Rastport

Now with Even More Whining!

My art:

9. Path

6. Steps

58. The Statue

67. Only an Illusion

80. Light

94. Ruins

109. Rain

114. The Trail Does Not End Here

152. Waves

164. Push

166. Research

172. Special Effects

185. Explorer

186. Bunny Egg

	*The package, book three: This roommate has been deleted* John Shepard (radiographite@gmail.com) - Sat Sep 5, 2009 06:26:52 GMT - 1098
	Eight years of suffering, two years of planning, two months of I don't even know what you'd call it, finally comes down to a Wednesday afternoon in August: Endgame. This is where it all ends - and where it all begins.
	Book III: This roommate has been deleted XXXI: Smartest guy I've ever known I didn't get a car or a driver's license until pretty late in the game - mid senior year of high school - and thus suffered more than most kids my age from a disease called school bus. I fit into no cliques, not even the geeks (strangely most of whom tended to flip between geek and metal cliques, possibly attempts at self-preservation) and on a school bus anyway, your choices of socialization are basically whoever lives on that route. I wasn't exactly friends with anyone on that bus route. So it wasn't so much sitting next to someone you know, as trying to sit next to someone who isn't going to dump a jar of pickles into your schoolbooks before you get to school. (Yes, this happened to me.) They tortured us with this awful radio station played over the bus speakers, a sort of bastardized VH-1 kind of thing. I still know all the words from "Waiting For A Star To Fall" because it got played every morning of every day for an entire year and there was no escape. Not until I took to smuggling a tape player and headphones to school, somewhere around 1991. So it's '91 or so, and I'm sitting next to a kid a few years younger than I am. He wasn't even going to the same school I was, the bus just happened to go to the middle school after dumping us off at the high school. OK, quiet kid, he won't cause me any trouble and I won't cause him any trouble. Don't remember quite how the conversation started but it probably had something to do with the bad radio station. I broke out my tape player and headphones and said "yeah, well I got a solution to that, it's called Neil, Alex and Geddy." And the kid knew who I was talking about. He grew up on Rush. His mom was in the second row at a Rush concert in the 70s - Fly By Night tour '76, if I remember - and went temporarily deaf. (Huh. Thought women didn't go to Rush concerts.) And I had the tapes of Moving Pictures, Farewell to Kings, and the vinyl of 2112, he had the vinyl of Power Windows, Fly By Night and the 8-track of Caress of Steel. Cool. We each had almost every other album. I only found out his name when he was joking about having given the principal a different fake name every time he got sent to the office. Mike Smith. Craig Smith. Said the closest the principal ever got to figuring it out was "huh, coulda sworn your name was Ben." "No, you must be thinking of someone else." Heh. One, there was another Ben Smith, tall kid on the sports teams, no chance of being mistaken for him. And two, I remembered the principal he was talking about and was proud of the kid for getting one over on him. That had been the same principal who took the bullies' side back when I was the inmate of the week. Once that principal worked out Ben's real identity, well, he shifted gears. Started striking up conversations with the principal about the Saturn V model in his office. There is, you see, one thing that school officials don't really believe exists, and it's a smart troublemaker. Kid sitting in your office for backtalking a teacher, or for not having handed in a single piece of homework all year, or for "fighting" (or more the case, getting beaten up) it can only because they're developmentally behind their age. I proved that wrong. So did this kid. American public schools are not set up for kids who are developmentally ahead of their age. It was, to us, phenomenally boring and threatened to turn us stupid. (And ironically, we'd get so used to knowing more than the book, that on the odd chance that the book knew something we didn't, we wouldn't learn it.) I had turned to art and music to escape the trap. Ben just started treating school like a game, to see if he could find a more interesting way to play - like looking at a chessboard and making up newer, more interesting rules for the pieces. I got him interested in computers. It was a few years before he owned one himself. But he was still a menace in any computer class, knowing more than the teacher did, just from having watched me prove the book wrong. He was my best friend. He'd come over to my house and we'd watch Star Trek or some shit, I'd show him whatever I'd been building, we'd go to the garage and take two old radios and try to solder them together into one working one. I'd go over to his house and we'd listen to Rush records, go watch his dad's band jam in the attic, or we'd go outside and perform scary experiments with firecrackers. If he was in trouble at home, I didn't know it. There's a scene in the TV show The West Wing where the President is talking to the one Cabinet member who stays behind In Case Something Happens. He's giving him the talk. Tells him if something happens, assemble the joint chiefs, change the DEFCON, all that stuff. Then he says "you got a best friend? Is he smarter than you? Would you trust him with your life? Then that's your chief of staff." Ben Smith was going to be my chief of staff if I ever needed one. He was smarter than I was, probably the smartest and most mature kid I had ever met. He was years ahead of his age and I think he scared the adults. He could eat a subject - he'd sit down at a book and when he was done, he was the book, as if he'd digitized it directly into brain matter. He knew how to fix cars before ever owning one himself. And while I was the one who got him interested in computers, he quickly got ahead of me, at least in terms of general theory (he never really learned to program). I figured he was going to go on to college, pick up some four-year degree in three years' time, and go out and dominate whatever field he chose. I figured he'd end up doing pyro and special effects in the movie industry. Or maybe he'd end up on a pit crew at Indy. Or something special. There are child prodigies and then there are child prodigies so far ahead of their age that they could simply stand still and still be the smartest person in the room in 20 years. That was him. There was a period of a couple years where I saw less of him. He started to get into that angry teenager phase. You know the drill. He wasn't getting called to the office for backtalking teachers, or skipping class, or ignoring homework, or fending off bullies. He was getting called to the office for threatening teachers, coming to school high, or starting fights. He got in with a weird crowd, of which he was of course the smartest but he seemed not to realize that and let them dictate his actions for too long, he spent much of his last year in high school baking on LSD because having invisible dragons chase him around the school was to him a productive use of his time, and eventually he stopped going to school. And for about two weeks he seemed to improve, which was sadly not permanent. Eventually he announced he was joining the United States Army, a decision I still don't understand. The impression I get is that he really didn't come back from the army. Something happened and you never get a clear picture what it was. For awhile I figured he saw action and maybe there was a friendly fire incident. Then I came to doubt that he'd seen action, we think he spent his active duty digging stuff. He liked to brag about his sniper skills, but he was not a sniper, at least not in real life, in video games maybe. But the biggest change in him I noticed when he got back from the army was he had absolutely no regard for human life. Any subject eventually became about death and people who deserved to die. Maybe some of this was present before the army, maybe that's why he joined, but whatever it was, it came back from the army in concentrated form. Also note that you never get the same answer twice about how he left the army. It was not an honorable discharge, that's all we know for sure. Psych discharge maybe? He's not in military prison so it can't have been too bad, but something happened and I don't mean an injury. Well, once he took up anime as a religion in the couple years after that, I figured the darkest part was behind him, and that's who he was when my girlfriend met him and he sort of became part of our family. We took to calling him "Snab" - sensitive new-age biker. I thought we were seeing a new maturity from him, somehow more introspective; when he watched anime, it wasn't Dragonball Z or Fist of the North Star, it was Slayers, Utena, Saber Marionette, Neon Genesis Evangelion. What we didn't know yet was that he was actually taking NGE seriously as an accurate description of the world, and that the "death is awesome, what are people whining about" mentality that maybe followed him back from the army had merely taken a new shape. And that a big part of why he was into the kinds of anime he was, had much to do with the girl he'd met online and into whose pants he was trying to get. These were her favorite animes. That's who he was hoping to come to Portland to live with. And how this syncs up with his relationship with Matt that started about six months before the move, I don't really know. But then, that's who Ben is. He commits to things that conflict with each other and simply doesn't notice. He doesn't process consequences of actions or decisions - he just has fantasies of some dream world and takes whatever real-world roads he thinks might lead him there, and promptly gets lost and angry. And around the time of the move, increasingly his fantasies tended to end with "and then I'll blow them the fuck away with my gun." He knew this was out of line, he knew this was upsetting to us, so he'd cover it the next day by saying he was under a lot of stress at home. He told us his dad was beating him up. Maybe he was - years ago. By the time we moved, he was beating up his dad and bragging about it. The hint he was dropping was, if we helped him get away from his crazy parents, he'd get better. Did we miss an obligation here somewhere? We did what he wanted. What we believed he needed. We got him away from his crazy parents. Then he decided we were his crazy parents. Why? Because he thought we were always telling him what to do. He doesn't understand the difference between rules and consequences - he doesn't understand there's a difference between "don't be gay" and "don't have any friends once you've beaten them all up." One is a made-up rule. The other is a thing that happens. Anytime we tried to warn him about the results of some boneheaded thing he was trying to do, he interpreted it as us trying to control him. Well, yeah, I guess we were trying to control him. We were trying to prevent him from getting fucking thrown in jail for doing things he thinks he should be able to do. Things like beating up people who break his rules. Things like breaking into houses and buildings if there's something in there he wants. Eventually we gave up trying to warn him. We just should not have to be in the business of explaining to a supposedly grown adult, the simple philosophical underpinnings of society. Societies are artificial, yes, but he benefits from them, yet tries to sabotage any system he benefits from. Nobody made a rule that says people don't like assholes. It's just something that happens. And deep down he knows it too, he knows he doesn't like it when people treat him the way he treats other people. He just thinks it shouldn't apply to him. Maybe we should have done more to get him to grow past this phase. But you can't help someone who doesn't want helped. If he'd been like this when I first met him, I sure the fuck wouldn't have wanted to sit next to him on the bus. Had plenty of those douchebags on the bus already. I was trying to sit away from them. What he is now is less intelligent and less mature than the kid I sat next to on the bus. It would've been better had we moved here with the other Ben Smith that rode that bus. We don't actually know where the lies begin anymore. We don't know when our friend ceased to exist and this thing came to occupy its place. It's clear that November 2006 is when he decided to cease the illusion and declare war on us. But what led up to that is a gradual process of betrayals, lies, and abuse - so that you can't point to a single day where it changed, but neither can you remember the last time it wasn't like this. Now, he probably tells a similar tale of me. He thinks he's watched me deteriorate into an idiot, or that I was never all that to begin with. Differences exist though. I didn't make a career out of bragging, like he did. I didn't pretend to be anyone I wasn't. And I never tried to destroy him. Even now, this thing we're about to do - the only option left to us - which could destroy him if he lets it - I am nervous about because I'm not in the business of ruining people's lives if I can avoid it. I got in this mess because he manipulated this fact about me, that he had me convinced I was the one not pulling my weight. (Then once I got a job, he quit his.) Him? All lies and betrayal since who knows when. And am I supposed to pity him, that his parents were insane, that Indiana broke him and made him act out, that he got in with the wrong friends, that the army brainwashed him, that Matt lied to him? I don't know. I do know pitying him is like bailing out the Titanic with an eyedropper, an endless thing. The difference is I am not him. It isn't in me to do what he does. Or isn't anymore. If I were four, and loaded on sugar, maybe I could be what he is - a giant pant-shitting toddler with entitlement issues, whose life is just the space between tantrums. When I own up to a mistake I've made, he perceives it as a sign of weakness. I dunno. Maybe someone with training can help him where I can't. Maybe someplace with padding and straps. He's insane. Not like, charmingly eccentric insane. Not like, holds unpopular opinions insane, Insane like thinks we stole his towel and replaced it with an identical one insane. Insane like thinks I'm his dad and we're all still in Indiana insane. If someone is an alcoholic or an addict, it often takes something like what we're doing to get them shaken loose. Interventions don't work. Love doesn't work. Their life must break. The machinery of their life, all the things that make their addiction possible, all that must screech to a halt and fall down in little pieces so that they wake up in the metaphorical pool of vomit and say "this is actually kind of unpleasant." You don't do it because you want to destroy them. You do it because otherwise you are the one destroyed, you go up their nose along with the rest of the world. His pattern resembles alcoholism or addiction except there doesn't appear to be any one drug as a constant. He does drugs when he's got the money for it but he seems not to change when he doesn't have the money for weeks or months on end. His drug seems to be himself. He's addicted to being an asshole and consumes everyone around him to absorb the resources necessary to continue being an asshole. And he needs more and more of it to get his fix. He destroys the lives of those around him in addict-like fashion. Whatever. I'm not his keeper and I'm not sure I could ever be. I'm not a licensed therapist, I'm not a doctor, and I'm not an officer of law enforcement. I'm not his commanding officer, his father, his boss, his priest, his brother, his son, his doctor, his boyfriend, or even his friend. I have neither the resources nor the obligation nor the right to continue throwing my life down the bottomless pit of his mental illness in some desperate attempt to help a man who doesn't want help. We told him to leave and he wouldn't. This is all we can do now. XXXII: Mile markers We're behind packing. It's one of those things where if you're behind, you don't easily go from behind to ahead. One thing in our favor though: the more we push, the more bottlenecks we remove. Once I got the desks swapped, for example, that cleared the back end of the bedroom to use as a staging and stacking area, which will make the rest of this go more quickly. True to form, there are always Other Things Happening: latest is, I got asked to print wedding invitations for a friend. A friend that helped us get the apartment, so I'm not saying no. OK, so I have the printing setup in the new apartment, it's not ergonomic but it works. Seems easy enough, head up there, spend a few hours printing these things, come home. Not. For one thing, we're in a heat wave here right now - Portland rarely gets to the third digit, but it just did. For the other thing, the Epson Stylus 740 family is fast enough doing black and white, but takes about eight times as long to print color - and these were color. After about eight hours up there, with not much to do and my world in boxes, I came home and I must go back today and retrieve the rest of the prints. We think Douchelocker is looking for a job. May have even found one. If he follows his usual trend, he'll be day shift for a week or two and then move to nights. He's not home now and it's 9am, he seems to leave around 6am and come home somewhere in the 2-3 range of the afternoon. That's about what I want. And if we can keep it that way for just one more week, we can have him out of here for Endgame. A strange possibility now emerges: with the swapping around of stuff, maybe we can fake him out. Maybe by replacing everything visible with other stuff, he might not notice we've moved out! I mean, of the living room, we've already gotten about half of what we want to keep out of here without leaving a visible hole. Can we continue this pattern? I mean, let's assume we want to not take the dining table - and I endorse this plan, it's too heavy and doesn't do what we want - then that leaves the metal bakers rack and a couple of wheeled carts. Fine. Pull those. What about kitchenry? Replace the microwave with a fifteen dollar junker on the last day. Replace the dishes and things with stuff from Goodwill or Dollar Tree. Empty the cabinets on the bottom. Replace everything with robot duplicates. Then August 5, we just walk out the door one last time. We just don't tell him what we've done. I'm actually typing this in the new apartment now, on the iBook, not that I consider it a milestone yet. It's E minus eight days - E for endgame. Weird thing here, it's cooler if I don't open the windows. Reason I came up here was to get the wedding invitations I printed yesterday. Otherwise there's not much here to do. Except reminisce, try to edit down these three massive Rastports into something coherent and readable, and put off going back outside where it's going to be 103 later today. It's a mess up here. I mean, we've got a couch and a bed, so for once there's no shortage of places to sit. But there are no tables of usable height. No dining table, no working tables. And of the bed: no sheets, no covers. We're just wall-to-wall boxes up here, which we haven't sorted or put in the closets because for the most part, we really need all the boxes before it makes sense to start undoing any of them. Anyway. At the moving out side, though I gripe that we are way behind, it's not that bad now that I took out the latest batch of full boxes. We're all but done with the closets, we're about to start dismantling the futon, and my two desks are done. Most of the remaining bulk in the bedroom is - no surprise - clothes. Much of the rest are boxes, into which we are putting stuff we pull out of other boxes in a sorting process, so as to reduce the number of boxes overall. When you move, I tell people, count on losing about ten percent of your stuff. Maybe it gets broken, maybe it gets lost, maybe you decided to leave it behind, whatever: count on ten percent of your stuff being unavailable after the move. When we moved from Indiana to Portland, that figure was more like thirty percent, between things we had to leave behind, things that got left behind by accident because Douchelamp thought he was being helpful, things destroyed in transit because he did such a shitty job packing the truck (even after we told him to stop packing the truck, we'd do it ourselves because we saw he was doing a bad job) and things he managed to destroy in the first few weeks after we arrived. Well, now, between careful sorting and actually deciding what we want to leave behind, and actually acquiring new things to replace some of what we've lost at a greater than 1:1 ratio such as the bed, it's possible our loss rate this time may end up very near zero. I don't consider that calculation definitive. I am going to count on a ten percent loss rate, even as I'm sitting here looking at what we've already moved and none of it was damaged or lost in transit. Also, once we've moved, we go through all those clothes. That may bring our losses up to ten percent - voluntarily of course. Man. I don't want to go back outside! Tomorrow is truck day. We didn't get a truck Sunday, we used that day to pack. Now, tomorrow