socal has an ideal climate for putting up christmas lights, i don’t think i would be comfortable doing it somewhere where it actually rains or with big leafy trees around to contribute other rooftop slipping hazards. the only downside is that frequently you're forced to work with socal’s signature roofing material, the mission/spanish tile. in most of the country the vast majority of roofs are done with normal rooftop shingles, which are easy to work with because they have a flat sandpapery surface that provides so much traction that sometimes you feel like you're attached to the roof with velcro. the only thing you have to watch out for is worn-out shingles, the little bits and pieces become unglued and they become a seriously slipping hazard, in one instance that was more embarrassing than dangerous i slid on an unexpectedly slippery shingle patch in the middle of a relatively flat roof and landed on my butt.

⊕recently we've been training a new employee, the ocelot from minecraft. he uses a tiny ladder we found at daiso, which presumably they sell for this exact purpose.but in socal, they like to add a bit of local flavor by using clay/terracotta tiles for roofing, especially on the kinds of high-end houses that also pay to have christmas lights put up. sometimes you encounter these big flat tiles that aren't too bad, however most tiled roofs are done with curvy tiles that give them an uneven sinusoidal surface, whether it's from genuine half-cylindrical spanish tiles or cheaper knockoff S-tiles. besides being annoying to walk on, there are a lot of things you have to watch out for when dealing with tiles: they easily get slippery from dust or lichen or gunk collected in their troughs, sometimes they're loose and shift underfoot when you walk on them, or if you step on them incorrectly they can crack or break. many homeowners are especially concerned about that last one though as far as i can tell cracked/broken tiles still function just fine, almost every tile roof we go on has at least a few already broken by prior rooftop expeditions.

as for actually attaching lights, tiles are the absolute worst to clip lights to, done only as a last resort if there's nothing else like a gutter or magnetic strip. mostly this happens around gables, where the tiles are placed sideways on the end and you have no choice but to clip the lights under the tiles hanging over the gable, and somehow it feels like it's a completely different situation beneath each individual tile. one tile will accept the light clip easily and it will stay firm, the next one will light the clip in easily too but so loose that it comes out right away, the next one won't go in at all unless you shift the tile a bit and then it goes in firm, and then the last one has mortar or something underneath it and it's literally impossible to get anything underneath it so you just pretend to clip it in while secretly securing the wire around it with staples to the wall. frequently you have to settle for "good enough" when securing lights in those areas, unsurprisingly a lot of the "fixes" we have to go back for are a single bulb that fell out of place on a tile portion.

when we started off several years ago we installed lights clients already owned, but as we gained knowledge and experience we graduated to the real professional stuff, custom-cut lights. the way it works is that you basically make your own light strands to fit each individual roof, by cutting them from a giant spool of wire with light sockets spaced every 12, 15 or 18 inches, depending on the spool you use. the bulbs come separate and we have to screw them into the socket ourselves, but this allows us to do any color pattern the client desires. we cap off the ends of each strand with plugs, then use a spool of socket-free wire to make our own extension cords to connect the light strands to each other and then to powerfor wrapping trees we use the same kind of LED mini light strands you can buy at home depot though, purchased from a supplier in bulk. in a pinch we do sometimes have to go buy more at home depot, which are a little annoying to use because they come inside way more packaging..

once you've done custom-cut you never want to go back to using people's janky old lights, no more headaches about store-bought light strands always being too long or too short to fit a house, you just cut everything to the exact length required, including power cords. the best thing is that when the season's over, you label where the light strands go and store them, and if the client rebooks next year you've already got a full lighting setup ready to go that fits their house perfectly. the only wrinkle is that takedowns get hectic and light strands aren't always properly labelled, so sometimes for a reinstall we've got nothing to go on besides the roof and a pile of light strands and extension cords that are supposed to fit it. it turns into a kind of pizzle, reading clues in the ways the strands were made to try and figure out what needs to go where. a taped-off outlet on the end of a strand indicates a far end not connected to anything else, the type of clips used correspond to different roof parts: tuff clips for gutters and tile, magnets for magnetic portions like metal strips below shingles, shingle clips for shingles or roof peaks, no clips at all for lights we staple around garages or on fences. things don't always work out, you just can't figure it out or already spent a lot of time putting up the wrong strand, or sometimes a piece of the puzzle is just straight-up missing, however it's no big deal because you can always make replacement strands or cords using the supplies for new installs.

