house spirits

As a homeowner, some evil spirit who controls my domicile regularly adds to my agenda of projects. It's almost as if these very walls do not like nor trust me. I don't know why this might be the case (I got the best loan possible, honest!), but still, the building does its best to force me to do work for which I feel fully unqualified. 

Case in point: a few months ago, my back door decided to quit latching. At the time, I chalked this up to weather, mostly so I might claim to be a personal victim of climate change...for the bragging rights or something. Alas, spring and summer arrived, and the damn door still wouldn't stay closed...so it was my house's wicked intentions after all.

A renter would only have to make a call, and a professional (or a stoner who bluffed their was through an indifferent interview process) would come and apply expertise to the problem. I was left with just my wits and mechanical aptitude. Naturally, this initiated thoughts of doomsday scenarios.

As I have made clear before, home repair is not a natural ability. I do, however, have YouTube access, so I could at least consult with professionals...or at least enthusiasts...or stoners with webcams. Soon enough, I had a plan of attack.

But not, however, the confidence. I naturally tried the low-stakes solutions first. However, when tightening screws, lubricating the hinges, and animal sacrifice all failed, I knew I would have to move the door handle's scratch plate, and this would man chiseling out part of my door frame.

There's nothing quite like knowing one has to permanently and irreversiblly alter one's own house to freak one the heck out.

I brought out my freshly purchased chisel, along with a drill, screwdriver, holy water, Dremel, rubber chicken, cement mixer, and hammer. I prayed to Pan, the goat god. I texted Norm from This Old House and asked to borrow any talisman he might possess.

In short, I delayed in every way I could until there was nothing left to do but enter a fugue state and start carving out chunks of my own house. 

That's the last thing I remember before waking up in my garage. I put up my tools and went back into the house...only this time, the door closed and locked perfectly. I can only assume I was overcome by the spirit of some pioneer carpenter who defeated my house demon in single combat, because the work itself doesn't look half bad. Either that, or maybe I'm secretly a mechanical genius. 

I'm betting on the ghost angle.

thankless?

The great philosopher Annie Savoy said something to the effect of, "one should be strong enough where the vagaries of life don't affect them." Nevertheless...

I knock on my daughter's door and tell her I need a favor.

"Yes?"

"I know you don't care about such things, but can you come out to the living room and look at the yard?"

She goes to the window. Before her eyes is a sea of freshly trimmed grass. 

"....ooookay?"

"Can you tell me it looks good?"

When I was younger, I never really grasped just how much of my adult life would be spent doing tasks no one notices. It's a reality i can usually accept. There are times, though...

It takes a second, but my daughter smiles with all of her eyes. She gets on tippy toes, pats me on the top of my head, and says, "You did a really nice job."

It helps.

scarred, bleeding hands

 When I was going to community college, I had a professor who highly recommend I not go straight through to my highest degree and then start teaching. "Go see the world," he said. "Do stuff. Have adventures. Get your hands dirty. Don't be one of those people who never experiences the reality of the average person" ...because, to him, school was definitely the polar opposite of "the real world."

The problem? He never actually defined what he meant by the real world. I suspect he meant "compile lots of experiences," but I couldn't help but think of "the real world" as having some relation to the traditional signifiers of masculinity. If Academic was not real world, did this mean I had to take up Trade work? Become a mechanic? Build something tangible with my scarred, bleeding hands? If pressed, I know that I could not explain why I bought into this blue collar fetishization. Still, the image held sway.

This was another problem, because, in spite of a weird obsession with home improvement television shows (was this a signifier of my yet-undiagnosed Autism?), I was never what you would consider "handy." Tools were not my friend. Fixing stuff was not my jam. I didn't have the coordination to be mechanically capable. All I could be, I felt, was a blue collar tourist, maybe blue collar-adjacent.

I'm not saying these were explicit thoughts, but the attitude did seem to hold some sway in my various jobs to date. As a teen, I had done some lawn care and construction work in addition to my near-decade of Little Caesars. During community college, I broadened my experience by slaving away in warehouses for a few months. I went broader in terms of job types during my post-community college break by doing sales, but that job was still blue collar-esque at least in terms of the level of security and dignity it provided.

