Whew!!

Good lord, man. I’ve been zippin around the Bay every single god darn day since I moved back. I have been sleeping on couches and floors for weeks and weeks, and now finally I have my own floor to sleep on. Kerwin and I got a house in Berkeley, right on the Oakland border, about a half mile from my old house. This place is hot as hell. It’s got hardwood floors and new fixtures and appliances, and so on . . . and a li’l shaded backyard. My landlord, who is a heck of a guy, he said to me the other day: “You tell me what you want this backyard to be and I’ll make it be that thing.”

I have told him I want grass, and a place in the back with flat stones where I can put a table. He made me promise I’d water the grass. I promised him I would. I meant it!

Laura and I are going to plant California poppies all over the place, and a great many other things besides!! Isn’t that nice?? I’ll bet Dante is going to dig it hard.

Tonight, for God’s sake, I’m going to rent me a big-ass U-haul truck in Oakland and rip on down to San Leandro where my friend Tim’s empty ghosthouse sits emptily and ghostlike. I spent all last night tossing his unwanted possessions into huge black garbage bags, and putting nice useful things into huge brown boxes, and standing in cluttered rooms my friend used to occupy with my hands on my hips, arms akimbo, saying to myself and no one else: “Hmmmm. Man. Oh, baby.”

There sure is a whole lot of stuff in that place, some of which is mine, though not much of it. As I mentioned previously, in a fit of absolute mind-melting delirium, I have inherited Tim’s purple couch and his massive television. So I gotta load em up and take em north sometime this evening . . . I have no idea how I’m going to do this. Hmmmm. Man. Oh, baby.

Does anyone in the Bay Area want a bunch of black IKEA furniture? I guess y’all got forty-eight hours to let me know. And I guess ya gotta have a truck or an SUV, and be willing to take 580 south to San Leandro, way the hell down there. Oh, man . . . I’m definitely going to be chucking most of this stuff into oblivion, which is called the heart of planet earth. I’m sorry, earth. Please, y’all, come take this crap off my hands so I don’t have to choke our dear sweet planet with any more particle board furniture that is purportedly designed in Sweden.

Listen: Don’t despair. My own heart is still bitter as hell and soon, I promise here, I will go back to formulating sentences that speak for my bitter heart. I feel like hell. My body is a feeding trough filled to the brim with fifty-year-old corroded batteries and death-pale mannequin appendages. I need to sleep for a long time in my fortified compound in Berkeley. And then wake up again and hop onto that purple couch and watch gorgeous moving pictures on my stupidly huge television.

. . . my Great Fear, by the way, and I’m serious as a heart attack, is that I’m going to wake up in my house on Hawthorne in Portland, Oregon, and the last month of my life (or, God help me, the next six months, or six years of my life, or whatever) will have been an elaborate dream-hallucination perpetrated by some unseen cosmic joker. And I will be back in that absolute beef-jerky-dry oatmeal-flavored ice cream hell that was my life. Please! I pray that isn’t the case! And now I am going to stop talking about this before I unveil how truly deluded and paranoid I am about my own existence.

(lol)

By the way: I am getting a P.O. box in Emeryville this week. I’ll list the address as soon as I’ve got one to list. I hope y’all continue to send me mail~

OK: I am leaving work early to collapse on the rug in my bedroom. It is the only thing I’ve got in there right now. It is a nice clean life for right now. Maybe it’ll get real dirty again real soon.

I can only hope!!