Check it out, I’m living with a sweet, sweet man.

Yesterday morning, in a wave of blueness, I wrote that I was a tad lonely what with being a stranger in a strange land. Later that same day, M. tells me he’s too busy at work to keep up with my web opus. Ah well.

That same evening, he decides we should check out a comedy open mike in the neighboring village of Saratoga. As we are walking to the place, he makes some crack about my being “lonely.” Rat bastard had been reading all along, and he had decided to bring me on a comedy outing.

Along with the sudden outbursts in my head that run along the lines of “WHAT THE FUCK? I SO TOTALLY MOVED,” there’s another cluster of shocked internal monologues, “WHAT THE FUCK? I’M LIVING WITH A GUY.”

Anywho, the open mike, which was at the Blue Rock Shoot cafe, was fun. It was about what you would expect for Tuesday and open mikedness — some good, some bad, no audience. Kind of reminded me of the All Asia, back when it was fun and the other comics were friendly to one another and there was some supportiveness.

I was also pretty impressed and pleasantly surprised with Ruth Lynn Miller, a 71-year-old woman who hosted. Back East, I’ve seen a few older, women comics, but mostly they never seem loose and like they are having fun. More like they are giving a lecture and not trying to entertain. Not Ruth, though. She seemed happy and what folks might call “a hoot.”

The sad thing was it kept making me think of Pat’s essentially chucking it all at 71. Here’s someone the same age out and about at a comedy show, reminding me that you can age any way you want to–I’m going for less than gracefully.

Likely to be Nick-less today. He keeps threatening to paint what has become my bathroom, but he doesn’t want to do it if there’s been rain.

Today is the first day in a really long while that I slept in by myself for a while. I was still up by 10 a.m., because that would be the crack of 1 p.m. backeast, and my circadian rhythms are hella fucked up. I’m damn near narcoleptic in the evenings (where I once was insomniacal.)

Probably not coincidentally, because I have the unfortunate tendency toward introspection and self-reflection (to a completely narcissistic degree, it;s the first day I’ve felt a tad lonely. It’s not real good, self-indulgent loneliness. It’s more like a pinch, a soupcon of lonely. (Really nothing to write home about (or post here about, yet I am compelled).)

I think the solution is to, I don’t know, get myself a regular grown-up life. Get out, get a JOB, check out some comedy places. Playing house is fun and all, but one needs a life.

(Honest to fucking god, I don’t know how stay at home types do it. Although, I guess different strokes, different folks. I’ll go absolutely batshit if I don’t get out there in the world.)

Part of it is I’ll need to make some West Coast friends of my own.

But, I was thinking it’s not so much friends I’m missing, it’s adversaries to hate. I’ve tried hating these folks. (And, as god is my witness, there is a lot to fucking hate.)

However, distance and lack of contact really does mellow you the fuck out. I had planned on writing about the guy who is the single most passive-aggressive human I have ever met in my life and who envisions himself a comedy impresario. But, a few months back I realized how little his very tiny corner of the planet has an impact on my life, and what with being so far away, I just don’t care.

I figure he’s a pretty sad guy. (He is positively encyclopedic in his knowledge and, I think, love of comedy and comedians, but one on one he seems to truly hate comics.) Could you imagine your passion, your love bringing you so much pain that you regularly punch walls in public and cry about your heartache to anyone who will listen?

Soon enough, though, I will have fresh sources of righteous indignation, no doubt. I plan on checking out SF open mikes, so that will help bridge the hate gap in short order, I suspect.

And, I’m considering doing a temping stint for employment. Temping has always been good to me, providing opportunities for real employment and cautionary tales of what not to become. I have no doubt at all that a couple of chaotic temp gigs later, and my lust for controversy and provocation will be sated.

I’ve been kind of living a half life, since the fact that I have moved hasn’t really sunk in to my skull. It’s more like an extended vacation than an actual reality. (Of course, getting a job will crash that little idyllic bubble.)

But, as M. and I wandered around the San Jose Flea Market, where I bought avocados and garlic and tangerines with the leaves and stems still on them, because it’s not a cold and muddy March in Boston here, the nasty, cold, cruel world intervened. We came back to my car and the rear driver’s side window was smashed.

