Hello blank page, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again. And you know when it’s the first time you’ve spoken in the morning? It is the voice I imagine Hallmark’s Maxine to have when she says, “I’d consider hormone replacement therapy but I’ve got a whole bunch of other things that need to get replaced first.” A loaf of bread shoved into an untunable trumpet. Raspy and plugged.
I want to magically create a story to go around a line of dialogue that popped into my head like a visitor accompanying me through the empty dining room:
“She’s the type that admits to a party full of people she’s meeting for the first time that she’s working on herself.”
I want the person who’s saying it to be really shallow and boring. The indestructible type who seems to go on living without once stopping and analyzing their thoughts or lives or popping any supplements.
But I don’t feel like doing all the work it would take to create the story that would go around that. I’ve got boxes to unload. Placement decisions to make, or not. I wish I could mouse click drag the visual from my head onto the blank page that would wrap around that line.
The need to write isn’t stronger than the need to unload one box at a time and conduct interviews with each item. “Lamp, can you contribute to our lives or is it time for you to find a new home?”
Some of the items have been very mature, even non-plussed about the situation. But some items are taking the cut very hard. They make limp arguments, “but…but…colonial American will come back! You’ll be sorry!!”
It’s pathetic, really.
I’m like, “Look. You were given to us. We didn’t choose you. We don’t want you anymore. This is the end of the line.”
It’s callous and cold but you need to be firm or else you’ll lose sight of the goal: To never have to move things you don’t love and need. Ever again.
Two things I declare after this move:
1) Big Box stores should be forced to buy all their stuff back from America’s basements and closets and storage facilities before they’re allowed to bring in anymore new, cheap shit from China. Stop the madness.
and
2) If men who hate women is an ethnicity, hand me the petition that permits ethnic cleansing. It will kill the fast food industry, but it will create a big surplus of jobs in the service industry — floor refinishers, movers, mechanics, carpet cleaners, landscapers, repairmen, etc. The right thing to do is to take them out and shoot them.
It sounds harsh. But there will be a clause at the bottom that says, “You don’t have to be taken out and shot if you go into therapy until you are deemed ‘all better’ by a panel of female home owners.”
There’s something you don’t see every day — a guy who smokes and has tats and work boots, lives on coffee and cigarettes and convenience stores, in a therapist’s waiting room. The closest that’s ever come to happening is when Tony Soprano went to Dr. Melfi. On TV! Not real life!
They are a group that deserves their own song — “Sons” the counter to John Mayer’s “Daughters”.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about while I empty boxes. I’m so sentimental.
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