Wow, I am wiped. But very happy.

The day started out kinda shitty. Rainy, overcast, ugly. Had a counseling appointment, and those are kind of like being gutted anyway. Then I spent the better part of the morning searching for a HD50 SCSI to Sub-D connector cable. Don’t ask.

After prowling around my house, cleaning up (which Tiffany apparently greatly appreciates), I got sick of it, so I escaped to the loft. Max is still out of town, so it would be a quiet change of scenery for me.

I knew what I wanted to do for Max. I mean, it’s really all I can do. He seems to be leaning on Melissa now instead of me for friendship and advice, so I can’t help out there. But that loft is one big purple pigsty and I have no idea how he can work in there. That’s what I can do.

I walked into the place and just sighed. I didn’t know where to start. I tried to get some music hooked up but - imagine this - nothing that plays music was hooked to speakers! Weird. So, I walk around, gluing a candlestick back together, putting a face plate on the lightswitch on the wall. Filling five trash bags and dragging them to a construction dumpster conveniently located on our floor. I was just starting to get frustrated when Melissa called. I half didn’t want to tell her I was at the loft; I kinda liked the idea of this being my project. But that was pretty selfish, so I told her what I was doing. She asked if I needed anything. So I walked around the loft for like 20 minutes, coming up with ideas. Seven taper candles, three 3-ring binders, a holepunch, a huge rubbermaid container. Paper towels, toilet paper. A candy dish and Starbursts (okay, so I spoil him). Ashtrays.

So Melissa is off to Home Depot, and all of the sudden the key turns in the knob. Okay, heart attack! It was David from the Javier Mendoza Band. Whoops. They rent the loft too - they split it with Max. We chatted for a minute and his eyes lighted on the vacuum. “Can I use that?” He seemed very excited. Sure, I said. He grabbed it and went to town on the rehearsal space. He said he was tired of what a dump this place was. I agreed. I told him when I was done he wouldn’t recognize it. He laughed.

The bathroom was a nightmare. Cleaned everything. Chipped old wax from candlesticks. Wound up tons of feet of electrical cable. Matched media with cases (CDs, cassettes, DATs). The nice thing, though, was that the Javier Mendoza Band, minus Javier who’s in Spain, played a mini-concert for me for two hours. (Okay, it was just a rehearsal, but c’mon!) It was a little deafening, but I knew most of the music and could sing along - unheard!

Melissa arrived and called from downstairs. She had a ton of stuff, and we hauled it up. I was very happy - very content - putting up the new candles, filling the cool silver candy dish with Starbursts (and pulling out and trashing the lemon ones, because he always leaves them for last anyway). Melissa jumped right in, and we ended up taking down a huge L-shaped desk that Max had really wanted to get rid of but never had the time.

Suddenly the place looked huge. We organized, dusted, vacuumed about six times… Melissa sprayed the couch and chairs with a Febreeze-y Clorox stuff. I gave serious consideration to painting the door frame with silver metallic paint. But I didn’t. I might do that tomorrow, actually.

We dug through forty-or-so of his legal pads, separating his lyrics and his writings and putting them in the 3-hole binders. Finally, all trash gone, I was really very proud of the loft. It’s someplace I’d go to work if I wanted to be alone. That says a lot.

I struggled on the way home with dealing with my motives for doing this. I prayed all the way home. Did I do this so he’ll “like me” more? Did I do this because I see the great potential of the loft, and I’m sick of looking at it the way it is? Did I do this as a good deed, because it seems to be the only way I can help him out lately? Selfish, selfless? Reaching to earn something, or spending ten hours down there to escape my house and my own reality? Or maybe this is my reality? I don’t know. I received no answers last night. Maybe I just need to recognize that the heart’s motivation is never pure, and I probably did it for all of the above reasons and more. But at least it got done, and Max is going to freak out when he sees it. It RAWKS, dude.

Job well done by two rockin’ girls, if I do say so myself. We’ll just wait to see what Max thinks.

Dirty and dusty,


mich