PLUMBING
				    kremlin

i've never worked a night shift before. it's been about three weeks and i am
only starting to get in the swing of things

being wide awake and ready to wind down with a beer at 7:30 AM on a tuesday is a
strange place to suddenly be. living in a suddenly frozen desert swamp sort of
adds to that uncanni-ness. 

it has frozen in texas and my pipes are cracked and broken

there is almost no part of this shanty house that isn't elligible to join the
AARP. it's one of the last ranch style ramblers left in montrose, all of the
others have been replaced by bizzare brutalist white cube apartments which i
assume house pod people

our ballbusting 900 year old landlady (slum lord) sent out the handyman steve.
steve is not a plumber which is a point expressly made to me, by steven, several
times

we were not forewarned of this & steve's arrival came unexpectedly

8:00 AM thursday morning is now my time to furiously discuss drugs, on drugs,
with internet strangers soon to be nebulous internet acquaintances, then
friends, then perhaps even those friends from the internet you've known for a
decade suddenly

from my desk, if the door is open, i catch about a half-degree of the window
facing the backdoor. a full degree if i lean back. i lean back as to kind of
avoid the bizzare reality that the other players of the space game seem to deal
with the same problems i do at an alarming frequency. i lean back

	There;s a fucking guy back there

angry at the fact that i have to now deal with this, i find our friend steve in
the back yard, sauntering around, muttering to himself in a way that's between
mumbling but below speaking

"surely that man has a blue tooth head set"

but i was already smiling wide knowing he didn't. if you're going to appear in
my backyard unannounced, milling around babbling to yourself is the way to do
it

steve doesn't really speak english. you'll read that and think he's like any
other non english speaker but that is not the case with steve. steve will get
out about four or five sentences in perfectly spoken english before switching to
(hindi?) for a bit. you'd think that if 80% of his communication was clear,
that'd be enough for mutual understanding, but steve is all over the place

steve was furiously pacing around the broken pipe when i got to the back door.
that is a fact i'm only coming to realize is important now, writing this,
because the person standing near a broken pipe with a wrench is a plumber,
someone who is allowed in my back yard in this circumstance

HEY

YO

i tried to whistle but made a stupid faring noise with my mouth

he swings around at the perfect moment to make my sudden departure all the more
awkward as i realized how waistbanding a pistol in sweat pants was extremely not
working. remember where we are

by the time im out of my room steve has his head poked through the back door

YOU COULD NOT WITH YOUR FINGER POINT A WORSE PLACE FOR PIPE BREAK

and boy howdy he was right. if you're going to break a pipe, don't make it the
one between your meter and a valve, and especially don't make it one on the
ground next to the garage you keep all your weirdo electronics and "vintage
computers" you "collect"

i sort of like plumbing. i've done some plumbing. there's an illegal stipulation
in our lease that lets the landlord, you know, just not maintain the place. with
my engineering background i am of course compelled to think i am somehow
qualified to solve these problems. i'd like to use the expression "dive into
with full force" to describe my approach but combine that with the imagery of a
blind person gracefully swan diving into an empty concrete swimming pool

but this is not about me, i am not particularly interesting. -- steve. steve is
sort of interesting.

his murmuring grew to a breathless combination of words which i thankfully
mostly understood (individually, not collectively). steve was upset with the
pipe situation to be described later in this document's best paragraph. he was
upset at the last person to work on the pipes here because they fucked up. he
was amused by how preposterously inconvenient the broken pipe lay. this
amusement was not anger

what followed next was clearly anger. perplexed, astounded anger

ice on the ground is something you see once every 4 years in (excellent) swamp i
live in. it's a pretty reasonable assumption that a broken pipe after a
freeze/melt cycle is due to the freeze/melt cycle

this was not the case

the pipe had ruptured due to a sequence of truly insane and utterly nonsensical
choices made by the previous plumber who almost certainly kicked the bucket in
the reagan years as suggested by the lead solder used to seal joints and lead
paint used to, well, just hold on

the pipe burst because a large metal rod was inserted *through* it. the details
on exactly what went down are a little fuzzy as my simian mind was preoccupied
with thoughts about some weird software that started as a fluid dynamics
simulator and is now a physics simulator and an insane person simulator. i would
digress and expound on this but my thoughts aren't yet settled on the space
game

the rod went through the pipe and into the ground, on the other end were rusty
wires. it is a grounding rod, you know, for electricity.

