uh

It has been quite a while since I've written in here.

The squalor level of my apartment and of my life in general has not changed much for a couple of months now. That is, I haven't done anything much about it, no new cleaning or organizing, since my last post. I'm too comfortable at this level of squalor. I did have eye surgery a few weeks ago and it took me out of action for a couple days, but my inertia has been high even without that.

A week ago, when I was thinking about someone coming over, I realized that I'd need to put considerable time and effort, and some money, into making this place at all nice, let alone minimally clean and neat. I really wanted to do it, but I'm not going to have a visit from that person after all, so that brief spell of motivation has ended.

Last week was very painful, mood- and life-wise, and very squalid. I didn't really leave my apartment for a week. I've been smoking lots of pot and tobacco, and listening to music, and freaking out and crying and calling the crisis counseling hotline and my two friends, and demanding that my friends come over and bring me cigarettes so I don't have to go out, and calling in sick to work, and just generally not coping. In other words I threw the shit-fit of the year. In other words I've been quite ill.

(I've also been on my computer literally almost nonstop, reading message boards and news and blogs and e-mail and Craigslist, googling scandals, downloading music, playing music, making playlists, loading songs onto my mp3 player, writing in my offline journal, leaving a few friendly / clever / sarcastic / desperate posts, and playing online Boggle for hours on end. Writing and posting this. Internet addiction AHOY.)

What set it off? Some stuff happened. I abruptly saw how fucked up my life is, how many and deep are the ruts I'm in, how stagnant I've become, and how lonely and needy I am. It was hard to stand. I also had a brief sense of a hoped-for future, but it was totally contingent on something outside of my control, which disappeared because I was reacting so intensely, and kind of aggressively, to the uncertainty. (This all came with the experience of sort of falling for someone, but I don't want to get into that here.) And the nonstop pot-smoking MIGHT not be helping. ...I should probably make a list of what to do and what not to do, for future reference, just in case anyone that great should ever appear in my life again, so that I don't fuck it up in EXACTLY the same way that I always have.

I also wrote a lot about what I was feeling and thinking, as I always do in this kind of situation, but when I'm that freaked out my feeling and thinking become incredibly intense and insular -- maybe writing about it feeds that, since I resist any kind of form and just free-associate in fragments and short bursts, making changes on an obsessive theme. I don't know. Maybe writing tends to take the place of really thinking or feeling things through, for me. It seems so lazy and meaningless and escapist and hermetic to me now, the way I do it -- it's just a weird habit. I also do it because I'm bored and lonely and I can't seem to change that, and being way up my own overdramatic ass is all I have to occupy myself with.

As a person of diverse mood experiences, I now know it isn't literally the end of my life, but it still hurts. My dishes and laundry are backed up, and I have about 15 overdue library items, one of which is not mine. As always, I feel I'll be doing well if I can keep up with the most basic kinds of life maintenance. Well, or "well enough." Ugh.

While I was upset last weekend I called another friend, someone I hadn't been in touch with for several years; she'd seemed glad to see me by chance in the grocery store last summer and had asked me to call her sometime. On the phone I didn't talk about my state of mind. I just let her fill me in on her life instead. She said she wanted to get together this weekend, and expressed some interest in my apartment and my present situation. I might have her over. Then again I might want to meet her somewhere else.

OKAY.

Not hot anymore, clean floor, new fridge. New home for blog, too.

(My computer kind of died in the heat on Sunday, causing untold stress and woe, but it has come back to life and seems fine now.)

The new fridge is white, and taller but no wider than my old one, and has a freezer that actually works, and produces a low sci-fi-esque hum with a few quiet rattles. I like it.

Now my floor is cluttered with boxes of books and other stuff.

I've decided I can put away my crappy bookself stereo (I use my computer and mp3 player for music now) and some of my older books and CDs, to make more space for myself and the things I need the most.

Over the door to my apartment there's a large shelf-like storage nook -- obviously the layout of this place is fairly insane -- which is now occupied by boxes and piles of books and a few old posters and records, but if I organize that stuff more tightly, and maybe even get rid of some of it, it'll free up a good deal more space up there. Ditto the very top shelf of my closet.

