Six loads of dishes and a dead Christmas tree in the front yard later, we are beginning to have a house again. I saw Jason, BJ and Tiff off after a Macaroni Grill lunch. Our waiter wrote his name on the paper table cover with a crayon – I found him and this corporate gesture of false familiarity and fun to be infinitely annoying – it’s a misanthrope day & I am not a Macaroni Grill person. It’s just another manifestation of the great craze for sameness that has America shopping at Walmart and listening to Clear Channel, living in vast subdivisions of simulacra where coming home drunk can easily put you at the wrong front door.

I don’t get the Lamarckian lemmings and their quest for inheritable perfection made manifest in fake brick and Hummers, maybe if you buy in bulk you can get a great deal on denial. But then I ate there, and the chicken marsala was quite good, so I guess I better just shut up and get my own little lemming ass in line. I need to get a copy of The Idiots Guide to Surviving Late Capitalism so I know how to function in this brave new America. Maybe I should read Island. Is anyone up on their Huxley? How is Island as a utopia? I think I have a copy around here somewhere.

Party bits, hmmmm- I don’t think we’ve ever had that many people here before. If true wealth is measured in friendship, I am loaded. Dan and Jason’s impromptu synchronized rapping of the Digital Underground Humpty Dance comes to mind as perhaps my favorite moment of drunk boys on parade. Vanessa’s sweet potato pie and Beth & Dan’s cornbread were fabulous. Mary Beth as mix master and co-host was wonderful and generous. The vat of gumbo vanished in under twenty minutes, so I am guessing that went over well. I always feel like I missed out on getting to talk to everyone – after the atrocious football we got sucked into a poker game that went until five am and Tyler was the big winner of both buy-ins.

It’s nice for lots of us to be able to get together before the next round of changes. Moves, marriages, births, and deaths await us. We started yesterday off by moving Erica to a house in south city just a few blocks from my old grade school. We stopped in and had a ham breakfast with Brad’s parents before we went over to her old place to lift the heavy stuff. Brad’s father asked how I was enjoying my retirement. I love that. Until further notice I am retired. Until tomorrow I am retired.

Erica was very organized for the move and we were done well before noon, so I had plenty of time to finish up the gumbo. We played a DVD trivia game in the afternoon – I’m not one much for board games, but it was quite fun.

Excuse me for a second:

“What are you talking about? You love games of any kind. In some ways your life is nothing but a series of games.”

“Sure, but I like to feel retro about it – you know playing Risk rather than Trivial Pursuit.”

“You’re just hung up on being a thirty something and playing board games. It’s not like you’re having insipid Yuppie couples parties for people who’ve know each other since high school and have nothing in common anymore so they have to resort to games to be able to communicate about anything.”

“That’s true. It’s just this misanthrope thing has me being a little negative today. You know, a little cynical.”

“Well, knock it the fuck off. You’re just as much of a lemming as the next gazabo. Life’s tuff, cut people some slack. It’s not like you’re the measure of the model man by any means Mr. Log in the eye.”

“Point taken.”

Thanks for tolerating my digression. I just felt I needed a little talking to.

I’ve been surfing job sites all afternoon and I’m just not seeing anything that fits me. Maybe I need to change my tactics. There’s this word I’ve been playing with recently: hypothermal. I’ll give you the dictionary version. Geology – of or pertaining to or being high-temperature deposits derived from magmatic emanations forced under pressure into place in pre-existing rock openings. I’ve been doing a “life review” with all of my free time of late and I’ve been mulling over the way that we are all forced by pressure into pre-existing spaces in the societal rock. It seems to me that in my life I have been fairly passive unless forced to change by some alteration in my circumstance. Well, the lease is up. I need new work. I will soon morph into some other way of being in the world. Sort of exciting isn’t it? You know what I need? I need a mentor. I need someone who impresses me, and has faith in me, to show me the way to next thing. Universe, I’m looking for a mentor.

“Be your own mentor you tool – you’re a little long in the tooth for all this hand holding, don’t you think?”

“Point taken.”