From this New York Times article on the World Series match up between the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians, we hear the Cub’s manager Joe Maddon talk about what’s on his mind, and the Indian’s 2nd baseman Jason Kipnes talk about how he feels being a Chicago native, playing for an opposing team in the sport’s ultimate competition.
“Cubs Manager Joe Maddon likened his drive to work, spent weaving around cars and pedestrians, to a video game.
“Thank God there’s not another round after this, I’ll say that,” Maddon said. “I’m ready for the family vacation. But it’s spectacular in all the best. Hyperbole definitely suits right now — whatever you want to throw out there, it really matches up to what’s going on right now.”
And now they threaten to provide another chapter of disappointment for the Cubs, breaking many hearts along the way.
“I love it.” Kipnis said. “Good. I hope I break all of them. I hope I break every single one of them. I hope I come home at Thanksgiving and the off-season, and I want to have a smile on my face when I look at all these Cubs fans.”
See the difference?
I’m not surprised that Cleveland is up 3 games to 1.
Let’s talk about what I call the “presumed order of death.”
If everything goes really well and things follow the presumed order of death, our grandparents die first, then hopefully many, many, many years later, our parents die, and then hopefully many, many, many, many years later, we die.
Daddy died in 1993.
Mom died in 2008 – 8 years ago today.
I’m next.
Here’s how I imagine Mom and Daddy in the great hereafter, their bodies young and perfect, restored to being the hipsters they were.
I know I’m next, but I also know that I’m still very much alive.
And on fire.
And in love with every moment of every day.
I miss Mom and Daddy but . . . I’ll be right along.
PS The order of death is randomly jumbled, leaving us without a shred of certainty about anything other than how we manage ourselves in response to the complete randomness of everything including the death order. Cheers!
Across all domains, excellence is excellence is excellence.
Across all domains, greatness fears no consequence.
Across all domains, the demands of greatness never rest.
Nor do the needs of the world, and the billions of people in it who are disadvantaged simply by the circumstances of their birth.
One of the most powerful ways I hold myself accountable to get smarter, be more effective and to work in greater service to others is that every single day I scavenge wisdom and enlightenment, from simple realization to full on revelation, from everything I see, hear, read or experience.
No matter how mundane, no matter how routine, no matter how insignificant, each moment of each day holds an embarrassment of riches when it comes to learning potential if you know what to look for.
Studying people at the top of their game is a cheater way to learn what to look for and fast track your own enrichment.
For over 25 years, I’ve studied Bill Gates. Together with Melinda and through their Foundation, they’ve materially changed the world for so much the better.
What do we have to learn from Bill Gates? Watch this.
In this speech Mr. Gates lays out for us a blueprint to follow for tackling the world’s most complex problems. To turn caring into action, we must overcome complexity and, here, one of history’s most effective problem solvers teaches us how we can solve our own problems, at our own scale, in our own lives, and within our own work. I’ve been lecturing on this speech since Mr. Gates gave it. Because I continue to follow their accomplishments and process in achieving them, I can honestly say that I owe a large part of my own success, and my unbridled happiness in achieving it, to Bill and Melinda Gates.
I’m not yet certain why, but Melinda Gates sent me a Facebook friend request and it was with a whispered prayer of gratitude, I hit “accept.”
That’s one example of who I study and why.
Here’s another.
I study human performance, and I study it for 2 reasons.
First is because I’m an old jock – I predate Title 9 and in elementary school I played on boys teams because I was good enough to – but I also study human performance because athletes have to peak perform, then quickly move on to do it again, and again, and again.
There isn’t an elite athlete who isn’t masterful, whether studied or innate, at emotional separation and benign neglect of the past, and at moving on with a high spirit, and complete peace of mind that perfected preparation will deliver, at the moment of critical need, the performance of a lifetime. Over and over and over again. Day after day after day in training, and in peak performance competition after competition after competition.
I’ve learned tremendous lessons from this guy, Richard Sherman.
“So if I had to pinpoint the most difficult part of my job, I would say that it’s not any one thing I do on any given play.
It’s doing all of it, every play.”
