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The package, book two: Hell Month
John Shepard (radiographite@gmail.com) - Thur Sep 3, 2009 05:05:28 GMT - 1097

It isn't Hell Month necessarily because it is torture, but because the drama and the surprises - and the sense that the bottom may fall out any minute - never quite stop.

Book two: Hell month

VIII: Hiding in plain sight

Due to his unnerving habit of showing up wherever we go, we operate on the assumption that he's hearing bits of our conversations through the wall between our room and his. We don't know which bits. We don't think he's eavesdropping, we think he just picks up a word here and there and doesn't even realize he's hearing them, like some kind of subconscious thing. He hears us talking about a trip to the grocery store and he thinks "wow, I really need to go to the grocery store." At least that's the theory. There are other theories. But still.

We therefore may not speak openly inside these walls about the thing we're doing. We call it "the Package" - were he listening, he'd think we've ordered something very expensive that takes awhile to build, possibly a nice computer. If apartmentlike elements of the story begin to leak out, the cover story we'll use is that we're helping a friend of ours get an apartment. Good lies contain pieces of truth: a friend of ours is 30 and lives with his mom, and if we could get him an apartment here, we'd get $100 off our next month's rent. If he were looking for an apartment that is. If we wanted to send this place any more business that is. But anyway. We're hoping we won't need either cover story.

Yet another cover story exists, and this was actually somewhat fortuitous: the oven. The heating element actually cracked in two, and the bright flash was it trying to arc-weld itself back together. So says we, "we called it in" but we really haven't; we can delay the maintenance visit as long as possible, and use it as an excuse to be cleaning up and moving boxes to the "trash".

I remember back in Hell Week '07 I said "why does it feel like everything we do is a bank heist?" - because it's how he wants us to feel. Anything that isn't his idea, he wants us to feel like we're some kind of criminal. So anything that isn't his idea, or that we can't make him think is his idea (a magic trick I have not mastered) we must keep secret from him and have backup plans. It's truly ridiculous. And here we are, about to actually do something on the scale of a bank heist, with getaway cars and the whole shit, cover stories above cover stories... but if it works, we won't need cover stories ever again.

I don't know if I dare hope anymore. This creature that is destroying me, this cancer on my life, dare I imagine a day when it is removed? Dare I expect we can actually make this thing happen, after years of failures? after years of me discovering the hard way that I am perhaps no longer capable of success? It almost seems too easy - apply for an apartment, get an apartment, tender our 30 days notice, move our stuff out in exactly 30 days, and live again. Is there a sanity check for this? Am I expecting the unreasonable?

The sanity check, I guess, is when we get the Phone Call, get approved, and go sign the paperwork and actually have leases in our hands. I have concerns that something might not go cleanly in the termination of our existing lease here, that even after the 30 days are done there might still be something that could come back and bite us once we decide to move again someday. But you know, my hope is that we're moving into a place we can stand to live for five years or more, and that we'll move out of there once we want to, without some ticking shit bomb forcing us to swim against the current.

It should be a matter of taking each step as safely as we can, not dominated by the kind of panic mode thinking that we've been eating the last eight years - acting, not reacting - and basically only taking each step in such a way that it cannot collapse backward.

My understanding is, once we pay the deposits and sign the papers, it takes something very extreme for them to back out. Damage to this apartment cannot affect our residency at that apartment. If something does manage to end up on our record, after we've moved out, all it'll do is make it difficult to move again someday. By which time we'll have a better grip on our resources.

As I said, there's a sequence to the moving out - most irreplaceable stuff first, back to front, so that the amount of visible change to the apartment is correlated with the amount of damage he can do if he figures it out. I mean, there's still the open question of how we'll get the last stuff out - the table, the microwave etc - but if it comes down to it, if our cover is blown and he's found some way to prevent us from moving that stuff, it's stuff we can leave if we have to.

For that reason there's got to be a sequence to the move-out - not necessarily moving what we can when we can, but actually trying to get stuff we'll miss out first, so if something goes wrong, what we're losing are clothes and cables.

And I figure we'll have to "live" here right up until the end: one or both of us has to use this as a base of operations, be visibly here, making food, using the shower, doing dishes and taking out trash, having alarm clocks go off at the usual time, etc. so there is no sudden deafening silence to alert his attention. It'll probably be me for most of that. And my project will be to pack and consolidate, get boxes ready to go. Once he's asleep or out of the house, I'll probably get stuff out the door, at least one trip a day by whatever means is convenient - backpack, hand truck, friend with a car. We do have a lot of stuff, but over the course of 30 days, I expect we can move a lot of stuff, invisibly, load by load.

It's now the last day of June. I don't dare hope, but there's a promising lead. We lost some days, due to Francesca getting sick the day we were supposed to take in some paperwork. But now we're back on the merry-go-round and there remains now just one last thing they need to verify - our co-signer - and once they do that, which they said they can do just as soon as the fax arrives, then we're off to the races.

I'm confident our co-signer will meet with their approval. My concern is that they could still find other reasons to change their minds. It could still go either way. That's why hope is a commodity I do not wish to use up just yet.

Meanwhile on the other side of this wall, in the kitchen, the buzzer has been buzzing for fifteen minutes because Douchewinkle forgot he had something going on the stove. The flipside of hope is, just think about what happens on his end. He doesn't live with his mommy and daddy but he lives as if he did - someone else will take care of anything he doesn't want to. Day is coming when that changes and he isn't ready. If he were actually ready, he'd have moved out years ago. I shouldn't be smug, but there's something kind of darkly satisfying about what we're about to do to him. This isn't about revenge, but you know, I'm owed this. I've been owed this since the first time he hit me.

Hell, I've been owed this since that crap with the loan in Indiana. He lied to us until the last possible minute just to trick us into committing to this move with no backsies. It isn't that he applied for a loan and was turned down. It's that he had six weeks and in that time, never once took an hour out of his day to go to the bank and ask - but in no way should his inaction have any impact on the outcome of the thing he expects to do. He fails to hold up his leg of the tripod and expects us to make things happen anyway. Then abuses us for our efforts.

Know what he's been doing lately? All last week our Internet connection would vanish for about three hours at a time. First I thought Comcast was hiccuping. But when Comcast is out, I can't ping them but I can ping his machines. (We know the IP addresses of his machines because they're listed in a sign on his bedroom door, a relic from a time when we sorta got along. Except for when we didn't. Which was often.) Last week, during these outages, I couldn't ping his machines. It was always happening while he was home - either right after he woke up around 10am, or right after he got back from somewhere. We think he was unplugging the one hub with all our Macs from the main hub. We think this was simply to ensure he had the full use of our bandwidth for something. But what?

If he's playing an online game, you know because he can't remember what headphones are for, so you hear the explosions and the "TWO FRAGS LEFT" announcements. Similarly if he's watching something, he usually wants the whole neighborhood to hear it too. Whatever he's doing lately is awfully quiet.

There's a webcam bolted to his wall. Could it be he's the source of a video feed he wants other people to watch? We don't hear him talking, and you can imagine how much he loves the sound of his own voice.

And I shouldn't have to care what he's doing. He shouldn't be unplugging it.

Is he forgetting that he's going out of his way not to pay for the Internet hookup? He's still behind on rent. Guess he thinks if he pays any amount at all, it's not late. I think you can guess why we're allowing him to get away with this: because very soon it won't matter.

When we first moved here, for the first year or two, when we still thought he was our friend, we'd all three go out and do stuff. There was a point beyond which we started doing this less and less, kind of where you'd begin to make plans for the evening and realize you can't remember the last time you did this and it didn't go horribly wrong. For him being our friend, it became a hell of a chore to have him around: racist remarks in public, talking too loud about killing people when there's a waittress at the table turning visibly pale, pulling dumbass stunts and pranks to try to show people how cool he is, and mostly, if we went out to eat, his blood sugar would bonk and he'd try to start a fight on the way home. There were things like, you'd cut short what you're doing to go pick him up from something he's doing, and you'd get there and find out he took the bus and didn't bother to tell you. There were things like, you'd leave food for him if you weren't going to be home, he wouldn't eat that food, he'd open your last can of soup, fuck up cooking it and throw the whole thing in the trash and go to bed hungry.

There were a few moments like this in Indiana before the move but it was only occasional. Figured he was having a bad day. Out here bad days are all he seems to have. At least to us they're bad. He seems to get off on days when he treats people like shit. He seems to get off on days when he isn't able to do what he wants because he's fucked something up. Otherwise he wouldn't have so many days like that. And you just get tired after awhile of being punished for being his friend. You think "it's been N months since the last time he beat the hell out of me, maybe he's over it" and then he fucking trashes the living room because he ran out of milk and he thought it was our job to monitor milk levels. It's not if but when the next bizarre thing is going to happen. He'll go months, even a year or two (2004-2005), so you let your guard down, then boom.

How's all this going to go down, I wonder. Do we do this, have a brief period of stability, then he finds out where we live? Core reason why I'm writing this is so my story is out there somewhere and it'll be harder for his potential allies to take his side of the story as-is; he needs allies to help him get his life working, get his bills paid, not to help him on some birdbrained revenge scheme. (And also, if anything does happen to us, it'll be known.) But that's the most crucial part of the story: making sure in this effort to keep him from destroying me, that he doesn't still find a way to destroy me.

He will resent any successes I have as a result of this. I start drawing pictures or writing fiction again, he'll want to destroy what I'm doing, he'll want to interfere somehow.

I also expect him to make Moo Bunny look like the inside of his diapers. I'm gonna be busy on the delete key, that's for damn sure. 90% of the drama we have with him on the homefront is just his need for attention and the rest is delusion; we will, by doing this, remove his ability to demand attention in person, and he will probably turn to Moo Bunny to get his tantrum on. Be warned.

I wanna know, once he's plotting his revenge, what he thought we were supposed to do about him.

He made this necessary.

And he will not understand.

Note from the future: what he expected us to do is have working reset buttons. He just thinks everyone is equipped with an overnight memory erase, that he can think up the most bullshit things to do to his friends and the next day they'll have forgotten all about it and want to hug him and kiss him and call him George. He is actually surprised and offended to discover that people remember, and hold against him, the fucked-up things he said to them the day before. And no. He doesn't understand.

IX: Glittering memories that don't always glitter

This thing is getting long-winded, ain't it?

My memories of this apartment aren't all bad. It's had its moments.

And like I said about eighty times, if it weren't for him we'd be happy to keep the place. It has geometry problems and construction problems and management problems but we could make it work - if we just didn't have to deal with him at the same time.

The living room is just a terrible piece of feng shui. It's huge but is so poorly shaped it's not even funny. It only has two corners that can be used for corner-like things. The other three corners aren't corners - one is the front door, another is the kitchen, and another is the fireplace that we never use. The living room is as long as the two bedrooms put together - it's as long as the unit - and is just this awkward puzzle-piece shape, with a hallway in the middle and a kitchen on one end. One wall is all window, south-facing, so you bake in the summer. It seems like an ideal place to put a couch but if you do, the couch faces nothing; there's noplace to put a TV that faces it.

My tendency has always been to divide the living room up into three areas. Well, maybe four if you count the Cube as its own thing. The area between the fireplace and the door. The area where the Cube and the couch are. And the area that faces the kitchen. Each of these three areas is big enough to be a small-sized living room all to itself. I figure if we didn't have him around, we'd orient the couch to serve as a room divider between the fireplace area and the rest - the couch could face the television in the only spot in the room that isn't drenched in glare, and we'd walk around the couch to get to the rest of the place. That'd be fine for us.

Anytime the fireplace area is cleaned up, bikes mysteriously appear in it. There was a time when we were OK with that. Then the cat barfed on his bike and he threw furniture down the hall. We started encouraging him to put his bike on the porch after that. If he ran the living room the way he wants to run it, it'd be a full-time bike factory with Furries on the couch. He's said so. Well, now's his chance. We're leaving him the couch.

I dunno. This was just a poor choice of apartment for us. It's better than the first one we looked at but the point is, we only looked at two. We should've kept looking. It was him. With him, it has to be done on his timeframe - if he's in a hurry, you don't get time to do things right. You don't get time to plan. You don't get time to wonder about consequences. You don't even get to look at all the options.

Should never have moved here with him. No apartment works if he's in it. He is the architectural flaw in any room he's walking through. You can't walk by him without him wanting to strike up a conversation - the problem being, it's about a 50-50 chance whether the conversation is about radios, or about how the Jews deserved what they got in WWII. If things aren't going well for him, he'll take it out on whoever is nearby. Hence our need to keep him at a distance.

Consequently, even though we haven't looked at very many places this time, I'm confident that we can make any of the floor plans work for us.

That said, I'm kinda sad we didn't get the one place that so closely resembled my old place in Indiana...

This apartment is a known quantity. We know it doesn't have black mold. We know the plumbing is fucked but we know how often it's fucked (by the way, the twice-a-year plumbing visit is coming up pretty soon). We know how warm it gets in summer and how cold it gets in winter. We know our neighbors. We know how the wind hits the place. We know how often to expect the power to go out. We know what leaks when it rains. We know where the beams are under the floor. We're about to trade all that in on generally unknown things.

But that's how all this has to work. We don't get the luxury of illusion, that we walk out of this place and there is somewhere a glittering paradise we move into, where everything works and nothing is annoying. No. This is going to be massively annoying for awhile. Particularly we are bringing with us two machines that must be kept running - Francesca and Saturday Market - and the infrastructure that keeps those machines running has to be working as soon as we bring them.

All the infrastructure I lament having lost here over the years, I lament because there's been a time here when they worked. I could draw here once upon a time. I could write code here once upon a time. Even the Cube of Denial, briefly, seemed to work - draw the curtains, monitors in night mode, put on some tunes, and write. These things taunt me, because they used to work, they could work again, they just don't work here, anymore, more than one at a time. Each thing I managed to do, as soon as I managed to do it, something else buckled. I'd lose pieces of my life. We're about to try a reboot of all that, maybe by starting over with our choice of infrastructures, without having to placate him with our designs, we can build the place how we want it, so it can stay that way.