Annoyingly, both of those places are very hard to reach, which is why I haven't made better use of them before now. (Example: to get to the space over the door I have to clear off a narrow shelf -- fortunately built-in, and sturdy -- and climb onto it from a chair.) Still, cutting down on clutter and making more room in my limited living space has to take precedence.

Deciding which books to put away is always hard, but I find it kind of absorbing too, in that it obliges me to reorder and prioritize my interests. As with sorting out papers, I have to resist the temptation to grab something interesting that I haven't looked at for a while and read it right then instead of finishing the project.

I'd like to hide my huge, heavy, ugly, barely-used-for-months TV/VCR, too, but it doesn't fit anywhere. Maybe I'll ask K. if he wants it for a while, but I'm pretty sure he won't.

I haven't forgotten my vow to sort out the box of papers that used to be on and under my coffee table, either. My new goal for that is to have it done by, um, Sunday night.

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Citra-Solv works pretty well on grimy walls and tile, and smells nice; too bad it's so expensive. I've cleaned some areas of the walls and kitchen cupboard doors with it, but basically my entire apartment would have to be doused in Citra-Solv and wiped down to make a really noticeable difference. I can do a little at a time, though.

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This is the story of my struggle...
I reached out for my credit card...
In a super store
Surrounded by luxury goods
I need a freezer
I need a hi-fi...
OH NO! I LEFT IT IN MY OTHER SUIT!
"Capital, It Fails Us Now," Gang of Four, 1981

(A non-sonic extract can't do it justice without the note of sheer panic in the scream at the end, or the bassline.)

WAY TOO GODDAMN HOT

Rug out, floor swept and mopped, some areas of walls washed, furniture mostly back in place. New fridge tomorrow. Don't ask me about sorting out any boxes. Cleaning will resume when I am not HALF DEAD FROM THE HEAT: 97 degrees Fahrenheit today, highs of 100 predicted for tomorrow and Monday, heat indices around 110. I mildly dislike and disapprove of home air conditioning in this climatic region except for about two weeks each summer, and we are in the second of those weeks now.

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Disturbing conversation with landlord while rug was being taken out. Very nice guy in many ways, but he talks proudly about, for example, the time that one of his sons almost killed two young black men who were harassing a couple of white girls; his son beat them up to the point that it was entirely possible that he might have killed them, which scared him badly, not so much because they would've been dead but because of the consequences he could have faced. Knowing my landlord a bit and having met his sons, I see no reason to doubt this.

Landlord also mentioned startling facts about his own residence: "I have tons of doors and stained glass windows and miscellaneous fixtures in storage, from all these old Victorian houses I own. My own [slightly dilapidated Victorian] house has nine bedrooms. I use six of 'em for storage space, plus a couple garages. My one son said 'Dad, you should get rid of all this stuff.' I said 'But when I'm gone, you'll inherit all of it!' Son said, 'Okay -- get more!'" These people are fucking crazy, more than a little scary, and Persons of Squalor in their own ways to boot, it would seem, but they've been nice to me overall.

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Watched Team America: World Police for the first time this weekend. I liked it a lot, especially the songs, but cannot cope with the self-satisfaction of the guys who made it. To wit (from an October 2004 interview):

Stone: It's about optimism, though. That's the big thing about the movie; that end message is about American optimism. And that's the difference between America and the rest of the world, because if you go to Europe, people are not optimistic about the future there. And Americans do have a naive optimism about that -- it's not just us, and the fact that we live in this L.A. bubble -- I think all Americans have this naive optimism and have for a long time. And a lot of times it's naive, and it's unfounded, and it's even wrong, but it's somehow that optimism that keeps America looking forward and trying to make the world better. And I really do think that's something that's unique to America that doesn't exist in a lot of the world.

And it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Stone: Exactly. A lot of times it fuels the good things. Sure, it's stupid, and a lot of times it's a big smile while eating a big shit sandwich, but you just keep going, you know?