No big deal, really, since glass is insured and at 60 degrees the breeze was fine. Most importantly, the alarm must have scared the ne’er-do-wells away, since my GPS and iPod carelessly left in the car (but not in plain view) were in tact.

Honestly, if I had lost the GPS I would have cried at the violation. The GPS has greatly affected the possibility and ultimate success of this move. Having my own car with me has been fabulous, and having a GPS device, which allows me to find important things like the nearest Target, gas and Bed, Bath and Beyond, has provided a degree of autonomy that makes me a far more pleasant person.

Tomorrow, I guess, will bring me at an auto glass shop and picking up the last of the staples I require to feel secure (baking soda, baking powder and salt). After that, I must seek employment and toil here in the Golden West. (Picture Grapes of Wrath without the devastating, grinding poverty.)

It’s like I’ve moved to a foreign country or something.

I mean, like, I can’t buy Pepperidge Farm bread and the milk selection is smaller and gas prices, whoo boy, don’t get me started.

There are actually some differences, really. Like the other day, M. and some of his friends and I went to a Korean restaurant. It was small and friendly and probably family run. And, I was the only white person there, I think. In Boston, you are pretty hard-pressed to find a place that is 100 percent full of Asians.

I was such an anomaly that the waitress kept asking the other people if “she” was OK with spicy food. We all assured her I was fine. Nonetheless,when she brought the soup, she brought over some extra plain chicken broth and explained to the group that I should dilute my soup. (I didn’t, partially because I like spicy food, and partially because I am a stubborn, macho jerk.)

California is a special wonderous place, though. Last night in an Italian place in North Beach, San Francisco, the check came with a giant bowl of community gummy bears for us to sample. It was an enchanting sight and not one that I have seen on the East Coast.

(After goading M. to take a big fistful for me, to go, as it were, I spent the rest of the night amusing myself reenacting the last scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: “Gummy bear? They’ve been in my pocket. They’re real warm and soft.”)

Other than that, as I’ve gone through the new place and worked on getting settled, I’ve been compiling a list of evidence that I might be a tad obsessive-compulsive:

Other than that, much love and legging breaking success to these guys, who are doing a few big weekend shows. (If you are in the Boston area, it’s a worthwhile evening’s diversion.)

Yesterday on the news I heard in passing but didn’t really hone in on this little nugget. (Try here if you are adverse to signing up for news stories.)

What I hadn’t realized is that it happened in the place in which I now reside. Worse yet, desperately hungry while running around the other day, I ate at Wendy’s. I felt better when I realized not the same one.

California is scary.

Shit, I haven’t sat down for days. I just declared myself done for the day.

Like magic, about an hour or so ago, I wrote the sentence above, and M. walked through the door with pizza. Well, he called it pizza, and the box said pizza, but they do things different here in California. One of them was mooshu duck, you know, like them Chinese eat.

I have dishes and assorted kitchen shit put away, and I began a shrine to my lapsed Catholicism in the kitschy, mirrored built-in china cabinet. Right now the shrine includes a slightly tattered blessed virgin Hummel, a Lenox China plate view of the Vatican and the old extreme unction crucifix that I still feel guilty whenever I touch, even though Pat isn’t around to chide me. What M. suspects and may not embrace is the shrine’s growth potential.

Other than unpacking, I spent today dealing with the new landlord, Nick the Greek. I suspect Nick’s control-freakishness will either become so annoying we end up moving or a deep fountain of character-based tales.

Today we walked through the apartment, so we could agree on important checkpoints, like there are five cracks in the tiles around the kitchen sink. The potential flashpoints were his attempts to control, oh, I dunno, normal behavior.

Like when he started to wipe strands of long hair off the bathroom counter while clucking about needing to keep everything clean and warning about long hair and drains. Clearly, he was assessing my hirsutism and trying to educate me on how to avoid plumbing disasters. Only, as he rolled the strands from finger to palm to show me, he realized they were the long, thick, luxuriant locks of an Asian man.

The low point for me would be the tampon wrapper. First, you need to know, I’m a hippie chick at heart, so I tend toward recycling and making sure my feminine hygiene needs don’t become the turrets on some poor, unsuspecting kid’s sand castle downstream from a water treatment plant.
I go for completely biodegradeable paper and cardboard.

