Cal Freeman

A Structuralist’s Guide to Sink Maintenance

Jerry Nichols makes a wrench sleeve from the straight piece of a drain trap.  His flannel shirt sleeve brushes against the wrench sleeve while he works at ratcheting locknuts beneath a faucet head.  Sleeves become sleeves and parts of sinks become parts of new sinks; parts of sinks become tools for repairing old sinks with spirited-away parts.  The vectoring of the two sleeves is what the structurality of structure caused as soon as the first sink was installed.  In our neighborhood the totems are transitive involving on random days sinks, squirrels, dogs, elms, brown bottles.  Prohibitions against tossing out old sinks are seasonal.  Prohibitions against killing squirrels are rare, however in certain instances where a dog has feared a firing gun or the police were in earshot I have known the killing of squirrels to stop.  Jerry Nichols has prohibited the consumption of squirrels under any circumstance.  As a retired teamster driver, he balances competing moieties: truck/dog/brown bottle/squirrel/sink/alligators of tires in the road.  Squirrels are rabid.  Dogs are kind.  Elms feed upon an underground stream concomitant to above-ground currents.  In a careful bricolage, we keep the water running down.



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