And at the same time, you know, we can take pride in the new place. Here, we stopped seriously trying to decorate about a month after we got here. There just wasn't a point. We've gone through periods of not wanting to clean the place, because there just wasn't a point. You cannot be proud of an apartment that smells like human waste. You cannot be proud of an apartment that is liable to get you murdered. If he came to us today and said "I'm moving out" we'd do the place up right - we'd pitch the rickety chairs, we'd clean, we'd move the couch, we'd put up posters, we'd steam the carpets, we'd put crime scene tape over his door and never open it again, we'd get a coffee table, we'd get a nice television and a computer to feed it video, we'd live here. It'd be ours. But no. He has no intention of moving out.

There's some desire too to get away from the memories of bunnies dying around us. For awhile the place was turning into Watership Down. Zowie was the final straw - you could at least pretend somewhat that the living room was ours certain hours of the day, with him running around and being silly. But since he died, it just feels like a huge wasted space. And that seems to be why we kicked the Grand Plan into high gear in late October - because without Zowie, the last chance of this place ever being home again was gone.

If it ever was home.

Ah but I forget and downplay the turning point. I can't remember Xombi without remembering how she died. And I can't remember how she died without remembering what that fucking asshole said the next day. He petted her the day before she died. What the fuck is wrong with him? It wasn't about the bunnies. Ever. It was always about him. That's by his design. Anytime it looked like it was going to be about the bunnies, he had to make it about him.

This isn't about revenge, but damn, we're owed this. He skates by believing no one can punish him for what he does. He orchestrated all this in 2001 so that we can't punish him for what he does, not without inviting greater retribution. Well? We change that now.

See what I mean? Anything, any subject, eventually goes back to him. We do this thing, we excise the tumor, we set up shop in some new place far from him and far from his oozing socket of evil, and after awhile it won't be about him anymore, it'll be about us and a world of new opportunities.

Think I'm nuts? I got so much done in the three or four days after we got back from Seattle because he wasn't here. I did my Saturday Market build in a day and that was dragging my feet. I know what's possible.

I also know how much we have to lose.

This ranks up there with the initial move here, as the biggest and most complex thing I've ever attempted in my life. We do have a few things going for us now that we didn't have then: we have a more robust network of friends, we have a better plan with fewer huge blind spots, we have fallbacks, and 9/11 has already happened so we probably won't have something so nation-changing happen a month after the move. Matt's not involved this time. We know our financial reserves this time. There's no car to risk breaking down this time. We're not moving 2700 miles this time. We learned a lot of lessons last time.

But still. We weren't then hiding from someone who would kill us if he just had an excuse to do so. We're older, poorer, and the economy is worse. We don't have a car. The failure modes are deeper: we could get murdered, he could burn down the new apartment, we could make money mistakes and lose the apartment, we could end up homeless. There could be something environmental about the new place that kills rabbits. We have a more robust system of fallbacks and safemodes now than we did, but we may need them.

I'm not expecting this little project of ours to cure all our ills. I'm expecting the chance to do better things with my life.

I want to own nice things. It's not that we can't afford nice things once in awhile, it's that we don't dare own them. We own not a single piece of nonstick cookware he hasn't gouged with a fork. He cooked something in one of our nice baking dishes that dissolved the coating, we don't even know how he managed that. He destroyed two George Foreman grills. He fucked up one of my Kenwood speakers by throwing it across the room. We're scared to own nice things because that'll be what he smashes in his next tantrum.

But what's really going to happen? I'm not kidding when I say I expect a round of depression to follow this. I know my brain well enough to expect this. I'd like to think I also know enough that when it hits, I'll recognize it and start looking for countermeasures. But if I could control it, it wouldn't be depression.

I'd like to think too that there's a momentum that won't be disrupted right away. Whatever I'm doing, whatever I'm trying to do, just comes to a screeching halt once he walks in. Come back from vacation and be immediately reminded why you needed the vacation, that kind of thing. I've known for years this is the biggest piece of the puzzle - to stop being stopped by him always in the middle of whatever I'm trying to do - with it cleared away, will I actually use what I've won? Once I have my freedom, what will I do with it? Sit around and watch TV because I can?

I'm an artist. I don't draw these days - or at least I don't draw very much, I don't finish pictures or begin new ones - but that machine is still in me somewhere, in need of an oil change. The things that interfere with that machine are in three categories: depression, infrastructure, and him. Depression clouds my mind, defeats my concentration, but ironically once I build to a critical mass with a picture being worked on, the depression retreats. Infrastructure means things like, not having a physical place to work on a picture, or pictures getting damaged, or humidity. And douchebaggery - smell of raw sewage may be inspiring to him, but to the rest of us, a whiff of it has a certain interrupting effect to the creative process. So does being interrupted by a creep trying to start a fight.

What I wanted to do was salvage this place, build new infrastructure here. It would have been easier. Just not have him around, and draw on the dining table like I used to do. But no. He insists on being around. So. I have to lose the infrastructure pieces I was hoping to salvage. I must build anew. For awhile I won't even have a chair in the new location.

Well, that's not entirely true. I haven't used it since Zowie died - I was sitting in it petting him when his seizure occurred - but we do have a butterfly chair that is portable enough to be one of the first things we move. Come to think of it, I do have a lot of smaller furniture bits that can go on a two-wheeled cart in the first week. There's a tiny end table in the storage closet downstairs that can go. There are several pieces of finished particleboard that can be called into service as drawing surfaces or turned into mat cutting boards. I figure the core of my Saturday Market production can be moved in one trip - and then I can actually do the week's production there, and bring the finished product back with me, since the Green Suitcase will still probably live here. Once the production moves there, probably, I'll have enough of a work site that I can draw there too. I mean, the first month I'll be too busy moving stuff to draw, but at least the mechanism is there, and for once that can be the first infrastructure rather than the last.

Well. Now that I've said that, I've probably jinxed it and we're about to get declined.

...

That was the phone. Declined again. This time they take issue with our co-signer.

I hate how credit checks work. If you buy something on credit, your credit gets better; if you pay it off, your credit gets worse. If you buy something big on credit, your credit gets better, but if what you buy is too big, you can run into trouble because your payments will be too big. Seems like the only way to have excellent credit is to buy a sixty dollar MP3 player or something and only ever pay the interest. Which is precisely what people are encouraged to do.

Well, we do have a pocket ace - another cosigner we can try. We try one more time on that place, and then we move on.

X: The road back from Longview

One night, on the way back from visiting his friend in Longview - oh, I am ahead of myself.

Where's Longview? Doesn't really matter. About 40 miles away from Portland.

In the early days here, we all three used to go and do stuff. This one day, musta been the same week we moved into this apartment, August 2001, we went to see his friend in Longview, the friend he moved here for in the first place. The friend wasn't home. He hadn't bothered to call to see if they'd be home.

It's dark when we get there and discover they're not home. He says "oh I bet we can get inside. We'll go in and make ourselves something to eat, leave a note that says we were there, she won't care." Says we: "um no."

Need you the point drilled home? We're the assholes for pointing out this dumb thing wherein the neighbors will very likely notice us working on someone's front door at 10 at night, call the cops, and we the two sane ones will have to explain to Officer Plod why we went along with his brain-damaged idea to break into someone's house for no fucking good reason.

So we headed home. Him on his motorcycle (back when he had one) and we in my car (back when I had one). Noticed him weaving in the lane a lot, and we travelled all the way here from Indiana in this vehicular arrangement so I know how he usually rode.

We got home. He was first up the stairs, then me. And when I got up there I saw him trying to put his key in the door lock upside down. Nothing too odd about that, I guess, if you've just moved in recently - takes awhile to get used to keys and locks, and which way he key goes - but if the key doesn't wanna go in, most people turn it upside down and try again, and if it still doesn't go in, they look for the reason.

Instead picture a drunk trying to put a key in a door upside down. He had the look of a man doing good just to get the key near the keyhole. I don't think I'll ever forget this, watching him sorta mash the key against the lock and stare at it kind of blank and dumbfounded trying to figure out why it didn't work.

Well, in those days we thought he was human, and moreover, our friend. I got my key out, reached for the lock and said something like "here, let me try" and he just hauled off and smacked me. Probably on the arm, I don't remember. I do remember my keys disappeared. I do remember my watch disappeared. He whacked me so hard the watch band came apart.

Your best friend just up and hit you. That's never happened before. What do you do?

I'm not very good in a fight, a thing he has become fond of pointing out over the years as if it makes him right. My first mistake is usually getting into the fight, although sometimes there's no option to avoid the fight. Well, at that moment, I'd just been hit and my first thought was, if I don't hit him back he'll go on believing he can just hit me any damn time he feels like it. It may not have been the wisest thing to do.

I had a full 2-liter of Diet Rite in my other hand so I just brought it around and took him upside the head with it. And the thing I remember about that moment is, wow, it shouldn't be that easy to hit him with this, his reflexes must be damn slow. I realize later he'd gone right back to trying to fit his key in the door upside down, as if I wasn't there. Well, hitting him with the plastic bottle only got his attention.

Girlfriend arrived in time to see only the part where I lost. I got the floor mopped with me pretty bad. And his explanation? "Goddamn crazy motherfucker just hauled off and hit me with a fucking Diet Rite bottle for no reason!"

That's how he still tells the story - that I just hit him for no reason. He has no memory of what led to it.

I hit him to er, explain that he was not authorized to hit me whenever he felt like it. But he was so blotto that he a) didn't remember having hit me first, and b) now uses it to justify anytime he hits me. My effort to try to prevent him from thinking he can beat me up anytime he wants, makes him think he can beat me up anytime he wants.

Things backfire with him, have you noticed?

Thing to remember about this entire episode was, he looked drunk, he acted drunk, he sounded drunk, but he'd been in our field of view all damn day, we never saw him drinking. This was him sober. It's called neuroglycopenia, the special brand of crazy you get from spectacularly low blood sugar. And we figure that day he probably intentionally didn't eat because he expected his friend to be home and we'd have dinner there.

Maybe we have to gloss over his behavior that day, on grounds that his blood sugar was fucked up and he really couldn't help it. Except for two things.

One, he has never actually reevaluated that day in light of this. He doesn't think he was out of control that day. If he even remembers it.

And two, he never stopped pulling stupid shit like that. He'd have a peanut butter and cake icing sandwich for breakfast, nothing for lunch or dinner while he was at work, then come home looking for a fight. He goes out of his way to pretend there is no such thing as low blood sugar - any of the times I had to drop everything and find food in a hurry, he mocked me for it, told me it was all in my head, and probably still considers it proof that I deserve to be murdered in my sleep - meanwhile he is living proof this thing exists.

We've seen some real winners from him. One day we found him trashing the kitchen so he could clean it and have something to do. Said he was bored and Portland sucks because there's nothing to do. We decided to not be home for awhile.

All his bullshit can't be blamed on the blood sugar. But that's the thing. He lets himself get fucked up and doesn't think there's anything wrong; when he sobers up, he thinks the conclusions he reached are still valid. He never reevaluates anything. He simply never thinks it's possible for him to be wrong. If he's wrong, he's right. If he contradicts himself, he's right twice. And if he's thinking through a hypoglycemic haze, well, even if he can't remember anything he said or did, it's still right. Unless you are the one repeating it back to him, in which case you're wrong and he's still right.

Were he not an asshole, he might be capable of managing his blood sugar.

His eating habits are those of a little kid when its parents are away. He used to mock his sister for hitting the snacks and cookies too hard, but now that's him, with the added bonus that he can't even remember whether he actually bought the cookies or not.

He needs help. And I don't mean handouts and handholds. He needs professionals to come and put him somewhere that he can't hurt himself or other people. And in this country it is spectacularly difficult to get someone institutionalized without their consent - which creates the odd paradox that a crazy person has to realize they're crazy before they can get checked into the happy place, which means he'd have to get better before he could be hospitalized. Oregon is a particularly bad place to be insane anyway, as it no longer has a mental hospital and the regular hospitals are quite full thank you; that's why Portland has such a visible homeless population, because that's where mental illness gets you around here.

I don't know what he is. Blood sugar. Addiction-like behavior. Just plain nuts. Drug burnout. Head trauma. Asshole. I don't know why he is this way. All I know is he is. I have reason to think he is to some degree choosing to be what he is, because he does have some ability to turn it on and off - especially if he's trying to get something from someone, if he's trying to impress someone, he can snap out of it for awhile, stop saying douchey things, not beat people up. That is, he knows what he's doing is bullshit. He just finds the illusion too much effort to maintain. Around us, or around whoever he had been trying to impress once they no longer meet his needs, he just doesn't care.

He never apologized for hitting me.

Only time I can recall him apologizing was the time he threw water in my face, something about the air conditioner and him thinking it would work better if he left his bedroom door and window open.

He never apologized the day he kicked a dent in the bedroom door demanding to know "WHERE ARE THE FUCKING FORKS" - when they were in the silverware drawer. Don't know where he expected them to be.

He never apologized for trying to start shit with me because he thought I stole his towel. Apparently he still believes we stole his towel, and the identical-looking towel in the bathroom where he swears he didn't leave his, was ours which he smugly "stole" in revenge. There is a recognized mental illness by which people believe their acquaintances have been kidnapped and replaced by lookalikes...

He's stopped using his special shower head but has never apologized for the shit fit he threw over it in the first place.

He just doesn't think he's wrong.

And I just want out of his game.

XI: The bubble

I hate the waiting. This is so much hurry up and wait. Especially the place we're dealing with now. Seems like it takes all week to get a 'maybe' and about 45 minutes to get a 'no'. I must really want this place, we're now on the third try with them, our co-signer was declined so now we're trying with another co-signer. Spoke to them around noon and they said they'd just gotten the fax and were running it "now" and now it's 4pm and nothing.

I have this delightful fiction in my head, a daydream, by which they, you know, call me and say "you're approved" and we go down that day and pay deposits and sign papers. Somewhere I heard this fantastic tale that this is how it's supposed to work. No longer sure I believe it. Not sure how it's supposed to work instead.

We sorta want this to get moving by the 7th of a month - no longer sure which month - so we can issue our 30 days here and not owe an additional month's rent here.

We've been fighting this crap for a month just to get the first leg up. Is the whole process going to buckle like this? I get tired of being Schroedinger's cat, waiting for someone to open the box.

