Issue 12, containing: Unforeseen Errors in Home Rearrangement, Local Happenings, Letters, Commonplaces, &c.

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SOME EDITORIAL NOTES

With the assistance of some careful time management tools (otherwise known as “a polygonal box I spent 20 minutes cutting out and coloring with highlighters“), I have found myself back on track with this issue of the magazine. It’s astonishing the things you can trick your own mind into doing.

A further note: I only just realized that I missed the perfect opportunity in the previous issue to have a heading read MORE HAGIOGRAPHICAL HILARITY. This has distressed me for some minutes, but I will Persevere.

A further further note: I wrote the first paragraph earlier this week. It is now several hours past my self-imposed deadline for this newsletter. My brain has had the last laugh.

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THE UNFORESEEN ERRORS IN HOME REARRANGEMENT

As has been reported over the last several issues, I have been rearranging my apartment. It’s gone astonishingly well up to this point, and I assumed it would continue doing so, because surely if it would go wrong, it would have gone tits up much sooner than now.

My bedroom has defied this logic.

My method of rearrangement involves doing one disastrously huge and irrevocable change to a space so as to create the momentum for the rest of the necessary moves. In my kitchen, a beloved sideboard was moved for the first time since I moved in, and I was then able to immediately envision how to lay out the space anew. In my living room, I moved my couch to bisects the room rather than hug any particular wall, and in doing so I was able to sketch out the necessary next actions to complete the transformation. 

In my bedroom, I thought that a massive enough change would be removing the large tapestry of a dark storm cloud that covered one wall, mimicking a window I don’t have and large enough that I can see even with my glasses off. Taking down that tapestry, I thought, would free up wall space in a room that is otherwise hampered by a sloping ceiling, and also free my mind to come with the best solution for the rest of the room. It had worked before, after all. Surely this would not prove to be a mistake of colossal proportions.

I took down the tapestry. I folded it neatly. I turned, and a horror of blankness sucked all light and joy from the world.

In my mistaken belief that this was a temporary situation, I moved my dresser to the wall. The horror now had a large lump sticking from it, wart-like. Aha, I thought, I’ll move the dresser sideways, like I did the couch, and create a sort of false entryway to the room, how clever I am, I can still fix this. 

I moved the dresser a second time. I couldn’t tell whether this was an improvement, so I stepped into the next room, walked a bit away, and then came back to assess the effect of my new bedroom entrance.

The effect, as it turns out, is that I am suddenly startled by the human-height presence of something standing just inside my doorway. And it hasn’t been just once. It has happened every time I pass the room. It has been doing this for over a week.

I realize I could just move everything back to where it was. I could move the dresser. I could rehang the tapestry. But in my mind, I have already assigned the tapestry as irrevocably removed. That has been the winning move in all other rooms in my house, this ability of my brain to just decide a thing is now different forever. I had no reason to think it would betray me — though, I mean, looking at it now I can sort of see how I maybe should have seen this coming.

However. The dresser man and his blank-walled companion will meet their match this weekend. It’s taken days of thought, and more than one Pinterest search, but this time I’m pretty sure I can rearrange my bedroom successfully. 

Pretty sure.

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LOCAL HAPPENINGS

I have been informed that Mystic Seaport, reported on in an earlier issue, is having the Harvest of the Sea seafood festival this weekend.

As always, I would like someone — anyone — to tell me why bivalves are considered at all edible.

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THE LAUNDRY CHAIR

[This article was deemed too boring even by the Magazine’s very lax standards, and has been deleted for the betterment of the Readers and to save the pride of the Editors. -Ed.]

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A NOTE TO GENTLE READERS

Last week the Magazine asked Gentle Readers their opinions on Autumn. Gentle Reader Virginia responded that Autumn “is entirely delightful”, which is usually my own response to this season as well. This year I’m not entirely sure how we came upon the season so quickly, and therefore my own answer is something closer to “linear time is a lie.”

For this week, and in honor of that which is fading out: I spend a great deal of my time mentally working out what my future garden should look like. And so I put it to you, Gentle Readers: What is your favorite flower, plant, or tree? Should it have a home in my future garden, and if so, why or why not?

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LETTERS

From Gentle Reader Virginia, to the Magazine:

In a house of my slight acquaintance, called Buena Vista but very emphatically pronounced BYOOnah Vista, there’s a tiny bedroom called “the box room” that has a tiny alcove containing a rickety old writing desk that I could sit at and my fingertips would touch if I set each elbow against the wall. The window in this alcove looks out over a steep slope at the bottom of which is a river hidden by deciduous trees, but tracking back up, one stares at a smallish mountain of pines. I don’t believe anyone in the rambling family of that desk writes. I often wonder whether it’s lonely.

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From The Box Room Desk, to Gentle Reader Virginia, “A response”:

First, I must thank you for your attention. It does an old heart good to know that one is remembered beyond the small instances of interaction. I remember you, too, and I hope it pleases you as much as me.

And I thank you for your question. Time moves differently for furniture. Your generations are our minutes; it takes centuries for our elders to even get a touch of silver at their temples. Imagine, then, that every season I see through my window matches with an inhale, an exhale, and inhale again, and you might then understand how I haven’t the chance to get lonely. There is always someone, if not this minute, then the next. The hectic life of a kitchen range wouldn’t suit me — I’m not so extroverted. And I’d rather my steadfast middle age than the caroming excitement of mayfly fast furniture.

I like the quiet, and the brief moments of introspection I can find between my owners’ visits. Best of all, I like that I have the time to contemplate the uses I have been put to — I can revisit the work done on my surface, the books read, the words written. A couch might only be able to see and process a flicker of a television image, and a tub has only the endless weight of water, but I can spend my time tasting the memory of creation. 

I count myself lucky in my placement and in my life, so eminently suited to my nature. May we all find ourselves so fortunate.

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COMMONPLACES

From Caitlyn Siehl’s What We Buried, “maybe eve was a wild thing”:

tell them you don’t know how Eve felt
when she saw Adam in one hand, and the rest of the fucking universe in the other.

tell them you don’t know how Eve felt
when she wanted the universe.

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From Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles:

QUESTION: name one hero who was happy

CONSIDER: heracles. theseus. jason. bellerophon.

ANSWER: you can’t (they never let you be famous and happy)

i’ll tell you a secret; i’m going to be the first

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From Terry Pratchett’s Men at Arms:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. 

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But  an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. 

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

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ANNOUNCEMENTS

No particular announcements this week. If you should happen to feel a ripple of psychic disturbance this weekend that inexplicably screeches the word clouds!!, you may assume that the bedroom rearrangement is going… poorly.

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If you would like to write a letter to be produced/answered in the magazine, please email me at minor.hours.magazine@gmail.com with the subject line:

Letter to the Magazine: [subject of letter as you would like to see it printed]

If you wish the letter to be anonymous or under a nom de plume, please state so in the body of the email; similarly, if you’d rather not be printed at all, please also state so in the body of the email. It will otherwise be assumed that mail sent to that address is intended for print.

Alternately, commenting on this post will get you a similar result, with much less fuss.

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-Until next week, be safe.