Karl Klockars

I’ve finally hit upon one of the major reasons I’m getting married. I was forced out the door yesterday with the phrase “Go out to the suburbs, drink beer and crash with your friends. Go!” ringing in my ears. When you find a woman who practically kicks you out of your own house to get drunk and eat buffalo wings with your idiot friends, you know you’re not far away from saying “How many carats?”

Now, of course I had a vehicle to pick up from the shop, and folks to stop in at, but I was just going to shuffle myself home after that, wage war on the parking situation around here, and then lay around, warm and sober, helping The Girl get to bed with tea and the evening reading of magazines. The other night I vocalized the Rolling Stone article about Nick Lachey. I didn’t do character voices, tho–although in retrospect it would be good practice to try to sound like a vapid blonde linebacker-jawed Texan. I wonder if I can put that on a resume.

But no–”You are going to go to your friends house and drink beer and listen to rock and roll and stay up late and probably eat things that are terrible for you.” Yes, ma’am. This is the kind of marital bliss a guy could get used to. Here I am trying to move on with my life and eat oatmeal and drive sensible cars. Maybe she’s an enabler. Hm.

And so I did. We listened to Motorhead songs and smoked cigarettes and watched baseball, and I was pretty sure the whole time that it was one of the last nights that it’s ever going to happen. And I wasn’t really busted up about it. See, the place where all this debauchery takes place is on the last legs of the lease we signed. In about 2 weeks, it’ll be all she wrote and then god only knows where my two friends are going to drag their boxes of Car Crafts, their plastic deep fryer that makes the house smell like eggroll, and where they’re going to put the cars that don’t move.

And so it was kind of goobye to the ‘burbs. I still have some crap stored there, boxes of paperwork and pictures, a bigass neon sign “liberated” from former employers, and some other jazz like that. I’ll have to get that as soon as the man kicks them out on their asses, but other than that I don’t know if I’ll ever see the inside of the place I hung my hat for nigh-on three years. Where I recuperated after a miserable living situation, where I hated life and where I suffered through jobs and bills and boredom–we called it the house of a thousand yawns.

So why was I nostalgic last night? What the hell is nostalgia for, anyways? Especially when the vast majority of the time there was either medicated, miserable, or mimpaired. I guess the alliteration didn’t work, but it was worth a shot, I suppose. Anyways. I sat around and turned on my neon and put myself back in a place that was really bad–and wondered why the hell I was doing it.

I guess just to figure out where we’ve been and put up little signposts along the way. This Way to Old Pictures, Broken Promises, and Entertaining Music. Hopefully “Bad Times” on that post is 2500 kilometers away. (That’s about as sappy as I get–quick, call Hallmark.) Maybe so we can look at now and figure out if we’re on the right track. Of the three of us, one is on his way back to school, the second might not do anything at all with life, and the third (me, apparently) is getting things where he’d like to be, maybe.

So I’m not going to cry when we haul the bar out of the garage. Probably. I’m not going to get upset when someone takes my Foreman grill that I left behind, and I don’t think it’ll be that big a deal when everyone gets the boot. It’ll just be another close of another chapter, and that’s something I’m starting to get used to. I do slightly miss living around the corner from a drive-in, but I only went four or five times anyways. Things go in shifts, as they do, and this shift has started something completely different. And it’s exciting.

I noticed the start of lines on my face, testament to a life lived hard and not quite put away wet, but getting there. I’ve been easing off and hopefully I won’t look like Edward James Olmoss when I’m 35, but if I do I suppose I’ll be glad I never got tattooed. Life’s hard enough on the skin and I’m sure not helping, but there’s no reason to have to pay for it too. So I’ll sit around and pet the cat. And make some tea. And be glad things are 164 degrees from where I started off a year ago. Not a complete turnaround but close enough to realize it, and the other 16 degrees are the things I hung on to. Love them 16 degrees.