His latest nonsense? He seems to be sleeping from about 10am to 6pm or so. Well, this does have its uses - if it's a regular thing, I can get stuff done during it - but you know, I remember what he put me through when I had to sleep days. Every fucking day at 11am, loud techno. He knew I worked nights. He just didn't fucking care. Then when he works nights, he rolls in at 3am and cranks his noisemakers. Need I repeat myself: you can't win with him.

Why is he sleeping days? He isn't leaving at night. Maybe he got a job, and is phase shifting so he can begin it next week. But I have my doubts. He usually doesn't need a week to phase shift. As with all his behavior changes, this probably means something. I shouldn't have to care. I should just be able to live my life and deal with my problems without this bizarre shifting framework to deal with.

Man. It really feels like that place is doing something hinky. If I call them and ask what's up, I can get a "no" in 45 minutes. If I don't call and prod them, I don't hear from them for days. I'm hoping it's just that there's a technical issue with the co-signer, like an employment verification that takes too long. But I begin to get the vague suspicion that these applications simply sit on someone's desk, and when prodded, they stamp "REJECTED" on them to punish you for asking.

Or maybe there's something about us as applicants that they don't like - something they aren't supposed to decline people for - and they're just dragging their feet to get us to go away.

Credit checks are a lousy way to screen candidate tenants anyway. I mean, first of all, the fact that we don't use credit cards - the state of the financial industry at the moment maybe makes that not entirely a bad thing. Credit checks, credit scores, credit reports - these are not inherently about being a responsible spender. They're about having you be slightly irresponsible, the credit card people and the banks want you to spend more money than you have on large, easily repossessable things, then make minimum payments forever. Then either you've paid in more money than the plasma screen was worth, or you've defaulted and they not only take the plasma screen back, they also keep all the money you paid in. This is, I hope, obviously unlike an apartment, wherein the property owners make their money by you paying the entire rent amount, on time, every time.

Dunno. Maybe the thinking is, even if your stuff all gets repo'd, it'll be easier to kick you out because you won't have as much stuff.

And it's a lie to think that credit cards imply anything about the cardholder. Yeah, J. Cletus Trailerpark probably won't qualify for a Uranium Visa. But George Anthony Middleclass III could end up Cletus' neighbor by improper use of that exact same Visa. You only gotta qualify for a credit card once in your life to fuck your life up royally and irreversibly.

My favorite is that some jobs now credit check candidates. Yeah. Circular logic much? "Says here you have bad credit." "Yeah I know. That's why I'm trying to get a job." And I can see if someone's applying to be a bank manager or something, where you want to know if there's anything shady or desperate in their past, wherein an employee might do a kind of risk assessment and decide it's worth it to try stealing the company blind. But nowadays, employers get their candidates screened by third party screening agencies, and those agencies increasingly do credit checks just for the hell of it. This is where that whole "the poor stay poor" thing creeps in.

And my point is, if this shit actually worked, the economy wouldn't be in the damn toilet. Making people poor - by laying them off, by making it impossible for them to get hired, by tying these imaginary credit checks to things involving real money, by kicking them out of their homes that they were in some cases tricked into buying in the first place, or simply by lying to them and taking their money - why is it so hard for economists to figure out that people with no disposable income can't buy the stupid shit that keeps a supply-side economy running?

That's why I say, if you want a reliable economic indicator, toys. Toy stores, that just sell toys, not toys and video games, not toys and clothes, not toys and comics, just toys tend not to weather recessions well - they're the first to close and the last to reappear. In general also the toy section of larger stores will shrink noticeably during a downturn - smaller selection, fewer of each thing, unrelated aisles merging. Wal-Mart for example rearranges and resizes the toy department store-by-store based on what sells - and boy are they tightwads about it, to the point of shipping whole brands off to other stores or converting whole aisles of toys over to cosmetics. Now, if supply-side really worked, toys would be the bedrock of our economic system - fundamentally useless things that keep people busy making them and other people busy buying them.

One wonders: did the growth of really cool toys and of cartoons as toy commercials in the early 80s contribute to Reagan winning the '84 election? I remember going to toy stores in 1987 and saying "wtf, there's nothing good" - was this because of the economy, or could it have contributed to it? Is our economy now in part because the last two years, clothes have been ugly, movies have been expensive to produce and made too little at the box office, music only reminds us of better songs from five years ago, and there aren't any good Transformers? There are those who straightfaced claim that Michael Jackson's Thriller single-glovedly rebuilt the music industry, which had been in a slump. Well? I don't see why it wouldn't be true. The economy of the 1980s was based on spending and on fictictious growth. Maybe pop culture itself - toys, music, TV, fashions, cars, Kirk Cameron - was the bubble of the 80s, what real estate is now.

OK fine. So my point is, I buy my Transformers at Goodwill with cash, if I buy them at all (there aren't any good ones this year), and not at Wal-Mart with a gold card. Does this make me a bad person? Earning that money sporadically and randomly at a street market, when I should be a cog in a machine with a steady paycheck, probably makes me a bad person, but that's not what's getting us hung up - just our credit.

Note also, I have bad credit but Girlfriend has no credit, she's been doing everything through me for the last several years, and so as far as credit reporting agencies are concerned, she doesn't exist. If we were married, we'd both have credit.

Our cosigners - both of them - are also unmarried. Both are in long-term relationships. Both have weddings planned soon, one this year and one next year. But meanwhile, it means the one shows up on a report as making $1500/mo house payments herself and having never used a credit card. The other, we don't know. We went with her because she uses credit cards. Maybe that's what was missing.

Still. The odd runaround and the dragging their feet fits two patterns: us with weird credit, or how you'd reject someone for reasons it is not legal to reject someone for. Like if you know something you're not supposed to, or if you're trying to turn someone down because you disapprove of their religion, race, gender, or living arrangement, you couldn't just stamp no on it, you've got to fuck with them until they give up. I don't know what they'd be wrongfully rejecting us for. Is our current landlord giving one of those "off the record" bad references that you can't prove but you know happen?

Girlfriend has advised me I should consider this one a lost cause. Still, the reason we're trying so hard is that it sorta seems to be calling to me - this one looks like it - and maybe the giveaway is that it's such a pain in the ass that it must be the right course.

We also figure it's the 4th of July weekend and it's possible that everybody involved in the screening has simply taken off early. Means we don't get to celebrate our independence until next week at the earliest.

What's eating me isn't the timeline, it's the possible losing of another good floor plan. What is it about apartment designers and shotgun living rooms, anyway? It's not that hard to arrange a unit so that the living room is not a hallway. The architects just think they're being clever. I mean, I realize I'm asking too much - the point of the move is escape, and if we get a place that happens to meet all our other needs then that's luxury - but fuck. There exist floor plans 600sqft and up in which I cannot have a desk or a workspace. Long skinny living rooms with a kitchen at the far end and a patio door in the middle. That kind of thing. I look at our place and I just ask: what the hell do they expect us to do? - there's noplace to put a couch that faces a television.

XII: The prize we sought

It is the next day - a new morning dawns on the ashes of me. Last night hurt - desperation. You saw it in what I just wrote. It's like treating a sick bunny but worse: you hurry up and you wait. You wait and wait and you dread the worst and you wait more. Patience is not a virtue but neither is impatience - you can't push it to make it resolve faster, nor can you sit back and allow it to take its own course. It is bleakness, concrete walls, dull steely skies, cold winds - doesn't matter if you look outside and see blue skies and sun, it's still the vast aching deep.

Depression is a barrel of laughs, I tellya.

So's waiting on an apartment.

When you expect a call back in an hour and don't get one in a day, it's hard to tell depression from apartment hunting. My bag-o-tricks for dealing with depression have to be brought into service to deal with this. And what is this? Waiting game. Dark fears. A system not designed for compatibility with people like us. The worry that we'll fail, this time, next time, time after that. Or simply that by failing this time, the things I saw in that place - the possibilities - just won't be there in the next one or the one after that.

They don't call me. I've found I have to call them. I worried that by calling too often, I was encouraging them to stamp "DENIED" on my application, again and again.

I must've really wanted that place to keep trying. Two co-signers and a month of phone calls.

Today is July 3rd and it is our independence day.

We are approved.

We go in Monday to sign it.

There remain unknowns. I was told last week that there might be a downstairs ready for us, don't know if that's still the case.

It lacks a dishwasher.

Fortunately it also lacks a fireplace, a patio, a pool, and a shotgun living room. The things we don't need.

It also lacks Douchesprocket.

We are cheering. Quietly.

The timing is exactly what we wanted: we pay this month's rent here, then issue our 30, and next month's rent is due about 36 hours after we walk out the door. Cruel? Yes, but it saves us a hell of a lot of money. We don't pay for a day more of this place than we actually intend to be here.

So. Now begins the great adventure. The move.

I characterize this process as follows: four weeks, including possibly five Saturday Markets, in which we must completely vacate our stuff from this apartment without him realizing what we're doing - the visible portion of us must remain as normal as possible, while the invisible portion must be as productive as possible, getting stuff the hell out under cover of darkness.

This is both liberating and terrifying. We have a lot of stuff and he's home most of the day. It's going to be a matter of architecting my days - that when he's up and awake, I have to be in here "doing boxes" and getting them ready to haul, so when he's not awake, or when he's gone, I can take the show on the road. All the infrastructure problems I already have? They're about to do a fifty-car pileup. Not just staying out of his way, staying out of his awareness. I have to know, not guess, which hours of which days he's home and awake, and that seems to change every day. (Like I said, he's parodying us. This is what he thinks I do - I stay home all the time and never do anything, and sleep as late as I want, right?)

I'd thought we'd put the Cube of Denial back up right away. We will, but not first thing, mostly because the materials it was made from are not readily to be found. Probably Tuesday or Wednesday I'll put that back in action, and start thinking about getting the Cube contents out of here - the G3, the printers.

Crap. How'm I gonna get this 21" ViewSonic out of here, hidden or not? This thing is a beast to haul around.

XIII: This is not a bed of roses

Well. OK, we're off to a very slow start with all this. Nightfall on the first day of the rest of our lives and we haven't packed a thing. I think we're writing off this weekend as a strategy thing.

Some of the zanier ideas we broached include building a pulley system that hangs out our bedroom window, to lower boxes to an accomplice in the alley. No, that won't attract any unwanted attention, no.

Doucheminster rarely leaves the house anymore so I'm not as worried about what he sees - my concern is nosy, talkative neighbors. I don't know who talks to whom, and by extension, who talks to Douchestring. Last thing we need is for someone to say to him "so, you guys moving out or something?"

This whole project can be made to look like a spring cleaning project - with the oven as an excuse - but if what we're doing is obviously not cleaning so much as taking stuff out of the complex, or putting stuff in a POD visible on the property somewhere, then word may get around. That's one reason I am kind of nervous about the POD idea.

I tend to come down on the side of, the plan with the fewest moving parts and strange failure modes. Secrecy is the most important part, this has to not attract attention, this has to look like anything except moving out.

I thought about writing "TO STORAGE" on every box that goes out our door.

I thought about simply bringing over a friend with a pickup truck once a week and doing a truckful under cover of darkness.

I wondered if a pickup truck parked in the alley behind us, with a person standing in the truckbed, could safely be handed boxes out our bedroom window. (Probably not, unless the truck has monster truck tires and the person is three meters tall.)

My idea of hauling the whole apartment out one two-wheeled-cartload at a time, day after day, was rejected. Some things like Viewsonic monitors and futon mattresses just aren't practical to transport that way, and the repeated trips would be noticed. Some trips like this will probably be made, such as the first few trips to bring in the Irreplaceables.

What can one say? I alternate between the sheer wonder of realizing we're finally doing this thing - like "President Obama" it never gets old thinking about it - and the dazed realization of the sheer scope and scale of what we must now do. I rescind my earlier statement that this is as complex as the initial move here. This is twice as complex.

We have signed the papers and paid the money. We have an apartment.

Two apartments, really - a new one and an old one. So we went and talked to the landlord here about getting out of this one.

The landlord is very accommodating - has agreed to put "do not contact" on all paperwork related to this, has agreed to have the lease termination confirmation sent in a plain brown wrapper, has agreed that Douchespree is not to be contacted at all.

It's daunting and my mood has been all over the place.

I don't utterly dislike this apartment - ah, but then I kind of think about it and I do. It is full of darkness and bitter memories and betrayals. It was never my apartment, not even partly - anywhere Douchebracket was allowed an opinion, I was treated like a spent booster rocket, I'd served my limited purpose and deserved only the scraps of a life I could scrounge together. My apartment in Indiana was four years of happy memories; it was a place I lived and can remember fondly. Know what I'm going to miss about this place? Zowie, Ghost, and Xombi. And they don't live here anymore anyway.

You'd think, an apartment 900 square feet, wouldn't feel so claustrophobic.

That said, one of the things that sent my mood into spirals is the layout of the new place. It's in actually the same complex as the like-my-old-place one, but is a somewhat different layout. Good: the living room is not a "throughway" like some of the places around. Bad: the bedroom is tiny. Good: the closet space is vast. Bad: there's a lot of square footage given over to a hallway I didn't think it needed. Good: the living room is rectangular. Bad: part of that rectangle is a linoleum pathway from the front door across the kitchen area, kind of dictating where we can't put furniture. Good: the living room and kitchen are one. Bad: the living room and kitchen are one.

I think I was kind of sad about not getting the other floor plan - the one that kept me fighting to get this complex.

But you know what? Any floor plan that lacks Douchegourd is a floor plan I can work with. It may not be ideal, it may limit our possibilities for awesomeness, but I think we can make it work.

The vast closets are going to help matters considerably. Seriously - one is almost big enough that I could put a desk in it! (It's tempting.) We do own a lot of stuff. It is not immediately clear how much of our stuff is actually stuff we need to keep - I know there's a lot in the category of "stuff we wish we could use but can't because of our situation", stuff that becomes usable again simply by moving. Some stuff is simply inefficiently packed in boxes, due to one or another Rapid Spring Cleaning event. Some stuff is redundant, in the sense of only exists because of this place - some stuff is here because we needed it five years ago and something we need now leans on it. The non-Euclidian shape of this apartment has mandated a certain clutter - we've tended to use stuff to define space. I want to get away from that.

