Hanging lights and talking to Stanley +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ It was a sunny day, finally. Garrett had ordered the box of backyard patio lights months ago and they stayed in the corner of the dining room floor, as a reminder and as a bet that this cold wet dark winter would eventually end. Today he went out to hang the patio lights. The instructions the came with the box weren't very good. And in the months of gray weather, he had watched youtube tutorials showing how other people had hung them. The house exterior was brick. A few weeks ago, he had tried drilling into the brick with his power drill and the drill made zero progress. Then he had ordered a masonry drill bit. Today Garrett took the masonry drill bit out, popped it into the drill and walked outside. Garrett pulled over a stepstool to the corner of the house, climbed up, held the drill up to the bricks and pulled the trigger on the drill. Then he saw his neighbor reading a newspaper at his picnic table in his adjacent backyard. "Hey Stanley!" Barely any difference at all. The drill bit spun but didn't bite into the brick. Garrett pressed the drill in harder into the bricks. The drill's motor slowed down and the sound went to a lower frequency, but still, the drill bit didn't dig into the brick. Garrett stopped. Got down off the step stool and stared at his house. Then he looked at the drill in his hands. "You're a masonry drill bit and that is masonry. What seems to be the problem?" He realized Stanley was watching and probably overheard him talking to himself. "Hey Stan -- I'm trying to drill into the wall so I can put in a hook so that I can string lights across the backyard, but this drill is not working. Any ideas?" "You're using just a regular power drill? Might not be powerful enough." Garrett walked over to Stan's table and sat down and got out his phone. "Stan you ever used a hammer drill?" Stan nodded back, leaned forward and erased a row of letters on the crossword. An hour later, Garrett pulled back into his driveway and lugged out of his car a rented hammer drill. Garrett saw Stanley was no longer in his backyard. Garrett tried the hammer drill with the smaller bit. The drill bit dug into the brick, but kicked up dust. The wind was blowing now and his hands felt cold. .. Garrett goes back to buy earplugs and a dust mask and a better drill bit. .. Garrett thinks about the bullshit machismo of the blue collor archetype, putting up with mediocre tools, wearing injuries like some kind of badge of honor. Once he has all the right gear, the task becomes straightforward. .. The anchors and the eye hooks go into the brick fine. .. Garrett drills into the tree and puts the third eye hook in to the tree. Maybe looks at the tree and then wonders about consciousness of trees. Like maybe they just experience time much more slowly than we do. They do make decisions, but not every second, but more like once a day or so. We flit by them perhaps. .. Garrett explains how he researched how much damage a single eyehook screw would cause. "It would actually be more destructive if I just looped the wire around the tree a few times, according to this tree surgeon website I found. A single puncture like this should hopefully not cause discomfort." "Why did they go with tree surgeon anyway? Why not tree barber or tree dentist or tree chiropractor?" .. Garrett goes back and gets the lights of the box. Then uses black zip ties to fasten them to the guide wire. The wind is blowing but the sun is shining and the sky is blue. Garrett moves to stand fully in the sun. While using the zip ties, he remembers how twenty years ago, he had travelled to the capital because for a planned march. He and his friends were there to spend the weekend in the office buildings, meeting with clerks, trying to educate members of congress about an upcoming vote on arms sales to a 3rd world dictator. But lots of other folks were there too to participate in a march that week. He remembered thinking these guys were missing the point. If they wanted their policy proposals to be listened to, they had to give up this street fighter mentality of activism. "See Stanley, the republic of {Indonesia} wanted to purchas all this military equipment, and there were laws on the books saying that weapon sales to human rights abusers were not legal, and really, you would think we wouldn't need to have "Honestly, though, the experience kind of soured me on activism. As soon as I got there, the organizers looked at me, and I could tell they were profiling me." "They hit me up for a donation. But the girl with the dreadlocks that I had split a cab with from the airport, they didn't ask her. Instead, they put her on something else." But if they're goin full on revolutionary, well, they needed to tighten up their security. Garrett was there as a volunteer, but he could easily have been an informant. Garrett looked at how he had attached a few of the zip ties, and turned the lights over, and then pulled on one of the zip ties, and the tie came right off. Then he went to the next light, pulled that zip tie, but it stayed tight. "Stanley -- check it out. I put some of these in backwards on accident. When you put them in wrong like this, you can still slide them off." Stanley smiled and studied the crosswords more. "When was that, when you were lobbying?" "Well, we weren't registered lobbyists. We were volunteers, but it was about 1998 I think." "Anyhow, like I said, the experience kinda ruined me on activism. I felt like it was more about posturing than getting shit done. There is this population of folks that find a cause that is easy to fund-raise on behalf of. I felt like for the professional, full-time organizers, the top priority was collecting donations." "And then for the volunteers, well, this was almost like a social event. At night, there was this really, really surreal catered party, where these two dudes went up on stage and talked about their experiences as refugees." "It was weird because earlier, one of them had seen this t-shirt I was wearing at lunch, that was a picture from an old martial arts movie, and he recognized the movie, and he and I had talked." "I didn't know he was a refugee... I thought he was like a cook or something like that." "During lunch, he and I had already been talking a whole bunch about old kung fu movies that we had both watched." "But I could tell the lady organizer, Sheila I think her name was, did not appreciate how we were just shootin the shit about Fearless Hyena. She gave me dirty looks! Never mind I had been doing in congressional office buildings for the last two days non-stop." "The whole thing was very strange. It was a fancy catered dinner at a nice hotel, kind of like a wedding I guess." "See, this was a real I'm not in Texas anymore moment too... those east coast aholes are such snobs... I've never been asked so many times where I went to college." Garrett stopped and tuned the lights and the cable again. Stanley half-smiled. "You put them on wrong again, didn't you?" Garrett grinned back. "Were you watchin me do them wrong?" A few minutes later and all the lights were attached to the guide wire, correctly finally. .. the last scene Stanley looked up and watched as Garrett turned on and off the lights with an app on his phone. "Looks really nice!" "Yeah, not so bad! I wonder what else is gonna break." "You know, I had I thought." Garrett didn't even look up from the remote. "Is it that if maybe I focused more on the work rather than treating it like an opportunity to free associate, and if maybe I was more methodical and more cautious, then I would have been done quicker?" Stanley pointed to his nose. "if I didn't look for metaphysical symbolism in everything, but just paid attention more, I probably would not have needed to buy replacement bulbs." Stanley shrugged along. "I think you're right Stanley. I think you're right. But I think maybe you're not considering the downside." "What's that?" "Well, remember how you're dead?" "I don't want to talk about that." "Yeah, well, I get that, but it's still a fact. Last summer was no fun for me either." "If it weren't for my overly active imagination, we couldn't hang out like this. Cuz last summer, instead of calling me up, you made a different choice. Remember?" Garrett turned on and off the lights a few more times and then walked inside. .. vim: set syntax=rst: