Good night and have a pleasant tomorrow

This is pretty freaky, this starting over a whole new life. Leaving all my stuff—both physical and metaphorical—behind, including my beloved couch (above), dragged unceremoniously on to the front lawn for the trash people to come pick up. To add insult to injury, we had to pay to have it taken away.

Well, I won’t forget you so easily, my Monkey Wards Clearance Sale couch. We had a lot of good times together. Wink broke one of your footrests early on by hurling himself onto my lap from across the room in a charismatic stupor. I first wooed The Missus on you. You were home to dogs both beloved and ultimately unsafe at any speed.

Mostly you were the couch that The Boy grew up sandwiched next to me on, with my arm around his shoulder for the last almost five years.

And joining you in ignominy in the front yard on moving day was my office’s ugly pale-pink easy chair from where Johnny Cash and I also raised an infant Man Cub.

Then there were the boxes of newspapers I have produced over the years that I just couldn’t justify taking with me again. After culling a few selected issues, I threw 20-some years of my print output in boxes on the couch in the front yard.

I think I don’t remember being so weirded out after my last major, hundreds of miles away move, but I think that was because the moving ordeal took place on a Friday or Saturday and the following Tuesday was 9/11. That really superseded any melancholy navel-gazing for the next few months, and by then the new town had become the familiar routine.

So I’m going off the air for a little while now. The movers swear they’ll be at the new place at 8 a.m. tomorrow and the internet guy isn’t scheduled to come till Monday and that’s if everything goes exactly right, and nothing ever goes exactly right.

I hope that soon I’ll find more universal topics to write about, but right now it’s all about The Move and exercising rigid emotional compartmentalization.

Ooh, speaking of which, Inception, opening this weekend, is a movie that demands to be seen more than once. Bow down to its awesome coolness and mind-fuckery and if you can, see it on an IMAX screen. Even Leo DiCaprio not only doesn’t wreck it by his mere presence—ala Aviator—he’s not even an annoyance. Obviously writer/director Christopher Nolan is setting out to make himself this generation’s Christopher Nolan—imagine Alfred Hitchcock meets Michael Bay by way of Stanley Kubrick—and so far his film résumé is impeccable and only growing more distinguished with each movie he does. (On a related note, if you haven’t checked out Nolan’s  The Prestige on DVD, do it now!)

Okay. It’s tired, I’m late and tomorrow is going to suck rump, so hello Boise and goodbye Forum for a while. We’ll catch you on the other side.