This apartment has tended to be defined in terms of stuff I used to be able to do. Either things I used to be able to do here that are lost to me in terms of infrastructure and douchebaggery, or things I used to be able to do in my old apartment that we could never quite make possible here.

We've made several stabs at making this home - the bunnies are arguably the greatest success we've had at this, and if we can call a row of urns a success you can guess how successful the other attempts must have been. Otherwise we try to set things up how we want and we must lose it, either it annoys him or it annoys the property company. Worse, it's usually nearly impossible to correct a room design decision once it's implemented - things get built up around things. And I know it's not inherent in our lifestyle because in Indiana, we moved stuff around all the time. "I think we oughta try this desk over in that corner." If we didn't like a piece of furniture, it got moved. If we really didn't like it, it got gone.

Still. I have concerns about the new floor plan. I can't prove it but I think it's smaller than the other one we were shown, even counting closet space. I'll know once I get in there with measuring tape. I have concerns about the bedroom - it actually looks so tiny that a bed can only fit a certain direction, and we can't have a big bed. And I must admit I'm going to miss our large kitchen, not that we can do much in it anyway. (Know what I'm going to miss most about our kitchen? Catching Zowie in it all the time.)

I dunno. Most of it is probably just anxieties rising to the surface. Hey. We're moving. My problem is, while I am bemoaning the loss of our 900 square foot apartment, I forget that I don't live in more than about 200 square feet of it.

One annoyance is the trip from the train stop to the front door is longer. Much longer. We'll need bikes. And Saturday Market, let's just say I'll get home a lot later.

But our new apartment is four steps down rather than seventeen steps up. My back will thank me for it. I've long since theorized that some of the psychological pallor of this place is due to the "climb to the torture chamber" effect of the front steps - partly the actual steps being nonstandard and too damn tall (a landing halfway up would probably help a lot), partly the sheer number of times I've gotten to that top step and dreaded opening the door, having some inkling of what I would find. It drains you to come home. You dread coming home. If you dread it, it isn't home. So. Moving downstairs. It means I get home from Saturday Market and the hard part ends before I reach the steps. Maybe that means I get in the door and am invigorated.

We can own bikes again, without being the subject of scorn from a bike elitist who thinks we aren't awesome enough to ride bikes.

That said, I figure once the mental roadblocks get cleared, once we're settled and have working infrastructure again, I can start thinking about owning a car again. Not that I want to get back to driving everywhere, but for things like Saturday Market, you know, what would really help is if I could have a box with wheels and a motor that I can use to carry me and my giant suitcase great distances quickly, I wonder if they make such a contraption.

I started today with a lot of unknowns and we've blazed through most of the worst of it. We have the apartment. We have the 30 days handed in on this apartment. We have sympathetic landlords at both ends. We have friends willing to help us as they can, although we don't have any friend with a cargo van and limitless free time, we do have friends with cars. We've done the paperwork. We have some money saved up. We have the outline of a plan. It's frankly amazing how much we know now, that we didn't know this morning - pieces of a vast puzzle beginning to come together.

Is it possible this thing could really be that simple?

Ah hell no. It never is. The simpler you bank on it being, the nastier the hidden surprises. And that, my brain is probably converting into some kind of hazy anxiety over the shape of the living room.

It is too simple. Is there a failure mode I'm missing?

I mean, whole classes of failure modes just got excluded simply by signing paperwork today. We now have an apartment to move to. If we change our minds or something blows up, we can back out of our 30 day lease terminations. We have a reasonable-looking method for unloading the apartment. Things are coming together.

But really? My anxieties run more towards the metaphysical. I fear, because we're about to have something go right for a change, someone I care about is going to die. Isn't that usually how it works?

Is that even reasonable or sane? Yes, someone died when we moved here. Nobody died when I moved into my old place though. Besides, 90% of the point is to keep us from dying.

Another principle I forget is, this is meant to be a beginning. We'll live at this new place two, maybe five years maximum and look for something better. Bigger. With features we can't afford now but will want someday. More convenient location. More favorable room geometry. A garage. Hardwood floors. An extra bedroom I can turn into an art room. My dream is to someday own a house - though I don't know if that can ever happen.

Anyway. I sorta knew I would have emotional problems once we got into this. I just didn't expect to sign the papers and then immediately be this unhappy. But then, it's been such a rollercoaster so far, such anticipation and excitement starting Friday morning when we got the call, that maybe I just popped a circuit breaker and it takes a day or so to cool down. And I never said this would make me permanently happy but the Girlfriend can't stop bouncing up and down and giggling over this, and I can't crack a smile. I feel like we just committed to something doomed to fail, and until I chase it down, until I work through the thing and find what's bugging me, it's going to be there.

Hmmm. It was rainy through all this. Is that the problem? Is this what happens when I push through the lethargy but still have mood problems? - that something cool I'm doing just feels like we're all going to die?

I dunno. I don't consciously think this thing we're doing is doomed. And I don't know if I trust the feeling either. My objections fall to two points: did we get an apartment that is too small to work for us, and how can such a complicated thing not have any other major failure modes? Feels like there's something I'm not seeing.

Note from the future: this tendency to look for unseen things is not a negative trait. It just needs focused, put to use.

OK. So the next stage is to get utilities turned on. We'll only have two utilities, electricity and Internet. Phone landlines cost too much for how rarely we use them, and besides, the phone company will be a security hazard (selling personal info) and our phone number will give away our geographical location, so we'll just use our cell phones. We probably won't bother to get cable TV, there's so little on and it costs so much - I don't think we can justify paying for the privilege of watching commercials.

I gotta get somewhere and shop for furniture. When I talk about things we have that are boxed up or taken apart because we couldn't use them here, part of that includes furniture - we have an entire desk and several small tables unassembled in closets because we knew if we put them together, they'd get destroyed the next time he needed to vent his aggression. Now we'll need them. Otherwise, we're leaving behind most of the big furniture. Entertainment center, stays. My desk in Cube One, stays. (It is actually my desk from Compassworks and itself has some bad memories - it's the only standing piece of infrastructure from that era, and is overdue to not be standing anymore.) The couch stays. The desk from the Cube of Denial goes with us - we can finish assembling the shelf that goes over it. TV stand goes with us. The two office chairs go with us, at least until we get better ones.

There's a sort of minimum infrastructure we're going to need - we'll say, a baseline to aim for at the end of the 30 days - wherein we have a place to sleep, places to put two computers (mine and hers), my printers, some kind of surface on which to do my Saturday Market things, plates to eat off of, and Francesca's cage and containment. Beyond that, the niceties can come later.

The new place is so much cheaper than this place - and will be cheaper to heat and cool, I imagine - that it'll be like getting a raise. The initial investment of that leftover money will go towards filling in the infrastructure gaps, such as a bed and a dishwasher, and turning our temporary desks into decent, long-term-usable ones.

I figure it'll be September at the earliest before I can have an art table.

Well. It's Tuesday and today we go back up to the new apartment and try to get some work done. The goal today is to get the place measured for floor plan and furniture, maybe take a few smaller items up there (whatever will fit in a backpack), and thoroughly document the condition of the place and any minor damage that exists. Figure today or tomorrow the garage will be ready for us to begin actual moving of boxes; see, we got a garage, but it wasn't empty yet, the truck will be here today to empty it.

XIV: Colors of failure

You know what it feels like? It feels like a bunny death in reverse. When we get a new bunny it's awesome and brings great joy to us but isn't world-rebooting. But when they die it stops the world and you can't go back to how it was. Colors look wrong. This move feels a lot like that - even though this isn't an out-of-nowhere surprise, and isn't inherently a negative thing, there's still a lot of that world-stopped sense to it, a lot of sense that we're losing something.

I guess there'd be an irony if, a month after the move, I begin thinking of the old place as "home" retroactively, something I never really felt living there. But like I said, I'm expecting emotional rollercoasters for awhile. This little project of ours is a massive serotonin spike, which for awhile is going to have me not depressed but bipolar as my brain recalibrates. Yesterday's weird weather can't have helped; tomorrow's weird weather won't help either. Some things, I'm just not going to feel the way I probably should.

However, what I'm trying to do with all this is get rid of a major source of depression in my life. I am forbidden from being happy with him around. He sees it, he puts a stop to it. This thing we're doing isn't to create lifelong bliss, it's just to get me out of life-destroying chronic depression in the same way I had to quit Compassworks and throw that douchebag to the curb.

And I note that once I quit Compassworks, I was still depressed for awhile, which makes me suspect it's normal that the brain doesn't always recalibrate quickly.

We are fixing a mistake. We can't undo what has been done but we can do anew what should have been done. We're eight years older and hopefully wiser, I'd like to think we're stronger. We've made our mistakes and I'm hoping - no, I'm damn sure - that moving here with him will remain the biggest mistake of our lives, that we are not now making a worse mistake by leaving. I'm not sure what mistake we could make that would be worse than moving in with him.

Depression can linger after the source is removed. It sometimes finds other things to fixate on. I'm hoping that because I expect it that I can sort of get in ahead of it, forestall it, build in the systems I need to battle it. I'm not hoping for a cure. I'm just hoping for someone to stop standing on my head while I drown.

I want it to be, if something fails, it's my fault. Weird? Yes. But if I attempt something, and it fails, and I know it's me that failed, I can do it better next time. If I attempt something and it fails, and I can't separate my role in its failure from his or from this place, then I don't know what to do differently next time. Just as likely his presence will preclude a next time. I want to be able to fail better.

There's a smell to failures that occur with him around anyway. It just hurts worse to have something go wrong and then there's him like a spoiled garnish on a bad meal, making things feel as if they've failed worse. I shouldn't have to care. But the pattern was established early on that he was grading me - and what friend does that? - that if I failed at something or made a mistake or misspoke in his sight, I'd get lectured and threatened, usually while I was busy trying to pick up the pieces. Consequently nothing can just go wrong around here, it has to go wrong and immediately be hidden from view.

Things went wrong in Seattle. I kept having stomach problems. We kept getting off to a late start on the day's activities. We kept getting off track trying to find things that downtown Seattle doesn't have. There were arguments. There were technical problems. But you know, we still counted the trip as a success. We had fun. Because it wasn't about the problems. We didn't have to languish in our failures, nor hide them, nor hold our noses because it was in the area, nor feel our stomachs clench up because his radio just got cranked up, or any of the bullshit that punctuates our lives here. We had good honest failures. Stuff we could work around. Stuff we could get up and walk away from. I think that's probably the strongest evidence that this thing will work - that when we do make things happen far from him, they tend to go smoother.

Still. The move must happen in his presence and be kept more secret than any sick rabbit or malfunctioning computer we've ever had to hide from him in the past. We must work out his day-to-day schedule, what little he has of one, and from it figure out what days it's safe to move stuff. And days when we bring the truck? Have to be days when he's not going anywhere, lest he see us downstairs loading a truck.

XV: Topology

It's Tuesday and we've just been up there again. We got the electricity turned on. I took measurements and we went over the checklist of stuff that is already damaged. We discovered a lot of dings and dents we didn't notice the first time around; those are minor. Will say that up close, it's too obvious why the apartment was so cheap: they didn't mask off the baseboards when they painted, the cabinets are old particle board, the closet doors must have cost about five bucks each, etc.

We discovered a problem: the bathroom sink. Specifically the cabinet under it. It's awful. Mildew, water damage, and what looks like the Fungi from Yuggoth. Yeah. This would be the kind of failure mode I had missed: that there would be some really horrible thing they were supposed to have fixed, didn't, and now we have to get them to fix it. This thing is unacceptable. My take on it is, I don't care if we have to rip the cabinet out ourselves - actually take a jigsaw and cut the thing apart leaving just the countertop and 2x4s to prop up the corners. But it can't stay like this.

Manager did say, if we discovered mold, to let her know so they can clean it.

Anyway. So the place is kinda small and it seems to get smaller each time we look at it. And I don't know if that's an illusion created by the hall closet being enormous, or by the fact that there is a hall consuming some of the square footage (which the other layout didn't have), or if that particular unit and floor plan really is a lot smaller than the 650 square feet I thought we were getting.

Hmmm. Not counting wall thickness, the L-shaped hallway is 42 square feet and the hall closet is 40 square feet.

No, that's not enough to account for it. Let's transfer these numbers and make a drawing in Flash, one inch per pixel - shouldn't take fifteen minutes - and some quickie estimations of area.

Hmmm. Says it comes out to 570 square feet.

I found a drawing of our current living room I'd done years ago in Flash, also one inch per pixel, and overlaid it. That's enlightening. The new apartment damn near would fit in this living room - if you could make this living room into a rectangle.

Doesn't prove the new space is small. Proves our existing place is too damn big and awkwardly shaped. We don't use that living room. We can't. It's literally two thirds the size of a 570 sqft apartment, and we can only actually furnish and use maybe 150 sqft of it - another 100 sqft is kitchen - and the rest is lost to walking around.

We noticed when we had the place perfectly clean, that we couldn't sit and watch TV in the living room because the TV is at one end of a 25-foot room and anyplace to sit and face it is at the other. Should we have just kept that wall cleared and used it as a projection screen?

I am not kidding. Our living room here is 25 feet long and about 10 feet wide, but nonrectangular, with big pieces carved out for fireplace etc.

The new place, the living room is 15 feet by 13 feet, and that's just the carpeted area, minus the linoleumated kitchen "zone".

So. What consumes all that space in the current living room? A fireplace we don't use. A couch we can't sit on. A stereo system we never have occasion to use. The table that serves as my market work area, which is poorly organized and spread out. The Cube of Denial, or its remnants, still relatively compact and occuping a weird corner space whose intended use we cannot divine. This is just a bad floor plan. Not saying the new one is great but I think we can make it work - it lacks most of the annoyances of this one.

The new one has its own annoyances to be sure. It's actually kind of ugly inside - the doors are all this very nasty dark brown, the cabinetry is cheap and unsightly, and it really annoys me that they didn't mask off the baseboards and trim when they painted; either paint the trim or don't. The inside of the front door is hideous, it's half a shade darker than the other dark browns without managing to be an awesome 1970s Darth Vader black, and it's dented on the inside (not the outside!). That is, it's going to be a challenge for awhile trying to take pride in it, because it's obvious they didn't.

