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.