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In 2011 Donald Trump considered a run for President. Seth Meyers, ensconced (solo) behind the Saturday Night Live fake news desk mused, “If saying that you were going to do something was the same thing as doing it, my dad would be on the cover of ‘Finished Basement’ magazine.”

I rolled off the couch laughing. It hit too close to home. I started finishing my basement seven years ago. I completed the home theater, a pantry, an office, and a big bedroom. But the main area in the center of all these satellite structures was a mess. Exposed insulation. No drywall/half drywalled. No flooring. Half of the electrical outlets were merely wires in a box capped to complete a circuit. There was no return air vent in the basement to create negative air pressure, so the ducting over which I labored circulated something less than an asthmatic wheeze. Disappointing.

Worse than the incomplete state was all the “junk.” The “Oh I should probably throw away that scrap of off-fall lumber, but what if I need just-that-much for something when I finish the basement?”  Ergo there were piles of wood scraps everywhere. When we had theater nights, I’d be embarrassed to walk company past all the blight on the way to our posh little theater.

I stopped working on the basement. And then I couldn’t seem to remember how to get started again. Home renovation requires a surplus of money and time at the same time. Lots of room for excuses.

The Donald made good on his promise/threat to campaign for POTUS, so I figured I’d finally try to make the cover of Finished Basement magazine.  MBW and I might be forced to move in the next six months, so all my exposed wiring and jerry-rigged patched outlets were not going to pass any sober inspection.

I’m still not done with the basement, but I’m mudding the drywall seams now. This is a tedious process. It’s messy. It creates a coating of dust that gets sucked up by the HVAC blower and powders the whole house in confectioner’s sugar. And I must work in stages and give wet mud a full day to dry before I can move on to the next step. Suh-low.

I’m getting too old to haul sheets of drywall by myself, even though drywall is getting lighter. A dozen ten-foot spans of sheetrock can take the verve out of a man. At the end of a long day, I was a creaky lump of middle-aged goo.

Last Monday afternoon (technically Day One of vacation) I was daydreaming as I pulled a fresh utility blade across some drywall. My left index finger was hanging over the business edge of the metal straight edge and I lopped off a significant portion of the tip. In the X-ray below, you can see the shape of the normal ring finger and the angle of the cut across my index finger.

Shawn Xray Finger

I looked down into the gush of blood and knew right away that this was a before-and-after moment. I knew this would be an injury by which I would redefine normalcy. Strangely, the injury did not hurt that much. (Good thing, as I’d end up waiting four hours in an ER waiting room to see a surgeon.) But there was something very psychologically disturbing about looking down and seeing a part of me NOT THERE. Weirdness.

My finger will never be the same, but it will heal. It has come a long way in just a week. I had a follow-up visit with an orthopedic hand specialist and he said, “Shawn, I’ll see forty patients today, and there isn’t one of them who wouldn’t trade injuries with you. All things considered, you missed the bone. You missed the tendons and flexors on the top and bottom that give you mobility. And you sliced off the nerve clusters that would make it throb and hurt. Your finger will look weird and you’ll always think twice about tool safety every time you look at it.”

True dat.

In other news, I’m struggling a bit with my agent. I swore that whatever she asked me to do to my manuscripts, I’d shut up and do it. No ifs/ands/buts. We were off to a great start. We had two major revisions to my latest manuscript and I admit that she was right about almost everything. It’s a much better story. But then… Then her inner Politically Correct self kicked in. This third edit is looking like notes from a Womyn’s Studies major at Sarah Lawrence. My Agent is a woman of refinement from West London. My protagonist is a smartass teenage boy from Blytheville Arkansas. I’m sensing a reader disconnect. I find myself struggling with whether it’s a good idea to de-funny and de-edgy a story just to appease a hypothetically uptight school librarian somewhere down the line. That has never been me before. I’m not PC. I don’t respect PC. My instinct is to push back.

But I swore to myself that I’d just shut up and make any edits she suggested.

Yikes.

I have to figure out what is most likely to get me on the cover of ‘Published Author’ magazine. Hell, I’d give the rest of my left arm to finally achieve that dream.

 

 


3 comments

  • Dane Tyler

    August 31, 2015 at 4:21 pm

    OMG, I’ma hurl. That…your finger…oh…

    Good luck with the edits. I would flat refuse to PC that book if it were mine, but then, I’ll never grace the cover the of the magazine you’re gunning for either.

    Tough choices. Hope it’s worth it. We’re rooting for you, bro.

    • Shawn

      Shawn

      August 31, 2015 at 10:06 pm

      I had a childhood friend (from grade school) post pics of a traumatic accident she was in on Facebook. I swore I’d never post graphic photos online. I hope the X-ray conveys the story of my injury.

  • Gayle

    September 1, 2015 at 9:08 pm

    I am pretty sure I had (have?) that copy of Bananas magazine!