But take pride in it we shall. I got posters I want to put up, posters that haven't been on a wall in eight years. I got decorating ideas. I got ideas how to arrange a desk so that it wants to be kept clean. We can have a real bed, a couch, a place to put a television, we can invite people over. And I mean, it won't ever be truly nice - it won't be our friend's condo for example, and it won't be what this place could have been - but it'll be ours for as long as we choose to make it so.

And we do intend - couple years from now, once we've got motor vehicles and better finances, we'll get a bigger place. This is a move out of necessity. That will be a move because we want to. This helps serve as an escape valve for any frustrations we have with the new place - knowledge that we don't have to be stuck there if we don't want. It isn't our tomb.

XVI: Robot duplicates

One more way to know we're doing something right: there's basically nothing in the new place, nothing to do, and we enjoy going there. We dread coming back to the old place. We've been up there every day this week running errands of one sort or another, and once we run the errand, we go and hang out in the empty apartment and just kind of be there for awhile.

It's like, it's not perfect. It's not even excellent or great. But it's ours.

We thought of an innovative way to get the living room emptied: we don't empty it. We replace everything we're taking with stuff we're not. Make it look like we're swapping furniture between the living room and the bedroom. For example the Cube of Denial: the desk and the G3 on it can be swapped with the desk from the bedroom and the nonworking G3. The monitors with the G3 are junk and will be staying. We hide things in plain sight. Maybe Doucheclam gets the credit for this brilliant idea, with the whole "abducted his towel and replaced it with a robot duplicate" thing.

This isn't his stuff we're taking. We're making a careful effort to take only stuff that is legitimately ours. It won't stop the accusations, particularly since he can never seem to remember whether something is his or not, but we'll be in the right. Notably we're leaving his TV and any videotapes we think are his.

He'll probably claim the table and some of the dishes are his property somehow. Don't think they are.

There may have to be an expedition into his room to check for stuff belonging to us. I'm not looking forward to that. I'm not even hazmat certified. I'm also not sure what we'd hope to find. Does he have some kind of storage offsite somewhere, at a friend's house? He has commented that he's got half a dozen bicycles at someone's house. Maybe he's got boxes of stuff there too. Note he doesn't live there.

Ok but let's sanity check this. It sound like, aside from the room-searching expedition and the disappearance of the table and microwave and most of the dishware, he might not even realize we've moved. Can it be that easy?

Well - that's the weird part. It's not easy but it's too easy. It's just, we do some stuff and then it's done. This is utterly unlike anything else I've attempted in the last several years: we figure out how to do something, and it looks like that way is going to work, and then we set about doing it. This isn't like us doing something. This is more like him doing something: fantasizing about a positive outcome and there never being any reasonable likelihood of failure. What am I missing?

Is it really that simple?

Well, there are hints of failure modes buried in it. Right now the problems "in work" are: the nasty bathroom sink thing at the new site, possible insects at the new site. We're also working on clean transfer of utilities. These are just the major showstoppers on our plate now - the things that we know about that could fail in a big way. (Mold or bugs for example could become a bunny health problem. And an unclean transfer of utilities might leave a backdoor for him to either fuck up our utilities or socially engineer them into giving up our address.)

Oh yeah. And Saturday Market. The one place he knows to come looking for me. I intend to keep right on being there, but I'm also aware I'm sticking my neck out: it's as much about being there to sell stuff as it is about proving I'm not afraid of him. Except I kinda am afraid of him. I mean, if he comes after me, he'll get what he deserves - and I don't mean a statue of him in the town square. But I'll also get what he deserves. I'm tired of getting what he deserves.

One of the more ironic ways this could get fucked up is if we do it too well - if we leave him where he left me, a broken shell of a man, and he commits suicide. It's not what I want, mostly because I don't hate his mother - she's got one son in Iraq now, I don't think she deserves to receive her other son in a box. Moreover, if he dies, that ends any possibility that he might grow up. I could see him threatening suicide as another of those douchebag drama chips I was talking about - he has pulled that stunt before, downing a bunch of caffeine pills and admitting it to his family so they could rush him to the hospital and feel sorry for him. I'm not worried about his drama chips, now that I've learned the hard way that's all they are - counterfeit poker chips from a bankrupt casino. I'm worried he may do instead of threaten.

You know, last time I wrote one of these epic posts as-it-was-happening, was the Seattle vacation - and it ended with a twist, exactly as I feared. Is something similar going to happen this time? Can I get a note-from-future to tell me what I should have taken steps to avoid?

Note from the future: Buy a fire extinguisher.

Sheesh. No answer.

Sure there's an answer. You just can't hear it from the past.

XVII: This is where it starts to get boring

Right now Douchedrone is away. He took his bike. For once this is a bad thing because it means we can't be taking things to the staging area - he'd see us if he happened to roll in. We don't know how long he'll be gone. He's been known to be gone days like this, although if I get up at 5 tomorrow and his bike is still gone, I'm moving boxes anyway, for a few hours at least.

A logistical wish I have, which probably won't come true: to wheel the cart to Saturday Market from this apartment and wheel it home to that apartment. Obviously at some point the cart does need to go up there, but when that time comes, it'll probably go by truck. Until then I basically have to "come home" here since here's where computers and printers will probably be until the last possible minute.

(I say that, but I can envision a transitional working setup - I do my printing from the G3, but the actual print files are stored on the Clone and that's where the printing used to happen. So Clone at least, or Clone and G3, and the 740 and a 13" temporary monitor, need to go up there, not necessarily same truckload but at least the same week so that I can print stuff. And as long as there's a desk in the living room with a computer and a printer, he won't know what's up. One thing: a way to cut mats must exist up there before the printing moves. Another thing: despite the ballyhoo, I've sold only two prints made with the 1280, so it isn't as critical that it moves when everything else does.)

(I am under no delusions that this will be a comfortable working setup. But I find I'm more willing to make sacrifices if I know there's actually a payoff.)

Ah, a failure mode finally occurs to me: we're going to be buying a lot of stuff pretty soon. Bicycles. Rugs. A couch. Desks. Maybe a portable dishwasher. Maybe a bed. I don't think any one thing is going to be horribly expensive, but all of them at once could add up. My worry is that once we commit to several expensive things, that's when something expensive will happen. And what sort of expensive thing could happen? Francesca. Normally rock-solid. But we're about to put her someplace we know little about. We've ruled out environmental problems here, so if there's something about that apartment that would make rabbits sick, we'll notice it right away - but then what?

I think the real work gets done next week when I start swapping furniture between rooms. It'll be something I can do with him on the prowl, because it'll be things it's safe for him to see. I mean I don't want him to stop and talk to me about it, but I can at least take greater risks on being seen in-progress. And once the entertainment center and Cube One desk are moved, that opens up the bedroom and makes it easier to move the closets out while he's asleep.

Whatever day is our last day here, Francesca should be moved the day before, probably by pet carrier on the train. I wanted to move her sooner but it's looking unlikely that there will be a comfortable midpoint at which someone is living at the new site to keep an eye on her.

Isn't this exciting?

We have some furniture. Much was stored in the locker downstairs, nice furniture that we couldn't put to use because we feared it getting destroyed. Mostly end tables, shelves, a coffee table, that sort of thing - no chairs or anything spectacularly useful. We had stuff we didn't even remember we had. Also found in the locker: a Tandy FD-502 floppy drive for a Color Computer, with controller, still in the box. I'd picked this puppy up at Goodwill oh, five years ago.

In about four hours I cleaned out that locker downstairs and took a chunk out of the bedroom. I was impressed by how much room it opened up in the bedroom and how little actual stuff there was. This place has been very inefficiently utilized: stuff shoved in around other stuff to fill space and keep bunnies out of trouble, ill-shaped furniture too big or too small for the job at hand, or just simply trying to cram an entire apartment's worth of living into a bedroom because the living room is enemy territory. The bedroom now unstacks like a puzzle, so long as we proceed in such a way that Francesca only has access to areas we've cleared of trouble.

The going must be slower later in the day, as there are more chances to be seen, but still. Progress finally being made. This thing might happen cleanly after all!

XVIII: The problem solving toolkit

When I talk about failure modes, I do not mean I expect it to fail. I mean I don't undertake a project like this without expecting that it could fail - and pretending that it can't fail usually guarantees disaster. I'm not whining, I'm sanity checking.

This thing is big, complicated, and dangerous. We've got groundwork laid, several of the biggest pieces are already in place, and we're proceeding cautiously. And so far things are working, in many cases smoother than I expected they would. This is cause for concern because something this big doesn't just stay on course by itself. I'm checking to make sure I'm not overlooking something massive that's going to throw us a curveball 3/4ths of the way in, right when we're least equipped to deal with it.

"Is it really this straightforward?" is all I'm asking - and I'm old and bitter enough that I don't trust a simple, too-fast "yes" answer to that question.

Well, in one sense, it isn't really this straightforward because it isn't straightforward. Have to move stuff without being seen. That means we can't move too much stuff. Have to move stuff when he's not around, and his schedule varies. Have to move stuff a great distance, which means depending on other people for wheels. Have to move out in as close to 30 days as possible - so as to minimize the financial problems he can cause for us if he discovers what we're doing before our leases are up. I dread him finding out pieces and asking us when his warped mind isn't able to make them fit; I dread us getting entangled in some maze of lies because I wasn't able to stay out of his way one day. I dread him suddenly deciding he needs to look in the closet for something, right after we've emptied it. I hate the fact that he doesn't work, so I have to clean closets and move furniture while he's asleep, without waking him. So yeah. The principle is straightforward, the execution is anything but.

Weird as it sounds, I need to know the pitfalls and failure modes before I feel comfortable. No situation is without its possible failure modes, and the bigger and more important the thing we're trying to do, the bigger and nastier will be the pitfalls, and therefore I'm trying to gauge my completeness of information by checking to see if the fail scope matches the scope of the project.

The initial move here, while large and scary, seemed straightforward just like this. At once I am surprised it worked, and I realize in some ways it didn't work: we are just now clearing up most of the failure states from eight years ago. These were inbuilt failure modes that maybe we suspected but didn't actually take seriously. Some I warned out loud about: this guy who's supposed to be our friend is being a real jackass and I don't see evidence he intends to stop, or what if I can't find a job right away, etc. These were things we should have built into the plan, and we didn't, because we thought it simply couldn't go wrong. Then it did, and look what it's taking to correct it.

We didn't look at the data and say "yeah, it could go wrong but it's unlikely for these reasons, and we've got this and this in place to backstop it" - rather we simply blew it off and said "it won't be a problem."

This time around at least we're aware of the hazards and we've got some backstops.

XIX: Unrecommended daily allowance

Saturday July 11. A huge failure mode may in fact now be underway.

The Girlfriend is at the hospital right now.

I'm at Saturday Market. After I left the house she called me and reported a set of very strange health problems - a numb left hand, ear popping, blood vessels visible through her skin more than usual, woozy head, stuttering. She came down to the market to have me take a look at her - by the time she got here she was better. So she went home. By the time she got home she was worse again, so she went to the hospital.

It's probably nothing. Some of these symptoms - notably the ear popping and the random body part going temporarily numb - we've seen before and they've been nothing. Dehydration usually. But still. It's weird enough, and there is enough of a history of Strange Health Problems in her family, that getting a checkup is probably prudent. Her father died of a heart attack at 38. She's now 35. And these symptoms do match those of a stroke.

To say the absolute least it would be no fun to move into a new apartment alone. The point was to start over as a family, me, her, bunnies past present and future. And if she's about to blow a blood vessel in her right hemisphere, well, that's not the ending we wanted for the story.

She's OK. Doc said it's energy drink withdrawal. She was aware the energy drinks she'd been having the last couple weeks were bad for her, and stopped, but didn't realize not drinking them would briefly be scarier. Something to do with having sucked down 200% USRDA niacin every day for the past two weeks, and now her body is trying to purge all that. She probably sweats niacin now.

XX: Back to the attack

Monday July 13. Plan today is to swap the entertainment center and the TV stand. Or appear to swap them. The TV stand quietly goes downstairs.

Naturally it fails to go smoothly: at 9:45 there was a phone call from a telemarketer that woke up Doucheclap. So work in the visible areas must stop, and so must hauls to the staging area; the TV stand may have to go in the bedroom temporarily.

The urns are on top of the entertainment center in the bedroom, and that means I have to assemble them into the Important Things box. I intend to hand-carry that box up there, or at least transport it in the cab of the pickup.

I have no real way to gauge progress of this project. We have a lot of stuff. A lot of it is stuffed into closets. A lot of it is inefficiently packed. A lot of it is hollow. A lot of it is junk. But honestly I don't know how much stuff we really have in terms of things we need to move. Maybe we're ahead, maybe we're behind. I do still stand by my notion that if we just get him out of here for a week, we can be down to the bare walls in about three days - but we can't get him out of here for a week and his schedule remains unpredictable. And yes, that still means the Endgame - the moving of the living room and kitchen - is a magic trick whose secret I have not yet figured out.

In one sense we know we're behind: all the videotapes, CDs, little stuff all over the living room should have been removed a long time ago so that it doesn't all vanish at once. Didn't, because we didn't have anyplace to put it.

Anyway. So after the entertainment center swap, that opens it up for me to start cleaning off and dismantling this desk. That all comes up probably Wednesday. The desk in the Cube of Denial in the living room gets cleared off and moved. This desk in Cube One in the bedroom gets cleared off and dismantled. The dismantled parts get taken in the living room and reassembled in the Cube of Denial, and the G3 Mac put on it. And the desk that was there? Shipped out. In the bedroom I don't get a desk. Good news is, once that's done, it clears access to the closet here - which will take a few hours to empty - and that's the Sunday truckload.

Failure modes. I am comforted by the thought that if he does figure it out, and confronts us with it, we have options. We can accelerate the move. We can call friends over. We have cover stories and plausible ones at that - "we didn't want to tell you because you'd think we were moving out and you'd get mad." We even have the option, an expensive one, of backing out entirely before August 5 - we bring everything back here, we cancel our cancellation, we pay the $150 for early lease termination at the other apartment, we eat the month's rent we already paid, and we apologize to him and promise not to do it again, while we look for another way. We're designing the move sequence to conceal each thing we do behind another thing we do, and to try to minimize what he can destroy if he figures it out early, and that if absolutely everything else fails, if we cannot have an Endgame, we can live without what we couldn't take that final day.

