D-Day

I am ready man, check it out, I am the ULTIMATE bad ass. State-of-the-bad-ass-art. You do not want to fuck with me. Check it out! Hey Ripley, don't worry. Me and my squad of ultimate bad-asses will protect you.

The house is filled with people. People putting my stuff into boxes. Every so often I can feel the sting of salt start to hit the corners of my eyes, and not only when the dust from a shelf that hasn't been dusted in years kicks up. Just every so often though. I think I am too overwhelmed to be overwhelmed yet. The feelings of...fear? loss? nostalgia?...hit hardest when I go to look for something -- something that I meant to mark last night DON'T PACK -- and it's been packed. In one of the dozens of identical brown boxes stacked around our house with the destination room written on it.

The first mover guy and his daughter arrived at 7, the second wave showed up at 7:30, then more arrived at 8. I assume the infantry is just around the bend.

I went out to get Darin and me morning bagels and juice; when I came back, the kitchen had disappeared. I went out to get some furniture that needed to be repaired and when I came back our bedroom had disappeared. I'm afraid to go out again, because when I come back I might need to ask, "Hey, where's my husband? Um...would you punch air holes in a couple of those boxes?"

We're marking boxes of books by type of book (fiction, non-fiction, computer programming, computer general, writing, film...you get the idea) and which room it goes to. The movers are loving that: "This is fiction. Is that the right or left bedroom?"

Hey, the infantry's here! Picking up our furniture, sticking it on a trolley, taking it away. Bye bye, furniture. Bye bye, TV. Bye bye, books.

• Tuesday: Had lunch with Eric. I hadn't seen him for a loooong time, since last July. He's doing great. He passed on some info-cum-gossip about a friend of ours, the kind of story that make you reconsider the whole meaning of the word "friend." What Eric told me has led me to realize that I should not contact that person again or believe anything that person may tell me in the future (and the only reason this person would contact me is for money, so -- no problem). It's sad. It was also fairly inevitable.

  We had dinner with Lee and Ali at a great restaurant in San Carlos.

• Wednesday: I was supposed to have lunch with Judy, but she had another, more pressing appointment come up. "You'll just have to come to LA, I guess," I said. I went to Cafe Borrone and tried to outline my screenplay. Then I went to get my hair cut.

  Dinner with Rob and Laura at Sue's Indian Kitchen.

• Thursday: My mother came down and helped me go through all my clothing. Originally we had talked about her coming down on Friday (today), but then Darin said, you want your mother around here when all this hilarity is going on? So she came down yesterday and that was a better thing, as I spent much of the day running around without my pants on whilst trying on clothes, and that probably wouldn't have gone over so well with the movers.

  Or maybe it would have. Mustn't judge.

  Anyhow, I discovered two very important things:

  1. It is valuable to go through your wardrobe every so often and throw things out in order to refresh your personality every so often -- I don't wear the same things now that I did when I was 22, even though I still had all of those clothes stuck in my closet.
  2. I've gained a lot of weight since I was 22.

  Bye bye, leather skirts. Bye bye, Oleg Cassini suit. Bye bye, spandex dress that came down to mid-thigh. (Did I really wear that? Must have been when I was blonde.) I also found stuff that still did fit but I hadn't worn in years because it was in the closets in the guest room.

  I tried to nap in the afternoon: exercise in futility. I tossed and turned and made mental lists of things not to forget, all of which I did forget.

  Dinner with the Petries, CJ-n-Lance, and Sho. CJ has a much better description of what went down than I can do -- I couldn't even remember the whole bit about the terrier bloom. Sho and I, in a bold move, did not sit together, although we did end up ordering the same main dish. The restaurant, The Heights, was awesome. What really bums me out is that Rob and Laura and Sho all said that it had been better on previous visits.

  The idea that it had been better made me crazy.

  After dinner we drove home with Rob-n-Laura, and we played with Nutmeg for a while. She is such a fun little dog. She almost makes me want to have a dog, but how could we be sure of getting one as cute and friendly? Honestly, we can't, so we're not going to risk it.

  I couldn't get to sleep when we went to bed, of course. Too much excitement and nervousness about today. Darin started snoring away almost immediately.

In order to keep myself a)amused and b)out of trouble today, I've updated my essay about web journals to include a little more information about why you might not want to keep a web journal.

We're on the express elevator to hell - going down.

One of the movers asked me if I was going to miss this area. "Yes," I said. "I've spent most of my life here." Once again, because I can't do anything without questioning the correctness of my decision 18 million times, I wondered if this was a good idea. (Asking yourself this as the movers are carting everything away -- Travis, you're a year too late.)

Los Angeles has always been the Great Evil, as far as the Bay Area is concerned. Los Angeles, on the other hand, regards the Bay Area as a nice vacation spot or, less commonly, a suburb. Los Angeles is the motor in the California engine, the place that gets all the attention, money, and water. During the political campaigns last fall I saw the difference between how candidates view Northern and Southern California: they could care less about Northern California. I had never seen so many political ads, so many visits of a candidate to an area. Night and Day.

I keep repeating my mantra of "Change is good, change benefits the soul." But inertia is the strongest force in the universe. I'm really scared. In six months, a year, I'll laugh about it and say, "What was I scared about?" But hindsight is 20/20; forward-sight is a little fuzzier.

Game over, man! Game over!

All gone. Except for the furniture in the guest room.

The deep stains in the carpeting (axe murderers? us?) are visible. The deep imprints of the furniture feet mark where our stuff used to stand. Cobwebs, dust, trash. I think Darin should get a cleaning crew in here, perhaps between installing new carpeting and Mitch moving his stuff in: scrub the kitchen floors (and cabinets), wipe down the blinds, really get those countertops.