Hand crafted.

Three years ago I wrote about a couple of old men I had encountered through work when I was a young man. There was mailroom Joe, who hoped we could become friends like on TV, but he was fired from the job soon after. And there was Gabe, a doddering old man who duly showed up for work every day at the company he had founded maybe fifty years earlier, but they didn't let him do anything anymore. I thought it was interesting to remember those men, how each in his way tried to hold on to relevance in a world that really didn't care. 

There was a third man whom I wanted to write about, but I couldn't do it unless I found the present he gave me. And I'm very happy to say that I found it during our recent move.

So, what is it and how did it come into my possession? 

This is a small hand-carved monkey wrench, made from a single piece of wood. The dial on the handle opens and closes the grip. It is smooth as silk.

One summer in college I worked in a living museum kind of thing -- where you dress in Olde Tyme clothes and tell people about the place and what people did in the past. I was in the carpentry shed, with a bunch of tools and a foot-powered lathe and pants with a flap in front and suspenders and a collar with a necktie and a vest. Jolly old town carpenter, that was me! Fortunately I didn't actually have to make many things. Craftsmanship did not descend upon me with the title. 

But craftsmanship was certainly thriving in the old man -- whose name I have forgotten if he ever gave it -- who came to visit once in a while to discuss woodwork. I had no real knowledge, but he didn't mind. He liked to tell me the kinds of projects he was doing. And I liked to listen to him, but he did get in the way -- when people would come in, I had to do my history schtick. And he'd be there in his 20th century clothes, sometimes adding information that was not helpful and sometimes irrelevant. 

But if there was a visitor who did know about woodcraft, the kind of fellow who liked to play Stump the Docent ("What kind of wood are you using? Was that found in this area at the time? What sorts of household goods would be made here? What would the local carpenter charge for say, a table and eight chairs?"), then my elderly friend was exceptionally helpful as a distraction. 

I was a college kid! You couldn't expect me to know anything! 

Anyway, as the end of the summer season approached, my friend gave me that little monkey wrench. It's beautiful. The wheel is perfect and the hand-carved screw on the clamp still works as well as it did all those decades ago. It was very kind of him to part with this, and I have always enjoyed showing it to guests.  

I wish I knew the fellow's name -- gone now, I'm sure, but he was another example of the kind of man we often see. Retired, enjoying a hobby of small interest to most people, but capable of amazing flourishes of skill. Thanks for visiting, Woody, or whatever your name was, and thanks for the gift. I cherish it still. 

Trash talk and dead bodies.

I don't want to keep dwelling on things that are different in this alternate universe to which I have moved. But I will. The thing is, it's just close enough to the old life I had that it throws me off. 

Take the trash pickup. Longtime readers of this blog -- all good-looking and tasteful, with powerful intellects and enormous patience -- will recall that in New York, I complained a lot about the free-for-all that was our trash situation. People put everything short of dead humans out for pickup, and maybe they disguised a few of those. You could use any ol' trash receptacle you had handy. And the garbagemen came by on Tuesdays and Fridays, with a "recycling" pickup on Wednesday.

Here, the trash pickup is one day a week: Monday, You don't dare miss it because they won't be back. So people have their stuff out Sunday night, although I haven't seen a pickup here before noon Monday. It's one of those towns where you get two large trash cans when you move in, one for garbage and one for recycling garbage, and everything has to fit inside. The truck comes by and picks up the can and dumps it into the hopper. Another truck comes by later and gets the other can. It cuts manpower by two thirds, and it keeps people from trying to leave a sofa or a piano for pickup. 

Well, they wouldn't try it twice. 

My main problem is that I don't know what the hell day it is. I had tuesday-wednesday-friday tattooed on my consciousness. When a holiday would bump the week forward a day, that was bad enough. Here, around Wednesday I do not know immediately what day it is, because the trashman would not be back for days. I'm a rudderless boat on the sea of time now. 

And I'm scared of my sink.

This is the first time in my life I've lived somewhere with a garbage disposal. The InSinkErator came with the place. I am glad to be able to get rid of most food garbage instantly -- so I'm not stuck with it until next Monday! -- but man, it's scary and loud. 

