unpacking

Two weeks ago I became a home-owner.  The feeling was like emerging from the pool after a series of underwater acrobatics.  Slightly disorienting, but with a feeling you went in the right direction.  Of course I’m not completely on dry land; now I will also have to tread water in order to maintain my property (and my mortgage).  But I can still inhale deeply, tilt my head back, and relax in the knowledge that I own the space around me.  While the native American in me has an inherent disdain for the term "mine", as far as legal rights go, I have to admit it's pretty sweet.

We are almost unpacked.  Only a few odds and ends: a couple of things for storage, a disassembled lamp patiently waiting on the hearth, our paintings.  When I have no stuff, moving is a breeze.  Point in case: when I moved to Japan out of college, what little stuff I had was thrown into a suitcase, and the rest was sitting in storage in a house owned by my best friend's sister.  Well, actually… there was also a box or two in the basement of a different house - a cozy house in Cambridge I had lived in with four roommates.  There was also all of my possessions at my mom's house in Cincinnati ... but if I had been able to ignore that stuff for four years, I could easily ignore it for another one or two.

So, my friend’s sister, the house in Cambridge, my mom’s house, and my suitcase.  That was it, the sum total.  The night before moving to Japan (or maybe the morning of - I can't remember), I packed the suitcase, crammed other necessaries into a carry-on duffle bag, and boarded a flight for another country.  The song the “Molly McGuires” strikes me as appropriate for that particular set of circumstances… since I’ll never see the likes of that again.

The part that resonates with me still, as I grow older and reflect on the inevitable accumulation of stuff, is that besides deodorant and the infrequently used personal item or two, I did not lack for much in Japan.  This was surprising, since I had given the whole process about as much foresight as my decision to follow my high-school girlfriend to college in Boston, giving up a full ride at a state school, my friends, and my parent’s support (not to mention the hefty post-graduation sum my dad was offering me to stay in Ohio).  During the course of that adventure, similar to the move to Japan, the stuff part seemed to work itself out.

For my Boston migration, I had to take my stuff with me in a two-door car, in a single trip.  The move was supposed to be, and was in fact, for four-odd years.  Because it was against my parents' judgment, it was one of the only moves where I didn't have the good will of other to rely on for help.  Fortunately, I had two things going for me: I still had a car, and I had almost no stuff.

Of course, like most privileged first-world brats, no stuff meant that my two-door car was practically ready to pop. Indeed, had you tapped on the hood hard enough, a computer cable might have snaked out of the rear bumper (I'm sure it would have appeared as disquieting as it sounds).  Said college-era computer rested in the bucket of the passenger seat, above a nest of speaker wires, documents, and toiletries.  Upon arrival at my apartment in Boston, I found that the can of shaving cream tossed haphazardly into the mix had been completely emptied, and over the course of 12 hours the gel itself had either dried or frozen, since my computer, which was stuck to my backpack, which was stuck to my toiletries bag, was coated in a rock-hard layer of the stuff that didn’t come off until a thorough scrubbing.

In some past / future life, I must have either been a sailor or a Star Trek ensign.  In those times, storage space was pretty unnecessary. Besides a closet for those spandex-inspired uniforms (certainly in the Star Trek life, and possibly in the sailor life as well), and a pad-locked drawer for the taser (because every taser should be pad-locked), storage space was pretty unnecessary.  If you did happen to need something specific, that's what the replicator was for.

What you didn't see were huge suitcases where they kept all of their earth-stuff that they quite frankly didn't need.  Whatsmore, I am fairly certain in that past life, like this one, I was quite content.  Perhaps because of that (can I blame it on a past life?) when I have to move stuff, actual stuff, and there's no getting around it, I am just about the most inept, disorganized person you have ever met in your life.

At this point, when I look around me, there are certain things that I’m less flippant about than I was before.  For example, the composite countertops are treasured.  The two sinks, with their constant smirk of privilege, are appreciated.  The sofa, my comfortable chairs, the teal stool I splurged on for my wife at the antique store in Brooklyn for her birthday… these things I can’t just throw in a car.  In fact, the whole home, including the immense amount of energy that went into acquiring it, making it legally mine, and working to make it perfect, is something I couldn’t pass off to a friend or flippantly disregard (at least not yet… I still have a few years before the hobo urge strikes me and I pack up that polka-dot rucksack).

In the meantime, I should really unpack the rest of my earth-stuff.

