Welp, here I am. Phoenix. Again.

Welp, here I am. Phoenix. Again.

Tonight (thursday night) I sleep … well, I’ll probably steal the bed in my brother’s room and make him sleep on the couch … he doesn’t move in until August so it isn’t exactly his room yet, plus I’m sure he’ll want to stay up later than I do tonight. I’ve very likely got to wake around 6 or 6:30 AM and go shopping for tile for the floor in the room I’m to be moving into tomorrow. See, back when my dad was remodeling it for Angela to move into, he only tiled around the edges, since she had a huge area rug to cover the rest of the floor… But since she’s moved into the master bedroom in the last couple of weeks in anticipation of my arrival, she took the rug with her, and … well, we’ve got to tile the floor and do a couple of other upgrades to the room before we can begin moving my stuff inside.

So. Tomorrow. Big, busy day. Get up early, buy tile, plus whatever else we need. Install the tile, do the other upgrades, install a new front door (see Angela’s recent post for more details), unload all the stuff from the truck and move it into the house and into my “new” room, which includes exciting things like assembling the huge bed and … well, this won’t be in the bedroom, but finding or creating a place for the bowflex to live… And I think that due to the unruly nature of my packing (and the fact that I tried not to pack everything, just the things I use the most often) that I must unpack nearly every box very very quickly in order to get access to things such as clothes and toiletries and … whatever… else… I need.

And here’s an interesting thing that I may not have mentioned here before: The room that I am moving into tomorrow is essentially the same room that I moved out of when I first left home back in 1997. It’s had a few upgrades and remodels since then, but it’s in the same place in the same house.

My favorite upgrade may be that I won’t be living with parents this time around.

My dad owns the place, but he’s got to stay on with my grandparents in Pine, and then follow them wherever they go when that place sells; they require full-time assistance. So much so that my father hates to be away from them right now, tonight, for fear that something will go bad and he won’t be there to help. He’s been invited to a father’s day thing on Sunday, and he’d like to attend, but moreso he’s concerned about being away too much from his parents. Anyway, it’s his house, but he doesn’t live here, doesn’t want to live here, probably will never live here again. He’s said he won’t sell it until after Heath finishes high school next summer, so that he can attend the same High School all year (and the one he started at), but after that … I don’t know what will happen. Perhaps my sister and I will go find and buy a house somewhere in Phoenix. Or maybe my father will have another house in the Mesa area and I’ll go live there and go back to ASU. Or maybe the world will go into upheaval this winter, and every plan we make will be altered in a way only true believers could have seen coming…

Regardless, I’ll very likely be living at this address for the next year. If you have my PO Box in Pine in your address book for me currently, email me for the new one. Phone number is the same, and will be at least until next April (or the end of the world as we know it, whichever comes first.)

They say “you can’t go home again” but heck if I don’t seem to be doing it, and quite by accident. I wonder if I shall find work. I wonder if I shall lose weight (not living with my grandparents/parent means buying my own food, which means I have control over my diet, which I plan to use eDiets to help me control, since it worked for me before). I wonder if I shall stop sweating. Eventually I must get used to the heat. I always have before. Those cool Rim Country days have spoiled me, it seems. Perhaps within a week or two 110 will seem quite passable.

Am I saying something? I think I’m too distracted by all the things that are going on and going through my head to say what I meant to say. And blogs don’t seem to get a re-write. So… maybe I’ll try posting about it again, probably I won’t, and maybe you’ll read between the lines and see that I’ve apparently gone in a big circle for the last decade. I remember the last time I lived here the impetus for the changes in my life that got me out of here was love, and looking toward marriage. If life is a circle, a cycle, will I reach that point again?

Just as before I seem to be seeking a low-level job, just to earn money, not because I want to but because I am required to by my life circumstances. Last time I was engaged to be married, and that was a positive and energizing motivation for seeking employment despite years of loathsome attitudes towards the whole of capitalism and employment. This time I am in debt up to my armpits, and that is motivation for me because I want to retain a good credit rating and history so that someday, were I to find love again, I would be economically prepared to pursue a beautiful future. A mortgage, a car, a college fund for a baby, the whole bloody rot requires a positive credit history. Oh, and did I mention that … some 2/3 of my outstanding debt was accrued … as an indirect result of love? That in some twisted corner or my mind I spent a vast sum of money for a couple of not-very-logical reasons relating to love, and that one of them was a sort of contract with myself that I would spend that money then, and when I had it paid off would be when love would come back into my arms… a sort of romantic amortization must have taken place in my mind, tying prophecy, economics, and love into an equation for how much to spend, and on what.

Am I re-tracing my steps, trying to re-create the scene of the crime, of love? Am I trying to re-create my youth, or is this all just circumstance and over-thought and selective memory and bistromatics? Is there fate, is there beauty, is there serendipity in the world, and can I touch it from this lonely spot on the map?

I’m near again to a friend of mine who bought a house just blocks from where he grew up, to where I grew up and first met him and we became friends. I’m closer, far still but closer, to my other friends, some as old, some newer, but all rarely seen in recent years. I’m closer to the nearly 3million people that live here than I was in that tiny town of less than 1k, and perhaps a step and a day and a breath closer to love.

What is this clumsy obsession I seem to have with love?

Have I mentioned here that I recently discovered, quite casually and with some surprise, that I am no longer pining, no longer longing for those lost loves of mine?

I remember the sensation, and it is gone. I remember the lovers, and they are gone too, but … somehow it’s just sweet memories. I don’t seem to care one way or the other that I ever have any of them back in my life. What I want is to have … something like love … like it was before, or something new, with someone I’ve long known or someone I haven’t met yet … as long as it’s love. I have sweet memories, sweet moments, (some quite painful, but that’s sweet in its own way too) and I want to find some new ones, is all.

It’s very different, and I can’t say for sure if it’s any less trouble yet, but I think I like it. I think it’s growth in the right direction. Towards the light instead of just the memory of the light.

I’ve just noticed that today, Thursday, seems to have been the two year anniversary of my mother’s death. Huh. I was just thinking about writing something about my mother’s not being here changed the whole experience of this house, which is of course because she’s dead, and I remembered that she’d died in the summer, so I looked up the date… and it was today. I wonder if that’s why dad’s been extra grumpy and stressed the last couple of weeks, or if it’s just everything else. Everything else is certainly enough for me.

I’m getting tired, and it’s getting late, so I’m going to see if I can shower without waking everyone in the world up, then go to bed. Night.