News in Briefish

The move – It’s over. The three of us began our move on the morning of an extremely muggy Saturday, under the direction of Yammers, the neighborhood streetcat. Yammers has successfully charmed Ginger and Carmelita’s block with his street-hustler brand of affection, his prodigious drool and equally generous gifts of dead mice, voles and—most recently—a squirrel the size of Yammers himself, on G and C’s front porch.

Interlude/Ode:
A jolly little song for Yammers (named for his sweet potatah’ color and disposition) by Ginger:

Yammers, oh Yammers.
Our new Gentleman Caller.
He doesn’t leave his Calling Card;
He nails it to your Heart.

Turns out that Ginger and Carm’ are not the only ones who’ve been caring for Yammers. He goes by George across the street, where they feed him wet food and dry, and down the road, he’s known as Sam. We found out about one other life that last day. Turns out that next door, Yammers is Walter. There, he lounges around inside and out, and enjoys free-form jazz music with the elderly bachelor who lives there. Oh, Yammers. You’ll be just fine.
So, Yammers/George/Sam sat in his usual spot on Ginger and Carmelita’s porch, looking on with slit-eyed approval as the three of us lugged their heaviest, most unwieldy furniture down G and C’s steep staircase and onto the Oldest UHaul in Beachtown. I’m serious: When I drove the thing off their lot, I first thought it did not work at all, since there was zero forward motion until I had the acceleration pedal flush with the floor.

The Oldest UHaul also turned out to be rusted-through in spots, so when the subsequent noon downpour came, it also ruined a couple boxes of Ginger and Carmelita’s books and soaked through their mattresses as well. Word to the Wise: This is not covered by U-Haul unless you buy their special “Your UHaul is a piece of Crap and Will Ruin Your Personal Belongings If it Rains” Insurance. S’true.
Around noon, two friends came and kicked much moving ass with us until long after the sun went down. Things went a lot faster and both apartments were translated to Mansion House.

Mansion House has many small, quirky, things wrong with it. It is, however, utterly amazing on the whole. I had a friend over for supper the last week and she walked around slack-jawed for about five minutes at the place’s high ceilings and wood paneling and awesome antique peacock wallpaper in the dining room. I remembered, suddenly, doing the same when last year’s tenants had me over for supper for the first time. And thought of how we take for granted what we’re around every day. And how maybe Lorrie Moore is right in this one short story of hers in which one of her characters posits this notion that we can only love what we don’t understand. In some small ways, at some small moments, maybe. Maybe, Lorrie Moore.
Anyhoo.

Chicaaaago! — is where I am, at present. Visiting my sister, yo. This morning, she asked me what I wanted to see, so I looked up all these “Haunted/Weird/Historic Chicago” activities online, but they all cost more dinero than Lowly Grad Student Me wants to spend. So instead we went to Wicker Park for the Haunted Consumer-Whore Tour of Chicago. Ducked into one shoe store where I flipped over a price tag that read $485, and immediately had that sort of scary nightmare idea about What If I somehow destroyed these shoes completely?-->like, dropped them and then jumped up and down on them repeatedly with the hefty mary janes I wore into the store? That whole fear-of-walking-too- close-to-the-edge-of-the-Scenic-Overlook,-because-what-if-you-just-jumped? thing.
Gives you goosebumps.

Tonight, we take in one stop of the cheap and yummy Salvadoran food tour, so I am psyched about that.

Also, about Chicago: The stranger-type-men here are all stare-y and flirty, (and in the worst cases, cat-call-y.) It’s a little jarring after Beachtown, where the creepiness was more in the vein of “Wait, isn’t that guy dating that 19-year-old, 40?”

Also, about Chicago: At any hour that I sit down on this couch in this apartment, there are children playing in the street down below, with at least one screaming in a repeated car-alarm-like pattern. This includes midnight.

Eyelid twitching – I was lying down reading the very last issue of Punk Planet (huge sob. possibly more about this later), dozing off to said screams and shouts. It was that sort of quasi-sleep that involved a To Do list of things that must be accomplished upon return to Beachtown. It also included a brief worry session over the fact that I often have trouble recalling the perfect descriptive words right when I want them, and does this mean I have some sort of early-stage brain disorder or perhaps a tumor? The poor word-recall is part of the reason that my Real Writing™ takes so long, part of the reason I’m an abysmal arguer who often scripts perfect witty and biting come-backs several hours or days after the argument. So I’m lying there falling in and out of sleep, worrying because I’m trying unsuccessfully to come up with the word “integrity,” and then I really fall asleep. And then I wake up and my left eyelid’s twitching. Still is.