Hey Summer, Where ya Been?
A= This is moving week. Yes, it’s adieu to ye olde artsy garret in favor of a portion of giant old mansion built in the nineteen-teens, with my two pals, Ginger and Carmelita. It’s not that I don’t need, love and crave solitude, Henshaw; it’s that too much of it in an enforced way magnifies my weird little proclivities to the max. Soon, the decoupage is everywhere and things are organized in a ROY G BIV sorting system made up in a fit of 2 a.m. inspiration. You understand. Merely having people in the next room, or the next wing, as this gigantor apartment will allow, is comforting. It tells me there’s order, and there’s dinner taking place at a normal hour in the next room, which I am welcome to join, or to decline, politely.

The folks moving out left things in the mansion house—which I may just call the place here—with a wink and nod to a great Jenny Lewis tune—anyway, they left it kind of a mess. This means that Carmelita and Ginger and I have spent the past two weeks dumping things and scrubbing things and shouting, “Oh god, that’s disgusting!” a lot, upon revealing items such as particularly gigantic dead cockroaches, rat droppings and dog turds in kitchen cabinets.
No one ever said the road to the life of beauty was a smooth one.

So, we’ve been cleaning. Meanwhile, I’ve been in the early stages of trying to put together a syllabus for my classes this fall, and-! working on two stories I want to have ready for workshop when classes start up again. This, between: putting in many a mind-numbing, but necessary hour at ye olde call center of doom and writing articles for various local publications. That and I can’t seem to shake this weirdo summer cold which tells me that all I really want to do is sleep all the time.

Meanwhile, I’ve suggested to Carmelita and Ginger, the notion of creating some Uruk-hai from the pits of the steamy swamps west of Beach Town to help us move things from our two apartments to the new one, come Saturday. Seems their only close male friend is outta town for the weekend, which brings our collective grand total of close male friends here in town to zero.
Not that we need the menfolk. The three of us have enough moves under our belts to be able to move our big unwieldy wooden furniture in our damn sleep at this point, anyway, I suspect. We’ll be fine. Freaking exhausted, but fine.
Gotta go, now. See ya.

(Meanwhile: Listening nonstop to these songs on the National’s newest record that Marshall keeps feeding me, one by one. Argh.)