highindustrial.

It was a decidedly un-Halloween Halloween although our waiter at Louise's was decked out like Panama Jack and told us to call him Dr. Jones and at first I missed the reference because he was blatantly Australian and I kept thinking he was trying to be one of those dudes from the Discovery Channel and later E_____ snarked to B____ Why don't you put him in your movie instead of ______________, frankly he's better looking, so we left him a big tip. + 7

Like blades in a pair of shears, the two Saturdays, this one and the one past, come together on my first week in a different climate, quietly cutting the ribbon of San Francisco to officiate Los Angeles. The old spell broken, I can recall only the last seven afternoons; the last year won't come into deep focus for a while.

I can't get John Barry's score from Indecent Proposal out of my head. I heard it play over a trailer for a brilliant-hued film wherein Julianne Moore is married to Dennis Quaid and wears a red dress or a blue dress and glances sidelong at Dennis Haysbert. In the movie, in the trailer, it's autumn. +

Two days in, too many new faces, set up the phone line, picked out some furniture, no I don't like that movie, that's okay I'm not really hungry, the scene plays better if you pretend Renée Zellweger has Down Syndrome, can't wait till the DSL arrives, DirecTV is definitely better than AT&T Broadband, don't come in yet it's a mess, do you think he'd notice if we batter-fried his goldfish and put it back in the bowl? I miss you. + 2

Once more, with feeling:

"All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in the afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it." (p.212)

Out of one city and onto another. + 4

If I could, I'd take you back to a rainy Thursday afternoon in late September of that year, my nineteenth: we'd walk through the lush light, under oxidizing leaves, over brick-red promenades; "always" and "forever" would retrograde in each other's orbit. + 5

Packing as a precursor to moving can be an exercise in frustration, combining elements of raging sentimentality (oh look, the material moments of my life, flooding back) and plain, lame, exhausting exertion and attention to detail—triggering still more material moments and tiresome but unavoidable flashbacks. It's a toothsome cycle.

I have So Much Stuff™. I wish I could roll all of it and myself up into a little armadillo ball and just surrender, in materio, to trade winds and warm asphalt currents, allowing the natural commercial order of things to pendulate me to my new center of gravity.

But instead, I'm stressed: wakeful at odd hours against a backdrop of infomercials; stealing naps and thieving dreams; hemorrhaging boxes and bubble wrap. + 4