HOME DECOR – ADVENTURERS IN LIVINGNESS

ADVENTURES IN LIVNGNESS FALLS ON MISSING MY BOOKS, WARDROBE AND ARTWORK. The walls are still bare, and it occurred to me that the absence of a glance to one of my favorite photographs or prints, has sidetracked to the laptop screen, television, and when those images blur my eyes, I look to the Bogenvilla next to my desk. The color is provocative and matches my decor.

Writer’s linger on thoughts, and their surroundings are like a stage to an actor. As I am in the pulsating process of reading my publishers edits, the silence in this little studio is a monumental accolade, my friends know I never go anywhere without my earplugs. It’s my tick, loudness unless my music, is disrupting.

My wardrobe, the summer clothes are in the POD, so I had to buy a few items, and those algorithms are on me every day with advertisements for shopping. It’s worse than addictive, it’s annoying. Why don’t they advertise artwork and books?

Minimalism finances. Spectrum offered me free cell service for a year if I leave Verizon. While attempting to switch from Verizon to Spectrum I accidently locked my phone. One of the steps was unlock your phone, so instead they locked it! Four days of unsuccessful tech help from Verizon, I asked my new neighbor friend, who launched her own cell phone service years ago.

“ Call and ask for the advanced tech team, ” she advised in her sultry soft voice.

” Thank you, great idea. Are they bots or human?”

” You’re funny, no they are human?”

” I always ask when I’m calling any service, the bots sound human! I asked the nurse in my Doctor’s office and she cracked up, so maybe it’s just an ice breaker, and there’s a lot of icy reps out there.”

I spoke to the first rep and asked for an advanced tech expert, he said he could solve the issue. Forty-five minutes later, after four failed attempts to unlock my phone with the PUK number, (now I call it the Puke number and a transfer pin.) he said he would forward our conversation to the expert. That was last Wednesday. No one called back so I asked, Luana for advice.

” He didn’t forward it, I was afraid of that. Just text me if you need to make a call.”

” You’re better than Verizon!”

On Friday she texted me a link to unlock my phone. I clicked and received the Puke number and transfer pin. Wahla! it worked. I knocked on her door,

” You unlocked me!”

” I’m so happy that worked, you can’t be without a phone.”

” I can’t be without you!”

My possessions in Saratoga Springs now appear as decorations from a former celebration, like side dishes of over 20 years of mixing and matching prints, drapes, sofas, chairs, tables, vases, and artwork. Now they’ve been removed from my experimental minimalistic living. A former lifecycle that began twenty-five years ago, and are boxed up in a big POD storage. And I refuse to meet them in the present. Friends ask me, ‘when are you bringing your furniture here?’ I can’t answer in words, it must crystallize like it has this past week, when I missed my wardrobe and art hangings. Within the admired art, clothes, and sixty-two boxes, (I looked at my inventory) are a haunting of memories tied in see thru knots of Dodger, my x. As a confirmed refuser of goodbyes, in any relationship, this one has to be nurtured with precision, and that means, no reminders.

The stark white walls and Amazon assembled furnishing are stationed without emotion, memory or love. Functional, practical and unfamiliar. Ive created a new palette, like my first studio in Los Angeles in 1976. Then the others, studios over the years, small, compact, easy to maneuver and clean. Internally, the walls and shelves are cluttered with decisions. The edits on my book from the publisher, when will I find employment? How to engage in new friendships, clubs, gyms, meetups.

Singleness in a city, that was once my home for twenty years, evolved through generations, adding new policies, laws, regulations, real estate development, customs, and an impressionable celebration of the arts and culture. It has no resemblance to the San Diego I met in 1983, except for the ocean and the bordering cliffs and seawalls. That is where a continuous rolling of memory waves sear my view, and I see my youthful delight in San Diego. I’ve always been impressed with people who truly live in the present, can’t figure that one out, maybe I’m just a past time girl.