The Friday of another week of construction going on inside and outside the 600-square foot cottage beside my house. A special work crew was up and ready to hang sheet rock at 8AM. I called them "sheet rock stars". Their skill is in handling these clumsy pieces of wallboard that must be cut precisely and hoisted up on scaffolding. They speak Spanish back and forth at each other all day.

One yells out dimensions while the other carves the 4x8 sheets with a special knife. The one below then picks up the sheet and lifts it over head to the one on the scaffolding. The one below then hops up on the scaffolding and helps hold the sheet in place overhead while the other one drills screws into the sheets and studs with a cordless electric screwdriver. I stood and watched them, on and off, for most of an hour. If I had not been paying attention, I fear that they would have stuffed me away between a couple of studs, as if I were a character in a horror tale of Poe.

I once hung sheet rock myself. Fortunately, all my work has been torn down so that I no longer need to look at it, and so that others will not be tortured with unsatisfied curiosity concerning the sight of it. A right and proper way exists in which to make the walls of a building look clean. I know what the finished results should look like, and I understand the tools and materials, and how to use them, but there is an art and mastery of technique that one should also possess when attempting to construct large plain surfaces that others will be forced to view for many years to come.

If I had the strength, the youthful vigor, and, frankly, the desire, to hang sheet rock in a manner that appealed to all, I honestly think that after I had walled about ten or fifteen houses, each with ten or fifteen rooms, I just might get better at it. That could be more of my idealistic, dream-like thinking that carries me awkwardly through a world that demands precision, conformance, adherence to specification, and care for the concern of others. For me, in my sheet-rock hanging years, I thought the mastery was accomplished in paint and thick paste, but have since come to learn, thanks to the kindly criticism of those about me every day in this life experience, that my craftsmanship and sense of beauty and design are ever-so-sadly skewed.

Maybe this is why I took to writing. No heavy lifting is involved. When two pieces don't quite match up, just insert a paragraph return between them, and add in what might seem like appropriate punctuation. I may write myself into a corner, but I will never seal myself up inside of a wall with my words. When others criticize my thoughts and the mechanics of how I put them out for reading, I can claim that it is only a draft, or that it is a new and fashionable current in literature that I am trying to emulate. I know of no measuring and concern for exact dimensions in my writing, but I suppose that sometimes it is quite apparent. And, if after great labor, the writing just appears to lack all sense of design and purpose, I do not have to tear it down and haul it off to the county dump before I can begin anew.

I called these guys this morning "sheet rock stars". They hadn't seen my sheet-rock work I did years before because it had already been torn out of the remodel project and hauled away, but I suspect that if they had seen any of it, they would have suggested to me that I take up writing instead.