found drama

There’s a dire need to get snow tires on our cars despite the fact that it’s still late summer and the leaves haven’t turned yet. This urgent responsibility is somehow complicated by the fact that there’s this swanky dinner party type event going on in our house. Guests are generally well-dressed (a black dress cocktail affair) and there’s lots of banter. (Not talk. Banter.) It feels like a scene from a film written/directed by Steven Soderbergh.

There’s a series of complex maneuvers that I need to perform to get through the crowd in the living room (which suddenly feels very distended, way too large) and to the upstairs. Except that the kitchen has been turned 90 degrees and instead of having stairs, I need to hoist myself up to the top of the refrigerator and climb through this 3′ x 3′ aperture. Besides being turned 90 degrees and this aperture, the kitchen is otherwise untouched. But the aperture is disturbing. It has no real trim or borders to speak of and the edges are slick and greasy. If the living room dinner party was Soderbergh, then the kitchen is David Lynch. Regardless, I get myself up on top of the refrigerator and as I’m climbing through into the aperture (it’s not a hole, mind you, it’s definitely an aperture) one of the guests (spilled over from the cocktail party) remarks that it’ll make the place very hard to sell and that it’s almost definitely a fire hazard. I remark back that this isn’t the usual way up. (And realize that this now constitutes a second/alternate/parallel upstairs and my house has been rewritten by Danielewski for David Lynch who is writing a sequel to a Soderbergh film.)

Once through the aperture, the whole house slants at about 10-15 degrees. Things stay on their shelves but there is a distinct angle that must be overcome as we walk back and forth through the house. A is already here and has been loading the tires into her car. (How did going up bring me down to the garage? And why does our house have her parents’ garage?) I help her with the last tire and we’re off to get them swapped out. Only after we arrive at the service station do we realize that we have only three of the four tires. Can we hold our place in line? (There’s a wait anyway?) We haggle a bit and they’ll hold our place but if we don’t make it back in time, they’ll skip over us and put us at the back of the line. Racing back to the house, we go tearing through the garage et al. Where is this tire? The angle makes it tough since now that we’ve disrupted where individual items are otherwise stacked, they’re tumbling down the angled concrete slab.

About Rob Friesel