Population Zero
On moving out, ghost town speculation, women's basketball, and a few things I've liked this month
Downsizing
I’m packing up my house right now. I’ll be moving out in late July, eight years almost to the day after I moved in. That’s about six years longer than I’d ever lived in the same place before. My family moved around a lot growing up, thanks to the military, my mother’s iffy real estate investments, and a general penchant for itinerancy I seem to have inherited. I stopped counting long ago, but before this house, I’d averaged roughly one address for every year of my life.
This house was almost sixty years old when I moved in, and had only been previously inhabited by one couple, some of whose belongings still remain: a tweed newsboy hat in the garage closet, a bunch of hand-knit doilies in a kitchen drawer, a dim mound of stuff in the far reaches of the attic that I never got around to cataloguing.1 In their dotage, they let the place go a little, and in the eight years since I bought it I’ve changed just about everything, mostly myself: painted it inside and out, renovated the kitchen, built a patio out back, killed half the plants through halfassed pruning or neglect, and removed the sliding glass door between the kitchen and living room with my face.
At this point, the house feels thoroughly mine. That’s a complicated feeling. While it’s probably better than the alternative—especially in the housing market of the last few years—in my experience homeownership is generally overrated and fraught with financial terror, always worrying some imminent roof or water heater failure will cost thousands of dollars. It’s happened to me half a dozen times: termite damage, roof leaks, the garage door finally rots away and has to be replaced. It usually feels more like the house owns me.
Maybe that’s why packing hasn’t caused the melancholy or nostalgia I remember from previous moves. I’m tempted to say I enjoy it. This time around, I’ve decided to get rid of a lot of stuff I no longer use or need, and probably never did. Every time I leave ReStore or Goodwill after dropping off another carload—I’ve probably gotten rid of tons at this point—I feel better. You should try it. I wish I would’ve done it sooner.
Trying to buy a town in Texas
A few weeks ago, one of my oldest friends texted me a link to an article about Lobo, a ghost town in West Texas whose owners had put it up for sale, soliciting bids and proposals from buyers who wanted “to do something interesting out there.” So, after talking it over for a few days, we sent one. I don’t want to say more at this point, mostly because it’s a long shot—I’m guessing they got dozens of offers. We should hear back sometime in July. In the meantime, if anyone reading this has a trust fund and a burning desire to invest in a ghost town in West Texas, holler.
WNBA games
I went to my first WNBA game this month. It wasn’t my first women’s basketball game—I pinch-hit for the beat writer a few times when I was a sportswriter at my college newspaper—but it was my first professional one, and only my second live pro game ever. I went to a midseason Bulls/Sonics matchup a few years before the latter were stolen from Seattle.
But I’ve been to a lot of live sporting events. In the last year alone, I went to an international soccer match in Dublin, an Eagles home game, and Game 4 of the World Series. An early-season WNBA game that was a blowout by the second half was still a better fan experience than most of them. If Portland’s bid to revive its short-lived franchise is successful, I would totally buy season tickets.
Two short books
Now that the school year’s over, I’ve been reading recreationally again. The first book I read was Jose Vadí’s Inter State, a recommendation from a friend that I’d been meaning to read for at least a year. It’s a lean collection of essays about California—the author is from SoCal and has lived his adult life in the Bay Area—which is to say about skateboarding, art, immigration, racism, agriculture, gentrification, water, wildfires, and many other topics, especially the dizzying rate of change in my former state. I only lived in San Francisco for four years, so I never considered myself a Californian, but my time there overlapped with some of what Vadí covers here, and this book made me deeply nostalgic for a time and place that wasn’t that long ago—I left SF this time in 2011—but is already long gone.
I also read Alejandro Zamba’s Multiple Choice, a gift from one of my favorite people. It’s a weird book, a fiction/metafiction/poetry hybrid in the form of a standardized test, and the format takes some patience early on. But I liked it better as it went along, and by the end liked it so much that I wished it were longer. (It’s maybe 100 pages, the kind of book you can read in an hour.)
One short essay
Yesterday I was thrilled to see in my inbox a link to the new DIAGRAM, consistently one of my favorite places for nonfiction, which features this lovely essay by Kosiso Ugwuede. She just graduated from the MFA program where I teach, and I could rave about her work—I’m like the vice president of her fan club—but you should probably just go read it yourself.
32 Sounds
I saw this documentary a few weeks ago at my local indie theater, The Darkside, maybe my favorite place in Corvallis. Billed as “an immersive documentary,” I guess it exists in three forms, including a live version where audience members wear headphones. I saw the theatrical one, in a small indie theater with the best audio it can afford, so I probably missed out on some of the immersiveness of the live version. It’s loosely inspired by and structured after the 1993 CBC experimental doc Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, which my colleague and I did a very long podcast episode about a couple years back.
32 Sounds probably appeals to a niche audience, some Venn diagram of viewers with an interest in audio recording or production, arty non-narrative documentaries, and oblique Sebaldian inquiries into time and grief and loss. Luckily, that’s pretty much exactly me, so I loved it.
Love
This month I’ve been listening a lot to Black Beauty, the posthumous “lost” album by Love, the seminal LA psych-rock outfit first introduced to me by my SoCal roommate when I lived in San Francisco. They’ve since joined my regular rotation.2 I own and mostly listen to their first two albums, but lately I’ve been playing this one. It has an interesting backstory and is uneven in a way I like. This is probably my favorite song:
One time a heating repairman went into the attic and brought back an issue of Time commemorating Nixon’s election.
I mentioned Love in my last book, because Bobby Beausoleil, the Manson family henchman, murderer of Gary Hinman, and late-career Capote interviewee, played guitar in an early incarnation of the band.