“You may not see it on your TV screen at home because the camera always follows the ball, but if the play is away from me, and I’ve got a fresh backup receiver across from me whose job is to take off down the field and run me away from the play, I have to respect his route. I have to run with him, full speed, like he’s the No. 1 receiver and he’s getting the ball — because there’s always a chance he might. And if I get three different fresh guys off the bench running me off on consecutive plays, and I come back up to the line against their true No. 1 in a crucial situation where I know they like to hit him on a fade, I can’t stop the game and say, “Hold up, I gotta catch my breath.…”
Nope.
I have to match up — and man up — against their best receiver and do my damn job.
No excuses.”
“You probably remember the 2013 NFC championship game when we beat the 49ers — you know, the game where I batted the ball away at the last second to set up the game-sealing interception and send the Seahawks to the Super Bowl.
I made that play because I saw it coming. Because I was prepared. And I had been banged up — run off on the plays before that one and used up on the the drives earlier in the game. When you get to the fourth quarter, nobody is 100%. That’s when ballers ball. That’s when stars shine. So no matter what had happened previously, the reality was that it was first-and-10, fourth quarter, inside two minutes, and it was me vs. the 49ers’ wide receiver, and one of us had to make a play.
My job was to make sure it was me.
And that’s what I did.”
And with that, Richard could easily be talking about a professional, problem solving Pilates teacher who has to put aside all other matters – all stress, all distraction, all everything – and give their absolute best, to every single client, every single session, every single exercises, every single time.
In life, as in sports, what’s done is done, and all that matters now is your ability to do your best, to create amazing, to give it all, again. And again. And again.
THAT’S what separates the absolute great from everybody else.
Endurance, discipline, being unstoppable, relentless, smart and capable are all implied, assumed, expected, demanded.
Of you.
By the world.
Simply because you’re here, and simply because the circumstances of your birth were so very favorable.
When I lead teachers to this realization and they get, often for the first time, that enormously powerful, mind blowing, intellectually and sensually seductive satisfaction that comes from creating a session that truly flows the teacher’s and client’s body, mind and spirit together as the single power source we were designed to live and work from and through, they almost always stare at me in disbelief – that this level of engagement was underneath all previous “sleepwalking sessions” they’ve taught – and ask, “how often do I have to do this?” and my answer, both fortunately and unfortunately, is always the same:
You have to be your exquisite best every fucking time.
Being inconsistently magnificent is far worse than being consistently mediocre.
The choice really is ours – choose to be great! – and that choice is informed, sustained and evolved by one thing, and one thing only; our level of tolerance for or, in the case of Mr. and Mrs. Gates, of Richard Sherman, and of, oh hell yes, Rebecca Elizabeth Leone, our level of embrace of all that’s implied in holding ourselves accountable for the demonstration of our greatness, every fucking time.
Make the most of your privileged birthright and be every bit as impactful as Bill and Melinda, and as Richard, but in your own exquisitely unique and exquisitely powerful way.
If you teach Pilates, you live in Joe’s shadow, whether you teach like he did or not.
If you teach Pilates, you are advancing his legacy through your own work, whether you know anything about him or not.
Making someone else’s work you own is often difficult. It’s so difficult that we don’t need to look beyond it to explain the rift in the Pilates industry between the hard line classical devotees who stay true to what they believe is Joe’s work, often without having a clue what they’re doing, and the modernists who have fused and made Joe’s work contemporary, often without having a clue what they’re doing.
Unless and until you, what I call, “bring the story of your life to your work”, you’ll be selling the commodity that is “the P word” and when that happens, your efforts to position and promote yourself will be competing against the efforts of studios with advertising budgets and/or square footage and/or equipment investments that are bigger than yours, and/or more established than yours, who have staffs of teachers with more experience than you/yours.
When that happens it’s really a shame because the thing that makes it so amazing for clientsisn’t that you’re teaching whatever it is you’re teaching, it’s that they’re working with YOU.
How do we know that it’s you, you, you at the very center of the client experience? Your clients are completely free to go anywhere, to work with anyone, at any time. You don’t own them, they’re not indebted to you, their not bound in any way to you.
