The man cupped the hair brush in his hand and turned toward the bus window for a private evaluation of his reflection in the glass. He smoothed his hair, then began on his mustache, thick and coarse as straw. Because it was the same pale shade as eyebrow and eyelash, it created a permanent impression of surprise on his face. He wore a brown leather jacket too wide in the shoulders, and on both hands he wore chunky gold rings.

He slipped the brush into a coat pocket and pulled out a scuffed flip phone that he opened and closed, opened and closed as his rings glinted in the sunlight. A second man took the empty seat next to the first. The bus was quiet except for the phone’s staccato snap.

“That’s some jewelry you got there,” said the second man. “What are they? Dragons?”

“Nah, man,” said the first, putting the phone away and holding out both hands. “This is a panther, this is a bat, and this is onyx–all from Value Village.”

“I’ve never seen jewelry like that,” the second said.

“You gotta check out their jewelry case. Sometimes there’s nothing but junk, but then you find things like this,” and he shaped the three ringed fingers into devil horns. “I’m an Ozzy Osbourne fan.”

“I like the Stones, myself.”

“Classic rock is cool. Rolling Stones. Elvis. Elvis was the original.”

“They say rock and roll got its start in the Blues,” the second said.

“That’s right, man. It’s a straight line.”

“You hear B.B. King died?”

“Huh-huh. Eighty-nine.”

The bus climbed Holman’s hill, and the driver called out the next stop.

“That’s mine,” the first said. “Getting out at Dick’s. A man’s gotta eat, you what what I mean?”

The two men talked burgers and Seahawks and the weather until the conversation stalled for a measure. In the silence, the first man hummed to himself, head-banging to an internal rhythm.

“You a musician?” the second asked.

“Nah. But my dad, he was a songwriter. Thirty-five years.”

“Yeah? Anything, I kno–”

“Never published.”

“Oh.”

The bus slowed to a stop. A ringed hand was extended and gripped. “Rock on, man,” the first said, then he was out the door, fist-pumping the bus, the sunshine, the city.

• Sign of the horns.
• Seattle’s beloved burger, Dick’s Drive-In, where even a billionaire will wait in line.
• Internal rhythm.
• More bus writing.
• Another blog and its bus-driving writer.

“What (President Donald Trump) did was not perfect. No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security, and our fundamental values. Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine. …

My promise before God to apply impartial justice requires that I put personal feelings and political biases aside. Were I to ignore the evidence that has been presented, and disregard what I believe my oath and the Constitution demands of me for the sake of a partisan end, it would, I fear, expose my character to history’s rebuke and the censure of my own conscience.”

• Romney’s speech to vote to convict.
• His constituents respond.
• A vote that should be more than an historical footnote.
• Some Republicans share his view that the president abused the power of his office for personal and political gain.
• The attacks from family, party, and fellow citizen begin.

.

All the hours pulling up layers of linoleum, carpet, nails and glue.

All the steps danced across the rough surface.

All for naught.

Refinishing existing floors would’ve meant one fewer remodeling decisions needed to be made, but the Ukrainian floorers walked into the house, surveyed the evidence, and issued a verdict: The floors were shot. I received the news as I listened to a journalist report on another house, another group of Ukrainians. Lawyers and leaders took to the floor, made the argument that the American political system, the presidency, the fabric of our nation, was shot to shreds.

That night, I inked in small squares. I welcomed the pause in the decision-making and turned myself over to the meditative creation of charting out quilt blocks on paper. The top left block in the image above is a cross, maybe a variation on a block named Ohio Star. The ray of triangles next to it is a pattern happily named Toad in a Puddle. The two bottom images are variations of Broken Dishes, a design that dates back to 1895 with the pattern’s publication in Ladies Art Company catalog.

If the date is accurate, the pattern emerged at the end of Reconstruction, a period of about 30 years following the Civil War when the government worked to end racial discrimination, improve educational and employment opportunities, and expand electoral power.

As I blackened one square, than another, I wished for such a pattern now, for a set of instructions to guide Americans as worn and weary as those of old. I want a pattern that redefines purpose and meaning, that stitches scraps, joins cloth and citizenry, heals a broken democracy, and makes a divided nation whole.

• This old floor is similar to a ship at sea.
• Museum collections and an unusual variation of Broken Dishes.
• Toad in a Puddle, embroidered version.
• Ohio Stars inside Ohio Stars.

David Lance Goines’s “Unpleasant Surprises” for The Pacific Film Archive, University of California Art Museum, 1978.

