This Old House...

...can suck my dick.

When my wife were young and stupid, and childless, and when she wasn't my wife, we'd go traipsing around quaint neighborhoods and looked at lots of charming old houses, because that's what we liked.

In the end, we bought a house that was more old than it was charming. We made it charming inside, by painting its walls all kinds of fucked up circus colors, and by adding our tchotchkies and our touches and our random piles of shit.

We have such charming random piles of shit.

1928 was a long time ago. It was before the stock market crash. It was before color television and before women going to work and women going to war. 1928 was before the "Wizard of Oz"-- that's how long ago 1928 was. Do you believe there was a time before that movie?

Our house was built in 1928 and, thus, it is eighty-four years old. When you're young and stupid, the idea of living inside a thing built before your parents were built doesn't seem absurd at all. Having lived in this house for some time, it does now. Noam Chomsky is eighty-four years old, and I wouldn't want to live inside him. I can't stand the fucking guy. Shirley Temple, I just learned, was also born in 1928. Somehow, living inside her sounds better, but only marginally.

At first, the old home was fun-- it gave us things to do. Old lady wallpaper? Let's strip it and paint! Nasty linoleum floor the color of a three-year-old's vomit? Let's rip the bejesus out of the floor and replace it! Old windows-- caked in decades and decades of lead paint? Let's....

FUCKING SHOOT OURSELVES!

See, 'cuz window replacement people don't like dealing with lead paint. And a new law was passed recently that says that they don't have to-- that the onus is on the homeowner to get an environmental hazard specialist into the home to either remove or encapsulate all the lead paint and provide the window people with a certificate of non-PB-ness before they can proceed with the work.

Can you say:

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Because, with two month-old children bleating their tiny genitals off in the next room, I sure as Christ can't!

These days, it seems that everywhere I look in this old house of ours there is something to be replaced, fixed, updated, re-done, dealt with. The windows are the obvious priority. Last year, before this fucking regulation was passed, we replaced half the windows in the house. The downstairs, mostly new windows, is toasty warm. Our bedroom and the rest of the upstairs, mostly old windows, is like living inside Shirley Temple's Kelvinator. After two horrifying nights spent shivering in our bedroom with the twins, we moved "OPERATION NEW LIFE" downstairs. The twins sleep in a pack-n-play in the dining room, the parents sleep on the sofa in the living room.

That's right, we're crashing on the couch in our own goddamn house, and we have been for over a month. And we will continue to do so until the windows are all replaced.

There's water damage on the wall in the nursery. There's water damage in the wall in the 1st floor bathroom. The roof's probably falling in because it was clearly installed by a guy with a sixth grade education. When you're feeding and changing and clothing and burping and wiping two little children, projects are no longer fun, old houses are no longer charming. You finally get why young couples buy pristine, 4.5-year-old homes in developments where the biggest dilemma they have is choosing the white, the off-white, the bone, or the creme one.

I get it now.

You win.

I can't take it anymore.

If I have to spend another month on this sofa, it's not going to be pretty.

Don't get me wrong, I love this house. We're not going to go live in a gated community because we've got "a few holes in the floor, the odd door missing" (to quote Basil Fawlty), but you can love something that makes absolutely no sense. It's nice to know that, even though we went and got married and had kids and got a mortgage and two dogs and two cars and some more gray hairs, that I'm still basically just as fucking stupid as I was before.

I was worried there for a second-- weren't you?

Homesick

There are dogs here that I am neglecting, at present.

There is a veritable trove of slightly off-beat films that I haven't watched in years, beckoning to be rediscovered.

There is ceaseless universe of reverse-cowgirl streaming internet pornography.

There is a gigantic, floor-to-ceiling bookshelf positively littered with all manner of literary offerings.

There is a smart phone and a computer and music on radios in the living room and in the kitchen.

There is dusty banjo that could be tuned at a moment's notice, resigned, though, to its fate, leaning helplessly against the window air-conditioning unit in the office.