i unfortunately know a litle bit about this. you can ground a circuit through a
cold water tap, like when you're lining the fence with copper wire to create a
makeshift shortwave antenna with your weird kind of racist dad. water is
conductive. more commonly the rod goes into the ground, which is also usually
conductive

so, this grounding rod, sitting between a 3 foot gap between the back of the
garage and fence, an overgrown mess of decades of detritus and weeds that had
grown into vines that had grown into weird anemic trees. this grounding rod was
painted. it didn't come painted. it was painted. it was painted the same color
as the garage. paint is not conductive. the circuitry in my house was not
grounded. thankfully there is no ground pin on the outlets in this ancient home
besides the one i strangely installed one day. the amp plugged into it now gives
a hum where it didn't before. the ground was subsequently disconnected to
eliminate the ground loop as we are in our early 20s and cannot die, especially
not in an electrical fire

it's sort of nice to know that even back in the 1940s people screwed up as
royally and maximally as possible, employing such a degree of backwards demented
logic as you'd expect from a home owner's association bylaws handbook or normal
computer software

anyways, steve, ohoho. oh boy. steve did not fuck with this at all. steve, the
man who is self purportedly not a plumber, immediately took to the valve between
the city's water main and our house with the wrong implement. an implement used
to unwrench joints around a u-bend underneath a sink. it worked perfectly

	`I just use this for many valve. It works mostly. No need for heavy T`

(steve's parlance doesn't transcribe to text very well)

steve continued,

	`Too many tools is too bad. I use this one for tiling and for drywall
	and for ducks` (ducts?)

he spoke while gesturing listlessly at nothing in particular. it became clear
that steve's limited, nebulous tool set was carefully chosen. when you are the
un-fuck-it man for an ice queen landlord you sort of have to be a plumber and an
electrician and a roofer and sometimes a debt collector. the arcane set of tools
used to approximate all of these trades made a bit more sense

the lack of a monkey wrench did not make sense. none of steve's esoteric
implements could wrench like we needed them too. i offered to purchase one from
the nearby hardware store which was a great excuse for me to go to the nearby
hardware store and purchase a monkey wrench, *my* monkey wrench. steve objected
but i was deadset. i was buying a wrench today. the newly purchased wrench
calmed two agitated souls: one was drowning in thoughts about drugs and space
and coincidence. the other was angry he couldn't wrench down a pipe joint

a few hours passed. several trips were made to the hardware store by my
roommates and the new tennant in the garage apartment, less than $20 was spent.
i sort of farted around not helping while getting jawed at by steve who had
permenently changed the subject to grand life philosophies. i'm about the last
person that'll tolerate some windbag wasting my time, but between the fun of
trying to decipher what the fuck steve was saying and what language (or
nonsense utterances) he'd conclude thoughts with, i realized that his sensical
words actually, uhh, rang true

steve believes in doing a good job. read that last sentence without the
disinterested, vaguely-trying-to-be-funny style this document has maintained so
far

this hit me on a deeper level than i was expecting

i'm young and do not really understand the world very well. i'm not so young
that i'm blind to the depths of what there is to understand about this world,
i'm allegedly content with the resignation that for the time being i'm sort of a
dumbass and will continue to be a dumbass in the future, although less so
hopefully

i'm going to tell you that i believe in "doing a good job", "doing things
properly", "taking your time to properly solve a problem", or "solving a problem
for the sake of solving a problem and nothing else". i am going to tell you that
these are some of strongest and earnestly compulsions i feel. i'm not lying when
i write this but i wasn't lying when admitted to how little i understand
anything at all, so maybe weigh those two facts against each other

nearing 200 lines, i realize i have spent the hours meant for sleeping writing
a truly innappropriately verbose wall of text all because of how stoked i was
that an angry muttering tom bombadil character spent an extra 45 minutes to fix
a pipe properly

the new pipe was measured and cut, threaded. steve's measuring tape is
interspliced with further, smaller graduations he hand-scratched into a long
measuring tape. the previous graduations on the tape presented steve with an
unsuitably low resolution of 1/8th of an inch

i'd guess this was a 12 foot measuring tape. i never saw the end of the
graduations, i don't doubt for a second they extend the entire length of the
tape. do you know how many notches you'd have to painstakingly scratch on to a
12 ft measuring tape to change it from 1/8" -> 1/16". well, don't: 1152

steve might be a little nuts but holy shit a master plumber could not have done
a better job. the dude fuckin laid on his back, in the small pond of pipeleak
water, so as to see up a length of fixed pipe so he could better lay teflon tape
on the *inside threaded surface of the pipe joint*. i challenge you to try and
imagine what such a manuever would be like, considering the damp slimy pipe
surface, the fucking hell that is teflon tape (fuck teflon tape) all while
laying in a pool of possum water at the impossibly cold temperature of 45 F

my pipes don't leak anymore. there is no longer a bizzaro steel rod puncturing
the most critical pipe on this property. i own a monkey wrench when i did not
this morning. i am thinking less anxiously about the space game, still.

me and steve sat around smoking cigarettes and communicating with each other
through a method i can't describe but wasn't reliant on words. we talked about
the virtues of work ethic and then we talked about those that have broken our
hearts. the conversation, as well as this text, ended with a solemn mutual
acknowlegement of how terrifying electricity is and how terrified of electricity
we are


									       k