where am i ?

It’s weird to be standing in the house you’ve lived in for twenty-five years and be able to look through the bathroom from the bedroom and see the kitchen…that’s what a gutted house will do for you…distort your perceptions…the geography isn’t the same…and won’t be again…what was, isn’t and it’s not coming back…well…that is the way of things…and it’s not a great loss either…it was a form of stasis and that probably isn’t the best way to live, humans being creatures of habit non-withstanding…so it’s a step towards a new form of reality…a genuine deconstruction…not some post-modernist claptrap…more like some good old g.e.moore “get a grip on all this dualist bullshit, it’s change that I can see”…derrida and his overblown imagination can go fuck off…but i am digressing ( digression is the structure of human thought )…still…seeing a set of familiar visuals so radically changed can be a bit disorienting and lead one to ponder the transitory nature of anthropogenic structures and artifacts…there is no permanence here…or anywhere for that matter…life is short and the rest is unseen…what’s in store for tomorrow? more of the same? where’s my copy of principia ethica ?

do i own the cat?

daisy the cat has been retrieved and installed…and she is not a happy cat…this will be much more comfortable for a ten year old cat than spending the winter outside…but she is not convinced…like the rest of us she senses that this is not home…it is a foreign place and they do things differently here…how this particular facet of this adventure pans out is as uncertain as any other…we have had cats disappear before and that could happen again…or as the winter sets in she may find a place to set up shop and stay warm…it won’t be the basement she has used over the last decade or so but it may do for the nonce…one would hope she’d find a more inviting place than wedging herself between an outside wall and a couch while complaining vociferously…these are peculiar circumstances…it is a domicile of our own but we actually possess almost nothing beyond two beds and some clothing…right now even the bath towels are a rental…and in a culture where possession and ownership are first principles ( watch some television sometime and then dispute that with me…i’ll hand you your head in that debate ) it is a strange place to be…unnerved and liberated at the same time…I don’t own this stuff so I don’t have to worry about it…a taste of what wealth might be like except i don’t have to worry about someone taking my wealth…any wealth i hold is pretty much intangible and that is the liberating part…i foresee an austere sort of life in the future…the material past has been put into the dumpster…a desk…a chair… a lamp…a bed…a few books…and a backyard to garden in…i begin to see a less worrisome retirement than i had imagined. since this was written last night the cat has moved out from behind the couch to explore and claim territory…a bit of a return to normality…but then she let me pet her…obviously still a disturbed feline

furniture

i am still an internet nomad so this is just a fast post to say that the furniture that is " a step up from model home decor " has arrived and it is institutional late twentieth century motel kitsch if i ever saw any...blond formica veneer and tacky lamps...the couch is bearable but the chair is as loud as they come...some say they are leaves others shell macaroni...either way it's a fine thing that these are temporary...i'd hate to live in state farm's world full time.

weird flashbacks

my new livingroom has wood flooring...my new front door has a view vaguely reminiscent of some san francisco slum...my new basement steps are steep and dangerous ( and i have no idea how they will get a washer and dryer down there )...my new backyard is big but doesn't have any teosinte growing ( yet ) and the bus barn is right over the back fence...i was supposed to get the "furniture" the insurance company is supposed to provide today,,,but the woman called and said when she made out the order she got the right street address but filled in the wrong city and ( this is the kicker ) state...one has to wonder if there is such an address in wherever the hell she sent our free stuff ( and if there is what did the people living there think? ) or is there some forlorn delivery crew vainly pouring over maps, consulting gps, and scanning the horizon in search of it with a truckload of goodies? i picked up a check for a whopping $2000 advance yesterday ( taking unscheduled time off from work to do so ) and stopped off to put it in the bank thinking it would be available today only to find the bank put a hold on it until it could be verified...still hasn't cleared...i love a bureaucracy that says it's there for me and then does what it can to not help...i paid premiums for twenty-five years for this? appalled doesn't cover it...perhaps i'll be in a better mood tomorrow about all of this...but i wouldn't hold my breath if i were you

housing market

so i signed off on some paperwork pertaining to a three month lease on a rental house the insurance company is putting us into next week...a nice place i am told...two bedrooms and a full basement...newly redone kitchen for the stove and refrigerator that we are getting ( also courtesy of the insurance company )...seems we will be renting furniture ( but not beds...i draw the line there ) to go into the rented house...a lot of cash floating around...but what has really caught my attention is the rent on this modest house...it amounts to $240 more per month than my mortgage on a three bedroom home runs...the housing market has been said to have "turned a corner"...seemingly so... i can imagine that this might seem a reasonable deal to someone dispossessed from an "underwater" mortgage...but who in this blue collar town has that problem? foreclosed, perhaps, but not on a house worth less than what's owed...i can't help but wonder about the distress serial renters face...i'm doing this on someone else's dollar ( less twenty-five years of insurance premiums )...how many people can afford this in this economy here in the rust belt? and if they do what do they forgo to do it? life can be a struggle sometimes...some people just struggle more...nietzsche was mistaken...what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger if it doesn't cripple you in the process of not killing you.