All I ever heard of these things were what happened when you let utensils fall into them and what HORRIBLE things happened to YOU when you tried to get them out. 

Stone cold killer

I mean, the way this thing goes through a head of celery or a chunk of beef has to give you pause. I could easily see Steve Buscemi's leg sticking out of the sink in a remake of Fargo. 

Wish me luck with the InSinkErator, and that I do not forget what day of the week it is when Monday arrives. Last week the truck dude failed to completely empty my garbage can and it's got some bad juju going on right now. If I miss him tomorrow, I'm going to have to shove all the garbage into the disposal. And I think that may work no better than trying to get Steve Buscemi in there.  

More lessons.

As we continue to get things set up in our new home in Dixie -- the area, not the cup -- I have continued to reflect on some lessons learned in the process. 

1) It's different when it doesn't snow a lot.

Back in New York, the potholes from last winter are still being fixed. Where you don't get a lot of snow, the roads don't get nearly the same damage. People have been telling me how they got a shocking SIX INCHES OF SNOW in one storm last winter, but there were precious few plows and I guess no salt trucks, so people had to wait until it melted. Which I suppose took a one or two days. Meanwhile, I have seen zero potholes. 

Roads weakened by salt and other chemicals and damaged by the expanse of freezing water give way in spots. Not seeing much evidence of that here. 

You see this brick structure leading out to the street? In New York, a plow would have busted the end of it years ago. Many times have I seen these kinds of things built, and many bricks have gone flying by March. Snow plows aren't invulnerable to ice and snow either -- and snow plowers are only human.

2) People really are friendlier down here.

New Yorkers always make the case that, while they act like jerks on the outside, they have a heart o' gold on the inside. And I think that's mostly true. But in this part of the south, at least, they act friendly on the outside, which is nice. And it's institutionalized: in Publix, the big supermarket chain, I've found that you not only don't you have to bag your own groceries*, you really can't -- the way the counter register line is set up, you can't reach them. Besides, there's a clerk already doing it. Customer service means something here, apparently. 

*Self-checkouts do not apply; you gotta bag your stuff there.

Maybe the biggest, most general life lesson I had drilled into me was:

3) Sometimes "I did my best" doesn't matter. 

We really hit the wall hard when moving day came. The last few days we were literally throwing things into boxes and hoping for the best. We should have been working harder to get things prepared before the big day, but it seemed like it would never come, and when it did, it happened faster than expected. So in the end, we just had to gut it out. Which meant that there was no "That's enough for today," no "I'm wiped out," no "I did my best." 

Most jobs that are not in emergency services are specifically set up to make sure things can be done by reasonable staff in reasonable time, so you never run into this kind of panic. When I was in the magazine business, deadlines meant working late, because those presses would roll when scheduled. But even then, everyone was prepared and it didn't usually become a big problem.** 

It had been a long time since I'd been caught in a situation where I could not quit until the job was done, however late, however exhausted, and it was humbling. And I lost some pants along the way, as I've detailed on this blog. The whole thing was a fuster cluck of massive proportions, and we're still digging out.

But at least we don't expect to be digging a lot of snow.  

As the man says, everything in life is a blessin' or a lesson. I hope I've had enough lessons for a little while. 

**A beloved colleague in the magazine game went to work for a celebrity rag for a while, and found herself working all night long to get the stupid magazine out the door on time. While it was a sort of news magazine, there was no need for that kind of panic and mania and drama; it was just poorly run.

And one married a Wilson!

 

9/11 at 25.

I've shared my thoughts on Patriot Day over the years in this blog. Basically, at this point it's obvious we did not dispatch enough of the sons of bitches in Afghanistan, going by the chaotic withdrawal from that blighted country under President Biden. As Kurt Schlichter wrote yesterday, "If there is one overriding failure in the war on terror, it is that we did not kill enough of the terrorists."

And that's my main thought at this late date. 

I asked a friend of mine, retired now from the New York City Fire Department, if he had any thoughts he would share. He said no; "I just try to forget it." He avoids anything on television that might show the World Trade Center on that day. I told him I understood. I do not know what to do with my anger when I go down that path. 

