leaving the miami vice compound

After so many weeks past Move Day, our house near the ocean is slowly coming together, organizationally speaking, although we both freaked out a little after we couldn’t see the dining room anymore after the movers left. So for the first week, the spot where our new, soon-to-arrive dining table will go is, or kinda still is, currently occupied by about a dozen boxes and plastic bins . I know I like to cook, but man, I have a lot of pots and wooden spoons. I also want to eat dinner on a real table, and soon.

Thankfully our house has an end-to-end attic which can store everything from a boxed up set of cocktail glasses to a baby rhino. With most of my stuff put away now, we’ve been slowly figuring out where a lot of Charlotte’s extra stuff might end up. Until then, the guest bed has been turned into a giant shelf for Charlotte’s extra boxes of clothes, mementos/valuables passed down to her from Athena and so on. Our goal is to have everything functionally organized before Christmas, possibly in time to accommodate a holiday cocktail party we have in mind, a visit by Miranda on the 13th, or both. Charlotte and I are both independent in our own ways, and so much of the first month has been a matter of figuring out what our shared space might actually be. The problem is that Charlotte basically packed and unpacked for two people. And I haven’t lived with a woman under any context since Jill, and that was during Clinton’s first term. So we’re both dealing with realistic adjustments, I guess. But in the long run, we’re both getting what we want, and that’s something to be cheerful about, worth looking at the longterm for.

That said, I was not sorry to say farewell to my last residence. Pre-San Diego, most of the places I lived in Rain Town were early 20th century brick walk-ups, with flourishes hinting at simpler, more spartan times: an old fire escape, giant doors walled off with cinder blocks to accommodate more units, painted over molding that framed where a Murphy bed used to be. Think the building featured in Seinfeld, but more dog-eared, and with less interesting neighbors. Without getting too chicken-or-egg, the brick buildings were an extension of my own personality, and with the furnace turned on, I spent a number of evenings watching televsion or reading a book while the drizzle entered Day 15.

My first residence in Sonny Returns to San Diego: The Movie, was unlike any of these places. A giant tiled courtyard was in the building’s center, bordered by 40-foot palm trees, large, ugly ferns, and fountains that ran all day and invariably made me want to go to the can any time I walked by them. And the quaint, subtle brick designs I was used to were swapped out for stucco, and a bland burnt orange, offwhite and cobalt blue design that fell somewhere between Santa Barbara and Barcelona. Okay…I get it, it rains like 10 days a year here, if that, but jaysus the entire building seemed to have taken a big soma pill around 1984, side effects still in full throt.

Within 30 minutes of moving in, I dubbed this transitional residence the Miami Vice Compound. The MVC was so named for two reasons, one being the modern but not cutting edge design and the other being the building’s primary demographic: old people. More specifically, old people with a lot of money, a lot of free time, and likely mad at one or more of their kids for forgetting to call on Father’s Day. Old people easily comprise over 70% of the MVC’s residence, and regularly used the courtyard as a kind of impromptu barbershop pulpit. Usually the courtyard activities consisted of complaining about Tenant X or Tenant Y being too loud, reminiscing over how great Judy was as a building manager, or getting really quiet when Lena, the building manager’s mail order bride would pass by, showing prospective new tenants around in a tacky floral skirt with an exceptionally short hemline. Nothing shuts old men up like the sudden opp to ogle the backside of a leggy, laconic Russian.

I got along with most of these folks, mainly because I could talk about things that mattered to them, which in this town is basically Naval history, baseball, and the wonders of fiber. That made it somewhat tolerable. But I also recognized from Day 1 that I was essentially passing through, and while the MVC was, and still is, a nice place to live, it also wasn’t me. The MVC is ideal for those content to enjoy their golden years in the sun, easy access to Petco, hospitals in case they’ve fallen and can’t get up, and a nice steak dinner when the kids, and their kids, are in town. In fact, much of the neighborhood immediately west of the Lamp is like this. Virtually every time I went to pick up coffee before work I’d see a couple of them standing on the street chatting, a trophy dog on one hand and expensive handbag and/or trophy wife in the other.

