2 Oct 2023 - 2:57pm
What am I doing? Why am I even here?
I'm back to pricing storage spaces nearby. The web specials are quite affordable.
My morning started well enough. Now it's a lake of shit. It doesn't take much to trigger that kind of hideous transformation. It never really has.
There's a timeline that's being followed here. It started about 7 years ago. It ends somewhere around my 60th birthday. That's when Shelby-Alice completes her MA program. I've committed -at least in my own mind- to being here for that long, to help to make that happen. It's also around the time when the lease on this place starts to run out; the managment company routinely requires our signatures for a re-up at year's end. An arrival at several decision gates, all layed out at roughly the same point. I need to start planning for that arrival now. I can't go on like this.
Maybe a 5x5 space could work. Just store the crap that's normally out of sight anyway. Stuff in closets or in the garage. Its absence from the house wouldn't attract as much attention as, say, clearing out my office might. Although if I boxed up all the loose crap on my desk and stored that, it would just look like I tidied up. I could make a number of brief and discreet moving trips, spread out over several months.
Once again, the thought of doing this makes me feel sick in my heart. And it also offers a possility of... what? Hope? Hope for what? An absence (or cessation at least) of heart-sickness? Maybe?
Just before things went to shit a short while ago, I was getting ready to tell the story of how I didn't throw more bad mistakes (in 2015) after earlier bad mistakes (made back in 1999). But today is October 2, and I just discovered a diary entry I wrote 2 years ago today, but didn't get around to posting. Maybe that's more appropriate for this horrible day.
2 years ago today I'd just spent 48 hours in a frantic -and futile- attempt to get Mom's apartment even partially cleaned up, in preparation for Nils's arrival with a moving van. It's possible that even then Mom knew she was sick. There had been a plan underway for some months to move her back up to Oregon, so she could be close to my brother and his wife.
Mom was a hoarder. Hadn't always been. It became a problem over the last 25 years. After we moved her down to Livermore in 2010, it got out of control. Several trips were made over the years, either by myself or my brother, to clear a path through the mass of... stuff... she'd accreted. Sometimes to make space to shampoo a dog urine-soaked carpet. Sometimes to replace a refrigerator filled with rotting food.
I was out of PTO, so I gave myself a weekend to do the sorting and discarding, so that my brother could get in w/ a handcart and load out the stuff that hadn't been donated or dumpstered. I couldn't even make a dent in it.
Every. Single. Item... had to be thoroughly evaluated and pre-sorted into several pre-sort piles, which soon started spilling into one another. Because there was no clear surface large enough to pile anything and still walk in a clear path between piles. And after the end of the last day I went back to my motel room and got despairingly drunk. I felt like I'd let Mom down. I felt like I'd let Nils down. Even though it had been a Sisyphean task.
Anyway. Here we go, back to 2021. For a minute. My pre-amble is now larger than what I wrote on that night 2 years ago.
So. Here we are again. I'm writing this now, but I don't know how or when it'll be integrated into the (un)winding, fly-specked mummy bandage of this goddamned 2-decades-and-counting story I'm trying to defibrillate.
I'm currently sitting at a desk in a motel room on the main drag in Livermore, CA. Will I change that name to something fictional in a Peter S. Beagle sort of way? Maybe. We'll see. Right now I'm just flying along on the 3 little bottles of hard liquor I just tipped back, typing madly, drunk-ass Hemingway style on the cheap-ass Bluetooth keyboard i got for the express purpose of recording my life's disintegration into the Notes app on this ancient beater iPad I inherited from Shek many years ago. "How beat"? You ask. This beat: when I took it down the street to the Apple products repair shop in Burbank... 3 years ago? (What a comparitively innocent fucking time, thinks me)... after the polite and courteous customer service guy informed me that fixing the cracked screen would run me a minimum of 200 clams, I went home and patched the cracks with packing tape... THAT beat, ya wise ass fucks).
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