Fear and Loathing in McDonough: the saga of cedar lumber

There is nothing greater than a power drill.

This I learned this past year, when I used a power drill to hang symmetrical picture frames (with the use of a level) as well as build a wine rack. It was like catching a bug of some kind. For an effeminate intellectual who nonetheless feels his family roots in soil and labor, the feel of a power tool and the creation of something beautiful, no matter how small, is exhilarating.

So I decided to build raised garden beds. As projects go, this one was not too difficult, and with a few boards I could build simple 4x4 boxes for placement in the front yard. No problem, right?

Building the boxes would prove easy. What did not was locating cedar boards. I was determined to build my bed out of cedar, both for the aesthetic appeal and the fact that it would repel a certain number of bugs that would destroy whiteboard. Needless to say, I was unwilling to build it out of pressure-treated wood. I don't care how many studies show that it's fine. If I'm going to the trouble to build the damn thing, then I'm building it out of cedar.

Cedar is expensive and thus rare. After a couple of false starts, I made the requisite phone calls to find an obliging retailer All signs pointed to a Home Depot just south of Atlanta. Upon arriving I found the 1x8s I needed, but discovered that the 2x2 posts were not there. Alas! That forced me to drive an additional ten miles south to McDonough to buy the necessary 2zx2 board.

where one buys furniture, in hell

No problem, really, until I tried to leave.

The drive to McDonough is no more than thirty minutes from East Point. Just a smooth sail down the I-75, blowing doors off the tractor-trailers and avoiding the inevitable horseshoe slingers off the I-285 connector.

So I spent thirty minutes driving there, and thirty minutes driving back, roughly. What I did not anticipate was the difficulty in getting out of the parking lot at Home Depot. That took close to thirty minutes.

where one can get dental surgery, and a manicure

The Home Depot sits squat in a huge quad-complex of stores that clearly drew in people from thirty miles square. Getting in is easy--just an exit off the freeway and a quick right turn. Getting out is damned hard. One is forced into a right turn out of the complex (the freeway was to the left), and then one has to meander through traffic to take a left turn into another shopping complex before pulling a U turn to get back the other way.

Where the parking lot ends... (apologies, Shel)

This proved an education all itself. The parking lot of the complex I had to pull into was a kind of faux town square. No megastores, but instead a grouping of family services that one used to find in small office complexes. This itself was no surprise, but then the parking lot abruptly ended. Asphalt gave way to a dull and vacant lot of weeds and mud, stretching off into nothing. In the distance one could see a house-line. Track style homes, built to spec on a planned lot, probably thirty feet below the grade of the mall, and thus thirty feet beneath the vacant lot. Everything looked all new and cheap and earth tones. It was a bare Levittown plastered against the steel gray sky. No trees, no landscaping. Just the dull efficiency of the late capitalist world.

I hooked my U turn, waiting for a line of pretty mid-level cars to pass, including an impatient Mustang that took the brick-laid speed bump at 45, which could not have been pleasant for the driver or the passenger. He hit the 90 degree turn at 30 and peeled off even faster. I felt a kinship, I hate to say. These shopping complexes are fascist buttresses, and the only way to really fight them is to fight them.

Getting back onto the main road was hard. I watched the string of Fords and Chevys make their pass, a procession of fleshy women in steel gray coifs with hard set mouths under square frame glasses, the thin lipped men next to them staring straight ahead, silent and defeated. It was a bleak scene. I entered the procession and took my place, reveling only in the opportunity I had to let three cars pull in from a mall outlet on the way. The drivers looked vaguely surprised at my kindness. The goatied redneck in the Nissan truck behind me revved his engine and bared his teeth, which were so white and large that they shined even in my rearview mirror. Getting onto the I-75 northbound proved a whole other problem. I had to pull one final U-turn because the line to enter the freeway ran three lights back. Better to jump the line by a stoplight, pull a U-ball and join the stream of traffic without excessive pain.

Civic architecture is about efficiency and control. Strapped as we are to the single-family home and the single-family car, the mega-four-corner complex (six or eight corner, in some cases), is probably as efficient as one can get. It is a bleak efficiency. The control it exerts is even bleaker. One might be able to finish all one's shopping there, but one must also drive from parking lot to parking lot, weathering traffic, dealing with the bored masses, who are quick to irritation yet slow to confrontation. It is a slow suburban death one dies, in such places.

I felt even worse for the residents of the adjacent housing complexes. If one's upstairs view was a vacant mall lot, a barren expanse of red Georgia clay and invasive weeds, one's aesthetic sensibilities must be staid and stultified. Not by any coarseness of character, mind you, but by experience. And the fault lies not with the sad family who buys the 2500 square foot home there, because it is affordable, but rather with the developer who was too cheap to hire a serious architect, and too stupid to understand how space and design work to shape human life.

The drive north on the I-75 towards East Point was smooth. Wax Tailor on the stereo. I thought about my power drill, which I would soon be using to make a simple raised bed. It is the simple things, I suppose. That, you know, make life worth it. And beautiful.