And Put a Plastic Head-Bobbing Dog in the Rear Window

Here's what I learned today. A metal cutoff blade in a circular saw you don't care about will do an okay job of cutting patio stones, if you aren't in a hurry. But if you're smart, you'll work outside. Because the dust is beyond belief.

I wasn't smart.

I managed to hang a hundred pounds of useless crap high up on the garage walls this afternoon, and then I decided to cut a piece of a patio stone and stick it in a place where runoff is eating the dirt. I feel like I dug the Panama Canal, singlehanded.

I'm turning into one of those old guys whose garage is always perfect. A guy who nails baby food jar lids to a board, hangs it by his workbench, and keeps sorted screws in the jars. Soon I'll be wandering around the yard in Bermuda shorts and black socks, muttering about chinch bugs and how the law will never find my secret stash of Chlordane. Anchor tattoos will spontaneously appear on my forearms, I'll start using Brylcreem, and I'll have false memories of storming the airfield at Guadalcanal. I'll get up at six every morning, run a flag up a pole by the driveway and salute it, and in the afternoon I'll sit by the mailbox in a folding chair I bought at the drugstore, drinking whatever canned beer is on sale and telling my candy-ass neighbors to keep their goddamn dogs off my swale.

Yes, I'm turning into one of those scary guys who taught PE in the sixties and seventies. A guy whose hair never got more than three-eighths of an inch long, and who wore a giant special Frankenstein shoe because he stepped on a landmine. A guy who slapped every kid who couldn't climb the rope. Who smoked Luckys while making the kids run laps and went to his grave without ever having trimmed his toenails. A guy who pulled his own teeth with pliers in order to avoid taking sick days.

I want to buy some enormous white boxers with bizarre little geometric shapes at regular intervals on them, and I want to pull them up to my armpits and wear them when I go outside in the morning to get the newspaper. I want to smell like Lectric Shave and fall asleep watching Lawrence Welk, on a TV that takes ten minutes to warm up.

That's my dream.

If you think your garage is too small, spend a couple of months organizing it. You may be surprised. You probably have five or six hundred pounds of stuff you can set by the curb for the trashpickers. You probably have no plan for floor space usage, so things that could take up x square feet are taking up 3x. And you probably don't have enough hooks and shelves.

One of the most irritating things that happens in garages is that stuff ends up on the floor, down around your knees, in front of things you need to access at waist level. For example, you'll have a cabinet you need to use a lot, and below it, on the ground, there will be an old television. And you'll have to bend forward at the waist in order to reach the cabinet every time you use it, and that strains your back. Putting up shelves that begin around four feet off the ground makes a big difference. A tremendous percentage of the junk that sits on the floor will fit on shelves, and suddenly, your floor will be twice as big, and your lower back won't hurt. Except from building the shelves.

Once your floor is clear, you can find a place to hang that board with the baby food jar lids. Oh, hey. I better get to the drugstore. I need some new shirts, and I'm almost out of Aqua Velva.