June 16, 2007

Friday(ish) Shuffle - Greetings From Prettytown Edition

I have moved to another planet.

It's a planet where the neighbors come to introduce themselves when they see the U-Haul pull into the drive. They also stop to help you carry furniture into the house for an hour in 90-degree heat. It's a planet with two predominiant professions: psychologists and Catholic high school principals.

It's a planet where the neighborhood grocery store makes awesome mustard potato salad, will let you open an account, and turns on their barbecue smoker at 8 PM. Every night, if you're outside my house, it smells like barbecue.

Okay, so maybe I didn't move to another planet. I think that maybe the move killed me and I've died and gone to heaven.

Speaking of heaven, do you know what happens to a $2 hollow St. Joe who's been buried for six months? He gets filled with dead earthworms. That was a little grisly. Not as grisly as the unearthing, I understand. I wasn't there; B., PKB's awesome son, and a little guy named Thumper excavated the front yard of the Crapshack in search of Joe as their last act.

When I buried Joe, I put him six inches down and jammed a big stick to mark his space. A few months later, B. covered that section of yard with 15 feet of mulch and he removed my Joe marker. Not that it would have been visible under the mulch, but still. They called me at 7 PM Friday night, "Where did you bury that thing?"

PKB's awesome son and Thumper asked B. if it was really necessary to go through such a production for a $2 plastic saint filled with dead worms. Yes. Yes, it was. As B. told them, "We almost lost her cat how many times today? She'll kill us just for that. If Joe's missing on top of it, there's going to be real trouble."

The cat's fine. She's just good at hiding, but I guess there were several occasions when the guys were sure she'd gotten out of the house. At one point it was dire enough that B. went across the street to Tattoo Face's house. He was outside with his wife-type person, several other local drunks, and I don't know who else, since I wasn't there.

A few hours early, at 1:30 PM, PKB's awesome son noticed Tattoo Face outside, drinking a beer. To which he said, "Dude. That guy's drinking a beer at 1:30 on a Friday afternoon." B. replied, "Oh. He's running behind today."

Anyway, B. went The Tattoo Face Round Table Discussion Group to see if any of them had seen, or perhaps ritually sacrificed my cat. No, they hadn't (like I said, she's fine and adjusting well to the new digs). They did ask B. if he knew who would be moving into our old house. You see, these people, who have drunken cookouts in their front yard most nights, scream at each other, scream at their children, zoom not-quite-street-legal dirt bikes up and down the street at all hours of the day and night are concerned that they might get bad neighbors.

!!!!

That's exactly what they said to B. "Well, we sure hope they're good neighbors. We don't want anyone bad moving into the neighborhood."

Bad? From what I've witnessed of this gang, I don't even want to know what constitutes a bad neighbor. Flesh-eaters? Post-doctoral students? The Amish? I just don't know.

I got a call from my next-door neighbor on Wednesday when we had the 26-foot U-Haul in the driveway and an army of people hauling all our worldly belongings into it. When I see her name on the caller i.d., I never answer because I don't like to talk to her. Besides, I think she has a little crush on B., so I figure I might as well allow her that little thrill.

So in the middle of what she knows is moving day, with moving chaos occuring right before her eyes, why did she call me? Because she had some questions about a doctor's appointment she'd recently had.

I'm sorry. I'm moving. I'm also not a doctor. Unless your uterus is hanging out of your body and I'm the only person in the world with the kind of stick required to put it back in, THIS ISN'T A GOOD TIME TO CALL!!!!!

So there you have it. Two final tales from the Redneck Jungle. From here on out, it's nothing but tales of Catholic high school principals who are really nice and will help strangers move. Not nearly as interesting. Thank God.

We're nowhere near being settled. Much unpacking to do. But all of our stuff's here. Our family's all here. Clara Jane, the dogs, the somewhat errant cat, B., me. Even with our stuff piled all over the new house, and the exhaustion, it couldn't feel more right to be here. It's already home, and we love it.

1. Kate - Johnny Cash
2. Fast Cars - U2
3. Joy Inside My Tears - Stevie Wonder
4. On and On and On - Wilco
5. We're Going to Be Friends - White Stripes
6. What a Difference a Day Makes - Dinah Washington
7. Crab - Weezer
8. Dinner at Eight - Rufus Wainwright
9. Amazing Grace - Mahalia Jackson
10. Sunrise Always Listens - Paul Westerberg

Damn. Even the shuffles are better in Prettytown.

Posted by Robin at 11:14 PM | Comments (11)

June 14, 2007

Last Entry: Crapshack

It's 9:36 PM. I'm at the crapshack, but most of my stuff is at the new house. We will be, too, in two hours or so. We made one last trip tonight to fetch the hounds and grab some necessities. In my fervor to make sure the essentials didn't get packed until the end, we managed to get to the new house with things like winter clothes and 3098 Fiestaware carafes, but no toilet paper, towels, food, beer, or, well, dogs.