They’re with you because of YOU!
There are other industries where creators step, in one way or another, aside giving their work over to others to interpret, to evolve, to be the starter for their own interpretation of the same thing.
There are other industries where “bringing the story of your life to your work” is on display, for all to see.
Paying attention to similar situations helps us get smarter about our own realities.
Bob is absolutely a genius beyond measure and his interpretation of his own work is, without question, amazing.
But there’s no dispute about the power of Kesha’s interpretation of it. And if you read the article on what Kesha’s been going through, you’ll absolutely hear in her rendition of “It Ain’t Me Babe” every bit of her pain, her hope, and the deepening of her gift. Remember in the article how the author talked about her pauses? Patience is hard to learn; Kesha’s performance of this piece let’s us know she’s learned it.
Kesha has a right to interpret Bob’s work, even with Bob still alive and performing it himself.
Joe’s dead.
You, and how you teach, and how you work are the only way for Joe to be relevant today.
Without you, and your next client, Joe’s work will be as dead as he is.
You have every right to Joe’s work – we all do.
You have every right to make it your own – we all do.
Then and only then will your unique talents, gifts and genius shine through.
Then and only then will you have brought the story of your life to your work.
Be like Kesha and boldly perform master work, even right in front of the master or his most judgmental legacy holders.
Be like Kesha and bravely make genius works your own.
If you don’t, the world won’t know you, and what you can do – and neither will your clients.
If you don’t, you’ll be the cover band of Pilates teachers.
The world doesn’t need more impersonators of Joe, the world needs YOU!
Tomorrow night in Game 2 of the World Series, Trevor Bauer is pitching for the Cleveland Indians. I first read about Trevor in Sports Illustrated back in 2011. He developed his pitches by exploiting the brain science of batting.
It’s within that “20 feet of flight” that batters have to decide if they’re going to swing and Trevor, exploiting the brain science of his opponents, has designed all of his many pitches to travel that same 20 foot wheelhouse strike tunnel.
What’s that got to do with being a problem solving movement teacher?
Exploiting brain science is available to everyone, not just professional athletes like Trevor.
If you’ve Gap Filled with me, you already know about athletes like Trevor, and you already know why my work is so startlingly effective.
Exploiting brain science is exactly how I developed my pain-relieving/alignment/engagement protocols. My protocols have been called a lot of things over the years – like many of Joe’s exercises, clients have named them – and for now, they’re most often referred to as “Doming, Elevator, Pelvic Ring & Cross Draw,” or sometimes “Leone Align & Solve.”
Here’s proof of the effectiveness of my protocols within a single session.
Here’s what those types of alignment changes look like on the inside.
My work is based 100% on the exploitation of brain science, my work is full of the work of Mihaly Cssikszentmihaly, and if you want to take the most direct, powerful and effective approach to achieving change, lasting results, and solving any problem you or your clients are faced with, your work will be full of the exploitation of brain science, too.
Working any other way – especially the “monkey see, monkey do” way of movement/choreography-based demonstration and/or description – is woefully ineffective and, in the end, a waste of time. I mean, how many clients do you have who still, no matter how many times you show them or explain it, can’t do what you’re trying to teach them to do? Years of expensive and time consuming effort on the part of all involved are spent trying to learn something that, through the exploitation of brain science, can be accomplished in a few minutes time.
That’s precisely how I can teach clients to solve long standing pain and performance problems quickly, effectively and permanently. Many videos of me doing just that are up on my video site. Many who’ve observed me teaching my problem solving sessions have said it seems like “magic.” It’s not magic, it’s brain science, and seeing the power of the unconscious brain come out of the recesses where it usually lurks and take over in the conscious world is a totally cool thing to witness.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if you already knew what you were going to do, each session you teach, each problem you face? Think how empowering, relaxing and down right fun that would be. That’s exactly how I feel about my work, every session I teach, every problem I face. I already know what I’m going to do. I’m going to exploit the unconscious brain’s superior wisdom to solve it, to solve anything, to solve everything. And with that, I’m free, I’m completely liberated from the rote, from the formulaic, from the circumstances and details of any given situation. When you use the full resources of your unconscious brain’s super wisdom, nothing surprises you, nothing destabilizes you, nothing breaks you.
