Point Break

L and I are homeless. We live in her parents ski place. We signed a lease on a 3 bedroom farmhouse that technically begins today, however we have been told that moving in this Labor Day weekend would be, at best, optimistic. Time lost will be deducted from the rent and all that, but this transient state we have been thrust into is becoming a bit trying.

Everyone likes to have a place where they can seal themselves up away from the world. Be this your living room, with a bowl of pop-corn on your lap and episodes of some TV show you’ve already watched a zillion times aglow in the corner (let’s say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) or a pristine study where your desktop computer lives, upon which you surf the net, discovering what everyone thought of the latest Venture Brothers episode or how that fascist Michael Cera will put the kibosh on an Arrested Development movie no matter what it takes. This is your private realm and not just because it is where you can walk around in that pair of underwear with the skulls all over it. Because it makes sense and it’s yours and its filled with the things you like and make you happy.

((Obviously, a million percent of this happiness is derived from the company you chose to keep, and it goes without saying that it is L who deserves all the credit for keeping this grumpus sane and non-murdery. There is a lot of bitching and moaning in this post, most of it real small fry in the grand scheme of things. But I didn’t want anyone to come to the conclusion that comicbooks, Youtube and a room of my own in which to look at comicbooks and Youtube, are really what’s important. Just saying.))

So yeah, I’ve been living in a ridiculously spacious resort for the last 45 days. It’s way WAY more than I could ever realistically afford on my own. And even though L and I have it to ourselves, with occasional visits from degli parenti, brobots and berninations, it is not home. Part of this has to do with the future. As in we don’t have one with it. Part of this has to do with the past. As in L has a nostalgia-soaked memory filled history here. She grew up in this place. It is not the home she expected to be living with her husband.

If a home is an extension of the self, and you’d be hardpressed to convince me that it isn’t, then the belongings that fill said home are like so many veins, bones and guts. The only problem is that 90% of my veins, bones and guts have been frozen in carbonite. Ziplocked away and out of bounds for the better part of 2 months. Not having access to one’s belongings is incredibly frustrating and not just because I’m partially OCD. It’s the grass is greener conundrum. The shirts I want to wear are those I cannot. The movies I want to watch are the ones in boxes. The books I want to read… oh who am I kidding, I never learned how to read.

These two restrictions together are psychologically impairing enough but when combined with little digs here and there, a dented driver-side Jeep door that forces one to crawl out the passenger-side every time you want to exit, say, like some hill person, or the fact that I have been systematically siphoning the internet from coffee-houses, poorly secured wireless beacons, museums, cafes, and other hotspots because we haven’t had access in Vermont, and things begin to get ugly.

Yesterday evening I finally broke apart. All of these mildly annoying inconveniences, all of these sublte incursions into my ridiculously mundane concept of self, all of it came crashing down. All because I couldn’t find the televison remote. It was the straw that broke my back, it was this camel’s Waterloo. I flipped out. Everything that had come before this moment was tough, this was simply intolerable. To have to get up and walk to the tv every time a commerical came on… I bellowed and growled and tore the living room apart.

An hour later I found the damn thing, under the couch and under the cat, and like angel’s singing from the heavens, I knew everything was going to be okay. Because I could watch an episode of the Office I’d already seen 6 times, and then, at commercial, check the score of the Indians game they were sure to, and inevitably did, lose.

It felt like home.