More about my new life

Well do you want to hear more about my new life? I don’t know why you would, but here goes.

Nothing is really happening except for our mover arrived and his gigantic truck pulled down an internet line and so the police and fire department and a verizon truck all came out and the policeman was like WELCOME TO OUR TOWN with a little salute, so that worked out.

Unpacking our shit and setting up our home after living in it empty for 10 days was truly delightful. Every single possession looks divine in its new place, including my one true heirloom–a glorious old million-pound beat-up hardwood butcher block table that my parents got before I was born and that I ate 3 meals a day at for at least a decade before toddling off to boarding school. As a young teen I demanded that when my parents died I be given the table (i.e. instead of my brother getting it) and my mom said I could have it whenever I had a dining room big enough to fit it (i.e. I didn’t have to wait until they died). Well lo and behold the great day finally arrived and I am only nearly 40 years old! Still a few years left to enjoy my hard-earned heirloom (knock on wood). This is the table that my brother carved the word “table” into and then tried to blame it on my dad, a classic family tale.

Imagine if we found out that it WAS my dad who did it, and he let my brother take the rap all these years. “I don’t know what I was thinking”

We still have to put up all our fantastic artwork, such as various paintings of squid. We also still have to pull out all our vinyl and re-organize it by vibe, which we’ve been meaning to do for ages. This will take days and will cause many fights but it’s worth it.

I feel like a hateful materialist with how excited I am to live in this gigantic glowing house that has working windows, a shower, and that isn’t filled with black mold and mice. Maybe I AM a hateful materialist but honestly relatively speaking I have been living in utter dumps since I was 18 years old and it wears on you when you are supposed to be putting on a pencil skirt and heels and pretending you’re middle class every day even though everyone knows higher education is a sinking ship. Of course, speaking relative to another world altogether I have been living in insane mansions my whole life, I realize that, I’m not a fool, but whatever. The point is, I have my own office and I can not tell you how it feels (divine). The other issue is that, to be fair (to me), my office at school is–compared to my previous idyllic spread–a bit grim (cramped gray brutalist cell) and is SHARED, which sucks for the kind of hunched-over silent focus I need to bring to tasks like course prep and grading, so having a personal space is legitimately important to me. Anyway I don’t have to make excuses to you people! Stop hectoring me

We have a big-ass classy rug that ties the living room together. And our gigantic couch fits perfectly in the sunroom which is now a sitting room/movie viewing room. You can pretend you’re at the beach. The snoopy skids around on the hardwoods and is generally making a dumbass of himself as usual. We’ve started our new compost pile, which is fun, and we’ve sworn to clean the house every Friday afternoon, which is a fool’s dream.

We only had one rough patch, which was when Gary got overwhelmed by the task of organizing the living room books–should they be alphabetical within each sub-category and if so, should they be alphabetical by author or title? e.g. just one example of the kind of madman I am dealing with here. Look, if you’re going to be a detail-obsessed perfectionist then you better walk the walk and not complain about how long it’s taking you to hysterically organize some books! I unpack my books in 45 minutes because I take them out of boxes and jam them on whatever shelf is next to the box. If you complain about your own organizational needs which I do not share then I’m gonna come in and throw all the books on the floor, which is what I did, which solved the problem because then he was re-energized with rage and saw new sub-categories that would enable all the small books to fit on the short shelf or something. Anyway now I know where my copy of Infinite Jest is and that’s all I care about. We have different sections for “essays,” “memoirs and letters,” and “non-fiction” FYI pray for me

Finally in possession of my bicycle, I rode downtown on the bike path just now. It took ONE SECOND. I don’t know about getting to the bus stop in an aforementioned pencil skirt, or in a rainstorm, or in winter, but dang, the bike makes our house seem like it is just a hop/skip/jump from all the places one needs to go.

One funny issue is that there is one food co-op in this town, and it is a really awesome one, and it is perhaps the only location in the entire valley that you can neither bike nor walk to, unless we are missing some glorious road to el dorado situation only locals know about. We have pored over the map and tried so many different routes but it can’t be done, unless you walk up the highway, which is emo and dangerous. The co-op is in an old rock quarry (steeply-sided) and can’t be gotten to even by cutting pioneer-style through the pathless forest surrounding it! It’s amazing. Our grocery shopping life is going to change dramatically since we have to drive there in the car. Or, I guess you can just bike on the highway and suck it up.

MAPS. This town is bonkers and I will never learn my way around. I walk out the front door and am literally lost within 5 minutes. I feel like I am in House of Leaves. Every single errand culminates in me being astounded by every turn Gary makes on our way home–WHICHEVER direction I think we are going it turns out it is the opposite direction. Over and over again, our house looms up in front of me from a completely unexpected direction. I feel like that Oliver Sacks guy who has no short-term memory. Every street changes its name constantly, and twines around so you can never predict where it might intersect another street. Furthermore, half the streets in the town have the same name as the other half. So Bridge turns into Damon and then intersects a different Bridge, which turns into Russell. That Bridge, if you go the other direction, turns into Main, which is also route 10 or something, and which then turns into Elm I think. The streets change names when you’re about to get to something–e.g. several different streets become “Bridge” when they are a few blocks away from the bridge. Also, there are VERY few actual street signs placed around town. You can turn on what you think is State street and drive 10 blocks before you see a sign, and it turns out it’s actually Gothic, which on this side of Main is called Crafts.

I assume it is because all these streets were established by the pilgrims. “Bread street. Witch street. Don’t Go Down There Street. Street Before Main Street.”

I went out of my way to avoid being accosted by a signature-gatherer by turning down a side street, planning on doubling back to where I’d parked my bike, but I got so lost because the street so immediately went in some unexpected direction that I ended up in a weird dead-end blocks and blocks away, where, luckily, there was a farmer’s market happening, so I bought some arugula, so it all worked out (and I avoided the signature-gatherer).

I should have finished this syllabus weeks ago but instead I have barely started it. Something about the way the textbook is organized is completely stymying me; I have the sense that once I crack the code everything will become clear but until then I am noodling around on a piece of paper, writing “doo-wop” and crossing it out and drawing an arrow to “gospel” which is also crossed out. I think I need to challenge myself to stop thinking chronologically, as, in spite of its dark drawbacks in the realm of “women in the blues” sidebars and similar nonsense, I believe the textbook is actually non-chronological in a couple key ways. EMBRACE IT. Chronology is another fool’s dream.

I meant to join a yoga place today but I didn’t. I shopped for fancy mustard and didn’t buy any.

Snoopy’s bed is in my office! It just worked out that way. So now I get the benefits (weird noises; looking at him whenever I am feeling frustrated) and the deficits (farts) of his presence. Last night the old man got up in the dead of night to go to the bathroom and the dog was just standing there outside the door, silently. I woke up when Gary goes “JESUS!” in terror. “No explanation for it; no point in looking for one neither”