What I think about when I'm not thinking about sex

It might just be that time of night, but recently all I can think about is drinking and work.  All the time.  In every situation.  When I'm home in the evening, I think about work.  And then I think about drinking.  When I wake up in the morning, I think about work, then I go there, and think about drinking.  When I'm drinking, normally all I'm thinking about is drinking, and not work, which hopefully means I'm not an alcoholic.

Of course I also do the obligatory modernesque activities and cultivate a couple of interests that define a professional man in his 30's living in the city, such as cooking, exercise, weekend excursions and the obligatory hobby (*ahem*).  But at the end of the day, quite literally, I'm not thinking about that new Point Reyes hike we stumbled upon last week, or what kind of clothes I'd like to buy.  I do think about food, which can actually be quite dangerous if I'm working from home and the cookbook is on the top of our bar.  But as soon as I eat, which is usually right after I finish working, thoughts of food flutter away and I'm left with alcohol, and work.

Tonight I finished my most important work early, which for me means before 7:00 (I think it was 6:59 to be exact).  That meant I was home, fed and entertained by an episode of Mad Men prior to 9:00.  Even assuming I would make it to bed by 11:30 - which is a stretch - that still left me with more than two hours of time to kill.  I could always veg-out with a video-game, but I'm 30 for Peat's sake... surely I could find something more worthwhile to consume my time.  Still, the options seemed limited.

I look at the preceding paragraph and the first thing that pops into my head is how I would feel if my future child were to read that.  I imagine it would be somewhat disheartening to him or her, that dad really had nothing better to think about in the evening than drinking and working.  The ironic thing is that I'm sure, no... dedicated to being the type of father that is engaged in his children's life to the point where they see me as more than the caricature of myself I'm alluding to here.  Hell, even the fact that I have a sense of irony has got to make me somewhat interesting to them, at some point.  The problem is, I'm just not sure what to do with myself until then (which is an extension of not knowing what to do with myself tonight, I suppose).

For a while during law school I had an idea to go to Somalia and learn about Somalian culture and pick up a little of the language and then come back and start a business consulting with shipping companies on how to avoid pirates.  I'm serious.  I called all of my best friends and told them about this idea.  I figured I could get some funding, and get on the first Hargeisa-bound flight to Somaliland that I could find.  Even in hindsight, it was (and probably still is, until word gets out), a fucking brilliant idea.  An American who lived with the pirates, and knows how to avoid them?  I've already been a consultant long enough to know the value that experience brings to the table.

The pirate thing, for the month-plus that it consumed me, was more than just an idea - it was a distraction and a dream rolled into one.  It was similar to how I wanted to open up a petting zoo for little animals when I was a child, and would lay in my bunkbed for hours thinking about all the people who would come to the zoo to hold the hamsters and gerbils and possibly even newts.  I even had the costs accounted for - $100 was what I reckoned it would cost to start the whole thing up.  Probably a bit on the low side, even if it was the 1980's, but the point was is this was something that kept me up at night, and consumed my time.

I'm a perpetual skeptic of those who say that we lose our passion as we grow older.  I don't think we lose our passion for taking bold action as we age, although I don't see myself moving to Somalia anytime soon.  Instead, I think we become more aware of the amount of work that would go into it, and the creature comforts we would sacrifice to pull it off.  Which is why the house-hunt that is currently consuming my life (and my wife's) is not evoking the same level of blind excitement that it would have, say, when I was 20, assuming I had the means at that point.  In other words, it's not that I don't have exciting things to occupy my thoughts; it's that much of what is exciting eventually turns into work.

At this point a lightbulb might have turned on.  "So when you say you're thinking about work, you really mean that you're thinking about how to make things happen!" (this is directed at the three readers who have made it this far into the essay without going off for a drink of their own).  And to you, I respond, no, it's pretty much just about work.  Like for example, I think about whether my boss would let me move to LA, where the houses are cheaper, or I think about whether I've pissed anyone off recently or who makes more money than I do.  And then, predictably, I get tired of this, and start thinking about drinking.

This is the point when, being an adult, I go and grab a beer.  Or a second one, in this case, which is coincidentally probably a good time to wrap things up.  There will be more on all the interesting tidbits I've conveniently dropped during the course of this posting later... such as where I go on my weekend excursions, what kind of father I'm really hoping to be, when I'm planning to assume that role, or how much that petting zoo actually would have cost.  Stay tuned, brave reader, stay tuned.