Entropy originates with great energy, heat, and order, so I began this remodel where these elements are most concentrated within the home–the kitchen at breakfast.

“Energy is primary,” wrote the physicist Geoffrey West. “Without a continuous supply of energy and resources there can be no ideas, no innovation, no growth, and no evolution.”

Or scrambled eggs, for that matter.

The energy released in a cracked egg and the glow from the coil of an electric range are examples of  the second law of thermodynamics. When energy is transformed into a useful form it also produces “useless” energy as a degraded byproduct, West explained. A cracked egg cannot be returned to its original form, so why not scramble it? Heat radiating from a cooktop not only cooks the egg but warms the kitchen.

“The battle to combat entropy by continually having to supply more energy … becomes increasingly more challenging as a system ages, underlies any serious discussion of aging, mortality, resilience, and sustainability, whether organisms, companies, or societies,” West wrote.

The kitchen in my new house–a 1918 Craftsman–showed all the signs of West’s aging system no longer functioning with ease and efficiency because of age, warp, and gunk. Like all things, kitchen surfaces and features have a lifespan, and this kitchen had been well used and unchanged for decades.

Proof was hidden in the broom closet, which had not one, but two 4-inch-wide holes venting to the outside. The original purpose for this drafty closet was a mystery that I contemplated as I scrubbed grime and smoke off walls and cupboards, peeled layers of gingham contact paper from shelves, and took a crowbar to a sealed oven door.

My initial commitment to refinish and restore the kitchen disappeared with the dirt and grime. In its place came realization that my slightly cleaner-but-still-dingy-white kitchen likely predated the modern refrigerator.

In the era of the icebox, West Coast homes were equipped with tall, skinny closets that held wooden slat shelves to help air circulate. My closet had vents  near the top and bottom that once opened to the outside. The top let warm air escape, while the bottom drew cooler air into the cabinet. This cold pantry was an ideal space to preserve food like butter, eggs, cheese, berries, fruit, and vegetables during a time when space in the icebox was at a premium.

At first I was charmed by its novelty, toying with the idea of restoring it to its original use and reducing my family’s own refrigeration, while chalking one up for the environment.

In his 2017 book, “Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies”,” the physicist West explained that the amount of energy needed for a human to stay alive, known as our metabolic rate, is about 2,000 calories a day or the equivalent of a 90-watt incandescent lightbulb.

“As social animals now living in cities we still need a lightbulb equivalent of food to stay alive but, in addition, we now require homes, heating, lighting, automobiles, roads, airplanes, computers, and so on. Consequently, the amount of energy needed to support an average person living in the United States has risen to an astounding 11,000 watts. This social metabolic rate is equivalent to the entire needs of about a dozen elephants.”

My daydream of responding to America’s indefensible use of the world’s resources through my choice of refrigerator was quickly derailed by the practicality of insulating a 100-year-old closet. Like everything else in the kitchen, the cold pantry must go.

Putting aside the moral conundrum for the moment, the renovation alone required a huge amount of mental energy because it came with a thousand additional questions I was unprepared and ill-equipped to answer. Had someone asked me how to function in a poorly designed kitchen, my answer’s would come easily. But options multiply with a room’s gutting, and the obvious solution had become as uncertain as artist David Lance Goines’s egg.

“I was born on a farm,” wrote Goines in explanation of his 1978 poster “Unexpected Surprises.” “My job was to coax eggs out from under the broody hens and bring them into the kitchen. Chickens are not too ight-bray, and they’d wander off and leave their eggs any-old-where, and sometimes you’d discover them a bit late. Consequently, whenever you’d break eggs for eating or cooking you’d crack them one by one into a separate bowl and take a gander at them to make sure that they weren’t busy turning into a chicken. Sometimes they’d be rotten, and that’s a smell you don’t forget. Even though I get my food at the store, I’ve always been just the littlest bit apprehensive whenever I crack open an egg. Maybe you are, too.”

Like Goines and his egg, I stood in a kitchen and studied a smooth, white surface. Plaster wall had supplanted egg shell, but the uncertainty of what lay within remained. How do I open a wall to connect kitchen and dining rooms? Can a refrigerator fit where the cold pantry now stood, a tacit acknowledgment of the house’s history? And what I do now that I’d junked the stove? Suddenly I was not only replacing the stove, but I was deciding its placement within the kitchen, and its fuel source.

