Filling holes with various materials

Today, in addition to spackling up a messy patch on the family room wall, I’ll be continuing to try to shake a person out of my head.

The messy patch is where someone (Jeff or an electrician...it’s lost at this point) sawed a thin rectangular gorge into the stucco where an electrical box was meant to be installed. My brother-in-law Wade finished the associated lighting installation just last month, but needed only the space for a single switch there, so the stucco is in the midst of a 3-step repair by me which, with luck, will disguise the mess. The person is an actual, existing human whom my disobliging imagination has elected to insert into any daydreamed vignette, where Jeff’s decline has left a different kind of gorge.

My next step with the blemished wall is squeeze spackle, from a tube. I’ve chiseled the leftover chunks of stucco, which Wade had to remove from inside the rectangle, into pieces I could glue back in, puzzle style. Then I managed to make one of two cans of spray foam which have been sitting in the basement for x years function well enough to fill in some of the more gaping gaps. (note: Neither Touch-n-Foam® nor Great Stuff® lasts forever unopened.) Today I will hack off the foamy overgrowth (spray foam always over-expands,) then squeeze spackle into the remaining crevices and hope to putty knife the whole thing into something resembling the rest of the wall.

You can come see the finished result if you want. I will not reveal the identity of the unfortunate person who keeps appearing, without having agreed to do so, in my mental movie reels. Don’t worry, you would never guess, so don’t try. It’s that random. Even though this is a person I have spoken to on rare occasions, I actually don’t even know whether the feller is attached or not, so that should rule out any notions you might have.

So, despite the absurd refusal of my psyche to stop doing that, it’s a little comforting to know that he has no way of knowing how much time he gets to spend with me in that alternate universe. I think it’s just one of those things like mental Tourette’s...it will just have to go away regardless of my conscious bidding. In the meantime I have Bruce (see pic) to hang out with,

and a wall to patch. Busyness is the key to keeping stupidity at bay.