Don't Take Me Seriously - Book - Page 113
ESCAPE Weekly
Sept. 10 - 16, 2010 – 16
Welcome to Dante’s Garage
A foolish man discovers hell on earth when he
decides to clean out decades of clutter for a garage sale
W
“Abandon all hope ye who enter here.
hat is the true purpose of
Through me you pass ...
your garage?
Is it a place where you park into the city of woe.
Through me you pass ...
your automobiles?
No it is not, I say, and those who would into eternal pain.”
Now, during this mission of madness in
sell you the parking fairy tale are either
the garage, the tortures of hell assailed me
completely naive or live in a development
on two levels.
with no street parking and a fascist HOA.
First, as you might expect,
I submit that a garage is,
there was the physical agony.
in reality, the catch basin
This included backbreaking
for all your sins and errors,
lifting at odd angles; eyes,
the black hole of guilt and
nose and lungs coated by
perdition that, when you
dust; bruises, barked shins
can no longer avoid it, will
and myriad little bleeding
line up your life’s failures
wounds from nails and sharp
chronologically — and rub
corners; heatstroke; and
your nose in the dust that
several near-death experiences
covers them.
Jim Walker
I learned this last
Don’t Take Me Seriously resulting from trips and
falling ladders. Yet all this
weekend, when I spent
was to be expected. Though
an eternity in hell — aka
dangerous and painful, this was merely
my garage, aka the refuse heap of
physical labor, met with stoic fortitude and
multiple decades.
the belief that continued effort would lead
Now, the mere spending of time in
to results. (Well, maybe not so stoic. I’m
my garage wasn’t the torture. I mean, I
sure I whined a little.)
had kept a path through the rubble that
However, the second level of
allowed oxygen and some sunlight to pass
persecution was the real torture. This
in when the big door was open.
was the psychological attack, the spiritual
That’s so I could raise black widows in
assault, and this, itself, came on two levels
all the crevices.
— both resulting from my own stupidity.
Beyond that, I had long ago developed
Now those of you who have been
the ability to completely ignore the pulsing
through similar experiences probably saw
masses of junk pressing in from the walls,
the flaw in my plan right off and have
shelves and rafters. These had become a
been shaking your heads at me since.
sort of mosaic art to me, the kind of thing
Yes, it was the garage sale and dumpster
where you could cross your eyes a little bit
to come later. This, basically, left me with
and imagine colorful creatures.
Little did I know I was actually seeing
nowhere to put the junk from the garage.
creatures from Dante’s Inferno.
All I could do was rearrange it. And, in the
However, last weekend things changed
rearranging, it expanded three-fold. Soon I
when, against my will mind you, I took
had a garage piled high, a front yard waiston the task of cleaning out my garage in
deep in refuse, and a backyard like Sanford
preparation for a mighty garage sale and
and Son.
a dumpster — both of which were to be
“This is the big one. I’m comin’ to join
scheduled at a future date.
you Elizabeth.”
It seemed boxes, books and carpet rolls
And this was my introduction to the
were multiplying like rabbits.
caverns of the damned.
Metro Creative Connection
Is this how your garage looks? It’s all one and dandy until you decide to clean things up for a garage sale.
Worse yet, between putting the debris
out of sight at nightfall, and pulling it
out for the eventual garage sale, then
moving the leftovers to the Goodwill
and dumpster, I knew I’d have to handle
everything two to three more times before
it went away.
“You fool!” the mad shrieks of the
damned derided me, as the flames of hell
licked my heels — and I found myself
wishing those flames would consume
me, the house and all. (And here, as mud
formed in my eyes, I cried out to my
creator for succor.)
But the summit of my suffering was yet
to come. When I reached the attic rafters I
came upon the graveyard of my past lives,
lying in wait there to ambush me with
reminders of my failures. Here were the
old Rossignol skis that had been intended
to take me to the Winter Olympics like
Jean-Claude Killy; the college textbooks
I’d rarely cracked, stuffed with tests
graded C-minus; the scorched pistons
from engines I had destroyed; the 200
beer bottles I had collected for the home
brew kit I’d used only once; and the 300
pounds of wood framing for my ’70s-era
water bed, representing my misguided
youth. And the knife of guilt found my
heart when I came across the tangled
fishing gear that hadn’t been used often
enough with my daughters.
All of it mocked me and shamed me
with a life so poorly spent.
It was hell on earth.
Eventually, I got everything out of the
yard and mostly out of sight. But it waits
for me still, waits for the weekend when
each totem of long ago will have to be
confronted again and decisions made for
its next journey.
But can you really block out the past by
throwing it in a dumpster?
Your garage is hell, my friends.
And it waits for you.
E-mail Jim Walker at jwalker@the-signal.
com. It will be forwarded to him in hell.
