Things one shouldn't do when moving

The thing about living is that life accumulates stuff. We gather the momentoes of youth, adulthood and old age, of accomplishment, of love and of sorrow. During the course of my short life, I have accumulated stuff that let me raise children, care for my family and friends. I have accumulated the keepsakes of summer fun & winter solitude. I have accumulated the trophies of family love, friendly love and romance. I also have the badges of loves lost.
When it is sitting around you everyday, the stuff begs to be sorted out and pared away... the gold from the dross. It never seems urgent to do so. There is always another day to sort through the past while you are living in the present, collecting more stuff. Then there is moving day. All of your stuff is sitting there wondering where it will go. And you are sure it won't all fit where ever you end up next. So you start the process... again.
This time around, I have more trophies and more badges than I have ever had in my life. As I seperate the wheat from the chaff, keeping the essential art tools, my friends in the books that I own and the tools of hospitality that I yearn to employ someday soon... I have broken the cardinal rule of packing. If you know the box to have belonged to Pandora and you are under a deadline... don't open it.
Pandora's box is full of letters. I have only a few days left to line up my poop so that my sister doesn't flush it for me. I know that box is full of dangerous, heart stopping poison. It is in the ink of a familiar hand that once was all balms and tonics for the sorrows of a different time. There are a few strays that once resided between the pages of a book or a magazine. They pop out at inopportune times, dripping their sentimentality, scorching skin and soul. The letter tucked into a box of random items was one such scorcher. I've kept the box because I need to go through it. Someday the sentiment won't kill me. Someday I will look through it and see the me that he saw. I will want to know that someone loved me with the kind of passion that makes your heart stop in a good way. Someday, I will believe what I read. The problem is... this isn't that someday.
The letter, drizzled with this signature ink color, in that handwriting that heralded an afternoon's entertainment full of art, ideas, plans for the future and the promise of sensual dreams fulfilled. It was like so many other letters over the course of our four year relationship. This one was dated a mere four weeks before the unexpected implosion.
It began in the same way: "Good morning Sunshine, how is my Dodi today?" And after the discussion of our respective projects, the requests for assisstance in difficulty, the shared dreaming of a future that would go on forever it ended the same way that the other letters had ended before. "You make me happy. Your laughter and smiles brighten the darkest of my days. I miss our time together and I an not wait to get back to your loving arms, to make art with you in the studio to build our future ..."
And in a months time, he stood in the mirror of the vanity, adjusting his tie while explaining to me that after his job interview he was going to stop by her work place and see if she would take him back. You see, he thought about it a lot. And, in his words, as indelible as the ink in his letters, he told me "I'd go back in a heartbeat, without a second thought, if she would have me back."
Total eclipse of the heart.
My heart is in that box with his letters. I knew it was. So why did I open that box? Why did Cleopatra stick her hand in the basket when she knew the Asp was in it? What made me think I was ready to be someone's Dodi again? Hope or desperation? I don't know. I only know that you don't open the box to the past when you have three days left to move.

The coffin of my youth

Add another nail.
Walter Cronkite has passed. And for the most part, everyone is sad. I've heard a few people lambaste him for the Vietnam War. I know I wasn't there. I know that I don't know that much about the whole thing. But I do know that winning isn't everything. If your win costs you more than your resources, if it costs you your soul and your friends then the win is nothing. And I do think he knew that. Walter Cronkite was the voice that calmed our chaotic house every night around 6. Nobody was yelling at anyone else. And when he talked about something, you knew he had a clue. Some may think that wasn't the case with Vietnam... fine. But with everything else, he spoke with authority because he educated himself on a subject until he had it.
Specifically, for me, it was Space. The final frontier didn't seem so strange and foreign. With Richard C. Hoagland at his right hand, Cronkite brought the distant stars into view with his grasp of the technology that NASA employed to stretch the scope of human endeavor beyond our thin stratosphere. If you want to balme anyone for the solidity of my Trek fandom, blame Cronkite. The wonders of the Enterprise seemed so much closer to me as a child than t hey do now because he told us what NASA was doing to advance our understanding of space and its idiosynchracies. With Cronkite at the helm of public support, NASA flourished in appropriations committees until their complicity in militaristic campaigns became known.
His was the voice of so many important occassions in America both sad and joyful. He told my mother about Kennedy and Monroe. He told me about Elvis, Crosby and Grace Kelly. He ended every broadcast with "And that's the way it is." But, oddly, I never took that to mean it would never be any different. He sign off was not the resignation of defeat but the acknowledgement that the way it is today is today. Until he retired, I was an optimistic person. The crazy defeatest thing settled in afterwards because no one was ever certain that the present was just the present.

My heart hurts so much right now that if I were a poet I could make the world cry with a single verse. If I were one with my art supplies, my Muse and I would be crying into the Ultramarine and Cad Yellow Medium wondering, of course, if maybe the Pthalo Blue wouldn't have been a better choice.
This kind of pain should be producing something besides puddles of tears on my pillow. If not for the inks and paints at least it should produce something more in my day job, those woe filled hours in which I toil and spin my wheels. All I have produced is the unwaivering conviction that I have so thoroughly suceeded in my bluff that no one will call it.
A good friend, a dear old mate from school, told me he always thought I had my poop in a group and was pretty well settled. Since it followed a small pity party in which I wondered aloud what the hell was wrong with me, I feel confident I can say my dear friend thought that I was so well put together that I didnt need anybody. The bluff.
The hand I hold is far less certain than my friend or I have made me sound. I do need someone, many someones. I don;t need a guy to screw in lightbulb. I don't need a guy to kill my spiders, trap my mice, change my water faucets, lay my ceramic tile, install a toilet or any number of household items. I don't really need a guy to fight my battles FOR me. With would be nice, But I can fight my own battles. And thus, I have given the world the impression that I don't need a guy in my life.
Sure, I win the hand. Ante is mine homies. But, like the boys say, money can't buy love and it sure as hell doesn't buy anything good from the relationship department.