The most elaborate and imposing apparatus ever constructed to paint a room.

Lit like a boxing match.

See it from a mile.

A ridiculously grandiose set of circumstances.

The wall of one room removed for a live cutaway. My house. Where I grew up. Tree in the front yard. Moon in the backyard. Pancackes, pot roasts, dead cats, snow, rain, early mornings and late nights. Genuine random. One constant was the smell of my feet. Another was my drumkit. Comic books. Chewing tobacco and dark beer. My house dissected like science fair project. Absolutely impossible yet it all took place.

An enormous, convoluted steel and hydraulic apparatus for the painting of one small room. It stretches through back yards and occupies most of the block well before it begins to even labor and pump. Thrust, grind and mash. Pulverize and obliterate. It’s huge, smoking and steaming and spewing.

Workers scurry, pound and shovel. They shout and signal among themselves. I’m wearing a hardhat. Eye suffocating goggles that relentlessly shift from yellow to green to blue. Some mask for breathing. Feels like I’m in deep sea gear.

Illuminated like the scaffolding at midnight on a twenty four hour casino job.

Sprawling and archaic. I explain the deed can be done easily with aerosol cans or a rented compressor. Rollers and pans, brushes and cans. So much easier than this. They won’t hear me. So much simpler.

I’m so angry I choke the ends of my sentences.

They don’t listen. Not as though they can’t. Much more like they won’t. It spooks me.

They keep building. Assembling with machines themselves the size of houses. Monstorous vats filled with molten metal and boiling concrete, bubbling like simmering sauce. Cauldrons baking the damp earth in my chilhood back yard.

Splattering sparks and startling discharges of air and steam. The periphery of my senses kept busy with all things making me flinch.

I’m trapped here and there, now and then, by the giant engines and the things they are building. Malicious, mindless. Climbing out while watching for sudden tons of movement or keeping distance from an industrial dragon gone senseless.

Madness and they won’t listen.

I make it to the bathroom in time to witness all water pissing on every book I’ve ever owned. Hundreds, maybe thousands. My bathroom. Familiar. No soap. No shower curtain. No valve for the water. Nothing to do. The water slows pissing and stars gushing. I haven’t stepped foot in that bathroom in almost twenty five years. It haunts me, that bathroom.

Dad is on the roof hammering so hard the noise is from a cartoon.

Construction continues so before I know it I stand in the middle of what appears as a refinery Sunlight from the west glances off it’s gleaming spires. My boots are dry but caked and heavy. Wild iron contrivances looming like Vegas billboards along the 15, the size of office building skeletons without yet any concrete or glass for skin.

Bristling with cranes and open elevators, lifts and chutes.

Equipment dangles and sways. Before I know it, everything commences to swing and twirl like carnival rides and it’s all I can do to keep from getting crushed by the whipping insect head of an oil pump or sliced to ribbons from braided steel blown and slashing by an impossible tempest.

It’s these machines I fear the most as no human sits atop them.

Death is everywhere until a young latin boy in a tailgated old Chevy shows up on a construction elevator with hot dogs, tacos and flan but no onions or clean napkins. I see the front of his facade is a regular food truck and we’re dealing out of the back. I speak spanish to him but he ignores my requests or acts as though he can’t understand me.

I know better than to ask for mayo.

Just then, one of our forklifts is completely obliterated by a heavy metal object orbiting with abandon from a crane broken loose for reasons I can’t grasp or even see. I watch it’s arc and hold my breath at it’s apogee until it comes all the way down. The violence of it is breathtaking. It obliterates the dense little appliance like a wrecking ball vs. an ice sculpture. The forklift explodes and I see a man’s head cave like an egg filled with berries and pale pudding.

It’s chaos and massive amounts of burning steel lands like munition everywhere but where I stand. Destruction so sudden and extreme I can’t run.

The smell is is metal and fuel exhaust, fossil lubricants and the grit that finds it’s way into your lungs and under your nails. And burning. Burning. Tar. Constant fire.

The irony is not lost on me as it’s all for a very small thing. A task for two humans for an afternoon, maybe two.

At this point, I begin to wonder why my mind is playing me this movie. It’s not the first time it’s done this sort of thing. It’s crazy, my mind. It does this sort of thing. It plays me really weird movies.

It’s not who you are but where you are. Waitaminute. Not where you are but who you are. Something like that.

Who wants to go sledding?

Drinks for my friends.

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