Having moved into my new place with a solid roommate just outside of downtown asphalt-wasteland Columbia, I’m back on the grid. It’s been quite a nightmare getting moved in, but I’m thinking this will set the stage for better things.
The few days in which I was moving in were some of the worst, most harrying of my life. Seriously. A friend of mine had an away message on his AIM account not too long ago that read something along the lines of, “There is no worse hell than moving.” I disagreed, till that last night. It was 05:45 and I had passed over the “be-out-by” deadline by a day already: I was sweating that ammoniated, salty sweat of extreme fatigue; and alternately standing unsteadily, loading things into boxes, and becoming infuriated over the Sisyphean task before me. I had turned the A/C off in the apartment to conserve energy, but I shouldn’t have. Wisdom told me to turn it down to 60°F, but I left it as it was. Later, the only thing keeping me awake was raw anger; I wasn’t even upset about anything in particular, I was just enraged, lest unconsciousness take me.
And I agreed with my friend, there really is no worse thing to face in that sense. In the physically-taxing, why-am-I-here’ing futility of moving, one finds in his physicality the prison actualized that I pictured it to be from my first taste of Cartesian dualism in high school: just as in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Case thought of his body as a carrier for the mind, a stupid piece of meat, so did I think of it thus; a damnable prison to be ruled over and destroyed to continue. Sleep and exhaustion became absurdities in those early morning hours, when I’d had three hours of sleep over the past 50+ and had had to present a final project in my psychology class. Necessity of sleep, like the existence of spiders, became evidence of a fallen Creation; if only I had something to block the adenosine receptors perfectly, to kill all the other physiological needs for sleep in my brain, I would be all right. But I didn’t. The authority of the body was dragging me down, and I got to the point I was slinging fists into walls, objects, freezer doors: I didn’t care, I was a poorly-oiled machine that was moving objects into boxes and carrying those boxes to the vehicle that would take them to the new apartment. What a hateful time. I was grateful that it was as short as it was. I ended up doing well in the class and moving just fine (with the help of my dear mother, who drove down to gather stuff for me as I passed violently into unconsciousness to sweat out the ammoniated sweat of someone hatefully punished by his own body).
That’s only one small piece of what made last week one of the longest of my life. It is a week that shall live in infamy; you know the kind. It’s one that’s a concatenation of several eternal days filled with strife back upon you get to look later in life and laugh, sweat on the brow no matter how hot, and say: “At least it’s not as bad as it was then.”
So thanks for those of you who wondered where I’d gotten to. I’m back, and the regularly scheduled daily-and-then-some-posts should be flowing again as of today. Note: I haven’t decided whether I’m going to backpost; but if you see anything on the main site between now and the 26th of July of this year, that’s a backpost.
