Progress Report

Who knows how and when it will all end?

When people ask about my work-in-progress, I usually mention this joint and how I use it as a progress report. That’s hardly true, since these articles are usually a departure for some of the subjects I’m researching: fireworks, optics, automatons, etc. Saying it’s a progress report is easier. Maybe, though, I should try to make it a progress report for those who are cheering for me. So here’s where the story started...

In the summer of 2015, we were selling our house on South Fairmount Street in Pittsburgh, a three-story, Queen Anne style stone front house over 100 years old with some obvious flaws. The rest of the family was gone and all I needed to do, besides write, was pack and prepare the house for sale, including fixing the corroded metal box gutters on the front porch roof. Prefabbed metal gutter liners weren’t easy to find, so I spec-ed and drew a version of what I needed, and my friend Greg and I drove out to a metal fabricator’s in Moon Township.

The fabricator created huge mounting devices for HVAC units and similar industrial scale projects. I only needed a six-foot piece of metal. A fellow listened to what the project was, looked at my drawings, and was amused enough to spend a few minutes to cut and bend a piece of metal to our specifications. Greg and I had lunch at a GetGo and we went back to pick up our nice and shiny custom metal liner. My design and drawing were slightly off, but with some asphalt paper and gooey tar, we made that gutter work. It wasn’t good looking, but it tested flawlessly. I think the new owners have since renovated the porch roof; I would like to have been there when they undid the shingles to reveal our handiwork.

A far as my writing had been going, I was working on a fictional family history that paralleled the young adulthood of my grandparents, chronicling the advent of electric car starters, theories of the subconscious, rural electrification, and commercial radio. I had plenty to write about but nothing was getting done. The novel was full of people working and complaining, wooing and kissing each other, doing violence upon each other, that kind of thing. All that business kept getting in the way and brings to mind Michael Chabon’s passage from Wonder Boys

“I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming…”

It was time for a fresh start. I began dreaming of a scenario of a man, unburdened by possessions and relationships, traveling along the steppe with only his horse to keep him company, one of those let’s-make-a-little-weirdo-and-see-how-he-gets-in-trouble gambits, and once again things got complicated.

As I approach the 11th anniversary of the Lazar and the Yamantaka’s inception, I wonder if “how I do one thing, is how I do everything” and that my ad hoc box gutter repair is analogous to my approach to fiction, a glossy mask of aspirations increasingly crammed with backfill and black putty packed into the crevices.

In July, I’ll be leaving Prague and returning to Pittsburgh. People ask me how I feel about that. Dualities like happy/sad and regretful/exhilarated can’t explain how I feel. T. S. Eliot used the term, “objective correlative”, something that showed emotions. An objective correlative is like a symbol, but since it’s not the word “symbol”, I like it much better. To me, cardboard moving boxes are the objective correlative I’m looking for. Cardboard moving boxes are full of tired and well-worn memories, burdens, and epiphanies: photographs, faded letters, electronic cables, unfinished manuscripts, and children’s Halloween costumes. It’s where the quotidian past meets the workaday present of packing and leaving and arriving and unpacking.

If my life were a movie, I’d rather the concluding scene be one of me with my family and friends, laughing, singing, and dancing to the music. But first, I need to tend to the strata of hopes and imperfections of what I believe brought me here. Thanks for joining me.