Zach Hively
Fools Gold

As a man with an advanced degree in English, I must say that few literary delights compare to building something tangible with my own two hands. Barring that, because in fairness I use English far more often than I use corded drills, very little compares to getting my dad to build things for me.

With me! I mean WITH me. Father and son, drawing up plans, watching instructional YouTube videos, buying carloads of hardware from every home improvement store in the county then returning everything because the hardware they bought was the wrong size hardware—this is as American a pairing as playing catch in the yard. It’s even more American if one of them is playing catch by himself because the other one has a job and responsibilities and doesn’t have TIME to do this right now, Dad.

But—I wanted a pergola. It would make me feel more retired, even though I’m not and (being an English major) probably never will be. So unless I can build a pergola out of a comparative analysis of magical realism in the collected works of Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, for which I would have to read a LOT more of both authors, I needed to suck it up and dedicate some of those endless working hours to helping my actually retired dad get excited about starting a new temp job, only for free. Because I sure can’t research all this lumber by myself.
And boy, is there a lot to consider with lumber. Such as: why is a two-by-four actually a one-point-five-by-three-point-five, yet when they say it’s ten feet long it’s actually ten feet long? Did the definition of an inch shift since the invention of lumber, while feet stayed the same? Or is this, as I suspect, a dark conspiracy backed by Big Wood to nullify all my lumbering calculations?

Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself. You see, before we even started with the lumber, we had to set the concrete.

The cardboard forms for concrete pillars, as you may know, are round; bags of concrete, on the other hand, are not. This set up Pops and me for doing some math. It being a word problem, I felt qualified to help:

“If a pillar is eight inches in diameter,” Pops began, “and we need to bury them thirty inches deep…”

“Are these real inches or lumber inches?” I asked helpfully. “And, how many inches equal a pound of concrete?”

Like a couple of smart fellas, we budgeted the entire first day of Project Pergola for buying concrete. This disappointed me somewhat; I had visions of pizza and margaritas under the pergola before sundown. But, Pops knows best that some things, like his son, take longer to reach fruition than you bargained for.

Day Two, Pops called in to his one-day-a-week volunteer gig, and I had to find a decent bookmark for the novel I was reading, so that we could dedicate ourselves to mixing concrete. You don’t want to half-ass mixing concrete—not if you ever want to use your wheelbarrow as a wheelbarrow again. But you might want to half-ass mixing concrete, if you have any desire to move your body without hurting ever again.

It turns out—despite suggestive adjectives to the contrary all over those bags of concrete—that concrete requires a great deal of force to mix. Strangely enough, this might have been the moment that Pops chose to disclose to me, in a moment of male bonding, that he had scheduled surgery for his hernia.

“I can handle the hose,” Pops said. “And I can poke the air bubbles out of the concrete after it’s poured. But you get to mix.”

So I did. I flexed every muscle in my body mixing concrete. And when those gave out, I flexed the muscles that aren’t actually muscles, like spotting an its when an it’s is needed, just in case they might help. They didn’t. But I mixed the snot out of that concrete, until Pops said, “Let’s call that good enough; we don’t want it to set before we pour it.”
​
He handled smoothing that concrete and setting some brackets with a master’s touch, and I made sure his dialogue included semicolons correctly. And that was the end of Day Two.
I’d like to say Day Three saw a pergola. Instead, it saw Pops drive home for some much-deserved R&R and a long session of researching bolt lengths. It saw me gazing proudly, for a great many hours, at the six concrete stumps sticking out of my back yard. Someday, I will have a pergola to enjoy. But even that cannot compare to the pride I feel today. It’s like I am standing taller. Which I am, if you measure in lumber inches.

~Zach Hively
Fool's Gold

Look, I realize that vacation rentals—let’s just call them “Airbnbs” because that’s what they all are—are responsible for a great many of the world’s woes. These include housing shortages and jacked-up costs of living, gentrification, several Kardashians, the lion’s share of the endangered species list, and methamphetamines, probably.

But they are still my preferred way to stay in a stranger’s home on vacation, when I actually go on vacation. In adulthood so far, this averages once each decade. Plus, they have kitchens. This is preferable to hotels, where I cannot even pretend that I will cook my own breakfast.

Not using the included kitchen that I COULD use is just one Airbnb perk among many. I’d like, for your vicarious vacationing pleasure, to declare several other benefits—unlike the apples and the baggie of ham that we did not declare at customs on our way home. We brought them along for the flight after not eating them for breakfast for a week. Then I did not take them out of my backpack before customs because I was hungry, and also because I forgot.

Speaking of hunger, let’s make you hungry for travel with these Many Benefits of Staying in an Airbnb.

Ease of Access

After a long day of international plane travel, all one wants is to lay one’s head on another person’s used pillow and fall asleep so fast that one cannot wonder for long about how foreign head lice differ from domestic ones. Such was our wish.