I returned to university life for many reasons, but one of them was definitely "an attempt to better myself." I had done enough of the menial, of the blue collar, and now, it was time to move on. This justification was, I now realize, code language for some mixture of "I deserve more dignity than this temp work/labor life provides" and "I'm simply not suited for a blue collar existence." At the time, I was not aware enough as a person, though, to really grok how much this mindset was riddled with both prejudice and contradiction. 

All I could see was a future possibility of working in a book-lined study in a house with interesting brick architecture, reading tome after tome while wearing some equivalent of a tweed jacket with corduroy elbow patches. People who live such a life don't need to be good with a hammer. They don't need to be able to rebuild large household appliances. Theirs was the dignity of a life of the mind. The rest? People can be hired for the rest. That's what I wanted for myself.

This was not, though, what I got. Yes, I eventually ended up with a University teaching job, but it is very much of the worker bee variety. I don't have a life of abstract ideas. I don't live in a cool multistory brick gothic revival. I don't have a tweed jacket. And when something around here breaks? Rather than call someone, I generally have to default to grabbing my toolbox.

It's summer, and as I'm not teaching, I have a list of home repair projects to occupy my time. This week, I had to scrape out and replace the seal between my driveway and house foundation. Scraping out the old, decaying seal went well, but I bashed and scarred the hell out of my hands. Replacing the seal involved a lot of crouching and kneeling, which made my hips sore. 

Painting the wood underneath the thresholds of both my front and rear house doors, though, was shockingly zen. I don't know how good I am at it...probably not very...but the act of house painting was soothing. It was calming. I could put forth a good effort, and the quality of the final project was almost entirely due to those efforts. I liked that. 

Have I achieved that mythical balance between school in the real world? No idea...but I've got the scars on my hands to prove I'm at least working at it. 

What's In A Name?

 A month or so ago, my daughter (now a precocious/bitterly sarcastic twelve) and I were talking about names and how they develop. I told her that someone of English descent who is named Smith, for instance, likely had a relative who was the town blacksmith. A lot of similar names (Baker, Taylor, Carpenter) were probably ultimately decided on by wayward census takers of the Middle Ages. They were simply desperate for ways to distinguish between the four Jonathans in this hamlet, so decisions were made...and future generations have had to live with the original census taker's lack of creativity.

Our last name is DuBose. I further informed my daughter that, while our family is (as far as we can tell) descended from Norman stock (French Vikings!), the name is from French. It roughly translates to "of the woods," so our ancestors probably had something to do with lumber...or foraging...or, hell, maybe they were just poachers. My daughter took this with good graces, particularly as she is the exact opposite of an outdoors enthusiast. 

Today, she informed me that she was really bored, so she googled her first name. "Sylvia means 'wood' or 'forest,'" she informed me, "so you basically named me wood of the wood! It's too much wood!"

"You know what that means?"

"...whaaattt???," she asked, naturally suspicious of her father.

"That means we're going to have to make sure that, once you're on summer break, we take a lot more trips to parks. We've got to get you reintroduced to nature!"

"...um, no."

"What? Don't you want to get to the root of your name?"

Evil stare.

"Get it? Root? Root?"

She then shut her door in my face.

a new Christmas story

"Yard Christmas decorations used to be made out of hard plastic. No we have all these inflatables."

"Yeah?," I hear from the back seat (along with a slight sigh).

"Well, I think I know what the next step in outdoor holiday decorations will be."

"Yeah?" 

"Holograms! That way, instead of all these static displays, you could have them act out scenes! Stories instead of boring figures.

"Pretty soon, though, people will realize that if you have a really interesting scene, you'll get more views. So people will start experimenting with having their holograms act out different genres of stories."

"Um..."

"Oh, at first, people will do holiday stories. But pretty soon, someone will try comedy. Then drama. Then action-adventure, romance.... The stories and the holograms will get more intense and interesting. Production value will go up and up.

"People will soon recognize that the best stories aren't on television or their phone but on their neighbors' lawns. People will walk around their neighborhood, looking for the best stories. The owners of the houses with the best stories will get endorsement deals, becone famous...and the battle for the best holigram decoration story will get more intense."

