Sunday Stories: Gravity’s Rainbow (6)

It is not about us. It is about them. No capital T, just a t. No drama but only performance. “We’ll all use it, someday, to leave the earth. To transcend.” Everything can be forgiven, everything except for the lack of aspiration that is normally called out by the label ‘ambition’. “They were athletic, brainless men without vision, without imagination. But they had power, and it was hard for him not to think of them as superior, even while holding them in a certain contempt.” A time is coming that will be the time for the weak. Emancipation of the weak is unavoidable. In the quadrialectics of strength we have reached the stage where muscular strength is still being compensated for by strength of character. The base movement is nevertheless a movement of removing strength from equations.

A bad move

Yesterday my parents came down to help me with the remainder of my move. Things went incredibly smoothly moving out of my Chicago place — except that I forgot to pack my drawers full of random kitchen implements (spatulae, wooden spoons, etc.) and my condiments (which I only noticed while on the phone with The Girlfriend, after my parents were long gone) — but attempting to get everything into my small Kalamazoo apartment was nothing short of a disaster. My desk, a particle board assemble-by-numbers thing, literally broke on the way up the stairs. The couch got all the way up the stairs, but even removing the couch’s legs, the stairway railing, and the front door proved insufficient to get it into the actual apartment. Both pieces had to be given up for dead.

We then went shopping for some furniture, purchasing a new smaller desk and a couple bookshelves (I’ve pretty well decided to go without a couch now, resigning myself to a lonely armchair). I began putting together the bookshelf and the thing all but fell apart in my hands. We decided not to proceed with the assembly of the other two items since they were the same brand and probably equally shitty, and at that point it was late and my parents needed to go home lest they fall asleep behind the wheel. And when I decided to try watching Mad Men to calm down, I found that I only had access to basic cable channels and customer service was unable to get me the remaining channels that I was paying for.

Moving to a new city is already inherently stressful, but multiple hours of unrelenting failure really got to me. My sister is coming today to run errands with me, including another attempt at a desk and bookshelf. I’d like to think that I’d just laugh if things fell apart again today, but that seems a little optimistic.