is also supposed to hit a record 106, do not want, but hopefully it's just a matter of, throw everything in the truck, drive, throw everything out of the truck, repeat if necessary, and go hang out somewhere with air conditioning. And I don't know if I'm doing Saturday Market this coming weekend. The job could still fall through. They're running a background check on me. I don't think there's anything bad in there but I always hold a degree of skepticism. My one real concern is my juvenile record: I watched a kid spraypaint some cars and my parents took the plea bargain instead of going to trial, even though I'd have won. It's supposed to be expunged after I turn 18, but it is still in my record - marked "expunged", but not actually expunged - and depending on the nature of the background check, it may show up. ("There's something here but it isn't really here.") The job deals with the financial industry, so in a way I hope they vet the hell out of me, I don't want some big bank failing because it routinely employs shady people to write its code. If a background check turns up that I protested the war in 2003, and that disqualifies me, then I'd consider that a reason not to have wanted the job in the first place. But, these people don't strike me as being particularly conservative. Anyway. If I know I have the job, 100%, then I don't need to do Saturday Market the next few weekends. In fact if I have the job, and keep the job for awhile, I'll save up and buy a car and not go back to Saturday Market until I can drive there. That removes about 99% of the modes by which Douchekidney can damage my lifestyle. OK, nuff sitting around up here. Longer I hang out, hotter it is outside, so I guess I'd best get moving. XXXIII: The aging rock star The thing that got me the job, apparently, was my saying I wanted to work alongside brilliant people again. My teamwork skills aren't the greatest, and I often tend to prefer to go chasing Lovecraftian monstrosities alone - but I offhand mentioned in the interview how I missed being part of a bright team, and neat things like the Instant Huddles that we used to have at CPBX. What makes me want the job, of course, other than the money (which is substantial!) is that I miss chasing Lovecraftian monstrosities. It's not like I wake up and say "you know, what I really want to do today is go put on my shitwaders and crawl into some Leviathan made of sixty thousand lines of uncommented Perl" - but yet, it's a calling. I do wake up some days and realize there really aren't that many people in the world who can do what I do, fewer of which still actually want to suffer Perl a decade after it went out of style. (And maybe the reason I got this job is that I'm the only one left in Portland, the rest having changed languages or changed towns.) But with Perl I seem to have the knack. I get Perl's jokes. I can sometimes figure out what the drunk guy before me was trying to get the code to do. I can read someone's Perl and figure out what language they migrated to Perl from. I know this stuff. I'm not afraid of Perl, more often Perl is afraid of me. So if I'm in a job where I'm never doing this, I'm probably wasting someone's time. Fortunately that appears to be no longer an issue. I have every intention of staying at this job a long, long time. Things that can still go wrong: I could fail to mesh with the team. I know I'm not the best at what I do, although I seem to have gotten through their tech screening OK - they think I'm good enough. I don't want to be the weakest link and I fear it could happen. A bigger and more interesting failure mode: burnout, this is not Compassworks and I probably won't get time to feel sorry for myself, I'm expecting it to be one brain-grinding Perl exercise after another, with some nasty stuff like Javascript, CSS, and whatever the fuck Internet Explorer thinks it's doing with the above, so that I will be running in high-powered mode most of the time. Maybe I need that, maybe it's a return to the kind of fast pace we had at CPBX back in the day, but it's been awhile and I honestly don't know if I'm still capable of it. Burnout claims victims in this industry. I guess, doing so much of a thing I am actually good at that it hurts, actually working hard at something besides keeping Douchewinch off my back, growing my skills - well, I have a phrase for that, you may have heard it: That's A Problem I'd Like To Have. I worry that the gaps in my professionalism - especially early days, when I'll still be living out of boxes, won't have gotten my stride, and will still be flushing out bad brain chemistry - will show through, maybe get me in trouble. I know one of my problems right now is lack of attention to detail - odd, considering how often I get praised on the attention to detail in my pictures, or in my older Web sites - it's a depression symptom, the brain gets used to not working. And one more failure mode, an unlikely one but one I still feel is worth mentioning, given the incredible magnitude of the life changes I'm now happily making: rock stars have a tendency to drop dead right before they begin their big comeback tours. Not saying I'm a rock star, though all this may make me one. No, the mechanism behind this may still apply - aging rock stars who have fucked themselves up with chemicals or rough living, who maybe have been off the stage for awhile and have just committed to extreme schedules of rehearsing, and in some cases, they maybe celebrate too hard the night before the big show - it can take them down. I'm 34, not that old, but not necessarily healthy either: hypoglycemia, years of chronic depression, years of Meteorites, being overweight, family histories of basically everything that can be in a family history (one side diabetes and heart disease, other side cancer and allergies), basically I could be priming myself for a health failure mode. It would be appropriate, no? to finally reach a point where I improve my life, and then my machinery throws an exception? I can't exactly lose a lot of weight between now and the 11th. Not and be healthy about it anyway. Am I expecting an Elvis-style warp core breach? No, but it does seem like things are going too well. Are they? This is how things were generally going for me for awhile in the 90s - there was a time when I didn't expect everything I did to blow up. That's because they didn't. We're not wrong: his involvement throws bad dice into everything we attempt. Evidence of this is that the only things around here that work well are the things he can't get his claws into. Evidence of this is that his absence - however it comes to happen - causes things to start working better. Rooms stay cleaner. Equipment runs more reliably. Our moods are vastly improved. A previous time when my life was constant failure, it was because I had something like him in my life - a boss in the process of evolving from a competent, capable nice guy into an abusive micromanaging Napoleon. Before that, the darkest times of my life were 1985-88, and 1991-1992; 1985-86 it was about two cruel teachers and the rest was school bullies and no friends. It is, for me, perhaps not normal to have my life constantly in ruins as it has been the last eight years. Yes, machinery breaks down. Infrastructure buckles. Sometimes things don't work. But eight years of losing everything? Everything we tried failed because we didn't have the money or the parts or the time or space to do it right; every attempt to resolve these resource issues failed because it inevitably went through him and got stomped on the next time he needed attention. Things are working now because we've spent the last two years building the infrastructures that go under him, around him, infrastructures that may be less efficient than we like but that he can't fuck with. Things are working because we've spent two years working towards this. I got a job in part by having convinced him I am not looking for a job, so he couldn't monkey-wrench it. What we've been through is just not normal. Part of my recovery was realizing this. That's the lie they tell you: douchebags make you believe you're the unreasonable one. This is usually possible because everyone is unreasonable sometimes - so they just dig up something you did wrong and they clobber the shit out of you with it, any one thing you did wrong justifies any fifty things they do wrong. Point is, I had to realize I've already atoned for whatever I did to him and then some. I mean, I'm so unreasonable that he's never been without a nice bed the whole time he's lived here (a bed to which he has now fitted pee-proof bedsheets), but when I had to sleep on the couch because our futon broke and we couldn't afford a new one, oh, that drove him up the fucking wall. My sleeping on the couch annoyed him. That's how unreasonable I am. So. Today's July 30, E minus 6 days. And the plan as it now stands is, we get a truck on Sunday to do as many loads as we need, and we get the truck again Wednesday which happens to be our last day on the lease here. That day, we expect to have several friends available most of the day to help us out. Here's how we believe it's going to work. Douchepram does have a job now, has him out of the house from about 7am to about 5pm most days of the week and he takes his bike, suggesting a long commute and an 8 hour day. We don't know when he moves to nights, but we assume eventually he will. So. If this schedule holds for just one more week, then next Wednesday the 5th he will leave here at 7am and be gone until 5pm - and during that time all we need to do is, with about four or five people here, move everything else out. The crunch is, we have to be done with absolutely everything in the old apartment as of Wednesday, August 5. We have no legal authority to enter the old apartment after that day. Can we make that deadline? I think we can, although this week's heat wave has knocked our schedule for a loop. XXXIV: Playing chess against a wombat "Endgame" is a chess term. They say the hardest thing about chess is winning a game that you've already won. Get to a certain point and the checkmate is already in there, you just have to find it and get there without making any mistakes, like Michelangelo chipping away everything but the statue. I'm no chess player myself, but I know the rules and I know how big it can get. I know you need to be able to plan a zillion moves ahead, to second guess your opponent, to hide things in plain sight. I know what they mean about winning a won game. Chess doesn't just teach you strategy, chess teaches you that there is such thing as strategy. Worth noting Douchebaron doesn't know much about chess. He doesn't think there is