Hello world. Let me catch you up…
-FIRST-
How to get to my new house in three easy days.
When our U-Haul is two thirds full, we realize that we should have gone for the bigger truck. Even after selling, giving and then eventually trashing seventy-seven percent of our belongings, there’s still an overwhelming load to come along for the ride. My dad becomes obsessed with a real world truck-loading variation of Tetris, that I will dub Pack-tris. It is the fine art of fitting everything we own into everything else we own and then all that owned stuff into all the other owned stuff until everything is one solid cube… until everything fits into our tiny truck.
Lifting the piano, my father squishes the artery in his wrist… it’s really gross and I hide in the garage so he’ll stop showing it to me.
Squishing silver platters into a space of the truck where they do not want to fit, my father splits his nose open as one flips back up, into his face. Note: his nose will be on television 6 days later. Double note: it’s mostly healed now.
When everything is finally in the truck, everything still didn’t fit in the truck. We had to pack smaller items throughout the orifices of my car, hitched behind it. My ab ball sat in the driver’s seat, pretended he was driving to Connecticut all on his own.
Tuesday morning… it’s a day later than we planned on leaving, but we set off. Two days to Connecticut… one night in a hotel in between. My father driving the truck… an animal carrier carrying the cats riding shotgun. My mother driving their car, me shotgun, both dogs panting on the backseat. They pant like mad all the way to DC. There is no air conditioning.
In Daytona, we realize that the trailer my car is on has a tire ready to explode. We spend hours finding a U-Haul place and having them fix the tire. This is the worst way to start a road trip.
We stop two dillion times. We stop for coffee. We stop for food. We stop to pee. We stop so the dogs can pee. We stop so the cats can pee. We keep the cat’s litter box in the trunk of my car. When we stop, it’s placed on the floorboard of the truck and the animal carrier is opened for them to use it. They never did. Everywhere we stop, someone has to stay with the dogs. This makes it impossible to eat inside any restaurant.
Although, I do eat dinner with my mother at the Denny’s in South Carolina where we met Natalie’s father after filming that whole monkey-creature trailer.
Anyway, Two days on the road becomes three and it’s really quite hell and it’s days behind me now… so let’s move on.
Random, quick fact about my new home: Norwalk is only a few miles from the real town of Sleepy Hollow.
-SECOND-
-What’s a radiator, and can you place a bed up against it without burning the house down?
We arrive Thursday night… the third night on the road. It’s dark, raining, and super duper cold. It is the worst way to get to your new home.
The house looks unimpressive on the outside, but amazing on the inside. A big living room. Beautiful cabinets in the kitchen… spinning doohickeys and hidden drawers behind them.
The “Florida Room,” as my parents call it, in the back of the house is gigantic and surrounded by eighteen floor to ceiling windows. I do not approve of the name… as I do not like attaching Floridian themes to cool-ass window rooms.
And then I notice the lack of central air. For the first time in my life, no air conditioning. And even though it’s thirty degrees outside right now… I know that the summer will still bring on the hot and that scares me.
And then… the radiating heat vents. They’re everywhere. On at least one wall of every room… oozing their warmth for all and scaring me to death. Evidently, they work by circulating burning hot oil throughout the house. This oil is supposedly refilled by a magical man that we have no knowledge of, but are sure exists. They are not hot to the touch, but my mind says “STAY AWAY.” I’ll drop something on the ground and then think… but what if it got kicked under THE VENT!? What if I burned the motherfucking house down?
Moving on… the basement is scary in a whole different way. It’s low ceilings, dark lighting, and dirty red checkered tile give off a condemned mental hospital feel at all times. I will say though… the basement is huge… as big as the entire house and clean enough to live in, even though it freaks me out.
We kicked in the locked door of one of the many closets down in the basement and found boxes of stuff that went eight feet back. Hanging in the very front was an old yellowed dress about three feet tall. A dress that most definitely belonged to the dead little girl skeleton I was positive we were about to uncover. But in the end it was a bunch of stupid Christmas shit from the last tenant… so we relocked the door and will now pretend that closet doesn’t exist.
Random, quick fact about my new home: All bottled drinks aren’t taxed, but have a five cent bottle deposit. Crazy bottle eating machines in front of all grocery stores count your empty bottles and spit out cash redeeming slips. Also no tax on clothing purchases under seventy-five dollars. That has nothing to do with the crazy bottle eating machines… but something to note.
-THIRD-
-Traversing the spider web of doom.
On the main street my house is off of… there are little shops. Delis. A mom and pop video store. A newsstand with porn… everywhere! So I decide I’ll drive past them… see if there’s any real shopping to be found beyond them.
Of course, I make a wrong turn coming out of my own driveway and end up lost in Norwalk, Darien and Stamford, CT for almost four hours.
I start off driving through neighborhoods for nearly thirty minutes. The roads are narrow, sometimes un-lined, and ridiculously hilly and fork laden. Every intersection is a fork and there’s never a street sign when you want it… so you can’t tell which side of the fork is the continuation of the road you are on… and which is a different road altogether. Every turn you make is life threatening, because no matter where you are… oncoming traffic will be down a hill so you can’t see if anyone is coming.
One second, I’m driving through winding residential hillsides and crazy cemeteries, the next I’ve somehow come out exactly at a Best Buy. It was this incredible moment of glee that I will not soon forget. And although the Best Buy doesn’t actually open for two more weeks… the thought of it’s soon-to-existness is all I need.
So after getting over all that I set off again… and find myself in “Historic SoNo!” or Southern Norwalk. This is the home of lots of traffic that makes my car want to overheat and trendy little stores that business people and me eat up.
I end up at some Harbor.
I end up back in the residential hills of doom.
I end up in the middle of a funeral precession. Not behind one. IN one. I’m talking… several cars in front of me, driving 15 mph with their hazard lights on… several more behind me. Now this is incredibly embarrassing. I’ve somehow cut into this line of cars. In my mind there is no excuse for this and I turn off of the road… even though I was sure it was taking me in the right direction.
I end up back at Best Buy and drive past it to find… Barnes and Noble, CompUSA, Circuit City, Wal-Mart and everything else that doesn’t belong in such a crazy small town.
In Wal-Mart I buy 120 dollars worth of weight equipment and a map of Norwalk to find my way home. I find that I’m really close, but still get lost and have to stop two times to look at the map on the way back.
Random, quick fact about my new home: The front door of my house locks automatically when you shut it. This resulted in me being locked outside, barefoot, in the forty degree cold for two hours the other day!
...still more to catch up on...
Christian
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