The day started badly and got worse. Last week, for no...

The day started badly and got worse. Last week, for no good
reason except sometimes days go wrong, we struggled through each hour. Cuts
were off. Corners were sloppy. Nothing was level, plumb unachievable.
Instructions were misunderstood. Jokes weren’t landing. This summer, we’ve had
the help of a twenty-three-year-old kid from Washington State. He reminds me of
the freshman from Dazed and Confused,
the long-haired one who’s always pinching the bridge of his nose. He and I
stood looking at the landing we were framing outside, feeling tired and mad and
dumb.

“We’re tilting,” he said. I looked at him, thinking maybe he
was talking about the state of our small deck. “Do
you know that phrase?” he asked. I said I did not. “It’s from gaming,” he said.
“It’s when you start to fail, and because you’re failing, you keep failing, and
keep getting more frustrated, and that makes you fail even harder, and mistakes
just bring on other mistakes. That’s tilting.”

It was just the right encapsulation of the day. “Blind
leading the blind here today,” M. said when she joined us outside. “I mean,
what the fuck happened here?” she said, looking at the way four pieces of
two-by-six came together at a corner, none of them flush. We stood at the
corner and looked. And we all started laughing, dying laughing, because sometimes
days go so bad, and sometimes there’s no other reaction to be had, except to
fix it, which we did. “You know tomorrow will be better,” M. said. Which is
always the comfort. The next day is always better. And she was right. In the
first two hours of the next day, we got more done than the whole previous eight, tilting no longer, but upright, and on.

[Image from the Times Tribune Archives, on the building of the Pen-Can Highway, June 3, 1960]