It was interesting to me that in a building with nearly 200 units, the only children connected to the place were visitors, and that’s probably because the building’s minority tenants fell into one of two categories, young kids fresh out of college who didn’t care what happened to their IKEA furniture, or people my age who were biding their time until they bought a condo or, in my case, were planning to move in with someone else. There were no fully functioning families in the building, only portions of them that were either enjoying the 4th quarter of their life decked out in Tommy Bahamas, or still in the 1st half of their life with abundant time left on the clock.

This may have been the main reason several of these old people immediately disliked the younger people, because the last thing they wanted was any reminder that they were living next to life-sized children, such as the half-dozen dumb 20somethings scattered about the upper floors. Cheering loudly during Monday Night Football in a heavily pro-football town, was one thing. Stumbling home from Bondi or The Bitter End at 2:30 in the morning, with a one-night stand in tow, that was another. Certainly my old upstairs neighbor, James, felt this way; if the phone convos with his children were any indication, the last thing he needed was yet another reason to open up a can. Or, maybe he did want to open up a can. He did get into it with the tacky sex couple on one memorable Tuesday afternoon, which I overheard while editing user guides from my couch.

I always assumed two things from the window that ostensibly featured tacky sex couple. It was either a woman who was an escort with a regular clientele, someone who really liked porn, or a woman who had an…uh, standing appointment, with the same guy on Tuesday afternoons. The first time I heard it I thought it was funny, and by the tenth or eleventh time the noise was background noise, no different than the hummingbirds in the palms or the traffic from the street. Thing is, though, I had work to distract me from thinking too deeply what or who was being done forty feet away. Not the same story for the powderkeg sitting above.

Five minutes into this particular session, I suddenly heard James yell, “that does it,” and he stomped across the room, flung open his screen door and leaned out from his balcony.

“Shut yo damn window, woman!”

“Uh…uh…uh…uh…” Just the one person this time. Autoerotic calisthenics, was my guess. Maybe the guy was

“I know you hear me, dammit!”

“Uh…uh…uh…uh…”

“Everyone hears you slammin’ it! Now shut the hell UP!”

Silence. I guessed now that the couple had stopped, realizing James was yelling at them. I pictured them whispering to each other: Do you think he heard us? Of course he heard us! What should we do? I don’t know, maybe go to your place? Why, just ignore him and he’ll go away? What, when his lease expires?

“I still hear you! Call it a day and keep it down!” Say what you will, but occasionally old people make for great free security. I so wanted to poke my head out at this point. In a world where I spend 40-50 hours each week reading about and editing information about integrated circuits, this was my personal High Noon. Another sliding of framed glass, presumably the f***ee’s window.

“What is your f***ing problem, f***ing perv?” Definitely younger.

“Oh, I’m the perv. I’m a perv to call yo noise when you and yours go at it like a couple of dogs and everyone can hear you?”

“You’re the only one who’s f***ing complaining! No one’s here but you getting off by your f**ing self. If you don’t like it you can f***ing close the window!” SLAM! goes the window.

James wasn’t done. “If you don’t put it down, I’m ‘onna take this belt and really give you something to moan ‘bout!” James went on and on like this for a good two minutes longer, barking his head off like a deranged rottweiler, excited by the paper boy just out of leash range. I wish I could repeat the rest of what James said, but truthfully I was too busy biting my tongue to keep from laughing out loud.

I thought about this exchange again when I returned to my now-empty flat, after six hours of watching my and Charlotte’s stuff get loaded and unloaded on Move Day. Everyone hates dealing with this part, the last cleanup of sinks and floors, figuring out what to do with the nine or ten miscellaneous objects (empty cardboard boxes, random dishes) that are somehow still scattered all over the place. I threw the last few objects into an oversized Nordstrom bag, made one last attempt to shampoo-clean a couple of wine stains in the carpet from a party in May. It’s awkward for me, because I want to do enough cleanup to get most of my deposit back, but not enough to register that I care about who lives there or what happens after I am gone. After about 25 arbitrary sweeps over the last few spots, I took the Nordy’s bag down to my car, packed up the cleaning stuff, brought in a bottle of red wine for the next tenant, and basically sat down in the middle of my empty living room.

And as soon as I did, the exhaustion began to settle in. Kinda like when you sit in a hammock or adirondack chair. I hadn’t slept much in the previous two days. There’s always something you miss, boyo. Like forgetting to change the address on one of your credit cards. Or you didn’t read the fine print of the lease. Or you accidentally threw something valuable out with the trash two days ago. Or worse. Usually, I’m smart enough to head any of these details off, but this time, I admit my head felt too crowded to care about them at this time. I can’t describe it. I was tired and a little confused.

