have to get to work for a couple days. Why not wait until the storm is over? Perhaps that makes me lazy? Under the circumstances, being a lard ass is just wise time management.

I am not “snowed in” I am “lard assed in”.

Now you know.

My house was built by hicks. Nothing wrong with that. It is inhabited by one.

Maintenance and repair of that which hicks have built is neither science nor art.  It is a no-rules death match against catastrophic failure, creeping decay, and bankruptcy.  Hicks build without things civilization expects; like blueprints, rulers, squares, and levels.

Thus, a mundane task (insulating my attic) became… memorable.

I entered the attic through a plywood door that was exactly short enough to make me hunch like a caveman…but only after I’d conked my noggin on the sill first.  The main attic was rectangular and logically laid out.  I could add insulation while standing erect and feeling cool.  It was a textbook “easy job” like the background for those DIY poster ads with unbelievably clean cut male models.

Nobody doing home repairs looks like this. Also the child is an actor from Bulgaria.

You know the ads I’m talking about and you know what the men in them look like.  According to Home Depot ads, DIY homeowners look like Brad Pit.  I call bullshit!  Men that look like that would shit purple twinkies if they had to hang out with scruffy unwashed goons like me.  I hate those male models!  You never see them getting bitched out for sliming grease on the doorknob or leaving a carburetor on the kitchen table.  I’ve never seen an ad with one of those pinheads shoved into a crawlspace at 2:00 am looking for a water shutoff valve.  I’ve never seen an ad with a guy explaining to his wife that something slipped while installing a crappy air conditioner and now it’s time to get a new window and didn’t we want a new window anyway?  As soon as I see an ad with a “Brad Pitt look alike” hobbling around his day job and popping Advil like TicTacks after a weekend of putting up drywall I’ll show some respect.  Until then I just get infuriated and mumble expletives in the checkout line.

I don’t have one attic but many (didn’t I say that hicks don’t plan things out?).  The easy and obvious attic was not today’s quarry.

I ventured further into the unknown by inching up a steep unreinforced slope with a low roof studded with nails.  I wasn’t in a stairway mind you but stumbling around the dark netherworld above a stairway’s ceiling like a fat wheezing bearded squirrel.  The only thing that kept me from falling through was 1/2″ drywall and hope.

Then I crawled infantry style another twelve feet in level but even more cramped quarters.  By then I was covered with cobwebs, my flashlight was crammed against my chin, and I was too busy spitting dust out of my mouth to swear adequately.  Eventually I encountered, not unexpectedly, an old and partially obscured roof.  It’s the external edge of the small “core” of our house.  That’s the part of the house that was built first, in an innocent time before electric lights and indoor plumbing.  It is now engulfed on several sides by additions.  Most of our living space is really just additions to the original hovel.  (An aside…hicks know how to build houses on the installment plan.  Need more house = install more rooms.  I presume they added rooms whenever the turnip crop paid particularly well or farm kids started overflowing the available space.  Whenever one section of the house meets another there is a rift in the time space continuum where joists sag, pipes freeze, wiring suddenly changes direction and purpose, and all hell breaks loose structurally.  The original builders covered it up with ad-hock walls and hoped for the best.  The lucky bastards are all dead now.)

This particular piece of roof, which hadn’t seen the sun since Eisenhower, had a small hole in it.  About 18″ of one board had been jaggedly hacked out.  This led to the oldest attic of them all…dating to the Bronze Age .

Since nothing larger than a Smurf could get through that hole I assume the meager insulation there was laid down generations ago.  It wasn’t even enough insulation to be inadequate.  The new reality of keeping heat in the house is going to be a bright new future for me and my family!

Slithering on my belly I fired up “The Problem Solver” (a reciprocal saw) and manfully ripped my way in.  When there was enough space to drag (literally) my ass (literally) through; I went for it.  I landed on my face on the other side.  By now I was fifty feet of misery from the normal world where I could stand up and walk around.  I’m not claustrophobic but this was a bit much.  I tried not to think about it.

I had a blow in insulation tube and dragged it in behind me. Helpers loaded the blower (actually I was so isolated by then that I have no idea how it got loaded…for all I know the insulation faeries waved a magic wand).  All I know was that I flipped the switch and all hell broke loose.  Giant clouds of airy pink fiberglass ejaculated all over the cramped space.  I made a manly effort to inch myself to the back of the cramped space to fill it evenly but I mostly flopped around like a gut shot walrus in a growing pile of itchy pink fluff.

Things immediately went from mildly unmanageable to total chaos.  As drifts of insulation grew, the space between the nail studded roof and the visible horizon shrunk.  The feeling of being hemmed in grew oppressive.  When your horizon is 2′ high, the ceiling is studded with the sharp business ends of nails, and drifts on the floor are rising like a pink Hello Kitty flood of doom, you start thinking about cutting a hole in the roof and heading for the bar.

My flashlight somehow got buried.  The limited light shifted from harsh white glare to pink haze to pitch black.  I dug around for it, dropped it twice, then finally emerged with it upside down and casting weird pink backwards shadows.  Where exactly was the hole I’d hacked to get into this mess?

Meanwhile I’d rolled on my back, bent one leg at an angle not recommended by the Surgeon General, gotten my elbow wrapped around a support truss, and bounced my head off the brick chimney.  The hose, still spewing insulation(!), was wrapped around me like a corrugated Anaconda and if I shifted in the wrong direction I was about to get a TSA style wedgie.

This is the second time in my life I’ve had no idea where “up” was.  (The first time was during a mishap while skydiving…short  version of that story: I lived.)  Cramped space had turned a simple home improvement job into something like drowning in an exploding pink pillow while jammed in Satan’s sphincter!

Did I write that last sentence?  Trust me…you had to be there.

At my wits’ end I flipped off the blower and sat still for a few minutes.  Eventually I managed to unearth the flashlight.  Then I identified where the coils of hose entered the little cavern.  “Up” was the pointy metal shards above my shoulder.  “Down” was one hand and my left knee, both cramped and jammed into a solid joist buried somewhere under a mountain of shredded fiberglass.  The moment had passed.  Whew!

Once I got my shit together things could only get better.  Besides, what else could I do?  I finished the job and started back.  After I’d crawled, oozed, inched, shimmied, slithered, and wriggled my way back to the outside world my wife asked.  “So how was it up there?”

“Trippy” was all that I could say.

She didn’t know what to make of that.  I was too distracted pulling fiberglass out of my ear to explain.  Let’s see them put a picture of that on their damn advertisements!