a shade west of the eighty-seventh meridian

"however sympathetically or sentimentally a white american viewed the indian, the industrial culture was certain to eat away at the tribal cultures like lye...what destroyed him was the manufactured products of a culture, iron and steel, guns, needles, woolen cloth, things that once possessed could not be done without... "beyond the hundredth meridian" wallace stenger __________________________________________________________ to the very best of my knowledge there are no native americans in my lineage...i am from only the second generation of my mother's family born in this country...dad's family goes back a bit further with roots deep in jasper county indiana ( and my father's mother's mother was from kansas )so stenger wasn't writing about me at all...but i am just as corrupted and even more embedded in the "industrial culture " that corroded the indigenous ones....i was born into it and the only work i can find perpetuates it...so inside the box that i am at odds with what i think i should be...as i look at this second dumpster and say "YES!" finally the stuff is going i am also coming to the sad conclusion that all it's going to do is fucking fill up with "stuff" again...okay..perhaps i can ride herd on just how much and what kind of "stuff" gets in...but some is so ubiquitous that its is preordained...there will be a furnace ( yes there are statutory regulations on wood burning stoves in my town ) and a water heater and a stove and a goddamned phone and an internet connection and windows and doors and carpet and paint and drywall and nails and trim..all of which degraded the environment in some way in their manufacture and transportation...i doubt the building code would allow the deletion of most of the "essential" fixtures...the way my great grandfather lived would be illegal in lake station in 2012 ( or more like 2013 by the time this is finished )...no kerosine lamps or outhouses allowed...sanitary and fire hazards...so i'll keep growing bits and pieces of my own food...and explore edible native plants and try to be more native to the place i live in...and i'll try to stop fooling myself about exactly what's going on here...i'll live as far outside the consumerist utopia as i can manage but without its utter collapse i'll lay odds it's inescapable...more as the "stuff" rolls back in...we'll see how deep it gets.

empty fully before refilling

the appliances are in the dumpster and many personal belongings too...no great loss...clutter more than anything..rather liberating in a way to come to the point of needing to decide what really is important and what can be jettisoned..some of it has actually become a burden rather than a possession...nothing especially profound in these insights...four years of economic stagnation paved the way for a culling of expendable rubbish...i have rented a 5' X10' storage area and aim to keep it less than full...some appliances form the basement that can be salvaged and some books...the rest is moveable and lends itself to my current nomadic existence...this is, about to end as we seem to have found a short term rental that meets our needs and our insurance company's budget...situated in midtown and closer to work than the half-unbuilt ruin we have temporarily left behind...the smoke damage on the east side of the house was extensive...two rooms on the west side had the doors closed and so will be sealed and painted...the rest of the house will be gutted, sealed, and rebuilt..new furnace...new water heater...new roof. floors, and walls...perhaps i will be retiring in somewhat worry-free circumstances...dwelling-wise anyway..a process that will be ongoing into next year so this blog will be filled with all the pathos and drama i can come up with...this is all new to me...i've been to rehab but my house never has...will there be a relapse? recidivist behavior? is there a twelve step program for this? fha?

things = memories?

the first dumpster load of "stuff" from our burnt and smoked out house is loaded and ready for the landfill...what does that say about my environmental "native perennial species" gardening pretensions? so much for movement away from the consumerist/disposable society...most of my house has become as disposable as a closed big box store...true i am salvaging what i can in the way of books and cds and dvds...but they will end up as disposable eventually...when the owner dies or technology renders them obsolete ( like the boxes of vhs tapes stacked up int he living room...keep or pitch? how do you recycle them? )and no-one but some nostalgia freak wants them...i'm still tied down by "stuff" in more ways then i am prepared to admit apparently...time to rethink my position, motivation, and the assessment framework i'm using to evaluate what i am doing... lots of memories in there" someone said yesterday and i thought how important could a memory be if it had to be indexed by an artifact? wouldn't some important memory stand alone? independent of anthropogenic "stuff"? why would it need a memory jog? seems to me the last thing it would need would be some token...but symbols seem so important to people in their self-definitions ( not to mention their definition of "others"...yellow stars of david have made me wary of symbols for a long time...political symbolism is shorthand the makes actual thought unnecessary...another reason to seriously question anything politicians say...inattentiveness can kill you) and even if a thing is attached to a memory, what is a memory? when you remember are you remembering an actual event or person or are you just remembering the last time you remembered it? is that why human memory cn be so fallible?

is this deconstruction or what?

dispossessed and nomadic...i have slept in three rooms in two different houses in four nights...after a number of years on the road in the 1970s i converted to sedentism because i had had enough of moving around...this is dredging up old memories of " sleeping where i fell " rather than some fixed point, and i am not as young as i used to be...i can deal with this, but not without some questions...so, as if i am not sticking my nose into enough other stuff, it seems as though i am going to have to explore exactly what "home" means...at first i thought of starting another blog to do this with but since this deconstruction of "home" through rapid oxidation and its resultant confusion lends itself so well to post-modern "death of the real" i said what the hell...this blog has fallen into serious disuse and this seems like the time to resurrect it...as it is a lot of "home" stands to end up in the dumpster and when "home" is rebuilt as a shiny, squeaky clean version of its old self what does that do to memories? the corner of the carpet that molly the bunny chewed isn't going to be there anymore...so what happens to memories of molly? less frequent because of the lack of a non-verbal indices of what was? how much do visual cues play in making "home" home? there won't be any outside what we rescue and clean up...yeah some photos will remain but they will be unreconciled...the reality will have changed...old reality brushed out like an out of favor commissar disappearing from a stalinist group portrait...this is going to be a weird trip because i am in a weird frame of mind...thrust back to 1975 in some ways when i thought i had buried that particular reality for good and all...hang on...there will be grumpiness...