My cell buzzed from the kitchen. I watched it dance around the counter for a moment or two, then jumped up to pick up the phone. The number on the display screen wasn’t recognizable, but I picked it up anyway, thinking it was Shelley or Running Man, seeing about drinks later that night.

“Hello?”

“Is this Mr. Amou?”

“Yes, who is this?”

“You called us about getting a maid service a few days ago? I’m sorry about getting back to you so late, but we’ve had an increase in service requests and I wanted to see if you needed our assistance with your apartment?”

“Oh yeah, that’s right…” I’d forgotten about the flyer left on my car two weeks earlier, offering on-call cleaning for offices and small apartments. Sensing serendipity, I gave them a call to see about cleaning out my kitchen and bathroom. At that point, I was ready to pay a guy to worry about one thing less.

“No, um, you know, I never heard from you, and I actually just finished cleaning the space a few minutes ago. We have it under control.” My voice echoed around the barren walls.

“Well, again I’m sorry for calling back so late. Keep us in mind in the fut--“

I hung up. That was my cue. And for the apartment too, I guess. Normally, before I leave an apartment for the last time, I sit for a few minutes and reflect, and as dorky as this might sound, I actually say goodbye to the place I lived in. But this time I just wanted to get out of there. After dropping off the key, I turned out the lights, pulled out of the garage, drove up the road to Ocean Beach and…I haven’t been back to downtown since. Life is short, if you savvy, and I think honestly I was done with loud neighbors, idiot building managers, flakey services, factoring in an additional 30 minutes each night just to see my girlfriend with commuting, searching for a parking space. I’m thinking this is the bridge all new families get to cross – getting rid of all such white noise. If so, then I was ready a long time ago.

note to bucharest, romania

Find anything that you liked? Does it read better in your native language?

Maybe start at part one of the yarn. You'll be less confused that way.

Peace,
SA

going off on keith olbermann

Dear Mr. Olbermann,

It pains me to write this, but I can’t let this one go. You, kind sir, are a Grade A hypocrite.

My frustration stems from watching one of your recent Special Comments, a segment familiar to regular viewers of Countdown With Keith Olbermann, a five-minute editorial on a hot topic of the previous week that closes out your nightly broadcast. Usually the Comment is in response to a policy decision made by President Bush or other senior government official. Sometimes, the Comments are in response to a cultural critique made by Bill O’Reilly or some other conservative pundit(s). And sometimes your Comments fall somewhere in between, such as the one you broadcast on Monday, November 10, 2008, excoriating the 52.2% of my fellow Californians for passing Proposition 8.

I actually agreed 101% with the humanistic content of this comment in particular, which at times reminded me of your personal hero Edward R. Murrow, camera angles and all. No doubt Ed is smiling down on you for this one. And your 11/10 Comment has since been forwarded to me twice, first by my girlfriend’s best friend, and again via the PFLAG mail group at work. The first time, I didn’t watch it, because, I was too busy laughing hysterically at the slo-mo-Barney-gone-wild video, also from Countdown. The second time, I deleted the email, because by then I was angry.

At you, kind sir.

Because you didn’t vote this year.

And you admitted as much on, of all places, The View. The effing View.

Interesting thing about the Countdown transcript for November 10th. Your Special Comment addressing Proposition 8 was led in by a video clip of your appearance on The View, shot earlier that day. I’d forgotten that, probably because when I see Elisabeth Hasselbeck on the screen I fear turning into a pillar of salt, and under such circumstances I flee. After hearing the commercial for foot-long subs, I knew the panic had passed, I watched your Prop 8 Comment, liked what I heard and I spent the rest of the evening eating dinner and playing Scrabble with my girlfriend.

A couple of days later Charlotte sent me the video of your entire appearance on The View, the first four or five minutes of which are witty banter among the ladies in re: your show’s content, how you always bash O'Reilly and Sarah Palin, you know, the sort of stuff as a regular viewer I assumed you'd say. Then it got awkward; Joy Behar asked you point blank if it's true what she read, that you didn’t vote, and you admitted toward the end of the segment that you did not. And Behar kinda took you to task for it a little bit, you replied in return as it being a “symbolic gesture” of sorts. This went on for about twenty seconds, and Joy’s disapproval was joined by Whoopi, Sherri Shephard, and even Elisabeth’s dim bulb turned on at that point. As it started to appear to turn completely postal, Barbara Walters jumped in to plug your show and basically bailed you from getting verbally impaled by four women on a live feed. Cut to commercial break. Nice save, Babs.

