Don ‘t worry, that’s not a death metaphor. This time.

Instead, it refers to the fact that today is the very last day of our legal ownership (rentership?) of our good old, bad old, just plain old apartment at Francis and 1 Road, which we affectionately dubbed Nerdvana.

And to be honest, I am finding it hard to stir up any nostalgia about it. I am sure that, once I leave, I will eventually develop a sort of rose-colored, honeysuckle sentimentality about the place.

After all, that has happened for every single other place I have ever lived. When packing up, I came across a box that had been used to deliver my groceries way back when I shared a place with Eamon Smith, and there was our old address, 996 East 10th, alongside my name.

And that released a powerful cascade of nostalgia for that weird top half of a house I shared with Eamon. I wasn’t particularly happy (or unhappy) there, but the nostalgia remains.

Like I have said many, many times in this space, I struggle with the whole idea of nostalgia. The idea that things attain this nostalgic glow simply via the process of memory compression over time really bothers me. Why should I get this warm surge of feeling about an unremarkable period of my life? The emotion connected to the memories doesn’t match the content of them. It makes me feel like my intellectual integrity is subject to constant erosion that I can do nothing to prevent.

And yeah, I know that makes me sound like some kind of fucked up monster. I know that I have serious social issues and that I am not a healthy specimen of psychosocial adjustment. It takes a special kind of messed up to be unable to simply accept the warm glow of nostalgia as one of the nicer things about life on planet Earth.

But I can’t help it. I’m a poorly self-programmed robot. Warm on the outside, cold on the inside.

Anyhow, I can’t seem to feel any sentimentality about the place we are leaving. Perhaps it is simply too soon. Or perhaps I am just prejudiced against it right now because we have a shiny new apartment in a rad location and the old apartment is, quite frankly, positively filthy, and it is hard to feel nostalgia about a place so dirty and dusty that it made me physically ill the last time I was there.

In fact, to be honest, I don’t ever want to go back. I don’t want that filthy awful place, with all the dust in the air from all the packing and so on, to have even one more second of access to my precious lungs and fluids. I feel like the last time I was there, last Friday, cost me a week of health recovery.

But there is still a lot of stuff to move, and I would feel terrible if I did not do my part. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of my life. And I have already committed to the job of packing up the kitchen. So staying home is not an option.

And I know, intellectually, that I am seeing that apartment at its absolute worst right now. It was a fine place for years, before we had to go disrupt everything and stir up years worth of dust while also revealing all the grossness that had accumulated in little places like underneath or behind furniture.

But right now, I don’t care. Life inside that apartment is like living inside a vacuum bag, and I hate it there.

Still, we have had a lot of good times there. Times spent watching videos (including Felicity’s marvelous homegrown video CDs), hanging out, enjoying one another’s company, occasionally pausing the video parade in order to discuss something more thoroughly or just gab on what is on our minds.

Those times spent together are the best times of my life, and I will always cherish them. And make sure that the tradition lives on in our new place, despite the cozier confines.

Still, no matter how you slice it, I will be glad when this day is over and I can bid adieu to that place forever and ever. I am tired of being limited by the past and I am eager to stride into the future with all the energy and optimism I can muster, never looking back.

What has happened before in my life does not matter nearly as much as what happens next in my life.

Honestly, what I want most right now is to go to sleep. I had a very bad moment due to a very injudicious decision to drink some Diet Coke with my breakfast, which left me both tired and wired, and that is like my worst possible mental state that doesn’t involve a severe brain event.

It leaves me anxious and sleepy at the same time, and so I am too tense to sleep and yet too sleepy to be able to come up with a plan to escape my terrible mind hole, and so I get the worst of both states.

So, no drinking caffeinated beverages when I expect to be able to go back to sleep. Duh. Seems pretty obvious to me now, but that is hindsight talking.

The upshot of that misadventure, however, is that I am now very sleepy. I am thinking that taking a nap after I finish this blog entry is not so much an option as an inevitability. I am not really in the loop on that decision.

Well, no matter how this day shakes down, the next time I talk to you people, I will be free of Nerdvana and fully committed to our new place, Fanhattan.

Before that, though, I am going to go lapse into a coma for a bit.

Thank you so much for reading me. I will talk to all of you nice people tomorrow.