Nothing.
We’re infinitely more powerful than we realize.
Learning about brain science is imperative for all problem solving teachers.
Be like Trevor and exploit every possible advantage so you can be your best, and bring your best, to every client, every friend, every interaction, every single day.
Because you’re on her brand new, state of the art, privately-hosted blogging platform right now, and this site, http://rebeccaleone.com/blog, the site you’re on right now, is where the Pilates Nun’s content will magically reappear, article by article, organized into her exclusive category and by original publication date, until everything that was there, will be here. Like internet magic.
The internet made me take down the original Nun site.
Here’s why.
I’m a leader in the Pilates industry for lots of reasons but one of the most important is that I’ve been first to use the internet to bring my work to you, the vast majority of it for free. I’m what’s called an early adopter of emerging internet technology which, almost all the time is a good thing, except for when it isn’t.
Before the majority of other educators knew what a blog was and years before the platforms that dominate blog hosting today were even around, I used the absolute best platform available at the time to build my little Pilates Nun blog. It was up for over 8 long years and it was full of 100% original content – no writer’s block here! – that all had one important thing in common; every article comprehensively detailed important educational aspects of teaching, business development, staffing, client service outside the session, and a bunch of fun stuff that didn’t have anything to do with teaching but had to do with living a good life, a big life, a full life, on being happy, being strong, resilient and self-sufficient. Thanks to you, dear reader, my PilatesNun.com site became very industry-famous, and whenever readership soars Google knows it so my little Nun site ended up at or near the top of many of your problem-solving Google searches. Thank you, thank you, thank you for that and for everything else you’ve ever done to support my work.
I knew the Nun site had reached critical mass when one of my longtime athlete clients from Seattle, Samantha Boyd, was walking through the food court at one of Seattle’s larger Home Depots, passed a group of older men sitting at a picnic table eating, and overheard one of them say, and I quote, “the Pilates Nun fixed my back.” Samantha stopped dead in her tracks, then approached him and told him she, also, knew the Pilates Nun. He corrected her. He didn’t know me IRL, he only knew me by having found the Nun site online as he searched for relief from back pain.
So the Nun site was definitely reaching people I surely never could without it, and that’s an amazing feeling. And it’s an enormous privilege. And it’s a really important responsibility.
But the very internet that I used to bring that marvelously deep content to you is the reason the site had to eventually be taken down.
The internet made me take it down because the back end of the Nun site had become so prehistorically ancient that the internet, which changes for the newer/faster/smarter/better every second of every day, eventually broke up with the back end technology we’d used for the Nun site.
Hosting platforms like the one I’m using to write to you right now have constant choices to make about how current they’ll stay, what changes they’ll make in market focus, and even if they’ll stay in business. The platform we used for the original Nun site couldn’t keep up with the powerful emergence of blogspot and WordPress, blogging platform behemoths, and my old back end simply became too old for the modern internet to make sense of. When that happened, the site came down and all the content went into storage.
Where it still remains. Completely intact and just waiting to get back out here so together, we can reach more folks who need help.
Nun content is on the way. Plus, as you know, I’m still writing a ton and this site, this “we’ll be together forever” back end and I, will contain all my new written material, as well.
Thank you for your patience while I’ve done a million other things that were momentarily more important than dealing with the Nun site. Thank you for waiting for me to finally get around to it. Thank you for reading me.
In case you were wondering – you were, weren’t you? – I want to assure you about my other platforms. All of them are state of the art and all of them enjoy market entrenchment so deep that there’s no way imaginable that they’d become obsolete.
Let’s go through my various innovations, one by one. This is a good opportunity for you to review your engagement and make sure you’re getting notifications of new posts on the platforms you most enjoy.
