My Parents' Basement

I brought up a piece of old furniture tonight from my parents' basement-- a particle board desk that used to hold my old Macintosh IIc back in the mid-90s. It has slots on the side of it for CD-ROMs, dating it significantly. Now I need slots for all the various external hard drives I have! (One for photos, one for music, one for failed NaNoWriMo projects, etc.)

I set up the desk in the front bedroom of the apartment, which I've decided will be my office. I'm going to get a chaise longue.. or maybe just swipe one of the old twin foam mattresses (also from my parents' basement), throw a fitted sheet over it and use it as a place to flop when I need a break from writing.

NaNoWriMo is coming up, and I need to start thinking about my upcoming novel. I've always had this idea in my head (well, ever since high school) about writing a novel based on the principles of electrochemistry. Since I graduated from HS about 8 billion years ago, all of my knowledge of electrochemistry has since been cast to the four winds.

But there's my parents basement, treasure trove that it is, that has my chemistry book from college-- I wish it were my chemistry textbook from HS, but those we weren't allowed to keep. (And if I remember correctly, my HS bf ensured that I had his former copy of the book, where he had left clandestine notes to me in pencil that I was to erase when I returned the book at the end of the school year. Kind of romantic.)

Either way, I figure I'll spend the next few days working on a scheme for NaNoWriMo and refreshing my principles of ionization.

Ooop! I'm late for work! Gotta run.

Why Go Home?

Sure, North Jersey has 'em. The Diners, that is. But really, they've got nothing on the Greeks and the Turks that run a Diner Mafia down here below the Burlington county line, where 295 and the Turnpike run parallel, where you can't get there from here.

I've been living in San Liberal, CA for seven years now and have just returned to my native land, South Jersey, Salem County, to be exact.

In San Liberal, "SJ" did not mean South Jersey, it meant "San Jose", and what a relief it is to be back where there isn't a Spanish name to be heard for miles... well, not until you hit Malaga on Rte. 47, and have a piss-poor root beer float there. They're probably not even aware of Malaga, Spain. Of course, in Spain they write it Málaga. How right they are.

I've also just returned from Spain where I was dicking off for about seven months. I went there in between San Liberal and South Jersey, and then the dollar tanked and, pues, here I be, starting this blog about coming home, to see if you actually can go home again.

I'm not living at home. I have an apartment in my hometown on a street that has a bad reputation. But I pay $300 a month for two bedrooms, f-in awesome. I've got a full-on study in which to write.

I'm a writer. Working on a novel. Working at a hospital in the meantime, putting that Spanish to use in the ER, translating for patients that have been through the wringer: rapes, heart attacks, demons chasing them, puppies with lasers trying to kill them... I've seen, if not it all, then I've seen a lot.

So why go home?

That's the question I'll be exploring here.

Why, indeed.