painting tips.

Angela and I spent some time painting the living room recently. I learned a lot from the experience. For instance, I learned that applying a layer of calk along the edge of the blue painter’s tape can actually do more harm than good. That dang calk peeled our drywall right off. Additionally, I learned that 90% of a paint job’s success is in the preparation. Any bozo can slap paint on a surface. The real art is in how you tape the plastic tarp to the baseboards. And perhaps most importantly, I learned that just because a building has an extravagant, every-color-of-the-rainbow paint job, that does not necessarily mean that it is a paint store. Also, I learned what a gay bar looks like.

I think making gay bars look just like paint stores is cruelly deceptive. It's like putting anti-freeze in a Mountain Dew container and sticking it in the refrigerator. To the casual observer, the two look virtually identical. Confusion and the disastrous consumption of a toxic fluid not meant for ingestion (by which I mean Mountain Dew) are at risk of occurring. Similarly, regarding the paint store/gay bar situation, what you have is one of two potentially uncomfortable situations:

1. A fellow in old, paint-speckled cargo shorts, tennis shoes and a faded college t-shirt asking the Freddy Mercury look-alike behind the bar where he keeps the paint rollers, or,
2. A costumed cowboy in skimpy leather chaps, thoroughly disappointed to find nothing but a closed, empty, disco-ball-less paint store on a Saturday night.

Personally, I’d prefer if neither ever happens again.