Category: ultrapersonal

I’ve been on the move, obviously. I doubt I’ll ever get the chance to say much about the last few days at home, but they were hectic, sad, and sweet to varying degrees. The big moving sale/party turned out to be a god way to generate money, get rid of crap, and see friends while there was still time. It even turned out to be a way to repair a few fractured friendships, which was especially good for my morale. My final (maybe? maybe not?) WYSIWYG was fun, but since I had no time to prepare anything I improvised and can’t relay my story. People laughed, though, so I guess it went well. The frantic pace and my overwhelming preoccupation made it difficult to really appreciate my last few days in New York, and my last few days with Special Agent Josh, but now that I’ve had a chance to catch my breath I can feel the saudades creeping up on me, filling in the free bits.

I had only a few days to get settled in Reading, and they were a blur of errands, biking around town, and getting to know the outgoing class of MA students, all of whom confirmed that I will barely be eating, sleeping, or having a life for the next 12 months. As much as I’ve become a hermit-like workoholic this last year, I think I’ll have to brace myself for much more of the same during the next.

And now, with barely a chance to think about it before arriving, I’m in Lisbon, having my last hurrah before the work gets underway. I’m here for an another big type-geek conference, though, so it’s still a way of easing myself into my new life. (N.B.: Everyone in Lisbon is sexy, especially the kid at the art school hosting the conference. It’s just lovely, really. Also the city is absurdly beautiful.) I have a few more days of all this before I head back to Reading for school and student poverty and my daily bike rides, so I’m basking in the Portuguese vibe while I can.

So, for those of you who aren’t reading this just to see if I’m alive, have I completely bored the shit out of you yet? I hope I’ll have time to be interesting one of these days.

Ack! OMG! Freaking out! It’s Friday and it’s my birthday and I’m at work and I hate work and I leave the country (for a year? forever?) in exactly two weeks and I have to put everything I’m keeping in storage tomorrow and I have to sell everything else (big sale/party next weekend!) and I have to finish two huge freelance projects and get a haircut and get touch-ups done on my new tattoo and have the dentist put in my new crown and school doesn’t seem to know about the huge sholarship I won and did I mention I’m leaving the country in two weeks and I’m freaking out?

My pal Mark broke my heart last night, telling me that Buster had just passed away. Buster was Mark’s dog — his beautiful, lovable, extraordinary dog — who he adopted when we were living together in a vast, ramshackle loft in Bushwick when I first moved back to New York ten years ago. Buster was a surprise: Mark adopted him from the North Shore Animal League while we were each home for the holidays, taking a break from the months of cleaning and construction we’d been doing. Mark was a little worried that he’d picked up a pet without asking me first, but Buster had me under his spell from the moment I saw him.

Buster’s early days in Bushwick were a challenge, to put it mildly. He was a puppy and insufferably cute, though, so it was easy to forgive his misdeeds. Also, neither one of us was able to spend as much time at home with him as he really needed, so his early training went slowly. He ate all the upholstery off a 3-piece velvet couch I treasured. Every day we’d come home to discover a Family Circus trail of pee showing the circles he’d run when he’d hear the key turn in the lock of the front door. He also started out with an awful GI-tract infection that soon led us to the horrible sight of our deathly ill pup hooked up to an IV at the vet’s office.

After we left Bushwick, Mark and Buster were my neighbors in Fort Greene for a few years, and I had the pleasure of watching Buster grow up, learn his lessons well, and become the best damn dog I ever knew. I was pretty indifferent to animals before Buster, but I’ve been an avid dog-lover ever since. In many, ways he really embodied everything that I love in a dog, and I can’t help but hold the rest up to his high standard of affectionate, loyal, good temper.

Buddy, thanks for everything, and we’ll all miss the hell out of you.

The latest offering in this Summer’s big clearance sale is the rarely used SparkyMobile:

I’ve been planning to have a big “Everything Must Go!” sale in September — and probably still will — but poverty is becoming a real issue at the moment, and I’ve been in a bit of a panic about how I’ll actually eat and pay bills and whatnot without liquidating a lot of stuff right away.

This Summer has been a nasty confluence of financial issues: the class I was supposed to teach was cancelled, my health insurance has gone up to a staggering amount of money per month, I’ve been getting a ton of dental work done, and so on and so on. Unless some of those overdue freelance paychecks start rolling in soon, things are going to get pretty bleak.

