Wherein I survey my surroundings and pronounce them good

I like it here. I realize it's early yet, and that the summer's oppressive heat has not yet set in, and the rumored clouds of poo-stank from the nearby Cowschwitz (a friend's witty term for the feedlots surrounding the town) have not yet smothered the town in stench, but I'm willing to go on record right now with a positive endorsement of Central California.

For one thing, there are roses. Roses here are so beautiful they look fake. They're like drag queens, these roses-- they're blatantly manly in their size and heft, they come in big gaudy, vibrant colors, and they expel rose-smell with the force of someone belting out a show tune. The other flowers, which explode from the parched ground in obnoxious defiance of common sense, can barely keep up. Once before when I visited California and spent a day in Oakland, I decided that the state motto should be "Flowers for no fucking reason," since irises and giant calla lilies leapt forth from even the humblest of street corners and from in between grease dumpsters behind restaurants. I stand by that early statement, too.

But before we get too far in the California love fest, how about a few words on the trip out? It was long and bizarre. I learned that Honda does not have long-torso-ed white girls in mind when it designs seat for the Accord. I also relearned a truism about Texas weather-- the one about "if you don't like the weather, wait an hour and it'll change"? That one echoed back to me about five hours into a 13-hour trip to El Paso when the cold rain turned to sleet, then to ice, and then to snow. I had on a T-shirt and jeans and flip-flops, and suddenly I was slowing from 85 to 35 and fighting to control the car. For another 7 hours. Great scabs of ice formed over my hood and began crusting up the margins of the windshield, and then I stumbled upon easily the worst way to make an apple slush: throw three 18-wheelers, one of whom is carrying a giant load of apples, together, mix with one SUV and one pick-up, and tumble everything together across both lanes of I-10.

Finally, around 10 miles east of El Paso, the storm broke and the early evening sun came out. The iPod was on random and tossed up Jet's "Timothy," which somehow fit perfectly with the dark contrast on either side of the emerging mountains. All the ice encasing the car lit up, melted slowly, and fell away. Giant gray chunks fell from the undersides of the 18-wheelers I'd been passing, and who had in turn been passing me ever since eastern Arizona, and then as the light faded, I-10 did a few lazy shakes before unfolding El Paso and Jaurez, Mexico in the valley below, all lit up beneath a fine haze of dust and dusk.

Day One clocked in at 12 hours for me and 13.5 for Pants and DD (one of our single buddies also transferring to Central California), who were both hauling trailers.

Day Two was much the same, except without the ice. I decided on Day Two that I would get out of the car and stretch at regular intervals, and the trucker Meccas seemed to be a reasonable place to do this. At a truck stop in Las Cruces, New Mexico I met a woman in the bathroom doing a dead-on creepy imitation of Charlize Theron's public bathroom bathing ritual in "Monster," complete with the hair sprayed mullet wings fluffed by the hand dryer. She was muttering to herself about someone's "damned fancy fuckin' floors."

On Day Two I listened to two audio books, each being the sole title on offer in their respective truck stops that was neither romance nor war fiction: The Silence of the Lambs (better than the movie, amazingly) and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I especially recommend the latter on CD because Anthony Heald (creepy Dr. Chilton from The Silence of the Lambs, coincidentally) reads it, and he does a beautiful deep south accent that isn't campy. Plus the story includes a witch doctor and a drag queen.

Day Three opened on a great note-- a massive wind farm in Palm Springs! It was surreal to see so much movement over such a great distance, and on such dramatic and varied terrain. It was like seeing wind, and as we wound through the valley headed north, I couldn't help but feel hopeful. Here, at least, was evidence of people trying. Day Three was also noteworthy for the wide variety of crops we passed. No longer just cotton and grain sorghum-- we saw Asian pear orchards, cherry orchards, strawberry and tomato fields, grape vineyards (mostly for raisins, I think), pistachio and walnut orchards, and some other weird crops I wasn't sure of. We also followed a small two-lane highway into some desert mountains and found the place entirely populated by Chinese real estate agents.

Finally, though, we reached our new town and immediately set about securing a place to live in the business hours remaining. We had our eye on a little house that looked nice on the internet (by which I mean one exterior shot, and then whatever the Google Earth satellites could pick up--nice roof!), but had a change of heart after seeing another place whose interior held one of my housing Holy Grails: wood floors. Certainly the place had charm beyond that, but my decision was made once I pictured myself sliding around in sock feet.

We signed a rental agreement in the ten minutes before the real estate office closed, and were on our way home with a celebratory six-pack when Pants asked, "Do you remember the refrigerator in that place?" "Not really," I answered, "Do you?" "No. And I think that's because it didn't have one." What followed was a long, two-part chorus of variations on "fuck" during which the two voices had to instate a brief period of separation in order to face down the mounting panic which comes with writing another fat check. Which is exactly what we did the very next day.

Skip ahead one week, during which Pants and I sleep on the floor under damp bath towels (our furniture arrives tomorrow, fully 8 days after us) and then on a $20 air mattress under blankets borrowed from a far more organized bachelor, and you end up here, with me, in my empty house, blogging from the floor after annihilating a Panda Express meal, and pretty well satisfied with my life.

