Jorpblog

© 2007 Hayley Murphy

Tuesday night I did a photo shoot with daydreamer, awesome photographer, fellow caver and new friend Hayley Murphy. She’s doing a series of photographs of people at work, daydreaming about being being someplace else or someone else.

I can relate to that. When I’m at work, I’d rather be making bagels, drawing with pastels, playing ghaita in the park, riding my bike, hanging out with friends far from home, playing Kuhhandel, camping on an old farm field, climbing a mountain, reading a Hesse novel, printmaking, trying some new soup recipe, watching Charlie Kaufman movies, listening to James Brown, playing hooky to go to a museum, drinking Boddingtons, building a fire, looking at the stars, playing with my cat, sitting at a cafe sketching and listening to a couple converse in a language I don’t know, eating fried plantains at Handlebar, or wedged into the rocks by Lee Street beach, looking out at the hazy land mass on the horizon and listening to the water eddy into a torn and faded can of Tab.

But Hayley had all the shots worked out in advance, and in the frame of her mind, this office guy always dreams of being a luchador. And after all, isn’t it a treat sometimes to abandon the attachments to your own goals and be thrust into somebody else’s dreams? Thanks for that.

It’s been so long since I’ve blogged, and I feel like the bar has been rising with each passing day. The pressure is increasingly great to write something worth reading, to the point where I feel like the monk who, after taking a vow of silence, is invited to speak a single utterance after seven years of silence. Talk about anticipation!

I don’t flatter myself with this comparison–I know that I am writing this for myself, and only hope that anyone that cares to read it will be entertained or have an interesting thought or two along the way. I know too that the medium of blogging, with its low barrier to entry and ease and speed of distribution, is not well suited for the perfectionist. Basically, if you’ve got a blog, and you’ve got something to say–say it and move on! In other words: Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I read two blogs regularly: Malcolm Gladwell’s and Travis’s T-Blog. It suprises me every time that Gladwell posts a blog with typos and misspellings. But I’m not surprised anymore when he makes a well-argued point only to be out-argued (though usually not out-styled) by a horde of fanatical commenters. And as for the News from the T, it is consistently, addictively worth reading…though lately there haven’t been nearly enough food shots, even cutting some slack for the injuries.

And with that in mind, I intend to post some photos of my latest hobby–baking bread. I am getting to be a pretty fine baker, but somewhat less of a food photographer. I love looking at pictures of food, reading cookbooks, and especially watching people cook and eat in movies. When Bobby Bacala sheds a tear while eating his wife’s baked ziti–the last ziti she ever made–I shed a tear along with him. When starving Japanese peasants devour a bowl of rice in an Akira Kurosawa movie, I reach for a towel to wipe up the saliva.

So hopefully there will be more food photos and more blogging in general coming to this space soon. Seven years is a long time to wait just for some pictures of bread.

Suddenly I could do anything! Nothing could stop me! I was going to get my life in order, work it out down to the minutest of minutiae, and by identifying the obstacles, breaking them down into concrete particles, obliterate them.

Buy a condo by first listing everything that has to be done along the way.

Write a novel one page at a time, one sentence at a time…even one word at a time.

Become a master baker in just 216 easy steps.

Live a healthy life by following these 740,318 simple rules.

Hang a name on something and it loses it’s power over you. I would map out my life on paper, and step by step advance toward the sunny future I had never even dreamed of. It was like a massive, prolonged adrenaline rush, and it came to me without the use of any questionable substances whatsoever.

***

The water poured down on me–not in buckets, not in cats and dogs or sharp little water pellets. But it was coming down hard, harder than I’d felt in years. It was as if someone had been standing on the sprinkler hose, and they’d finally got off. And it felt really really good.

I love the shower. If I could, I’d spend all day in there. Read in the shower, eat in the shower, play harmonica in the shower, watch movies in the shower. But for the past 3 years I’ve suffered under a shower with low water pressure.

When we first moved in we had tons of pressure, and a seemingless bottomless hot water heater. Something was wrong with the shower, but something minor and forgetable. And then one day I came home from work and Sara told me that Ray had changed the shower head. Instead of a big flat shower head we had a skinny articulated brass elephant trunk-like thing that could be adjusted to any height and direction, and at it’s tip was a huge head with a range of settings. It looked cool, it had possibilities, but due to some fucking American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) standard, it didn’t put out the pressure that I need to thrive.

And so I suffered these three years–still taking my time in the shower every morning, but not really enjoying it. Three years of silent, austere, bitter showers. Then one day, I decided that I wasn’t going to take it anymore. I made a plan, enumerated it on paper, and set out to change my life. I got a bucket, put it in the tub, and pointed the elephant’s trunk at it. I turned on the shower and timed how long it took to fill the bucket: about five and a half minutes (it was a big bucket). Then I unscrewed the shower head and timed it again: two minutes. Two minutes! So skinny though it was, it wasn’t the elephant’s trunk that was slowing down the flow, it was that convoluted shower head.

I tried taking a shower without the shower head. It was interesting–powerful and directed–but it hurt. Not really an improvement.

The next day I went to Ace Hardware and looked at the bath accessory section. There were about half a dozen shower heads, but they all had the same fucking government restriction that limited them to 2.5 gallons per minute. When I asked the red-vested Ace employee in the next aisle, he went on to tell me his story of searching for a shower head that could put out the pressure. He’d basically given up on finding one when he happened into a dollar store that had some kind of black market shower head that was not produced in accordance with Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) standards. But one of the shower heads had some little filter in it that looked like maybe it could be removed.

Instead of buying the brass one with the filter, which cost $25, I bought the $5 version made of white plastic. I figured if I was going to intentionally break something, it’d be easier to break something cheap. So I took it home, opened up the package and examined it. The only thing limiting the flow was the diameter of one small opening in the pipe. I ran into the living room, grabbed my leatherman, slid back into the bathroom and began to carve open the hole. The wall was maybe an 1/8 of an inch thick, so it held together but opened easily. I’d say I more than doubled the opening before I screwed the shower head onto the articulated elephant’s trunk.

I turned it on, looked at my watch, and counted how long it took to fill the bucket: two and a half minutes. Woohoo! The drought was over! Redemption, after so many years of suffering. Needless suffering? Yes, but that wasn’t the point. No, not needless suffering, because I wasn’t ready to take the steps. I wasn’t ready to break free from the low pressure prison of self-pity I had made for myself over three years time. It wasn’t until that day that I was truly ready to go forward in my life, accept those realities that I couldn’t change and clear my thoughts out to see just what I could change and where I could go.

To get there, I would need to see the path ahead not as an amorphous leap of giant proportions, but as steps no more than a fast jog’s space apart. What were the easiest ways to make my life better? What could I do in just a few hours, or over a weekend, that would make a noticeable difference? What was a task small enough to be broken down into no more than a dozen realistic steps?

***

On a hunch, I looked at the convoluted brass shower head to see if there was any way I could “fix” it. I already had one working shower head that had basically saved me from dropping off the cliff into the sea of hopelessness. I was surging with new found power and capabilities, why shouldn’t I take the next step? Inside the pipe of the convoluted shower head was a tiny o-ring, smaller than my pinky. I cut it with the leatherman and it popped out. Then I twisted the big brass shower head onto the threaded pipe and turned on the water. Dumped out the bucket, slid it back under the water and started the stopwatch…30…1:00…it was filling up pretty fast, definitely faster than five and a half minutes…1:45…2:00…2:27. And that was it. Full pressure. I had the shower I’d wanted, the shower I deserved all along, the shower that stood for everything that is within arms reach but seems unknowably far away.