We were in good spirits after traveling by car, plane, moving walkway, plane, bus, customs line, and bus to the one coastal town in Mexico that spring break hasn’t heard about. I was able to use our Airbnb hosts’ directions—and the knowledge that “a la izquierda” means either “to the right” or “to the left”—to guide our taxi right to the front gate. The taxi drove off, and I pulled up the Airbnb host’s instructions for easily and safely accessing our new home away from home.
“The purple gate will appear to be locked,” the instructions read. “It is unlocked.”

“It’s locked,” said my travel partner—let’s call her “Maggie” because that is her name.

I, being a man, tried the lock myself. It was locked. I managed to message our Airbnb hosts. I’m not sure what I wanted them to do, seeing as they were at that moment in California or some other place that was not Mexico, but I hoped it would be something useful. They, however, did not reply in a timely fashion.

So I did what any former middle school math student would do: I skipped to the next word problem—the keys to the house, reportedly left, securely, under a cloth on a table by the front door. Unfortunately, the front door and this purported table were inside the gate, which had not yet unlocked.

The irony of a gringo jumping a wall to get into someplace in Mexico gave me the boost I needed to do so very quickly and discreetly. Maggie guarded the luggage because she is scarier than I am, while I fetched the key. This was challenging, considering there was no key.
“There is no key,” I muttered through the gate.

“No key?” Maggie said back.

“No key,” I said. “Unless you can find it,” which, her being a woman, seemed likely. My whole life, women are finding things that don’t exist until I ask them to look.

Maggie passed our backpacks over the gate and then jumped it herself to prove me wrong about the keys. But the keys did not materialize. I wrote our hosts again, as timestamped proof that we were not breaking and entering in case the authorities ever got involved.

We made ourselves right at home on the rocking chairs on the patio and watched the sun set on the locked doors and welded-shut windows of this beautiful one-bedroom casa with well-tended garden and fully equipped kitchen. We laughed a little, we cried a little, and we got hungrier and hungrier, until I decided to jump the fence again and fetch us some food and possible camping supplies from the mercado on the corner.

While I was away, the hosts responded that this situation was very unusual and they would try to get ahold of Juan the property manager. In the meantime, they suggested we dig for the possibility of a spare key buried in the corner of a flower bed opposite a radiant pink bougainvillea. We did not find the key, but we had corn chips, real Mexican corn chips, made with actual tortillas and not whatever comprises a Tostitos. And we had a bottle of tequila from the highest shelf in this little mercado, which I ordered using my best Spanish pronunciation of the label over and over until the clerk understood my accent from sheer repetition.

We were prepared to hunker down for the night, mosquitos be damned, when Juan arrived with a hefty set of keys and a heftier set of apologies. “I thought today was yesterday!” he said many times.

Now we move on to the next of many Airbnb benefits:

You get to leave public reviews.

​Beautiful outdoor space. Through the window, the kitchen appears useful. Clear directions and very communicative hosts! I already can’t wait to go back.

Young people just don’t read books anymore. This must be truth, because I hear it from plenty of old people who must know exactly what young people do with their spare time. They then proceed to walk away from me without buying any of the books I’m selling.
 
I cannot promise that these old people are the same old people who gape at young people who don’t own televisions. But I can promise they are the same old people who drove the young people off Facebook fifteen years ago.
 
Granted, there are solid cases to be made for the decline of reading. Take me, for instance. Me getting published anywhere at all on a regular basis suggests heavily that no one reads anymore, regardless of age. Unless it’s the birds and gerbils whose cages get lined by my work. The US Census Bureau does not track such things, but if they did, I suspect they would find more people light fires with my work than read any single piece from start to middle.
 
But I am just one man. I can produce only so much writing—as much as half a man, or perhaps a quarter. There are dozens more people like me out there, each of us struggling to craft the perfect cup of tea. Some of them are actually succeeding in writing back-cover copy for other people’s books well enough to get them banned. Banned, I tell you! And by people you KNOW don’t read.
 
Now I can’t articulate exactly why it is okay to start a fire with my junk published in a newspaper, but abominable to start a fire with a book. Nor can I explain why burning a book is worse than banning, because it isn’t, other than in a matter of degrees. (Most bannings, for instance, take place at room temperature.)
 
All I know is that if I can’t stop people from condemning books to the ol’ burn-n-ban, dammit, I want them to condemn my work too. Because that is the SUREST way to get someone to read it. Or at least to buy it—can’t burn it if you don’t got it.
 
Frankly, I can’t figure out why I haven’t had more books banned, aside from the fact that I haven’t written very many. I am always game to “punch up,” as comedy experts say—to take a swing at The Man, the powers-that-be, particularly if I think they are unlikely to read it.
 
Take the old people who think young people don’t ready anymore. I’m pretty certain they read only the Wall Street Journal and/or the CNN crawl, neither of which has picked me up for syndication (yet). I can “punch up” because their horses are so high, and most especially because they don’t know I exist.
 
