Status report

The repairs are done.

My homeowners insurance is going to cost $900+, which is SO not-what-they-originally-told-me. :::sigh:::

The appraiser has been out and all is apparently well; I'm waiting to hear back from the lawyer and the realtor re: the closing date. I'm thinking it could be Friday.



Suddenly I am very nervous.



Last night did NOT help matters. I spent the day, first off, cleaning all the JP-era belongings out of the garage. Most of it was neutrally-charged: old teaching books, for example, and all the books I'd bought when I was trying to decide what to do with the rest of my life; a bunch of VC Andrews, and pretty much everything we couldn't sell at the used bookstores for heroin money. Some things were gut-wrenching only if you knew their history: years and years of Rolling Stone and Spin and Alternative Press, cut up for our impromptu collage-work walls at the old place on Cortez. All those bands, all those gone things, all our reality--and I'm the only one who remembers. The worst part: I can't even do anything worthwhile with any of it, the artifacts nor the memory; everytime I think about it I just sail off into the sickly little clouds. THEN, to make it worse--cleaning out the bedroom closet I found a binder full of a draft of the last book. It was good enough--though five years of perspective tends to draw out the shortcomings and the awkwardnesses--but oh, god, it shredded me up inside--especially the descriptions I'd written from memory, like the night in the apartment on Maplewood. I'd forgotten--I'd MADE myself forget--what those nights were like, what HE was like, what we were like together--because nothing nothing NOTHING will ever approach that again. When LJ came into the picture, I was so fucking overjoyed--my sex life for the past 5 years had consisted of CR, who never wanted me; and Bob, who wanted me but didn't really do anything for me. LJ was...wonderful, mostly, and still is--no complaints, though I do wonder about a lot of things--but it's wonderful AS A THING IN ITSELF. If I give it a context any broader than CR and Bob, if I go back into my history any further distant than that--then it's like there's an obstacle there. JP and I were SO intense...and there are times I sense that in LJ, so I can't complain and I can't discount that maybe HE's as embarrassed about it as I am. But in the meantime I'm left with memory, or worse yet, left to avoid memory. I don't know which is harder to bear--thinking about it, going over in my mind what I will never have again--or avoiding the memory, knowing it's there, knowing it could sneak up on me at any moment and just incapacitate me, knock me completely out of this very tightly-wound happiness I've spent eight years building. I've given up on "Why?" of course, at least for THAT situation--but in a way I've never even gotten to the point where "Why?" is even a QUESTION. In a way I think I've never even gotten past "NO"...no, this is not going to happen, it is NOT going to be, I am NOT going to live in a world without JP in it, and CERTAINLY not for another 40-50-60-70 YEARS--oh, no, absolutely NOT, and I'm ALSO not going to live in that world SOBER--don't you fuckers think you're asking for a whole hell of a LOT??? Yes, yes, I know--the 12-step evangelists are priming up their keyboards and perking up a pot of coffee to tell me about how I have to "accept" the things I can't change. Well, fuck you, I say. I have accepted a LOT in my life--but taking JP was unconscionable. A -warning- would have been nice; one of those nice literary little second chances everyone always seems to get--but NO--one shot, a couple of struggling breaths, and that was that. No goodbye, no final words--a couple of snide-ass paramedics looking at both of us like we were something fished out of a dirty diaper, making snippy remarks to of all people his MOTHER--and the neighbors watching, and the cops cuffing me; then the next I see of him he's on that big metal table from all the forensic shows. Not that they HAD forensic shows in 1995; all they had was "ER" and believe me, what's-his-face Wyle would have been a far sight more compassionate than THOSE assholes were, and in the meantime there's this huge, awful FACT that they're expecting me to comprehend...



...I'm just not up to it, you know? Even now. Even eight years later, I am not prepared to "accept" ANY of it. He was the most talented and amazing person in my entire life, and he was pretty much singlehandedly responsible for how I came to look at the world even now, and instead of some kind of celestial fair play, some cosmic warning shot, he got THAT. WE got that. I don't know WHAT he got, or is getting, or where he is really--back to the post about the three big possible outcomes of death, I guess--but I know where -I- am, and it's a far lesser place without him in it, THAT much I can tell you for SURE.



So everybody put THAT in your craw and smoke it, or something.