I was the First Educator:
*and still only* to produce a video site, full of comprehensive, valuable free 100% original educational content. After hearing how I wanted to share video educational content with you, my brilliant web consulting genius, Sean Hreha of Breezy, recommended I use Vimeo.com for my video site, and for over 7 years I’ve been pumping out the video content on my Vimeo channel since
*and still only* to video record all courses and give you a copy, plus a copy of the next time I teach the same content. Internet file transfer services have historically been befuddled by the burden of transferring large video files so course attendees used to have to provide me with an external hard drive for me to copy the video files onto (which takes hours and hours and hours of my time) but now Dropbox, my preferred file transfer service, has finally caught up with me and now has the technological attention span necessary to allow me to upload an unlimited number of hours of video and transfer those video files to you via the internet. Live long enough, everything works out!
*and still only* to email push substantive free valuable content to my 100%-you-asked-to-be-on-it mailing list. Your inbox is undoubtedly flooded with emails from tons of other educators but their emails absolutely do not contain substantive, comprehensive educational content. Mine do, and always have, and always will. If you’re not on my email list but want to be, email me at [email protected] that you’d like to be added and I’ll get you on it.
to teach via Skype; many many other educators have followed but they don’t film it for you like I do.
to podcast with over 50 hours of free substantive educational content on my Listen & Learn playlist; not many other educators have followed my podcasting lead and here’s why; podcasting reveals the speaker’s ability to speak logically, progressively, constructively – or not – and many “educators” know they can’t do that AND they don’t know how/want to edit the way they’d have to in order to make themselves sound reasonably capable.
to offer my services bespoke; what you need, exactly the way you need it, completely customized for you. My skill set is very broad so not only can I, of course, help you with all things Pilates, but I also offer you my design and creative services to help you do things like choose your studio name and tag lines, design your logo, design and content-create your website, design and content-create your studio forms.
My forever promise to you is that I will continue to early-adopt, I’ll always keep innovating – I can’t help it! – and I’ll always give you as much of me as I possibly can, for free.
When my Derm told me about this DRUG STORE product line, she raved about it
She kept saying “it will rebuild your skin, it will rebuild your skin, it will rebuild your skin.”
I tried it.
It’s rebuilt my skin.
Products cost between $7 – $12, and among my local CVS, Target, Walgreens & Walmart, Target has the lowest everyday prices but be sure to watch for specials on Amazon Prime.
Through my mid-50s, my skin’s been getting thinner and thinner, and as that’s happened the texture of my skin has changed leaving me with tons of wrinkles, crinkles, folds and drapes. Now, at 59 (which is really 60 because, you know, we don’t count it until it’s done), the surface of my skin is more similar to crepe paper than it is to a human organ.
Here’s what CeraVe’s done for my skin.
My first 2 CeraVe purchases were the body lotion in the big tub and the healing ointment in the blue tube, and I started using them in August. I use the body lotion after showering and I slather it on everything but my face. I use the ointment as an overnight treatment on the backs of my hands and on my forearms.
After just a few weeks, my skin became thicker, shinier, waaaaay smoother feeling and looking. As my skin thickened, many *MANY* wrinkles on my neck and arms went away. Gone.
For my whole life, I had asymptomatic small flat red dots on the backs of my upper arms and legs; they’re completely gone.
In the past month I bought the full facial line (eye repair, 2 PM creams, hydrating cleanser, facial soap) and am now experiencing the same improvements on my face.
I still cleanse my skin in the Laszlo way, I still use my Prevage system and Tretinoinin addition to CeraVe.
How thick and smooth and thick has CeraVe made the surface of my skin? Right now, I’m somewhere between a Nathan’s Hot Dog and a dolphin.
I bought my precious vintage single wide trailer just over 2 years ago, and it wasn’t long after I moved in that I realized the real estate ad should have said:
All maintenance has been 100% deferred!
Absolutely everything is wrong with it!
Spend the foreseeable future fixing expensive and sometimes life threatening problems!”
Life threatening? I must be exaggerating, right?
I’m not.
As soon as I had the electricity turned on, the fuse box blew up, caught fire and burned along the raceway through 8 feet of wall. After the electricians “fixed it” and turned the power back on, thankfully the fuse box didn’t blow up again; this time the bus bar melted which eventually blew all the fuses including the main. Through all my many electrical problems that have put me in the dark, the longest I’ve been without electricity is 9 days. In a row.
