The Vast Conundrum

A month has passed, and you can’t tell anything has happened here.  I have less than a month to do everything still.  Not good.

Having had to abruptly move many times in the past, I’d gotten used to the idea of stuffing everything into boxes and dragging it to the next place temporarily called “home”. It’s kind of sad that eight years on, I still have things in boxes, and I’ve never yet gotten to the bottom of sorting out even the stuff that was unpacked.

Out of a desire not to haul my junk around yet again, and out of the obvious necessity of having less space if I move to the city as I’d like to, I am attempting to use what time I have left here to reduce The Permanent Collection by at least half. I still have some clothes from the 80’s that I couldn’t fit into if I wanted to, and I’m still finding books about obsolete technology. These things though fairly well purged in past, still turn up with surprising frequency.

My dread however, is saved for what’s behind the under-staircase door. Untouched since 1997, I’m not sure what’s in there, or how much of it there is. Have fear for me.

No, that’s not a word. It ought to be though.

interlockicity (n) The state of being in interlocking conundums.

In the finest Murphy’s tradition, the author finds his home being sold out from underneath him, at a time when moving is not really an option. In addition to being financially unviable, moving entails the loss of IP addresses, phone lines, and other things that will be expensive and bothersome to replace.

At the end of the day, every day is the same as every other day.

Proving yet again, that money makes the brain go soft, today’s rumor du jour is that DoubleClick is about to be bought for the insane sum of $1.2 billion.

Meanwhile yesterday, President Bush signed the shortsighted and reckless “Screw small businessmen and the middle class Bankruptcy Bill”, helping to ensure that the number of people who actually pay the taxes, innovate and produce in this country will continue to shrink. One reason for America’s vitality has been its formerly sound banruptcy policy that has been economically proven to be a good thing for both creditors and debtors, by rehabilitating rather than ruining the bankrupt for the rest of their lives.

Here it is, almost 5am again, and another stress-induced sleepless night now behind me. The pattern repeats itself yet again. I should be coming down sick again any day now. I want out of this rat race toward death.

Now I leave for the train to Manhattan, so that I can endure another long day of trying to fix a bloody mess without implicating the friend that is responsible for it. He’s busting my balls too. Not smart.

Some people, when confronted by facts, simply refuse to accept them because those facts are incompatible with the view of the world they wish to hold unto themselves.

It is a waste of time trying to change their minds.

I never did get any sleep last night, and I’m going to have to be up at 5am to do this nightmare all over again.

It takes forever to get from one place to another, and once I get somewhere, they almost invariably present me with a list of things they want to cover that exceeds what can possibly done in the time available. And so the week begins, in about four hours at precisely 5:00am, I will get up, make myself presentable, and start walking toward the train station. I will arrive at the station, and will board my first train of the day, in what will amount to about seven hours spent on the rails, bookended by forty minutes of walking, with twenty in the middle. Somehow in-between eight hours of commuting, I have to get an entire day’s work done.