Apr 18, 2006
Commodity, Firmness and Delight

PIGS, I'm not afraid to admit that over the past month or two the usual routine has broken down here at Camp Levon. The usual routine went something like this:

1. Wake up about ten minutes later than advisable
2. Go to work
3. [SCENE MISSING]
4. Come home, have a beer
5. [SCENE MISSING]
6. Wake up around 11pm and do some quality writin' for The Inner Swine

Suddenly, my list of More Shit I Gotta Do included 1. Find everything I ever owned, ever, and 2. figure out where it belongs. After Day Three, the answer to #2 turned out to be “the garbage” a surprising amount of the time.

Then, back in March, The Duchess and I decided to move to a new home. This was one of those decisions that seem like a stroke of genius when it's kind of unreal and in the future—especially if you're having the conversation after a few cocktails and a good dinner—and quickly devolves into farcical horror. First of all, The Duchess and I are not exactly rich, so hiring movers was out, which left it to us to pack everything we owned into little boxes and somehow schlep it to the new location. As with all moves, this began as a precise and cheerful exercise, with everything packed carefully and according to a complex 230-step plan designed to preserve the delicates and make unpacking a simple exercise in logic. By Day Two, however, this precise plan had descended into bedlam, with things being jammed into boxes with incredible violence, entire rooms of things thrown into the garbage in disgust, and many loud verbal disagreements over what is essential (her: shoes; me: Scotch).

By Day Three, there was a real Lord of the Flies situation going on. We'd already gotten a summons for illegal dumping, and the new location was starting to resemble a war zone. More than once the Duchess found me hiding in a closet, weeping. Calling in The Inner Swine Inner Circle (TISIC) in order to move some heavier pieces resulted in a brief return to some order and sanity, but the discovery that many of those heavier pieces wouldn't fit up the new stairs shook our faith and resulted in some harsh words and an attempt by Ken West to burn the new home down. A few pulley systems which resembled the slaves building the pyramids were hastily sketched on the walls, but were quickly discarded as impractical, as no one at this point had had any dinner.

All this has had a deleterious effect on my writing and The Inner Swine, as I've spent every waking moment these past few weeks carrying heavy objects up and down stairs, getting a crash course in things like plumbing and carpentry, and painting. And painting. And painting. Plus, you'd be surprised to find out what packing everything you own into random, unmarked boxes will do to your general level of organization. Suddenly, my list of More Shit I Gotta Do included 1. Find everything I ever owned, ever, and 2. figure out where it belongs. After Day Three, the answer to #2 turned out to be “the garbage” a surprising amount of the time.

AS a result, the March 06 issue of TIS got off to a slow start and I almost didn't get them all mailed in the cover month—something that has never happened. I always get the damn things out in the cover month, because I am about an inch away from being Rain Man and the idea of missing a date drives me fucking batty. I swear my future involves turning into Bathrobe Man, wandering the neighborhood muttering to myself and being tormented by the local children and a few imagined giant rats in smoking jackets, and this is how it begins: A weird dedication to routine and order. I'd sooner cut off my own foot than mail the March issue in April, bubba. But it almost happened, which resulted in me being hunched over a pile of zine guts on March 30th, muttering and stapling and sweating and swearing. The muttering and swearing parts are pretty typical for just about any evening, of course, it's just that they usually occur over a toilet, not zine guts.

There's also been a paucity of these online columns, though no one has been protesting outside Camp Levon, demanding more of these—probably because no one actually reads these columns—because it's hard to write columns of this quality when you're re-grouting the tub or laying awake at night wondering where in hell all the lamps ended up. Plus, while spending all your weekends and evenings carrying your own weight in boxed possesions, you've still got to work the Day Job, although in this context the word work is defined as “sitting in one place for eight hours and staring fixedly at a spot on the wall like Jack Nicholson in The Shining”.

None of this, it probably doesn't need to be said, is conducive to writing anything more than To-Do lists. Ironically, that makes it a perfect subject for this column. And the circular, mobius-strip quality of this column is complete.