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5:14 a.m. - Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2002
Ms Leslie makes a partial payment on her sins

Ouch!

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. They�re wrong. At least about the part of the road that swings through my neighborhood.

Down here, the road to hell is paved with a nice Italian 12x12 ceramic floor tile in a pleasant off-white color described as �desert sand�. And don�t tell all her Christian friends, but it runs smack through Ann�s house.

Ohhh!

Well, the good intentions are there. She had nothing but the best of them when she took it upon herself one day to tear up every scrap of carpet in the house and drag it out to be hauled away. That carpet was ruined long ago and she had decided that even living on bare concrete floors was preferable to one more day on that nasty carpet.

Owwww!

And then, after a couple of weeks with nothing at all on the floors, she got one of those Mississippi brainstorms that floods the mind and just washes away any kind of good sense; Never again would there be carpet in her house to be vacuumed and cleaned. She went down to Lowe�s and bought enough ceramic tile to cover every inch of the floor in every room of the house.

Ouch

She had good intentions too, when she agreed to pay her grown son to prep the floors and lay the tile. Although he had never actually laid tile before, he had seen it done. Presumably on TV.

And he had good intentions. After a five hundred dollar pre-payment, He did spend a day mixing goo, spreading it on the floors and dealing tiles like playing cards into the goo in the middle of the floor in each room. But then he got busy, I guess. Suddenly he had problems finding the time to come back and finish the job.

Owww!

So I spent yesterday learning exactly how the road to hell is paved. It�s paved right down the center with those glossy, heavy, brittle blinking tiles. And it�s my job now to spend a chunk of my own little eternity crawling up and down that road on my hands and knees, cutting tiles one at a time and fitting them into the blank spaces all along the edges of the road to hell.

Ohhh!

Ironically, I just read a little bit about Dante�s inferno and the various punishments meted out to sinners. I�m too tire and sore to go back and remind my self of which sinners exactly, but some of the damned are condemned, according to him, to crawl about hell eternally on their hands and knees. Doesn�t sound so bad, does it?

Ohhh!

Well, I�m here to tell you . It�s one of the most diabolical kinds of torture the human mind can concieve. I came home last night tired, dirty, with big bruises on both knees. I was too wiped out to eat supper or even shower. I just fell into bed and slept. I still woke up every two hours, right on schedule, but I was so exhausted that, after making a circle in my apartment, I would fall right back into bed. Together, we got her kitchen/dining area finished, but that�s only a start. We have a long ways to travel crawling down this old road.

Today I get a reprieve for the morning. I need to go back to New Orleans to see my therapist. I�ll get back this afternoon and go rushing back to hell�s highway to fill in some more edges before night. Maybe it�s good for me. I don�t know. I haven�t worked hard for quite a long time. Towards the end of the day, I was laying on my side scraping up old cement from tiles that had been laid wrong by her son and cracked when the first foot touched them. I couldn�t bear getting up off the floor to get a tool or the vacuum. I�d just scoot myself over to where I needed to be. Ann thought this was funny, but she is in the same shape as me. She ended her day covered in dried cement and dust too. With her back aching and her bones creaking, she did at least have the energy to dump a load of epsom salt into my tub and settle in to a steaming bath before changing clothes and heading back to spend the night in her own personal construction zone.

Ouch!

Even my fingers are too tired to go on. That�s how I spent my day. That�s how I�ll spend the last part of today.. and tomorrow, and Friday and all the rest of the days until we nail the last bit of trim at the around base of the last wall of the last room of this little spur on the low road to hell. I can hardly wait.

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