We pull into the school dropoff line.

"Of course, someone will remember that we, as a society, like shows with action and violence. So they'll put up a war story hologram. But by this point, the hologram displays have gotten so realistic, so intense, that all their neighbors will think they're under attack. It will just escalate and escalate."

We get to the front of the line. "Mark my words, honey: the next world war will be brought about by Christmas decorations."

""Okay, I'm confused."

"Just have a great day at school. Love you, honey."

"Bye, Dad."

She walks to her classmates, and I pull out of the parking lot. I head for home, confident that I have given my daughter something to think about before her school day starts.

what our soldier boys do to unwind

I have a student who was a US soldier stationed in Syria at the start of their civil war. He has told me some wild and depressing stories.

Yesterday in class, I asked my students for their coping mechanisms for their worst jobs. After class, the former soldier told me after class that, when in Syria, all his squad survived on Egyptian cigarettes and an Iranian energy drink that included cocaine.

I promise not to complain about my job again...or at least for the next minute or so.

shopping, memories, and gum

One of the weird things about having a job without the standard 9-5 jobs is that you get to do things at times where normal working folk are...well, working.

I went to the grocery store today at one in the afternoon. Normal grocery store hijinks ensued (a mix of "Hey, raspberries are only 50 cent a container?" and "Why is the queso fresco in with the store brand cheddar and not with the international cheeses?"), and I moved into checkout before something interesting happened.

After unloading the groceries onto the conveyor, my eyes settled on the gum area. Gum designers (if there is such a thing) really love the colors blue and green. I guess they are the mintiest colors? But then I saw one of the few holdouts: purple packaging.

I immediately grabbed the grape gum and was simultaneously hit by a deep wave of nostalgia, and I was seven years old again. My father was in the air force, and I grew up (through first grade, anyway) on a base in Germany. For some reason, the base grocery store didn't stock bubble gum. I dunno why. Maybe President Ford had a bad gum experience or something.

My grandmother would send over packages every so often, and, when we were very lucky, she'd throw in a couple of box of Bubble Yum, mixed between regular and grape. It was a treat, and we would, while it lasted, be kings of the school yard...rare Bubble Gum could be traded for favors. During first grade, I even got in trouble for running a little bit of a Bubble Yum black market.

I blink my eyes, and I'm back in the grocery store line. Suddenly, I realize my nostalgia was for a minor event that happened over four decades before...and I feel really, really old. Then I look around me, and I realize 90 percent of the shoppers are senior citizens, and now I don't know what to think at all. I pay for my groceries and wander off to find my car.

The grape gum (not Bubble Yum, by the way) tasted more like the color purple than an actual fruit, and it list all flavor in about seventeen seconds. The nostalgia, though?

That stuck around.

adulting is hard

I'm currently waiting for new tires to be installed on my car. I'm at Costco rather than a tire store. This means that, for the first time in my life, I'm waiting on tires but not able to read a fishing magazine. It's weird.

The tire tech, while ringing me up, kept referring to me as "boss." Now, I'm killing time while trying to decide if "boss" is a label of working class camaraderie or a coded way of acknowledging that I am indeed fat.

I never used to think like this when I was a teen.

my child's thoughts, early holiday edition

I was driving my daughter to school today, and we passed a house that had already put up Christmas lights.

My daughter: "I HATE people who put up Christmas decorations right after Halloween."

Me: "If it makes you feel better, when I saw the lights last night when driving home from voting, I yelled at them."

Her: "I was playing Roblox yesterday, I had someone come up and wish me a Merry Christmas. They were wearing a Christmas sweater, and antlers, and everything."

She takes a beat. "I really, really hate overenthusiastic Christmas people."

Ah, my progeny.

center of attention

I feed my cats every day around 11. This means that from 10 am or so, I am the center of their attention. They stalk me, meow at me, follow me, paw at me, look at me with adulation, swat at me, mock me, and so forth.

Now I know how the Kardashians feel 

this i promise you...

In the last few years, I have begun to feel a desire to bring back cool elements from the past. I started to wear waistcoats when I teach. I bought an Indiana Jones hat. That kind of stuff.