anything in the world about which he must think really hard. Goes back to his delusions that the world is here for him and therefore its complexity is adjusted specifically for him and what he's willing to do. Used to be, he revelled in learning complicated things. Now, he thinks what he knows is enough, physically lashes out at anyone or anything that presents information he thinks he doesn't need to know, and plans zero steps ahead. And he only tackles complex things if he thinks it will impress someone - especially someone who isn't going to fact-check him. Maybe I shouldn't be worried that we haven't got all the bases covered. Maybe I should be worried we've expended too many resources covering bases when what we're dealing with is not some chessmaster that notices every little out-of-place thing and is always five steps ahead. Thinking in terms of what he does or doesn't notice is a waste of energy, in my experience - he operates on some other plane of existence, sees things that aren't there and fails to notice what is. Sunday August 2. E minus 3 days, by which we are counting August 5 as E minus zero and liftoff. We've just made three truckloads. The new place is physically becoming difficult to navigate - this is because the emphasis has been on simply getting stuff in there, not on organizing, stacking, space-filling, or even opening boxes. My concern, since we won't be there again until Wednesday the 5th, is that it'll slow down our loads by having to rearrange stuff to fit new things in. We know we're doing it wrong. We know just throwing stuff into the apartment with no organization is going to sandbag us later. But we also know the priority is to get everything out - with careful orchestration - so that he doesn't notice. Once he doesn't take an interest in what we do, it'll be easier to reorganize. Well. He's noticed we're doing something. But what he sees is rearrangement - a desk vanishes, another desk appears in its place the next day. So far, in the living room, almost everything we've removed, we've put something in its place, so that there's a "story" for everything. Some of what we've replaced, the thing we replaced it with looks nicer. Smaller desk replaced with bigger desk. That is further driving it into the ground, further removing from his realm of possibility that we might be moving out - it looks instead like we're bringing stuff in rather than moving stuff out. It's finally happening. We're in the home stretch. The bedroom closets are empty. The hall closets are empty. Hard things left to do: still have to deal with all the clothes in the bedroom, still have to box up all the videotapes in the living room. The videotapes are an interesting case: they're stacked in rows three deep under the fireplace shelf, and about a third are his, so we're simply leaving his tapes stacked neatly in the front to hide what's vanishing behind them. Still, we have a lot of videotapes and there will probably be a "purge" phase once we're moved - movies taped off TV, if we have a better version on DVD, can probably go. But otherwise most of what's left in the bedroom is random junk and 75%-filled boxes of sorting. And that's sorting to take place after the move, when we have more time but less space in which to do it. So tomorrow, Monday, that's me all day here, boxing up videotapes, continuing the sort-and-rebox in the bedroom, and waiting on a fresh batch of boxes. Also, redoing the dining area to make it look lived-in (in such a way that the stuff we want is ready to grab and go). Tuesday, I hope to see the last of the clothes boxed and hidden; figure Tuesday night, by the time he gets home, anything going downstairs has gone downstairs. There's enough slack in the lines that if his schedule changes next week, we can probably accommodate it - we expect him to go on night shift, we just don't know when. It'll just mean we're hauling boxes in the afternoon instead of the morning. We had a strange scare this morning: the apartment complex's fire alarm went off, as if someone had pulled it, at 6am on a Sunday. Except no one had pulled it. The system is notorious for pulling itself once every couple of years. Not so much worried the place will burn down, as we've got the really critical stuff (except Francesca) at the new site already - more that the alarm would wake the douchebag and get in the way of our moving stuff downstairs. And it did but we made it work anyway. Note from the future: the new place does not have a complex-wide fire alarm that can be pulled. There is little else in my life the next few days but moving boxes and concealing it from Douchepit. XXXV: Ordinary miracles This process has astonished me. Where once my life had been all failures, suddenly I'm seeing success after success. We're catching breaks as we need them, from the availability of a co-signer, to the availability of a staging area, to Douchepot suddenly getting a job, to me suddenly getting a job, to me getting a job that actually starts a week after we move. Dare I say miraculous? Well, not necessarily. The miracle is that we are human - and it is what humans do, that we create miracles. The raw material of miracles? Opportunity. Our miracle here is a multilayered thing, we needed not just the opportunity to move but a network of opportunities surrounding it, favors we could call in, strings we could pull, long-dormant network links we could bring up, reserves we could tap, so that if this one opportunity came, we could take it. And the seeming ease with which we're able to do this, is more down to the wall we had to climb to get this far. We had to wait for him to get a little better before we could do this! We tried to make this happen in 2007 and we couldn't - he was too much of a douchebag then, more than we could handle. We had to wait for him to mellow a little bit. I don't feel bad about that, because he mellows and douches in cycles and that's one of the major things I'm tired of enduring, of having him turn on me right when I thought we were mending. It's why I didn't try to mend this time, because, you know, fool me once. One reason why the job happened? Bits of groundwork I laid in October through March. Not much. A retooled resume, actually more than one, with skills emphasized differently depending on what job I'd be sending it to. A resume in Word DOC, not merely RTF with the extension changed (Office will open these just fine, but online resume-processing scripts do not). A job search workflow - an "open in tabs" thing of job searches, and for those job sites whose search modes left much to be desired, I wrote Perl scripts to screen-scrape them for me and bookmarked those. (The Dice Index of which I spoke in part one.) It took many months for a job to appear for which I was actually qualified, but when it did, I had something I could throw their way. My hope was, given more time and more focus, and less bullshit, I could also have had an online portfolio and maybe some additional showcases and technologies to list in it. Didn't get that far. Didn't need it. Thought I would but that's one of depression's lies, just like you're never skinny enough, you're never good enough. And to some extent that's a useful thing, the trick is developing an instinct to know when it's OK to say "yeah, I could be better, but right now I need to be just good enough to do this thing" - and I think I've improved to that point. The groundwork I laid to get a job, back when getting a job was believed to be on the critical path, well - that framework was still in place. Why I found the job: I was looking for an apartment, but continued sweeping the job sites once in awhile. Why I got the job: I happened to be looking when it was offered, I have the skills they want (or a close enough match that I can grow into the rest), they like my personality (that's a scary thought, isn't it?) and moreover, I wasn't the same person I was in January. I think the job had to happen after the apartment, because I am generally incapable of going somewhere and convincing them I'm good at what I do if I haven't succeeded at anything recently. The apartment was a victory. That taste lingering, I went into that office and did my interview - and won. This job, it's noted, was not being offered in 2001. Humans make miracles. If there's a supreme being that makes miracles, honestly, I doubt we as a species would ever notice them, they'd be too subtle and I doubt they'd be tailored specifically for us. No, what makes humans miracle creatures is that - at least when we're on our game - we can adapt to a situation, often without realizing we're adapting to it instead of the other way around. An example I recently heard, from a preacher on the train, so this is about as earnest a miracle as any I've heard claimed: his father, unemployed in the 70s, asks God for a miracle and it is given a spool of wire on the roadside, just a massive six-foot-diameter spool of thin copper wire that had fallen off a truck. The father in question was a jewelry maker by trade. A miracle because the copper wire had come to him. Anyone else would've walked past it. But no. This man, because he knew what to do with it, and could (and did) make a decades-long jewelry trade from it, only running out of wire from that very spool in 2002 goes the story, obviously received this wire as a gift from God. My interpretation? No one else would have known what to do with that spool of wire - except metal salvagers, any number of other craftspeople with a use for a ridiculous amount of copper wire, electricians, or an employee of the company that was missing the wire in the first place. Had someone else found that wire, someone else would have a story to tell about it. Had it never fallen off the truck, the father in the story might have found some other life-repairing thing. And a poor example the wire spool makes too, because its true owner would've been well aware of its value and would've noticed its absence, so this "miracle" told to me with a straight face actually came at someone's expense; for all we know a truck driver lost his career over it. Point is, that wire was obviously valuable, and the "miracle" is that someone with a genuine use for it happened to find it on the roadside - someone whose need was dire, and who could use that wire to fill that need. There is still plenty of room for spiritual interpretations here, but notice - the miracle is not in the giving of the wire to the man, the miracle is in the man having a use for the wire. The miracle wasn't the man winning the lottery or getting a job making jewelry - it was in finding a source of materials he could use. Had the miraculous find on the roadside been glass beads