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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

i am being killed by this. this is killing me. my first draft of my first chapter is going great. i told it to imitate the style of "the domestication of the garage" and this is so fucking funny but also has already doomed our species to extinction

This is the whole of my argument in miniature, and the reader may as well have it now, in the first chapter, so that he can watch it come apart and be reassembled for the next three thousand years. An entrance has two incompatible jobs. It must handle the machinery of arrival, which is a problem of width and turning and where to put the vehicle and its driver, and it must stage the reception, which is a problem of dignity, sequence, and being seen. Give them separate rooms and both go well. Squeeze them into one and something has to give. The Iron Age town, with plenty of ground and no shortage of labor, built both rooms. The Renaissance palace built both rooms. The English country seat built both rooms, and a mile of drive to lengthen the second one. The American suburban lot, thirty feet of frontage and a mortgage, could afford neither, and so it kept the machinery and abandoned the reception, which is why the front door of the average house in this country is now a vestigial organ, opened for strangers and Halloween. We did not decide this. Nobody proposed it, and if it had been proposed, we would have objected. It happened the way the garage door became the family entrance, which is to say by accretion, out of the daily preference for the shorter walk. But it is worth knowing what we gave up, and where it went, and that it was once a room with a bench in it where you could sit down and get a thing settled in front of witnesses.