Life, before and after the end of civilization

I don’t know if the world will actually go nuts. I don’t know if pleasant society will ultimately collapse, resulting in some barren Mad Max landscape, ruled by leather-clad road-rage-aholics who all seem to have an Australian accent. I doubt it, but I don’t know.

But if there ever is one seriously bad Earth Day coming, I’ll last about a week.

My back door gives on to a very nice, spacious deck, at the second-story level, with stairs down to ground level. I’ve spent many fond hours on that deck, reading, laptopping, snoozing, listening to music, listening to birds, watching planes leap away from the airport, watching potted annuals mutter, get depressed, and finally commit suicide.

So, the deck is great. But I could live without the stairs, for reasons I’ll shortly explain, and a few days ago, I tackled the project of removing them.

Here’s the back story.

One day last summer, as I dozed on the deck in the serenity of singlehood, a leash-less neighborhood dog, who had obviously lost his copy of the community bylaws, leapt up the stairs and announced himself. You might say I was surprised. You might also say the ocean is “damp.” I was not so much at a loss for words, as I was at a loss for which of several words to use, and in what order.

Shortly, though, I did settle on a fairly pejorative vocal buffet, featuring concise nouns that employed many of our finer, guttural consonant noises. The dog, a sensitive beast, was offended, and said so, and immediately moved on.

And there’s my motivation for the project. These stair-enabled disruptions, I don’t need. Nor would I care for some overly-enterprising Truck-O-KornFed-Kowmeat salesman who, upon getting no response at the front door, decided to hook it around back. Plus, you never know when Congress might decide to implement some kind of retroactive Stair Tax, or announce their new Newel Post Licensing Allotment Revenue Generation Act, as adjusted for inflation, altitude and/or/but not limited to vertigo.

So, over the weekend, the weather having recently turned to such projects, I decided to remove the stairs. I mean, how hard could it be?

A lot of what I’ll be describing next, you probably saw coming…

In a short time, I had employed and exhausted my expansive tool set (standard hammer, crowbar, aforementioned concise nouns). I had also managed to scrape a goodly amount of skin off one arm, and puncture my thumb on the side of a nail. Yes, Virginia, there is a way to cut yourself on the side of a nail. And in that short matter of blood-stained time, I had managed to remove, along with dearly-missed slabs of my exoskeleton, the handrails and a few dozen balusters.

(The removed wood sits, still and now, on the deck, wildly splaying tetanus-laced nails in all directions, spearing skyward like Jack Nicholson’s haircut or some overly demented out-takes from a ‘Saw’ sequel. I don’t know where my skin went. Maybe the neighborhood dog…)

And so, I face a dim future in the post-apocalyptic dim future. I will not be an amazing, invaluable, leather-cosseted asset after the Fall of Civilization. I’m obviously beyond my pay grade already, as Site Foreman of my own deck-struction project. To proceed with the demolition, my skills and my tools are inadequate. I either need tools that are more subtle (circular saw, claw hammer, more band-aids), or less subtle (mallet, truck & winch, Mad Max extras, Twilight Zone-sized termites). And I’ve only eight months or so until the first snowfall.

Perhaps it’s best if I just wait, anyway. Joe Biden could easily show up, hair plugs waving in the light spring breeze, reminding me to be patriotic, insisting that I give half my deck to those who are deck-challenged. Or, any day now, Congress could pass TARP 91-G, Phase 68, and insist that Bank of America needs my house for a mission-critical, pre-planned, non-bailout-funded Caligula weekender, and I should go live in a more patriotic place, like under a bridge. Or under a tarp.

Maybe I can sublet from the dog.