I sometimes think there's something with my shower. Vortex-ual. Like a BIG spiral, above the smaller one. I can't get in there without getting spun around on my axis or what feels like whorled away on a breeze. Sometimes I wake up and realize water is draining, the salmon could use. That's bad; so I get out. But half the time I haven't washed anything.
So I've tried to start a routine where I scrub and shampoo before thinking.
"I wasn't thinking."
"Good!"
We're looking for fruition on that, about 2007.
How are you going to STOP thinking?
Well, that's what drugs and alcohol are for.
But drinking and showers don't mix.
Dexedrine and showers are good. Good for the salmon. (See the "Showers For Salmon" brochure.) Unless you're a compulsive washer. Twenty~three hour showers are not good.
I once took something in school, that might have been dexedrine. I had an apartment with an architecture student. It was a nice place, but on a busy street. I remember the shower in there was the greatest. It was tiled with white and some roundover tile accents and bandings; but I can't remember their color, which is odd. Was it a bright red-pink? That changed the whole hue of the white with just a smattering?
It lit up the place like bright fruit. But what I do remember is that there was a window right where your head would go, up high, that just opened blissfully out into the sunshine of the side courtyard. (You can already tell this wasn't Oregon.)
In Spring the sun was just the right height to come in that window, so you could stand there in the sunlight and take a sensationally bright and colorful shower. It was purge-atory. Like falling in a glass of cool-aid.
I loved that spot.
It was The Clean Room.
The special room.
Each house has one, or you better move.
The thoughts I had in there!!
But one day I had introduced this chemical to my cells, and I needed to iron a shirt. For something. It was the weekend. Like a Saturday is.
You can tell this was a long time ago, because who irons a shirt? And because Saturdays came after such busy weeks you didn't even have a plan for what you were going to do. Except say, studying or listening to records.
"Records."
I was dating my spouse, even then, although she wasn't my spouse then, because I don't think you can date your wife. Can you?
Maybe I needed a normal looking shirt for that. (Another good thing to learn, is not to shrink your tee-shirts.)
Well, we didn't have an ironing board.
But I I I, had a Saturday.
And needed a shirt.
And had "taken" something.
________________________
If you draw this line up here ^,
and add them up you get:
"Gaugie builds an ironing board."
The guy I was living with there, he was always building kind of silly models of buildings for classes, but I don't think he ever undertook anything as ooomphy as building an Ironing Board from scratch.
(To pass your Boards.)
(I have my own Boards, now.)
(eg, The Rusty Board.)
(The Bread Board.)
(Flower Boards.)
( In Watermelon Sugar.)
Stupid architects.
Ninnys, really.
I had a dining table and a kitchen table, and the kitchen table looked the best for this, so as not to scratch the wooden one, and so I got to work. With towels, scissors, padding, awls, shears, and string; and a piece of wood.
That's the board part.
We already had an iron.
I'm just saying that, because I know what you're thinking.
I would guess I worked and steamed my mental windows for three hours planning and learning and experimenting and fitting and attaching and tightening everything up, good, on my surgical table of tools. I had decided I could tackle this thing, once and for all, and accomplish. I know there's no ironing board Merit Badge, and you'd probably have to do two ironing boards in different styles anyway, but this is the first thing I had built, for function, since a coffee-can and inner-tube TomTom drum we built in Cub Scouts.
I remembered I didn't get that tight enough. Didn't get the surface rubber ply stretched tight enough. It was hard to do; and instead of a TomTom it came out a TumTum.
Oh, well.
Who needs a fucking TomTom anyway.
So I tightened up this sheet-topped towel-padded tour de force, like a whalebone corset with cheater-pipe tie downs. With the strenth of ten thousand ironing-board iron-men. (Because, somewhere in the back of my mind, was the Maxim of Ironing-board Making ~ that just seemed to roost in there like a swallow in a poopy cornice at Capistrano ~ that whatever the top-ness of the ironing board looked like, the post-processed shirt fabric would look like.) (Transference.)
(This is known as "telescoping," in various trades.)
If you didn't get it tight, the board's top-covering of bed sheet ~ an inherently rippy fabric ~ you would be "wave-surfing" with your iron. Instead of iron-ing.
