Newton’s work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future. A man in need of breakfast.
- Nick Harkaway, “The Gone-Away World”
1. It’s been 3 weeks since the move, and this is the beginning of my 2nd week back at work. Yesterday’s commute was my first of what will apparently be a long series of NJ Transit nightmares, and even then it wasn’t altogether unpleasant; I was sitting down, for one thing, and I had a window seat, and the hopelessness never became the all-consuming anxious mania that it used to be on an NYC subway – I knew there was nothing to be done, and in any event it ultimately taught me how to transfer at Hoboken to the Path, which is something I’m going to be needing to do next year when my office moves downtown.
I am happy. I love our home. Sure, it’s not in the super-nice part of town, but whatever – it’s a 5 minute drive to the super-nice part of town, and it’s a 5-minute drive to everywhere else we need to go, and given that we don’t really go out all that much anyway, it’s the inside part of the house that counts the most, and I’m really happy with that part. There are no more boxes; there’s only the last of the artwork to hang up.
I’m not sleeping well, though, and that’s starting to become somewhat irritating. Haven’t fully figured out why just yet. Some nights it’s been a temperature thing; other nights it’s been an anxiety thing – for example, we had our driveway repaved last week, and as such I had to park the car on the street, and we are in the not-so-nice part of a very nice town, and I was worried about the car getting stolen; instead, I got my very first parking ticket for parking too close to a stop sign, which is a thing I didn’t even know existed. (Indeed, our car – a very reliable sort – is suddenly starting to fall apart, and we need to get it serviced, and I’m sure that’s going to cost an arm and a leg, and I just hope that it can all be fixed in one day. A thing about life in the suburbs that has become immediately apparent is that if you don’t have a car, you’re kinda fucked.)
2. Another, inevitable part of moving – at least in my recent experience – is that things sometimes stop working properly once they’ve been put into their new places. My PC’s USB ports are starting to crap out, which means my wireless keyboard/mouse and wi-fi adapter are hit or miss. The PC is almost entirely meant as a home for my Steam library, and given that it’s 5 years old and starting to die, there’s a part of me that’s inclined to maybe just wait until the Steam Boxes hit in the fall; now that I’ve got a proper entertainment center for the basement TV, it might not be the worst thing in the world to move my PC gaming rig to the TV, and thus give myself more deskspace for music stuff.
More troubling, however, is my PS4. For one thing, I seem to have lost the little USB Bluetooth adapter that worked with my fancy headphones. This is not necessarily the end of the world, given that I don’t really need to use headphones anymore unless I’m chatting with someone, but it does render those headphones completely useless. What is possibly the end of the world, though, is that my controller is no longer reliably staying paired with my PS4. Now, I’m not really playing much of anything with any urgency at the moment (though I’d very much like to check out Volume), but I expect I will be in the coming months, and I’d very much like to not have to worry about this sort of thing once the Big Games start arriving.
3. Now that the move is done, though, I’m going to have to start getting back into the swing of things. I’ve found that I have a bit of a creative inertia problem. This is good sometimes, in that when I’m feeling like I’m on a roll, I keep rolling, and I churn out lots of music and/or blog posts and/or various writings. But it also means that when I stop, I stop, and the idea of getting moving again can feel overwhelming. This is why I haven’t been writing much here lately; I’d put nearly everything on hold for the move, and if I’d happen to find an idle hour I would open up a Wordpress window and end up just kinda staring into nothingness, half-heartedly hoping that words would just show up, given that I couldn’t seem to summon anything. This is why I’m writing this post right now, if only so that I can remind myself that there’s a part of my brain that needs to get active again. I need to get back to the solo album; I need to get into this blog. My feet are on terra firma now, finally, and it’s time for the rest of my body to catch up.
Shouts From The Couch 
Glad you’re back to writing; I always enjoy your posts. And don’t worry too much about the house stress – it’ll fade with time.
Thanks! I’m sure the house stress will ebb and flow… Trying to not worry about worrying so much is its own special brand of anxiety.