Lissener,
Sounds like it’s well-nigh time for a big change in your life. You’ve got:
Not everyone has those things. so you have a head start.
lissener I’ve just now gotten through reading the whole thread (but started it right after you posted your OP!) and just wanted to add my general good wishes. You are valued; I always appreciate your film insights, even if I don’t agree with them. They’re well-thought out. And now that you’ve detailed your troubles, I can see how that might influence the times when you’ve been less patient with others’ opinions.
Again, best wishes. You’ve taken steps to deal with your problems and that is to be APPLAUDED. But you have a ways to go. Go. We’ll be here to listen if you need us!
As much sympathy as I have for you in your situation, I think keturah and fruitbat make perfect sense.
They see dirty clothes mixed in with three years worth of trash and debris, you see precious sweaters and rare scarves.
Before the service showed up, you had the ability to take the silver rings and sweaters and whatever else that was both easy to retrieve and of value to you and place it in the closet, and then make it clear that the closet was not to be touched. Instead, you left the “sort” entirely up to their discretion and walked out the door. You had every opportunity to ask for references from people they had decluttered, and you didn’t. A service to sort through every morsel you owned would have cost far more than $1,000.00 and taken much longer than a day.
I sincerely hope things improve for you soon.
No, he didn’t have the ability to sort–he was overwhelmed at the mere thought of such a monumental task (as most of us would be frankly, w/o being depressed).
Did he make mistakes? Sure–just like we all do. Lay off on the Monday morning quarterbacking already. As if this situation was black and white and we all would have behaved “perfectly” (or not gotten into it in the first place–it’s so easy to be perfect online). :rolleyes:
How would any of us deal with sudden homelessness and near complete loss of all possessions? I bet we’d be angry and scared and more than ready to blame all involved. Their feelings–let him express them. This place sucks for true human compassion sometimes.
Lissener: I am sorry for your troubles and I hope you find your way. Perhaps someday you will find another Hermes scarf that you like as much. Knitting supplies can be bought again. One day at a time. Take care of yourself.
I’ve thought of adding to this thread as things have developed, but it always seemed like attention whoring. So instead I’ll just update with a synopsis of the last few months. Which is still attention whoring, but it’s spread out a little . . .
Anyway.
So where were we? Our intrepid hero was cast out into the street, like a little matchgirl, clutching only what he could carry and leaning into the howling wind. Or something like that.
With the help of my friend Matt and his pickup, I salvaged a truckbed full of the most important things that were left, chief among which was my collection of over 200 neckties. These had been passed over by the cleaning locusts because they were in one of those red-lidded plastic boxes you can get at Home Depot for like five bucks, tucked away in my storage area in the basement of the building. This collection included such reminders of happier financial times as about a dozen Hermes ties, including one that I rashly paid more than $300 for and that I’ve seen on eBay for as much as $500, and several for which I paid more than $200.
Matt took everything but what I had on my back and in my bag to store at his place until I could figure out a plan, and I started sleeping at the video store. On the floor. Between Suspense and Martial Arts. A couple days into this one of my regular customers–a guy with whom I’d had a weekly conversation about movies for three years, and who complained to me about his divorce and introduced me to his fiancee and then his new wife, who also came to be a retail friend–he loves old westerns, she loves schlocky horror; very difficult to satisfy them both but we usually came up with something–anyway, I haven’t seen him in the store for a few weeks–Tahiti, don’t you know; Microsoft millionaire–and I eye-rollingly tell him what’s up: that I lost my apartment and I’m sleeping the store floor until I can get another couple paychecks under my belt and get a new place. He insists that I come and stay in his guest room. I refuse. He insists. I refuse. He reluctantly goes home.
Closing time, his wife pulls up in the parking lot. She comes in the store, insists that I’m coming to their place. I refuse. She sees my bag, picks it up, says she’ll wait for me in the car. I’m going to stay at their place. Awk. Ward. But, still. The floor again? These people are millionaires, both of them. They probably have a jacuzzi and a live in maid just for the guest room, right? So, I stay at their place that night. In the morning, we make coffee–she owns a local chain of gourmet coffeeshops–and have a nice little visit. The plan, I’m told, is I’m to stay in their guest room as long as I need. No arguments. Their guest room is actually a mother-in-law apartment in the basement: there are TWO guest rooms; a kitchen; a bathroom; and a separate entrance. So fine, that night I bring my bird from the store, where he’d been languishing in the back office, and move into their basement.
