There’s plenty of reasons why we’re selling Giddyland.  Not the least of which is that we feel we can cut our work in half.  Maybe it’s me, but I think it’s the house.

You see I have to do everything twice.

Sometimes three or four times, and the fact is I never know after I’ve done it again if I’ll have to do it once again shortly thereafter. Can be quite the mindfuck.

Case in point – yesterday I rushed in the morning to get the last of the invites to a pending Giddy bash out to the mailbox, didn’t want to miss the postal pick up.  Later in the day I went to retrieve our daily delivery and what was still in the box?  Damn right – the invitations.  The Postman left them behind and simply dropped the day’s delivery of lingerie catalogues, cemetery plot deals and usual assortment of threatening hate mail right on top of them.

So I had to bring the damn invites back inside and re-mail them today.  I just dropped them off at the post office. I had to return a letter bomb I’d inadvertently received recently anyway…but you get my point.

Earlier this Spring I had to go out and buy new garden hoses, as our previous two had burst.  Not one, but both had burst.  Fuck! That was annoying.

Shortly after making this purchase I was in the yard using the hose to clean bird crap off one of our patio table umbrellas.  It was the second time in just a few days I was tasked to undertake this mundane endeavor…I think it was the same fucking bird taking a shit on that umbrella.  The birds around here mock me.  Anyway, I finished spraying off the fecal matter and returned to what I had been doing; vacuuming the pool.

This may seem odd in and of itself.

What about Serge and Raul?  The expensive shirtless slugs who come and clean this over sized hole of Hell in my yard.

Oh they come, at least twice a week.  They clean the pool, then shortly after they leave the filter jets spew sediment and other assorted shit back into the sixty thousand gallon lake. Then I have to augment the work of the pool guys with my own efforts.  At least twice a week.

So while I was cleaning the pool, the hose which was only several days old…burst.

Now I had to out and get another hose. Again.

Fuck my life.

I finished the days vacuuming duties and went inside to find my wallet and keys.  It takes twice as long these days to find them because you never really know where the fuck they’ll be.

Selling your house puts your life in a never ending cycle of making sure there’s no clutter and everything is spotless in case some fraudulent speculator happens to stop by and check your place out.  They’re never going to buy in this depressed market, they just want to know where you stash your weed and sell-able gold.

So we try to hide away the clutter.

Twice as long to find the keys.

Finally found them, and secured my wallet.

Went up to the Home Depot to get another fucking hose.  Found one in the garden department and it cost twice as much as it had when I bought the last one a couple of weeks prior.

That’s what happens when you buy in a high demand market.  Price is going up because everyone has a hose that’s about to burst.  And they really need the hose because it ain’t raining no more and they need to feed their lawn to keep it from dying. So it’s what you’ve got to do.

Anyway, I paid for the hose at the register with a credit card which was carrying a balance twice as high as last month.  And last month sucked, it was twice as expensive as the month before.

I walked out of the store probably twice as aggravated as I had been when I arrived.  Got into my car and wished the air conditioner would cool it twice as fast.

Radio was on the news station, caught the last bit of a story about a quadruple homicide in a pharmacy not more than three miles away.  It didn’t quite sink in.  When I got home, my wife was reading more about it online.

Two employees, two customers. Four innocent people who didn’t give a second thought to their days simply going along as planned.  Senselessly killed by a lunatic who didn’t think twice about the consequences of his actions.  Heartless fuck no doubt didn’t think once.

Do you get the metaphor?

Of course you do.

How many days do you sack in sorrow lamenting your own regrets and woes?  We all do, and it’s always twice as many as we can accept.

Tragedy and pain will always give you perspective.

Such a fallacy of the human soul; too often the need to see the devastation of others in other to give one perspective of one’s self.

It’s at these times though when you most clearly realize the things that drive you twice as crazy as they used to can never be half as bad as the pain endured by those who give us that perspective.

We all live in two worlds.

The world inside our mind – and how we view ourselves,

And the world outside – how we’re viewed by others.

Just for a moment, can you recall when you truly viewed anyone outside of yourself in a manner other than specifically how they affected you?

Makes the perspective of two seem a little more unrealistic doesn’t it?

One isn’t the loneliest number.

It’s the only number.