Assuming the transcript of your 11/10 broadcast (great archives, by the way) is accurate, it’s interesting that Countdown basically used the four minutes of your appearance on The View right up to the point before your admittance that you didn’t vote, but stops short about ten seconds short of that unfortunate disclosure. But you know, I’ll give you a pass on that. Shows such as Countdown or O’Reilly Factor are no different than Oprah, Ellen, or your pick of any number of cooking shows on The Food Network: the host is the brand.

But still, I have to ask, kind sir, your decision to not vote is symbolic of...what? That as news journalism, Countdown can be somehow still be taken seriously as objective news reporting? Give me a break. You squandered that ideal when you started doing the finger puppet sketches of Wacko Jacko. More recently, your network was painfully quiet on October 23 and 24, the day during and the day after Alan Greenspan was grilled on the Congressional floor and admitted that his refusal in the early 2000s to regulate derivitaves were a chief reason we’re in our current economic mess. Straight or gay, the notion of keeping a roof over one’s head is a topic which affects everyone; ergo, it’s newsworthy. But not even Hardball went after this juicy scoop, and Chris Matthews usually pillories everyone. But that’s cool; it’s hard to berate a guy, when his spouse sits a few doors down from you, right? Right?

I’ll even take it a degree further, and say that maybe, on some level your 11/10 Comment was guided in principle by a basic interpretation of the fulcrum from which our government, and by extension of that our culture, is grounded. I am referring about the Declaration of Independence. More specifically, the second sentence of the Declaration, arguably the most brutally contested in American English, which says:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Yeah, yeah, everyone knows this one. Like you probably did, I first read it in grade school, but all the same I went down to Borders and picked up a $5 copy, just to be sure. It really does boil down to those two words “all Men,” doesn’t it? And everyone knows that in the 1776 context, this meant rich white landowners. But we’ve been wrestling with the finding the best context of “all Men” ever since, starting with George Washington, who was known to be conflicted on a variety of things, ranging from political parties to being a slaveowner, and furthermore a slaveowner who in his last will granted slaves freed as a condition of his will/passing. But only after he died.

And, we’ve gone through two rounds of clarifying our empirical understanding of this sentence, and the first came with the 13th and 14th Amendments, by way of the Civil War, the second was the 19th Amendment. The first one was a bloodbath, the second one was a nonviolent protest movement that spanned about 40 years (at least), starting in parlor rooms and lecture halls, and ended with a ratification of allowing women to vote in 1920.

Now it’s Round 3, and this one is just as imperative. Imperative because certain groups in this country are attempting a buttonhook around “all Men” by clarifying their understanding of the phrase “…by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” which includes a strict definition of marriage. I think the logic among Christian conservatives is that if God says marriage is a “certain…[Right]” that is, heteros-only, then the notion of “Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness” is still intact for everyone, gays can do the same things as straights, can do pretty much anything and everything except tie the knot, because hey, that was “certainly” ratified by God, an act that predates the Declaration, we’re all down with the Word of God, so…glad to have it in writing, end of story.

I think the rationale is something like that. I admit I’m guessing here. But going off on fundamentalists doesn’t concern me right now; instead, I’d rather focus on the phrase that everyone makes fun of, the “…Pursuit of Happiness” ending. (I pause for your own image of copious drug use here). Yeah it’s a little dippy, but it’s the only phrasing in the first three paragraphs (i.e., before the Founding Fathers really take King George III to the rack) that hints at the one option available to all citizens. That is, the option to actively Pursue one’s own betterment or, more simply “…to go get it,” as my old man frequently says. It is a phrase so prevalent to Americans that, like blinking or waving hello to the funny guy in the copy room, we forget it’s there. And this option—that of Pursuit—for me has always extended to criticizing my own government as needed, and by extension of that, criticizing my fellow Americans when they willfully step in the way of other’s Pursuit of Happiness.