There is tomato soup in the refrigerator. In all fairness, I'll probably get to that later.

I have to say that I'm more than a bit overwhelmed when I think of all the things I could be doing while at home, sick. If I'm honest with you, I may have been neglecting the books on the shelf, but I did manage to get another sixty-seven pages into Mark Twain's Autobiography, Volume 1. Still, it barely seems like I've made a dent, and his language and his wit are challenging to fathom when your brain feels like it is encased inside some sort of ghoulish Jell-O mold-- which it pretty much is, if you think about it.

I had to put the book down, though, because I am at the part where he is speaking of his daughter, Susy, who died of spinal meningitis when she was 24 years and five months old. And I just can't an elderly father's reminiscenses of his long-lost daughter when I'm not feeling well. It is too much.

On Tuesday, I had every intention of going into work Wednesday, even though I had been feeling ill all afternoon. I laid out my clothes for the next day, I made my lunch, I even put old clothes of ours in a paper bag marked "Donations" for the patients, and set it by the front door so I wouldn't forget it. But, after several hours of thrashing around in bed, simultaneously overheating and freezing to death, my sore throat making swallowing a very undesirable task, I leaned over, at 2:12am, and tapped Mrs. Apron on the shoulder. She jerked her head up, and hit me below the right eye-socket with her head.

"Ow!" I exclaimed.

"What is it?" She demanded.

"I have to call out for tomorrow," I replied hazily.

"Ok," she said, shmushing her head back down into her pillow. I got out of bed and turned on my BlackBerry. It made a ding that indicated some idiot had commented on a Facebook thread that I had commented on, about the movie "In Bruges," which seemed wholly irrelevant and annoying to me at 2:12am. I told the night nurse I was not coming in, and, for good measure, I texted my supervisor, and went back to bed.

Note: I went back to bed, not back to sleep.

There was no sleeping-- not for me, and not for Mrs. Apron. There was thrashing and tossing and the burying of heads beneath pillows and there was dog in between my legs, behind me, resting on my bladder. There was one point in the night where Molly had positioned herself so that she was dead center on my side of the bed, forcing my legs to dangle off the side of the bed, and I stayed like that for probably forty-five minutes, until my bare feet couldn't take the cold anymore. It was one of the worst nights I've passed in a while.

The day hasn't been much better. As a child, I can remember relishing being home sick from school. I stayed in bed all day and I loved it. As a thirty-year-old, I cannot stay in bed. Or in the office chair. Or on the sofa. Or anywhere, for any length of time. There is nothing to do, or at least there is the perception that there is nothing to do, which is powerful enough, and there is nothing in particular that I want to do. Sure, I'm blogging, but that is perfunctory and obligatory-- I'm not getting very much enjoyment out of it right now, sorry to say. The present experience certainly pales in comparison to the times when I stayed home from school as a little boy and took my meals in bed while watching "The Price is Right" on the little white TV brought into my room from the kitchen by my mother.

Just fifteen minutes ago, I actually threw a load of laundry into the wash, because I couldn't think of anything else to do. We'll see if I remember to put it into the dryer, and then if I forget it in the dryer entirely.

The most frustrating thing, perhaps, about being home sick is that I am not enjoying not being at work. I had the day off on Tuesday, and I didn't enjoy that either. Therapy, the dentist, the rain, and then I got sick. I am wracked with guilt over calling out sick, I know my department is going to be short-staffed, I know people were counting on me to do things that I'm not there doing, and I am obsessing over whether I could have slogged myself in, whether I was really sick enough to warrant calling out-- after all, what exactly is the threshold, what are the benchmarks for determining if one is sick enough to call out? I felt much worse, at 2:12am when I called out than, frankly, I do now. But could I have known that when I made the decision to call out?

Life was much simpler when I was a child and my mother made the final determination of I was sick enough to stay home from school. Although I sometimes disagreed with her decision, I at least liked that it wasn't me who was making the call. Because I don't always trust myself. And I rarely enjoy myself.

Even when I'm home sick.