or string the story would have unfolded the same, not because of God, but because of a guy with the imagination and adaptability to say "hey, that gives me a great idea..." It is our flexibility that turns random events into opportunities. And if it works, we call it a miracle - and probably rightly so. You know the bumper sticker that says "Expect Miracles"? Turns out that works. Don't expect miracles, they're unlikely to happen because you're not in a mindset to make use of them when the raw materials are provided. Depression makes one not expect miracles, the raw materials of which my success is now being constructed may have been there the last eight years in some form but I couldn't quite reach them, couldn't get grip on them, or simply couldn't see them, or wasn't looking for them, or was looking for different materials. (Known problem: when other people are defining your success for you, they tend to have a very narrow view of what materials you need. You get used to walking past opportunities because you've been told those are the wrong opportunities - until you can't remember anymore how to actually grab an opportunity as it goes past.) But when one is expecting miracles, it's a mindset that says - well, I'm not sure what it says, I'm new at this. I'm out of practice having things go right. I guess expecting a miracle, you're more likely to view what comes your way as waves to be surfed or maybe as things to buy at Goodwill - you see positive things that can help repair your life, rather than indifferent things. The danger is the Manic Zone that follows depression - the period in which one is full of get-rich-quick schemes - and one reason I seem not to have fallen prey to that this time is, I'd already gotten the apartment and had a couple weeks for my mood to stabilize before they called about the job. This whole adventure started back in May. Now it's August. I'm not having get-rich-quick schemes. I'm having actual things happen. That all said, for all I know, Douchepork may pick this week to lose his job again, and the rest of this stuff can't go out the door. And I say this and it's 7am Monday and he isn't even awake yet. We may have a problem. XXXVI: Final hours It's night on Tuesday August 4th. Tomorrow is E-Day and here's what we think we know: he didn't go to work Monday, he went to work today (Tuesday) at what appears to be daytime hours. We do not know if he works tomorrow. We're done packing the bedroom. It's down to boxes to go, an air conditioner, mattresses, a bunny, and that's it. The rest is living room and kitchen. Which won't take too long - if he goes to work. If he doesn't, we don't know what the fuck we're going to do. Yeah but, this thing's happening one way or another. We can get the boxes out with him around, we just don't take them one right after another, we spread them out somewhat. We move what we can with him out of the room. We take the dishes one armload at a time. We leave furniture if we have to. He knows we're doing stuff. We know because he's cleaning his room. Our "cleaning" has encouraged him to clean. With the bonus that this made him bring forth some of the dirty dishes he's been stockpiling - dishes he is never going to see again, because once I clean them, they're going in boxes. If he thought we were doing anything other than spring cleaning, he'd have reacted to it by now in some way other than cleaning his room. This means the illusion is working! I am very aware - in spite of the hectic process - that this is a heady occasion. Many things I do, I am now doing for the last time. Last trip to the grocery store. Last trip to the mailbox. Last trip to the laundry room. Mostly, last time I have to fucking deal with his dishes in which biology experiments are taking place. We've set our alarms for 6am, which is when we think he's going to leave for work, if he leaves. If he doesn't, it probably means he'll sleep in, which buys us a few hours to haul boxes and get as much out of the kitchen as we can. We've got help coming around noon, not just a truck but extra manpower, so whatever's left to do by then - if we can keep the Eye of Sauron off us until then - will go fast. I am aware of one other thing that will trip us up: the fact that the new apartment is a mess. Before we can add stuff to it, we must move stuff around, which will slow us down, and this one day, time is absolutely of the essence. I can tell you this: if I wake up and he isn't going to work, expect my mood to plummet through the floor. I can also tell you this: it's 10pm and his room light is off, suggesting he means to sleep through the night instead of stay up late playing video games. It all hinges on tomorrow morning, and whether or not he decides to go to work. You know I can't go past a moment like this and not say an earful. I mean, this is what I've been hoping for, wishing for, screaming for, for eight years. It's like graduating or something. Except that maybe instead of graduating, this is more like quitting school in the eighth grade and saying "fuck it, I'm going to college instead" and then actually doing it. All those nights at the gas station - nights where I preferred the gas station to home, because he wasn't there - all the times I've wished for this - all the years I've dreaded my own existence, or feared for my safety because I had to talk to him about something - the time I went to work with a fresh black eye - all the things I wished for are now coming true. And for that matter, all those nights at the gas station wishing I could have my old job back, being paid to do something I'm actually good at - now those wishes are coming true too. Like I said, this is happening one way or another; if we have to grab the air conditioners in a hurry and leave the dishes, we will. Maybe he'll find some way in the end to fuck with us. Maybe he'll figure out where we live. Maybe he'll park himself at Saturday Market and harass me every weekend. Whatever he does, I am never washing dishes for him again. Ever. There is absolutely no mechanism he can bring into play, absolutely no threats he can make, no violence he can do, that will put me back in this apartment scraping the mold out of some cup he forgot for months. Moreover, whatever he does to me, he'll have to go massively out of his way to do it - he can't just fuck with me on his way to the kitchen. Whatever, he cannot have us back, doing his bidding. XXXVII: This is the last day of our acquaintance It is August 5, 2009, 6 in the morning, and he is awake and preparing, so far as we can determine, to go to work. Whatever consciousness has been granting us favors the last two months has just granted us one more. He is leaving for the day and once he's out the door, our work can proceed uncontested, unmolested. I can't do much until he leaves but once he does, the floodgates open. Swap the G3 for its nonworking twin. Finish clearing the fireplace shelf - books etc. Haul the bedroom downstairs. Empty the bathroom. Do the last load or two of dishes. Box up dishes. We guess he comes home around 5, so we set 4 as the redline - absolutely nothing being done in the apartment after that. Most of it we make up as we go along. This much we did finally decide: Francesca and the air conditioners go together. Don't yet know how well the air conditioners will fit in the windows - we measured but it wasn't exact - but if it means we prop an air conditioner up on a chair or something, with a blanket to form a crappy seal with the window, just for one day, we'll do that. Fortunately the weather isn't going to be quite as out-of-control as it was last week. I won't exactly have time to write this as I go along. From the minute he goes out the door, we're going to be busy. XXXVIII: Endgame The move went basically cleanly. Took longer than we wanted and there were some miscommunications that mean we are missing a few things. It was utter chaos, we had friends up there helping us haul things out, deciding sometimes at the last second whether something would go or stay, it was just a blizzard, just getting things out as quickly as we could, improvising new ways to get stuff downstairs faster. Two years of planning and we were still making it up as we went. But we're here. It's done. Well, not really done - the new apartment is an unnavigable mess. Want access to the left side of the kitchen, you go one way through the maze - want access to the right side, you um, you don't get access to the right side. We have a television in the hallway, it was the only place we had room to stack it that exact minute. Things like this. So we're going to be busy for awhile, unpacking and in many cases, repacking. All this planning, all this dread, and on the day? We moved boxes, we closed doors, and we left. Hard work and chaos but not so much drama. We didn't even see him all day, he left and we started packing, and we were gone by the time he got home. It all ends, not with a bang but a whimper. Just the way I like it. I neither need nor want some grand confrontation, some battle to end all battles. No. He doesn't listen to me anyway, so why bother trying to get the last word. The best thing I can say to him is empty apartment and rent due on the 7th. What did we do with our first night of freedom? Ordered pizza and watched Coraline. Funny: Coraline's life is in boxes too. Amazing movie, by the way. Made in Portland, so naturally the main character is always dressed for rain. It felt like Mirrormask but with a stronger story. I dunno. Maybe we own too much stuff. But then, most of what we do own is duplicated and the rest is just poorly organized. For fun we decided the first thing we'll do - after getting enough computers working that we can get Internet access - is to move all the red boxes from the living room to the closet. This'll cut swaths through the maze, and get us a quick overview of some of the boxes and maybe reveal some of the stuff we're looking for. (For example: there is right now a shortage of power strips and extension cords. And they weren't all packed in the same box.) Red? Yeah. We got a lot of boxes that were the same size and printed in red ink. But we can do this at our pace. No lurking evil is here to glare at us while we do it. There are anxieties we are learning to suppress. We're not used to the noises of this place yet, so every time the guy above us gets up for a late night snack, and the floor creaks or a door slams, we think it's Doucheruckus, until we remember it isn't. See a shadowy figure in the hallway? Not him. Talking about him in a hushed voice because he might overhear us? Not necessary. Creepy person on a bicycle heading toward you on the street? Not so creepy. That sort of