The moon is full tonight over LaLaLand, which means the nuts are coming out of the woodwork. Not just here, but everywhere; we just have a greater concentration of them in L.A. It's warm, too, with the outside temperature still in the 70s at nine o'clock. More people walking on the street tonight, talking just a little louder than normal, laughing a little harder, neurons twisted skyward as the night's orb pulls at the oceans of lunacy inside them. Nor am I immune.
The baby in the apartment building next door is wailing away and the parents jabber back in some Pacific Rim language. This is not racism, just accurate reporting. Far from being immigrants living in squalor, this couple is attending Cal Tech and the infant will grow up in an upper middle-class environment, no matter where in the world the family settles.
I bit the bullet and went down to sign my tax return today. I asked about the overage in the cost versus the original estimate, and he explained that he thought all the files were coming as PDFs and Quickbooks, so he hadn't figured in the time to input the figures from the paper documents I left with them. In any case, the taxes are done and out of my hair.
I just finished watching "Alice," a bizarre retelling of the familiar "Alice in Wonderland" story by Czech director Jan Svankmajer. It's streaming on Netflix now, so if you have the service, take the time to see it. It's only 90 minutes long and the imagery will stick with you long after the viewing. It just proves that the East Europeans can take anything and turn it into another bleak surreal statement on postwar industrial angst.
I got a call from sister Kittie last night, and she and husband Dave are planning to come down for the weekend, since tax season is now over. This means I am beholden to clean the house before they arrive, since they're both sensitive to the hair and dust that I acclimated to months ago. Still, I can't see euthanizing Marcel because he sheds too much; that would really piss off Steve.
It's so depressing: I vacuum and dust upstairs one day, then vacuum and dust downstairs the next: within two or three days, black clumps of cat hair are clinging to the carpets upstairs and dancing along the floorboards downstairs, and the sheen of clean shows its first dull coats of dust. Here in the city, there''s so much crap in the air and it all settles in when I open up the house to cool it off in the evenings. I've lost my discipline for chores: making to-do lists doesn't seem to help. I need a drill sergeant or a maid, I'm not sure which.
Bob McBroom came by and picked up the Beretta last weekend. We both decided that since Steve had gifted him the gun before his death that we didn't need to go through the rigamarole of registering it again. And, besides, Steve had purchased it from a friend and never registered it in his own name, so the paperwork would have been complex and would have required going back 15 years to find out if the original owner had registered it in the first place. I just wanted it out of the house.
Bob's a contractor/handyman by trade, so we discussed what things might be done to the house to improve it value and sales appeal. Of course, an interior paint job is a must, as only one room has been painted in the last 10 years. There's minor finishing work in the kitchen that has to be tended to, but I still want a Realtor to let me know where it's wisest to spend the money.
The two clients that I was going to begin working with last week both were unavailable: the antiques dealer was in the midst of doing a design home for the annual fundraising tour here in Pasadena, and my poet was in London and not interested in diving into web design talk on a transcontinental basis. I heartily agree with her and let her know how jealous I was that she was in London. It brought back memories of the trip with Steve and our hideous/hilarious hotel in Paddington (an experience that predates this blog).
I think things are getting better for me, because happy memories of Steve no longer make me cry. But still, just thinking about him, connecting with the sense memory of having him near me and the comfort and love I felt quite literally makes my heart ache. And I still tend to burst into tears over the mere mention of kind and noble acts by good people. There is hope in the world yet, and I'm looking forward to a time when I can feel content on my own and feel a stable sadness I can endure when I think about Steve.
My sister Kittie, whose first husband died, told me that it would take about six months for it really to hit me, and her estimate is spot on: yesterday was six months to the day of Steve's death. It's one of those things you don't really realize until it's almost past. I just wonder how many more months it will be until I'm not riding in the wake of all that death, decay and grief.
Well, this is certainly a peppy little entry, don't you think?
One thing I did realize in ruminating yesterday: I am the one who controls how fast I move away from that awful time. And if I drag my feet about getting things done, I'm the only one who has to endure it (except you good folks who read this blog). But from now on, I shall be keenly aware of when I'm taking time because I need to and when I'm just spinning my wheels in an overindulgence of my depression and mourning.
I'm feeling another me emerging from all this; a guy who is ready to kick his own ass in order to get things moving. He's a doer, not a weeper. Perhaps I should leave the planning to him and dutifully follow his orders about how I'm going to get from Point A to Point W in a reasonable and rational way.
I just have to remember to go down to the garage each morning and read my license plate: "OK TODAY." That, as much as anything else, is Steve's legacy to me.
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