It is 9:30 on Saturday night, and I am sitting on my couch watching "Decorating Cents" on the HGTV channel. If this is not the bottom, I do not want to know where it is.
Last weekend the painter showed up, and true to form, he was missing at least 25% of his teeth (most in the front) and an equal portion of his brain cells. Lest anyone wonder why, he spent four hours painting and never opened so much as a window. Had anyone struck a match my house would have featured prominently on the evening news. That aside, he got most of a gallon of paint on the walls and not on the floots or furniture, all for eighty bucks. Did it look better? Sure. Did I care? About as much as I care about the whales. But did I mention that for almost two days, Janet was happy, and nothing else? Priceless.
Now we are watching the Food Network, some show called Oliver's Twist, which features a young hip-looking English guy cooking for all 'is mates. The food is strightforward but Oliver does it all in that very flip, speed-freak sort of way you can only get away with if you have an English accent. It all just screams, “Look at me! Watch how fast I can do things! Hey, pay attention! What’s my name? Where’s me bloody Ritalin?”
Of course, whilst Oliver cooks, one by one his friends show up, all fresh and ruddy from their game of soccer. My personal theory is that the show’s producers figure the main audience for a cooking show is female, so they got a young, good-looking guy to lead the show and ginned up a bunch of similarly good-looking “friends” to show up for dinner. Of course there is a problem with all this. Good-looking men who know how to dress and have chicken and polenta dinners together are generally what used to be described as “confirmed bachelors.” So they cover this with lots of gratuitous masculinity. They talk relentlessly about soccer, though they strangely insist upon calling it football. As the boys come in, Oliver makes a big show of grabbing them beers, though one look at these guys tell’s you they’re more Chardonnay than lager. Look! We’re drinking beer and talking about football! WE’RE NOT GAY!
Whatever. Finally they finish their chicken and polenta and its time for dessert. The producers cue this awful contemporary-rock soundtrack as they all lean back, laugh, dig in, all in slow motion just like a beer commercial. But they’re eating pudding. All very hip. All very English. All very… gay.
Of course, not all the adventures were happening in other people’s kitchens. Only a few days prior, I come home, and Janet pounces on me (I swear she takes lessons from the cat) about her TV set again. Seems she couldn’t hook the VCR up or something. She asks me to take a look. I wouldn’t want to but the batteries in the X10 camera I put in her closet were getting low so I went along with her plea for help.
While I was up there, I noticed a distinct odor of combustion which I figured to be the oven. It was more pronounced than usual but not particularly alarming. In any event the smoke detector in the kitchen goes off every time somebody so much as farts near it so I wasn’t concerned. But sure enough Janet came running.
“I think the oven’s on fire.” Do you see any flames? “No, but can’t you smell it?” Well I figured that was just your cooking.
Anyway, I go down, take a look, sure enough, nothing’s wrong. Still I shut the oven off and at Janet’s insistence open the kitchen door to let some air in. I check the pilots. The smell goes away. I close the door and turn the oven back on.
“What should we do?” Just wait a while, I say. Relax. Sure the smell’s a bit more than usual, but nothing to be worried about. “I think it’s a gas leak.” No, it doesn’t smell like gas. “Well it smells a little like gas.” I’m about to tell her, ‘you think that smells like gas? You don’t know from gas…’ “Who should we call?” How about nobody. I try explaining the basic physics of gas leaks, how they wouldn’t go away if we shut the oven off, but am met with a look of complete ignorance. I have a vision of a cow standing in a meadow while airplanes pass overhead. I mumble something about calling the landlord in the morning and retreat to the cover of my bedroom.
Of course, if the house were to blow up a la Edward Norton’s apartment in Fight Club, I would laugh like Tyler Durden as fragments of her sofa bed slowly burned on the street. Give me two minutes’ warning to grab a few things out of my room and bonzai!
A few days later, the house still in its not-blown-up state, found me and Janet discussing decorating. Why? Because my life is an oyster, full of pearls. Anyway, she had run out of trinkets to blanket a particular area of the living room, and was wondering aloud what to do. “Leaving well enough alone” not being a valid choice, I offered up a few of my old 11x14 color prints I had laying in a box. She looked at them, nodded that they were nice enough, but needed some “decent frames.” Being poor at the time I’d made the prints, I’d only sprung for those simple glass-sandwich frames you can get for about ten bucks in that size. Truth be told, for photographs I actually preferred their simplicity- just a sheet of glass and a picture. I thought them quite crisp and modern.
“But look, they have these aluminum clips right here,” she said, pointing out the four half-inch wide clasps that held the sandwich together. From more than a foot or two away you’d hardly notice them. “You really should put these in something nicer.”
And I thought, now isn’t that just a perfect description: Someone who cares more about the frame than the picture.
¶ 8:20 AM 0 Comments