And that’s why we have elections, Mr. Olbermann. Every person is entitled to make a vote to facilitate their ideas for change, but that’s the contingency, you actually have to show up to make the change happen. That includes backing up widely broadcast opinions on oh, I don’t know, let’s say a news journalism show watched by hundreds of thousands of people. Oh wait a minute, I forgot: absentee ballots. So you can mail it in. The process doesn’t even require walking any more.

And here’s the crazy part; people spent hundreds of millions of dollars this past year to ensure that everyone participate in the election. Including you, kind sir. It’s the most macro macroversion of squeezing blood from a turnip I can think of, at least until China embraces the public vote.

And that brings me back to your “symbolic gesture,” and I know, you think you’re being noble like your hero Murrow in straining to retain some objective pivot point (e.g., in case Obama turns out to be another Jimmy Carter). But given your profession and recent editorials, to me this admission will always register as a dumb choice to stay on the sidelines. And you cannot have it both ways, kind sir. You can’t vocalize disgust over the changes promoted in other parts of the culture you live in and regularly Comment upon, when in theory, if given the option to actively Pursue those Comments, you would have balked. That’s no different than the toady who goads two kids all morning to fight at lunch, then steps back to passively enjoy the spectacle he’s created. And I will respect more greatly any village idiot who knows how and when to mark an X in the box, even if to cancel out an X of my own, than those who claim to be so above the process that they cannot be bothered to expend a single postage stamp.

So this really boils down to 42 cents, huh? I know that you can afford this, but all the same, I plan on sending you a stamped envelope which you may use for your election. Also, you should see a clock installed here on gde… counting down to Election Day 2012. Think of it as your personal Outlook reminder. You’re welcome.

Until then, on behalf of my 46-year old gay sister, her partner, their fully-functioning hetero son, my gay friends, my girlfriends’ gay friends back in San Francisco, my new friends in PFLAG, and the 47.8% of us who voted to kill Proposition 8 in the fine state of California, for acts of hollow virtue that is your recent your lip service, I nominate you, Mr. Keith Olbermann, as the Worst Person In The World.

Shame on you,
Sonny Amou

Statistical data courtesy the San Diego Union-Tribune, Los Angeles Times and New York Times. Statements made about the content of Hardball and Countdown With Keith Olbermann were corroborated on MSNBC’s transcript archives. The snappy pic of Mr. Olbermann was pulled from www.mediabistro.com. Related video links were shamelessly lifted from youtube.

yardage

After the first square yard, I can relax.

Said yard can be linoleum, hard wood, carpet, sod. A basic vantage point where I can discern where the mugs go, where the garbage bags of packing popcorn are to be stacked, and what won’t be unpacked at all. I established my yard after running the third load of dishes through the wash, in the empty kitchen floor, typically where most of my yards start out. What can I say; I don’t want newsprint in my Cheerios. I also don’t want to be eating lunch from an old tv stand with a towel draped over it in my kitchen, so with any luck I will have a couple more yards to add to the first before the month is out.

And that will happen sooner than later. In the past 15 years, I’ve moved 13 times, 14 if you count the Benjamin Braddock home stint after graduating Iowa. By the fourth move, I’d developed a proactive system toward minimizing scrounge time (e.g., I’m out of duct tape, so I need to run to Home Depot and grab some more); by the seventh, I started using every move as an opportunity to prep for the next move. In this department, I know what I’m doing. But – cue the Wonder Years voiceover – this move was different for a couple of reasons.

For one, this is the first time I moved into a house with a sheila of the nonplatonic variety. Pre-Charlotte, the only sheila I lived with was Jill, a model-turned-deli-worker who was studying to become a pastry chef. This was during my Top Ramen mailroom lackey days, long time ago. Jill and I lived across the hall from each other in the same building and were on a hey-at-the-mailbox cordiality. Then, her roommate suddenly moved back to Arizona due to a family issue, and strapped for cash, she offered me the second bedroom. When I factored in the advantages of living with someone else, the reduction in rent was something like $250-300. But I might as well have won the lottery; I told Jill I needed a day to think it over, but the wallet moths were already measuring the drapes.

Upon cohabbing with Jill, my male friends began finding excuses to hang out at my place, particularly on the nights after she returned from aerobics. After watching her walk into her room wearing tight lycra pants and a sweaty tank, they’d ask me with a glance, “Dude, how can you live here and not want to jump her?” And my answer was: because I live here.

