Radio Free North Hollywood

We have returned from the Land of the Donkey to our home on Mulford Cove. It was a strange and educational six months living on the south side of town. But it has been amazingly good to be home up here. This place had just become crazy, with all the people who had lived here. Something like twenty roommates went through this place in three years, some not so great, most of them really great, some amazing. But all of them left stuff. We had just accumulated so much stuff. And too much of it was covered with cat hair.

We honestly thought we were moving down to Donkeyland for a long time. I got the title of my car at that address, and I registered to vote there. We were pretty set up. But it didn’t work out, and it didn’t work out literally at the last moment. We had moved everything out of this place, we were in the process of cleaning the walls. Everything was in a garage in South Austin, packed up in boxes, or given away. The giveaway pile in front of the house was pretty epic, though a lot of stuff was unfortunately destroyed by rain. Bad luck there. Well, good luck for the state of Texas and the world of nature, bad luck for household appliances that I was giving away.

But then, at the eleventh hour, the hour that we got to only because the property manager was too busy to do the walkthrough earlier, we decided to move back. And it has been amazing.

We had lived here for three years. That’s three years to think of what to do with the place, and then chance presented us with a blank slate. We immediately started fixing problems that had been bugging us for a long time. We moved our bedroom downstairs and our living room upstairs. We bought curtains and got some new furniture and fixed the leak in the air conditioner and generally made things much, much nicer for ourselves. Bam, instant improvement.

We’re still looking for roommates, but it’s been wonderful to have the place all to ourselves for two weeks. Things had been getting weird before we left in April, and I’ll never know why we dragged out leaving the place until September except that we knew, deep down, that things weren’t right down in South Austin. In fairness, Gewel knew a long time before I did. I let my desire to live down there blind me to the realities of the situation, but once I saw that the house needed thousands of dollars of repairs in order to be sanitary and safe and that there was no way I’d be compensated for putting that time and money in, well, to hell with it.

And, by accidental foresight created by laziness, this place was here to hop back to! And we get to do it all over again from scratch — how often does that happen? How often do you get to clean your whole house down to the walls and then move back in again? What an interesting experience. What a great way to make a house more liveable.

Game of Thrones interests me more and more all the time. This is exactly what America needed — a fable about politics. Not about war, but about horse-trading, negotiation, dealing with evil at something besides the point of the sword.

America is a nation of compromise with pure evil. Now that I know it, I never forget it. We are who we are because we could look murderers, slavers, and rapists dead in the eye and said, “We can get along.”

What that means I have yet to figure out, but I know it’s true.

I’ve really started to lose track of my own past. I used to have it so well organized, I always knew when everything happened because I could remember where it was that it happened. I was essentially using America as a mental organizational system. But then I went and lived in the same town for about eleven years, and for the last four I really, really lived there. So it’s all blending together in a lot of important ways. I remember that I was in the Fiesta on Stassney when I got an important phone call once, but I’ve been in that Fiesta a hundred times now. Which time was it?

I mention this because I was trying to figure out how many times I’ve slept outdoors. It would have been easy, once upon a time, but now it’s all jumbled up.

I figure I slept outdoors nearly 30 times before I moved out of my parents’ house (for the first time). Between boy scout trips and family camping and camping with my friends, thirty to fifty times.

Then I moved to Jersey and didn’t camp out much, if at all, until 1998. And then I started camping out and sleeping in my car a lot. And I kept it up until 2010. I worked it all out once an I spent about eight or nine months at various Rainbow Gatherings. I don’t have any idea how many times I’ve slept in various cars, because my standard way of getting places used to be driving until I needed to sleep, then driving some more. And hitching? And bike trips? I’ve spent maybe two months on bike trips.

I was wondering if I’ve spent more than a year of my life sleeping outside, but now I’m starting to wonder if it was two years.

Today is the day prophesied in the deeply odd series John From Cincinnati. This show, as you may recall, premiered after the Sopranos finale and ran for exactly two months in 2007. It’s one of the weirdest and most interesting things I’ve ever seen. Imagine A Simple Man done in the style of Deadwood with some deeply odd musings on salvation and redemption and what the Jesus myth means to people today. It’s a worthy story, and I don’t say that often. It’s an important story, worth telling, difficult to tell.

Anyway, among a blizzard of other odd things, much was made of the date 9/11/14, which was then seven years in the future but now is now, or perhaps past by the time you read this.

You may be assured that today will have my fullest attention.