And I mean, I still don't think this covers everything, and you can't cover everything, but the basic design of it all is to make sure that once it all blows up, we're out of the blast radius. If we execute this cleanly, and afterwards he goes seeking revenge, we deal with that problem then rather than having it be the problem we deal with now in addition to the rest. It's about deciding how and when we want to deal with him instead of him being in a bad mood and screaming "deal with me now and on my terms".

That's where we went wrong all these years. Everywhere his life intersected ours, it meant his failure modes were layered into our plans whether we wanted them there or not. Couldn't do anything without also building in margins for him to interfere with it somehow - and for the most part those margins simply weren't something we could spare. Why is this working when all our other plans didn't? Well, for one thing we do have margins - we have the margin of space with a whole second apartment, we have a margin of secrecy that hopefully will buy us time, we have a margin of time in that we can stop working in the living room once he's awake. We have a margin of money with which to buy replacements for anything we weren't able to take - which may include what he breaks at the end. We have a margin of experience - we can make educated guesses about what is or isn't likely to happen.

Still. Moving stuff out is big and visible and he only has to see it once to Begin Asking Uncomfortable Questions The broken oven "ruse" can only hold so long - if they come and fix it, there goes our cover story. You never can tell when he's going to get a weird hair and decide to look in a closet he hasn't looked inside in ages (just last week he was in a hurry to go through a toolbox he hasn't opened in five years and seemed agitated that we hadn't left him a clear path to reach it).

Whole reason we liked him in the first place is his natural curiosity - these days it's not so much curiosity or desire to learn, as fertile delusional state - he does have a weird tunnel vision where he could walk through a room full of naked people and not notice, but if he does see something he doesn't expect, even if it's been that way for years, he thinks it's an Important Clue.

He is a creature of pattern but it does change suddenly - if he does think something's up, he will go right to me and make inarticulate cryptic demands. If he does, we won't even be sure whether the game is really up or if he is hallucinating again!

What if he brings one of his dumb little buddies over, and they - even though they don't know the routine around here - might catch on to Something Is Up, or ask him a question that prompts him to start mashing gears?

XXI: Package Two

It's Tuesday and a new wrinkle has emerged: I just got a bite on a job application. I don't have high hopes that I'll get the job, but it's a start. Fail so I can fail better next time. Now, if I do get the job, because I applied for it before the apartment came through, I wrote "available: immediate" or similar, so that means I would have to basically stop packing boxes.

I checked my notes: I applied for this job at the start of June, a month ago. What's going on here?

Our world the last eight years is boxes. We get our life the way we want, then something happens and we have to shove it all in boxes. Now we grab one of those boxes out of the closet to take downstairs, we say "hey, this feels awfully light" and we open it and find it contains: two old newspapers we didn't intend to save, an empty water bottle, three or four lipstick tubes, and a smaller empty box. We'll open a box and find books 1, 3, 4, 5 of a series, book 2 was in another box. We'll open a box and find parts of cars we no longer own; I kept the armrest off a 1985 Maxima expecting to figure out a way to reattach it, then got rid of the car and lost track of which box I tossed the armrest into. It's loads of fun. But I'm hoping this consolidation process - especially in the outer closets, in the areas where we have not already done a consolidation pass - will reduce our moving bulk by 50% or more.

The keeping around of half-empty boxes - to fill space - is a natural tendency here, further evidence that this apartment is too big. I realize the new place may in fact be about 100 square feet too small - or that the new bedroom may be an awkward shape (exactly the size of two Saturday Market booths side-by-side) - but I think we'll make it work, and moreover, I think it'll be a refreshing change of tactic. I think we expend energy maintaining the box structure, I think I want to get us to a situation where we just live. I want to build systems that remain in place, systems that don't require stacks of half-full boxes.

Phone call just came. I have a job interview Friday.

I might be employed by Monday, although we're talking about a place I applied for in June that just now got around to my resume.

Obviously this complicates a few matters - obviously it limits how and when I can pack boxes - but damn. This could fix a lot of problems, at the expense of creating a few new ones. Figure if I get this job, if I keep this job, I can begin thinking about a car. I can begin thinking about replacing all these brittle, war-weary old Macs with shiny ones. I can begin thinking about doing Saturday Market right. I can begin thinking about where we'll live next. If I get the job.

And if I don't get the job? Well, it's my first job interview in eight years. I survived the phone call, by the skin of my teeth - I think I survived because it's "not what you know, it's how you think" - but figure N% of all applications I send out actually generate a response, M% of those responses will actually end in a phone call, V% of those actually go on to an interview, Y% of the interviews will end well enough for me to get a job, and Z% the job actually exists long enough for me to go to work at it.

Truck is coming this afternoon, at which time we take several boxes of clothes - and the Box of Irreplaceable Things. We'll probably also shop for a couch, while we have mechanism by which a couch can be moved.

Today I also find out what kind of job our maintenance guy did on the bathroom. I'm expecting he bleached and painted everything, and that might be enough, but if it really sucks, or if the fungi from Yoggoth is still visible, we may have issues. I also plan to debug the apartment - I'm going to do a boric acid treatment on the windowsills and other bug entry points, maybe some in the garbage disposal since we're not there very often and stuff could nest in it - and I'm going to hang a flystrip just to see what it catches between now and the next visit.

I'm not worried about the job. Either way works for me: if I don't get it, I have time to move, and at least I got this far. If I do get it, I have money and someone else can move my boxes - and of course, when I get off from work, I can go home to someplace that is actually home and not a house of horrors. I know I need the job, but it's not desperate - and that's generally when the magic starts for me, when I'm not pushing for something to happen, just making it possible for it to happen, hits all by itself Bruce Lee style. If I don't get the job, I got it covered; if I do, I go make it happen.

When was the last time you saw me talking like that? First year of Saturday Market, maybe? Back when things actually stood a chance of working right? Should I be hoping the job falls through, so as to keep my karmic supply of "win" for the move? Or is it simply, by removing (or attempting to remove) Doucheputz from the picture, my supply of "win" is automatically increased? Things are, briefly, going right that have been making a point of going wrong for the last eight years. Is it simply the right time? When I say I'm owed this, is there some cosmic force that agrees? I don't recall meeting up with some shifty goateed man with horns and signing a contract that vanished in a fireball...

(Well, there was that one time, but I didn't sign the contract that burst into flame, only drank it...)

(...it's probably better if I don't try to explain, and besides, the car only ran for a week afterwards...)

... We have returned, the bathroom sink cabinet is a massive improvement! It's my first time up there since last week, and I note the place is getting full but it's an unstructured full: all we're doing is delivering stuff, not actually arranging anything. That can't start until we get a couch.

We checked a couple of vintage stores - I think they were actually the same vintage store with two locations - and found that we can get couches cheap, if we wait for the right one to appear. That is: not too short or ridiculously large, not low-rider, and not Colors That Haven't Existed Since 1973. Nothing ages faster than earnestly colored furniture. And furniture? It likes to be earnestly colored. Makes me wonder, especially with a quick glance at the IKEA flyer that arrived in the mail today, if maybe the point of furniture is to look hideous and outdated in a couple years. Basic chair and table design doesn't change much, but the color schemes and fabrics are usually so extreme - even within the "great-grandmother would want this in her living room" range - that they're just sort of teetering on the brink of ugly the minute you buy them, you tolerate them not because they look good but because they look good next to everything else in the store. Baby barf green was briefly stylish for a few weeks in 1969 but it was never attractive.

We're taking this apartment thing too seriously and are looking for nice things this time around. OK. Suits me, though I'm so used to MacGyvering my lifestyle that I'm not even sure what the hell I'd do with a dining table that matched my desk.

Besides, the apartment is no looker. I think the plan at this point, at least in the living room, is to throw dark rugs over the beige carpet, and get dark furniture, to try to go with the color scheme rather than deny its existence. I mean, we can't exactly cover the doors. We may attempt to cover the ugly kitchen cabinets.

The rest of this week now collapses in a heap of infrastructure, timing, and drama. Today's Wednesday and we've committed to seeing the new Harry Potter with the gang. I dunno. I want to go, mostly out of social obligation - I've had to miss several group outings lately - but I don't know if this is the week for it. Friday is my first job interview in eight years. Following which we return to the scene of the crime in more ways than one - we return to OMSI for CSI: The Experience which will hopefully be less nightmare fuel than the last thing we saw at OMSI... during Hell Week.

You know, after Hell Week, I sorta figured, feared, that there could be another week like that in the making, somewhere in this failure mesh I jokingly call a lifestyle. Not so much that everything went wrong during Hell Week 2007, just that the damned drama knob on everything we did was turned up to some unreasonable level. By about the middle of that week it was like, nothing surprised me anymore. But then, that whole week was full of "OK, now this has happened, now nothing weirder can happen for the rest of the week..." and you already know how it ended up.

The 30 days of our notice period probably constitute Hell Month. Rules we think we know, just don't apply. I'm not entirely relieved by the idea that for awhile we're writing our own rules - because we kinda suck at it.

OK, here's a picture of a failure mode for you. Last night he was up all night with loud stereo. This morning he's up doing photo lab in the bathroom. When does he sleep? I don't know. When the meth wears off, I suppose. I kid, I doubt he's actually on meth, but you see my problem. I have to take all our belongings out with him not just home, not just awake, but active and watching. Fuck that shit. I gotta wait until he's asleep but anymore I don't know when that is. Today that's probably while we're at the movie, which makes the movie a colossal waste of time. Shouldn't be like that. Should I ditch the movie? No, because if I do, then he'll probably stay awake and the time I spend at home will still be wasted. Moreover, I have to do Saturday Market production this week, not Friday - and that means the time I spend doing that is time I can't be boxing up stuff. Is this week an outlier? Is this kind of buckling timeframe going to happen every week? The whole point is yes! - it's like this most weeks and we don't know in advance which ones won't be this way. Hell, maybe these weeks happen for a reason - whatever makes me have a good weekend at Saturday Market may in fact be the thing that makes him stay up all night and hog the bathroom sink all day.

So basically I can't move boxes out for the rest of the week.

Two more weeks of this kind of bullshit and the move is off. We just won't have gotten anything out of the apartment by then.

XXII: Object orientation

Thursday night. No boxes at all have been moved downstairs since the truckload on Tuesday. I got my Saturday Market production done, insofar as I think I botched my inventory counts and am probably going to run out of all the wrong stuff.

Tomorrow's the big day. The big day twice over: the job interview, and CSI at OMSI. What could possibly go wrong.

"Hell Month" - not that the month is all suffering, just that the drama dial is turned to 11.

For the job interview they want me to bring an object which symbolizes my personality and my programming style - object-oriented interviewing? - and for this object I have selected a 512K Tandy Color Computer 3. Yes, I still have mine. Don't know if it still works, I can think of no reason it wouldn't. (Disk drive probably doesn't.) It's small enough to be easily carried in a backpack or other bag. It's instantly recognizable, if not for specifics, as a 1980s 8-bit with battle scars. It is modified - upgraded to 512K, casemodded for better ventilation, layers of rubber implanted in the keyboard to shorten the key travel because that's how I preferred to type back then, and little stickers hand-applied to a few of the key fronts, C64-style, showing the OS-9 scan codes for each key. (I intended to do every key, never finished.) I rather like that machine, and I'm hoping someone at the interview has one in their past too and we can trade war stories. Flippy disks. OS9 bootfiles. Artifact colors. Errors in the manual. I don't intend to hook the machine up, just take it as a showpiece. But I do soon intend to hook it up and verify it lives.

For the job I was also asked to write a "story" of sorts - given this scenario, what would you do and they specifically said step by step - of "it's a few minutes to 5, you're the only one in the office, and a small client's Web site is broken." It grew into a Rastport almost, a big snarky collection of war stories and obscure things I'd look for. I don't know if it was wise to write a novel and an informal one at that, but I also figure, if I wrote something completely uncharacteristic, how long would I last in the job? I have this damn moral hangup about not lying to get a job. I tend to think, you're either gonna love me or hate me, I may as well give you enough information to decide which it's going to be. Maybe this is why I'm unemployed. But then, it's been eight years since I had opportunity to try.

The war story covered some interesting ground, like checking to see if the site is really costing-client-money broken or just "I can't get on the Internet and it's your fault" broken, or "this graphic is 2 pixels too tall" broken - and that depending on the client, maybe that's to be treated the same as genuinely broken. Or checking to see if it was ever not broken - some nonzero percentage of the "OMG it's broken"s I've battled in my time have turned out to have been broken since the beginning, the bug reports were someone noticing for the first time that a feature claimed completed, claimed tested, signed off on, and paid for, never actually worked and no one ever noticed. At one job I uncovered the evidence that got a consultant fired because he deliberately left a feature disabled on a site, hoping the client would notice it was "broken" and he could get paid for pretending to fix it.

I've had jobs where this whole question would be nothing but a trap. 4:45 on a Friday, client screaming bloody murder, I dare not touch it: client projects are billed by the minute, or client SLA specifically excludes overtime ("shoulda sprung for our Gold package, then we'd have fixed it Friday night", or overtime is a no-no anyway, or maybe it's a client the company wants rid of, or maybe it isn't really broken, just the marketing department trying to make the IT department look bad again. If I try to fix it, I'd get in trouble. But if the company lost a client because I followed the rules, I'd get hanged by the neck for that too. It's designed to go wrong. Which may be why some of those companies no longer exist.

I hope I get this job though. More I hear about them, more it reminds me of CPBX, or of Compassworks before it went bad.

XXIII: Hell Day

Back from the interview and yes, the place does look like what CPBX would have evolved into if it had lived to the present day, right down to a row of computers under repair. It's my dream job. Which probably means I won't get it.

Then again, they think I have a sense of humor (no idea where they got that idea) and I seem to have gotten the technical questions right, so maybe it's just a question of whether anyone else in the pile is better than I am. Or has fewer holes in their resume.