Parker: But another thing that goes along with the optimism part of it is basically the idea of, well, if I'm not going to have a fucking great time and I'm not going to really appreciate and enjoy and say life is great, then there really is no hope. Because all of the hope for the world is that there can be a great life, and to me, I'm proof of that, that there can be a great life. And yes, it's all about trying to dole that out to as many people as possible, but it's also about, when you have a great country, and it all works, and your life is awesome, then be able to say so! But for some reason, it's almost taboo to say, My fucking life is awesome, and I have a great time, and I have a sweet house and a nice car. People are like [using a scolding voice], "Hey, hey, hey, hey!"

Stone: Especially the richest people in the world, which we know some of in this town, you know? [Angry voice] "The world is fucked up!"

Parker: Look, we were below middle class growing up, and I had a dream that someday things were gonna be better, and I assume that's the way it is in Third World countries. So, if you're not going to enjoy the dream, then there's no hope for anything.

"A sweet house and a nice car" -- the very definition of "a great life" for most Americans.

I don't know for a fact that I would make different choices if I had a lot of money at my disposal -- though I think, and certainly hope, that I would -- but I tend to be offended rather than impressed by displays of wealth. (I am also offended by empty displays of righteousness from the wealthy, but I don't think they should shut up about inequities -- on the contrary, I think they should talk about them all the time, plus give away a whole lot of money, to organizations and individuals personally selected by me.) My inability to hide this attitude has caused me trouble in the past, in the workplace and socially. It's not like I launch into rants; I try to be polite, but the effort probably shows.

If I could easily afford a one-bedroom apartment in my neighborhood rather than a run-down micro-efficiency, plus really good health insurance and a semi-nice stereo, I would be materially comfortable beyond anything I've known as an adult or allowed myself to hope for, and FAR beyond the means of most of the population of the planet. In fact, I already am immeasurably better off than most people in the world, and my sense of entitlement to same is not large.

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It's hard for me to define what socioeconomic level I come from. I never had to worry about having enough to eat, or clothes to wear, or a roof over my head. On the other hand, my parents were constantly stressed about money (they had to declare bankruptcy at one point); the arguments and tension over money matters were endless. They never owned a house, but insisted on renting in expensive suburbs, moving about every other year due to financial and/or marital crises. (From fifth grade on my schoolmates were, almost uniformly, from families ranging from "very comfortable" to "very rich," and I absorbed my parents' feelings of being outclassed by those around me.) My father had a hard time hanging onto jobs; my mother worked only intermittently, and resented having to do so at all; neither of them had careers, just a succession of medium-crappy white-collar and pink-collar jobs. My mother grew up in poverty during the Depression and had lifelong envy-fantasies about aristocracy and wealth, while my father's family, as far as I could tell, had been middle-to-upper-middle class in a style that might have been called "shabby genteel" in the first half of the last century. Then there is the fact that my parents basically hated each other but couldn't quite be bothered to divorce; my father in particular seemed to resent what he experienced as the economic burden of having a family. I have the distinct impression that both of them regarded my early academic success primarily as a sort of retirement fund.

At some point I think I just said to myself, approximately, "Fuck it, these people are nuts and I cannot care about any of this bullshit." Unfortunately, by then I had also sustained the kind of emotional damage that makes it hard to actively care very much about anything at all, so I'm not personally a good example of any kind of alternative, but I like to think that I can now sometimes recognize theory and practice that makes better sense and is more useful than what I absorbed early in my life, and can now maybe learn a bit from it.

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This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin

*

"...my morals end at 100 degrees fahrenheit. when the temp's above 100 i can wear shorts, drink at work, stab people, steal stuff from people's desks, etc." -- M@tt He1geson: Real Name, No Gimmicks

Meh. Too hot.

In the last couple days I've done a lot of running around to various appointments via bus -- not a huge problem in itself, but having to scuttle around so much in the heat has taken a toll on my motivation to clean and organize, and I'm not even going to talk about how hot it is in my apartment. It's supposed to stay in the 90s through the weekend, too. Feh.