Closing procedures went swimmingly. Aside from the lack of essentials, we've only had one problem: upon arriving at the new house with the 26-foot U-Haul, B. realized he'd left the padlock key on his dresser at the old house. First purchase for the new house: bolt cutters.

It's good. Exhausting and filthy, but good. Good friends (PKB, Lance, Raquel, Thumper) make excellent pack mules.

We're sleeping in the new house tonight, although it'll be more like tomorrow morning.

It's good.

Posted by Robin at 09:36 PM | Comments (22)

June 10, 2007

From Here on Out, Nothing But My Old Crap

The condition of my brain has further deteriorated from hours spent sorting through old crap. However, I found some things you might like.

Here's what's left of my childhood ceramic doll collection. I ditched all but the ones that say "October" in paint (no October stickers; that's tacky), ones that came from grandparents, and things with the potential to scare the ever-loving shit out of people:

Clowny likes the babies.

You know what makes Clowny even funnier? While giving him a much-needed bath today, I found an inscription on the bottom: "Happy birthday Robin! We love you, Mom and Dad".

Some people have funny, scary ways of showing that they care.

Wanna see the most '80s-ist of 1980s high school yearbook covers?

That's a mock Swatch Watch face, covered with the faces of the members of the class of '88. What if the cover had been a mock Swatch Watch face, covered with the Swatch Watch faces of the members of the class of '88? If that had happened, no one in my school would have felt the need to smoke pot because our minds would have been blown, Man!

Here's the crap that went bye-bye:

Good riddance.

Posted by Robin at 09:51 PM | Comments (63)

June 03, 2007

What Lurks in the Basement

After weeks and months of packing, I've finally hit the point where there's nothing left to do except venture into what we call The Mudroom. It's this little, unheated room in the back of our basement which has never contained any mud, but has always contained a lot of crap. This is the room where, for eight years, we've tossed every single item for which we didn't have a better solution.

In June, 1999, once we were settled into our then-new abode, my parents arrived for a weekend visit. Dad backed his truck up to the walk-out basement door while my mom did a little dance in the driveway, singing, "Take your shit! Get it out of my house! It's yours! It's yours! Hallelujah, it's finally yours!"

Since that day in June, 1999, those boxes and big black garbage bags, filled with the first 18 years of my life, have sat, untouched. Well, not completely untouched. I'm sure they've been touched by many spiders. But not touched by me.

I grew up with a real sentimental streak. I never threw anything away. I've since outgrown such sentimentality, thus I have never had any desire to deal with all this crap.

Don't think that I haven't thought about just hauling all that shit to the curb on trash day. I can't, though. Some of the sentimentality remains, primarily because of my writing. I've written for as long as I can remember, and I was always careful to save every single word that came from my pen.

Tonight, I reached the point where I had no choice but to deal with The Mudroom. Within the first box, I found some of my early writings, those things that prevented me from shoving boxes upon boxes of 1980s garbage out the door without a second glance.

I was a very talented child. A gifted writer, I was told. I won awards. When I tucked all those pages away, the thought lurked that surely someday, when I was a famous writer, there would be a need and demand for those brilliant first works.

Tonight, I read two poems. I was astounded. Flabbergasted. And so thoroughly disgusted and mortified that I did what I should have done 25 years ago: I pitched that shit directly into the trash.

I'm not feeling bad about this. Not even a little. If anything, going through my old shit gave me some insight into why I let go of my sentimentality: it's the same reason why, if you have an amazing vacation to, say, Provence, it's not necessarily worthwhile to remember every single detail of what you packed, the drive to the airport, what you got at Starbucks while you waited for the plane, what delayed the plane, what magazine you read, what you drank ...

I'm sure you get what I'm saying. I'm looking at that stuff from so long ago as a part of the journey. I'd rather remember how writing made me feel, how and what I learned from it, and how it affects my life now. Letting go of the material remainder, along with the vomit-inducingly horrible 1984 poetry - sweet Jesus, what the hell did I know about bitter break-ups when I was 12 that would motivate me to compose poetry about them? - felt really, really good.

But some things in The Mudroom, I can't release. At least, not to Goodwill or the trash. Some things just beg to be sent to Kristina. And believe me, there was a great deal of screaming in The Mudroom when this was unburied:

Also, if you read my blog and you knew me at any point in the '80s or early '90s, this would not be a good time to piss me off because I can promise you, tonight I found a treasure trove of lovely blackmail photos. Oh, my kingdom for a scanner!

Posted by Robin at 08:48 PM | Comments (69)