Packing
November 30, 2003
My brain has the faint smell of a burnt-out resistor. I'm trying to find a new place to live, whittling my existence down to its bare essentials in the process. Adrift on a raft that's slowly sinking, tossing off a thing at a time to stay afloat. Sentimentality, thick and dense, pulls me under with every white-capped wave. Why is it so much easier to accumulate things than it is to get rid of them?
I bought a box of heavy-duty contractor bags and have begun filling them up one by one. But three full, heavy, black garbage bags later, I still weigh the same. "I should try to sell this". The future flashes forward to the time when I will need this thing or that. All projected fantasy. If I don't have it, I won't have it, and so what? The things that are saved are put into their tiny cardboard time capsules. "Will I ever open this again?" Probably not.
Sad days at the end of a sweet deal. The realtor tells me I'm a single guy, all I need is a studio apartment. He tells me that I don't need any of my things. He tells me that I don't need room to paint...that I can go to the park. He tells me about his divorce and how he kept everything and put it all in storage. About how he kept his firstborn kid's first diaper. Now, nine years later, he is finally getting rid of it all. He regrets wasting all that money on storage. He tries to get me interested in buying a co-op in Elmhurst, Queens. "That doesn't interest me," I tell him, but he doesn't understand.
I went to my endocrinologist on Friday to check in on my diabetes. I was late because a couple of noodniks got me snarled up in traffic. Three guys are climbing on the Williamsburg Bridge. Cops shut down the bridge while they investigated. Traffic stopped. Listening on the radio as the reports turn from "three Middle Eastern men in an off-limits section of the bridge" to "three guys from New England, drunk". Down to the Verrazzano instead.
Anyway, I tell my doctor about my headaches, and about the initial diagnosis — cluster headaches —but he thinks it's something else. "Well..see what the neurologist says." And so I see the neurologist on Tuesday. Though for now, the headaches are gone.
The likelihood of my finding a place to live with a backyard like I have now is slim to none. So watching the flowers as they start to come up is bittersweet. But it is nice to see that they are on about their business, oblivious to world events.
