Bricolage

Real plumbers go around in vans with shelves of stock and valves and couplings and random things but all I have is the random things. I believe the best plan for encountering the unpredictable is to carry randomness with me. 

Back when I was a baby landlord, I spent a lot of time in the car and felt every minute of self-inflicted and unpaid wasted time. I had worked hard to get here, to be a small-time landlord. Made a risky investment during the dot com crash, scraped by when rent was sparse. I worked full time in my other job while my wife and I had a kid. Time spent driving between the rental and home depot wasn't like wasting time at work, where I was paid regardless of how successful I was at a specific task. It was stolen directly from my daughter. There was a lot of banging on the steering wheel. So I put effort into curating the toolkit that went into the car.

I had carefully considered categories of tools: plumbing, electrical, carpentry. I was never prepared to completely fix anything because there was typically an element I didn't know about going in and was unable to improvise. My process went like this: 

1. go to the property and see the thing 

2. understand what was needed 

3. go to the hardware store 

4. come back and attempt the repair. Fail, go to 2.

After failing, I would visualize the random thing sitting in my garage at that moment that would have solved the problem. Before driving all the way back though, I would dig through my toolbox, the bottom of the box, where random things left over from other jobs were tossed. By browsing available solutions, I could sometimes resolve a repair. One day, I got a new toolbox and after moving all my tools into it, I considered all the clutter left in the bottom of the old one… nails, wire caps, a wood shim, a faucet supply valve, an old pipe clamp, putty knife, electrical tape, a bit of wire… I could just dump it in the trash and then I would know everything I carried around with me. I dumped it in the new box and threw in a few other things that were laying around the garage.

When I get stuck, I step away from the problem and sift through the random crap, letting my hands and my eyes explore the affordances of individual objects. Sometimes, they give me ideas even if I don't use the objects themselves. The anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss called this “Bricolage”. He characterized it as the way hunter gatherers solve problems, as opposed to scientists. I suspect it's how scientists work too.

This essay series is part of a project to document Texan’s experiences during the 2021 freeze. Do you have a story to share about the 2021 Texas freeze? Share it with my publication, Freeze Stories, on Medium. If its not filled with filth, I’ll publish it. Ok, I’ll publish it even if its filled with filth.