It is fortunate my career path did not cross with a house painter.  I’m not a good painter.  It’s not that I dislike painting; I tolerate painting.

Because I am not a good house painter I need to be an exceptional house taper.  Blue tape is my friend.  I know there are those who say it is easier to go ahead and paint and then scrape the windows afterward.  And they may be right.  But when I’m done painting I want to be done with painting.  So I tape.

Today’s project was the frame of the back door.  Painting took about twenty minutes.  Taping took three and a half hours.  I laid out drop cloths and taped most of the house, all of the patio and half the yard.  This is just the way I paint, a method gained from painful experience.

There’s a certain knack to taping, if I say so myself, particularly when painting a door frame against a stucco wall.  The important thing is to establish a good seal to keep the paint from seeping under the tape.  If the tape isn’t tight you may as well not have taped at all.

So with all the self-assurance of a bicyclist with training wheels, I opened the paint can confident that I could get paint on the door frame, all the door frame and only the door frame.

I succeeded.  A primer coat and a finish coat.

Then I made the mistake.  The same mistake I’ve made before.  I’m anxious to see the results.  With paint-splotched blue tape all over the place I can’t really see what a good job of painting (or taping) I have done.  And I want to see the perfectly straight line at the edge of the door frame.  Want so desperately to see it that I start to strip the tape off before the paint is dry.  The paint on the tape is, I think, the last to dry.  In moments, the paint is on the hands I took such care to keep clean.  And the tape is balled up into one giant sticky mass of wet paint that leaves its indelible mark on everything within half an acre.  It’s as though the tape, having done its job to perfection, realizes it is about to be cast aside, receiving no credit.  And it strikes back.

If only I had been able to wait I wouldn’t have to spend an hour scrubbing my fingers, my hands and my arms up to my elbows.  Worse, I wouldn’t be taping the door frame next weekend while I paint the spots on the stucco where the tape, having become a paintball in every sense of the word, attacked the wall like an adhesive graffiti tagger.  Why did I bother taping?  I knew somewhere deep in my subconscious that I would make the mistake again.

I want to blame the tape, but I do blame the paint.  If only it weren’t so boring to watch paint dry, none of this would have happened.