A couple weeks later, my boss tells us he’s closing his other store, throwing in the towel, and that staff–which has more seniority with him than the staff of my store–will be coming over here. My co-manager Eric will go to part time, and I will go. Whatever: you want to replace a team that works–our store is the flagship store, we have the best customer base and all of the new “creative” stuff comes out of our store: the newsletter, the monthly feature, etc.: all products of me and my comanager’s efforts. He’s going to replace us with the staff of a store that did NOT work: their store lost money and had to be closed. And they never had any featured sections, or anything beyond their permanent sections and new releases. Plus one of them drinks on the job, and the other one was horrified when she saw that I had photoshopped Queen Latifah into the cast of Lost. Whatever; you want it to be just like Blockbuster only more expensive, have at it. I extracted from my boss a promise that he would not erase the music I had on the computer–my home machine had crashed so I was holding 60 gigs of music on one of his computers–and I grabbed three years worth of evidence that I existed and went to my basement guest room and slept for a couple days.
Payday, I stop by my store for my final paycheck, cash it on the way to Best Buy, pick up a 500 gig drive, and head back to the store to retrieve my music. Which has all been wiped. Gone. Clean gone: all the CDs that I brought with my from Chicago ten years ago and subsequently ripped and sold; all the CDs I’d bought since I had been in Seattle, ripped, sold; all the music I’d bought from iTunes over the years; all the CDs I’d ripped from coworker exchanges and customer loans; all the music I’d downloaded illegally over the last couple years. Twenty years of music collecting, music that would easily cost $10,000 for me to replace (not counting the probably irreplaceable rarities): Gone. Gone gone gone gone gone. Defeated and deflated I go back to my basement room and sleep for a couple days.
So then I get up and really begin looking for a place in earnest: I don’t want to be a burden to my hosts for any longer than I have to. (They’re customers for cryssakes!) I answer a craigslist ad for the perfect place, at the perfect price, in the perfect location. “Your application has been accepted. Please to wire your deposit to Nigeria whereupon I will send you the lease and a keys via the FEDEX.” I find another perfect place. “Your application has been accepted. Please to wire your deposit to Nigeria whereupon I will send you the lease and a keys via the FEDEX.”
I begin looking for less-than-perfect places. I go to look at a studio that is just barely in my price range. There is graffiti on the walls. The windows are held together by crazy criss-crosses of duct tape. The entire carpet smells like cat pee. At least, I HOPE it’s cat pee. And the bathroom is down the hall. The community bathroom. Which is obviously a point of contention among the tenants: it’s apparently NO one’s turn to clean it this year. I retreat, defeated, deflated, and nap for another couple days.
I give myself to Monday find a place, or I get on the train and put myself, in a basket with a bow, on my sister’s doorstep. “Please to take in . . .”
I go to view an affordable apartment in the University District. Cleaner, but still with a community bathroom. W? T? F? I’m too old for this shit. I’m not sharing my bathroom with a bunch of strangers. No. I find another place, on the fringe of the U district, not quite as affordable, but it has a bathroom. Shared kitchen, but still. I can cook ramen in a rice cooker on the back of the toilet for now. Six month lease.
I call Matt, he comes to get me from the guest room with his truck full of my stuff. I wax profusely, profoundly grateful, and I’m out of the basement. I hope I didn’t leave them with too much of a cloud of my depressive bullshit. I did cook them a couple of spectacular dinners. But still. I took some pictures of her 17-year-old cat, who is the center of her life–trust me, wherever you are, you will hear the wailing when he finally makes it up to the heaviside layer–and I’ll do a drawing of him for her. It will never repay their generosity (they’re customers, for cryssakes!), but I think it will be a gesture that they will appreciate.