So, old Nick is walking from room to room, making his list and checking it twice. He’s at one toilet, where I carelessly tossed a wrapper, and blessed by of low-flow and my lack of attention, it survived it’s swim.

He stops and tells me, we have a problem, “There’s plastic.” Muttering and clucking and generally being a crank, he goes on and on about plastic and flushing, blah, blah, fucking blah. He is completely oblivious to my protestations that I am friend of the environment, and it is paper, flushable paper.

As he continues in this vein and kind of implies I shouldn’t be menstruating around his fine apartment toilet, he takes a pen from his pocket and fishes out the offending agent. He examines it more closely and as it drips it’s toilety juices, he opens all the cabinets where he would have put a trash can and finally listens as I show him where the trash can is.

Apart from my outrage, which, of course, I stifled, because I am a complete and total pussy around old men (they are my Kryptonite), I could only think, “Ewwwwww.”‘

(Lucky for me, since doing stand-up comedy, my normal shame reflexes are non-existent, which is also clear as I put this little story on the web.)

I think Nick’s lacking in the normal ew-gross-germs reflexes (which I have in near compulsive levels). Later that same day, I watched (and listened to the kvetching) as Nick retrieved a perfectly good, but definitely used, toilet brush from the garbage bin. (There was a whole lot of explanation over the garbage versus the recycling bins.)

Nick’s gonna be a ball.

Movers have come and gone, so now I’m here sorting through madness. (My own madness, as I threw shit in boxes and drove west.)

Meanwhile, last night we did get one TV cooking, and I can’t fucking believe it was the Terri Schiavo Show on every news channel. Generally, I’m suspicious of the husband of dead/dying women, whenever the setup looks tailor-made for a Lifetime TV movie.

But, in this case, even if (and it seems like a pretty big leap, since she wasn’t robust and jumping with good health prior to veging out) there were “foul play,” all I can think is “So.” Because no matter how much her parents want it, she’s fucking gone and not coming back. She’s a barely living shrine to some idealized living daughter, and she ain’t snapping out of it.

Maybe because I just left my family behind on the East Coast and am trying something new miles away, I also can’t shake the comparison in my head to what fueled a lot of gay rights fighting when AIDS hit. A major issue was whether parents or partners got the final say in treatment and care and where you lived and all of that.

The thing is, at some point you grow up, leave the house, get on with your own life, and your folks can’t do anything about what happens. They may want to and their intentions may be the purest of fucking pure and wonderful and light and love filled. But, you are gone, and that’s that.

And if you choose to live your life with a partner, even if your choice sucks and your parents hate the guy you pick, too damned bad for them. Parents sometimes have to just let go.

If they suddenly came up with some info that keeping her alive could prove Michael tried to off her, I might listen. Kind of like all of those “Unsolved Mysteries” episodes where the parents had bodies exhumed to prove the boyfriend or husband was indeed a rat bastard murderer.

But, they ain’t saying that, and I’m sorry for them, but the “life” they imagine, left their house quite a number of years ago and left her living self some time after that.

It’s all very sad.

Last night was our first night here in the new place. All of M.’s stuff is gone from his old place, and the movers are supposed to be here any time now with my stuff.

It kind of felt more like a sleep over than a final act last night. I can’t shake the interloper in a stranger’s house feeling. Col0r me Goldilocks, and I guess bears being all over Cali and in the state seal and all, it works.

I’ve been so busy with truly mundane, I ain’t hardly written shit. Of course, one could ask why or how have I possibly have found the mundane line about which I won’t write here. Is lining shelves and drawers really any more pathetically boring than the rest of Dee-Rob minutia?

Here goes, though, and let me know if belly button lint and toenail clipping are next in the scintillating prose arena.

I am fucking obsessed with shelf lining. Every time I have ever moved into a place, I’ve washed everything, floors, walls, shelves, light switches, porcelain fixtures, really everything with a surface. I’ve scrubbed and chucked bleach around to a fare-the-well. Then, in closets and cabinets and drawers, I’ve lined everything with Contact paper (the duct tape of the colored paper world).

(By the way, any one who knows what a complete and total slob I am is probably shocked I do all of that cleaning. But, I get all obsessive compulsive about what someone may have left behind, dirty-wise.)

But this fucking place has so much storage room, the lining has taken on global proportions.

I hear a truck out front…