But I will refrain from punching anyone, old or young, up or down, because I have faith in humanity. I was recently in attendance at a party for adults, in honor of a kid’s ninth birthday. I hung out with the kid, mostly because they had Legos, but also because I made a day-long commitment when I asked what they’ve been reading.
 
I learned—in greater detail than the original text—about their current favorite book series, which I’m pretty certain involved a kid and most definitely dragons and the kid had bullies and also sisters (which were maybe the same people) and these other people also had dragons who weren’t allowed in the apartment complex which was a problem because CLEARLY you cannot keep your dragons OUTDOORS, especially on a day like THIS, and you don’t even understand how cool the main character’s clothing is, which she makes herself with the dragon’s keen fashion sense guiding her, but the other dragons don’t appreciate the chic bent to apartment D-3, so they bond together to wipe out both the main character and her dragon, and it’s possible the lines bled between the book series and the Lego village we were touring together while enduring the synopsis, but you get the gist and also I evaded conversations about the stock market so it was a real win-win.
 
This: this is the greatest hope I have for the future. I’m pretty certain we’re all going to die in an overheated, ever-erratic climate like that time I forgot banana bread was in the oven. But until that happens, kids and other young people will keep reading, and bookstore sales will continue to climb so long as we have trees to make books and zealots to spike book sales by banning books. I just hope some of them are mine. 

Zach Hively
Fool's Gold

I have decided to become the human version of P.F. Flyers: I want to run faster, jump higher, or at least endure nominal physical exertion without hurting my back.

I have also decided to embrace who I really am, which is a man deeply averse to exercise. I have tried it all: running never gave me that mythical high. Swimming never enhanced my hearing with swimmer’s ear. And tennis? Well, I quite like my elbows just the way they are.

Yet for all the distaste and disdain I have for exercise, I LOVE being active. Who doesn’t love activities? This is a word we use to coerce children and child-like adults into keeping themselves occupied for at least five minutes a stretch. “Let’s do an activity!” could lead to ANYTHING. Building the Tower of Giza or the Pyramid of Pisa out of clothespins and pasta is an Activity. Digging for the Lost Ark is an Activity. Picking up the trash that blows in from the neighbor’s yard like money-seeking relatives in the night? Most definitely an Activity.

In fact, the only thing better than an Activity is a NEW Activity. This is really quite Zen, if you don’t think about it too hard: it’s the doing that matters with Activities, much more than the finishing, and if a new Activity gives your caretaker ten more minutes of effing peace and quiet, you best believe there will always be a new Activity.

Of course, I don’t get such inventive variety with my Activities these days, because I spend all my time walking the dog.

Both my faithful readers will remember that I recently adopted Ryzhik, who requires approximately seventeen consecutive hours of exercise each day. This contrasts with my other dog, Hawkeye, who like me prefers Activities to exercise. We are really quite alike, Hawkeye and I, and the similarities go far beyond our matching rugged handsomeness. I like throwing balls, and Hawkeye likes fetching them. I also like throwing sticks, which Hawkeye also likes fetching. We both enjoy the pure being-ness of being outside, and we both will turn around and head home rather than talk to strangers out there in the world. We will also congratulate each other on a ten-minute-constitutional well done, then settle in on the couch to re-binge a season of Daredevil.

So Ryzhik has forced a bit of adjustment in our lives. It now takes three, four days to binge a full season. And walking is now a regular form of exercise, especially if I don’t want someone pulling all the coats off all the hooks in all the rooms of the house, sometimes with the hooks still attached.

Ryzhik is that freakish beast who revels in exercise but can’t stand Activities. For a block of time each day, we leave Hawkeye at home for some of that well-warranted effing peace and quiet, and we go out for a destruction-prevention walk. Rather, I walk—and Ryzhik leaps up cliffs, and digs up rabbit dens, and disappears to join the circus, and returns with exotic animal skulls in his maw. He truly is a P.F. Flyer, and the reason I want to become one too is the dread that someday I will have to carry all 75 pounds of him home.

Fortunately, I have a brother-in-law. Let’s call him “Scott” because that is his name. Scott is the sort of man who was born capable of lifting refrigerators. For a long time now, he has been rucking—which is the fine art of powerwalking with the equivalent mass of a Ryzhik in a backpack.

“Teach me,” I said, because even after whole decades of Activities I am more likely to empty a fridge than move it.

So Scott got me started—and we started smart. I selected a moderately petite rock, and Scott had me wrap it in duct tape so it wouldn’t chew up my pack. I strapped the pack to my back and took the first steps of turning Ryzhik’s walks into an Activity—hey, let’s go carry rocks for an hour! It’ll be fun!

And it was, both times. I could practically feel myself getting stronger and less resistant. It’s amazing the difference that five, six whole pounds made in my worldview. Until those pounds made me take up new Activities like “should I take two or three ibuprofen this morning,” “where’s the ice pack,” and “Epsom salt baths.” Much less P.F. Flyer, much more penny loafer. Which is okay, too, because from now on, I’ll make the dog carry the rocks—in preparation for the day he needs to carry me home.