I move into my new place. Picture the smallest apartment you can think of. Now, cut it in half. Mine is smaller. If I put a kingsize bed in the corner, I’d have a margin of around two and a half feet on two sides of the bed. You think I’m exaggerating. I’m not exaggerting. I literally have to move furniture to go to the bathroom.
Matt unloads all my stuff, I get things stacked in the closet, under the bed, turned into furniture, etc. Sigh. Relief. It’s over. It’s tiny, it makes “tiny” look huge, but it’s over: I’m through losing things. I have a place to sleep. My bird has a place to sleep. With visions of eBay dancing in my head, I decide to sort through my no-longer justifiable collection of neckties. I’ve been thinking about it as an investment, of which I will now divest myself. I pull out the plastic bin, open the clamlike red lead, and my senses are assaulted by a sickly, moist puff of mushroom. It smells like mushroom. Like fungus and decay. I reach into the box–a roiling bin of gaudy silk eels, snapshot motionless–but smelling like the underside of a long-toppled log. I reach into a clammy, wet, slimy tub of Pacific Northwest rainwatered fungus. Matt–god love him, all my stuff would be gone if he hadn’t stored it for me–assumed that “plastic” meant “waterproof,” and had left my treasure chest of silken artworks out on his deck. As the months waxed autumnal, and the rain came down, my ties melded, and gelled, and became a mushroom loaf, impossible to disentangle, and utterly, wholly, irrecoverable. Whether due to some chemical action of the fungus, or just month of trickle down Seattle weather, all the dyes had osmoted from tie to tie, and not a single tie retained a thumbprint of unbled color.
I sat down and cried. I had not yet cried through all of this, but I dropped to the floor on my knees, sat back on my feet and cried. And cried and cried and cried. I thought I had come through, I was done losing things–all my stuff, art, my sweaters, my montblanc, my music–it was over, I had a floor and a roof and my box of ties, and I was done losing things.
And so.
The next day, over it–sad, but over it–I found a job. It’s temporary; they created a position for me that hadn’t existed before, and technically it’s not in this quarter’s budget, but if it goes well, it will be next quarter. I’m a Marketing Programmer (title to probably be refined) for IndieFlix,** an online distributor of independent films. Initially, my job will be to watch hundreds and hundreds of movies and put together recommendation packages; thematic groupings of movies to be featured monthly in their subscriber service. Subscribers to the site get all-you-can-eat streaming films, but they also get a handful of DVDs mailed to them monthly, and I’ll be programming those subscriber packages. I’ll also participate in local “filmfest” promotions, programming films to be shown at local venues by way of promoting the catalog. And I’ll be doing a lot of work on their real-live recommendations; instead of an algorithm that recommends based on download patterns, I’ll be blurbing each film in the library and associating it with other films they may or may not like. I may also eventually be building their library of classic films, which will initially be largely Public Domain titles, but may include (depending on licensing costs on a film-by-film basis) other classics which are not currently being distributed. And for now, I’m overseeing a call for submissions of independent films with a Holiday theme, for a December promotion on the website. And I’ll be paid to spend as much time as I can just surfing the web seeking out independent films that haven’t got an online distributor, contacting filmmakers, and asking them to submit their films to IndieFlix for consideration.
The pay is meager but survivable, and I can do most of the work from home. Though the office–which I’ll visit at least a couple days a week–is a great environment, with movie geeks and all around cool people. Oh and it has a view of the water.
So, although this is a temporary position until the end of the quarter, which is pretty anxiety-making, it’s still a huge relief for now, and it will allow me to politely decline the offer from WalMart, where I dropped off a resume last week, my most desperate week of job searching. Ever.
*Too Long Didn’t Proofread
**I checked with mods before dropping the name of the company, which I do only by way of full disclosure: inevitably I’ll be discussing some of these movies in CS, and I wanted to disclose beforehand that I work for the company that distributes them
I’m glad things seem to be looking up, and I’m sorry that you had those final indignities piled on top of you. It sounds like a perfect job for you, so I hope it is as advertised (or not advertised, rather) and ends up more than a temporary gig.