Remembering West’s dozen elephants– the 11,000 watts of energy consumed by the average American–I vetoed natural gas as a fuel source. Its drilling and extraction through fracking produces the entropic byproduct methane, a powerful and damaging greenhouse gas.

It wasn’t an easy decision. The familiarity and aesthetics of cooking with gas was tempting when the alternative was relearning to cook on a stove that uses an electromagnet to heat a frying pan. I had to remind myself that natural gas may be a cleaner source of energy, but that didn’t make it clean.

I opted for a learning curve and hydroelectric fuel. The mighty Columbia River will generate the power that will cool my refrigerator and heat my induction stove, which will cook an egg today and many days to come in the Entropy House. And my hunger will be satiated.

• When disorder knocks, let it in: Applying the second law of thermodynamics to a remodel.
• Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Company by Geoffrey West (2017) (public library).
• A short history of human’s long use of the pantry.
• David Lance Goines.
• Natural gas industry has a methane problem.
• Induction explained.
• Washington’s energy profile.

Built in 1918, the house showed its age through cracked plaster and rotten wood, sagging porch and wobbly brick despite any care and attention it may or may not have received over the generations it remained in one family. By the time the last surviving member sold the house to me and my husband, the most curious form of entropy lay hidden in its cantilevered northwest corner where bedroom floor had bent and bowed under time and its own unsupported weight.

Walking on the floor felt as if one were on a ship deck at sea, and it posed our first opportunity to use the second law of thermodynamics as inspiration and guide in a home remodel.

Entropy–from the Greek word meaning transformation or evolution–was first used by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius in 1855 to describe how the transformation of energy introduces chaos and decay. Entropy’s certainty and elemental nature gave Albert Einstein the confidence to write that “it is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown.”

Today scientists study the entropic forces within systems as various as city and soccer team. They research what happens to energy and its byproduct at sizes ranging from cellular to universal.

“It often goes ignored that without a continuous supply of energy and resources … there can be no ideas, no innovation, no growth, and no evolution,” wrote the physicist Geoffrey West in “Scale.” “Energy is primary. It underlies the transformation and operation of everything, and no system is without consequences.”

The floor required action filled with ramification. Money, time, structural consideration, asbestos test, city permit, dump-run and decisions about new flooring options were reviewed and revisited as we worked. How would we respond?

• Do we fight the forces of entropy by jacking up the sagging corner, inserting a beam from below, and praying that plaster walls won’t crumble and windows shatter in the process? The result would be profound: furniture would be level, marbles wouldn’t roll.
• Do we iron out the waviness from the interior by tearing out the wood floor in order to install a second, level subfloor, then put in brand new floor? The stakes would be lower–no splintering of glass and plaster–but we’d have now junked a serviceable floor for convenience.
• Or do we do the least harm to house and environment, yet introduce a level of annoyance into our lives by leaving a 102-year-old floor to show its time and wear?

In the end, we decided to continuing walking on wood that undulates like waves, allowing the floor to remain as evidence of the house’s age and poor engineering. The sagging corner will be shored up with an exterior post as we aim to slow time, not reverse it. With that decision made and the last nail pulled, we danced

For thirty minutes the empty house echoed with sounds of a family moving together in unfamiliar ways. What first was enthusiastic chaos–the stomp of boot, slap of hand, laughter at our shared awkwardness, toss of a sweatshirt suddenly too hot to wear–soon settled into joyful and rhythmic order as we learned song and step. Afterward, as I turned back to lock the door, I saw the old floor held new evidence of the second law of thermodynamics in action–a circle of boot scuffs.

• “Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies” by Geoffrey West (2017) (public library).
• When disorder knocks, let it in: A remodel inspired by physics.
• Entropy-based performance analysis in sports.
• Los Levys, dancing.

Unbeknownst to me, I’d boarded a ferry full of field trips. As we left the dock, everyone spotted the harbor seal.

“Mr. Bobby! Mr. Bobby!” came shouts and leaps. “Mr. Bobby!”

“I named him,” one youngster insisted over the roar of the other children and the ferry. “I named him Mr. Bobby.”

So ownership was asserted over the creature, even as it slipped, slid, then resurfaced away from the foam and froth, away from the clamor, away, away, away.

Sometimes a week unwinds before it begins.

Like the ferry full of children, I’m happy to wave goodbye.

To this one.

• Rolodextress.

I don’t like to run, but my husband and I challenged each other to run ten 5Ks before we both turn 50 in fall of 2020. Running hurts: My knees twinge, a hip grows cranky and my lungs have started giving me trouble. But three out of four of my kids have asthma, yet that’s never stopped them, so it won’t stop me. I just need to remember to use the inhaler before I start.

