The Demolition Diaries: Week 1

I arrive now at Saturday after my first full week as a construction worker, and I’m fairly certain that I am developing some kind of tendonitis in my right hand from swinging a hammer 8 hours a day. I had a dream last night that I couldn’t find my gas mask in my tool bag, and I counted over 20 scratches from nails on the inside of my left arm.

I overheard a conversation last week about BB-guns and one of the workers informed everyone that he has “a nice CO2 one; I bet that shit’ll break your skin!” At the time, he was wearing a shirt that said “Wild Willy’s Heavy Petting Zoo,” which backed up his opinion quite effectively, I thought.

I had my first experience pouring concrete this last week. It was hard (get it? HA!). I accidentally dumped a nice and chunky batch on the front lawn of the home at which we were working. Luckily, the owners weren’t home and the Concrete Dude looked like he had seen this before and calmly sprayed it all into the street with his heavy-duty-don’t-fuck-with-me hose.

Needless to say, I am quite enthralled with my new work environment, and relish my opportunities to learn as much as possible about carpentry, power tools, home-building, and the various creative and colorful uses of profanity. I’m developing muscles that haven't been developed in a while, as my runner/backpacker’s build is losing its tyrannosaurus-rex-upper-body-like appearance and rounding itself out a bit.

I even ate a cream-filled chocolate donut that had a thin layer of dust on top.

I come home tired everyday. I am the dirtiest I’ve ever been in my life, and my boogers are the deepest shade of black possible. I installed insulation one day last week, and am confident I still have roughly one million microscopic shards of fiberglass imbedded into my forearms. I used a sander and a metal-cutting saw. I learned that copper sells for five dollars per pound, and I was tricked into walking right into the fart-cloud of one of the stinkiest workers.

Everyday I am drinking coffee until it comes out of my ears and believe that next week I will try to take my first ever cigarette break.

I witnessed a rather lengthy conversation between two electricians about the life and career of Peter Frampton. I was even able to add a few facts to the dialogue, helping them recall that his keyboardist on the “Frampton Comes Alive” album was none other than Bob Mayo. I immediately wondered how I was able to drudge up that information. I think this job is giving me subconscious access to pieces of information and skills I was never aware I possessed. Perhaps I’ll even develop an extemporaneous opinion about sheet-rock or, even better, the pros and cons of using 3/4-inch plywood for floorboards!

I considered signing up for an “Install Your Own Toilet” workshop at Home Depot. Not that I need this skill or anything—I’d just do it for shits and giggles (HA?).

All week I was reading the seventh and final Harry Potter book, The Deathly Hallows. Anyone who has read Harry Potter knows the joy of being able to talk about the storyline, what this or that character is up to, and hypothesize about what will become of Harry and his buddies. I very nearly asked a co-worker’s opinion about whether or not he thought Dumbledore was really dead, and where he thinks the Horcruxes are hidden. You can imagine, though, my feelings of loneliness when I realized that this was, perhaps, not the guy to ask, as the shirt he was wearing that day read:

“Your girlfriend f***s like a CHAMP!”

Whoa! I just looked my watch and it’s getting close to Beer-Thirty. Until next week…

The Demolition Diaries

I smash things, and break them. I haul them and throw them. Sometimes I drag them, and other times I just huck them. Just freakin’ huck them. I cough and bleed. I say bad words and take water breaks.

I demolish shit.

Knowing that I would have a month break here in Spokane before disappearing back into the woods again for my primary job of teaching students how not to die or get seriously injured in the wild, I decided it might be a smart idea to try and save some money. I contacted my cousin Ryan who is remodeling his house to see if he could put me in touch with a contractor who could set me up with some kind of labor. He put me in touch with Jared, who ended up hiring me to break things, and then chuck them in a big dumpster. I was hired to do demolition. This means I was hired to demolish shit.

When I talked to Jared on the phone to get the details of where I ought to report to work the following morning, he told me to bring my demolition tools. Demolition tools? Like guns or bazookas, or bombs? I thought of all the things I would need to demolish something, and started brainstorming ways I could get my hands on some C4, or even a tank. But all I really ended up needing was a hammer. Oh, and I found a crowbar, too. I showed up bright and early at the site the next morning with my cute little pair of work gloves and tool bag (which is actually my Dad’s).

If I meet the folks who owned the house we are “remodeling,” I will tell them to never ever go back to their house. There is no good that can come of it. We have taken a quaint little abode that housed memories, feelings of comfort, the coziness of safety…and we have made it the exact opposite. There is more dust and trash than I’ve ever seen in my life. Nails protrude from the floor, the ceiling, the frames—everywhere—and it is like they are always jumping out at you and trying to scratch you, tear your shirt, kill your face. In my tool bag (which my Dad packed for me the night before just like a grade school lunch), I noticed he put in a purple respirator or, to use the vernacular, a gas mask. I laughed at the notion of wearing a gas mask on a remodel job, the chiding I would get from my coworkers, being called a “pussy” on the first day. No sir, not me—that’s going in the bottom of the bag.

By 9 a.m. I was holding onto it for dear life and received numerous compliments about my purple respirator.


“My respi-what?”
“Your respirator.”
“Wha—oh, you mean my gas mask!”
“Uh, yeah.”

My coworkers are all men, and they all wear Carthart pants. One of them showed up with a shirt the first day that said, “Fuck you, you fucking fuck.” Mornings mean pulling into the site with coffee cups from 7-ll, and lunches mean returning with some form of fast food paraphernalia. I try to hide my pita bread and hummus everyday, and avoid asking if this or that is USDA organic or locally grown.

When it’s time to go home at the end of the day, without fail, one the men always exclaims, “It’s BEER THIRTY!”

These mean refer to everything—and I do mean everything— as “shit.” Trash, trucks, tools, people, days of the week, loved ones…they are all substituted with the word shit at some point in the day. I’m practicing myself and today had a pretty good zinger:

A guy said, “Shit, we sure are moving fast, aren’t we!?”

I replied by saying… “Shit!”

Luckily, I own a truck and Carthart pants, but I think they’re on to me. I nearly blew my cover when I almost asked if we could change the radio from the classic rock station to NPR. That was a close one.

In all honesty, I find this kind of work very romantic. I can tell a lot of these men have been doing this for a long time, long enough to form very well-informed and articulated opinions—they all have an enviable knowledge of practical geometry, physics, angles, weight-bearing structures, volumes, pressures, electricity, and WORK. I opine that 6 months of hard work in any of these men’s lives equals that of my whole life. This fact does not shame me (though maybe it should?), but rather it heightens my respect for people in this line of work. It’s unlike any job I’ve ever had—no customers, no students. It’s just me and the blood. Just me and the pain and dust. It’s just me and the nails, hammers, shovels, drills, crowbars, t-bars, dump trucks, porta-potties and trash cans.


It’s just me, the guys, demolishing shit.