House of Eratosthenes

There is a record of dissolution dated November 3, 1991, with my name affixed upon it. And so it seems I had a different marital status up until that date, although I cannot recall much from that era. I remember living in a single-wide, which I did not want but my ex-wife did. Only other former spouses, similarly discarded like so much garbage, will understand how it came to pass that I resided therein all by myself.

I came out of this experience, eventually, whole again but not unchanged. I had nightmares about this piece of crap I’d been sold. But it was inside its dillapidated innards that I began to figure out where I really wanted to live. In there. When it was too late to do anything about it. As I lived the dream of a woman who wanted nothing more to do with me.

I thought of it again just now, as I finished hauling in groceries in hundred degree heat, for the benefit of another woman much more deserving of such male deference. My dream house, you see, has not too many definitions because I’ve not put a lot of thought into it. But it does have an elegant solution for grocery shopping, one that has been reinforced by years and decades of acquiring food. There is a behemoth that guzzles diesel fuel by the bushel for this purpose, which would give Al Gore a heart attack — unless, that is, it was put under his control. Four-on-the-floor. Retractable stepladder for use by full-grown men, not just petite ladies. The fuel mileage is in the single digits. You wouldn’t believe how many groceries this thing holds. In my dream house, I go grocery shopping every three, four, five months or so.

My dream house has a garage especially built for the dream behemoth. It’s down by the south end, near the pool area, because the land upon which the house is built is gently sloped such that this is where you reach the lower levels. A dumbwaiter is way over-sized for Queen Victoria’s era, it wouldn’t fit there at all. This is a twenty-first century dumb-waiter. It’s a good seven feet deep by eight-to-nine feet wide. It passes through three or four floors of the main building, delivering hundreds of cubic feet of groceries not only to the main kitchen, but to the computer room as well. Hey, repairs will be necessary and some of them might be local. There are file servers, database servers, video servers, satellite servers, web servers. Every now and then one of ’em will blow a power supply, so the dumb-waiter stands ready to assist.

That’s the grocery garage. The commuter garage is in another building, on the West side. This is the one I use every single day, as I shuttle my butt to a skyscraper housing a big important software firm of which I am the President and CEO. The commuter vehicle is considerably smaller than the grocery behemoth, costs a good bit more, and perhaps is maintained a bit more lovingly.

I never drive it in reverse. Not at home. Not when I pull out of the garage in the morning, and not when I pull in at night. Driving backwards on any kind of daily basis is a burden I’ve given up here. The commuter garage is round, about 23 feet in diameter total, and there is a twelve-foot turntable in the middle. It rotates 180 degrees clockwise every time the garage door is closed, you see. So it isn’t necessary for this garage to have two openings, in fact it connects to a single tunnel concealed underground.

Porsche 911 Turbo S There is a pedestrian underground tunnel that links to this commuter garage, and affixed to this is a changing room that is always stocked with clean, folded swim trunks and towels. My servants keep it that way. From here I can dive straight into the indoor pool, which naturally connects to the outdoor pool. So yes, it’s rather rare that a business owner clocks out at five sharp, in fact I know it almost never happens. But it ain’t no big thing. I can work ’til it’s pitch black, pilot my 911 Turbo S home, down through the underground tunnel just like Batman. Park it on the turntable, strip down, walk through the narrow passage way and dive right in. Oh my I do believe I forgot to mention the swim trunks. That’s how it would go when there’s no company; work, commute, tunnel, turntable, birthday suit, indoor pool, outdoor pool, hot tub. And then my sweetie brings me a roast beef samrich. And you just know there’s a waterproof keyboard out there.

Anyway, I thought that was a stroke of genius. A garage for bringing in the food, and another garage for leaving for work. These are two different things you see. Two different lists of requirements.

The master bedroom is a wonder of the world. You could play basketball in this thing. It’s impossible to figure out where the bedroom ends and the bathroom begins. His-and-Hers sinks are spaced apart from each other, and angled away too. There is copious surface space on the female side of this arrangement; before she unpacks her gear you’ll wonder how it can all be put to good use. After she’s unpacked, you’ll wonder why you were wondering. It won’t bother me one little bit. And my beard trimmings in the sink won’t bother her one little bit. The shower stall is more luxurious than anything you’ve seen in any four-star hotel. The tiles are all obsidian. The shitter is in a separate room all closed in, and the sunken Roman tub is in a separate room all open. It peeks out over the balcony. Again, there is an excess of surface space for magazines, champagne ice buckets, roast beef samrich plates, and yeah another waterproof keyboard. There is a fridge built into the base of the Roman tub as well. And of course there is a gigantic glass fireplace.

Her closet — it’s a floor. The next floor down. She descends the spiral staircase, like Venus fresh borne on the ocean waves, in her undergarments, then she makes herself up. Every inch of space under that leviathan of a master bedroom suite, it’s all hers.

The master suite does not seem as functional at six in the evening as it does about eight or nine hours later; it is built for sacrificing R.E.M. sleep for a little more carnal delight. It has 210 degrees of view all over everything. But the way the specially tinted light works with the windows, folks inside can see all over everything outside, while nobody outside can see what’s going on inside. Directly adjoining this is the highest room in the entire palace, the “observatory.” Perfectly round, fourteen feet in diameter, with a powerful electronic telescope and a transparent hemispherical roof. There is very little in the observatory. Just a table for an ice cold beverage, a bean bag chair, and my massive comic book & girly mag collection.

