Listen, if you don’t like what I’ve got to say, or the decisions that I’ve made, then there’s the door. OK? That’s my door. I picked it out. It used to be just plain wood, like no paint, so I stained it. So there it is. Cool?

Cool. But here’s the thing. We never use that door. It’s purely decorative. Whenever we need to come or go, we use the side door. Look at it. I should have said originally, “There’s the side door.” It’s not as nice. In fact, that was the original front door when we moved in. But I took one look at it and I was like, no way, absolutely no way is that going to be my front door.

I told my wife, I said, listen baby, we’re getting a new front door. And she put up this big stink, about how we just moved into this place, all, “we don’t have the money to be dropping cash on new doors, we’ve got perfectly good doors right where they are, you saw the doors when we were closing and you never said anything about new doors!”

But I said to her, I said, listen, I’m making the decisions from here on out. If you don’t want to live with my decisions, there’s the door. But I was standing outside. And I was pointing down the block, at the door store. It’s not a store exclusively for doors, it’s a Home Depot. And it’s not right down the block, but whatever, it was in the general direction that I was pointing. And I just took off, went straight to the Home Depot.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the Home Depot, or maybe you’ve been there, but you’ve only been down the tool aisle, or the light bulb aisle, but the next time you’re there, if you’ve never checked out the door aisle, I really encourage you to see what they’ve got going on. Tons of doors. You look at the aisle and they’re all on these hinges, hundreds of them, and when they’re all aligned, all you see is the ends, like just the wood finishes, and then you open them all up, it’s like an alt-rock poster display case at one of those emo stores in the mall. There aren’t any doorknobs installed, obviously, but you can just put your hand in front of that empty hole, imagine a doorknob, or you can get a piece of paper and cut out a door-shaped rectangle, and you can hold that up to the door, block out all the Home Depot background, just focus on the door. Or even better, you can go home, take a picture of the inside or the outside or your house, and you can cut out a rectangle for where your current door is, and then when you’re at the Home Depot, you take out that little door viewfinder thing and hold it up, you don’t even have to imagine, you get this automatic representation of what it would be like to see this door or that door as your door.

I didn’t do any of that. I already have a very strong imagination. Plus I kind of had an of what I was looking for. So by the time the Home Depot guy in the orange vest came up to me and said, “Can I help you with anything sir?” I cut him off. I didn’t even let him finish that sentence. I simply interrupted, “There’s the door,” and I pointed at the door that’s now attached to the front of my house, the door that I was talking about when I started talking about “there’s the door,” that door.

But yeah, the side door, it has a screen. It’s really squeaky. I’ve tried to fix the squeak. I went back to the Home Depot (just the tool aisle this time) and bought a can of WD-40. I lubed the hell out of those hinges, the whole apparatus, the tube that opens up and prevents it from slamming. But my wife got so pissed off, all of that WD-40, “all over my nice white dress,” the one she was wearing right after I finished with my repairs.

And she was getting angrier and angrier, telling me that I’m not a real handy man, that I shouldn’t have started messing with doors and hinges, complaining about the two inch gap under the new front door, how it sucks out all of the heat and creates that unpleasant draft, how the old front door isn’t meant to be a side door, that the screen doesn’t slam shut all the way because the old front door is too big for that space, that I should have hired somebody to come help me out, that I had no business marching off to the Home Depot by myself and picking out a door and carrying it right home that very day without so much as a call, a text, any consultation whatsoever.

But I just looked at her and I said, “Listen toots, I’m the man of this house. Capeesh? If you don’t like my decision making abilities, or if you have a problem with the decision making process, then here’s the door.” I said “here’s the door” instead of “there’s the door” only because, like I said, we were already standing right in the side doorway, it was here, not there. And I didn’t want her to, if she chose the door over me, to choose the front door, which, I’ve already explained, we never open. It looks too good. A terrific looking door. Even though, yeah, the hinges aren’t super sturdy. And sure, there is a big gap, but I just shove a blanket in there if it gets really cold. You know, I kind of like the gap. Like when the pizza delivery guy knocks, I just say, “Slide it under!” and then I slide him back out the money. It’s great because I never have to open it up. Chinese take-out’s a little bit more problematic though, obviously, with those rectangle boxes. I just shout out, “Take it around to the side door!”