increasingly, i am beginning to question what the hell i'm doing up on rooftops, especially after seeing many people online saying things along the lines of "hey guys you better not be getting up on the roof to install christmas lights, it is NOT worth the risk!". i'm not really cut out for this work or particularly skilled at these kinds of things, i'm somewhat clumsy and there have been too many close calls, if i keep pushing it i'm bound to get unlucky eventually. this all really started to sink in on one particularly sketchy roof section that was on a church no less, a narrow archway above the main entrance that was so high up the ladder fully extended could barely reach (so about 20ft up). the pitch of the roof ended up being unexpectedly steep, so i slid around on my butt up there until it was time to come down, which is always the hardest part because you've got to somehow maneuver your way backwards onto the ladder. i got freaked out which made things much worse, the most insidious thing about fear is that it can make dangerous situations less safe, it made my hands shake when i needed my movements to be steady, it made me panic when i needed to be calm. i thought for a second i might not be able to get it together enough to make it down, the fire department would have to come rescue me like a cat stuck in a tree. without a doubt, i thought, i am NOT getting paid enough for this shit. certainly i am in need of funds due to a certain extravagant purchase, but for only a modest decrease in pay i could be working somewhere like chick-fil-a where the risk of serious injury is practically nonexistent.

what even lured me to the damn rooftops in the first place? i suppose there's something vaguely romantic about manual labor, especially when there's an element of danger. you work with concrete things and your actions have immediate visible effects. at the end of the day, it's oddly satisfying to see the water run brown when washing off your hands, usually the contaminants being washed off are purely hypothetical. you gain access to hidden realms, magnificent sights reserved only for other inductees of the roof guild. where once foolhardy wayward youths ran off and joined a whaling ship, now they can go join a christmas light installation crew.

christmas light installation specifically also has a certain noble purity since christmas lights are completely extraneous, with no function or utility besides looking good. every other worker who gets up on the roof is there for some kind of practical, if not essential mission: installing solar panels for power, fixing the heating or air conditioning system, refreshing the roofing material to keep the elements out. meanwhile here we are risking our lives in the service of aesthetics alone, in a visceral way that many so-called "artists" never approach. but ultimately, i think this might be another example of running away, self-sabotage, rebelling against my destiny of becoming some kind of office drone, as a child one of my favorite toys was unironically microsoft office publisher 2003 on my dad’s old pc. the most fun i had working on christmas lights this year was putting together the payroll spreadsheet...

i've returned home now, and things are back to normal, too normal even. this was supposed to be the great year of changes and shakeups, instead everything seems to have reset for next year as if it's the start of the next sitcom episode. my mom came out of retirement and moved back, keeping things tidy and my brother in check, back to nagging me about how it's not too late to go to medical school. my brother, after yet another wild summer from which i begrudgingly rescued him yet again, is still here too of course, cooking up a new scheme for his b-plot next episode. he won't shut up about this thing he bought at some online auction, a "solid gold ancient dagger of unknown power" allegedly connected in some manner to saddam hussein, and he has announced plans to pursue his "dream job" of becoming a mercenary. though he has been doing no physical conditioning whatsoever, he seems to be taking it quite seriously, he quit smoking weed and got a military-style haircut. unfortunately i'm not sure he will be able to follow through because his mood and energy level are dropping with the temperature as always, he's been retreating to his room more and more, ready to go into hibernation. also, the mercenary job offer he got through the friend of an ebay seller of militaria he patronizes is probably not real anyways.

and of course, there's me, once again back home unemployed with little prospects or even idea of what to pursue next. i guess part of the problem is that when i think back to what i even did this year, there's basically nothing that could be called true progression or accomplishment outside of domains that are largely meaningless, like i'm playing charts that are one difficulty level higher in pump it up now. a honest summary of my year would be a scattered list of places i went an activities i did there (most of which i haven't mentioned on my site at all even in passing) that might sound impressive or interesting, but in the end it's all ephemeral, nothing has really changed and that's what i'm most afraid of, stagnation. i thought the way to avoid stagnation was to stay on the move all the time but maybe it's been nothing but changes of scenery, the only way to truly change is to stop running away, settle down and focus... while hiking down cowles mountain a few weeks ago, i wrote down in my notes: "i seek too much novelty in my hikes, always trying to go somewhere new... i should try to hike up the same mountain 100 times, really get to know it..."