Is is the first floor? Is is the second floor? Is there a third? I don't really know
Evening train to Boston has no ring whatsoever, but I am on one nonetheless, heading home. Providence slides away behind me against the soft grey-fogged sky. Every bridge we pass is foaming with graffiti, block-blue and barn-red and a surprisingly commercial teal. The rust-brown boxcars of the Southern Pacific are equally luridly tagged. We just passed a field of heaped and broken bricks, dustily red beneath a smokestack's shadow and bounded by trees on all sides. Paging Derek Jarman.
It was a hell-move. Honestly I think most of them are. I have now been told that I could make poetry out of a phonebook, but I don't think it can be done with the packing and moving of boxes. Boxes defy poetry. Pandora was relentlessly prosaic. We had two storage units and one apartment of ten years' occupancy to load into a rented truck in preparation for the arrival of the professional movers who would handle the furniture and the surplus; that was yesterday. The movers were today. The apartment echoed when I left it. At all stages there was stress and chaos and stairs and books and people (not me) not drinking enough coffee and people (me) not managing to eat on time and people (Niels) playing truck Tetris with unflagging good humor or a brilliant imitation thereof and at one point I staggered up to the second-floor landing and was handed a typewriter and staggered back down and slid it across the floor of the truck to Niels and staggered back up and was handed a second typewriter and at that point it was funny. I slept maybe two hours last night, tops. The curtains had been stripped from the tall windows of the front room and the dawn came up like thunder out of the Providence River, which it had no business doing. We packed Tiffany lampshades late at night. We packed pots and pans.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kore sent me all the Benjamin January short stories I had been missing and I read them as a form of sanity break. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
humglum gave me free run of her lavender honey gelato. greygirlbeast presented me with some books of hers I had never owned. I told Lydia and Selwyn that they were good cats and should not forget me and did not need to douse me quite so liberally in their fur to make sure it didn't go the other way. I ate a bagel at a weird hour of the morning while sitting in the driver's seat of a parked car.
Sometimes that is what you do with people who are friends. I am sorry that we had a hurried goodbye because of the lack of parking at the train station, but I have a standing invitation to visit the new place and I will be sending postcards before then; mostly I regret that the movers were punctual, because everybody could have used the extra wake-up time. I wish I could say that my plans for the rest of the week involved sleeping till Sunday, but I am not that lucky. My plans for the rest of this evening, however, are very much filed under collapse.
It was a hell-move. Honestly I think most of them are. I have now been told that I could make poetry out of a phonebook, but I don't think it can be done with the packing and moving of boxes. Boxes defy poetry. Pandora was relentlessly prosaic. We had two storage units and one apartment of ten years' occupancy to load into a rented truck in preparation for the arrival of the professional movers who would handle the furniture and the surplus; that was yesterday. The movers were today. The apartment echoed when I left it. At all stages there was stress and chaos and stairs and books and people (not me) not drinking enough coffee and people (me) not managing to eat on time and people (Niels) playing truck Tetris with unflagging good humor or a brilliant imitation thereof and at one point I staggered up to the second-floor landing and was handed a typewriter and staggered back down and slid it across the floor of the truck to Niels and staggered back up and was handed a second typewriter and at that point it was funny. I slept maybe two hours last night, tops. The curtains had been stripped from the tall windows of the front room and the dawn came up like thunder out of the Providence River, which it had no business doing. We packed Tiffany lampshades late at night. We packed pots and pans.
kore sent me all the Benjamin January short stories I had been missing and I read them as a form of sanity break. humglum gave me free run of her lavender honey gelato. greygirlbeast presented me with some books of hers I had never owned. I told Lydia and Selwyn that they were good cats and should not forget me and did not need to douse me quite so liberally in their fur to make sure it didn't go the other way. I ate a bagel at a weird hour of the morning while sitting in the driver's seat of a parked car.Sometimes that is what you do with people who are friends. I am sorry that we had a hurried goodbye because of the lack of parking at the train station, but I have a standing invitation to visit the new place and I will be sending postcards before then; mostly I regret that the movers were punctual, because everybody could have used the extra wake-up time. I wish I could say that my plans for the rest of the week involved sleeping till Sunday, but I am not that lucky. My plans for the rest of this evening, however, are very much filed under collapse.
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Frankly one of them could have been; it was like a land yacht with keys. The other was a 1941 Royal Quiet Deluxe.
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Moves are hellish. I am glad I was able to make this one a little better!
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It definitely helped! Now if I just never have to see a flight of stairs again.
(As a group, the January short stories seem extremely attentive to both the female characters of the series and 1830's New Orleans women in general. Can we get these collected in print, maybe with a couple others to round out the volume? "Hagar" and "A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven" are right up there with the best of the novels, but "Libre" is no slouch in that department, either.)
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Plus Chloë, who canonically teams up with Dominique already! New TV Trope: Four-Lady Band.
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I doubt she would let herself be seen in public with anything so African. Something European but also slightly terrifying, like an electric mandolin.
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I don't think particularly, alas.
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May you get enough rest to recuperate before the next thing hits.
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I am pretty sure I said to Niels that with the typewriters we had officially entered the shrink-wrapped lampshade/open box of last year's matzah/one sneaker stage of this move.
(My benchmark for the still-worst move I have ever been involved with. In that case no packing had been done ahead of time. There were no packing materials. We had to lash everything to the inside of the truck with clothesline. The new tenant was moving in as we worked. At one point I was handed a lampshade still in its plastic shrink-wrap, with a box of expired matzah and one sneaker inside. Somehow it symbolized everything. This move was not that bad, because there were no tenants incoming and most of everything had been boxed ahead of time, but the typewriter was still a moment.)
May you get enough rest to recuperate before the next thing hits.
Thank you. Unfortunately the next thing hit by waking me up at noon and I will have to deal with it today. I feel like maybe I'll sleep or rest or just stop shaking from sheer physical exhaustion in, like, August.
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I have now been told that I could make poetry out of a phonebook, but I don't think it can be done with the packing and moving of boxes. Boxes defy poetry. --I suspect this will end up being a challenge, and I suspect we'll see box-poems from you yet. In fact... I feel like maybe we have? Have you never written a Pandora poem?
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It was excellent!
In fact... I feel like maybe we have? Have you never written a Pandora poem?
No, but I did write a poem about packing books as I was leaving New Haven in 2006. You were right.
I'l see if I can do anything about Pandora. I have not written a poem in two or three months. I feel very much not present in my own head.
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I hope you will feel more at home in your head soon.