Category: Uncategorized

Watched Dodgeball just now. Very good. Not really the best in its tight little genre… Baseketball is probably superior to it in the farcical comedy imaginary-sport sport-movie-parody category, but it scores high marks above and beyond the bulk of the generic sports movies and even comedy/sports movies I’ve seen. And of course you’ll want to stay through the end of the credits for an extra litte laugh.

Saw The Terminal yesterday. I liked that one quite a lot as well, though it is a totally different style of movie. Effectively just a dramatic piece with comedy glinting off its solid core, and very emotionally and dramatically similar to Cast Away in my eyes. Excellent performances all around. I almost didn’t hate Catherine Zeta Jones through her inability to perform… character likability aside, her performance (and I hate to use such words, as they are so oft mis-used) lacked gravitas. Sigh. Hearing the words “Academy Award Winner Catherine Zeta Jones” really makes me feel the Academy Awards are a meaningless joke. But like I said, excellent performances (scaled to the abilities of the actors involved) all around; Catherine was not so bad she detracted appreciably from the movie this time out.

Watched the Eurotrip DVD last night, late, and that was a LOT of fun. If you like that sort of thing, at all, you should watch Eurotrip. It certainly didn’t get enough viewers in theatres as it deserved. I know I failed to see it in theatres. But a lot of fun. Certainly worth a rental or a purchase if you have the spare cash. I’m thinking of copying it, actually.

Dad’s still here. Happy father’s day, I guess. I remember when the plan was for him to drive me down Thursday (thanks, dad! couldn’t have done it without you!) and then he and Heath would return to Pine on Friday after everything was unloaded. Well, getting the room ready to move into took longer than expected and then there was the birthday party for my sister’s son, so he couldn’t get the door installed Friday and stayed over. And getting the door installed (and the wall adjacent to it) took a lot longer today than he expected and was more tiring, so he decided to just stay over again and attend a barbeque my sister invited him to tomorrow… and then, maybe, he’ll go home. Having him and Heath here, especially over a weekend, is making this feel more like another of those brief visits I’ve been making periodically to Phoenix for the 18 months since I moved to Pine. Making it had to believe, to feel, to fully realize that I’ve moved back to Phoenix, that I live here. It’s … there’s always a reason, often a very reasonable and logical one, but … it’s all quite difficult and frustrating and emotionally and mentally jarring to live in a world where even the simplest plans cannot be expected to be followed out. Sigh, I say. Sigh.

I’m tired. I want to get things done. I want to unpack my boxes, I want to hang up my clothes, I want to get things put “away” and make my room my room (again.) I want to sleep. I do not want to be woken up after too few hours to face demeaning and stressful “working” with my father that mostly amounts to … well, I’ve described it all before. I think I’ll go to my room, see how things go, go to sleep as soon as I can, and sleep as late as I can. Whaddya say?

Midnight rolls around, Heath’s still online. Shower worked good though. I’m all clean and stuff. Lots of water pressure. Lots, lots, lots more than in Pine. It’s deceiving, I think I’ll have to get used to it. I hear rumor that the other shower has less water pressure. I plan on trying it out in a couple of days anyway, so I’ll see what the difference is, and which I prefer. I figure it’ll be a good thing for me to stick to one bathroom and Angela stick to the other, so if I like the other one, all the better. Anyway, I seem clean to me, even if I maybe didn’t rinse all the soap away properly.

Gonna make this quick post, post that comic, check my mail, you know, then go lay down. Get that sleep I was writing about earlier. Feeling quite refreshed by the shower. Was … visibly very dirty before it. Though I’d actually sweat perhaps a third of the dirt off on the drive into town, which may say something else about how dirty I was. Anyway, off to do those things.

Ooh, and here’s a good quote:

“One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can’t utter.” -James Earl Jones, actor (1931- )

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.

Well, that worked out okay. Showered, clean now, but for some strange traces of color on my hands (and a couple of beard hairs). You know, what with the actually working on an art project. Looks … okay. I’ll have a better idea tomorrow. Not sure I’m satisfied with the colors. May … paint over it. We’ll see. And I’m confident that if I apply myself I can get the painting I’m in the middle of finished in a reasonably brief period of time to get the art supplies packed and ready to go in an equally reasonable period of time.

Did I mention the move?

When I put together a rough plan/timeline for packing and cleaning and such last night, I thought we’d be leaving Friday. It’s now Thursday. So, do-able, but … not the easiest. We did manage to get all the steel that would fit (and balance) onto the trailer today, and it’ll be hauled to Phoenix Monday or Tuesday and sold for scrap. That was tiring, but good. The place is getting cleaner and cleaner (ie: emptier) all the time. Anyway, more work to be done soon; taking down the old door, widening the hole, and installing the new door are on the plans for this week, it seems. And by “door” and “hole” I’m referring to something … I’d guess 25′ wide and around 20′ tall right now.

Anyway, I’ve got another box or two packed, I’m pretty tired, I’m going to bed. A little more lucid/coherent than earlier. Still sorta worried about the whole “get a job” thing I’m about to start to do, but … I don’t think I’ll lose sleep over it tonight. If you have any suggestions for ideas of jobs with little or no public contact, preferably indoors (heavy lifting being a reasonable job duty) and full time, let me know.

Feeling a bit tired. Lifting heavy objects all day will do that.

Working on a new, third art project for the week tonight. Strange.

So tired. Packing. Moving at the end of the week, to Phoenix.

Can’t take everything. Pick and choose, but everything has to be packed.

Lists of things not to forget. Things I need. Clothes, bed, iMac.

Thinking. Trying to figure out what the time-sensitive styles will be.

Seem to have got a sun burn today while loading steel on the trailer. Silly sun.

Should take a shower. SO dirty. SO tired. Not sure I could make it to clean.

Gotta get up in the morning and start it all again. Gotta get stuff done.

Perhaps the shower shall revive me, allow me to pack and work on art &c.

I’ll go try that. Maybe I’ll let you know how that works out.