The clothes I wore to the interview, I should mention, are a new look for me: black shirt, black pants, dark grey tie. I'm going for a Draco Malfoy look, I guess. But it's something you'll rarely hear me say: damn I look good in this. The tie is borrowed, so I probably can't wear it to the market, but this look will probably work with the red tie. At least until I go tie-shopping.

But for all I know, I look like I just went to a funeral. My own.

Next on today's plate? CSI. Half tempted (especially since I have red hair) to take my sunglasses and an iPod and speakers, with Won't Get Fooled Again ready to play from the scream, and just bust David Caruso moments all night. "Well, that's... (shades) what she said." YEEAAAAAAHHHH...

Well. Going too smoothly, ain't it? We were partway to OMSI when we get a phone call: our friends in the other car are stranded. Their car died on the road and won't start. They're in downtown Portland in the middle lane of a busy intersection and the car not only won't start, it won't go into neutral so it can't be pushed. Something to do with the aftermarket killswitch the previous owner added. So we tried to jumpstart them, and it would start but if we disconnected the jumper cables, it'd run for a few seconds and then die again. My bet is on the alternator, but testing/swapping the battery is easier and might get the car moving again in the short term, so we went and got a battery. I still think the alternator needs looked at, because I can hear belt squeal, this happened when the air conditioner was on, and because a car uses the battery to start, not to run. It was the failure mode of the alternator in my Chevy, that it started by making belt noise, then eating batteries, then finally sparks flying out from under the hood.

Anyway, replaced the battery and it started. We got to OMSI later than we'd hoped.

CSI: The Experience was pretty obviously put together a couple seasons ago, probably around the start of season 8. The video segments with the show's cast are from about that time period, and it's nice to see the old crew again - Grissom, Sara, Warrick.

The "experience" is that you are randomly handed a piece of paper on your way in, one of three colors, each color corresponds to one of three crime scenes. And you investigate the crime. I mean, it's kind of railroad - you can do nothing and still probably get through it, nobody's grading you. You go in a room to start with where there's a crime scene. You observe. You make notes on your piece of paper. Then you go to the "lab" where you've got computer touchscreens set up and video clips - a character from the show comes on and explains what you're doing. Then you'll get for example, a bit where you're shown onscreen fibers "collected" at the crime scene, which you're supposed to match - it's multiple choice and you can try as many times as you like - once you figure out which goes to what, you write that down on your piece of paper too. Around the lab are items on display such as a PCR machine, none of it is hooked up or working and you don't touch anything. It's kinda fun. Not as huge as I was expecting, but then, I'm not sure what I was expecting.

It only uses the downstairs half of the gallery.

Anyway. You can't have an exhibit based on a TV show without having brought along parts of the TV show. So there's a recreation of Gil Grissom's office, which you can't go in. And after you complete your crime scene thing, at the end of the exhibit, there are the miniatures - the actual filming props from the Miniature Killer arc. Ironically the most detailed miniature is the one the Miniature Killer didn't make - the one Grissom made of his own office, on the show anyway (the props were probably all made by the same person or persons in the FX shop). For fun, I compared the miniature Grissom office to the recreated Grissom office. Gotta wonder about that guy - as I'm sure the other characters did too - that his office is "decorated" with fetal pigs and the like.

Unilaterally all we kept thinking was, this makes us wanna go watch the early seasons of the show again. They seem to be trying to un-jump the shark in the latest couple seasons, but there's a magic from the earlier seasons that's lost and it shows.

We did get there late enough that we only had time to go through once, do one crime scene. So there will be a revisit.

And so Hell Week II is sort of anticlimactic.

That's good, I think, after the way it was shaping up. Especially once that car conked out. Gets to a point where you hope the drama has stopped.

XXIV: Space-filling curve

Still waiting to hear back on that job. I dunno, I'm not convinced the interview went all that well. But you know what? I have never gotten a job from an interview. In fact the only job interview I think I've won was at Sams, and I already basically had the job, the interview was a formality. This job now, the interview particularly scared me when I realized what they were interviewing for: a team member. It's not just, can you play the drums, it's can you jam with the band.

Then again, it strikes me as the sort of thing where, if a perfect candidate came along, they'd know right away and there'd be no further interviews. So I'm not markedly worse than the other candidates in the pool, and moreover, there seems to be no candidate that is markedly ridiculously better than the others, or else they'd just hire that one. So maybe I have a chance. Personally I say I give it fifty-fifty, though that may be optimistic - it's just that my friends all seem to understand fifty-fifty better than hundred-to-one, and this is the only way I can prepare them for possible disappointment.

So now back to moving stuff. It's Tuesday the 21st. It drips with irony that this past week was the eighth anniversary of leaving Indiana, and the final week of July is the eighth anniversary of signing the lease here; the actual day our 30 days are up, August 5, is probably the eighth anniversary of Douchecicle beating me up on the front porch. The irony, I'm sure, will be lost on him. But then, he always liked Alanis Morrissette for some strange reason, and has never looked up 'irony' anywhere that actually defines the word. (And how could he? You've seen how he spells. He probably thinks irony begins with 'a'.)

I couldn't get much moved yesterday - Doucheflap took his bike and Went Somewhere, and we as policy do not take stuff downstairs if he's out on his bike, lest he bike back and see us. The exception would be if we know where he's going and when he'll be back, which of course, being that he has no job and no desire to get one, is never. Instead we worked the bedroom, boxing and reboxing, preparing boxes we don't yet have opportunity to move. And we did finally get the entertainment center moved and the TV stand downstairs. Figure if he hadn't noticed us rearranging stuff before, he's certainly noticed now.

Truck tomorrow. While we have the truck, we're also picking up a bed we found on Craigslist. Woulda gone Sunday but the seller's father had to be rushed to the hospital, so I guess last week's sense of drama was pretty evenly distributed. I for one consider a real bed one of the highlights of the move - something we can never have here, because of the need to fit our entire lives in one room.

Timing of this week stacks up against me in such a way that I may have to lose this weekend at Saturday Market. Don't want to, need the money, especially if I don't get the job, but where is there time to go get materials and print stuff? Thursday?

One way or another I lose the weekend after this one. That's probably Endgame, the final day of move-out will be either Saturday or Sunday (or maybe both) - and the good part is, that means I don't need computers, printers, or mat cutters at all next week, that infrastructure can be torn down.

Good news is, days when we have our friend with the truck, we can make multiple trips. So if I can get two truckloads out, or three, then those can all be gone in a day. Within reason. I mean, if we're trying to move three truckloads and go pick up a bed from Craigslist and go shopping for furniture all in one day, I imagine it won't work.

It is also not yet figured out what we'll do if I get the job. I did get a call from them today, said I'm a finalist - asked me a question about what I'd do if they needed me to bone up real fast on Javascript or CSS or cross-browser compatibility, to which my answer was "well, I'd go to Powell's Technical Books and spend too much money, and um, uh... I guess this is the problem I want to have, to be told 'here's a technology, learn it' instead of driving in the dark..." - and right now they're waiting on my references. It could happen. If it does, though, the exact hours of the day in which Doucheclamp is asleep and out of my way, are the exact hours of the day in which I will not be home. Girlfriend may end up taking days off (and if I get the job, she can afford to do so) and moving boxes downstairs in my absence.

The thing I'm noticing, a recurring theme in stuff we're moving, is that we always assumed plush bunnies, wrecked computers, and Lego are the bulk of the space-filling stuff we own. Not the case. Clothes. To some extent, videotapes and books, but mostly clothes. Four whole largest-size-you-can-get Rubbermaid tubs full of clothes. Numerous cardboard boxes full of clothes. Promising-looking boxes you expect to be full of papers or electronics - clothes. Maybe 50% of the stuff we're moving, other than notoriously-uncompact things like furniture, are boxes of clothes.

We've moved only four cardboard boxes of plush bunnies and about a dozen such boxes full of clothes so far. Clothes we haven't worn in years because, in a previous Rapid Cleanup, we just threw them all in boxes and forgot we had done so. At the other end, we may unpack all this, sift and sort, get rid of things we're unlikely to wear again, and probably still spend a couple hundred bucks in quarters just doing laundry. The good part will be, lots of "oh that's where that fucking thing went" moments. Already had a few: oh that's where my 1992-era Sarah McLachlan shirt went. Not that I can wear it anymore, it's a Large and I'm up in Extra Large territory these days. (With the strange proviso that, generally when I start a new job or otherwise clear up a source of depression, I lose weight.)

XXV: It came from the cubicles

I've been thinking about back at Howard Sams, when I found myself depressed with no visible reason to be. I'd quit Compassworks, gotten a job making about five times as much money, without the dipshit boss, and... was still depressed, talking about quitting Sams. Now, a few things true then aren't true today. This was when I still hadn't put two and two together on blood sugar, and would sometimes forget to eat and then have these weird tantrum-like fits. (I recognize them when I see Doucheclatter have them.) I also figured, having just come off a period of a year or so of relentless bullshit - Compassworks wasn't always a nightmare, understand, but after we failed to get bought, the boss got really weird and abusive - that maybe my brain chemistry just needed time to recalibrate, and after the initial "holy shit, this worked" wore off, I was back in a slump.

Not the case. I had to kind of go "back to the cubicle" mentally and re-analyze Sams and remember what was really going on. Why was I depressed? Because Sams, although the job paid well, was kind of bullshit, mired in the most bizarre office politics I think I've ever had to deal with. Stuff that makes the Portland Saturday Market board of directors look like nothing.

One: the guy I was working with, wasn't abusive but wasn't a nice guy either. He was damn proud of having gotten a module he wrote onto CPAN (the Perl equivalent of Aminet) - I notice that module is not there anymore (or it may have been folded into another, similar module) - and the hint was, I guess, that he was sort of waving this fact around to impress lesser Perl people like me. And after what I'd been through, I still tended to fall for the "I am better than you" joke. This alone shouldn't have depressed me, but I think it may be evidence that he was continuing to use an existing exploit pathway to fuck with my head, possibly without even trying.

One and a half: There was no one at the company to socialize with except that guy.

Two: I was basically forbidden to do anything. If I saw a bug and took the initiative to correct it on a production box, I'd catch hell for it. I almost got the hint that the bugs were well-known and documented somewhere as expected behavior of the system but no one would cough up this documentation for me. It was supposed to be my job to gather "functional requirements documentation" - that is, to figure out what the code should be doing, so we could maybe rewrite the thing down the road into something cleaner. Again, no easy task prying documentation out of these people.

Three, and this may explain number two: Marketing was at war with the IT department. You hear IT people complain that this is the case in their company, that the rest of the company wants to raid IT's budget because they don't actually understand what IT does - no, this was worse. The VP of Marketing would, upon getting a bug report from a client, forward it and CC it to everyone in the company including the CEO with an unsubtle "look how bad IT are screwing up." The subsequent fix, coming maybe half an hour later, was then summarily buried. Result: CEO thinks IT are screwups.

I don't know how they intended the company to function without IT. Guess the databases and Web sites were just supposed to develop themselves.

The VP of IT, not being one of the CEO's golfing buddies like the VP of Marketing, was given all the blame and none of the authority to fix anything - his budget was torpedoed - and when the CEO ordered IT to add layers of management, it had to be done. The punchline being, we got two new managers - one reports to the VP of IT, the other reports to the other manager - and we reported to the lower of the two managers. Yes, one manager's job was to manage the other manager. Which, I note, was not done. Lower manager needed managing. When she left, all of our "completion" documents were found in her desk, unsent and unsigned - these were the "OK we've done this, now Marketing needs to sign off and we can make it live" that we had been waiting on, and she'd just been sitting on them, claiming she'd sent them to Marketing to be signed when she knew she hadn't.

Still. The first half of my time at Sams sucked, the second half not so much so, because in addition to the new managers, I also got new coworkers. I forget this matters.

This place I'm applying at? I don't actually know if I fit in with the people there, maybe it'll be an opportunity for growth, but they like my sense of humor (or maybe they interpreted my bleakness as humor) and at worst, I'm liable to be "the only X in a room of Y" kind of thing - for Y maybe being anything from gay to kayakers. And this concern comes about largely because all the guys there have the same haircut, which may be practicality in July, or may be because they run in the same social circle somewhere outside work. And not saying I have to be bestest buddies with each of them, but like I said before, I get the hint they're auditioning a last-minute replacement musician for a tour and may reserve the right to reject me if I don't jam well with the band.

The Who analogy: Kenney Jones is an awesome drummer, but can't jam. He's fine in auditions, fine in the studio, but if the band went off-script, Kenney wouldn't follow. The Who depended a lot on Keith Moon's ability to "rescue" them in concert if a jam had gotten away from them, obviously nonverbal "we're in trouble, we need a drum fill now" cues that Kenney Jones never quite picked up, he'd just keep right on drumming steady. Probably started out as a sort of "yeah, we're having issues but we think Kenney will grow into it" but by about 1982 Roger Daltrey said "either Kenney goes or I go." Is that going to be me? Am I the drummer who doesn't know when he needs to take a solo?

XXVI: The date is set

Well. If Doucheclabber can stay asleep for awhile, I can maybe get some shit done today. I wanna aim for two truckloads, admitting that one of those may get a bed stuck on top of it.

Whirlwind week, gotta say. Tonight in addition to a truckload or two of stuff, we're also picking up a bed and a couch. Probably be out all evening doing this. Our friend's pickup has issues - the passenger seat doesn't stay locked in place, and if someone's sitting in the "sideways seat" behind it, they get squished every time the truck accelerates. And I usually get the sideways seat. 'SOK, these are the kinds of sacrifices I'm willing to make, sacrifices that are in pursuit of something rather than just "you have, I want, therefore We (meaning you) Must Make Some Sacrifices."

A bigger sacrifice is about to be made: we've rescheduled things a bit, that Endgame is August 5, a Wednesday rather than a Sunday. We've decided I get to miss this weekend at Saturday Market, which means I can start moving computers. Specifically in short term, the Mac Clone, the 740, and the 21" monitor if I can get them all downstairs today. Now, what would enable a market run this weekend is if I also figure out work surfaces at the new apartment: somewhere to put that computer back together, print stuff, and cut mats... in time to make stuff. We're still sorting out the furniture situation up there. As in, currently, we don't have any. Some folding chairs and a little folding table, and that's it. We have pieces of better furniture, not all in the same room yet - a coffee table with no legs for example, the legs are here somewhere. I got some ideas about how to do my pictures, since we're hauling a few hundred enormous Rubbermaid totes full of clothes, that a few of them can be stacked creatively to form a crappy desk and I can throw a piece of plywood across them. I have a piece of plywood.