So there’s that.
Then there’s this.
Soon after the fire, and by “soon” I mean the next week, the ceiling in the living room, kitchen and dining room collapsed. The 1″ x 2″ chopsticks beams that provide the structure between the roof and the finished interior ceiling came crashing down, taking with them the finished interior ceiling, and it all fell together, in one enormous whump. The place was full of workers and I’m pretty sure one of them caused the collapse but, regardless, it’s God’s grace that nobody was underneath it at the time.
Once the dust settled, the metal roof was exposed, and it had bowed inward forming a huge hollow, like a single-wide sized metal soup bowl. The roof was collapsing under its own weight.
I sprung into action and called roofers, construction companies, handy men, and anybody else I could think of.
The lightning capital of the world is Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, but the part of Florida that I live in is nipping at its heels. Because our weather is so severe, there are a bunch of apps that construction workers use to help them plan their work around the weather.
After I described my situation to one very kind roofer, he told me that thunder storms were predicted to begin around 3:15 that afternoon and I might well be killed if I didn’t leave the trailer before the rain started.
I was so stressed I doubt I would have figured that out but, of course, rain would accumulate in the soup-bowl roof, and, of course, the weight of the accumulating rainwater would cause the walls to collapse, and, of course, when the walls came down there’d be nothing holding the roof up and then, of course, the roof would come down.
Of course.
Florida is full of trailer parks and I had called a bunch of them asking for contact information for the park handy men, and the handy man from the park right next door to mine actually called me back.
Michael Fernatt, who became my personal hero, took a break from his scheduled job for the day and came over just as the rain began to fall, and he stayed just long enough to hang some cross beams and screw into them toothpick type props that forced the metal roof out of its perfect bowl shape.
That held me over until Mike worked me into his schedule to properly rebuild my ceilings including reinforcing the living room ceiling so it would be strong enough to hold my fabulous Schonbek chandelier which hangs in the center of a gold veined ceiling mirror.
Schonbek Halo
Mike said to me, “you do know you live in a trailer, right?”
I do, Mike, I do.
Then he died of pancreatitis. RIP Mike, you were awesome.
You’re probably wondering why I bought such a dump. Well, the real estate agent that sold it to me was dishonest, and she was in cahoots with a “contractor” who made almost everything worse, and every bit of work he did for me had to be redone. And there was a trend; she’s been accused of embezzlement at the firm she worked at at the time of my transaction. If I were to pursue action against her, it would implicate the sellers who are an adorable, ancient couple who I’ve fallen completely in love with. They were clueless about the condition of their trailer, they never lived in it, it had been empty for years, and they never claimed to know its condition. The agent was the dishonest party, not the sellers. You’ll hear more about “my old people” later.
I totally get the problem with “good money after bad” but I also think it’s possible that, at some point, enough good money will eventually modify the bad to the point that the bad money isn’t bad anymore.
Instead of worrying about what might go wrong next, and instead of focusing backward and seeking restitution, I decided to go another way. I named my vintage single wide my Junkyard Jewelbox and I set my mind to saving it.
About a year-and-a-half ago, Jamey was under my trailer pulling wire between my modem and some of my computers. Since it’s a single wide, while he was in the “crawl under” he could take in the entirety of my trailer’s underbelly landscape, if you will.
As fate would have it, he spotted a plumbing leak.
In the outflow pipe under the double kitchen sinks, Jamey saw a slow drip, drip, drip. He crawled over to it and found that it had been going on long enough that a significant wetland had formed beneath it.
He also noticed the reason my sink drain occasionally ran slow; as the outflow pipe ran under my dressing room which shares a common wall with my kitchen, it angled in the exact wrong direction an outflow pipe should angle; it angled up instead of gently down toward the oblivion that is its connection to the greater sewer pipe system that serves the entire trailer park, and beyond.
Jamey, beautiful Jamey.
Jamey is a genius, and it’s important that I get that right out there, unequivocally and right up front. There really isn’t anything he can’t do, and do well.