thing. But then, that kind of thinking, that kind of constant fear, is why we did this. It was eroding our sanity, you can probably guess. The air conditioner for the bedroom sorta fits, it's going to need work - possibly even a new frame - but it's in there and it works. Francesca isn't allowed out of her cage yet because we don't have a safe place to let her run, this carpeting is much plusher and harder to clean. It's something we'll have to take care of soon, I worry about her in her cage all the time. Especially after how much fun she had running around the old apartment once it was nearly empty. Infrastructure here is at approximately 1996 levels. We have everything here and we have nothing - it's all in pieces. We're missing a few key pieces of furniture, things we left behind so we could get better ones here - namely, a computer desk and a dining table. We think one of my desk chairs has gone missing in the move, we may have left it there by mistake and no we're not going back for it. (Does make me wonder what else we might have left.) Well, I've had breakfast and it's time to get to moving boxes. It's a new morning and a new kind of apartment - and maybe, soon, a new kind of me. I said to Girlfriend last night: "I like this new us. We accomplish things." XXXIX: Nailed upon the colored door of time On the old fridge door, right before we left, we removed all the magnets except one: a Happy Bunny magnet that says "have a great day, you worthless turd." We left it high in the middle of the door where he's going to have a hard time not seeing it. We could have left him ninety-five theses nailed to the door explaining what we did and why. But that magnet says it better than we ever could. He could walk in the door, see the place gutted of everything we wanted, and think it's been robbed. But hints will trickle in slowly: the "robbers" only took our stuff. His TV is still there, our smaller TV is gone, his room is intact and ours is empty should he choose to look inside it. And of course, once he sees that magnet, I think he'll understand. Then the power goes out. Like I said, I'm not a revenge kind of guy. But all the pain he's ever caused me - and he's caused me a lot - there's a chuckle and a smile when I think of him opening that door, of him getting That Sinking Feeling, of that feeling getting worse as he walks in. Everything he sees makes it worse, as it all dawns on him what we've been doing the last two years. He'll know why we didn't force the issue to get him to move out. He'll know we did this without him figuring out what we were doing - and the less he suspected, the more it will hurt when reality slaps him in the face. He'll know we hate him that goddamn much and that we are so sick of him that we're willing to burn absolutely any chance at reconciliation - though I doubt he'll figure out it's because we're sick of reconciling and then having him turn on us again. He'll know we actually had the moxie to pull off something like this, the whole time he thought we were weak and worthless. He'll know, as much as he thinks we're weak and worthless, how much he's depended on us. He'll know he can't punch, kick, threaten, or abuse his way out of this one. He will know the pain I've endured. I was owed this. And now I've collected on it. I don't need to do anything else to him. As an aside, the historical 95 Theses are a dry, boring read. I doubt they produced a Sinking Feeling in whoever first read them. XL: The enemy's lamentations We just got the net access hooked up. It's not the way we want it yet - right now it's one machine on the cable modem, we haven't got a router. Or rather we do have a router but it's in two different boxes. For fun we had a glimpse at his blog. It appears he had time to fire off one post before the power went out, whining that we abandoned him and how we still have keys and could break in anytime we want. Said if we're still on the lease, we owe him. Just wait until he finds out we're not on the lease and we don't owe him anything. Just wait until he finds out the rent is all him and due in its entirety the 7th. His blog is an utterly amusing thing: every single post you read, you slap yourself and say "oh my gawd, he really doesn't get it, does he?" Dig deep and you find one where he cries "oh how I miss the days when I had roommates who cared about me." I really like that one. The part he leaves out is what he did to cause us not to care about him anymore. Is it that he doesn't remember what he did? No, I know what it is: he thinks everybody "resets", he can treat you like his worst enemy one day and expect you to do him favors the next. This isn't fucking Groundhog Day with Bill Murray - and I'm amazed he's unable to understand that, despite years of seeing it not work. I mean, friends do allow for friends to be assholes sometimes. It's not like we keep count of number of times our friends have pissed us off. And we're certainly not keeping score of the number of favors we expect from someone. But everyone, no matter how close they are to someone, has lines they don't want crossed. This fucker manages to cross them more different ways than we thought possible, cross them frequently, he expects to piss you off by crossing those lines which is why he does it, and then he expects you to forget all about it the next day. He can piss you off in ways you never even considered a friend could piss you off. One day you just wake up and say, do I need a friend who does this to his best friends? There's a long list of "why am I hanging out with this guy" - for example we stopped making grocery trips for him when he started griping at us for our brand choices - when we were buying the brands he told us to buy, he'd just forgotten. Obviously the point of no return was Xombi, and if you look at his blog you'll see he always does this - someone dies, he attacks everyone who is upset by it. (Even the Furries are sick of this.) There just comes a time where you realize it's not a friendship and the problem is at the other end. What, he's upset that I didn't expend more of myself trying to please him? I didn't smile big enough the second or third time he kicked my ass, or the third or fourth time he called me a sack of shit to my face when I was doing him a favor I didn't have to be doing? I didn't thank him for the death threats? Howbout I stop hanging out with him, and hang out with people who don't sit around thinking of new ways to hurt me? Anyway. I like having that post of his as a checkpoint. It shows us what he thinks happened. It shows that he doesn't understand why. It shows that he is doomed because he is, once again, operating on too many layers of assumption, about us, about how we did this - he thinks we're still on the lease because he assumes that's how we'd have done this. It shows that he's not going around screaming that we stole a bunch of stuff, because while we didn't, sometimes he has problems remembering what's his. (We went out of our way to make sure to leave behind things we thought might be his.) He thinks I'm going to spend my "wretched" life thinking he's going to seek revenge. Meaning he doesn't know why I might think that. OK, good, if he doesn't consider me important enough to stalk. At least that's what he said before he learned the full extent of the plans we laid. Once the hammer drops, and he is unable to spring the whole amount of rent in time and his dumb ass ends up homeless, he just won't have anything else to do with his time than come after me. This doesn't scare me - if he hunts me down and kills me with the same competence he displays with everything else he's done in the last few years, I will live to be 110. Moreover, if his thinking is that I shouldn't think he's trying to kill me, maybe he could've checked in with that sooner, by oh I don't know, not trying to kill me, not talking about killing me, not making it clear he already has a place picked out to hide my body, that sort of thing. But then, bullies never actually contemplate the consequences of what they do - they will pick on you until you're paranoid, then mock you for being paranoid. I'm too old to be dealing with schoolyard bullies. And he's too old to be one. I'm not scared. Not anymore. Most of all what his reaction shows is, sometimes even rock bottom isn't enough to make someone realize they need help. It's one thing for a hardcore drunk to realize they have a problem but deny it's the drinking - this is more like a hardcore drunk who doesn't realize they drink, as if they don't even know where the empty bottles are coming from. He's an asshole. It ruins his life. He doesn't realize he's an asshole. Therefore he can't stop being an asshole. But to extend the drinking metaphor here: it's not so much that we let him hit rock bottom hoping it would change him, rather we did all this because it was the only way to get him out of our lives. We tried it his way. And what makes me smile is that he doesn't understand. He was supposed to move out, he made it clear he would not, so we did this. Sorry he can't figure it out. No, wait, not sorry. Amused. Point is, he can be confused and douchey somewhere else. I got a life to live here. He is someone else's problem. Most likely his own. XLI: Fresh start I figure it's going to be a few weeks yet before we have things to something we can call normal. Lots of unpacking. Lots of reorganization. Point: we did not label the boxes because we didn't want him to know what was in them if he saw them. Point: things aren't always boxed categorically, most of this stuff is boxed by what box it fits in and/or how soon we could afford to do without it. It's like... it's like a hotel room with our stuff in boxes. It reminds me a lot of our room in Seattle. Which is fine, because I viewed Seattle as a sort of prototype. It showed what was possible. OK granted, I already knew what was possible, and that's one of the things that kept gnawing at me all these years. I knew I could be more than what he was reducing me to. But I think we needed Seattle as a reminder that it wasn't us. So now it's done. We cut out the tumor. And what now? Well, I relearn who I am. It's been awhile since I was anyone. What do I do, how do I choose things to do, how do I solve problems, how do I work, how do I begin projects, how do I complete projects. These are things I've forgotten. This much I do know about who I am: I know who I'm not. I know I'm not him. I also have some hints of what I'm capable of doing: I'm capable of this. I'm capable of things that take years to plan and hours to execute. I'm capable of rebooting my life in a month. I'm even still capable of getting a job. It is useful as a checkpoint: I am