Moving; or, sometimes experiences can be likened to having Satan's sulphurous hoof planted swiftly and firmly into your man-bits.

Part One: The Utter Abandonment of the Greenwood Boy-Lair.

"Relax", said the nightman, "we are programmed to receive. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave."
- The Eagles, "Hotel California"

Holy shet, I just quoted The Eagles. Somewhere a moth-winged wood sprite has drawn its last, guttering breath, paying the ultimate price for my malfeasance. This is because, as everyone clearly knows, each time an Eagles song is played or quoted, something pure and innocent just stops living.

The decision to leave the Boy-Lair, aka The Cave, for parts newer and, perchance, less dank, was relatively easy to make, and involved a thirty-second conversation:

Me: So, now that you don't work at motherfecking insensate evil Onner-cay Airie-pray, what say you to moving to Bloomington, as we both are tied academically to it? Oh, and I work there, too. Like, every day. Also, this house is the size of a child's shoebox and reminds me of living in a coffin. A coffin full of mold and pet fur. A coffin full of mold and pet fur at a four-way stop a block and a half from a fire station.

Keith: OK.

We began searching Bloomington for rental houses, and nearly instantly we ascertained that our major requirements for a home would eliminate a vast number of possibilities in the vicinity of Indiana University. They were:

1) The landlord should not be willing to accept crack as a rent payment.

2) There should not, when one has windows open, come the sound of inebriated fratboys yelling at chaste young maidens in passing cars to "show [them] [their] tits."

3) The property owner should not be adverse to allowing two feral beasts of the earth inhabit said property, as - while it is difficult to believe - we've become attached to the gazelle and the hellcat. The gazelle, therefore, would also require a fenced yard in which he could extrude his hot loaves untethered to a human hand.

4) The rent had to be less than $800.

After two months of searching - and two piteous near-misses - we'd resigned ourselves to our collective fate (lingering death by mold-spore and encroaching suburban blight) when Keith began to explore the option of living in - *gasp!*- a Bloomington-adjacent community. We settled on the idea of Nashville, Indiana, population 950, which is a nearby self-proclaimed "art community." What "art community" means in the parlance of my people is "ass-ton of little stores wherein one can procure, say, handblown glass unicorn Christmas ornaments in July."

In many ways, Nashville reminds me of many communities in the Mothership - heavily touristed at certain times of year for primarily natural attractions, blessed with an abundance of unique artisans and their handiwork, and amply provided with spittoons and bootscrapers in front of the local Kwik-E-Mart. When the autumnal tourists and their fecking evil Harley donor-cycles have departed, they will leave behind a community that has only three chain restaurants, two stoplights and one supermarket. Hell, there isn't even a CHINESE place there, which absolutely atomizes my medulla to contemplate, for I imagine that there is, as we speak, probably a decent little Cantonese noodle joint opening up on Venus.

On the plus side, though, Nashville feels like a community. It remains to be seen whether or not this will be, given the population size, awesome or not. I can easily imagine a time coming where the the gas station clerk will know which fatty breakfast pastry I'll select before I do; also as imaginable, lively discussions about what the two freaks living out on Tuckaway Ridge are up to.

Villager 1: Did you see that ghastly Blair Witch-esque "folk art" wicker star they've festooned their house with? Bitch, please.
Villager 2: Oh, snap!
Villager 1: And wasn't the smaller one wearing a little Cornish driving cap yesterday? Cute, yes, but wow.
Villager 2: Yeah, and the big one apparently *hushes slightly* has to drink Metamucil. No, I ain't playin'!

After quite a bit of jockeying on Keith's part, we found a place that was a) in our price range, b) in a quiet, neighborly and partly wooded neighborhood and c) entirely precious. Two bedrooms, two baths (two baths, I tell you, TWO BATHS), galley kitchen, living room/dining room, full back porch looking out into a copse of trees and, perhaps best part of all, a rather large former art studio that will become, in the next weeks, The Book-Ridden Sanctuary Where Pets Are Forbidden.

But, as one is surely aware, moving comes with a terrible price. That price is "twenty bucks for twelve nearly-expired Vicodin you bought from a relative who underwent surgery a while ago."

Part Two: The Actual Moving Day, or, How Next Time I Will Make Sure I Am Sedated, Preferably With Russian Horse Tranquilizers.

I stood in our new, two car garage peering intently into a smallish room which, I was told, would be where our dryer was to hold court. Never you mind, good folks, that the garage does not connect to the house with an internal door, meaning that laundry would have to be taken outside to be dried in the garage; instead, I was captivated by childlike, red crayon graffiti that someone had scrawled onto the wooden walls of the room. "666", they said, and "All Hell's Braeking [sic] Loose", and "Lord Satian [sic] Possesses All Who Enter Here."

Awesome, I thought. Well, at least I have a vial of Pope-blessed holy water - not even making this up - which I will use to consecrate our dryer room. Added to the charm of the nearly nude, nubile young lass on a race-car poster that the previous tenant "donated" to us and which hung drunkenly over one of the garage walls, it was an atmosphere of nearly incessant merriment.

The movers showed up exactly on time in a truck that could have been used to carry, oh, Lithuania. We'd decided to use movers because a) it cost the same to hire them as to rent a UHaul for the distance we'd be covering and b) I fecking hate moving things. As they disembarked from the vehicle, the three mover-gents came toward us and asked where they could begin. One of them was a twentysomething with teeth brown as November mudpuddle; the black coffee in his dingy mitts and Marlboro jutting forth from the left one clarified this for us. The second mover-gent was in his late fortys with a long gray ponytail; he was thin like a reed and my mind's ear could hear his spine splintering into gory shards under the weight of my book collection. The last was a bald, strapping lad who had two improbable piercings, both of the "barbell" variety: one transversed the bridge of his nose, between his eyes, and the other sat firmly underneath his Adam's apple on his neck. As my bowels loosened thinking about how much pain either one of those would have brought to Good-Sir Number Three, we showed them into the house where all of our sundry shet held court. Within an hour and a half, our entire house was in a truck and bound for Brown County and the dozing hamlet of Nashville. Two hours later, they were pulling away from the new Man-Lair, having quickly and professionally brought our home to us on - and I can't stress this enough - ONE TRUCK.

Well, most of our home.

You see, we'd not packed up most of our kitchen. Or our bathroom. Or some of our garage.

And we still needed to, oh, I dunno, clean.

By 2 AM that morning, we were - for the most part - done. Along the way, the part of me that ever liked any aspect the Greenwood Boy-Cave died, was interred and began to moistly reek in the ground. If we never see that place again, it will be too soon.

But then I remembered the two year's worth of holidays we spent there. The anniversaries, the birthdays, the lazy Sundays, my recuperation from appendectomy surgery. A part of that place will be in us - in that first place where "you and I" became "us" - forever. And a part of us will remain there, too.

Well, if by "part of us" I mean "all of those dead nurses stacked like cordwood in the crawlspace", then yeah.

Until later (and internet connectivity is regained), I remain,

Domonic (nevermovingwithoutburlymovingdudeseveragain) Potorti