too many Daves

Seen during this morning’s jog.

Passing this on my Saturday run reminded me of a WWII veteran I interviewed in 2001. A deeply patriotic man, he seethed at the shabby condition of the flags his neighbors put up — and promptly neglected — after 9/11.

That detail never made the paper. The man, in fact, never made the paper.

We were considering him and several other people from his generation for a year-long project. He opened up almost immediately, welcoming me into his home and telling me bleak wartime stories of witnessing the deaths of men he trained.

All those decades later it was still raw for him. Too raw, as it turned out. He called me up later, sounding very shaken, telling me I shouldn’t have asked the questions I asked and he shouldn’t have told the stories he told. I apologized for upsetting him. We crossed him off our shortlist of potential subjects for the year-long project.

Even though no published journalism came out of talking with him, he is one of the many people I think of when I hear about some reporter fabricating a story, a source, a quote. Beyond the obvious ethical reasons not to fabricate, I just have never understood the impulse to cheat yourself out of being surprised by real stories, real people, real quotes. If I’d skipped that interview and sat in a bar making up imaginary quotes, my fake WWII vet would have reveled in this sudden surge of indiscriminate flag-waving. It simply never would have occurred to me to have the vet step into his driveway, point at his neighbor’s weather-beaten American flag, and speak with righteous, bristling contempt.

That’s a small thing, I guess. But small surprises absolutely nourished me during my time as a reporter.

In the “perfect world” we invoke when we want to make a change seem impossible, I would look at my phone much less. In the actual world, I’m looking at my phone only a little less.

My phone is how I check the time. It’s how I shoot and post Instagrams. It’s how I text. It’s how I keep up with Tumblr and Twitter. But it’s also how I can end up checking my e-mail way more often than is warranted; it’s also how I can piss away seconds and minutes waiting for the feckless cell towers to send out the ones and zeroes needed to display Andrew Sullivan’s gold-standard Daily Dish.

So I’ve resolved two things: 1) to use my phone less; 2) to make my phone time more efficient. In this spirit, I’ve exiled the icon that launches e-mail and given its prized spot to TeuxDeux, a great app that manages to-do lists and helps me steer my mind back to the things I need to be accomplishing in the real world.

Sometimes, though, my to-do list maroons me in a supermarket line or sends me outside to wait for our dogs to poop. At these times, I want to read. I’m determined to stop flopping around in search of random stuff to read. For roughly a decade, RSS has helped people avoid this random flopping. I’ve tried RSS several times before, subscribing dutifully to my favorite blogs and then ignoring them. Last week, I decided to try again. I subscribed to a manageable number of blogs and sites using Google Reader and found an app called Reeder that, so far, has done an elegant job of talking to Google Reader and delivering my RSS feeds to my phone.

My one deliberate inefficiency in all this purported efficiency is that I’m effectively double-subscribed to one blog: http://carpentrix.tumblr.com/

It sometimes gets lost in the flood of posts that come in via the Tumblr Dashboard, and I don’t really want to risk missing stuff like “The house that House of Sand and Fog built” or this, which speaks so deeply to the part of me that wonders if the best way for me to thrive would be to radically expand my idea of what work to do:

In terms of plumbing, I’ve wrestled with some toilets. I’ve waddled them on top of the waxy gelatinous ring on which they sit. And I’ve peered down that dark hole and felt the vertigo of poop tubes. Plumbing’s not just toilets; it’s water pipes and gas lines and wrenches. It’s also small spaces – I’ve crammed myself under a few sinks and wondered how the plumbers we work with – who are both large men – get their big arms and shoulders where they need to be. Metal (and let’s be honest, drain gunk, pipe clogs, and turds) appeal to me less than wood.

There’s something more essential about carpentry. There’s something essential about shelter. It’s nice when the lights work, and plumbing is important, but what do they matter without the walls around you?

A wall is real. A piece of baseboard that hides the gap between wall and floor, that’s real, too. I’ve spent a lot of my life mixed up with words, and carpentry has been a relief from that. Words make me stumble. I have chaos in my head and I’m not the best at sifting through the feelings or ascribing the right actions to the right feelings, or expressing those feelings in words.

Cutting a piece of trim, I don’t have to worry about how to explain what’s making me feel sad. I don’t have to worry about getting lost in the translation from emotion to language. A measurement, a cut, sawdust in my lungs. And the piece of wood slides in to fit tight after a few taps with a hammer. It’s this stripping away of bullshit, a stripping away of anything abstract or emotional or confusing. The actions are prescribed: measure, measure, cut, nail in.

Shoreline, WA yesterday.

This place as seen through the window of this place.