Last Friday night or some other one, I dreamt
that it was the first day of and I
was late for college. (That
phrase would be a helluva lot funnier if you had been a fly on the wall
watching my brother and me discussing the ridiculousness of Bruce Lee movie dialogue a thousand years
ago on a random jobsite.)
I had forgotten my backpack where I had stowed
my course schedule. Instead, I wore only my tool belt and cut-off jeans
shorts, Doc Marten boots. So, I just randomly
showed up at different classes around campus for the professors to berate me,
saying things like, There's no
place for a blue collar man in higher education. For the record, when
I finally started college way back when, that I had been a simple carpenter prior to admittedly (irrationally
perhaps) vexed me for sure. I
was older than the typical freshman and a helluva lot more strange for a
variety of ridic reasons and circumstances.
I woke up after the dream to the sound of what I
assumed was gunshot and malfeasance. In
the sunlight, it turned out to be hammering and Spanish – my across the street neighbor's
house was being re-roofed. It's funny (telling) how my unconscious mind reconnected
these two realities of my past with the accepted whatever of my present.
When I did that work back in the day, old dudes in overalls always seemed
to stop by and say dumb shit like, Boy
howdy; I bet it's hot up there. Or, Hey, hippie. Are you sure
everything is plumb and square? I hated those guys and I promised
myself that when I got old,
I would stand around and give people who were working for a living shit for no
obvious reason. As it turns out, I'm old now apparently. All I did that
Saturday was berate my Spanish brethren for the supposed subpar job they were
doing. And though it made me feel like a tool, I was satisfied that I had
finally exacted my revenge (however misguided) against those rednecks who once
disrupted my daily.
A friend of mine sent me a link tonight, said it reminded him of the Biesty and Macaulay drawings he’d seen as a kid. The
images in the article are beautiful amazing things and I relate to the so this is why I’m an architect nature of them. I to remember similar images from my childhood, but mine were worlds that I had
created alone, inside of my wandering mind. One of my first cogent
memories is of scotch taping notebook paper together so I could have sheets
large enough to draw cross sections of coal mines. It must have been
after a family trip to Mammoth Cave
One of my assignments in architecture school was to draw a
1:1 wall section through the building I’d designed.
I learned more about architecture with that one lesson than I did
through any other aspect of the intervening six years it took them to declare
me worthy of pursuing a license. It reinforced what I already knew – that seeing is the only thing that matters.
We are all naturally drawn to the surface of a thing, right? I’m as seduced as you are by the shimmering exterior of an amazing building, a beautiful girl, an epic sunset. There’s value on top for sure, but the truth is found within. How amazing can a building really be if that perfect cornice detail allows water inside? How beautiful is that girl, if her heart isn’t open to new ideas or closed by judgment? How epic is a sunset, if there’s a tornadic thunderstorm buried in her perfect red clouds? It is always in the details, and that is what we too often miss.
Perhaps, there’s an end of
year reflection type of deal
at play here, but I don’t think so. I’ve always acknowledged and accepted
my path or whatever but I may never have
embraced it as much as I thought I have or as I should. Clearly, given
these recollections, I’m doing exactly what I was meant to be doing with my
life. It certainly hasn’t played out as I had imagined or as I had
originally drawn it up, but it’s
right, now. As the year comes to a close, I know that I’m exactly who and what
and when and why and where I should be. This is my life, and I love it.
I
know that because I see in section, not surface.
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