Now I'm contemplating more frequently incorporating dead vocabulary into my speech. I already slide in "amongst" instead of "among." But it's time to step it up.

The next time I feel the need to insult someone, I will call the person in question a "one-eyed, hair -brained jackaninny."

It will be epic.

why don't I have an official soundtrack?

 My life needs more drama.

I've often thought about how the first day of any class I teach should open with flashing lights and a theme song. I could enter the classroom like a professional wrestler. It would be cool. I'm not sure the students would be any more excited than normal, though.

What I really need is a digital music player that catalogs my music, labels it according to mood, and allows me to play music accordingly. Angry? Push a button, and suitable music comes on. Another button for boredom, another button for depression, another button for thrill-seeking behavior.

Again, venture capitalists can e-mail me.

pay me for my ideas

I was listening to a podcast on technology, and it occurred to me that we're thinking about online data all wrong. 

Everything we do online gets tracked. So far, all this information is only used to sell us custom advertisements. This is such a waste. Half the time, it means targeted ads for things I just bought. 

There has to be a better way.

I can imagine a service that tracks your internet travels and ties them to career paths and work satisfaction. That way, 20-somethings can pay a slight fee to find out what their ideal career should be, based on how their interests align with those of established professionals.

I got ideas. E-mail me, all you venture capitalists.

is this how they describe me?

Today, on the way to her school, my daughter was telling me about a classy. "He's annoying."

"Annoying, how? In what way?"

"He's like a higher-vocabulary version of an annoying kid from last year."

My girl has a way with words.

Happy-Go-Lucky song notes

 So you've listened to Happy-Go-Lucky a few times on your favorite streaming platform, hit the "like" and "follow" links, and left a good review...right? Right?  RIGHT????? And you've even bought the album from Bandcamp (hint, hint)...and now you want more information about the songs. However will you find out more about what went on in TheMikeDuBose's brain??? Fear not!

TheMikeDuBose presents the song notes!

TheMikeDuBose live! "This Is Where We Fall Apart," Stone's Throw Tavern, Bowling Green OH, June 22, 2022

 

Happy-Go-Lucky now available! (and a brief talk about economics)

As of June 23, 2022, my new album Happy-Go-Lucky is now available. It is live on Spotify if you're a streamer. Please follow me on Spotify. Doing so helps my algorithm, which means a better chance of playlists and suggestions. The album should also be on all other major streaming services (or coming soon).

If you're into streaming, though, you should know that Spotify pays $0.0038 per play. That means, in order to equal one album sale, you would have to listen to over 2,361 song streams. They're not the worst paying in the business (YouTube pays royalties at a rate of $0.00074 per stream), nor are they the best (Napster (hilariously) pays $0.019 per stream). The bottom line, though, is that while streaming is convenient, the artists are not the ones making the money. 

If you want to support the artists you like, buy music from them at shows. If you can't make a show, there are always other options. You can buy Happy-Go-Lucky from Bandcamp and get a high quality instant download and streaming...and Bandcamp actually respects the artists and gives them the biggest cut. Use Bandcamp whenever possible! If you just have to serve the corporate overlords, Happy-Go-Lucky is also available on Amazon. 

If you would like a free way to support what I do, please post a review of the album (or of your favorite songs from it) on Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever. All of these services operate via algorithms, so the more engagement there is, the more chance there is of people being exposed to my music. This would cost you nothing, and I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. 

Musicians generally don't like talking about this kind of stuff, and I'm certainly uncomfortable even thinking this way. But if an album is released and no one hears it, is it art? I know I'm never going to get rich doing this, but breaking even would be nice. More importantly, though, I would love to just have people hear what I do. 

Thanks for all your help.

Happy-Go-Lucky artwork!

 Don't forget to pre-order at Bandcamp!

I'm a hot songwriter!

 I found out last night that my new single, "Three Quarters," is now on American Songwriter's "Hot Indie Favorites" Spotify playlist! I've never been considered hot before! Listen to the heck out of this, particularly my track! I'm down there at number 191 as of this writing.

"Three Quarters" now streaming!

 Listen to it right here!