The maddening part is that I’ve cobbled together a decent plan for next year: loans, scholarships, a steady trickle of freelance income, and socialized medicine will keep me fed and housed will I go to school as long as I maintain modest habits. The unfortunate collapse of my summer budget scheme, though, has ensured that it’ll be a minor miracle if I can make it as far as the end of September, when my next chapter gets underway. For the moment I’m out of cash, out of credit, and devoting as much time as I can to finishing up a backlog of freelance work so I can get out the rest of those invoices.

All this could be yours! Cheap!

Although I splurged some on furniture when I fled from Astoria and settled back in Brooklyn, it’s been a pretty threadbare year. I’ve been pretty sure for most of it that I’d be leaving this Fall, with very little idea of when or where I’d settle down after school. With the future so cloudy, it’s pretty easy to unload so much stuff. Starting from scratch somewhere else seems slightly more appealing than picking up where I left off, or finding a way to haul an apartment full of stuff again. I’ve lugged an absurd amount of stuff from home to home ever since I left for college, and the effort of doing that over and over has made me a lot less sentimental about things than I once was. This will be the third time since coming back to New York that I’ve massively reduced the amount of treasures/crap that I own, and I have to admit that I really wish I could let go of all of it once and for all.

Letting go, though, has never been one of my skills, even though I’m a master of moving on.

For a while now I’ve been tracking down digital versions of the songs that used to be in my collection of mix tapes. I haven’t had a working tape deck in years, so when I moved out of the Swanktuary a few years ago I decided to finally get rid of all the cassettes that had been taking up space. That collection included plenty of records that I’d already replaced on CD (and plenty I was happy to forget about altogether), but it also included an incredible collection of about 120 mix tapes that I had made between 1983 and 1999 or so. Most of those were 120-minute tapes, and they charted the development of my musical tastes during an era when my interests kept expanding in new directions. I taped from the radio, from my own albums, from other tapes, from friends’ collections — anywhere I could grab stuff that tickled my fancy. Some of those tapes were carefully cultivated mixes with segues that oozed with meaning, some were just randomly ordered. Most were fucking awesome.

I knew that a lot of incredible music would be lost to me forever when I ditched the tapes, but I keep kicking myself for not at least hanging on to all the labels I’d made, just so I’d have a record of what the collection contained. Not only would I be able to have some lists of what to hunt down now, but I’d also have some very tangible reminders of different parts of my life.

As I try to rebuild that library now, I find patterns emerging that I never would have guessed if I hadn’t been pulling all those old mix-tape tracks together in one place. For instance, tonight it just dawned on me that for a brief period (I’d guess around 1987 or so) I was really into Love and Rockets. Who knew? I certainly wouldn’t think to mention them in a list of my favorite bands, but as I go through their catalogue now, I find that I know most of the songs, and had a fair amount of them scattered throughout my mix tapes. Other bands who I really loved — Devo, New Order, the B-52’s — rarely made it onto the mix tapes because I would just listen to entire albums of theirs instead, and there was little need to introduce friends to their music via carefully chosen tracks on a mix.

It’s also amazing to think of how much mental energy (and cash) I once put into music fandom. That’s waned as other obsessions have consumed me over the years, and various periods of spending freeze derailed my ability to acquire new albums. My collection now is incredibly random, spanning many genres, many time periods, and the waxing and waning of many interests. My digital library has something to delight and horrify almost anyone, including myself.

My adored Teen Dentist has abandoned me. It’s nothing I take personally. After all, we both knew he’d be graduating in early May and passing me on to another student. Now he’s off to work in some hospital somewhere, and I never even got to see the animated music video he produced for the dental school talent show! Oh, the hearbreak…

Even in his absence he’s taking good care of me, though. He told me he was going to find me the best student he could because — as I learned last night from my replacement teen dentist (henceforth known as Teen Dentist 2) — I was the “best patient he’d ever had.” Even though TD2 is already way overbooked, Teen Dentist strongly urged him to make room for me in his schedule instead of passing me onto one of the sophomores, apparently the sad fate of most people whose student dentists graduate. (Sophomores! My god, I’m glad I dodged that bullet. I’ll take every year of experience I can get out of my student dentist, thanks.) I can only imagine what the parade of freaks must be like at that clinic, because at the end of last night’s visit Teen Dentist 2 seemed amazed and delighted by me, and swore that Teen Dentist was right about me being a fantastic patient. Maybe it’s just because I’m chipper and don’t complain, or maybe the student dentists like you to have enough curiosity to get them talking about what they’re doing. Whatever it is, I’ve got it. Apparently, I also got some fantastic work out of Teen Dentist: TD2 was awfully impressed by what he saw.

