Last week I spend some time during the day sanding and oiling a new pair of butcher-block countertops that I did not construct. One sits atop a kitchen cabinet and the other sits on a matching utility shelf. Both are freestanding and kitchen-counter height. I sand them with 150 and 220 grit sandpaper first. A few hours later between computer tasks I oil the countertops with butcher block oil — actually labeled oil and finish, which sounds like a command. I am informed that this brand of oil and finish I’ve bought is not really an oil, but rather a complex, occult cocktail of tung oil, long oil alkyd resin, Stoddard solvent, mixed isomers, and a grand goulash of other chemical schmutzes. I refer to it as an an oil anyway, since the word oil appears first on the label. Evidently woodworking pros scoff at anyone who uses this shit. The fumes smell sweet and dangerous. I have unwisely disregarded the warnings to wear a face mask and to apply in a well-ventilated area. As a result I have breathed too much of the stuff. Not a lot a lot, but too much nonetheless. I have no doubt inhaled volumes of sanding sawdust too. I will pay for this in my old age — or possibly the payment will be an old age hastened.

The wood drinks up the oil, amplifying the grain colors very beautifully. In many places the oiled grain takes on an affecting pearlescent luster, which I did not expect but am glad to see. This first coat takes several hours to dry. I return to working at the computer as the drying oil’s fragrance fills up the house, sickening the houseplants and ironing out my cortical gyri and sulci. A couple days later I re-sand lightly with 400 grit, then apply another oil coat. I may be building up an immunity to the oil fumes, or else succumbing to them. The oil-soaked cloth I’ve used must be disposed of in an oil-soaked-cloth-type disposal place and I promise not to disregard this part. I still need to re-sand again and may add more coats this week. I am obviously not good at this but the idea here is for the countertops to look a notch above OK-to-passable while being able to withstand grievous kitchen abuse. They can always be re-oiled and are supposed to be, periodically. Just kidding about the grievous kitchen abuse. The worst these countertops need to withstand is being covered with clutter, being splashed with bad beverages, being leaned on in moments of vacuous contemplation, and being bumped into in the dark.

Two brainless invertebrates arrive this morning with a moving van and carry away the accursed sofa and chair on behalf of the Craigslist buyer. A better way to put this might be: They present us with about thirty square feet of beautiful vacant space.

The blue sofa and blue chair have been successfully sold. The deal has gone down. The payment has gone through. The buyer will be picking up the furniture this week or next week. The transaction was originally supposed to be in cash, but we work something out and the buyer pays up front by getting me an Amazon gift certificate. Thus the sofa and chair will very shortly be converted into:

Sense of accomplishment! I finally do some creative fiction writing today. The first fiction I have done in many years. It is a Craigslist ad. Putting my ancient matching blue sofa and easy chair up for sale. The fiction is that these tormented specimens of cotton-wrapped polystyrene are actually worth the $60 and $25 (or $75 if bought together) I am asking for them. I say blue but a better term might be formerly blue. They now lean a little bit grey. A little bit sun-blanched. A little bit dust-coated. In the ad I wax autobiographical and mention that I purchased the items at a furniture boutique in Charlottesville, Virginia back in 2000 — what was I doing there? And in a moment of brave confessional candor I add that my wife and I have never smoked, have never owned pets, and have no children — this is a delicate way of saying that the sofa and chair are not, in my estimation, stinky. Dusty, yes. Faded, yes. Splashed here and there with wine and sweet-and-sour sauce and mysterious moving-van bleachy spatterings, yes. But they are not the stuff of 90s Volkswagen commercials. They’ll be fine in someone’s basement. Or planted in someone’s hipster pad and rebooted as shabby chic. Or reupholstered to a fare-thee-well and then lounged upon relentlessly until they explode or collapse. Someone please just buy them and get them out of my house. To make more room for our terrible Toronto tables.

Trying to get out from underneath a lot of heavy furniture.

Above: The Stretchy Room, or Accidental Fun With Lenses.

OK. We are pretty much moved in. Furniture placement is still pending, so the books and movies are for now on the floor.

I spend Sunday afternoon assembling a new bookcase, a tall dark double-width deep-shelf wooden case for our TV room. (Now to be called the TV-and-reading room?) Bookcases in two rooms now — our apartment’s center of book-nerdy gravity has shifted, no longer just the one room. I’ve moved most of the floor-cluttering book overflow into the new case, but the arrangement is still temporary, haphazard; Laura and I have yet to start the book-reorganization and reshelving process in earnest. (Which books go in which room?) Also, the room for now smells pleasantly sawdusty.

Alberto Manguel, A Reading Diary, setting up his book collection in a new house:

I’m in my library, surrounded by empty shelves and growing columns of books. It occurs to me that I can trace all my memories through these piling-up volumes. Then suddenly everything seems redundant, all this accumulation of printed paper. Unless it is my own experience that isn’t necessary.