Afterward:

I realize that one of the aforementioned readers who made it this far into the post might be my mother.  If that's the case, I hope that she understands, and maybe even appreciates that most of the references to drinking and thinking about work are literary hyperbole.  I have a number of leisure interests besides drinking and work, such as travel, abstract wire sculpture,  reading, and engaging in satanic orgies the company of dear friends.  So don't worry, I have plenty of healthy habits to keep me occupied, when I'm not obsessing about my job and longing for that next beer.

the measure of a man

T.S. Eliot may have measured his life in coffee spoons, but I prefer Scotch. Besides the fact that I normally just pour my coffee from the can straight into the espresso maker, I only have a few coffee spoons anyways, so it would be awfully hard to measure anything longer than a day or two with them. I suppose I could line them up, and then keep picking up the last one and putting it in front of the first one, but that would be silly. I think instead it's easier to use something you are actually going to accumulate over time, which is why I'll measure my life in bottles of Scotch.

You may argue that measuring my life with an alcoholic beverage would give short shift to my childhood years (at least the first 15 of them). That's true, but it's not so much the days of my life we are counting here, as much as the progress of my life as an adult, Scotch-drinking male. This pretty much renders childhood moot. In my early and mid-20's I drank whiskey, but never held on to a bottle long enough to say I was "accumulating" anything. I think the only thing I accumulated during those years were infectious agents that replicated inside the living cells of my hypogastric region (although only the most common little buggers, thankfully). My mid- to late-20's then was getting married, law school, and kicking off this thing that has become my career. All wonderfully exciting events, and each a journey in its own right, but it wasn't until I turned 30 that I really began to step into myself and feel out the kind of person I had become.

A person who drinks Scotch, that's who. At some point during that transition from an adult-in-training to a full-fledged member of society, I realized that I would always need to have a bottle of Scotch on my liquor shelf. Never mind that said liquor shelf is currently only my flat-screen TV box covered with fabric and turned upright (space constraints), or that the bottle of Scotch that currently sits on top is only $20… At least there's a bottle, and it isn't empty. Whatsmore, it hasn't even dipped below the non-respectable 5th of a bottle, at which point I'd feel obliged to finish it up quickly.

In fact, that's one reason why bottles of Scotch are a perfect way to measure the progress of your life. When I look over at my TV-box, er… liquor shelf, I feel a sense of pride that I've managed to grow out of my more impetuous years long enough to hold on to a bottle of alcohol, at least for more than a week. Even if it is the cheapest Islay Scotch available at Trader Joe's, it's still a sign that I've moved on from youthful overindulgence, at least as far as alcohol is concerned (and as my friend Neil, who introduced me to the varietal would agree, it's also a proof I have taste). Hell, we even have half a case of two-buck-chuck tucked away between the TV box and the stove. Next thing you know I'll be finding beer in the back of the fridge.

Proof of restraint aside, the other reason Scotch bottles are such a good measure of my adult life is that eventually the bottles will accumulate. Nothing to force with a spending spree at the liquor store... just something that will hopefully happen naturally. And as it happens, each bottle will earn its own story, potential bragging rights, or at least the opportunity to compare different tasting drinks.

When I was almost twenty and barely just beginning to acknowledge the adult world, I was invited to taste a couple of Scotches by the admired father of a then-girlfriend. Along with one of his younger coworkers, we retreated to the bookshelf-lined walls of his office. Like conspirators, we huddled around a particular bookshelf that had been converted into a shelf for various bottles, the names of which read like mysteries, histories and adventures. The power of a good Scotch collection is not something to underestimate!

I remember being in that office the better space of a half hour, which at that point was a record for conversing exclusively with grown-ups. I sat on a short plush stool, listening to my girlfriend's dad tell the stories of these extraordinary bottles he had accumulated , all the while sipping the subject of the tale. Being 20, I was thrilled to be drinking anything in public, but what I appreciated even more than getting buzzed in front of my girlfriend's parents was the glimpse into that man's life that our Scotch tasting allowed. Trust me, when someone shows you an ancient bottle of 12 year Scotch with a cut-out George Washington-esque picture of themselves taped over the logo, you know you're getting a taste, pun intended, of something that has mattered to that person on their own personal journey.

So in a way, the one bottle of $20 dollar Scotch on my TV-case turned bookshelf is a story in its own right. If nothing else, when I pour a glass for a future guest, I can at least say that I wrote a blog post about that very bottle. Barring the unexpected onset of alcoholism, I'll eventually expand my collection, and maybe someday I'll sit down with the lucky lad dating my own daughter, and share a few drams. Before I intimidate the hell out of him so that he never comes back, I'll have left him with a few good stories.

In the meantime, in all the space between now and that hypothetical moment many years in the future, there's plenty of time, and hopefully plenty of bottles to measure it with.