The locks have been changed and we are officially out of our old place, leaving it to the realtor and keeping fingers crossed. This week, we had a crew in to patch up all of the holes in the drywall from the various Ikea crap I installed and then ripped back out, and then had everything painted. After that, a cleaning crew came in and scrubbed everything from top to bottom, and got the whole thing in like-new condition, smelling of fabuloso and shining.
I went back in the other day, just to make a final round of obsessive cleaning, wiping off little spots and scraping off tiny droplets of paint here and there that were left behind. The whole thing hit me with a massive rush of deja-vu, thinking back to May of last year when we first got the keys and I spent a weekend assembling cabinets and listening to Rockies baseball on my then-new iPhone. This was our first home, our first really big adult purchase, and there are so many memories behind the whole thing.
It seems like we’ve lived here forever, even though it’s been just shy of 18 months. But I was thinking about the various places my cats have lived, and they have been at this place longer than anywhere else in their lives. And then I thought about it, and I think the last place I’ve lived for a longer period was probably back in Astoria from 1999-2005. I guess I lived at the Lower East Side place for just about as long, but it’s hard to figure out when I started living with Sarah, since I slowly moved things over a gym bag at a time over late summer/early fall 2005.
Anyway, the old place is for sale, and has an MLS number, and has percolated through all of the various online real estate sites. I am mixed on posting a link here, as I doubt any of my four readers are actually interested in buying the place. I am half expecting a sea of junk mail from the listing, more mortgage refinance offers and the whole nine yards. I am still trying to figure out what to forward and what addresses to change, and that will take me forever. (If you really need my actual physical mailing address, let me know.)
I have to go back to New York in December. This will be my first trip back since I left in 2007. It’s going to be a hurried affair – flying out on a Wednesday, getting in at like ten (getting to JFK at ten, which means probably getting to the hotel by midnight), and then flying out on Friday afternoon. I will probably be doing company stuff the entire time, and won’t actually get to see anything. I’m not sure I will bring my camera (the DSLR, anyway) or even my personal laptop – probably just the work laptop and two changes of clothes. And the Kindle, of course – I will have to load up with plenty of reading material, since I’ll have the cross-country travel days, stuck in the Phoenix airport with CNN blaring from the TVs strapped to the ceiling.
I feel a great need to take a bunch of crap to the storage place, and maybe get a few things out, like a stereo for this office, but I really don’t want to do anything. I wish I could write down the series of dreams I’ve had in the last few days – this morning, I had this vivid dream of reading this rough draft of Naked Lunch, the whole thing so colorful, this journey that Burroughs took as a kid through the southwest, exploded into pieces in a drug-fueled frenzy and carefully reassembled into this twisted, descriptive narrative. Maybe I need to buy one of those lucid dreaming machines or get into a sensory deprivation tank or do something that will enable me to capture this stuff and turn it into books.