Remember the Tinman from The Wizard of Oz? All he wanted was a heart. But he did have feelings. So much so that he cried and his tears would make his metal body rust. So much so that he rusted in place for untold years until Dorothy and the Scarecrow found him. This is how I feel about my shed roof. If I cry over it, it'll just rust more and I'll never see the Wizard and get my wish. Or some such shit.
Seriously though, this, and many of my other "homeowner blues" are getting me down. I nearly lost it yesterday...
I finally got up enough "noive" (as the "New Yawk"-accented Cowardly Lion would say) to venture out of the house to go to The Home Depot to get a gallon of the "Aluminum Paint" I'd already researched that would solve my rusty shed woes. This time, I did my homework. If you remember, I tried to remedy this shed roof issue a year a a half ago and, well, you can see the result...ultra failure -- worse than before. This "Aluminum Paint" was like putting liquid aluminum right over the nasty stuff and forever encapsulating the shebang. No more worries. And for just $25. Or so I thought. The 20-something year old girl smirked and said she never heard of anything like that and recommended I look into rust remover and/or converter, then plenty of elbow grease in removing any remnant rust by scrubbing or blasting, then applying a good base of primer then some rust resistant paint. I could see the dollar signs spinning in her dead, "wishing-they-were-looking-at-a-phone-instead-of-some-clueless-Boomer" eyes. I was polite but curt and told her I'd go across the road to Lowes. And so I did.
There I had to ask two employees who were apparently busy holding up their countertop with their elbows if there were someone to help me in the paint department. They paged him. He showed up and shouted at them like it was an inconvenience to be paged. I was pointed out and he motioned for his 20-something year old boy assistant to help me. He also knew not what odd fluid I spoke of but was about to suggest that I -- but at least before he went through his script of expensive product recommendations, he looked it up on his phone and found what I was talking about. They don't have it in stock. I said I guess I'd have to order it online and even though he works for this brick and mortar, he more or less nodded and assured me that I should have known that in this day and age, physical stores are a waste of freakin' time.
Thing is, when I did get home and did more online research, I discovered that there was "aluminum paint" which is silver colored paint to make shit look aluminum, "aluminum paint" which is paint used to color aluminum (not steel which my shed roof is made of, of course) or "aluminum paint" which is roofing paint which contains "aluminum" which is supposed to make the roof durable? All of this, on further digging, indeed would prove to ultimately be doomed to the same fate eventually as the cheap white paint I originally used on the shed roof...the rust will still LIVE ON and cause more damage and potentially bleed through. The only reliable treatment is removal (or conversion, but that's a whole other ball of wax).
But before returning home, after visiting Lowes, I went to Walmart, since I was out -- despite the fact, as I said in a previous post about the SNAP benefits resuming, that I SHOULDN'T -- and of course, it was jam-fucking packed! I got a few essentials and made my way through the huddled masses to self-checkout, was scanning my shit and the AI stopped me because I dared to hold two of the three cans of soup I was scanning in my left hand as I scanned one in my right. "Surely this human is trying to steal those other two cans and only scan one!" coldly-processed my accuser, the AI. The employee is summoned by the blinking amber light, she sees I was just starting on can one of three and said, shaking her head, "It didn't even give you a chance." And even though she was agreeing with me that the AI was incorrect and stopped me in error, I gave her a sneer. And I kept thinking about that for the rest of the night. Shit, I'm thinking about that now. AI is turning humans against one another. Why was I mad at her? She was agreeing with me. I was just taking it out on her 'cause I couldn't take my frustrations out on a computer.
Or is it deeper than that? Am I one of those nasty, crusty old men? Am I like a villain in a classic fairy tale...the old ugly hermit who lives in the rusty old shack and scowls at everything...especially the young and happy? It's not the challenge of a rusting shed roof and my tough-love lesson that I can't just spit an' polish my way out of this one. It's not the encroachment of the inevitability of an AI-enhanced world and the shoulder-shrugging acceptance of such. It's not even the sappy little mindless rom-com I watched later last night alone in my dark little room which with I had a bit of a sob sesh, I don't mind sayin'. I'm feeling a little better today. Still no solutions to all my woes and fears, but I guess, somewhere deep down, I do still have a heart. If only I can find it more often.