Thanks, jsg. Let’s hope so.
I wish you the best of luck lissener. I think you needed that crying spell - I know one or two I’ve had that have been real cathartic.
Yeah, I think so too. Although I still have moments of sadness over my Hermes scarf ties . . . still, I guess I’m relatively lucky this came so quickly on the heels of my other big material loss; feels like the same event, no need to mourn separately.
I’m sorry you’ve been going through hard times, I do know how that feels. But it seems like your new job is almost tailor made to your interests. It would be hard to stumble into something more in line with the things you enjoy, no? Anyway, best of luck man, things have been rough for you for a while now, I hope it’s all uphill from here.
Lissener, as someone who has been through depression, although not as long or as bad or as low, two things:
Yes, my thoughts exactly. Although I was encouraged by the amount of work I accomplished on friday from home while in constant Yahoo IM contact with several people from the office. Watched several films, discussed them pretty exhaustively–I held four conversations at once on each topic for the most part–wrote and forwarded notes and blurbs for publication. I also initiated a campaign to put out a call for holiday submissions (my idea from the ground up) and wrote the initial ad copy for the campaign. I spent the day on the internet, in other words, but NOT out of simple lethargy and inertia.
But yeah, I plan to go in at least two days a week. It’s bitch of a commute–two buses, each one from end of the line to end of the line; almost two hours each way–but still, out of the house is out of the house.
Gee, tough. But what’s with your seemingly obsessive trip down the rabbit hole to enumerate what is not there? Why should I care?
Point being, that you haven’t “lost” anything at all. You’re still carrying it all in your mind and you’re expecting us to help you with it (piece by piece) which is quite impossible. Only you can change your mind.
I suggest meditation.
He’s going through a grief process. Part of his life died. He lost things he valued. Saying he’s no allowed to mention what he’s lost is not fair or reasonable.
[emphasis mine]
Cite?
I’m just saying, enough already. Now, best of luck and get on with it. Just saying.
You know, when I was reading the update, I thought, “Jeez, lissener can’t buy himself a break!” But on further reflection, I think he might get a break if he stopped buying things that don’t help his situation.
lissener, you keep including dollar amounts in your descriptions of lost items. $300 for a necktie? What do you need a $300 tie for? To impress co-workers, clients, investors? Why do you need a tie at all, seriously? Where did you wear it, or did you ever wear it? Where and when did you wear the Hermes scarves? And the Stetson? You said in the OP that you’re not a hoarder, but ISTM that you are, and you’ve simply adjusted your definition of the term. What do you do with these items after you’ve acquired them?
You remind me of the Aesop fable where the guy buried a lump of gold in his back yard. Every so often, he’d dig it up, admire it, fondle it, and bury it again. Then one day, it wasn’t in the hole when he went looking for it. A neighbor heard him wailing and tearing his hair, and after hearing the story, told him to bury a rock and worship it the way he had the gold. Because the rock would do him the same amount of good.
What did you have all that stuff for? What did you do with it? Even the music, the one thing that didn’t take up space – did you listen to it regularly? Did it lift your spirits and inspire you? Or was it just more of your talismans? If you really valued this stuff, you would have taken better care of it. You’ve told us the dollar values, but not the values to you. What are the values to you?
Unless I’m misunderstanding, he didn’t buy these things after the “rock bottom” happened. And since he was planning on selling the ties, one of his prized possessions, to get some money I think it’s pretty unreasonable to be nagging him about having them in the first place. If he had been able to sell them, he would have been in a better position. That they were destroyed because a kind friend made a mistake is a blow.
Yeah, but the scarves and the Stetson and the figurines went in the purge that was the rock bottom. The ties were bought before that as well. All that money could have been either saved against the possibility of unemployment – which became a reality – or invested into his own business. He spent money on things that didn’t help him better himself, and when he got laid off…look what happened.
Well, I’m absolutely sure than when he invents a time machine, he’ll be able to do it all differently.
He needs to do things differently from now on. He needs to carefully consider every purchase. If it won’t help him climb out of his hole, he doesn’t need it. No, he can’t change the past. But he can change his future.