I saw a question raised online about why Hollywood has not done more by way of movies regarding the War on Terror and the September 11 attacks. I actually don't blame Hollywood for this. In World War II, war movies were popular, because we knew we were fighting nation states, and we would fight them until they suffered complete defeat. We can't do that with multinational death-cult adherents of a 1400-year-old religion. So our frustration and fury are unresolvable. Any film or TV show that takes on these topics will face a huge stumbling block right there. That's why I think the films we have had about the attacks and the war have not been successful. 

It's not because America does not love her heroes. You'd better believe we do.

We are now engaged in a war that began when our country and the West backstabbed the Shah of Iran and Jimmy Carter told France to let the Ayatollah go back to Iran (after the Ayatollah lied about how he had no beef against the USA). The birdies were always going to come home to roost, and they were either going to be vultures carrying nukes or eagles with lesser but highly effective arms. That's where we are in September 2026.

If you know anyone in the American armed forces, please make sure to tell them that we really do care, and we really do appreciate them. And if any more sons of bitches need killing, we trust them to do the job. 

God bless the United States of America. 

Pants macabre.

I've lost four pairs of jeans because of this move already, and if I lose anymore I will be walking around like the guy in the barrel. 

Yeah, him
again

It has become ridiculous. 

The day we left the house, after spending a full day of work getting stuff together and working with the movers to load of the truck, I had intended to take a fast shower and then head out the door, leaving New York behind. This did not happen. The day was so arduous that my wife determined that we would never make it to our new home alive if we set out then, so we just left as is and went to a local hotel (since we were required to be out of the house that night). Of course, I left my favorite pair of jeans and a shirt hanging in the bathroom, where I had intended to change into them after my shower. I did not realize this. When I showered in the hotel, I figured I had just packed them somewhere and couldn't find them. Only a day and hundreds of miles later did I realize what I'd done. 

Jeans total: -1

On arrival in our new state, we checked into another hotel. Our things were roaming the land, as I noted in my last blog entry. I was pretty sure my second-favorite pair of jeans was in one of the boxes, but as of today, a couple of weeks later, they have yet to show. 

Jeans total: -2

So I ordered a couple of pairs from JCPennney. Mock if you well, but their stuff has always fit me well. I got the notice yesterday that my package of jeans had been delivered . . . to my old address. I did not give Penney's the new address. Because I'm stunad. I have no means of contacting the owners of our new place. And I wouldn't want to bug them if I did. 

Jeans total: -4

I did buy one pair at Kohl's while we were in the hotel, because I was not going to wear shorts or sweatpants to a lawyer's office for the closing. 

Jeans total: -3

I've heard of guys losing their shirts, but this . . . !

In sum, I'm down three pairs on the enterprise, and I'm afraid to try to buy any more clothes. I seem to be losing pants on the deal each time. Love 'em or hate 'em, you just gotta have pants. It's impossible to find a good barrel these days.

Stay where you are! Or not.

Okay, sometimes you can't stay where you are. Sometimes you have to leave. Sometimes you have to move. Sometimes you can't stay in the same state because it is run by twits, thieves, highbinders, dimwits, jerks, numbskulls, crooks, communists, idiots, and assorted bastards, and you thank God the US Constitution guarantees free movement between the states. And then you sell your house and go.

not my house

But, as I have noted during my sporadic entries over the last few months, moving is a chore. I'll put it more strongly than that: moving is a 

🏠CHORE👷😫

It is the most difficult thing I have done in decades, and that's saying something. When we moved into our house in New York we were coming from an apartment, so we didn't have a lot of stuff. After more than two decades in the house, we had amassed a lot of stuff.

Here, in no set order, are the Top Twenty Things I Learned This Year About Moving. This is gonna be a big one.

１ Houses in New York tend to have cellars, and often even attics that allow for storage. Houses in the south more likely have no cellars (because they would get flooded) and if they have storage attics, the temperature in them can get high enough to spontaneously combust things. Therefore, all the lovely storage area you abused in New York will be gone, and now you have to make some Hard Choices about what you can bring.