*

Still no word from landlord. Stuff still in boxes. This evening I'll try again to pry a definite answer out of landlord about when he's going to have my fridge replaced and rug taken out. I'll also go through at least one of those boxes, so help me god, and get the contents whittled down and in some sort of order, even if I end up having to put them back into the box in the unlikely event that carpet removal is imminent.

Problems with sorting:

1. Temptation to read everything closely as I go
2. Getting upset about some of the mail, esp. things about health insurance and money matters

I do have some empty file folders. I think I'll label a few with likely categories before I start, so I can put things into them as I work. That should make it go faster.

*

I haven't been to the YWCA for a couple of weeks. My back has been giving me some trouble lately, but I want to go tomorrow anyway, after I've done my sorting. Maybe I'll just stretch and then use the pool. Yeah, that sounds good.

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"Never keep up with the Joneses; drag them down to your level. It's cheaper." -- Quentin Crisp

Merchandise, it keeps us in line
Common sense says it's by design...
You are not what you own
Fugazi, "Merchandise," 1989

E-WAY ARE-AY E-THAY ILTHIEST-FAY EOPLE-PAY IN-AY E-THAY ORLD-WAY!

That's "We Are The Filthiest People In The World" in Pig Latin (what else?), from a scene that was cut from John Waters' trash masterpiece Pink Flamingos (1972) but appears on the DVD. Words fail me when it comes to this film, but the plot hinges on two families in a battle to the death for the coveted title of The Filthiest People Alive. Forget Squalor Level 4, this is Squalor Level Ten Million. Not for the faint of heart or stomach, but I think everyone should see it at least once. Try to envision a 300-lb. drag queen skipping merrily through the woods outside of Baltimore with her two partners in filth and crime, all chanting this slogan at the top of their lungs. I find it heartwarming, but then I would.

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Yesterday I did laundry, washed dishes, cleaned up my computer's hard drive, did some other minor maintenance-type tasks, and got another empty box, into which I threw a bunch more stuff -- papers, small electricals & cords -- in anticipation of having my carpet removed. In the evening I called my landlord and asked him what day and time I could expect him to replace the refrigerator and take out the water-damaged rug, so that I could be sure to be here to help with moving the furniture and putting it back. (Late last week, when the fridge problem occurred, he told me that it would be on "Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday" -- that is, yesterday, today, or tomorrow.)

During our phone conversation it soon became clear, without his ever quite saying so, that my landlord regretted having offered -- repeat: offered -- to take out my rug, and would rather not do it. I said "If you and Chris [the caretaker] aren't going to be able to remove the carpet, it's OK, but I need to know so that I can plan accordingly." He simply would not give me a straight answer no matter how I approached the matter, and could not tell me when they would be here since he hadn't checked with Chris (who is his son). Finally, defeated, I asked him to call me back after he'd talked to Chris and at least let me know when they'd be here, since I have several things going on this week and want to be present for whatever they end up doing. He assured me that he would. He still hasn't. FUME. I need to either pack more stuff up or unpack and start organizing; I'm not about to try moving this furniture (some of which is quite heavy) and disposing of the wall-to-wall carpet myself. Meanwhile I have fewer piles lying around, replaced by several boxfuls of jumbled stuff. GREAT.

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Thank you to the people who read this blog and those who comment on it. I'm flattered, and glad someone is enjoying it besides me.

Coffee table update; major apartment upheaval soon

Coffee table has been cleared off and cleaned. Next steps: sift, cull, and organize the stuff that used to be on and under the table and is now in a large cardboard box.

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After some recent trouble with the electricity in my apartment -- it's in a large house, built in 1886, that has not been very well maintained -- my landlord agreed to replace my horrid old refrigerator with a new one, and to remove the nasty wall-to-wall carpet which has been damaged by the leaking fridge. Overall this is good news, but it makes me anxious too: taking out the carpet will mean shifting around everything in here, and there are loose books under the bed, piles of stuff in corners, etc. It's all supposed to happen early this coming week, so I've got more boxing to do. I should get another box or two today.

