It Matches the Curtains

This is likely going to be a shorter post as my attention is being pulled in several different directions at once today. I'm typing this from my bedroom, which is looking like a temple to postmodern minimalism. It's like Marie Kondo ran through here before collapsing into a gravity singularity that sucked in all my stuff. But not really because all my stuff has just teleported downstairs, which by inverse contrast, now looks like the least interesting episode of Hoarders ever. Do I have eleven never-opened Magic Bullet mini-blenders stacked on top of every copy of the Long Beach Press-Telegram from 1985 through 1991? I do not. What I have are haphazard piles of stuff arranged in a way that accurately conveys the annoyance with which the work was done.

I guess the moral of the story is: never buy new carpet. I can be glad it's only covering half the house. We've basically moved out of the upstairs bit and crammed our entire living situation into the lower half, the part that feels a lot more now like it's closer to the center of the earth. You can really feel the gravity down there now.

I've lived in this house now for a bit over 14 years. Prior to this my longest record for living in one place had been three years, in the house we sold in order to buy this one. Probably not coincidentally, these were also the first houses I've ever lived in that were owned by the occupants, not rented. So I have no idea how to be a homeowner. I'm used to the constant threat of chaos and disruption every six to eight months that I grew up with, so I have zero instincts to "improve" anything. Every cell in my body screams to not move too much around or upset anything as it is and MY GOD JUST HANG ON so no invisible hand shows up and scoops us all off onto the path of housing insecurity.

The day we moved in (again, this is over 14 years ago), when we saw it with all the previous owner's furniture out, we noticed the carpet for the first time. My then-wife and I said "yeuch, god, let's change that as soon as possible." Two days later we were paying to repair a busted copper water pipe under the slab in the living room. Every other thing in the world since then, up to and including divorce from said wife and transfer of responsibility for this heap into my average-sized hands, has always seemed more important than the dumb carpet, especially when you cover most of it up with beds and a moving, yet permanent, layer of Legos and Transformers.

But I finally ran out of other shit to spend money on, so here I am, doing the thing that is the most disruptive from a home improvement standpoint. But don't worry, I'm hanging in. No panic attacks. Well, no more than usual. As long as the piles of things stacked together downstairs don't interact in some sort of cascade failure of nuclear containment, rendering all of us either radioactive or sublimated to steam, we should be fine. I'm trying to be as rational about it all as possible.