a slab town handyman builds a dream

(that no mexicans will pay for)

There are some tasks that seem so unspeakably difficult, so massive in the time, attention and effort required in order to accomplish them, most mere mortals recoil before beginning.

There have been many people who have started out running marathons or writing a PhD. The number of those who have completed these tasks is far smaller.

The trails and paths up Mount Everest are littered with tents, poles, ladders and many frozen corpses. Though many began with good intentions, a good many of them took their last steps on that fabled mountain.

Recently I’ve engaged in such an endeavour. No, I’m not talking about the epic bike rides I’ve been on. Though they are huge undertakings, they pale in comparison to my most recent task.

I’ve been building a fence.

Now don’t laugh dear reader. I’ll admit, the fence part, the vertical boards and the nailing is easier to do than scratching your arse - that is unless you’re particularly a large person with milk-bag arms that can’t reach around your butt’s circumference. If this is the case, might I suggest getting a chicken to do it for you? They love eating worms and mites and if you can’t reach the deepest part of your darkest regions, I’m guessing the area isn’t parasite free.

But I digress…

And dear reader, though this digression may seem random, impossible journeys where one must ‘dig in’ to the centre of your arse point you in the direction where fence building, or rather, hole digging for said fence, becomes my Mount Everest.

Digging in Dartmouth is diabolical.

Dartmouth Nova Scotia - AKA Slabtown – is blessed with a wealth of gravel and cobblestone filled surface cover held together with a thin glue of dirt. One doesn’t ‘dig’ in Dartmouth. You pry. Pry a rock, move a rock, move on. Pry another, move another then repeat. It’s a grueling and painful process of scooping out rounded stone boulders and bleeding on broken up super sharp slate. Each hole a minor summit attempt, each rock a treacherous crevasse.

And unlike an Everest attempt, there’s no Sherpa to carry your shit.

I needed a shortcut. I needed a tool

After a quick trip to the Home Despot, I was back to the trenches with a gas powered post hole auger.

This beast promised to chew through sandstone and shit shale.

My hands shook with exhausted anticipation.

Let’s git this shit turnt up!

Oh, the optimism of a fool with a credit card.

Sadly, things were not so simple.

The mechanical gopher wouldn’t go.

I pulled the cord - nothing.

Pulled it again, still nothing.

I pushed the primer till the bubble disappeared and choked it more times than a teenage boy discovering the joys of pocket pool.

I checked the fuel. I checked the choke. Then I noticed the 'on' switch. Or rather, what purported to be an 'on' switch. It was clearly labeled "ON" pointing upwards.

Or was “On” downwards.

Who designed this turd?

Was it Putin?

Was it the Turnip?

Were they literate?

Was it just borken?

There was a faded image melted into the plastic a cryptic hieroglyph of a spark plug either firing or dying a quiet death - it looked like a man farting.

It seemed to suggest that on was off and off was on and down was up and holes were all filled before you really dug them.

Did they slip LSD onto the handgrips? Reality was truly on the move.

This, dear reader, was no mere mechanical failure. This was sabotage. A plot, no doubt, by the MAGAty Turnips to the south, aiming to frustrate Canadia into becoming the 51st state by working us into a collective rage with deliberately bad instruction manuals and perversely designed power tools. They've already infiltrated the Scandinavian flat-pack furniture companies, haven't they?

Switching out vital instructions, replacing sensible diagrams with abstract art, all to drive young people, gay men, and the recently divorced (prime flat-pack assemblers, all of them) into such a state of bewildered fury that America is destined to add a 51st, 52nd, 53rd, and 54th state to its crumbling empire, just for a chance at a sensible Allen key.

I played with the switches and yanked the cord while my hands grew bulbous blisters beside the valleys carved into my skin by the hand scooped slate.

As I insisted on the shortcut, I strayed further from my dream, my goal of building a fence, a big fence, a majestic fence, the fence to end all fences.

Best of all dear reader?

I wasn’t expecting the Mexicans to pay for it.

Defeated by foreign powers and their infernal machines, I returned to the crowbar. And then, it started to rain.

Now, if you hate digging and want to make it worse? Just add rain!

The dust turned to slime. The sharp slate became slicker, greedier for flesh. Moving mud is heavy, messy, soul-destroying work. But here’s the kicker: in making it worse, the rain actually made things better.

The relentless Dartmouth downpour, made the tip of the crowbar I was 'digging' with penetrate deeper. The mud, while vile, offered less resistance to the dislodged cobblestones than the dry, compacted 'glue of dirt.'

It seems if you want to make something easier or better, a sure route to success is to first make it worse.

Just add water; water always wins.

When things in life, or in relationships, seem solid, blocked up, and impossibly hard, maybe the answer isn't to bash your head against the rock. Maybe you need to muddy things up a bit.

Let the tears flow, let the uncomfortable truths out, let the chaos rain down. It’s messy as hell, but sometimes that’s what it takes for the crowbar of understanding to finally penetrate deeper.

And it certainly beats wrestling with a MAGA-Turnip-sabotaged post-hole digger just to save a manicure you never had.