２ I very much wanted to bring the workbench I had constructed, but in the end the mover -- who was NOT lazy about bringing things -- told me that in his experience the bench would not fit in the garage of the type of house to which we were going. This appears to be true, but I can't tell for sure, because five days after the arrival the garage is still full of boxes. I am not sure it will be empty of boxes until after the Second Coming. I'm glad I sold my car, because this may never be a two-car garage again. 

３ A decade ago, when we were first considering fleeing the Former Empire State, I bought a book called Moving Gracefully, written by Carol Miller Fradkin. As we got ready to put our house on the market I looked through the book for helpful tips. Ms. Fradkin's experience largely involved moving for work, her family uprooted many times, so she knew a lot about it -- but the problems of frequent moving are very different from the problems of moving after a long period of residence. The lesson here is that expertise is not always fungible. In any event, our moving was about as far from graceful as you can imagine. 

４ Not to belabor the topic, but if you've held on to things because "someone might need it" or "it's too good to toss" or "I'm still using this furniture but it's not coming with us" or "I'll use it again someday," you're going to find that the day you have to throw them all out will strike like lightning. I rented a 12-yard dumpster. Then I had a junkman come get stuff (fridge, crappy ol' bookshelves). Then I slowly put stuff out for regular collection so as to not overwhelm the garbagemen, over several months. Then I posted things on social media and gave them away free to the first caller -- including a huge dog kennel from the backyard. Then I had the junkman come over for round two, removing old furniture. Then the movers came. Then I needed junkman AGAIN for stuff that the movers couldn't or wouldn't move or forgot to take. 

５ A special note about books. Which are heavy and mostly worthless. As a child I loved books, not just as repositories of wisdom and adventure, but as the objects themselves. Computers have made them irrelevant. Except for a few rare editions, they are barely worth anything -- people can get the stories without lugging them around. Plus, my childhood dreams of owning a magnificent library were always undercut by my buying the cheapest version of any book I wanted -- used paperbacks, often enough. So when push came to shovel, and I mean shovel, I heaved hundreds of pounds of books into the recycling pile, week after week. I had to ask every time, Did I enjoy or at least respect this book? Might I ever read it again? If the answer was yes both times, I would save it. And now I don't know where to put them all. 

６ I thought we might have trouble getting to the house before the movers did. When we moved into the old place, the moving men went straight from the apartment to the house, fifty-odd miles away, me following in my tiny car. That's not the way it works now, or at least not on trips of 600 miles or so. By the time they got to our old house, they had already picked up a load in Massachusetts. After they left, they went to get another load in New Jersey. I grant you that the truck was enormous, but I really thought we had enough crap to fill it ourselves. Nope.  

７ And so our stuff wandered to and fro over the countryside for an entire week. We drove down the day after our stuff took off and sat in a hotel while we waited. Well, we also went to the lawyer to close on the new place and started bringing what we had in the car into the empty house, but there was no place to sleep, so we hung out at the Hampton Inn. We also went to the beach. Which was nice. 

８ Our movers were great when they got there. I was sad that all the boxes we packed were just loaded into the garage, though -- my wife had made a map with numbering on the rooms to match numerals on the boxes, and it all came to nothing. Nope, they just piled the boxes up in the garage. So that was a lesson. (They did assemble furniture that they had disassembled, so that was good.)

９ The old cable company wants you back. No, seriously. If you use cable for TV or Internet and you leave, they will come after you. I explained twice on the phone to the operators in Bangalore (or somewhere) that Optimum service was not available where we now live, so even if I wanted to continue with Altice's US company, it was impossible. I think they finally got the message. I once thought that Optimum (formerly Cablevision) would have to better after Jimmy Dolan sold the company. I was wrong. 

１０ Little red stickers. Everywhere. Every box. Every bag. Every stick of furniture. Everything that was ours that made it onto the truck got a little red sticker with a number on it. It set apart our stuff from the stuff that came from Massachusetts and Jersey, so good. But I have removed dozens of them. The highest number I've seen so far was 630, so I may be at this for the rest of my life. 

１１ When people tell you about the weather, believe them. I was dispatched to get a pizza one night and the drive turned out to be longer than I thought. And the clouds opened, and I mean opened. I got a real Carolina Baptism. The water came down so hard that on a couple of occasions I literally could not see well enough to pull off onto the shoulder. The last time I got walloped like that was 15 years ago, and on that occasion I hydroplaned and wrecked the car. Nothing like that happened this time. Thank God.

