My moving nightmare has just about concluded -- tonight Jon, Charles and I will be cleaning our old house. After that, it's just a question of getting the DSL set up here, figuring out the parking situation, and a prolonged court battle with our previous landlady (probably). Not too bad, overall.

Moving wasn't fun, but at least it was kind of enlightening. My knowledge of the junkie worldview is pretty well limited to Requiem for a Dream (and, you know, rock & roll), but I think I got a little more insight during the moving process: the weekend was divided between painful, disorienting encounters with reality and periods of blessed relief facilitated by foreign substances. Of course, in my decidedly non-hardcore case, those foreign substances were a lot of Gatorade and a little beer.

But really, I was in bad shape without them. Things sort of came to a head when I was trying to reassemble the bed. This is an operation that involves three pieces and two bolts. It's not like I was building a nuclear-powered robot or something. Teresa eventually saved me from a mechanical problem that I probably can't explain clearly without handwaving and maybe a whiteboard, but I think this made-up conversation captures the flavor:

TOM: Why is this cup spilling so much?
TERESA: You're holding it upside down. Also, that's your shoe.

It wasn't long after this that it became very clear that I ought to go to bed. Somewhere between the bathroom and the bedroom I could feel a knob in my brain click from "human getting out of the shower" to "crazed, half-dead water buffalo crashing through the underbrush", but it worked out okay as apparently dying water buffaloes are perfectly capable of running into things and collapsing, which is all I really had to do anyway.

Today I'm much better, although still pretty tired, and my head feels like it's packed with cotton. Hopefully that's from the lack of AM coffee -- but I did feel frighteningly more lucid after the day's first Gatorade.