By Rachel
Special to The Daily Sentinel
Listen, I have nothing against precision work. It’s what gets watches fixed and rovers landed on Mars, and I’m definitely in favor of both those things, especially after trying to fix my $19 Timex myself.
(You may be unsurprised to learn that consulting a YouTube video doesn’t qualify me to fix a watch and – spoiler – it did not end well.)
However, I’m here today to sing the praises of brute force.
Not just the necessity of it – because stuff really does need to be knocked over or torn down or broken into pieces sometimes – but the borderline spiritual catharsis that accompanies hitting stuff with a mallet or sledgehammer when you’ve spent the previous five hours fighting with it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Recently, it came to my attention that the gate on the side of the house was in declining shape. First it stopped wanting to stay closed, then the boards with which it was built stopped wanting to exist in a form that could be called “wood in one piece.”
So, I Googled it, naturally, and discovered that adjustable gate frames are available for purchase, along with an array of fence boards. This was a DIY revelation. High on delusion and hubris, I decided this was something I could knock out in an hour, maybe two. I mean, how hard could it be?
O, it is to laugh! Somewhere an ancient Greek writer of tragedy is rising from his grave to grab a quill.
Anyway, it soon became clear that the 4×4 fence posts to which the gate had been attached would also have to go, seeing as how they were, to use construction parlance, “bent.” There was nothing to do but dig them out.
I’m sure many of you can relate to the unique agony of discovering a previous job was done terribly but thoroughly. Whoever poured the concrete for the fence posts clearly didn’t use one of those nifty concrete form tubes you can get for like $10, and instead just slopped it all over the place. But boy, they slopped it DEEP.
I just kept digging and hitting concrete, widening my radius and hitting concrete. The deeper I went, the wider I made the hole, there was no end to the blobby, bulbous concrete. I’d get frustrated with one fence post and move to the other one, but it wasn’t any better.
And still I kept digging. Empires rose and fell, and still I dug. The sun went supernova, yet the shovel remained in my cramping hands.
Then I reached The Moment. You know exactly the one, if you’ve ever reached it – a moment of crystalline incandescence in which every atom in the universe distills to one furious thought: I. HAVE. HAD. IT.
I grabbed the nearest fence post and began yanking. Back and forth, side to side, pushing and pulling, fueled by leverage and a nameless rage that granted me nearly superhuman strength, I wrenched those worthless, stupid posts from the ground. They weighed a ton. I did not care. I ended up with huge splinters in unexpected places. I barely felt a thing.
Bent 90 degrees with my hands on my knees, panting, I was reminded of the time I decided I could disassemble a queen-size mattress box spring myself rather than pay a guy $50 to haul it away. One cheap pair of bolt cutters and three hours later, having reached Emotional DEFCON 1, I had an out-of-body moment in which I observed myself beating that wretched thing with a mallet and thought: Yikes. I’m not sure a tube of cookie dough is going to fix this.
But back to my point, brute force carried the day. I don’t know how else, lacking heavy equipment and a certain swagger, fence posts would ever come out of the ground or mattress box springs would end up in small enough pieces to stuff into the garbage can.
Granted, I’m generally left with a big mess and varying degrees of self-recrimination (e.g. “Oh, no. Does this mean I’m a violent person? Am I insensible to the finer things? Should I call my mom?”) but I can’t argue with the results.
However, lest you think this has led to a frenzy of gate building, at this exact moment there are three bags of cement and one adjustable gate frame in the garage, two huge holes beside the house and two crummy fence posts half-encased in blobs of concrete that I’m not sure how to get rid of.
Brute force may be necessary, but it’s exhausting and do I really even need a gate anyway?