Energy

"Oh, oh, oh,

Cincinnati."

-- The Seedy Seeds, "Oh, Cincinnati"

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Last full day of work. Of Cincinnati.

Big days like this always surprise you with how ordinary they feel. It's like putting on new clothes and realizing they are much like every other set of clothes you've worn. Things work the same way. Buttons button. Pockets bunch. Socks creep downward. Seconds make minutes make hours make a day, and it isn't any different just because something happens to be happening to you. (Or something like that.)

I've returned everything that was not mine a year and a half ago--the TV, the collapsible bookshelf, the turtle shell that sat in the basement for far too long. My artsy theatre books are off the shelf above my cubicle and in three uneven stacks on the file cabinets, waiting to be taken. Scattered about are several piles of semi-important papers, office objects, writing utensils. I look at all of this and wonder what actually belongs to me.

This morning, did a photo shoot for Disney's Peter Pan, Jr., and will return for another this afternoon. For now, maybe an oil change once I feel right about leaving the office.

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I was about to leave my apartment this morning when the energy company van pulled up. "Oh no," I thought, remembering when I'd scheduled for the power to be shut off, "I didn't think they'd come this early." We went into the basement and he started to take apart the meter. I debated asking him to return another day. I asked no such thing. When he left, I ran upstairs to open the windows, empty the fridge. To imagine this space after a day without A/C. Will I sleep here tonight? But then, sleeping in a hot apartment isn't too different from sleeping in a car, which is on my list of things to do...now the only question is, how will I power the vacuum cleaner?

We'll see how the evening goes. I wouldn't mind a lot of wind as I scurry upstairs and stagger downstairs, hefting bulk, gingerly turning corners at each landing. As one co-worker observed, it probably won't matter what temperature the air is. How true.

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I'll take a picture later, but I already have the bottom layer of the backseat packed, a flush Tetris arrangement of boxes and suitcases. Across this plain, I'll lay down the blankets, and above them, whatever else will fit. Past roadtrip experiences suggest I should keep the trunk as easy to unpack as possible. (Once, halfway across Illinois, I had a flat on the highway. Had to extract everything from the trunk and put it in a heap beside my baking car, free-pile-style. It was humiliating, insult and injury, and anyway it just made everything take longer. No intentions of this happening again, but it never hurts to have thought about such things in advance. So: the trunk will be easily unpackable.)

The rest of the day is a sort of game: see how long we can avoid going back to the apartment. A friend will drop by later to pick up furniture, and the rest will descend to the basement, or else the curb. It's like I'm passing a sentence on the furniture. "You have served me well; your existence will continue. You have always been problematic; you shall be locked up indefinitely. You are unwanted; get thee to the corner."

Itinerary

"And I love to drive west to the saintly plains of Nebraska night, and the car shooting past on a long straight run, the grassy wind singing in the vents...As if there were no way without a map and no pleasure without a plan..."

-- Garrison Keillor, "Jack Jack Kerouac Kerouac," A Life in Comedy

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My rough itinerary:

WEDNESDAY Sept 1: Wheels rolling, dinner w/ Bugay @ 6PM, Mansfield, OH, Hillsdale, MI

THURSDAY Sept 2: Hillsdale, MI

FRIDAY Sept 3: Grand Blanc, MI

Along the way: Ann Arbor/Detroit, MI

SATURDAY Sept 4: Stratford, ON?, Grand Blanc, MI

SUNDAY Sept 5: Lansing, MI

MONDAY Sept 6: Chicago, IL

TUESDAY Sept 7: Chicago

WEDNESDAY Sept 8: Madison, WI, Effingham, IL

Along the way: Tour Univ. Wisconsin-Madison, @ 2PM, Milwaukee?

THURSDAY Sept 9: Effingham, IL

FRIDAY Sept 10: (originally planned to spend days in St. Louis and Kansas City, but...) Bellevue, NE

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Got a long list of things to do before leaving: dinner at a Chinese place downtown, a gourmet breakfast at the Waffle House, lunch with a celebrity, lots of planning and lots of packing, one more full day of work (photoshoot included), cleaning (mostly the wiping down of surfaces and the uncovering of corners), and so on. A cubicle to be raided, files to be copied. Items to be returned to folks. A book to finish and return to the library. I foresee a lot of caffeine in my future.

Been asked a lot if I miss things, places, feelings and, of course, people. Yes, to all. Not so much the stuff, especially the secondhand furniture that will probably wind up on the curb come Wednesday, but everything else, I will miss. Perhaps I miss it already. Glad I'll be back in a few months, but still. The awareness of having seen people maybe for the last time is always unsettling: a social cliffhanger.

Sometimes I feel like I should feel like something, but I don't. If anything, right now, at this moment, I just feel tired.

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And, as always, it's a time of beginnings as well as endings. The tour started its rehearsals today. Got behind the steering wheel of the tour van that I drove for the first time almost exactly two years ago, and it was familiar and I remembered how I loved to hate that vehicle. The feel of being pushed up from the seat, the awkward way my elbows shoot sideways when I hold the wheel properly, the heat from the dash and the glare from the windshield, the feeling big on the road, small in the van--a management of contradictions, all at the crank of a key. Remembered what I did and thought when retrospect was impossible, when wisdom was unknown (always is, right?) and its lack unrecognizable, when I thought this job was either going to continue forever or end soon. I pulled the van up beside the building and jumped out.

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When you enter my apartment, there's a wall of boxes and cases blocking the window and the sunlight. Instant claustrophobia, and my things seem strange. I just packed it all and I don't recognize these piles and rows: a regiment of new soldiers. Unpacked and spread out, these things feel like home, cozy, well-intentioned and placed; but all together like this they are unnaturally mixed, a full-length mirror leaning beside pots and pans, clothes packed around lampshades and shoes stuffed with pencils. The occasional stray object--a phone book, a small can of pineapple juice, a dark basket of false plastic ivy--strikes me as absurd and problematic. I bite my nails wondering where I can fit it, whether I should just throw it away, why it exists. I remove it from the floor, put it on a shelf, and think the problem is solved.

But so much of packing is not solution; rather, it is delay. Constant reorganization, the making and unmaking of stacks, the grouping of things according to size or probability of being broken. You think to pack things only if you will use them again soon. You pick something up and ask yourself, Will I need this at some point, or can this go at the bottom? You feel waves of contrasting desires--I want to throw everything out--I want to keep everything here. It seems agonizing and impossible.

The only way to win is by attrition, small tasks, small victories. It's like acting. Pursue the major objective and conquer what you must along the way. Get lost in the details, get reminded of the big picture. Take breaks, drink water. And keep going.