In which it takes money to make money, and I’m loving not living in the country.

We’ve been here for eleven days now.

We’ve got a gas grill set up, and bought speakers for the laptop so we could enjoy tunes in our room. (The built-in speakers were like listening to iTunes through a telephone handset.) There’s food in the fridge, and we’ve even been to the laundromat.

We’ve been to OfficeMax and Office Depot more times than I can count. We’ve purchased reams of paper and cardstock, pre-scored business card stock, Sharpies, highlighters, notepads, files and hanging file folders, and more. We’ve got a plastic file bin with actual files in it. We’ve got two printers, one color inkjet and the other a B&W toner jobbie, that print, scan, copy, and fax. We’ve got two laptops, mapping software with a GPS receiver, and half a gallon of margaritas in the fridge.

We’ve got an entire little office set up in this hotel room. I am not shitting you. It’s totally legit.

Last night Truck and Bowling Jesus came over to our room, and all the guys grilled bratwurst, zucchini with butter, baked beans, and sauerkraut. (As the token vegetarian, I nuked some soup and had a few potato chips.) I put on JTQ‘s In The Hand Of The Inevitable and boogied around. Such a smokin’ album. [Thanks, Jay-rob Jethro! I love this fuckin’ album, bro!] People were eating, drinking, talking, the tunes were smokin’, the weather had cooled off and a storm was rolling in, and I felt great. Happy. Comfortable. This is my scene, man, groovy folk hanging out and talking, food, tunes… At some point I realized that I actually like living here better than I like living in my real life.

It’s a lot like dorm life because people are always popping in and out, and because the space is small and requires one to be extremely tidy and organized. Also, we don’t have that much stuff with us; a week’s worth of clothes, the office equipment, and a few toys like my guitar and the laptop speakers and the gas grill. It’s so clean, pared down, simple. Light.

To compare and contrast, at home people rarely if ever pop in because we’re 13 miles away from town. We don’t own a stereo. (Actually, we do, but Bread plays the TV through it. There’s no antenna on the receiver, and our CD changer died years ago, and I never did buy a cable to connect an iPod to it. Due to the house’s layout you can’t really hear it unless you’re in the living room with it anyway.) The place is huge, which means it’s been filling up with shit since we moved in and it’s not tidy and organized and it’s not clean. And it’s under construction. And it’s out in the country, so my toenails always have dirt under them. (My feet are clean right now, people! Clean. I’m barefoot as always, but it’s all manicured grass lawns and pavement and sidewalk, not actual dirt I’ve been walking on.)

I now realize that I prefer having a small area to manage. Turns out I am still an incredibly organized, tidy person — I just don’t know how to manage more than a thousand square feet. I don’t like accumulating a bunch of shit; I prefer a small amount of functional and/or meaningful stuff to an assload of crap I don’t really care about but which causes me vague anxiety when I realize I don’t even know where most of it is, let alone what it is. (My dad’s been sending me “family” stuff and I haven’t even opened the boxes. They’re stored in a closet somewhere.) I like living in a highly social situation that I need to occasionally escape from instead of an isolated situation that lets me mope and dwell easily.

I’m in total denial, of course, about shit like the overcrowding and pollution and rush hour traffic because I hardly ever leave the hotel. 😉