１２ Speaking of baptisms: Northerners, when someone tells you to make a turn at the Baptist church, ask them to be specific. We have very few of them in New York, and almost nothing but them here. I am happy to see evidence of strong Christian faith anywhere (although I will have to drive farther now for Mass). 

１３ The pizza I mentioned above was pretty good. Pizza, as they say, is like, uh, other things you might name*, in that even when it's not great it's still pretty good.

１４ It is typically humid enough here in the mornings for Aquaman to swim through the air. My fuzzy canine does not like this. He has had one decent walk, where we explored the local park on an afternoon when there was a breeze and the temps were in the eighties. My worry is, will we ever acclimate, or just huddle in the A/C? While taking out the trash this morning I saw a young woman walking two well-trained dogs at a brisk pace -- one of them appeared to be a Bernese mountain dog, a snow-obsessed hairball that Nature intended for cold climes -- and they all appeared to be very happy and active and comfortable. I hated all three on sight. Not just the fitness and happiness, but also the fact that when I had two dogs, walking them together was like being pulled by hyperactive morons driving scooters in different directions. Still, it gave me a little hope that Izzy might get used to this weather. 

１５ Speaking of garbage, they only do one trash pickup per week here. Is that typical across the nation? I believe that in the City and outside the City, every town in New York state does two, and a third pickup for the recycling boondoggle. 

１６ And on that note, problems you don't think about are: What am I going to do with all these damn cardboard boxes? They take them for recycling, but everything has to fit in a big green bin, so at the rate I'm going I will have gotten rid of unneeded boxes in 2028 sometime. There is a dump, but I will have to establish residency first, which means . . .

１７ . . . we gotta go to the nearest city worthy of the name to use the DMV. Not an unexpected chore, but since the car's registration is good in New York state until 2027 and the insurance is paid until November, I'd hoped to avoid doing anything for a few months. Alas, I will need that ID, and anyway we would like to vote this year. The DMV does not let you print out forms and fill them out in advance, as far as I can tell; everything has to be done on the spot. In California I think you can send any old border jumper to get a Class A Commercial Driver's License as long as he doesn't speak English, but here in Normal World they want to make sure you are who you say you are. Which is, frankly, as it ought to be. 

１８ The dog was an absolute champ on the drive south -- the longest car ride he has ever taken (eight hours over the previous record) and the longest drive I have ever made. He caused no trouble except for necessary bathroom/water breaks, and on that score he was no worse than the driver (ahem). He has, though, been having difficulty getting used to the new house. For some time I think he expected we would go home, to where he was comfortable and where his favorite sofa was. But the sofa was old and it was among the junkman's haul. Poor Izzy.

１９ It's going to be hard to think of myself as a Southerner, and that is absolutely not a rap on the people here. They have all been great, as friendly as advertised. But I had spent almost every day of my life prior as a citizen of New York, and damn it, for most of that time I was proud -- utterly proud -- of that state. From America's most world-class city to the natural beauty of upstate and the hard-won factory towns to the west, from its amazing history and its contributions to the nation and the world, there was no part of New York I didn't love. But in my lifetime it has chased out industry, encouraged lawlessness, pushed bleeding taxes to fund criminal activities, and let one of civilization's greatest enterprises turn to garbage. My heart is broken. When I mentioned to some people that I'm from New York, I added that I didn't break it and I couldn't fix it. And that is the sad truth.

２０ My main point in this Voyage of Stupid Discovery is that, while there were many reasons to leave New York  -- financial, cultural, professional -- I was settled in there, there were people we loved there, and (this is no small thing) I knew with dire certainty that selling the house and moving would be among the most prolonged, stressful, exhausting, and infuriating things we would ever do. I was wrong, though -- it was worse than that. And yet, this is nice place, I'm finding my way around, we are not far from the ocean, and I would do it all over again. Which is saying a lot, since I'm still surrounded by boxes and still can't find my favorite pants. Gonna check one more box . . . 

* ice cream