Ironing is just squishing. Controlled squishing. Spreading from a center stamp. Stamp it down, with something heavy, like iron, and spread the lumps of shirt out over the FLAT bed sheet and under-padding.
When you wave surf the top of the shirt with your iron, any wave in the undersheet gets bigger because it's WORKING, the IRON, and the wave rolls up in front of it. And fabric is being shoved and flattened, like soup, and then the underwave CURLS, flops over, and oh my god, you've wiped out.
You've run over the wave and made a wrinkle. Forged a permanent fissure, in the undersheet.
Which will TELESCOPE. You can go ahead and TRY to iron the shirt on top of a wrinkle, but, it isn't going to WORK. You will have Failed.
Well.
You're going backwards.
Aren't you.
This is why YOU,
can't be trusted with Dexedrine.
~
How are you going to hold the padding-towels down to the board, flat, with no nail dimples, duh, and then get the sheet to stretch tight over the whole thing, and held, without starting big fatal rips and tears in the sheet, or getting lumps?
Huh?
How.
Are you saying you could do it?
Is that what I hear? Because this isn't a say you can do it Clinic.
This is a get off your ass and do it clinic.
THEN, we'll talk.
YOU, best just listen.
The piece of sheet is the only non-terrycloth piece of fabric you have in the house. A tee-shirt isn't going to work for the top. So how are you going to stretch that sheet tight on the top, and then cinch it up on the bottom?
What's your grommet and holes? What's your binder?
Hmm?
If you tear the sheet, I am going to smack you.
No iffs or buts.
~
I recalled, when I thought of this incident, that the actual construction process involved closer to six hours. Now I remember why.
~
Well; finally I crumpled back into the chair.
Ready for a shower.
If I have a towel.
I had all kinds of tools and string and bungee cords and wire and rings and washers and pliers and snips and scissors and clamps and I got that sucker done. I took it off the table and leaned it against the kitchen counter, to admire the handy work of a Vinci.
I have a table full of tools and floor of scraps to put away, but I'm awash in the scent of nervous sweat and victory. What should I work on next? What is this thing? I was looking at the kitchen wall, to my right, and a part of the furnace cover above the table struck me as having been potentially useful in the ironing board construction phase. If I had adjusted my focus to it. But I couldn't quite figure out how.
You know? It had the look of the Second Ironing Board, for my Merit Badge; if the mind were able to grapple with it. It was a yellow-painted, perforated metal grille. A large sheet with holes drilled in it. If it weren't the cover for the heater, I could have used it. Like if it was in the basement and I'd seen it down there. At some point in time, most definitely, I would have thought of it; and maybe a whole second genre of board construction. Advanced. It would be nearly flat, from the start ~ flat and thin ~ and because of the holes, it would dissipate heat. Pass through, most of the iron heat, the towel padding absorbs.
Hmm.
So you might be able to get by with less, and more clever, padding. And get less padding-shift. And use the holes as some sort of aid to anchor and stretch the attachment. You would need to coordinate that attachment system with the padding so that you didn't get more telescoping, but just keep that in mind. Heck; you might even be able to use inner-tube material on the back for stretchers.
Wait! Wait! I got it!!
I need to see the top and bottom of this piece of metal at the same time; I need to get my head up to the edge plane there, so I can visualize the cross section of top and bottom attachment. I look to see if the cover is screwed to the wall, and it's not. They stuck a little pull on it so it could be opened. So I yank that and it comes loose toward me ~ it's been hinged on the opposite side ~ and I fling it open with dex-edral dedication to the improvement of ideas. I have to dodge-jump back out of the way, as an ironing board comes out and sweeps past my head and falls like a dead horse onto the table, smashing and scattering my tools to the four corners of the kitchen and dining room.
I sat back down.
After the spinning tools and broken cups and glasses had settled.
Well.
Here's a fine howdy-do.
Right here on my work table, where the last six hours I wrestled the olympian elements of constructing an ironing board, is an ironing board.
Like ~ materialized.
~
How did that happen?
What are the chances of that?
Was it drawn out there, by the other ironing board?
Have I permanently embedded ironing board consciousness into the kitchen table, magically never able to be used for any other purpose?
Can I go into the business of Supplying The World with ironing boards, just by removing this one and others?
And ~
~ wait.
Let me see......
How is this thing built? |
