There's some highs that come from this process of remodeling and rebuilding. The bizarre late night giddiness when the power tools are running past 9pm illegal and the hole in the wall is growing ominously and you push to do whatever it takes to accomplish this particular arbitrary task. A dark hours frenzy to enlarge a hole in the wall for a cabinet that won't arrive for at least a week makes sense, as a goal in and of itself. Just doing something. Tiny talking dust particles enter your brain and drive you to hammer harder and deeper into the plaster. The wood screams, the sawzall whines, the tools and materials shrieking, egging you on deeper into irrational destruction.

The morning after I woke up with a hangover from that - plaster and wood chunks all over my water closet, the ancient insides of the wall gaping accusingly; I had halfway disemboweled a friend and left them alive without anesthetic.

Then there's the high that comes from the sheer number of people you might have working at once. It's like hosting thanksgiving dinner with three separate families sharing the same house with their own customs. Today, I had ten people in here at once, at my highest count. Ten folks surrounding me, ostensibly doing what I asked them to do, what I was paying them to do (mostly with my credit card). These are elaborate tasks - laying paper to prepare for painting, digging holes to prepare for concrete slabs, bending pipes to make channels for new wires in the garden. At any moment I can watch the application of any one of ten particular skills in conjunction with a spoken and unseen balance of mitigating factors, made more explicity by the presence of carpenters, electricians and painters all working at once.

I worked to translate any feeling of power I had from these coordinated workers into a fuzzy sense of social good. I hoped that Ernie, the charming electrician foreman, might strike up talk with David, the smiling sensible carpenter. Why? Maybe they would have something between them they wouldn't have discovered without meeting here. A personal connection, a friend in common, a shared sense of humor. My house is a sort of party for different contractors. Today, they all speak Spanish between them - personal chats and craft coordination in a tongue I almost recognize, though my time in Honduras is fading. Central American memories, dust, visions of a future home, sleep deprivation and total inconvenience has me dazed.

Then somehow swept up in all the frenzy of work between all these people, I seek out a wrench and I go to work on a pipe protruding from the wooden deck. When I had the hot water heater removed, the plumbers were in a hurry to leave and didn't remove a remaining natural gas conduit. It's been capped and its sticking out of the deck since Sunday. Since the elctricians had removed some of the decking to lay outdoor outlets I figured I'd grab and hammer and wrench myself and start trying to twist out the pipe and install the connecting piece below.

So that's how I found myself, spindly limbs cranking a hammer, my full strength only halfway lifting a subborn board to get at a gas pipe. I was thinking of the plumber's words as he casually capped a pipe that was full-on blowing gas into the yard - "Everyone acts like it's such a big deal. It's just gas." So I unscrewed pipes and caps myself and soon had my own fully leaking natural gas festival in my face. The exertion of torsion mixing with the sickly smell additive turned my stomach and my head. I wasn't successful at reconfiguring the pipes. Rocking back on my topsiders I realized I hadn't tried to do very much, and I was failing. I was dizzy and sick and must have been crazed to think that it would be a good idea to start amateur construction hour by opening my gas lines. Brilliant. Can I bum a smoke?

This is not a Pipe.

I'm not sure I screwed the pipes and caps together tightly enough, or with enough joint sealer. I'm sitting near the still-protruding pipe and I can smell faintly the lingering malingering methane. The other work continues around me; I've got another victim lined up to take a stab with more serious tools at foreshortening this natural gas supply line next week. Meanwhile, dust piles up on my machine, in the only space I could find to serve as an office, a wooden chair and milk crate, near my suitcases filled with clothes, in a sort of temporary eddy in a corner of the back deck. After it's all done, I'm going to need to get my laptop detailed.