I know two things about cleaning gravestones:

• Don’t use bleach
• Don’t use a big freaky gas-powered pressure washer

I learned this watching grave restoration clips on YouTube—an activity that’s turned out to be my preferred mental break during a summer spent in a very strange headspace, fighting to finish reading the 61 books and articles I will be tested on in November to see if I can continue in my doctoral studies. Ideally, I’d be done reading in two weeks, but as of right now, I still have ten partly finished books and one I haven’t even started. I love everything about grad student life except this and funding applications so it’s been a rough summer of paying my dues and trying to get paid for my dues.

Clearly, gravestone restoration videos were the answer.

Most of the videos are narrated by biocide salesmen (the crud on gravestones is generally biological–algae, moss, lichen, all of it alive), earnest professional conservators, or amateur genealogists who are just so disappointed. They use soft-bristled brushes, approved cleaners with PH levels matched to the stones, and rinse it all down with a gentle slosh of plain water out of a bucket.

“That’s not tap water is it?” a heckler calls from off screen. “There’s chlorine in that!”

Welcome to Gravestone-Restoration-Tube.

But then there’s Bill.

From what I can gather, Bill is a senior groundskeeper-handyman working for a municipality in eastern Ontario. His personal YouTube thumbnail image is a John Deere themed open casket and his YouTube channel chronicles the maintenance he does in around the town cemetery (at least, it did until a board of directors banned him from filming anything past the cemetery’s front gate).

He’s like a goth Red Green (something for non-Canadians to Google), letting a slightly affected Canada-hick accent fly as he welds an old tank still full of diesel fumes without blowing himself to bits, and, yes, pressure washes the “friggin crap” out of gravestones, even a soft white marble one he begins the video by showing us that it’s a good exfoliant for his dirty thumbprint, improvising a tripod function out of the bucket of his skid-steer. He likes puns, mocks Nazis, gets distracted by interesting bird calls, and works the graveyard humor with quips like, “K, we’re here, live on location—well, least I’m live on location.”

And I can’t help thinking, but for a few decisions, maybe if I wasn’t so chicken when it came to the welding unit of my junior high industrial arts class, I could have been Bill. It’s a good life—creative, inquisitive, self-aware, brilliant in its Jack/Jenny-of-all-trades makeshift-ery. Dang, for all the lives we don’t get to live, languages we don’t learn to speak, people we never have “coffee” with, books we write that might never be read, books other people write that we might never finish reading.

I need these exams to be over. Until then, rock on, Bill.