Dante never wrote about this type of Hell

...but he should have.


Somewhere I read that the one thing that scares the Hell out of most real writers is an blank white screen on a word processor with nothing typed, a clean white piece of paper rolled into a typewriter empty of words, or a page in a spiral notebook with the only color being the horizontal lines on the page. For me Saturday morning had a similar feeling as I fell out of bed and made my way to my daughter's partially disassembled room to look at the fine light purple painted walls that I would soon be repainting the daring color of light pink. I looked in utter and abject terror at the room that I would soon be bound to in what amounted to as indentured servitude with my release conditional upon satisfactory completion of the project. Given my wife, Dragonwife, and daughter, Miss Wiggles, attitude about what they want I might as well as gone as far as to hang a sign saying: "All ye that enter here abandon all hope."

My morning coffee did me no favors by energizing me and I simply sat on the floor for almost an hour drinking it and listening to the weekend morning show on NPR unwilling to move. It seemed that the "blank walls" were laughing at me saying that I would never complete what I had to do. For several months my wife and daughter went over color samples comparing them to small pieces of cloth with elaborate pattens while did my best to ignore what it all meant. But yesterday it all came due and it was only after my daughter stated playing with the open cans of paint along with the kitten looking like it would jump into the paint pan with the roller sitting in about an half inch of what the can said was "blossom pink" did I find the motivation to actual start applying it to the walls.

After I started it went a lot better until I realized that the paint was so thin that it would take multiple coats and another trip to Home Depot for another gallon. Dragonwife graced me with several visits telling me about the spots of purple showing through. Bless her heart though she was on the deck in the backyard painting all of Wiggles' white furniture black and finding that most of what she had already done would peel off in big pieces of black rubbery sheets. The application of a sander with 60 grit sandpaper along with a serious primer got her back on course. I did have to thank her for almost painting the deck black with a couple of hundred paint drops which will be my responsibility to sand and paint at a later date.

By late Sunday afternoon the walls were done along with the room closet which for some reason for me is always a pain in its own smaller right. Started on the trim painting the baseboards and windows figuring that if I got that stuff the room and closet doors could wait till next weekend. Of course by the end of today Wiggles', as figured, decided that she didn't like the color and that she wanted the room painted red instead. Luckily the very cold beers I had in both my hands kept me calm, even with Dragonwife inspecting the my work.

A fried shrimp and flounder dinner later my weekend servitude was receding like a bad memory. That is until my wife brought out the new bedspread and curtains for my son's room with her wondering about the colors that would go with them. She was holding a collection of color samples about the same size as a deck of playing cards and went to the kitchen table to spread them out and compare much like someone playing solitaire. To damn bad I was the joker, or better yet, fool, of the deck. My son had escaped most of the weekend adventures being that his girlfriend was leaving for a summer camp in North Carolina for a week and he wanted to spend as much time as he could with her.

We start my son's room in a couple of weeks and I have news for my erstwhile oldest child and his social obligations. When I crack open the lids of paint to redo his room he can ask all his friends over to watch and even help but I will have some company and freely share my weekend misery.