Summary: I used to live in a slowly collapsing farmhouse. Just a few years back, in a small town in rural Virginia, my family and I were renting an old two-by-two that at some point in its long and undocumented history had clearly suffered either the slow withering of the foundation or perhaps it had been partially washed away by floods but the result regardless was that the house was slowly sinking in on itself. This had a variety of ill effects - no toy cars would stay put when you set them on the floor. Furniture along the outer walls of the house had to be carefully selected so that it wouldn't fall on top of us. Hanging pictures so they look level - which was never my specialty in the first place - became nearly impossible. But mostly, after a while, you just got used to it. A few extra hooks would align the pictures. A few extra bolts would secure the furniture. And for the rest of it, like the time during one particularly cold winter that the heating duct just snapped off from the vent underneath the living room, for the rest of it, we just relied on that most elemental repair tool. We just used duct tape. Thank God for duct tape. It couldn't fix the foundation but at least it could make the heat work. Without duct tape I don't think that place would have ever felt quite like home. Of course, duct tape's reputation precedes it. You don't need me to tell you this. These days duct tape has a bit of a magical reputation - for household repairs, sure, but also for construction on a grander scale. A quick glance online will unearth dozens upon hundreds of uses I'm sure quite unimagined by the folks who first put duct tape into the world: we've got duct tape as a fabric, with which folks have made everything from everyday wallets to prom dresses; we've got something called Duct Tape Occlusion Therapy, in which duct tape gets applied to warts and left on the skin for an extended period of time, though the results of this treatment are somewhat in dispute. Not to mention of course the many, many ways in which duct tape has become a repair tool for projects far beyond its original imagination: like, as a tarp that covers storm damage or as a patchwork fix holding up a streetlight. As a cradle for a car bumper as it cruises down the interstate. Even a quick fix wrapped around the wing of an airplane as it streaks through the skies. You don't need me to preach this Gospel. It's pretty well attested. The world breaks all the time. Our old house wasn't the only place with a crack running through the foundation. Good thing we have duct tape to patch it all back together.