Red Wine Armageddon very nearly happens to the great white sofa. I accidentally knock a stemless glass of red wine off my desk and in a split second it pours down onto my jeans and the floor, splashing an art class masterpiece of dark red splatters (a full red colour with magenta overtones, quoth the label) up onto the back of the sofa a foot away. This is by no means the first glass of red wine I have spilled recently. I am beginning to suspect there may be something in the stuff that impairs my motor skills. The wine in this instance is Spanish and hails from the Catalonian region of Terra Alta, which appears to mean either Earth High or High Earth. Standing there in black denim half-soaked in delicious High Earth vino, I note with a terrible gravity the freshly polka-dotted sofa back and I actually exclaim OH NO like a frantic hausfrau and then prepare for my better half to deservedly murder me where I stand, to murder me and chainsaw me open and take out my fucking soul and spread it on a soda cracker. However it doesn’t take long to register that the large off-white knit blanket that we have draped over the sofa back has proven its quality and heroically shielded the virgin white sofa fabric from 100% of the wine stains, which consist of a beguiling mixture of cabernet sauvignon, garnatxa, tempranillo, merlot, and syrah, and which turn black when Shout is profusely applied to the brave blanket and mostly disappear upon rinse. The sofa survives unscathed, as do I. Nay, he reserved a blanket, else we had been all shamed.

New sofa is delivered today. Lord have mercy: it is a white sofa — brilliantly, blindingly, terrifyingly Arctic bone china white, Paradisically pure white, the white of virgin snow, of supernova nuclei. It sits in the apartment like a great ocean liner, spotless and ghostly, a blank page, a wide whitened smile. Its eco-cotton upholstery drum-tight with expectancy, awaiting that first smudge, be it inky fingerprint or red wine Armageddon. The slightest opportunity to be smirched, stained, discolored, defiled: dust, perspiration, dead skin, harsh language. The furniture showroom salesweasels, drawing up the paperwork, look at us like we’re joking. The furniture delivery goons, unwrapping the plastic, look at us like we’re insane. Perhaps we are insane. Friends, family, strangers on the street — no one can believe our folly. You bought a white sofa? What’s wrong with you, they scream. Don’t you ever want to have KIDS?!?! The white sofa: home décor hallmark of evolutionary dead ends.

Ah yes, antiquing. Slouching around in dusty, musty, varnishy creep-shops packed to the rafters with revolting baubles, gaudy expensive junk, and cellar-scented corpse furniture. The vulturous proprietors can be entertainingly patronizing. They can tell just by looking at us that we don’t have the ingredients to make a real purchase, something worth a goddamn — a grandfather clock, a kingly dinette set, an Escalade-sized oil painting, an ornately carved and inlaid sideboard from darkest imperial China. It’s possible that no one ever really buys that big-spender stuff, that it is just rotated in and out of the store basements each season; but they permit this great pretense, this sense of casual-customer shame, that amidst all these looming four-figure spooky museum pieces, all we can buy is this measly postcard, that puny plate, this moddish flower vase, that ancient empty dynamite crate. Only rarely do we get something that can’t be carried away in a plastic bag. E.g., yesterday we buy a messily-restored wooden washstand. Previously from the same shop we’ve bought a strange chair. But ordinarily, it has become a sort of sad running joke that whatever kitschy gimcrack or cobwebby curio we can bring ourselves to buy, cashiers seem to always make a show of asking us, with a pitying smile, Did you find a TREASURE?

We attend two concert-hall jazz shows and find ourselves surrounded by unmoving old fossils. We pick up a crummy wooden Quebecois coffee table that some Torontonian Craigslister suckers us into buying. We eat sandwiches at an old-fashioned deli that somehow has no Russian dressing anywhere on the premises — I end up mixing some up myself at the table with ketchup and mayo, stirring them together on a saucer like paint on a palette. (In retrospect: I may have had better luck had I asked for Thousand Island.) We purchase a new tea kettle, after discovering last week that our existing one has been secretly feeding us rust. We hit Fat Bob’s at like 10:30pm for a late dinner of ambrosial barbecued shredded hog. We buy vaguely sci-fi silverware. We are ushered into sleep by fine spirits and stupefying silent films.

Billy Wilder on his trouble learning English: I couldn’t rearrange the furniture in my mouth. (A fine counterpart to this trio.)

REMOVED
This works. Am now typing to you from a new room’s corner, sitting folded into a cozy makeshift workstation assembled from disparate furniture components, desk end-table speakers shelves, things propped up on things, gloriously filled back-to-back bookcases standing within reach, a pair of warm low swan-necked lamps peering down at me from atop the closest case. The ceiling leans down a little; the hardwood floor speaks when walked upon. There is no room but I gather I need no room. With the door closed nothing else exists in here, intrudes, dilutes. All there is is me and you and our letters dancing the distance and lack of distance between us. All but ready to acclimate and begin and depart.