There has to be a wood shop. There has to be one. It has a wood lathe and a drill press and an air compressor and a pottery wheel and an oil change pit. Yeah that’s right, this is a third garage. You park a car to drop off the groceries, you park the car to enter your domicile after a hard day’s work, and you park the car to change the oil. Dream House Morgan is a multi-billionaire software mogul, and he buys his own food and changes his own oil.

The two-wheeled vehicles are in yet another building. There is at least one hybrid bicycle, a real “mountain” bike or two, several high-end racing bikes that cost more than cars. There are pulley systems that store these vessels out of the way up top, there is a repair stand, and storage space for the water bottles, energy bars, spare tubes, spoke wrenches, and apparel. We haven’t even gotten to the motorcycles yet. Hogs, Yamaha, Suzuki, Kawasaki, Honda. Lots of Honda. The way I figure it, the Goldwing will be stored here, and the trailer will probably go in that other building, in the workshop. There may be some neglected toys, but the Goldwing & trailer will not be among them. They’ll get a workout.

Sunsets are precious to me, and as I get older they are becoming more precious. (This was prophesied to me by a stranger when I was sixteen, and the prophecy has come true.) The westernmost building is set aside for the most masculine pursuits. The largest decking for barbecues is out here, along with a billiards room, and — for when the sunsets aren’t imminent — a home theater downstairs that has no windows whatsoever. Yet another computer station is concealed in this building, also downstairs, sharing the allocated volume with the home theater. My dream house, you see, accommodates my mood during any given moment — not the other way around.

Yes, I have some computing to do that is best done when there are no windows. But that’s one hour out of every four, I’d guess. Maybe less than that. The rest of the time I want to survey my domain, like a majestic lion. And so the top-most floor of the largest, most Southern building, is allocated for a single gigantic room: The Master Study. Primary workstation. Secondary and tertiary workstations. Three monitors apiece. The server room is just adjacent (and the behemoth garage, with eight-foot-wide dumbwaiter, is downstairs). This suite has its own pisser and coffeemaker. And, for when the time is right, a fridge with beer. Perhaps some blogging would get done here now and then. The view is the best in the entire house — a full thirty-five feet off the ground, with a wide-open view of the ocean.

It faces directly South, so the glass shades itself automatically when the sun becomes merciless.

You can swim directly from the indoor pool into the living room…after you swim from the outdoor pool, through a passage, into the indoor pool. And you swam there straight from the bubble-jet hot tub. You can walk from the living room to the dining room. From the dining room, up a spiral staircase, you emerge on a mezzanine which sports a fully-stocked wet bar, overlooking the viewscreen which is sixteen feet wide and displays a projection-teevee image that can be seen by all. Had you kept walking, you could go from there into the full-sized kitchen, but why would you want to do that? There is a laptop docking station by the wet bar, whose video channel can be spliced to this mammoth projection teevee screen. Every now and then, coming home from work, this just might be my mode: I might have an idea I’ll want to refine. I toldja. The Dream House accommodates my emotional profile in a given moment, not the other way around.

So you can watch the viewscreen from below, in the classic furniture cluster. With my favorite Archie Bunker recliner down there. You can watch it from above, at the wet bar. Or a bit closer, from the laptop docking station. Type in a letter, watch it appear on the screen, bigger than a man’s head. Awesome!

When it’s time to watch a movie, the video server is at your beckon-call. It’s connected to a jukebox. Back in the early ’90s, when I was writing the software to regulate a real-life optical-jukebox unit taller than a refrigerator that could store 50 GB (!), the dream house boasted a quieter model that cycled through 6 terabytes. Eighteen years wiser now, I bow to Moore’s Law. I no longer pretend to have an idea of what the goddamn thing stores or how it does it. I just want it to displace this bulky four-level bookshelf which surely must be home to more than 500 discs of James Bond movies, 1980’s teevee shows, and macho-movies like Patton, Braveheart, 300, Beowulf, The Incredibles, Die Hard, Raiders of the Lost Ark and A Bridge Too Far. The remote cycles through a tree-configured database. You sit in the easy chair, and go Movies -> Action/Adventure -> James Bond -> Goldfinger (1964) Sean Connery -> Play. Play & pause are run by a unique clap-on clap-off interface, for those all-important bathroom breaks. And yeah, I wrote the software that does it all.

Pool Party The wine cellar is concealed behind a secret panel on the ground floor. It is kept at a constant temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. This is very close to the dumwaiter, for the benefit of those grocery shopping trips that are entirely liquid. There is a thick plexiglass portal between the wine cellar and the indoor pool, from which you can see the swimmers underwater. The wine cellar sort of funnels into yet another secret passage, which leads to the other building with the bedrooms.

There is another building with a real library. Three floors. With ladders on wheels, just like in the old movies.

The Western-most building has a reason for being there, and it makes the most of it. So does the Eastern-most. And the Southernmost. The Southern end is where all the partying happens; the final frontier before you meet the ocean. That’s where my boat is parked. That’s where the extra-large, industrial-level gas barbecue lives. And the bubble-jet hot tub. And the soft-serve ice cream bar. All my house parties turn into pool parties.

Seven buildings all-in-all. Forty-three thousand, six hundred fifty square feet. Four floors if you don’t count that observatory with the electronic telescope, five floors if you do.

But I really haven’t put that much thought into it.

I always wanted me that library with the ladders on wheels.

Not gonna happen, though, I can see that.

I’ll have to settle for mountain hiking once a year and catch some sunsets when I can.
- philmon | 07/04/2010 @ 13:42

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Memo For File CXVIIIThursday, July 1st, 2010

Memo For File CXVIII
Thursday, July 1st, 2010