(Thursday, May 3)
We are IN!! The study of mutation and the public's fear of the unknown can again proceed APACE!
216-320-9528 -- that's the new Stang fax number (actually it's the only Church fax number).
PO Box 181417
CLEVE HTS OH 44118-1417
USA
That's the new Stang mailing address.
THE MAIN CHURCH PO BOX IS STILL 140306, Dallas TX 75214!! Jesus and Magdalen take your orders from there. I hand OUT your OTHER orders from here in lovely Cleveland Heights. And I order you to buy that remix of Media Barrage 12 CD, and/or that BEST OF ESO/SUBGENIUS CD, or those new 16 Hours of Slack on MP3 CD-Rs.
On Monday night I was shuffling around this new place that we had just moved into, filled only 3 hours earlier with the old furniture, and even with furniture from my youth, tables made by my dad that have been in storage for years, and suddenly everything was like an eerie dream, in fact scary, almost a waking nightmare. I felt like a character in a Philip K. Dick novel, experiencing shifting realities. "Whose house is this? Why is Pappy's table in this odd green room with this ancient cabinetry? Why are all my posessions strewn across the floor? This isn't my house. Where are the kids? What is this strange street? How does this strange door work? Who is that strange, STRANGE woman?"
I woke up in the wee hours of Tuesday morning to let purge the lucky worm, and became very confused, just looking for the bathroom. All the paths from bedroom to bathroom in all the houses, apartments, or dorms that I had ever lived in merged together... and none of them were the right path. It was like a bad acid trip. And also like a bad acid trip, the good kind anyway, it wore off the next day.
It's ironic that our first night in the new house would be so confusing for me, since I had just spent the last month concentrating entirely on very methodically physically moving every single one of these objects from the old place to the new, except for Monday, when I directed hired Mover Apes to deal with things like the roll top desk, the 7.5 foot long bookshelves, the Cast Iron Cast-Off Office Desk, etc., some of which required hoisting. (WHEN WILL THE ANTI GRAVITY PAINT BE INVENTED, O "BOB"? WHERE IS OUR "PROFESSOR CAVOR"??) Incidentally, the gorillas I was expecting from the moving company turned out to be gibbons instead! Skinny hippie punk lads with funny haircuts. They did an EXCELLENT job, though. I was billed for only 4.5 hours. And they didn't break anything.
Because of the Church Archives, I had to very carefully plan the logistics of the move in advance, and relentlessly proceed with a military-like cold logic. Which I had done. So it is funny that I had a kind of personality-displacement experience the night after moving in. Breaking down in confusion like a little baby. I suppose it could have been exhaustion.
So the next day, Tuesday, I couldn't rest, or think about anything else, until I had basically UNPACKED EVERYTHING and PUT EVERYTHING IN ITS EXACT PLACE. It was such an eruption of "nesting frenzy" that it shocked even me.
When Wei got home from work on Monday, it was to that weird new place we had been camping in lately to paint walls, and it was to her as if all of our belongings had suddenly been transported there -- but jumbled all about, as if by a crazy man.
When she got home from work on Tuesday night, it was to that same weird place, now again suddenly TRANSFORMED, BUT INTO AN ACTUAL HOME -- with the same *THINGS* from before, now all lavishly spread out -- and sharing space with weird "STANG FAMILY FURNITURE" that she had previously only glimpsed beneath cobwebbed shrouds in a dank basement.
So SHE feels like she's STILL dreaming.
On Wednesday, having finished getting us back online and the house turned homelike, I unpacked and built my NEW STUDIO. From a sardine can into Monstro's belly, is what it feels like. It took HOURS to find the exact configurations of desks, tables, and GEAR, that would allow all the machines to communicate with each other again, SCSI cables limiting the distances in two crucial spots... but IT IS DONE!!!!
DONE!!!
Well, actually, most of the Archives are STILL not moved. Maybe this weekend. I COLLAPSED last night, Wednesday night. We were at Dillards trying to find ANYTHING to put on our wedding registry. I swear, that store holds NOTHING USEFUL, except kitchen tools, and they're way too pricey. I think Target will be our main wedding registry place... Anyway, I started just folding up in the store... hallucinating, practically. Wei drove home, I got into the old bed in the new bedroom and looked at about 3 minutes of the TV movie of PETER THE GREAT and then FLAT-LINED.
Got up this morning and it feels like MY HOUSE, and I feel NORMAL, ha ha, "normal," and the only thing irking me now is that a lot of my TREASURES are still at those old places, somebody else's places, which is unnatural and evil. I will go and fetch them here, where they naturally belong.
AAHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
When this is done, I shall try to learn Dutch, ProTools, CuBase, Flash, and Final Cut, all of which I have been trying to get to for about a YEAR now. And then there's a whole nother list of stuff I have to MAKE. Actually that's a longer list, and with a deadline. Damn it. Even more than get things made, I like to LEARN new ways to make things. ("Anything that makes it harder to learn is AntiSlack." -- Stang 2000) I think it's some kind of tool user's neurosis, tool addiction, a guy thing, remnant from a million years of trying to make fire-starting and bone-carving easier, or something. This might explain why I change careers every few years. In the midst of all this "high-tech" crap, which is actually pretty low tech if you read a lot of science or sci-fi, there's this overriding PRIMATE IMPERATIVE that seems clearer to me all the time. As I get older, I imagine that I'm getting more PRIMITIVE... actually just focusing more on the basics, I suppose. I actually CARE about this VEGETABLE GARDEN that we inherited, in the new back yard, for instance.
I saw an old, OLD man wandering around Burning Man last year, butt naked, curiously gazing around in wonderment, looking, I swear by Your God,* like a Primo-Anthropocus suddenly transported from Olduvai Gorge. It seemed to me like that guy had Slack, and I have been thinking, "I wouldn't mind being like that old guy when I get old, or rather like I imagine him to be." (Since he might really be a miserable drunk, for all I know.) Knowing the way my memory is slipping already, I probably won't have much choice either way.
* Bender, FUTURAMA.
*****
(Sunday, May 6)
Today, I sorted and stowwed my UNDERGROUND COMIC BOOK collection in its new special honored place! An ORGY of compulsive sorting and organizing! AHHHHHhhhh!
I also unpacked the SACRED SUBGENIUS SCULPTURES like Susie's XX-Day glass bowl, Legume's Arnold Palmer action figure, Byron's "OverMan in Slack," the Smilodon skull, the Australopithecus skull, the Gigantopithecus skull, the human skull, my grandpa's skull, and other knick knacks, and placed them ever so feng shui-ishly about the living room.
During the last 2 days and nights, I alternated between frenzied one-man moving-and-sorting sessions and exhaustion coma. I CAN'T STOP!!! I've been hauling boxes of books and tapes up to the "Librarea" and, with barely containable joy, ANALLY filling the shelves according to category, size, color, scent, etc! That room is practically "DONE". There was JUST enough space for all the BEST STUFF. This means I can now begin the Great List, the start-up of all Things to See, Say and Do, or at least, Things to Think and Know.
It's EMERGENTILE HEAVEN, filling all these shelves with all my STUFF!! And IMAGINING how I will someday once again PERUSE these various shunned tomes, LPs, films, antique comics, etc.
And we haven't even STARTED on the POSTERS, framed pics... not to mention outfitting the dungeon! I CAN'T WAIT!!
I got the Throne Studio almost all whupped into shape, though, and I'm COOKIN'! Literally! It's a converted attic, and it's HOT up here in Heaven. A small air conditioner window unit came with the place, and it has to run constantly, except when I turn on the mic for Hour of Slack recording. Heh... just like the old days. Except that my "work flow" space has improved with each move, and this particular set-up KICKS ASS! It snakes around from the tape decks and music keyboard to the mixer to the computer to the CD burner and printer, whence swag gets finished on the Swag Finishing table, which includes padded envelopes, scales and postage. There's a separate video dubbing and ancient-tape dubbing section as well, and even SPARE SPACE for a table which currently holds an olde Macintosh which I'm attempting to reawaken from its centuries long slumber.
And there's ROOM to MOVE AROUND in, even to stretch out my legs while working! INCREDIBLE after the submarine-like quarters of before. I still have to crawl under furniture to get to the backsides of some of these machines for patchcord-swapping purposes... but that's okay because I don't think the set-up will change.
JESUS!!! I must stop and do the Hour of Slack 784, which is late as hell, dupe it and mail it, and get a haircut! (Just some of the hairs, not all of them.) And get fitted for a tux! And do that Euclid Tavern show! We mailed out postcards to all $30 Members in Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia, and the western portions of NY and PA... 500 postcards in all. Did that on Saturday. EVERYTHING WE NEEDED WAS WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE!!!! God damn, I might never have to drive again once this move is done -- and the rest of the motorists of Earth should let loose a huge sigh of relief at THAT.