I'm back, Bitches!

Well, the Goddamn move is finally over. After all of the packing and preparation last week, things kicked into high gear as soon as I signed the lease early Thursday afternoon. I showed up with a loaded jeep and started unpacking as soon as the deal was done.

It was mostly odds and ends, things that weren’t in boxes. Movers love to put shit in boxes and wrap stuff in plastic. But they charge you for all that equipment. I don’t need wardrobe boxes. Just pull that crap out of the closet, lay it down in the back of the jeep and off I go. I made trips like that all Thursday afternoon and all day on Friday. Friday night I finished up the packing.

Saturday is finally here and it’s pouring down rain.


The movers show up promptly at 8am and get busy. At this point, my job is mainly to stay the fuck out of the way and be available for questions. It starts off pretty quick. They make fast work of all of the boxes I had staged in the basement and garage. Then comes the furniture.

[FADE TO TRANSITION SEGUE AS CALENDER PAGES FLIP IN THE WIND, GOING BACK IN TIME] Towards what would turn out to be the end of my last marriage, my wife suggested that the living room furniture was getting old and should probably be replaced. She had already furnished the parlor with a flowery couch and a couple of chairs. So I went out in search of living room furniture. After very little shopping (men don’t fuck around), I found a set I liked and being a dutiful husband, I called the wife to describe it and ask if she’d like to come out and look at it. She declined, saying that it sounded fine and if I liked it I should get it. That’s when it dawned on me…I was buying my Divorce Furniture. She would be taking the flowery shit in the parlor and if I wanted anything to park my fat ass on, I’d better get it now or forever hold my peace.

I went for the leather. A huge, over-stuffed leather couch with a recliner at each end. This is a Real Man’s couch. The only thing missing was a pop-up fridge in the middle with a remote organizer and a blow job button. This couch doesn’t really like going through doors and such. Like its owner, it prefers to just remain right where it is. Everything about this couch screams SEDENTARY. So the movers had a real blast with the couch.

Then came the Matter of The Desk. As previously discussed, I have a huge cherry and brass desk that I purchased out in New Jersey during my first marriage. So it’s like 20 years old. The front edge of the desk has a well worn patina from two decades of sitting here, writing, working, playing various versions of Civilization and flight simulators, surfing for porn, and generally ignoring two wives. The desk is six feet wide and three feet deep. The thing is like an aircraft carrier. It has presidential presence.



OK, that's not my desk. That's JFK's desk. This is my desk.


I love it. I was convinced I wasn’t going to have room for it had resigned myself to selling it and getting one of those little computer workstations that would take up less space. Trelvix waved me off with a big DON’T DO IT! Like a Born Again Whore, he stepped in and prevented me from making the same mistake he did. Thanks Trelvix! Good save!

The desktop can be removed from the pedestal via several nearly inaccessible screws. The Desk slowed The Move to a crawl as each of the movers struggled with screws, cussed, and whined like little bitches. The biggest and strongest of the movers had two very large, brand new tattoos on the inside of his forearms. He was quite cranky about it. He would often wrap his forearms in Ace Bandages in an apparently futile attempt to ease the pain and irritation. Inserting his arm into the empty, yet tight and abrasive drawer-hole in an attempt to loosen and remove the last stubborn screw was really pissing him off.

The other mover, a weird little guy who kinda creeped me out, mentioned that he had already removed five screws. Thinking that a minimum of three screws should be adequate to secure a horizontal surface from horizontal movement, and remembering that I am paying these fuckers by the hour, I suggest that they just grab the desktop, strip that bastard off the sixth screw and get on with the actual moving part of the move. Three seconds later, we are back in motion.

Did I mention that it is still fucking raining and everything leaving the house is getting a right soaking before entering the truck?


Oh, and then there is The Dining Room Furniture. I have a beautiful, formal dining room set that I bought brand spanking new barely two years ago for about $1600.00. I’ve been trying to sell it because I just don’t have room for it.


But it’s nice stuff. Big, long, Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving table.


Six chairs and a big, lighted, mirror-backed, leaded-glass door, roll-top china cabinet, felt-lined drawers…just gorgeous. After weeks of craigslist postings, supermarket bulletin board flyers and flagrant whoring on my own blog, the price for the entire set had dropped to just $500.00 and I still couldn’t sell it!

I get a call about three quarters of the way through the move from someone who is interested in the hutch.


We had emailed earlier in the week and I told her I’d be willing to sell the hutch separately for $250.00. She is here in Liberty and wants to come by and “look” at it. I tell her “OK, but you better hurry or you will have to drive to Independence to see it. By the time she gets here, the movers are almost done. They saved the dining room furniture till last because if I can sell it, they don’t have to move it!

She and her husband finally get here and they are looking it over. They look, and look, and look. He “spans” some approximate measurements between his extended thumb and pinky, then he goes out to the van. He comes back in scratching his head, looking at the hutch and lifting the top. The movers are running out of things to move. I have to ask the couple “Are you absolutely sure you DON’T want the table and chairs”. They don’t. So the movers start moving the table and chairs while the couple is pondering the hutch. Then their daughter shows up. Then she leaves. Still don’t know why. The husband asks if I have a tape measure and I give him one. He determines that neither section of the hutch will fit in the van.

