Dinkaltranen

I can’t stand unfinished projects. I have over 100 drafts sitting in my website folder. It doesn’t matter why they never made it, why they’ll never probably be finish, it’s something I can’t stand about myself, or about anyone else. Some people can’t commit, or finish, anything.

My grandfather recently passed. I called his house The House of Leaves. He was a hoarder, and quite insane. He’d run a variety of pseudo-cults, was deep into Egyptian and pagan mysticism in the schizophrenic fashion, and was convinced he was psychic. When my cousin and I were 8 or 9, he gave us machetes for Christmas and said in a jovial tone: “These are for the Muslims.”

He was quite a character. He’s gone now. I wonder how much he passed on to my father, and I’m not sure I like the implication of the answer I find.

Either way, we had to clean his house. Closets full of hundreds of cooking books, not the thin ones you find in Dymocks, but the thick, hardcover ones spanning 60 years of gastronomy. Once we found a book that was nearly 200 years old, we presume he got it from a garage sale. Toxic chemicals, glass jars of mercury covered in cobwebs, tacky ornaments of every faux-crystalline form you can imagine. We had to dig up the yard because, when he was drunk, he confided in my cousin that he had buried a bunch of his guns out there, but we found nothing, even with a metal detector.

The bungalow itself was a kit-house from the 60s, maybe the late 50s. He bought it for a couple months’ salary, and renovated it twice a year until he turned 80. Every time he added new doors, new lightswitches, new powerpoints, a fridge in every room, a bathroom adjacent to every other room, doors that couldn’t open because they lead onto a brick wall, doors that dropped a foot right after the doorway because he just didn’t give a fuck, he didn’t care that the door was even square or there were lightswitches by the door. The ceilings sagged, the insulation hollowed out for termites and rodents. Mould, you couldn’t see it, barely smell it, but it clogged your lungs, almost as much as the chlorine from the spa. Every morning at 5:30 he’d walk through the house naked to go for his morning dip. Quite a shock for my sister and her friends, I tell you.

Nothing was ever finished. The house was a work in progress, and I don’t mean maintenance. Maintenance is boring, mundane.

Either way. He’s gone now. He didn’t want me to be there when he died, and I can’t help but feel that’s because his own son couldn’t be there, and me being there would be a reminder of that. That at the end, after pushing everyone away, he couldn’t even have a reminder of his own son, the one person who still stuck around, despite all the inane, contemptible, asinine bullshit my grandfather pulled. And I bet in the end, my grandfather still resented him for it. I know he was family. But it takes a real, concentrated effort to be that much of a cocksucker until the end.

My father was an engineer. He solved problems for a living. He doesn’t say it, but he’s disappointed in me, and he doesn’t blame himself. That’s okay, I wouldn’t want to either if I was him. It’s easy to blame parents. Now he’s retired, he doesn’t have any problems to solve, so most of his time is spent manufacturing problems for himself and everyone around him to solve. I think that’s one of the reasons he continued to help grandpa, apart from him being family. Grandpa was great at creating problems.

My father bought Grandpa’s house of him. I was slightly elated at the idea that Christmas would no longer take place in the Alice in Wonderland universe, featuring The Muppets and arguments that started minutes after the sun rose.

But no. A year passed, then two years. Then Dad bought a new car, and that was his project. Then it was some webdev stuff, a home server, then a smart home. If anything, the house became worse. There were still live wires in the back garden, dozens of lightswitches that connected to nothing, the garage was a dumping site of things they didn’t know what to do with and didn’t want to throw away. When he leaned against a wooden beam and it split from rot, partially crashing the roof down on top of us, I thought, surely, surely now he would do something. But no, even with my offered help, nothing happened. Every few months a new project, while the house steadily decayed further and further. If it was really exciting, his interest might nearly last a year, until he became disillusioned, disinterested, resentful of the whole thing. He couldn’t commit to even the most exciting ideas, like love, there’s a reason my parents are swingers, and its because it was the only way either he or both of them could consistently experience something ‘new’.

So as I sit in my car, thinking about the funeral in a week, I see a text on my phone telling me he can’t finish his speech. Call me cold, but I don’t think it’s because he doesn’t feel anything, or because he can’t think of what to say. I think he simply got bored.

And whenever I fail to finish something, fail to commit, I think of my father. I think of myself as a kid. And maybe it’s just in my gut, maybe my memories are liars. But I’m almost certain that to my father I was just another project. Something he thought he wanted, and got bored of, and washed his hands of to move onto something new and exciting.

You threw me away, you failed to protect me from the woman you made hate me, terrorise me, and yet I still can’t hate you. I just hope I never am you.

I will help him with his funeral speech. And I pray that I will never need help finishing his.

Part one is here.