Progressive

It is finally happening. In the back of my mind I've wondered if we would, when it should, when we could. There is no rehearsal for this surreal play. You just show up on stage with whatever props are laying around. If you'd like others, maybe the Director will write in something useful like a burning shrubbery... nothing too big mind you. That's happened once.. maybe. I am not crazy about the odds of waiting that long for random luck. Priorities ebb.

Today was momentous because it ebbed low enough to buy flooring. It lurked somewhere in the lower pantheon of life's necessities for a few years. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is peculiar in this regard. Its not like Bingo. You can have some moderate degree of food and shelter before going on to seek employment and eventually the Nirvana of self actualization... whatever that is. I think its done in layers. You double back to upgrade... Mrs. Maslow could have pointed this out to Abe at some point during a home renovation. In my case, life has not recently presented a near-death experience, job loss, or natural disaster. Blame it on Spring.

The removal of the dead tree was proof I was capable of getting around to the things at the bottom of the To Do list, but the turn toward summer has me seeing all of nature fixing up their nest. Why not mine? I know it will not last, but it is a good feeling having temporarily given the finger to entropy. And that rude neighbor kid that came by last year and commented on how bad the flooring looked? She can complain about the deck instead.

So its done. Trigger pulled. Poof. In three weeks it will be done (and most importantly, by someone else). I have to admit this particular item has been bugging me for a while. I've noticed it and disliked it for some time... but wasn't sure how to get around to the actual change. Marriage is of course a factor, but not really hindering this. In fact, it can only help, since I have no real confidence in any color matching at all. My wardrobe is really not evolved successfully past the Garanimals era of my youth. My wife knows what ocher is. How sandstone is different that willow. I am a deer, wholly dazed in the glare of these light tones. I don't know why it took so long, but its done. Now I'll fixate on some other insignificant thing to prove I'm getting somewhere.

Progress is a funny thing. It defines a relative movement between two places. Does it mean you are getting anywhere? Yes, I think, just not anywhere that's necessarily important, so that also sounds like no. It reminds me of the conversation every kid has with their parent: "why do I have to clean my room if it just gets messed up again?". A fair question. I usually answer "because I said so" since their statement is a gratuitous assertion. But at the root is a question that never really seems to go away. It sits, like my tree and carpet, at the bottom of this long list of unanswered questions. How do you know if you've made progress? Do you have to do anything to progress?

The American myth is told with its saccharine aftertaste, lauds hard work as the root of success. Perhaps that is true and there are 200 million different definitions of work out there. The "land of the free, home of the brave" seems more aptly a roost for the doughy and indeterminate. Clearly then you can have progress without hard work... can you have progress with out work at all?

Well initially I would have thought no, but then I ran into the Infinite Monkey Theory. It turns out if you wondered what would happen if you never cleaned the kitchen again, if your kids didn't clean their rooms anymore, they might actually have the means to clean themselves. So the theory has been posited that an infinite number of monkeys pounding away at keyboards will eventually bang out Hamlet. They produce nothing nothing nothing to nearly infinity, then... poof: Something's rotten in the state of Denmark. It sounds like entropy itself could wear things to so untenable a state it actually organizes, given enough time.

Is this possible? I don't know. First of all, if chimps wrote Hamlet, I would think there would be a banana or a tire swing mixed in somewhere for dramatic effect. Yet then I remember we have a mega-lotto jackpot in every state so any shlub with a buck can get a few hundred million. If I didn't replace the carpeting, it would eventually wear through to the floor, which would perhaps wear until it broke and we all fell to the basement and walked on the concrete. I am not sure the theory works that way. Perhaps an unclean kitchen gives rise to a super strain of antibiotics. Penicillin was first found on bread. But does this new antibiotic do my dishes? That's what I want. I want to know if a life of sloth nets out the same result as one of furious labor. In the end, I suppose each consumed 1 unit of life, its just when I look at it, one seems to have been dead for a lot longer. I just can't tell which one that is.