At this point, I am forced to explain “I’m sorry, normally I wouldn’t rush you or be this pushy, but I need to know with absolute certainty whether you want this hutch or not because I can’t take the risk of leaving it behind and then having you change your mind.” They finally reach a fucking decision and tell me they’ll take it. We agree that they can pay me half now to leave it at the house, I would get the rest of my stuff moved, then I would call them and meet them back here, collect the other half and they could take the hutch. Great! The biggest piece is SOLD and won’t be sitting in my garage!

But, they have to go to the bank. FUCK!! OK, fine. Go to the bank. If you don’t get back soon enough, I’ll call you and tell you where to meet me in Independence. They barely make it back in time with $140.00 in cash. Sweet!

(I cannot believe they didn’t try to get a better price! I mean, Jesus H. Christ! The movers are there, it’s the last piece of furniture, the clock is ticking, the pressure is on! Would I have come down a few dollars? FUCK YEAH! Would I have come down a lot? Absofuckinglutely! Idiots!)

So we head for Independence. It is still fucking raining!


We get there and they start unloading shit. I’m directing traffic. I had actually put signs up to number the bedrooms, which are all upstairs. “That goes in bedroom Number 1. That goes in the garage. That goes in bedroom Number 2. That goes in the garage. That goes in the garage too. So does that.”

The garage is filling up at a depressing rate. All of my bookcases and book boxes needed to go upstairs. The movers really didn’t like that very much. The Desk needed to go upstairs. They really fucking hated that. My cherry and brass dresser and mirror (which I also tried to sell and couldn’t) needed to go upstairs.

By the time they are done, I have WAY MORE SHIT in my garage than I had anticipated. No fucking way my jeep is getting in there anytime soon. The main culprit being the goddamned dining room table and six chairs!

$630.00 later, it’s time to go back and finish selling the hutch and get all of the “Oh, just leave that…we’ll come back and get that later” stuff. The sale of the hutch goes OK and that was a huge relief.

All of a sudden, the little, inconsequential “I’ll just come back and get that later” stuff is overwhelming! There is a ton of crap! Including all of the remaining lawn care stuff. The girl friend calls her boys to see if they are interested. At this point, anything they want is going for the Girl Friend Discount…which is FREE! Her middle son is interested and he shows up with a pickup truck, girlfriend and a buddy. So between five people and three vehicles we get the bulk of the remaining items out of the house.

At this point, I am the walking dead.


I’ve been running so hard for so long (stop it! Get your head out of the gutter!) that I can’t even think properly. I get back to my new home, order a pizza and try to set up any sort of audio/visual stimuli. I get the dvd/vhs player hooked up to the DLP HD TV. I think. I look through the box of DVDs and Armageddon is near the top. I pop it in and I get picture, but no sound. I fuck with the cables, I fuck with the Menu and Setup and I still get nothing.

The Pizza arrives. I ordered Hand Tossed crust, they gave me Thin Crust. Not a good first impression.

So I am sitting in my new home, surrounded by boxes, eating a pizza I didn’t order, watching Bruce Willis shoot a shotgun on an oil platform at Ben Affleck for boinking Liv Tyler, while listening to NPR having their Fall Pledge Drive on the radio.

It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. At least I wasn’t lifting anything or carrying anything up or down steps. I had a heating pad draped over a vibrating lumbar pillow and did a little self-medicating before going to bed to sleep the sleep of the righteous.

Sunday I got up and went over to the old house for The Cleanup. I took it one room at a time. I cleaned toilets, Windexed mirrors, scrubbed sinks, polished porcelain, vacuumed carpets, swept floors, packaged trash and tried valiantly to return the place to Sherri as close as I could get to the way I had received it. Took me four and a half hours. But I’m pleased with the results. I hope she is.

While I was doing this, my daughter, young Galadriel Tanqueray Onassis, texted me and wanted to come over for a while.

She's recently expressed some displeasure about living with her mother TED (The Egg Donor), and has started making noises about wanting to come live with me. I know that if she had been living with me for the last 5 years, she would be on the phone with her mother whispering about how I'm mean and psycho and wanting to go live ith her. She's 13 and going through puberty, her mother is 55 and going through menopause. That can't be a happy household.

Galadriel had not seen the new place yet and I was anxious to show it to her. She loved it! Neither one of us can figure out exactly why she likes it as much as she does, but she really, really does. I had not eaten yet so I took her to Longhorn on 39th, after which we went back to the new place and I enlisted her help to unload the VERY LAST STUFF from the Liberty House.

It’s over. It’s done. I’m in.

I am so fucking tired and stiff and sore I can’t even begin to describe it.

And I hired professional movers and paid Big Bucks!!!

Now, all I need is a fucking internet connection! I have no idea what is going on. Everything out side of Timber Brooke could be a molten slag of radioactive glass.

Illegal Militant Latino Homosexuals could have staged a coup, taken over the country and imposed mandatory sexual and cultural re-identification pogroms on white, trailer-trash, NASCAR wannabes (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and I wouldn’t know it.

Guess that’s just my way of saying, I really missed you guys!