Additional information about this shoe has been downgraded to the postscript.
Dear diary,
I write the following entry on the day that we plan to use to clean our apartment for the last time ever. The day has not yet begun – as usual, I awoke far earlier than the lazy sun of god and am writing in my notebook just to expend my excess anxiety.
I once saw, framed in the office of a lawyer, a motivational poster that said THINK POSITIVE. Why can’t I think positive? I’m always sure that everything’ll go wrong. I fear that, in the process of tidying up, we’ll knock something out of place and ruin the world, and goodness and mercy will come to a halt.
We’re planning on staying at my mother’s house tonight. My mom went on a bus trip to New York City with a few of her girlyfriends, and she told me that we (my sweetheart and I) can use her (my mom’s) house if it helps with our move. So, once we clean our spot (our abode, that is; not our body’s comely part), it would be nice to leave it all untouched, so that it stays clean, instead of utilizing the sinks & stove, etc., and then having to repeatedly re-clean them until the entire world gets ruined, and goodness and mercy come to a halt.
So the problem is that my sister lives with my mom, and my sister is not accompanying my mom on her trip; so it’s like the movie Mulholland Drive (2001), when the newcomer Betty (that’s us) is surprised to find a mysterious amnesiac (my sister) occupying what was supposed to be the empty home of her vacationing aunt (our mom), except that my sweetheart & I (the chipper, talented Betty) fully expect to inconvenience my sister (the “woman in trouble”), and my sister knows that we’re coming. Plus my mom’s name is Rita. But her last name aint Hayworth. (In the film, the mysterious woman, whom the aforementioned Betty is startled to encounter, assumes my mother’s name, after seeing a poster for the 1946 film Gilda, the lead role of which is played by Rita Hayworth.)
So we’ll stay at my mom’s tonight, and then the next morning we’re scheduled to rent a moving truck. We’ll haul all the big furniture—the stuff that wouldn’t fit in our hybrid wheelbarrow—out of the apartment, and, once the place is bare, we’ll park the truck at my mom’s and stay in the guest room one last night. So two nights total we’ll be staying at my mother’s. What this means for us is the convenience of not having to rent a ratty motel. What it means for my sister is the loss of two precious evenings alone with her beau. For I can tell that she had planned, before hearing that my sweetheart and I will be staying at her house, to use this momless week (mom’s vacation ends Friday) to let her hair down. And by “let her hair down” I mean that Susan (my dear, dear sister) had planned on taking advantage of this absence of authority to do activities that she’d normally never do – things that mom would not approve of – things specifically involving her beau. Now, instead of swinging from the chandelier while engaging in loud & savage routine-work like divinities, she & her beau will have to settle for discreet & quiet routine-work in a private bedroom like two chipmunks.
& yes, by routine-work, I mean intercourse: premarital and sexual.
But I say that if unrestricted fornication is THAT important to you, then you should buy your own darn house, like my sweetheart and I are trying to do: don’t live with your mom. Moms are pretty much categorically against facilitating their own daughter’s Bacchanalia.
Therefore, after we park the moving truck at the halfway house, we’ll do a walk-thru of our new abode. Which should take about an hour. And, during that same hour, our intended buyer will be doing a walk-thru of OUR OWN current-yet-soon-to-be-former apartment.
In summary, both walk-thrus are scheduled for seventeen hundred o’clock (5:00 p.m. Pacific Time): the one for the glorious apartment that we’re selling, as well as the one for the squalid hovel that we’re buying.
Don’t be worried about your walk-thrus. A walk-thru is not a test of your soul’s mettle. It’s not an Ultimate Judgment, where the sheep get separated from their goat brethren, and the latter are roasted in Hell and then feasted upon by angels, which is to say, devils, while the saved ones get corralled into a four-panel galvanized steel pen and told that it’s Heaven. (53 cubic parasangs; $292 USD.) No, a walk-thru is just a walk-thru. You just walk thru the house – who cares that you’re planning on occupying it. The idea is to make sure the place looks roughly the same as it did when you made your original purchase offer. For a month has passed, and who knows what the occupants have done! – those domains’ current masters who are soon to be its ex-owners might’ve trashed the natural environment for the sake of profit. Or simply out of spite. Or they might desire to send a message to the marketplace, like a mobsters’ warning: “This is what I think of your buying & selling. Beware my wrath.”
Will ye come & stand before me in this house of mine & say: We are delivered to do all these abominations! Is this house of mine become a den of robbers? (Jeremiah 7:11)
I’m just trying to say that I’m nervous about the potential results of the walk-thrus. Since I believe everything that CAN fail WILL fail, I assume both events will prove incommensurate misunderstandings:
I fear that our buyer will walk thru the apartment and cry: “What is this? I might as well have purchased one of those inflatable bouncy castles that they install at children’s parties; this place is the worst – I’ll now go hang myself from its rafters.”
Meanwhile my sweetheart and I will walk thru the shack that we’re coveting, and we’ll find that the seller has spray-painted large-font cusswords on all the walls & the floor, in bright pink & neon green. That’d be nice. I like those colors. They remind me of the 1980’s. I hereby therefore commemorate this finding with a MORAL: Super-fashion, even when unfashionable, is never out-of-fashion.
And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers. And he said unto them, “It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.” (Matthew 21:12)
Well, you know the rule: As soon as I quote the Bible, I must quit. And I’ve quoted it twice now, so I’m doubly due to take my leave. Quoting the King James Bible is exactly like touching a stripper. I loathe strip clubs and I’ve never taken a golf cart to go sightseeing past one, but I’ve been told by all the former presidents that there’s an unspoken agreement between all the sensual congresspeople within: You can LOOK at but never TOUCH the merchandise. So if the garden hose slithers out of the shed on its own accord and impersonates a serpent by offering you some freshly picked fruit, never accept it. Just gawk. For, the instant you reach forth your arm & take & eat the body & blood of the fallen messiah, all the armed security guards at the club will haul you off and throw you into the parking lot, where you will rot for the rest of your life. But at least you have vodka.
And when the man saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, he took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto his sweetheart with him; and she did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they became as God, encompassing not only good but evil. Then they put forth their hands and took also of the tree of life, which the scientists labeled JESUS; and they ate that, too, and happily lived forever after. Therefore the LORD God expelled these latter saints from his dismal strip club, which featured a flaming sword on its marquee, and he instructed his security staff to relocate these offenders to the garden of Eden, in Xanadu; because, thereabouts, a giant ape known as King Khan had built a stately pleasure-dome, situated between the lodges of Woodgate, near a zone christened In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida – not to be confused with La Dolce Vita (1960) or Emerson’s translation of Vita Nuova (1295) – where Alph, the sacred river, ran, thru caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. (Genesis 3:6)
P.S.
Below is a shoe that had an interesting life. First, it was envisioned by its creator; then it was built by a shoemaker; then photographed by a photographer; then added to an ad; & at long last it was cut with shears by Yours Truly. (I do not say that it was then photo’d again when re-published on this blog, because I never even scanned my own careless cutout; I just taped the thing to the screen – you can peel it off and caress and smell its paper, if you like.)
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