Recent random high points:

*two friends from Berkeley came to visit and brought me excellent conversation and delicious bread

*I got locked out of the house last night, barefoot but carrying my cell phone, and after ascertaining that the single locksmith in town was on vacation, this English major with no criminal record broke in with alarming quickness and ease. I know I should be a bit more upset about this (my security is this flimsy?), but in truth I'm rather proud of myself.

*I found a small herd of buffalo today! Tatanka! In a teeny field, really no larger than my parents' backyard, about five miles from town, roughly fifteen buffaloes lounge in their massive sweater vests in the evening twilight.

*My mom's coming out Wednesday night (high point enough, that) and we're going to Xanadu! No shit-- San Simeon, the Hearst Castle. I'm actually going to get to goggle at boundless hubris. I am excited beyond all reason.

Scorched Earth

One of my favorite things to do when we move is throw things away. Half empty jars of sauerkraut, holey underwear, unread magazines, molten candle stumps-- all of it, out, out, out! It's a dizzying high for me, a cleansing euphoria. I like to think of the period before the move as a time in which I have to streamline my orbit of stuff, to become as light and aerodynamic as possible so that when I launch into this new situation, there are no fusty old pieces of crap weighing me down.

Pants has a different philosophy, and my recent Kristallnacht on the junk recesses in our house threw him into a panic. It's the beginning of the end!, some dark corner of his mind shouted, and since then he's taken to asking me questions like this when we're lying in bed on the verge of sleep:

"You know that plastic piece that fell off my Storm Trooper model last year?"

"What? No."

"It's gray. That little gray plastic piece. I had it in a pile of buttons and stuff in the spare bedroom. Do you know what happened to it?"

"No." (Half truth-- the whole truth would go, "No, but I'll bet if I came across some random little piece of gray plastic I would have tossed it without a second thought, especially if it was in a pile of buttons.")

The lights go on, and as I lie there groaning and flailing for a pillow to cover my face, he disappears to paw through boxes in the spare bedroom until half an hour later, equally triumphant and guilty, he emerges-- "Found it!"

Great.

Pants and I are at opposite ends of the junk spectrum. He was raised by parents who were themselves raised by survivors of the Great Depression in the Dust Bowl. Echoes of hardship and frugality are pronounced, even the subjects of family jokes and lore, in his parents' (quite comfortable) home. If at any point, the U.S. were the target of nuclear attack, the Pants family homestead would supply and protect its entire neighborhood, and could even set up and rule a bartering system based on canned goods and childhood relics.

Pants's definition of junk, in fact, is quite narrow and applies mostly to anything used exclusively for decorative purposes. Anything else can be saved, repaired, scavenged for parts, or sold on EBay for a ridiculous profit.

Far in the distance, at the vanishing point of the spectrum, is where my definition lives. Junk to me is anything old and easily replaceable, anything unused a year after its purchase date, anything I'm sick of looking at, anything someone else would make better use of.

At a very early age, I learned that anything too old, too small, or too unappreciated was far better off in a giant black plastic bag bound for Goodwill. My mom (Hi, Mom! Honestly, I'm not saying you scarred me!) supervised regular purges of my bedroom-- clothes, books, toys, stuffed animals (whom I fully believed to be sentient and vying constantly for my love, weeping their button eyes out when I chose to sleep with a different one), were all held up mercilessly and robotically to the question, "Keep or give away? Keep or give away? Keeporgiveaway?" Too many "keep"s was bad news. The ratio of "give away"s had to reach some kind of agonizing golden mean to buy time between each raid. Then at the end of the raid, she would always say, "Now, look at this place! Don't you feel better?"

At first, it seemed like she was mocking my pain-- Miss Mousy was suffocating at the bottom of her Hefty bag grave, right underneath my half used sticker collection-- but after the first couple of raids, I did start to feel better in my newly streamlined room.

When my family moved to another town, and then overseas where our whole household had a weight limit, it became kind of comforting to be able to quantify exactly how much stuff tied you to the earth in any one place. The problem, of course, was that eventually that number got dangerously low and was spread thinly over two continents, neither of which felt like it was "home." It's dangerous not to feel just a little tied down.

Now though, after being married to him through several seasons and moves, my definition of "home" is beginning to switch to simply Pants himself. My mom said this would happen, and it's kind of a relief, since getting married and moving out of state with him right away was so thoroughly not-home that it gave me "heartache." But now it's OK. If we could make it work in the tiny, tiny town in South of Everywhere, Texas, surely we can handle California.

That is, if we can get out there with all the JUNK he won't let me throw out. My secret wish list for stuff I'd like to throw out:

*All the empty beer and wine bottles he's been saving since two moves ago, waiting for us to move to climate that's not so scorching hot so he can make wine with the wine-making kit he got in Florida.

*The extra version of the board game Taboo we're inexplicably saving

*All the commemorative beer steins from cool pubs he visited before we were dating

*The yellowish fax machine his folks gave us ("But it works!" Yes, but we'll never be not-cheap enough to buy a land line.)

*The rickety, yellowing, clamp-on desk light with the scruffy rabbit's foot chained to it that he's had since he was a kid (see above, irrelevant defense that it still functions).

*And finally, at the risk of biting the keyboard that feeds me sweet, sweet Internet lifeblood, THIS JANKETY LAPTOP!!