I’ve run three 5Ks since this challenge began, each one is easier than the last. My baseline is 37 minutes, 29 seconds, set during the first race on Halloween. Since then, I’ve shaved off a second or two. I could claim it’s because my endurance is growing, but I think it has more to do with pressure lessening: When I look at the people around me, all jiggle-jogging our way to the finish line, I smile and relax.

My latest race was a Jingle Bell run. Snow fell at the start and finish lines, and joggers wearing Santa hats and angel wings sang Christmas carols along the route. My 12-year-old, disappointed that I’d not paid for him to participate in the timed race, took my number at the last minute, so my official time was impressive, though wildly inaccurate.

Maybe on my 10th 5K I’ll match this time.

Or maybe not.

Others may measure success by score, placement and time, but for me, it’s happiness I’m racing toward as I near the the finish line.

• A line from the poem, “Breathing,” by Mark O’Brien.
• My most recent 5K.
• Runners are happier than the general population, a 2018 study found.

Don’t tell me that life’s a path of self-discovery. Don’t tell me I could’ve taken the poet’s less-traveled road as I sit in traffic. Don’t tell me that we’re all on a journey toward self-improvement, self-actualization, self-awareness: I ain’t intrested.

2. Snail sentences, small and measured, Nov. 23.

In slippered feet, I wander through dim rooms, so cool, so empty; the movement a thin line of progress, so small, so measured.

3. In early morning’s sooty light, birdsong blessed the day, June 18.

Eighteen years have passed since sleep and sons eluded me, enough lifetime for two of the three boys to grow into smart, strong men now living in the liminal space that hums with uncertainty, molecules vibrating with anticipation. Jittery, I breathe in and wait for the future to reveal itself.

4. From my perspective, all exhaustion and futility, Oct. 22.

Want to know what I fear? 

Not having an imagination large enough.

Delightful enough.

Fanciful. 

Enough. 

Enough.

Enough.

Weary in spirit, I walk.

5. It’s never too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize: Relying on Thoreau as I mother a young climate activist, Sept. 24.

My child hovered in the entry, uncertain where to go, what to do, fearing what might happen if he crossed the thresh hold. His face was drained of color and creased with worry. I shook my head.

It’s time to go.

But they won’t let me.

This is what it means to strike.

6. A weather forecast calls for reduction of cloud, mushroom, Oct. 1.

My friend called me the A-word, my child says when asked about school. Respond with a plate of buttered toast and ibuprofen for him, wine for me. Days that begin with translucence and bird aria end in the poet’s unstoppable coming darkness.

7. Philosopher-poet seeks words’ precarious beauty, March 26.

Here.

In this space that is public (yet in all other aspects private because of its obscurity), I speak into the silence. Like a ghost, I’ve haunted the blog for the lifespan of this youngest child. Stealing moments out of my life, reveling in the temporary solitude, I have been happy. To write is a comfort. With few watching, the blog’s opacity frees me to live the questions and write my way to the answers. Here there is space to wander and wonder.

I am grateful.

• My favorites and yours from 2019, unredacted:

1. Potholes on the road taken, Jan. 22.
2. Snail sentences, small and measured, Nov. 23.
3. In early morning’s sooty light, birdsong blessed the day, June 18.
4. From my perspective, all exhaustion and futility, Oct. 22.
5. It’s never too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize: Relying on Thoreau as I mother a young climate activist, Sept. 24.
6. A weather forecast calls for reduction of cloud, mushroom, Oct. 1.
7. Philosopher-poet seeks words’ precarious beauty, March 26.

I’m thinking about Walt Whitman, about unreadable sentences, about words that falter, fail, fall into weeks of inky wordlessness. I’m thinking about the Rolodex, found for eight dollars at the used hardware store. I’m thinking of its irrelevance and obsolescence and realness in a world where chunks of our lives now exist outside of time and location, in a place vulnerable to disappearance and deletion in a way the Rolodex will never be vulnerable.

I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.

–Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

To lift the Rolodex off my desk I must grasp it with two hands. Made from steel, it’s heavy, and made heavier still with the hundred or so blank cards neatly sandwiched between two end frames. The cards are yellowed and softened by time; the plastic index tabs, brittle. The letter F is missing and J’s tab is broken. I pull a card from the deck and turn it over and over, rub finger and thumb against flanneled paper. I pick up a pen, thinking of my day. Who had I been with? What had I thought about? Why do I want to remember these hours? Whom will it matter, if not to me?