His mind is lightning fast, absolutely nothing gets by him, his construction and carpentry skills are excellent, he’s an artist in the truest and fullest sense, and his work and life experience is intensely significant. Plus, he’s an ex-porn star, and they simply don’t put unattractive men with small penises in porn. Well, they do, but it’s a sub-genre, and Jamey’s gorgeous in the main-stream porn kind of way.
I digress.
He reconfigured the elbow to create the necessary slope in the downhill direction and he replaced the pipe. And just like that, the leak was fixed.
Fast forward to about a month ago.
As I storm delicately float through my trailer, stomping walking softly like the fierce graceful, scary feather float, freakishly strong wispy ballerina-type, gender fluid dom girly girl that I am, I’ve noticed a softness under foot. As I stalk pirouette about, I’ve noticed that the floor seems to give, but just a tiny bit, underneath me. It’s as if the floor is suddenly “sprung” – like a proper dance studio floor. It gives, but just a tiny bit. It bounces, but just a tiny bit. It moves with me, but just a tiny bit.
And somehow, in the teensiest partial wrinkle in the palest of shimmery grey grey matter in the deepest recesses of my brain, and completely unconsciously, I began cross linking disparate data points until I was strong enough in my theory to know what was coming.
And I actually called it.
In late September, I was visiting with my “old people” and something odd happened.
Somehow, I spoke words that didn’t really make any sense at the time . . .
Somehow, completely, unexpectedly and without any logical context triggering them . . .
Somehow, certain peculiar words, strung together in such a particularly strange way and then softly, almost at a whisper, these strange words tumbled haltingly from my wrinkled lips.
“I hope my trailer floor doesn’t collapse.”
Here’s the thing about some old people, and my old people, particularly.
Non sequitur is de riguer.
My comment went completely unnoticed.
Except for by a microscopically microscopic portion of a wrinkle in the pearly palest recesses of my grey matter where 3 cells celebrated with a perverse sense of satisfaction, knowing that the thrill of accurately predicting the future would soon be overwhelmed by an enormous amount of work and expense that would, in the end, suck. And suck large.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Early this summer, while cleaning like the germaphobe I am, I flooded my kitchen counters with a quarter inch of scalding hot bleach water and as I let it sit – you must let it sit for a while in order to kill bacteria, you know that, right? – I noticed my kitchen counter had separated from the wall. Where I used to enjoy scrubbing in the grouted “u” shape that joined the horizontal counter with the vertical wall, now, in that same place, there was a void.
My counter was sagging, hanging, sloping away from the wall that it used to be connected to.
Where the horizontal meets the vertical
Busy, as we all are, and as I tend to somehow always be, I simply added the recognition of the counter sag to the mental “things of mine that sag and/or hang” database I keep in the brightest shiny pearly part of my grey matter.
My morning ritual of exuberantly pounding empty the grounds basket in my 9 shot espresso maker often creates a Rorschach of droplets of espresso all over the chalk white faces of my kitchen cabinets. Early in September, while I was wiping them down with scalding hot bleach water, I noticed a vertical gap where my corner cabinets meet.
Where the Cabinets meet in the Corner.
Do you know what happened next? Of course you do.
I added the kitchen cabinets to my mental database of “things of mine that sag and/or hang.”
Then time, as time does, began to warp.
Five days in London, less than a week at home, then a grueling 6-day course in Paris where I didn’t realize a housing host offer didn’t include anything to actually sleep on, so, like the tough girl I am, I (gratefully, happily) slept on a Cadillac conversion for 6 nights. Without sheets. Without a pillow. And for 2 of those nights, with a bath towel as a blanket. And – hello Europe! – even though it’s in the low 40s at night, the heat wouldn’t be on until the day after I flew home.
But I’m durable and resilient and man, am I game, so, in spite of the difficult sleeping situation for most of my nights there, I crushed it in Paris and I flew home in high spirits, feeling invincible, unstoppable, and super charged by my own constantly-compounding ambition and overflowing with unmitigated joy derived from simply being alive.
But while I was gone, a bazillion Jewelbox data points that had accumulated from 45-years-of-deferred-maintenance had cross linked and reached a critical mass of their own.
