Reunion with my STUFF

I have lived in a state of flux for a year and a half now, starting in the fall of 2020. It has not been pleasant and it has been detrimental to my not-strong-anyway mental health, which requires stability. Stability. Lol.

Most of my stuff has been in storage since the fall of 2020. I have missed my beautiful bed. I have missed my couch. My dad’s reading chair. All of my framed pictures. All of the things I have acquired over the years to make my apartments little havens of creativity and mental calm. I’ve worked hard to do this. It’s hard for me to just settle down. But I love looking around and seeing all my things, things I’ve had for years, my framed Sam Shaw photograph of Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes, the framed print of Elvis kissing the woman (see my blog banner), my framed Hamilton poster, and etc., each with a memory attached to it.

And then there are the books. I packed up the majority of them, keeping just a handful, the ones I use most for research and writing. But my books aren’t there just to be used. They’re there because I love having a library. I may not be re-reading John Banville’s novels any time soon, but I love to have them AROUND. Just in CASE, yes, but also because … each book, again, has memories attached to it, meaning. Over the past couple of years, I’ve had to just grit my teeth and deal with the fact that I don’t have access to my books. Sometimes I’ll be like, “Dammit, I know there’s a quote from Billy Wilder that’s perfect for what I’m trying to convey, but that book is in a storage unit in the middle of a Connecticut forest and I can’t get to it.”

So. I finally am in a position to get my place in order. I had all the books in boxes, stacked up against practically every wall in this new apartment, creating an inherently temporary feel to everything in my life … which has been very difficult to deal with. I had to wait to put them away until I could get my shelves re-built. These bookshelves are your basic Ikea shelving – and if I were rich, I would get rid of them immediately and purchase better ones. I have my ideal bookcases in my head and Ikea shelves AIN’T IT. But I am not rich, and therefore … these are the shelves I have. But they too have tremendous meaning attached to them, because of the circumstances in which they were built. The Twitter thread I fired off about that experience has gone around the world five times over, and is still going strong. Seriously. Nothing I have written has traveled as far as that Twitter thread. So the shelves are filled with the love of my friends, who gathered together to help me while I was in the middle of a gigantic crack-up. It’s almost tangible, the feeling these shelves give off, because of that memory.

When I moved, not the last time but the time before that (two moves in one year) I had the bookshelves dismantled and I considered getting rid of all of it, but a cooler head prevailed. I kept all the “lumber” and it too has been sitting in that storage unit. I finally – finally – after months – got a guy to come in and build them again. And LOOK at this.

That’s only the half of it. There’s more, but I couldn’t fit it in when taking the picture, and there’s another WALL of books in the other room.

There was then an orgy of opening all the cardboard boxes and throwing the books up onto the shelves, willy-nilly, without any organizing principle (well, I organized my two shelves of Elvis books/DVDs. First things first). I just wanted all the books OUT of the boxes and UP THERE where they belonged. I will eventually have to organize everything – which will involve taking all the books OFF the shelves again, and I just cannot face it right now. In the meantime, I have to deal with the chaos of shelves like this:

The incongruities are very entertaining.

Baseball anthology next to Lehman Brothers collapse. Charlie Manson sitting in between Cary Grant and Jean Renoir is particularly hilarious. Maud Hart Lovelace’s Heaven to Betsy, a fave when I was a teenager, perches next to a book called Evil Genes, and I cannot stop laughing. Evil Genes??? (It’s a very good book though!) Plus, randomly, there are two books by friends in these pictures, one of whom was my senior prom date, because life is a very strange thing indeed.

This has been a reunion with my books. I sit on my couch and stare up at the walls and feel relaxed in a way I haven’t in almost three years. I don’t just like to have bookshelves, I like to have bookshelves be the actual wall. It’s also important to follow my dad’s advice, given to me long ago: “Get bookshelves that go to the ceiling. Otherwise, you have all that wasted space at the top.”

The best part is: my library fits, with room to spare. I do periodic purges, so the number of books in general remains about the same.

And now … if I need to use a Billy Wilder quote, from some interview he gave in 1971, I can find it. Easily.

There’s another up-side to finally getting my place in order.

I’m feeling ready for a new cat. No one can replace Hope. (I was cooking chicken the other day, standing at the stove, and I literally heard her footsteps coming down the hall. She would always follow me into the kitchen, particularly when MEAT was involved. Hope never lived here. There are no associations with Hope in this apartment. But she’s still in my heart and soul. I haven’t heard her footsteps before, though!) Hope’s death was just part of the total fucking shitshow that was 2020 … and not only was I not ready for another cat, I also just wasn’t in a position to have a pet. I feel like I am now. I will go the “rescue” route again, because one of the pleasures of getting to know Hope was watching her blossom after her abusive beginnings. She had a happy safe life with me and I loved being a part of that. It’s still a little tender because Hope was so much a part of my life, and she was such a specific loving little creature, with a huge personality, and we were so close it was insane. Especially since I mostly work from home. Like, I was always home. We were always together.

So. Nothing can replace her. But I think I’m ready to accept another cat into my world, especially since my place now feels more like an actual place, as opposed to an extension of my storage unit.