Gun, with Incidental Flowerpot

July 30

10:23 p.m

This is officially the worst move of my life.

About 30 minutes ago, as I was loading flowerpots into the trunk of my car, trying to get the last of the stuff from the old house moved, a guy came up to me and asked me if I had the time. I said no (don't own a watch, all the clocks are at the new house!). Then he asked me if I had any money. I said no. Getting panhandled on my street is not unusual, though he was younger and better-dressed than most beggars.

Then he pulled a gun on me. He didn't bother to repeat his request for money. It was, I suppose, implicit in the gesture. I held up my hands and said something like "Dude, I don't even have my wallet, I'm moving, almost all my stuff is at the new house already."

He said "You're moving?"

I said "Yes," and gestured at the pile of crap sitting on the curb that I was about to load into my car. He seemed rather nonplussed, and walked away.

I've never had a gun pulled on me before. I don't recommend it. He didn't even point it at me, really -- just showed it to me. It was black, kind of big -- hell, I don't know anything about guns. It didn't have a little orange tip, though, and it looked more substantial than hollow-bodied plastic, so I assume it was real.

I was surprisingly calm. Didn't even freak out afterward. Just went inside, and told Heather, and she freaked out, a little, on my behalf. We waited a few minutes for my erstwhile mugger to, we hoped, go far away, and then got in the car and left, with a lot of garden stuff still sitting on the curb, because we didn't feel safe loading it into the car, of course. We don't care if anyone takes it, anyway -- we were going to give it away anyhow.

As we drove away, we saw the would-be-mugger walking along the sidewalk, not even a block from our house, trolling for other victims, I suppose (although why mug people in such a piss-poor neighborhood? It's bewildering!). I quite seriously considered driving up on the curb and running the motherfucker over, and I squeezed the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles hurt. But Heather pointed out that it would be a felony, even assuming our low-to-the-ground car made it up over the curb onto the sidewalk, and so I drove on. I felt so outraged and powerless, though, so furious, and I wanted to seize power in the situation by doing violence -- I don't remember ever feeling that way before, though I must have, at some point, during the horrors of junior high, at least.

We didn't bother to call the police. We've called them before (once while we were watching a man get mugged on the street perpendicular to ours), and they've never even bothered to send a patrol car. And if they did send a patrol car, and the mugger thought I'd called the cops on him... well, I'm going to be at the house tomorrow night, too, and I don't want to get shot, particularly.

That fucking sucked. I'm having a terrible few weeks anyhow, doing nothing but hauling boxes, my back killing me, cleaning our filthy old house. I didn't need this. We didn't even finish cleaning or moving -- which we'd planned to do tonight -- because we were too freaked-out.

It could very much have been worse, though. I didn't get hurt or even lose any money. I am unspeakably fortunate -- within certain crappy parameters.

I am, needless to say, very glad we're moving away from that neighborhood.

8:26 a.m.

[I wrote the below this morning, but I figured I'd lead the entry with the recent trauma instead, chronological sequence be damned]

I managed to scrape some productivity from the bleary eyelid of morning! (I shouldn't be let loose with metaphors before 9 a.m., I guess...) I wrote a review of Scott Nicholson's The Harvest! It's a bit on the long side, so I'll need to edit it tonight, but it says what I want to say, reasonably eloquently, I think. So that's 600 words in the hopper, yeah!

It feels so good to write, even just a bit of non-fiction. I'm seriously word-deprived. It's not from lack of trying, either -- in the interstices of the day job and the Hell That Is Moving, I've been trying to write, it just hasn't been working. I have two other half-started reviews (though I'll likely only finish one of them). Yesterday I read the half-a-story I wrote at Rio Hondo, and it's actually pretty good, it just needs to be finished. At lunch I tried to work on it, but even though I know what happens next in the story (road trip to Big Sur!) I couldn't seem to compose a decent sentence. I'm just so exhausted, and bruised, and phlegmy, and dust-clogged.

Because, yeah, we're still moving, though we're down to cleaning the old place. Yesterday I got the fridge clean, and mopped the kitchen floor (again, and we'll likely have to do it still another time), pulled some nails, spackled some nail-holes, dusted a bit. There's so much garbage and recycling, I have no idea what we're going to do with all of it. But whatever it is, we have to do it by tomorrow night, because our lease ends on the 31st! Tonight Heather and I are just spending all night at the old place. She's working on the yard (lots of garden stuff to dispose of) as long as there's light, and then she'll join me in the general scrubbing-and-dusting in the house itself. At least Holly cleaned the rest of the kitchen, and did the whole bathroom by herself, which helps immeasurably. We also owe a debt to Heather's friend Todd, who came to our house yesterday during the day and took away a huge pile of junk to the Depot for Creative Reuse (formerly, and more mellifluously, known as the Center for Creative Reuse) and Urban Ore and the Computer Recycling Place Whose Name Escapes Me.

We hung out with Todd a couple of nights ago. I don't know him well, but he was telling Heather that he's been reading a lot of Richard Laymon lately, and that was a conversation I had no difficulty joining, and he and I chattered happily about horror for a long time. He's a big Lovecraft fan, but hasn't liked much of the associated works -- you know, the stuff by all the other writers who like to play in Lovecraft's stygian sandbox. So I recommended some good Lovecraftian fiction -- Mr. X by Straub, and Nick's Move Under Ground (Todd frequents Borderlands, so I imagine he'll be able to find the latter when it comes out, and he's a big fan of Kerouac, too, so he's basically the perfect audience for that book). Heather says he actually seeks out things that people recommend to him, which made me a lot more careful and enthusiastic about making recommendations, naturally. It was nice, being social, having a break from the move.

Gotta go to work. More later.

Words written since February 1, 2003: 76,900

Words written since last entry:
600

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