While I was in Paris, my kitchen floor collapsed.
The floor is separating from the wall.
I’m the Momento of story tellers; To go fully forward, we have to go a tiny bit backward.
Last February, the guys who mow the lawns here at the trailer park hit my trailer with their interstate-median-sized commercial lawn mower. The driver in question was a super nice man who just couldn’t stop apologizing. And that really matters. Especially when hardly anything else does.
Here’s what needs to happen for a super nice man to run an interstate-median-sized commercial mower into your trailer.
He sneezed.
And as you may know, sneezing requires – without exception it includes, it most assuredly insists upon, it fucking demands – an eye blink.
To review: he sneezed, and, simultaneous with the sneeze, he blinked.
When he opened his eyes after the blink, he was headed straight for my neighbor’s Frangipani and rather than commit an interstate-median-sized, landscape edition, Director’s Cut of Trailer Park Chainsaw Massacre, he swerved into my screened porch instead.
When he hit me, I was inside my Jewelbox, in a state of blissful flow working at my desk. The force of impact was strong enough to knock a small vial of my dead mother’s hair off the stand of my Thunderbolt.
Instantly, my mind, ever the problem solver, produced this list of possibilities:
Allegiant jet on approach to nearby PIE crashing into my trailer
Then I became aware of the sound of the powerful mower motor, which before had been the familiar mow-day constant deafening roar, but now it was chugging and coughing and wheezing to a stop.
And then I knew what had happened: an interstate-median-sized mower had just crashed into my trailer.
My first instinct was to chase down my dead mother’s hair and restore it to its rightful place of honor, so that’s what I did. Then I went into the yard prepared for absolutely anything. And that’s what I got.
My porch was trashed. Vinyl panels were everywhere. Two walls were down.
Trailer Park Chaos had been visited upon me.
Again.
It took 4 days for the boss man from the grounds keeping company to even call me back, and it took another few weeks for them to under-the-table fix my porch – of course we’re not going to report this to the insurance company, we’re going to handle this just between us.
What’s the lawn mower incident have to do with the floor collapse?
My floor collapse is centered on the “T” where the trailer wall meets the porch wall that took the greatest mower impact.
I wondered if the floor collapse had something to do with the fact that an interstate-median-sized mower crashed into my trailer.
I had the owner of the lawn maintenance company come out a couple days ago, he ventured into the “crawl under” space, snapped some pictures, came back out and proclaimed that Sneezy crashing his interstate-median-sized mower into my porch didn’t have anything to do with my floor collapsing.
I thought it did.
It didn’t.
The reason my floor is collapsing is because the outflow pipe under my kitchen sink – the one Jamey fixed – broke, and, for some unknown length of time, all the water down my sink drains has been directly flowing into what was once a wetland but is now the Gulf of Mexico.
My “crawl under” Gulf of Mexico is a large enough body of water to have formed a tropical biosphere beneath my trailer.
As tropical storms, hurricanes, tornados, and a summer-full of near-daily sub-tropical, Class 1-equivalent storms raged in the real world, I’m certain there have been miniature versions of all of that in my crawl-under Gulf of Mexico biosphere.
Surely, the vapor barrier will protect the subfloor of my Junkyard Jewelbox, right?
Ha.
It’s not that my vapor barrier is breached. I never had one.
Fortunately, the vast majority of what goes down my sink drains, and I know you saw this coming, is scalding hot bleach water so – great news! – no rodents have moved into my crawl-under Gulf of Mexico diorama.
My subfloor is made of particle board, and, as you know, on the best of days and under the most favorable circumstances, particle board just wants to fall apart but when you install a Gulf of Mexico right underneath particle board, the particle board not only falls apart, it molds and funks itself up into a rank organic slurry of rotting goo. And it expands to about 4″ thick. And then termites come to feast on the untreated joists that my floor system rests on.
And then my kitchen floor collapses.
I’ve spent most of this week getting estimates. Three of the 4 contractors who’ve been out agree that my beams are solid and the floor won’t completely give way but the 4th said “it could go anytime.”