I don’t know much about TD2 yet, other than he’s Asian, from Alaska, plans on settling in Seattle after graduation, gets teased for having really girly handwriting (frankly, I like a medical professional with legible handwritign like that), and he knows a little about comic books. He’s not all dorky and dreamy like Teen Dentist, but he’s a good kid, and I’m glad I that I’ve been left in good hands.

While sorting yet another batch of old photos this weekend, I realized that I’ve been back in New York for about ten years. Ten years! No wonder I’m dying for a change of pace. Ten years in a place like this is time enough for plenty of ups and downs, but I’m ready to take a break from such a wide spectrum of experience. Although I can say New York itself is more responsible for the ups than the downs, I’ve had enough massive downs during these last ten years that I just want to go someplace more low-key and bury my head in the sand (or rather, in a pile of nerdy typography books) for a while.

Yes, I’ll miss good pizza and Coney Island and WYSIWYG and corner delis and this city’s particular blend of people, and all the possibilities for enlightenment and adventure that brought me back here in the first place. However, I won’t miss subway rush-hour hostility or the crowds along 34th Street or endless commuting or throngs of wannabe “Sex and the City” girls screeching around the East Village or another generic “luxury” apartment building replacing something I loved. I’ll miss a lot of specific people, but I’ve become so isolated through depression-fueled negligence that I miss those people already.

When I left Boston after living there for almost eight years, I felt like I had pretty much finished it. Here, I still don’t feel like I’ve even scratched the surface, which is exactly the kind of endless promise that brought me back in the first place. Living here is damn hard, though, and frankly I need a rest.

When my pal Mark and I snagged that massive loft in Bushwick ten years ago, we were young and full of enthusiasm. The ridiculous misadventures we had living there were only the first of many absurdities that make for good stories but a wearisome way of life. (I keep forgetting that those were the pre-blog years — most of you don’t even know the full wackiness of Junky Alfredo or Texas Trevor or the Crackhouse Stake-Out or the weekly thrift store binges!) Just as Mark has been pulled back to New York over and over again through the years, I’m sure I’ll never escape the event horizon of this place. I don’t think I want to. But it’ll be interesting to try.

Even though I know I’m a bit nomadic, from time to time I still entertain the fantasy of owning a home of my own someday. Of course, my vision of owning a home is a fusion of various thoughts I have about mobility, thriftiness, craftsmanship, ecological worries, and an aversion to suburbia. Pretty much, that leaves me salivating over fantasies of tiny, prefab, loft-like houses that can be dropped in unusual places. This page of teeny houses, for instance, makes me tremble with delight.

I consistently forget to jot down these various house kits that catch my fancy, so I finally went on a hunt this evening to find links to various projects that have caught my eye over the years. (Most of what I found came from Treehugger and Max at lotsofco.org.) My favorites:

• The Wee House is definitely a favorite — teeny, sleek, and flexible

• The miniHome is not just sexy, but it also seems to consider the cost and land-use issues for a li’l prefab house, as this Treehugger post notes

• The various schemes from BlueSky Mod are also magically delicious, but sadly they don’t show as much of them on the web site as I would like

• These groovy Floating Homes from Germany

  rock me

• The Micro Compact Home is lovely and tiny, especially in this idea for a tree village made of of the little cubes attached to vertical supports

• The Zenkaya would be delightful for a little warm-weather getaway somewhere

• I love the Boase concept from Studio Force4, which I first read about in Metropolis a while back — a cluster of sort-of-treehouses built into groves that actually decontaminate polluted soil

• The Flatpak House is a great idea for beautiful little modular houses, but the website is a bit of a flash-intensive horror

• The Loftcube is sexy and futuristic, but a bit too posh all in all

• A few different models from the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, especially the XT house, seem really darling