Traversing Easy Street

When I was younger, I always wanted to live on one of those roomy Chicagoland lofts. Of course I wanted to live there by myself. And most of the ones that I saw on TV and really liked are completely different from the ones in real life. My friend Nate moved here from Boston back in the fall. His girlfriend Bliss and their friends Jordan and Hutch all live together in a loft. The living space is huge, but the bedrooms are small. Also, the building’s old so the hardwood floors aren’t that great. There’s no laundry in the building either, which can be really frustrating, especially during the winter. No one wants to drag a bag full of laundry through the cold and snow. From what they’ve told me, the building was going to be used for commercial purposes. The leasing agent kept saying she would get back to them, but they kept telling her it was what they wanted and that they were going to take it. So the leasing agent let them sign the lease for however long they’re going to stay there. It’s good enough for them now, but one day they’re going to want something nicer.

One of the best ways to get a girl to like you is to listen to her. If the girl likes to talks a lot, then by listening to her she’s going to really like you so long as you don’t do anything that bothers her. This certainly doesn’t guarantee that she’ll be your girlfriend or your wife or anything like that, but she will like you. And if you’re able to stand hearing about her girlhood in Georgia, how her rich father already knows which retirement home Atlanta he wants to be put into when he can’t take care of himself anymore, and all the other really unimportant minutia of her life you might as well marry her since if you’re not annoyed by now you never will be. Then again a larger problem looms. You might be attracted to a girl and become interested in her. You might meet her and really like her. But then you might encounter the problem all men have had since time’s primordial beginnings. She has to talk and talk and talk and you just don’t want to go on listening and listening. Enough is enough and her life might be her life, but you didn’t ask to hear all about it.

I worked in real estate for a while and hated it. Every morning, I dreaded getting up out of bed because I had to deal with people. None of them could ever make up their minds about anything and they had no respect for my own time. They thought I could drop everything and just show them whatever apartment they wanted to see right there and then. Then they’d see graffiti nearby and I’d say there would be graffiti removal done soon and that it was a good neighborhood near the train and restaurants and all that. They’d say they were making up their minds. So I’d have to bother them the next day or until I got back in touch with them and they’d still say they hadn’t made up their minds. I’d get jerked around for a while and then they still wouldn’t take the apartment because they weren’t “in love with it” or something else. None of them cared that I had taken time out for them and that they completely wasted it. Some people never bothered to even get back in touch with me at all. My boss said I had poor people skills, but everyone mostly seemed to like me. I couldn’t help it if the apartment they were looking at didn’t have the closet space or a deck or a patio or whatever else they wanted but couldn’t realistically afford.

Things at work were pretty hectic. There were several shipments of machine aluminum that came today and needed to be unpacked on short notice. I sort of welcomed the chaos. It really helped keep my mind off of the recent conversation I had with my girlfriend. She told me she hasn’t really been too happy with how things are going in our relationship lately. I just listened. I was obviously really disappointed to hear that she felt that way. I had no idea. She told me all of this the other night. I’ve been so busy with work and I thought she understood that the reason I’ve been working so many hours lately is so that I could be able to afford to do nice things for her and with her. I can’t really cut back my hours at work now and I don’t really want to either. I was explaining this to her and she took it really personally. I don’t know what we’re going to do now. We haven’t really had a serious discussion like this for a long while. It has me scared that I might lose her. I tried calling her a few times since sitting down to write this and she’s not picking up her phone. If I do manage to get a hold of her tonight, I hope this conversation goes better!

Michelle wanted to know if we could stay out of the Austin bankruptcy file and pay our debts and keep the house. I wanted to try, too. We had worked too hard for too many years to just let it all go. We put our heads together. We needed to get more money — fast. We came up with several plans, none of them all that great. We were spinning our wheels, we thought, after awhile. Nothing would work. How we got in debt was one thing. We traveled a lot and it was very hard to keep up with book keeping. We lost track of what we were spending, versus what was coming in. We would borrow and borrow and never pay back. That couldn’t go on forever. Each time when we got back from being on tour we were just too exhausted to do anything. Unless you have been on the road you just don’t know. It can drain you. You spend your time racing to the next show, but then after you are still all hopped up and can’t just sit down and read the paper, like if you were working a 9 to 5 job. You ended up partying until 5 am, then crashing for awhile, then getting up and on the bus by 9am. You could sleep on the bus, but it wasn’t like getting a night’s sleep. So we got careless, too careless. That’s how we ended up filing.