everything he said I'm not, I've done everything he says I'm not capable of doing. XLII: Smoke on the water In the old apartment, there was a vent fan in the bathroom. Sounded awful, never worked very well. I took it apart a couple times and oiled it, which helped somewhat. And with three people living there on different shifts, you can guess, the fan tended to stay on almost round-the-clock, for eight years. Without incident. Just a few days after we move into the new place, the building caught fire. Source: bathroom vent fan left on too long. We're OK, all our stuff is OK, the fire was contained to their bathroom - but damn. Was this a warning shot or something? My first thought, on being told there was a fire and we needed out now, was: "we've only been gone for a few days, could Douchepsycho have found us already?" Ah but seriously: we're going to buy a fire extinguisher or three, have them in easy reach, and we decided Francesca's travel carrier should be stored near the front door and reachable "on the way out". Also I want to buy a fireproof safe, which may have to wait a paycheck or two. Given Douchepeg's pyromania, we had been thinking about a fireproof safe and fire extinguisher and a "panic bag" anyway. We're good, just shaken up a little. We continue to rearrange. A moment of some panic: we realized we left behind all the spices. That whole side of the kitchen cabinet we forgot to grab. No biggie, it's certainly replaceable to the tune of about sixty cents a bottle at Winco. But it makes me wonder if there are any other important things missing. Unboxing has been fun. That's not sarcastic: it's actually entertaining. We're going to set aside a box for "stuff we have half of" - so that when the other half is found, that thing is available for use. (Most of the time this is a thing in one box, power supply in another.) So there's a lot of discovering stuff that we maybe could've used a year ago but was hidden as a result of the last "hurry up and box everything". Conversely there is a lot of stuff hidden here deep in the stacks. We haven't found the silverware yet, for example - I remember it going in a box, I remember the box going out, did we leave it in our friend's truck? It's going to be awhile yet before I have a place to draw. Meanwhile I give you Bunny Egg, which I drew an hour before we got approved for the apartment. It is an instant Saturday Market hit in the two weekends it was actually there. It was just meant to be something silly to doodle, it wasn't intended to be symbolic of "new day dawning" but it works for that. Otherwise Saturday Market is a non-happener for a couple more weeks yet: I briefly had the infrastructure here to do my production, then lost it to the boxes. It's OK because I don't depend on Saturday Market for money anymore, and so I was willing to sacrifice some of its infrastructure to make the rest of this happen. Remember I said we had two machines that needed to be kept running, Francesca and Saturday Market? Well, by giving up Saturday Market for a few weeks, that left only one machine - and freed up some resources. I guess if pushed, I could do Saturday Market next weekend - but if it isn't necessary, I'd prefer to focus those resources on other things. I still don't have a proper desk, remember. But this isn't drama anymore. This mess is fun. Sounds strange but it's true. Every day it's new puzzles to solve, new things found in the unpacking, new possibilities. You know what we did today? We made breakfast. This wasn't impossible before, but towards the end, it had become difficult and annoying. You certainly couldn't make breakfast on a day Douchespoon was around; for one thing, you making breakfast would "remind" him that he wanted to make breakfast so he'd suddenly be in your way, and for another thing, his existence made us lose appetite. Instead, it's like we're back in Indiana, and if there's something we want to do, we can just do it. Usually. One odd thing I noticed: it feels like we've lived here for a long time. We've lived here days. But it just feels like home. A very messy home that is nearly unlivable at the moment - but home, as if we've known the place for years. It does bear a resemblance to the general layout of our apartment in Indiana, but not that strong a resemblance - no, it's not the appearance or the geometry, it's just that it feels like home. Then again, our hotel room in Seattle felt like home. XLIII: Error handling Tuesday I start my new job. They gave me a couple weeks to get my act together first, because they did pick up that I was in the middle of some intense life change, and that means I have to hold up my end of the bargain, and go in there Tuesday looking like nothing is wrong. Professionalism is error handling - my home may be in shambles, shower curtain held up by zipcords because we can't find the curtain rings and didn't have time to buy new ones, or whatever, but from the moment I step on the job site, it won't show. The drama is neatly hidden from view by the time I get there. I mean, the ability to do this is something I've usually lacked - things going wrong outside of work, doesn't affect my work necessarily but it may make me late, may make me show up in bad clothes or miss a shower or three, may make me cop an attitude. I don't want to be that guy. And this is my chance to not be that guy. I said I expected the job to be hardcore Perl, head-down, pedal-to-metal coding all day, no time to catch my breath. Now, I've made such promises in the past. Sams I thought would be like that. Notre Dame I thought would be like that. But here, it's not me saying I intend to do that - it's that I get the impression that's what's going to be handed to me and I just won't have a choice. I hope they start me off with some fast-paced project that forces me to keep up. And I said so in the interview, that I want to get better, I want to always get better. That's me and programming, that's me and art. And there's a difference between this and the depression-fueled illusion that I am never good enough. It's more like, be good enough to do what needs done, but aim that the next time you need to do that thing, it'll be ten times as good. Where regards my art at least, I'm already sorta good - people buy my stuff, albeit mostly the novelty stuff. Programming? I'm good enough to do stuff and have it work, but I know I have it in me to be better. It's the learning that fascinates me, the building of things I didn't think I was smart enough to build, and then the waking up to a world that contains something new, something that exists because I built it, something that didn't exist until I got hold of it. I don't even have to stretch the metaphor. It should be obvious by now that my world has changed and new things are becoming possible. It is so nice to be on the way out of depression! I can still feel weird brain chemistry - I still have anxiety moments, probably anytime the serotonin drops below some threshold, it manifests as "oh fuck, something is going very wrong." But otherwise? Man. I forgot how it feels. I feel taller. Food tastes better. Even the rain doesn't seem to get to me as much. This living room, with its towers of boxes and a tiny crooked trail that leads through it, is neither daunting nor claustrophobic, and if I need something, I just get up and rummage through boxes until I find it. And of my anxieties? Once I hit upon the logic that proves the anxiety is unreasonable, it evaporates. This leaves only the reasonable anxieties, which can be dealt with practically. This may make me a better problem solver: I begin to work the problem instead of the problem working me. A guy could grow to like this not-depressed thing. Curious to see how long it lasts. XLIV: Wishes sometimes come true Tomorrow the new job starts. I had been worried. I guess now I'm not. It's just one more crazy thing I do. I'm not worried that a job will eat my free time. One thing I notice already here: I have a lot of free time, because at no time of day do I have to drop what I'm doing or not start projects. Today for example: lots more unpacking, rearranged Francesca's cage again, fixed the kitchen faucet (loose set screw), went shopping for supplies for first day at work, and installed the second air conditioner. In the dark times, I'd have considered myself productive for accomplishing any one of these things. And I still have my moments - moments of anxiety, moments of gloom, moments of wondering if there's a mistake in it all - and when I have them, I just go look for a project to start, and around here there are plenty. Concentration is still something I need to work on. Follow-through is still something I need to work on. But... this place is healing me. This time I do not reserve the right to walk away if there's something wrong with the job. Need the money too badly. Need the resume piece too badly. I want to stay there awhile, suffer if that's what it requires, and rebuild the rest of my life. This is the good and useful kind of suffering. I am not naming the place where I work. Don't want him following me; don't want them stomping on me for talking about them on a blog. If I have stories to tell about the place, first of all emphasis on have to tell, it'd have to be important, and second, I'll sanitize the hell out of it, purge all trace of identity from the key players, and generally make it AnyCompany. (More than likely, any posts I make about events at work will be technological - "got to play with this neat new toy today" kind of thing.) I dread the ride there every day. Long. Boring. Goes through weird part of town. Figure it's going to be awhile before I can afford a car again, and even then I'm not sure driving to the place is that much better than riding there, so in the shorter term I may buy an Eee or similar (what's the generic term for a "netbook"?) to have something to do on the bus/train. I'd have posted this thing days ago. We don't have the Internet situation sorted out here, mostly due to key components being in boxes - and a job that keeps me gone from 7am to 7pm, so I don't get time to go through boxes now. The job? Verdict still out, although it's to be said the money is good, so I can suffer through a lot. I do notice I've started thinking again. Concentration is still an issue, so I've made an effort to keep notes so I can look and figure out where I am. Also started keeping chocolate-covered coffee beans in reserve, to battle the 2pm slump. I can say, until I get the machinery a bit smoother as far as going to work and coming home at reasonable times, I'm probably not doing Saturday Market again for awhile. I lost track of how many times I gave up, believed I would