• Disfluency while reading Whitman, 1892 version.
• Internet historians mourn loss of cultural record as Yahoo deletes group archives, National Public Radio, Dec. 9, 2019.
• A patent, Jan. 24, 1956.
• Images from Rolodextress.

“We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create, from a physicist’s viewpoint, entropy.”

–theoretical physicist Geoffrey West

Two months ago, my husband, Marcel, and I bought a second home, entered into contract to sell our existing home to a developer, and introduced a level of disorder and chaos, of the physicist’s entropy, into our lives. Our decision was in response to the Seattle City Council’s rezoning of our neighborhood. Small, old houses with spacious yards like ours would be torn down to make space for three or four townhouses. City leaders hoped it would address a housing shortage, rising rents and historic redlining.

Initially we wanted to build a small rental unit on our lot–but that was too expensive. Then we thought we might find neighbors and friends who’d want to invest together, combine lots, and build an intentional community known as co-housing. After all, it was people, not place, that mattered, right?

I floated the idea.

My hand-out to neighbors. Image of cohousing community by developer Orange Splot of Portland; painting details by muralist Ryan Henry Ward of Seattle.

I canvassed the street, knocking on every neighbors’ door, inviting them to brunch in hopes of sparking conversation. I talked it up with friends, sent my extended family on a field trip to visit a cohousing community–so much effort and it fizzled.

“If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons,” West said. “They’ve come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That’s why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”

I went to a conference, dragged Marcel to a cohousing meeting, a picnic, and along the way met some friendly people. But in the end, we just didn’t want to share a yard, a wall or one more picnic meal with this dreadfully earnest, well-intentioned, cringe-inducing crowd.

When we learned that neighbors to the south and west were selling, that where seven homes now stood there’d be 37 townhouses, that we’d be living with years of construction–we decided to move. In late September we found a fixer-upper three miles east of our current home, a 1918-craftsman with a bit more space, a little less yard, close to public transportation, schools and a patch of urban wilderness. We had 10 months to make it habitable.

Our future home. Photo of Zillow listing.

Located within the Roosevelt urban village, the 1,800-square-foot house is part of a neighborhood that recently received historic district status. Most of the homes are craftsman or tudors. There is a small garage in the northwest rear of the lot is where a backyard cottage will be built. The 5,000-foot-parcel is bordered on the south and west by a narrow graveled alley.

To help us focus our energy and resources, Marcel and I developed principles for remodeling our home:

1. A place for multigenerational living, designed for elders who want to age in place, recognizing the seclusion and independence of the teenager and young adult, honoring the privacy of the couple, creating small spaces for the very young.Â
2. We prize the Dutch concept of gezelligheid. It is difficult to translate, but encompasses the ideas of coziness, togetherness, warmth, and joy.
3. Awareness of where the house is in the neighborhood and to nature through use of views and creation of outdoor rooms that create a seamless transition between inside and outside.
4. Efficient and beautiful use of space through the reuse and repurposing of materials and resources.
5. Emphasis on sustainability and a small carbon footprint.

Entropy illustration from Conscious Entities.

In our mind weve named the property Entropy House, a portmanteau of the original owning family (Entrop) and our last name (Levy). Entropy is energy that dissipates as time progresses, and the best explanation I’ve found comes from comics author and humanities professor Nick Sousanis. As he explains, the arrow of time is why coffee cools, ice cream melts, and the universe spreads and grows cold. It’s the introduction of chaos and the pervasiveness of disorder; eggs scramble and cannot spontaneously unscramble.

Entropy illustration from NfX.

Because entropy’s a reminder that all that’s familiar will end, it’s a call to celebrate the vibrant, chaotic energy of all life, and the rarity of our existence. We like its idea of irreversibility (from thermodynamics) and surprisal (from information theory). As an aesthetic, wabi-sabi aligns with this and rings true with us. We’re using Pinterest to gather ideas, designs, etc. I’ll be documenting the remodel here.

• Geoffrey West, theoretical physicist.
• Seattle upzoned map.
• Seattle housing and affordability plan.
• Seattle attempts to rezone away the racial divide. 
• I was once enchanted with the concept of cohousing.
• The Dutch word for cozy: Gezelligheid.
• My future neighborhood: Ravenna-Cowen North Historic District.
• Comic artist and humanities professor Nick Sousanis understands entropy.
• Wabi-sabi, a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection.
• My Pinterest page.