This would obviously not be a long-term setup, but that's the point: I will be able to replace it with real furniture, while being able to at least get something done in the meantime.

Of the furniture we know we need, the bed and the couch are about 50% of it. Following that I'll need a desk and a table. We do have a desk going up there next week - the one from the Cube of Denial - will probably go in the bedroom and be Girlfriend's desk, since it's meant to be her desk anyway. But I'll need a desk and an art table. And thing is, there are a multitude of shapes and sizes of desk, so I can take my time and find something I want, albeit with plywood on a stack of clothes boxes until then.

This all means in the next few minutes I have to take apart the Clone - and most importantly, the 21" Viewsonic has to go bye-bye. We don't have net access up there yet, so this ends my ability to browse in high resolution. After the monitor goes, and the Clone goes, that leaves the G3 in the living room, and of course the iBook.

... the 21" monitor is now removed. I'm temporarily living on the iBook on the desk, propped up to about where the monitor was.

Dunno if I mentioned but we have a lot of stuff. In one of those clothes tubs I found a T-shirt from IUPUC Student Activities Council '95-'96. Also found a Hoosier On-Line T-shirt. Both are red. I know I always felt like a Star Trek Redshirt both places: there to make someone else look good by being vaporized by the alien of the week. Double fun: someone I know from way back from Student Activities Council, who would remember that shirt and the sense of being a redshirt, is one of my references for the job.

OK. So next on the list of things: well, we get the truck this evening, but also Doucheclimber is around, so I can't take any more boxes out. Or if I do, it's a one-at-a-time kinda thing to help throw off detection. There was a scary moment this morning when I got back upstairs from taking a box to the garage and he was in the living room, looking for me to tell me there was a phone call. Scary in that, about 30 seconds sooner, I might've had the box still in my hand.

Anyway. After today's hauling, next on the list is the dismantling of my desk. I still have some stuff to clear off of it, later today, and what I'll probably do for a computer in the near term is to put the laptop on a stack of boxes and use it that way. But once the desk is dismantled, that opens up this whole area of the room wherein we can stack stuff - and that should speed up the consolidation and reboxing, as well as enable me to get the last two Rubbermaid totes out. Then the desk pieces go to the living room, and the Cube of Denial is dismantled one more time, and the desk reassembled in its place and a G3 - not necessarily the working one - is placed on that desk. And everything I took out of the Cube of Denial goes in the garage, and there is vacuuming, and I'll probably put the nicer office chair at that desk, and it'll look like I use the fucker.

That'll be the end of the saga of the Cube of Denial. That'll also get the good G3 shipped out.

After that, it's the equipment cart in the Saturday Market production area. I had hoped to have it out on this load, but guess not. Anyway. Do that, empty under the table, move out my Saturday Market production and replace everything with empty boxes to conceal the "shrinkage", and vacuum and take out a load of trash, and that's that area cleaned up by probably Tuesday or Wednesday. Maybe sooner if I lose the market this weekend.

One piece of favorable news? Douchefungus may be getting a job. Apparently he interviewed somewhere on Monday. Hey. Good. Gets him out of here a few hours a day at least - until he brings a sixpack of beer to work, starts punching customers, and starts ranting about the Jews. Well, as long as that shit goes down after we leave then it doesn't really matter, does it? It's time, as of when August 5th comes and goes, to stop making my decisions with "but what if Douchehanger gets involved?" as an aspect of it. We'll take the necessary precautions, hide our location, try not to get followed, and so on, but basically, I'm sick of living in fear.

I have the sneaking suspicion, once he's out of my life, it won't be impossible to do Saturday Market and hold down a day job. I mean, it may be a bit of a stretch - I have a feeling I may come home Friday night from work and say "you know, fuck this, I'm going to do absolutely nothing all weekend" and that would be a legitimate thing - but that's part of it, Saturday Market should be something I want to do. It's supposed to be fun. When it isn't, the customers can tell.

Not saying there won't be infrastructure problems once we're moved. In fact - remember how I used to complain about how long trips to the store took? Now they'll take longer at least until I get a bicycle and some sort of grocery-transporting mechanism for it. For awhile it's going to be cramped up there while we sort through things, assemble things, and get stuff stacked instead of lying around the place. For awhile my desk will probably be plywood on boxes. For awhile I will have problems finding simple things like cables and computer parts because they'll all be in boxes - most of them unlabelled. It will set me back to approximately 2006 levels of infrastructure, of things simply not working at the very basic level, but with a couple advantages over 2006: one, I'll know what's going on, and two, each infrastructure I repair will stay repaired. Once I get a desk, for example, that problem straightens up and stays straightened up, I'll have a desk I never need to evacuate in a hurry. (Three, if I get the job, I'll have money with which to buy solutions to infrastructure problems.)

We get the bed tonight, which means that infrastructure - the place to sleep problem - is basically cured before we even finish moving, and then it'll stay fixed. We'll have a bed. We'll continue to have a bed. It's not a futon, so it won't break after six months, and the metal frame slowly warping over time won't kill my back.

This whole project creates new problems, in some cases resetting us to earlier stages of problems we went to lengths to try to solve - but it's worth it, simply to trade in our set of problems on different ones, re-roll the dice and start over with a set of problems we maybe have a chance of solving, a set of problems that will no longer include him.

XXVII: The future and the past

In the packing, we found some old photos - taken in the old apartment in Indiana, most of them with Ben in them. And what you may already be figuring out is, when I speak of the creature now, it's in Douchevariations, but when I speak of him back when it was reasonably humanoid, I use his name. The old pictures are just eerie. I remember that guy and wonder what the fuck happened to him. Granted even by then, 2000-2001, we were already seeing decay, but at least he was recognizable. We excused a lot from 2001 onward because we remembered who he'd been.

I also remember the apartment. A weird thing keeps happening: even though the new place is not the layout we wanted, and therefore isn't a match to the old apartment, it has just enough of its characteristics that we keep expecting to find Indiana apartment features in the new place. Indiana apartment: kitchen sink had two basins. Here, kitchen sink has one basin. New place, one basin, and yet for some reason we kept thinking it had two. It's just little things like that, placement of light switches and light fixtures, windows and closet doors not quite where I expect them to be, etc. Hell, I'm half expecting one night to wander in the kitchen half awake and have trouble finding a particular utensil because it isn't where we kept it in Indiana. The silverware drawer is on the other side.

Took the computer up there. Went and bought the bed from Craigslist. Went and bought the couch from Craigslist. It will come as no surprise: once you have a couch, you have an apartment and not just an empty room.

I know we'd had our concerns - I pursued that apartment doggedly and then didn't get the one I expected to get. We had concerns about the size, that it's smaller than we though. We had concerns about the bathroom sink cabinet. We had concerns about the kitchen. But not only have those concerns sort of evaporated, the place gets better every time we're up there. It looked small, but once we started putting familiar things in it, it started getting bigger. I haven't pinned down the source of the optical illusion yet, but something made it look like our new living room is no bigger than this bedroom, and the new bedroom the size of a closet. I don't know what we were expecting. Well, now we dropped a queen size bed in the bedroom with plenty of room around it, and we threw two couches and a metric assload of boxes into the living room and it's still spacious, and of course there was the blueprint I did showing the new apartment overlaid onto the old one, and basically we are impressed.

Maybe all it needed was scale.

Today is Friday July 24th. Eleven days to go until Endgame.

Last night I took Saturday Market production up there and attempted to get my prints built there for the first time. Didn't get finished. 2006 levels of infrastructure? Hell, try 2004, a virtually negative amount of Saturday Market infrastructure. Everything's either on or in cardboard boxes. It was slow going because absolutely nothing was organized - took two hours just to verify that all the equipment I needed had actually been brought up there, and another hour to re-teach that computer how to print. I had prints piled up on prints, noplace to throw mat scraps, noplace to stack the cut mats, it just got to be a logjam. So I'm going back up there tonight to finish the job and bring the finished prints back here.

Still, it's nice to just be able to do the damned work. No rush to evacuate the room, no worries that unfinished stuff won't be where I left it. I wish I could say it was enjoyable, it's not yet enjoyable because of the makeshift workspace, but I can see possibilities. And this is the kind of thing that has to start being done up there, of doing things there to see how we'll have to do them and what pieces are missing. So if I'm still going with my plan to have the computer desk and the Saturday Market desk together, that means the Saturday Market desk will have to have shelving, places to stack finished prints out of the way, etc. and the computer desk will need to have someplace to put printers. It's good to know, because this is the sort of thing that's difficult to evolve gradually.

XXIX: I did say it was Hell Month, didn't I?

This story just wouldn't be complete without the thing I do not mention. I hereby mention it: Body Worlds. And I mention it only because the nightmares started again.

The first one didn't bug me too much - well, during the nightmare it was pretty unpleasant - I just figured it's a neurochemical purge, maybe a sign things are going right. Then had one again the next night. That spooked me.

It would be a pretty big failure mode if Body Worlds came back to town. The actual exhibit wasn't the problem - the problem was the billboards, months before and months after I went. There was no waking up from that nightmare.

The second of the anxiety nightmares did offer an interesting idea: change the billboards. Instead of the plastinates, howbout pictures of live ones doing stuff with just a small section replaced by plastinate in similar pose. My head was doing a remarkable job of graphic design in my sleep with this - even the typography was all mine. You could have these things all over town and not scare people. Think they'd do it? Not a chance. The sad truth is that those damn billboards were attention-getting and unmissable.

What do the anxiety dreams mean? As always, anxiety. Maybe not that a real failure is approaching, but that my brain detects such modes in a system.

That we're way behind, that there is a heat wave, that we're slipping - that's the failure mode.

And of the job? Not worried I might not get it. Worried I might get it and lose it.

Note from the future: there's a chiropractor's office near here, and in the back window, which I sometimes walk past, there's a mounted human spine, pretty sure it's real. It's not there for show. That's their storeroom. It's just shoved there, in amongst boxes and chairs, like they forgot they own it. It's all beaten to hell, the mount is falling apart, several vertebrae are missing, etc. which makes one wonder how it got that way. Is it possible I saw this early on and didn't consciously register it, and that's what prompted the anxiety dreams?

It occurs to me to wonder something.

In 2007 the damn billboards were unavoidable. They were on the backs of buses, on page 3 of the free weekly newspapers, there were ads on TV, there were four-color-glossy ads in the mail. Couldn't take two steps out the door without a mutilated body staring at you. This had a pretty obvious effect on me.

Wonder if the reason we were having so much drama from Douchefreak that year is that he was noticing the billboards too.

He was already insane, let's not kid ourselves. You've probably been within the blast radius of his "death is freedom" rants before - or heard the shit he says when someone has actually died within his sphere of awareness. We think it's a coping mechanism. He has an even unhealthier view of death than I do - it seems tied to his unlimited need for control, maybe this is his way of controlling death. Or at least pretending like he controls death. Controls death enough to apply it to people. Controls death enough that fear of it doesn't control him. That's the lie he wants you to believe. But he barely conceals his fear of it. Death does control him, and if you don't believe me, wait until his grandmother dies.

"Death is freedom." He's said it so often. Maybe not so much anymore, I wouldn't know, but for a few years there he couldn't end a sentence without it. It is meaningless. He's an atheist, or so he claims, so unless he knows something other atheists don't, death is the opposite of freedom, or at least the opposite of free will.

His whole life the last several years has been about inventing context for death, making up fantasyland scenarios in which he can turn the ultimate loss of freedom to his advantage. How many stories have we heard from him, bizarre what-ifs that start with him desiring an unreasonable outcome to a situation everyone else is able to endure just fine - such as Oregon's law by which you may not pump your own gasoline, a gas station attendant must do it for you, and his opinion is that if he ever gets his car shipped out here, he will kill anyone who touches it - and ended with some variation on "and then I'll take the cop's gun away and shoot him with it"? He doesn't need to lock the front door, he told us after about the eightieth time we noticed he doesn't lock it, he can wake up and kill anyone who breaks in. Anyone who doesn't agree with him about any of these things deserves to die, he says.

Now. You take someone with this kind of bizarre death fetish and present them with Body Worlds billboards every day of their fucking life for eight months. What's he going to do with it? Is it porn to him, or is it a reminder that there is something in this world he cannot control? Either way I'd expect him to arrive home in a decidedly turgid state of mind, and that's exactly what kept happening, night after night.

The timeline doesn't entirely fit. We reached last-straw status with him months before the first billboards went up. The business with the antennas began November 2006, Xombi died January 2007, and the billboards started appearing in late March. However, we saw fewer attempts by him to start fights about the same time the billboards went away. But by then I'd also stopped sleeping on the couch, so it's hard to isolate.

Whatever. He's not a complex douchebag - he is not hard to figure out once you realize he's living in a fantasy world and has almost no imagination. His world is made up of things he thinks he controls by sheer force of awesomeness, and problems whose only solution is whatever form of violence he's in a mood to cause. Nothing else exists. Of course, the more intense his never-neverland, the more the real world pisses him off by not listening to him when he tells it how it's supposed to work. The rest is details.

One more point: I don't think he's an atheist. He exhibits the same kind of petty point-scoring I see from street preachers, always trying to impress invisible people while ignoring the visible consequences of their actions. He sounds at times like he's rehearsed what he's saying - comments that don't appear to match the situation, in stilted language he has to struggle to articulate - as if this is the movie about his life. And I'm not saying I'm not milking this for all the dramatic potential it's worth, but I'm a writer. Who is his audience? Himself, as far as we can determine - which makes his desire to go down in a hail of bullets that much more incomprehensible, if he's dead he can't enjoy it. But who am I to judge his superior logic.

XXX: Chapter thirty

July 24.

I got the Phone Call.

The job is mine.

I start August 11.

End of part two. Tune in Friday for the story's majestic conclusion... or its gut-wrenching collapse.

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