It will be great to have a new or newish fridge, with a freezer that actually works. I just hope it won't be ugly brown like the last one, and I hope it won't be too loud either, since in this apartment the fridge is never less than ten feet away from me. It took ages to get used to the noise this old one makes, but by now it hardly registers.

I'm definitely looking forward to the carpet being gone -- I won't have to worry any more about getting it clean, for one thing, and though the wood floor beneath it is not in top shape, I think it will be easier for me to keep clean than the carpet was. ("ctrl-s, this implement, with the long handle and the bunch of straw-like stuff at one end, is known as a broom.") I plan to get a nice throw rug too, from Target or wherever.

Having the carpet taken out will also give me a chance to rearrange my furniture. Unfortunately I am bad at envisioning better ways to have it; this amount of furniture wouldn't be a problem in even a slightly larger room, but here there's just too much of it for the space, and not enough of it is storage-oriented. Wish I could put a few things in the basement, but das is verboten. I can't see getting rid of any of it, either. There must be something I can do. Any improvement at all will be wonderful, I tell myself.

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I also need to do two loads of laundry today, and finish washing the dishes that are in my sink.

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Saw a mouse in here earlier this morning. Not unprecedented, but very unusual for the summer months. WTF? There isn't any food lying around.

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Squalor Book of the Week: Down and Out in Paris And London, George Orwell.

These three weeks were squalid and uncomfortable, and evidently there was worse coming, for my rent would be due before long. Nevertheless, things were not a quarter as bad as I had expected. For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, ‘I shall be starving in a day or two—shocking, isn’t it?’ And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne.

And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

The entire book is available online, here.

Waste, emptiness, nests, boxes

I'm feeling very disorganized and procrastination-prone, and tired too, and I have a bunch of errands to do today. Here are some things that are on my mind.

Waste. "To use, consume, spend, or expend thoughtlessly or carelessly. [...] From Middle English wasten, from Old North French waster, from Latin vastare, to make empty, from vastus, empty."

From a 1966 book review: "Pynchon's intricacies are meant to testify to the waste -- a key word in The Crying of Lot 49 -- of imagination that first creates and is then enslaved by its own plottings, its machines, the products of its technology." -- Richard Poirier, New York Times

(Auto-suggestion: don't buy so much crap in the first place. I've gotten much better about this, partly out of economic necessity, but I could always do better yet -- do I really need a VitaminWater, in a plastic bottle, almost every day? -- and somehow I still have about eleven lipsticks. Well, at least those are small.)

Empty. "In Old English Ic eom aemtig could mean 'I am empty,' 'I am unoccupied,' or 'I am unmarried.' The sense 'unoccupied, at leisure,' which did not survive Old English, points to the derivation of aemtig from the Old English word aemetta, 'leisure, rest.' The word aemetta may in turn go back to the Germanic root mot-, meaning 'ability, leisure.' In any case, Old English aemtig also meant 'vacant,' a sense that was destined to take over the meaning of the word. Empty, the Modern English descendant of Old English aemtig, has come to have the sense 'idle,' so that one can speak of empty leisure."

Nest. "See empty nest; feather one's nest; foul one's nest; stir up a hornet's nest."

At times in the past my bed has been covered with books and papers and CDs and clothes, so that I had to shove it all aside to make room to sleep, but somehow I got over having to have a literal nest (aside from my apartment itself, that is) and the bed itself is no longer cluttered. That more or less coincided with getting a laptop a few years ago and using it in bed all the time -- most of my reading and writing and music is now in this one box. But now there's computer squalor to deal with: defragging the hard drive, backing stuff up to the external drive, scanning for viruses and spyware, deleting cookies, etc. I tend to put those things off for no good reason, but I do get around to them once in a while, and my computer seems to be OK.

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Yesterday was a bad day for several reasons, but I did manage to get two empty boxes for the stuff on my coffee table. There they are, ready to go. Later today or tonight I will begin the cleaning. Woo.