If Jill appeared normal if slightly air-headed as a casual neighbor, living with her was quite the eye-opener. For one thing, Jill was rapidly working toward triple-digits in the bedpost notch department. I admit I was impressed, to a degree. On more than four occasions I woke up on a Saturday morning to find some random guy sitting at my kitchen table, drinking out of my coffee mug and helping himself to my Honey Nut Cheerios. Nearly always said John wore some combination of soiled boxers, barbed-wire armband ink, and that vague happy glow most guys acquire after a postcoital one-nighter.

The only thing that kept me from throwing any of these clowns out of my kitchen on the spot was a Really? And you just met last night? sense of amazement which accompanied all of these encounters, plus a general tabulation in my head of the names of these guys, perhaps as a means to avoid acknowledging I wasn’t getting any action at the time to appease my Rain Main side. For what it’s worth, if your first name is Ray, you had a 35.2% probability of successfully nailing Jill, about 10.31% if it’s Jason, 1.6% if it’s Max, and about negative 250% if it is Sonny. The numbers probably have changed in lieu of Jill’s activity, although I am confident about that last datum.

When Jill wasn’t getting to know an entire area code on a carnal basis, she’d sit by the kitchen window and smoke dope all night long, watching the cars zip by on the freeway below. Was she dealing out of the house? I couldn’t tell; given the sudden influx of guys I didn’t know showing up at the apartment, I couldn’t tell if they were stopping by for sex or drugs, sometimes, frankly, it was both. I wasn’t judging, people are free to do whatever they want. But Jill seemed way too reckless, I sensed a real self-destructive streak. After four months, I was fed up with the massive unfamiliar foot traffic eating up my cereal, I decided that I didn’t want to end up on the 11 o’clock news, and moved out.

Most of my better friends have heard about Jill already. More specifically, my friends know my habit of saying after a few drinks in recent years “the next roommate will be my wife.” I’d repeat this more emphatically on the one or two post-Jill occasions in which I relented, and try a cohab situation for the sake of saving ten bucks on cable. On both occasions I’d regret it within a month, realizing that sharing an office space or a few scattered convos for a year provides virtually no insight how the person is once they get home, throw their keys on the coffee table and put the bunny slippers on. When they are only behaving for themselves.

All the same, I thought I had a better chance with living with Charlotte because we were already spending significant amounts of nondate time outside work, outside dating itself, I guess. I’d seen her when she was sick, I’ve seen her in a cranky mood, and she’s definitely pretty much seen the same from me. My own bed would stay made for days at a time, and at one point in August I found a spiderweb in my kitchen sink due to lengthy unuse. A year past our first date, we were both ready to move forward. The constant shuttling between our buildings and moving cars around in my neighborhood for parking spots, all of this was really wearing on me. I wanted to spend more time with her without so much administration.

There were other incentives. As I said before, I was not a big fan of Charlotte’s oldere building. I later clarified that dislike upon the building’s new manager, Jeff. The problems began about a month prior to Move Day, when Charlotte gave notice to vacate. Charlotte mentioned later that this was the first time Jeff had managed a building, and that would eventually explain a few things.

Such as availability. If it was a matter of scheduling a preliminary walkthrough or fix the closet doors, Jeff wouldn’t return her calls. However, on two occasions that Jeff wanted to show the place to prospective tenants, he pestered her relentlessly with calls at noon, followed up by more hostile phone calls later that day at 3:00 p.m. wondering why she hadn’t called back. So as Charlotte was sorting through boxes of Athena’s belongings, Jeff would show up at her door, either unnannounced or several hours past a scheduled time. worlds biggest mosquito I’d ask her “why do you let this kid do this to you?” She answered, “I just want my deposit back.”

I was dealing with the same thing. My building had been run for years by Judy, who helped me lease the space via faxes when I was still in Rain Town. By and large, Judy rates pretty high as far as building managers go.

I’m guessing I was one of several tenants who became flustered when the prompt, overly helpful service I was used to with Judy was replaced by Dmitri, whose best skills appeared to be cornering the market on yellow paisley polo shirts, and remaining steadfastly unhelpful when confronted with a very basic question. Like this one I asked about three weeks ago:

“Hey, so I’m moving out next month and was wondering if you could recommend any good movers in this area.”

