It's Not Tundra

I took off for the afternoon and Tripper took care of the inspector guy. He called me about two hours in and said there wasn’t anything big to worry about, but that the guy was going to be there about an hour longer than expected. When I got home, it was dark. Patricia and Lauren were off at a Girl Scout function [1] and I had the boy with me. I took a look through the house and you could tell things had been moved. Tripper called me as I walked through the house to make sure everything looked okay. He told me that he had to wait for the final report, but that nothing looked too bad and he’s be over later when they delivered the report to him. It was after five and I had to get dinner started. Connor was working on his homework. I turned on the lights in the backyard and noticed that the faucet was dripping. There were two faucets in the backyard – which seemed excessive for such a small house. One was over in a corner by the kitchen and was not only a faucet, but had, for a w...

It’s amazing that in this consumer society [1] that you can build a pretty decent business out of being the guy who’s there to catch when people are throwing things away. I mean this in several ways. First: There’s the guy who runs the company that rents dumpsters. Second: There’s the guy who crawls into that dumpster and pulls things out so he can sell them. [2] I couldn’t believe the crap that built up over the years. Part of the problem is that it’s actually hard to throw stuff out or give things away in Los Angeles. Seriously. When did Goodwill and the Salvation Army get so picky? No computers more than two years old. No books. No videotapes, especially those recorded yourself off television [3] . Each piece of furniture was carefully scrutinized for imperfections and many were rejected. Really? Didn’t they know that we were GIVING them this stuff? Oh, and what about those ads about providing jobs for people who would fix these things and thereby learn valuable and ...

We hardly had a spike in showings after the change in companies. And now the clock was really ticking. It was the middle of September. Where our initial questions had covered if we would have enough time to get our stuff together and let the kids finish school if we sold the house. Now we were looking at the calendar and thinking: 1) Would we EVER get outta there? 2) Would we have to move the kids out of their school and into a new one at some really shitty time? Like, March. I’d done it that way. My parents moved in November of seventh grade and again November of eighth grade. If you would really like to screw your kid up, do this to them. I won’t go into details about my childhood out of a Pete Hamil novel, but let’s say that I would have been a mess without moving. The moving made it a really prosaic mess and sent me into a period of isolation where I totally shut down and lived in books. [1] My kids [2] were popular and well liked. They had friends and their...