woke up around eleven am today, having gone to sleep at 6:30 am, just
to get a head start on the day.
went to circuit city, bought about a hundred dollar’s worth of coax,
speaker wire & plugs.
came home and started screwing the surround speakers up on the rafters
in the basement here, then started laying and stapling the wire.
get to the next to last speaker and guess what, ran out of wire.
so i stop there, fuck it, buy more speaker wire tomorrow. got the
center, sub and two rear speakers already hooked up to the receiver and
i decide to fire it up.
nothing, nada, zilch. not even a hum. the shit kicker is that the
led/osd on this thing went out about a month ago so i have no fucking
clue what settings are screwed up if any.
ok, fuck that too. i can live without a receiver until the summer time,
when we get caught up with all these other expenses.
so instead i ran some straight over the air antenna lines to the living
room and guest room. discovered i could see straight into the
boiler room from the guest room closet. i could like drop a pack a
cigarettes between floors.
then i start fooling around with that new satellite receiver that
came in yesterday. popped in the latest firmware and literally 2 minutes
after that, i’m flipping through dish like nobody’s business. but this is in
the basement, i want to put this bad boy in the bedroom. i found old
cabling in the wall that was rg-59, not satellite rated, but it was
splitting into a newer rg-6 line that ran right up into the master
bedroom. the trick was to get from the boiler room to that rg-6 line in
the den through the rafters and underneath the stairs.
but i just finished and feel like i actually got something done.

and i push her to start with the boxes because i know they’re going to pile up and out and on top of each other until we are on top of each other without the interesting bits that used to happen when we were all alone before baby.
but she dilly and dallied until i started pulling her hair out or putting out the fire that is her thinking about it and just got it all moving along and even the baby helped by putting things in and, with a moment’s hesitation, putting them back out until i reached down and wrapped the edges round and round with tape even if i might have snagged baby’s hand between the seams from time to time.
and each time i thought i was done there was another corner with an article of clothing or an electronic doodad or niggling piece of nostalgia that begged for attention, inspection and packaging, and from neatly ordered and marked boxes of contents and destination it too soon became misc this over here to misc there.
i even had her feet in my hands pushing her up above closets into attics wobbling for the last piece of something or the other that we hadn’t seen in years, completely forgotten about but couldn’t let go for the life of us. when the boxes started covering the floor and blocking our view of the street where we would soon no longer face, the down and up to the tops of the closests finally bummed my left knee and i hobbled on to work.
every joint hurts, sore in the places where little muscles join big ones and a whole life gets packed right in front of your eyes in practically no time at all.

i’ve said, written this, time and again, how a friend of mine, while in the midst of working through what he believed were some severe issues, had read a batch of my writing, some of the strong experimental stuff i had been writing just before i met up with Blitz, he said to me, with a bit of a gleam in his eye, “how does it feel to be insane?”
and although much of the passion is gone, i can still see it now and then, that madness to writing, or rather that madness i like in myself when i am writing mad things.
and i think that’s what i’d like all the time, that kind of automatic freefall, moving it along more and more off center, immediate imagination, disregard for waking logic, synaptic semantic roulette. but, i also feel that there has to be a catalog of this life i am living, detailing my life somewhere to be remember somewhen and hopefully some other someone than myself.
is the writing itself enough of a marker. can it be thin enough to see what life was happening?