“I don’t know. Look in yellow pages.”

“Well, yeah I could have done that, but I figured you might have heard a few good things from tenants who live here now?”

“Is not something I know anything about. I suggest yellow pages. Okay, thanks for stopping by.”

If there’s one thing I hate about the tenant/landlord relationship, it’s that dumb song-and-dance a smart tenant such as myself has to maintain after giving notice, not do or say anything that’d cost them their deposit. Particularly if the landlord could potentially turn into a total bag.

And sometimes negotiating it is much like a Big Ten football game, where teams nearly always play for the 4-yard gain down the middle, instead of the 40-yard pass which makes the highlight reel. I reminded myself of this analogy whenever I dealt with officious jerks of any kind, focus on the steady progress, no matter how slow. But nothing sets my Scottish stubbornness off faster than when I know I’m being brazenly disregarded. My heels develop tar, if you savvy. That’s about when I spotted a flyer tacked to a wall, citing a moving company. Very likely one of the relics of Judy’s recent management.

“What about these guys?” I gestured to the wall; Dmitri was already sitting at his desk, fumbling through the pencils in his desk mug. He looked up and saw the flyer for the first time.

“Um, I don’t know anything about them. I think you should look in yellow—”

No. Not today. "--yeah, but since this flyer is on the wall in your office, wouldn’t that be a tacit endorsement of these movers by this building?”

“I am the building manager, I never hear of them.”

“I meant your predecessor.” Dmitri’s mental translator appeared to jam. “The person who did your job before you.” HIs bulb undimmed. Maybe.

“Yeah, maybe so. Could be approval. Could be decoration. I still say yellow pages. So you move out first November, I note that on Outlook. Okay, gladIcouldhelpthanksforstoppingby.”

“Sure, thanks.” I went back to my apartment to sweep off my patio.

Idiot.

I ignored Dmitri’s help and contacted the movers I saw on the wall. Thanks to Judy’s lingering organization, I successfully coordinated a two-stage move from Golden Hill to Downtown to our new house in Ocean Beach. The crew was early and very fast, and one small billing error notwithstanding, everything was done inside of six hours. We relaxed later that evening and sometime the next day, I began clearing out a yard in the kitchen, one box of hastily packed silverware at a time.

Several days later I was sweeping leaves off the driveway, the first time I’d done so since I was about 13. A guy about my size and age walked up the alley, toward me. After a second, I recognized him as Alex, half of the married couple who’d just moved down the street into owning a house of their own. We’d met a month earlier when we’d checked the space out; I sensed the guy had never lost his temper in his life. After exchanging a quick salutation, Alex showed me all of the spots in the yard in which our cats might be able to escape. He then asked me about our transition in general.

“Well, it’ll be a while before we get everything in place, but we’re feeling positive about it.”

“Cool, cool. The landlords are pretty on it; Ben pretty much will fix everything same day, and they’ll leave you alone so long as the bills are paid.”

“That’s good news,” I said, and repeated the hassles that Charlotte and I both had with our most recent landlords. Alex waved that off.

“No man, Ben and Jeri aren’t like that. They’ll charge about $100 for shampooing the carpets and that’s about it. And honestly, when Kim and I were dealing with the closing on our sale,” he said, nodding to the house behind him, “I was like, ‘sure, one less thing to worry about. Take the hundred.’”

“Okay, well, I should get back to sweeping.” I wasn’t sure if this convo made us friends or not, if anything it was nice to learn a relative stranger in my new neighborhood was more helpful than most of the people I’d lived near, or under, during the previous five years. Good sign.

“Yeah, well I gotta drop off this vaccuum at Chris’ house.” He pointed to a Spanish-styled door across the alley from my place. “We’re still putting everything away, you know. But it’s cool. It’s what I wanted. You understand.”

“Yeah.”

“See ya, bro.”

“Sure, later.” I watched him amble back down to his house, like Sam Elliott’s long lost grandson. If only I were so laid back.

But I’m not. I sense I just chatted with one of my own epiphs, and it made me a little anxious. And I was pretty sure I knew why. We’re still figuring out where the plates go. We don’t know how the gas fireplace works. The mail isn’t properly getting forwarded to us yet.

But I’m working on it.

The house stuff, too.

--for Ernesto, Everett, and Bobby. Thanks for a great job.