Oversaturation

Once a long long time ago when my only contact with blogs was my friends' blogs, I would sit there at work and be like, why don't they post more often? What the hell else are they doing that's so exciting and important that they can't post? And if they're doing something so exciting and important why don't they write about it? And here it is, and I haven't posted anything for like months, which is really the beauty of the co-written blog, because Noko Marie is putting up interesting things in the meantime. So I don't feel that bad, but I do feel a little bit bad.

Here's the deal, which you all already know, but still. I'm moving some place new. This hasn't kept me from posting because so much work is involved, although this weekend is the dreaded weekend of packing and it will suck. Still, moving, as I always forget in the meantime, although it leaves you with a series of small and annoying tasks to complete, is not all that physically complicated, especially for me right now where I am staying in a Best Western.

There is a huge psychological unease component and, separate but related, there is the overwhelming adjustment to a new place. For me this takes the form of everything being at least momentarily, gripping and important. When you've lived some place for a while, certain things are foreground, and others are background. There are the places you go and the places you don't really go, and every now and then you're like, "Oh, I should check out x." X can be a neighborhood or a museum or a cute little store or something entirely different. But you check X out and you fit X into a pre-existing framework in your mind, and that is that. Right now, though, in Bakersfield, which is the place to which I am moving, there is no foreground and no background. Every convenience store, every bar, all requires some kind of absorption. A place has to be made for it in my head.

Anyway, that's where all my mental energy is going. That, and motel room cable, which has been a very rewarding experience.

Also the other day a train roared through town, carrying tanks on it. Tank after tank after tank. Not tanks of gas, but Army tanks. That was a little scary.