Writing While Eating

There was a short story contest (under 1000 words) at Red Room but the deadline passed a couple hours ago. I didn’t have time anyway. I didn’t have time to go work out today either. I haven’t worked out in two months thanks to B-Man prep and noontime meetings and moving out and the gods only know what else. Today was the what else: Tried to get traction on a project and then went downstairs for a chee’burger. Those would have been unacceptable excuses back when I was working out regularly. Soon I will return to a more acceptable frame of mind with regards to exercise. But with regards to writing? Hold not your breath. As the Padre says, writers write. Am I a writer? I’m a guy with a job and a new apartment.

Being the sort that craves adventure, I don’t at all mind that I am still sleeping on a foam pad on the floor in the same dusty sleeping bag I used for cover in my little shed at Burning Man (those were some comfy digs, I wish I had pictures). My head is in the bedroom and my legs in the hall because when I hurriedly moved my crap all by myself I hadn’t the time to organize it, just dropped it where there was room and went for another load. So the bedroom has bookshelves on their sides and bureaus upside down and boxes piled and drawers stacked and basically resembles a messy closet with messy closets. I’ll fix it up soon but so far I’ve been home very little and the stuff-moving time I have had has been used to clear out the front part first because that’s where the bookshelves will go. It’s all been a matter of getting sense for where things will go and then discovering where the front of the line really is and starting there. Maybe that’s from my manufacturing engineering background. I don’t own a bed anyway, so what’s the hurry. I bought a vacuum cleaner and placed the kitchen table. Whoopee!

Actually I sort of have a bed in the form of a hide-a-bed couch my father bought in the early 1980s and it’s still in great shape except for what I did to it dragging it by myself up the concrete steps. Yes, I really did move everything all by myself. None of this help from friends crap. I’m learning to accept a lot of things about myself and one of them is that I’m just not very collaborative. If a task really requires two, fine, I’ll work with someone on it (romance comes to mind), but for most things I just want to do it my way. This has a lot to do at a very basic level with my relative low success in the corporate world but I’ll grouse about that some other day. Suffice it to say I not only didn’t want any help, I didn’t want anyone to know what I was doing or where I was going. My wife had to know what I was doing, of course. Eventually I told her where. The word has gone out to very few others. I suppose it makes sense that at this time I just want to be left alone.

I mean in terms of my nest and sanctuary. It’s mine, I’m still dealing with the uncertainties, leave me alone. But I don’t like actually being alone particularly and so have worked at the shop whenever I could. The Lectric Lurveseat is again a live project, and between that and tomorrow night’s par-tay I won’t be at the apartment much until Sunday sometime.

Except I have to do laundry. Well, no! I bought underwear yesterday. That’s a guy’s normal response to the need to do laundry, right? Just buy more underwear.

More about the apartment: My dust-covered motorcycle, which was hidden non-operative in the garage for over ten years, is now at the head of my parking space, a twice-daily reminder of how much I have left undone. I am inclined to sell it as is rather than invest the time and effort to rebuild the carburetors and make it run and sell it for a few hundred dollars more. I know, that’s good return for the time. But only if everything goes right and besides I have other things I’d rather do.

So how’s it at a deeper level? I wrote this in comments yesterday somewhere else:

My first night in my new aptmt (Monday) was fine and neutral until I slipped and broke a glass, one of my grandfather's whiskey glasses but nothing valuable or sentimental, and somehow that was just the trigger I needed. One wailing incoherent hour later I was on the phone with She Whom I Can Now Call My Ex with all the confessions of I don't know what I'm doing and she's still my baby and all that stuff that twenty six years will plant in a person; yet the next day, after she had fed me dinner and we were dancing around the concept of staying or going "home", the conversation released the toxins in our relationship and I suddenly realized I didn't have to put up with it or make nice or sweep it under the rug or anything. For once I not only felt like leaving but had somewhere to go! So I did.

Been fine ever since.

And it’s true: I was more buoyant yesterday and am today than I have been for a long while. There are always good moods and bad, of course, but the added lift of being out from under The Relationship seems to be real. This isn’t to say anything negative about It or Her, believe it or not. By and large we had (or have) an excellent relationship with great communication and a lot of common interest and humor. There was just another side to it that I did not acknowledge as real for years (decades?) that became more significant over the past few (or ten) and I just didn’t want to ignore it anymore and keep on being a malcontent; and since that’s a subject both deep and broad that might take a lifetime to explore properly, there’ll be no more about it today.

Oh, it’s after one, I suppose I should “work”.