never be at this job, never be back doing this again. Even now I think it's too good, maybe it won't last, maybe it's just a teaser and I'll be back to shit jobs and rain for another eight years. It's not easy work - I'm dealing with code that is, not Lovecraftian, but not of this earth, it is vast, sprawling, decentralized, and uncommented. I hit my elbows constantly on the sharp corners of unclear business requirements - that sometimes the code doesn't do what you expect because there was a hole in the client's expectations. And you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way. I wished for this. It isn't even about the money. This is what I do. The other half of what I do is art, and that's the next major project, getting it to where I can draw at home. It'll get done. Things have a tendency to get done now. Not always in a timely fashion, because this week at least I seem to have about two hours of free time a day - but it will get done. The job takes it out of me, but I find I don't mind - I come home to a home and to such astonishing amenities as a bed. First paycheck comes the 20th and reflects four days of work. That one, although still the largest paycheck I've had in years, will be anemic, and will probably be gone instantly to pay bills. The second one, the paycheck that arrives the first week of September, that one is the one that changes my life. That's how it works for me with these programming jobs. The first paycheck isn't the world-changer. It pays off some bills, it gets us the expenses we need to survive until the second one, but whatever's wrong in our lives is still wrong after that first check. The second one fixes things and they stay fixed for as long as I hold that job. And this time around, the goal is to build infrastructure for down the road. I don't know how long I'll have this job. In the first interview they asked me where I wanted to be in five years and I said "right here" - but I don't know that something won't go wrong. That's why, even though Saturday Market is no longer critical, and will in the near term be treated as merely a fun waste of a weekend, I'm still going to start buying serious equipment - a proper EZ-Up with black sidewalls, better lighting and tables, etc - so that if the job folds or something, I can go back to Saturday Market full time and show 'em how it's done - or when I go back for leisure, it won't be with busted, sanity-absorbing equipment. Likewise, when I get to buying computers, I want to buy the top of the line stuff, simply so the computers stay usable longer because in five years I don't actually know where I'll be or where my money is coming from. Don't know if I can justify some eight thousand dollar Mac, but certainly I want to break the trend of subsisting on 1990s hardware. (Or at least start over with a different decade.) Which is well in keeping with how I feel lately: as if I am, if not gone back in time to 2000-2001 to try it again, at least facing 2009 with the same set of tools I used back then. And for once it's not about looking back and saying "oh, the last time I had it good, that's when I fucked up" - no, 1999 through early 2001 worked because I was doing it right. It crumbled once we let Douchepillow start making our decisions for us. XLV: The end, and a new beginning I seem to waste a lot of time analyzing my past, and I often make the claim that most of my problems can only be fixed there. This job is miraculous in that I am essentially allowed to rebuild myself and repair most of the things I thought could only be fixed in the past. This is a massive break and I'm careful not to underestimate the limb they went out on to hire me. I wasn't their best candidate. They hired me because they like me personally. The existence of this job at which I am now employed may suggest I never fully knew the ground truth here - obviously Perl jobs sometimes do exist here, just not visible in the ways in which I was searching in 2001. But then, my job search in 2001 was ridiculously hampered - newspapers only running employment classifieds one day a week, "employment weekly" magazines running more ads for trade schools than actual job listings, and maybe two hours a day in which to use a computer with a net connection, what with my computer basically positioned on the hallway and Douchegolf hovering over my shoulder. This job could have existed in 2001, I'd never have seen it. What would we have done without him in the mix? Not sure. Moved earlier, and had more money reserves? Moved later, and had time to get one more job under me? Moved better, taken the time to research things instead of taking his word for it, planned ahead and gotten motel rooms for each night of the drive, found a way to get the ground truth before deciding whether to move at all? Don't know. I do think a friend who was going to move with us stayed behind when she realized we were serious about taking him. We didn't realize it was him versus her. If we hadn't brought him, we'd have brought her, and I'd have been back on my feet sooner because she doesn't destroy people for a hobby. How much of my life is wasted because of a decision we didn't have the courage to make - that the day he told us he didn't get that loan, didn't even try, and therefore flubbed his only obligation, we should have cut him loose and told him to move when he was ready? Looking back is not always about wishing for a better time. This may have just begun the best time of my life - opportunities opening up for me now that have been closed for eight long years. No, I'm looking back to make sure I know the score, make sure there aren't any more of the same pitfalls and stupid failure modes to bite me again. The last time I was making this kind of money, we were still broke. Then it occurs to me: there are a couple reasons why I kept coming up broke despite making bank. One: we were saving up for the move, and therefore afraid to actually spend the money to improve our lives, on the theory that once we moved, then I'd get a nice job and we could start owning nice things. (I didn't plan on an eight-year gap.) And two: travel expenses ate a lot of that money. When I worked at Notre Dame, I had to live in a motel room all week. I think I was paying more for the motel room a month than I was paying for my apartment. That was also the job where not a week went by without something falling off my car. It is possible to make a lot of money and not be rich. So, note to self: don't get a car that blows up every week, don't rent two apartments. That's not as insightful as I'd hoped. Job longevity? Well, I'm a 34-year-old junior programmer. One perspective is that I am experienced but still eager to learn; another is that I'm a has-been who can't code his way out of a wet paper bag without asking help. There are issues with my interpersonal skills - a story for another time - and that may be the thing, rather than my technical skills, that could trip me up. For starters, I promised them they wouldn't see me having a bad day, but then I had a bad day and it showed. I have to get used to trusting people again, and to being trusted, being able to say "OK I'll take that task from you" and actually deliver, after years of realizing I can't complete the tasks I begin. So on the one hand, I have room to grow, and on the other hand, they may begin to feel they hired me to already be at a certain level and grow from there, not to grow to that level. They have said they have enough work for me - and few enough people - to keep me busy well into next year, just with what they have now. So if they canned me, they need someone else in a hurry to take those hours and do that work. But that's not to say, once those jobs are done, they could decide to stop assigning new tasks to me and cut me loose, fire Kenney Jones and hire a drummer that can actually jam. Which means, even if I think the job is a sure thing, I need to be thinking a couple of chess moves ahead. I mean, once I've had this job, it'll be easier to get the next one, I hope it doesn't come to that, but unlike last time, I mean to have lifeboats in place. One reason I want to buy top-shelf computer hardware is to get me access - and keep for awhile access - to current software, and not end up in the boat I was in, where I can't learn current Internet technologies because they just don't work on my system; learning AJAX or ActionScript on a 400MHz Mac is like learning Java on an A1200 - you can but you'll only learn the limitations of the platform. I never want to be eight years behind the curve again. If I'm at this job for the next eight years, I want to come out of it in 2017 knowing 2017 moves. Epilogue: New skies I've had the idea for years that the day we finally got him out of our lives, the Rastport post about it would be titled "This roommate has been deleted." It was a long road but I finally get to use that title. It's August 26 and my Eee has just arrived. The first use for it I could find: using it as a wireless bridge from the Macs in the living room to the cable modem in the bedroom. That's why I haven't posted lately: all this Rastport was on a machine that could not go online. This doesn't solve our home network issues but it makes an amusing stopgap. I go online and first thing I discover is that I've been scooped. (I dare not go to Rastport from work, though they don't mind me checking my email on lunch.) OK fine, so Carl beat me to it. (Or actually Douchebronco beat me to it, and Carl just relayed it.) Doesn't mean I can't still tell the story my way. Besides, you sure won't find out from Doucheblazer that I got a job. Hell, I relish the idea that he thinks I'm still unemployed and unemployable. I can enjoy now the fact that he's wrong about everything - and imagine with a smile the consequences of his delusional state crashing into unfiltered reality day after day, while I build a life better than anything he will ever have. Revenge, the Klingons say, is a dish best served cold, and it may be August, but I can imagine the cold chill he got when he finally realized what we did. But I much prefer the saying: living well is the best revenge. All I did was take back what wasn't his. I took back my life. The rest seems to follow naturally. Things just aren't about him anymore. And that's how we wanted it - the one thing he couldn't allow - for us to just go about our lives and not deal with him if we don't fucking want to. This post obviously deals a lot with him, but you know, other than finishing the telling of this tale, we just don't think about him anymore, except to laugh. The story is by no means over, but it is ours to write.

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