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Rock on Mr. and Mrs. Plame

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Brilliant.  In a country where the courts and checks and balances and all sorts of quaint ideas have shit the bed, sue the bastards.  How beautiful is that?

GWB proudly became the MBA president who’d run us like a CEO (which in his case meant running shit into the ground, like he did with his businesses).  How do you take businesses down?  Sue, Sue, Sue-dio.

I wanted indictments.  But, this might be fun.

Thank you Mr. Joe Wilson and the woman known as Joe Wilson’s wife.  It’s a little bit of a smile.  Sure, I did want justice, and the whole affair reeked to high heaven.  But, something is better than walking away unscathed.

Not to mention, in this fucked up business model of a country we left that used to have something like a functional system, if there were indictments, no doubt they’d exit the stage a la Ken Lay.  Heart attack or the ultimate Teflon maneuver?

Wishing for an owner's manual

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The life of a real estate typhoon is hard.  Serious empathy for The Trump these days.  But he makes it look so easy.

Here’s the thing.  You can make the decision to move across country, easy peasy right?  And, about the time I filled my gas tank and started driving west, I had worked out that the chapter where I lived in my little Cambridge condo was past the peak in the narrative arc and would be winding down.  Sure.  I got that.

And, when I walked through the place in May and took a few pictures, then walked through again with Terry the Real Estate Broker and talked about the work I would need to do to be a landlord, I could feel that the chapter had thinned down to less than a page left.

Who the fuck wants to be a landlord?  Karma, man, karma.  Who would want to sink a lot of dough into a place for the privilege of being a landlord?  A landlord from a distance.  Expensive, bad karma. Even The Trumpster lived nearby in Jersey when the Atlantic City empire began.

Meaning, there wasn’t really anything to decide.  Selling equals more choices.  Choices in Cali with M.

Still and all, it is a weird thing to give up the place.

Tougher still is entertaining two offers that at the moment are the same.

I’m really what you would call pro-choice, and not just about my right to baby killing.  I like a fine array of choices.  Chinese?  Home-cooking?  Bowl of cereal?  Yup, I defend my right to choose.

But, dammit all to hell, I fucking hate the responsibility of deciding.  I ain’t no decider, like the GWBush-man.  Deciding implies ownership and living with consequences and failing amd winning and losing and succeeding and grown up shit and all.

I feel like my condo is a puppy.  I want it to go to a good home that will take care of it and treat it better than I can now.

And, I want to end up with enough cash for M. and me to be able to get a Cali puppy.

How much do the Internets rock?

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Dig this my teeny-tiny readership. Yes, you three friends, relatives or cyber-buddies, please do listen up.

My home of the last 10 years is chilling in the free market economy. It has put its best face forward, new shiny windows and white picket fence, looking to close the Cambridge chapter of the dee-rob.com saga. Maybe not entirely close, because you can take the girl out of Cambridge and all that.

(Personally, I thought when I let comedians sleep there when I left, because lord knows sane people wouldn’t leave comics behind as stewards, I thought the saga would end differently. I imagined a blaze of glory that would be retold in flashbacks on some “Behind the Music” style show or an interview, “Is it true that you accidentally lit your friend’s house on fire?”)

Anyway, July 4 and the impending sale combined has me getting pretty nostalgic. There were a lot of calls to friends who had drunk on that back deck and walked down to the river to see the fireworks, and then walked back and drank some more.

July 4 and fireworks are kind of the perfect holiday ingredients. The weather is usually good so there’s that. There aren’t all sorts of horrible obligatory traditions and whatnot or familial requirements. Nothing is mandatory and seldom does it end in tears or regrets. Well, I have regretted some tequila shots come July 5. And, Pat always claimed that there was something about salmon and snow peas that were the chosen meal of the day. But, while she said that, not once did the salmon or snow pea appear on a plate in the 70 + summers she bitched about the heat and humidity and enjoyed.

The other bonus is absolutely no liberal guilt or anti-war sentiment clouds the Revolutionary War. I still rally round not paying taxing to no stinking king.

I’m drifting off topic, which is that the web is a magical place. In the midst of my compulsive need to write here, I’m dealing with strangers 3,000 miles away who are walking through the home that isn’t my home any more but is still my house. And in that 3,000-mile vastness, my real estate agent says, the other broker mentioned that his client saw your website, what’s that all about?

So, he and I talked about stand-up comedy. And, I tell him I’m an aspiring writer and performer. Things that hadn’t come up, given the calculated nature of buying and selling.

And, maybe the future, new resident at my old address is reading this.

And, maybe I should be pandering and marketing and selling, selling, selling. (Even though, as M. has pointed out, my writing tends toward stronger when honest and genuine.)

If it helps, honest to god, I will and do miss the place that was affordable enough for me to call Cambridge home even after rent control ended in the early 90s.

And, from a karmic standpoint, if one were to believe in such things, that place was a significant marker that led me to where I am now. I mentioned this last night to M. or maybe it was over the weekend.

I had allowed the place to get overrun with junk and for a while some of the needed work went undone, because it overwhelmed me. My prior relationship had also overwhelmed me, and the house, and it’s less than stellar state, was a constant source of friction. It represented to that man my inability to adequately take care of things, and my unwillingness to change (which he meant in the least flattering way possible).

Then, the bad man left. I started reclaiming chaos. I met M.

Instead of scolding my failure, M. said, “Hey, we should fix up that front room, so you can use it as a bedroom. I’ll help you clean it and paint it and whatever else it needs.” And so he did.

Maybe it’s not perfect, now, but it a damn sight better than when he first saw it’s use as a disused junk room. I started working on and changing other things. The upstairs neighbor and I pooled resources and did a lot of necessary work, but agreed to stretch our budgets a bit to do it right.

And, here we are.

Where would the karmic wheel have spun if M. had said, “Jesus H. Fucking Christ, you’ve trashed that room, what’s wrong with you?”

Lighter side, while seeking light

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What I should write about is our quest for California cliches. This weekend, loosely entitled “Beach Blanket Bingo,” we dragged the grill to the beach to light a fire, sear some meet and watch the sun settle over the Pacific.

As Americans, it was essentially a game of how many provisions we could carry a short distance. [image:4002:l][newline]

The side game was “I’ll follow the sun.” Fucking microclimates. No shit, and I may never get used to this reality, in Northern Cali you could wake up to 80 or 90 degrees of dry heat with a lightbulb hovering headward and illuminating the idea, “BEACH DAY!” A few miles down the road, the temperature has sunk by 30 degrees and fog has clouded blue skies.

Our first beach stop in Santa Cruz was Hitchcockian cool with a flurry of pelicans and gulls. [image:3998:l][newline] [image:3987:l][newline]
Cool as it was with riots of birds and a rusted out shipwreck, it was fucking cold.

Eventually, we landed. [image:4008:l][newline]
The lighthouse started moaning out a fog warning. We cooked and the fog rolled in. [image:4006:l][newline] [image:4012:l][newline]
Just call me Gidget.