children in after-school activities. In those primitive times, when children came home from school, they’d just go outside, completely on their own, and engage in what professional child psychologists call “nonstructured” behavior, also known as “playing,” which is when you run around shrieking and getting dirt in your hair hold elaborate funerals for stuffed animals lie on your back next to a friend and make burping noises until one of you laughs so hard that he pees in his pants pretend you are fighting evil aliens from the Planet Kawoomba, who can be defeated only by spit

And so on. Of course, today we realize that children need to have a great deal of structure in the form of leagues and uniforms and referees and team photographs and trophies and dozens of parents standing on the sidelines shrieking like mental patients. So unless you are some kind of low-life child-abusing vermin, one of the first things you’ll do when you move to your new home is enroll your children in Little League, soccer, and midget football, as well as a scouting program, not to mention gymnastics, ballet, violin, karate, computer, tennis, and helicopter-piloting lessons. You want your child’s life to become so structured that he or she is incapable of fooling around in his or her own yard without detailed instructions from a coach. (“OK, Jason! Burp! NO, dammit! Not that way!”)

Not that we have time to worry about our child’s education or after-school activities. No, we are busy working and striving, in hopes that someday we will be able to afford something that most Americans dream of but very few ever achieve: nice furniture. We’ll cover this depressing topic in a later chapter. But first we need to look, in the next chapter, at the basic condition of our house, and see if we can’t, by means of various costly projects, make it worse.

Chapter 6. It’s Noon: Do You Know Where Your Contractor Is?

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