Impulse

No drips. No sparks. No light leaks. The Last Darkroom in America is finally open for busi­ness.

Ever notice that any home project takes at least three vis­its to Home Depot to get done? Three. Per day. No mat­ter how much you plan, you will end up find­ing one more thing you need, or the part you bought isn’t right, or that you really did want the high power model after all. Your return is inevitable. Predestined. Personally, I think they put some­thing in the ven­ti­la­tion system…

I’ve spent the last sev­eral weeks mani­a­cally res­olute on get­ting this thing built — which is why I’ve been offline for so long. I started this project in January 2004 with the pur­chase of a room full of equip­ment and a naive idea that it can’t be that hard to build a room in my base­ment. I fig­ured I’d have it done in a cou­ple months. Twenty months later, I’ve found enlight­en­ment.
The dif­fer­ence between myself and a car­pen­ter is: they know what they’re doing. They know why its impor­tant to put studs every 16 inches. They know how to make a straight cut over 8 feet long. They can hang a door in under eight hours. They’ve been doing it a long, long time. Curiously, I found my knowl­edge of device dri­vers and PC bus archi­tec­ture did not trans­late to these tasks, nor did my engi­neer­ing degree pre­vent me from drilling though a water pipe.
It seems, right angles only exist in text­books along with other fan­tasies like straight lines, level floors, and fric­tion­less pul­leys. Molding and base­boards aren’t to make the room look pretty; they’re to hide the mess. This project was a great chal­lenge to my per­fec­tion­ism and patience. In fact, once I real­ized that it was impos­si­ble to build a room in an 80 year old base­ment and have every­thing fit per­fectly, I tossed per­fec­tion­ism right out the win­dow. My pro­duc­tiv­ity went through the roof. So did the qual­ity, weirdly enough. I didn’t care about being per­fect, I cared about doing as best I could and hoped that was Good Enough. There was a lot of work to do (this is where patience comes in), but in the end, it all came together very well.
I’m going to make a sign to hang over the door: “Abandon all per­fec­tion­ism, ye who enter here”.
And so, with the smell of ammo­nium thio­sul­phate and sele­nium waft­ing through my nos­trils, we return to our reg­u­larly sched­uled pro­gram­ming. I’ve got sev­eral Cool Art entries, more mus­ings, and even a few short sto­ries, in the queue. Stay tuned.
(fyi: I’ve been get­ting flooded with track­back spam so track­backs are turned off for the moment).

Related posts:

1. The last dark­room in America