FINALLY, after all these weeks, I have the Internet on my main computer again.

And it feels good. Oh, how I have missed you, Internet in its rightful place. Sure, using the shared living room computer got the job done, but like Dorothy said, there’s no place like home.

There is still the little matter that the living room computer, in its fresh place in our new bedroom, is sans Internet and down one power cable for its monitor (I honestly don’t know where that damned thing went), but still, baby steps.

As promised, I will now step up the ambition levels of my videos. This little period of pure uncut talking heads stuff made for a nice break and a suitable transition period between doing no videos and doing some, but now that I got the Internet on the same computer as my video editor, I no longer have any excuse not to try to get back to doing the kinds of things that I was doing way way back last October before I made the disastrous decision to drop the video making while I wrote that year’s novel.

Mistakes were made. Lessons were learned. Now is not the time to blame game.

Instead, let’s play the Name Game!

A great game that everyone loves except my friends Mitch and Chuck.

So yes, I am positively giddy to the point of delirium about having the Internet back on this computer. Sometimes you just don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

(WARNING : If anyone links to one of the bajillion covers of Big Yellow Taxi now, I will be forced to hunt them down like an escaped fugitive and pop a cap in their ass. I swear, it’s worse than Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, of which there is only one fully acceptable cover. )

(That was it. Love you, Rufus! Maritimes boy made good. )

Man, I am extra wacky today.

As I promised, I continued to blog and make vids while I was away from you all. I missed one day, which was the Big Moving Day last Tuesday, and so it was total chaos and I had barely a chance to draw a breath, let alone concentrate on things like blogs and videos and so forth.

But otherwise, I did not fail in my duty to keep producing content that would eventually add value to the world. They say that there are many ways to be “productive” that do not involve being employed, and I really want to believe that. I certainly would not tell another person in my position that they were a worthless drain on society.

But that is still how I feel sometimes. It would do me major geographical shifts of good to have some sort of job, even if it’s just working the till at a local gas station or the like.

And experience aside, I am qualified for such a job. I am courteous, polite, honest, dependable, mature, reliable, and I genuinely enjoy customer service.

Honestly, the only strike against me is that I am not sure how long I can stay on my feet at a stretch. But I would probably be okay if I could go for a wander around the store now and then to move my feet and take care of little tasks.

Moving your feet is not as good as resting them, but it helps. The main problem with standing for a long time when you are a fat dude is that blood pools in your feet, making them swollen and sore.

Walking gets the blood moving again. Again, not a total solution, but if the job for some insane reason forbade sitting, it would get the job done.

I get the feeling that the breaks other people used for coffee or smokes, I would use for sitting. To me, they would be Sit Breaks, or maybe Foot Breaks.

So who knows, there might be a job like that around here somewhere. I would much rather work for a small business than a big corporation. Sure, small businesses can be as insane, cruel, corrupt, and fucked up as big businesses, but at least you know who your are dealing with. You have some idea of what it actually going on.

And you are not being asked to dissolve your identity into some homogenizing corporate whole either. That is not an idea of which I am personally fond. I like to have full control of the identities I assume, and that is a lot easier with a small business. You aren’t Worker Drone #1273556.

You’re Bob the Cashier. Or in my case, Mike.

And honestly, I just like small business more. Small businesses practice genuine, honest capitalism. They can’t make a profit by manipulating their own stock or ripping off their employees’ retirement funds or any other financial skulduggery.

They only make money by selling goods or services to the public. That’s exactly how capitalism is supposed to work. And inasmuch as a society allows for entities to reap the benefits of capitalism without providing the benefits of capitalism to the community, that society is not capitalist.

It is, at best, an oligarchy. Remember that, folks. All that talk about the wonders of the free market and how it can provide everything we need is built on a presupposition that the operators within the system can only become rich by providing an honest, genuinely benefit to society.

But the very nature of the profit motive is to look for shortcuts that maximize profits, and in order for the free market to compensate for all the possible dirty, anti-capitalist tricks in the world, we the consumers would have to have nearly perfect knowledge of what businesses are doing to us.

And that, of course, is impossible on the face of it, let alone against the self-interest of the very people such knowledge is supposed to police.

Man, it feels good to vent my political thoughts again. I am so glad to be over that hump.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.