Nothing major this time. --Well, it was a move, and moves are rarely easy. (Unless you are one of those whose entire world can fit into a duffel bag.) But this move was not across country. Just up the street.

I am no longer living an odd limbo existence in a friend's basement apartment. I found my very own place in the lovely town of Wolfville. Man, that took some searching! With a big university population in this small community, many are already forced to share accommodations. The hard fact of the matter is that there are more people trying to live here than there are spaces to put them all. I figured I'd be spending the winter hunkered down in my friend's place, waiting on the spring thaw and the exodus of students returning home for the summer before I would be able to pounce upon a place of my own. I was prepared to do this, and my friend was willing to put up with my presence, cramped but alive as we both were. (Halving rents and bills has a way of smoothing many things.) But through an amazing twist of luck a place opened up and I had sunk deeply enough by then into the loam of the community to know what was going on and how to snap up the place fast as a jack-rabbit. I signed a one year lease.

I rented a van, (smaller than the truck I'd used in my cross country haul), and spent a couple of days driving back and forth across the small town. Not having to do everything in a single trip makes packing a thing of ease, because the van is no longer by essential need, a game of Tetris. It's just a powered platform on wheels which you have for a day and a night. Mind you, it was still a hefty bit of work moving all my stuff, most of which when you add up the metric tons and divide, consists of boxes upon boxes of Thieves & Kings trade paperbacks. --One of the winning aspects about my new place is that the basement provides ample storage for a small publishing venture like mine. That it is in the basement of another building across the street from where I actually live, while odd, is of minor concern. Hefting a box or two every now and again through the ice and snow somehow seems like a welcome piece of adventure for the coming winter.

Now, I've never lived on my own before. I've always, all my years, lived shoulder to shoulder with either family members or room mates. --Small pressers like yours truly, (when they live in huge metropolitan centers), can't usually afford to live by themselves, and to be honest I've only rarely felt the need to complain. I have always quite enjoyed living with others; when it's good, it's very good. I have learned how to cook a wide variety of foods in dozens of amazing ways. I've expanded my circles of knowledge through whole worlds of books and new perspectives on life, through conversations over week-end breakfasts, over late night dinners in the back yard. I would never have discovered such a vast map of treasures without so many living companions eager to share. And I have learned! I have learned how to live along side a host of different personalities as well as their relatives and friends. I have become a veritable social worker! Indeed, much of the well-roundedness I claim for myself I can directly attribute to living with people who began as strangers. Of course, this manner of living will always provide its own brand of stress and strain. Its own unique lessons. Heck, it was enough to drive me to despair a few times, but in the end one comes away stronger and better prepared to face the world, one's survival instinct and laughter sharpened to a razor's edge on experience. Still, there is a time for everything, and the time for me to live on my own has finally come.

Interesting observations. . .

I have never been able to 'expand' before. If you have lived in cramped quarters, you know what I mean, and you also know that I don't just mean having the ability to declare without argument or consideration which direction the toilet paper unfurls, or where the temperature is set, or which way the chairs must always face. It is all of this too, but I am talking about more. I am talking about essence! The essence of one's spirit being able to fill a space without contest or constraint, and being able to stand within that marvelous, unified universe of 'self' and feel as though the static, for the first time ever, has been shut off. --Finally tuning into the station of one's soul.

I have never really felt fully at rest or peace in my own home before. I have never been able to exhale all the way and then inhale again nothing but the atmosphere of my own presence. (And no, I don't mean my 'smell', but in a way I do!). In any case, this was unexpected and strange to me. A revelation. --As my friend unrolled the decorated wall hanging which had been taken down to make room for my boxes in his basement apartment, the sense of his space opened up in a way which was quite astonishing.

"Ahh!" I said, blinking in awe, his earthy air flowing into the room. "I can feel your place grow wide again! Our lives have been jostling one another all this time, never allowing either of us to be fully!" This observation came to me in a rush even as the 'feel' of the basement settled cool and deep around us, recovering its old self.

"Yes!" he enthused. "And you'll feel that as well when you get yourself settled into your place." He had not been able to explain it properly before. It's something you have to sense for yourself, I guess.

Things my apartment has:

1. The big brown and grey office desk my father found at a garage sale for twenty-five dollars and put in my bedroom when I was fifteen years old. It was built sometime during the seventies when offices were grim and serious places where people smoked and secured contracts with big clients and felt satisfied that the world would never change and that everybody would always be rich and have two cars and a big color television set. My desk is made from the same heavy-gauge steel everything in the seventies was made out of. My desk is sturdier than some of today's disposable automobiles, I think. It would win at smash-up derbies. And I have written every word of every story I have ever written since then sitting at this desk. It travels with me when I move and though it shows signs of wear, it is nonetheless as firm and solid as the day it was built. --Quite unlike those sagging desks people buy today from discount furniture stores where the favored construction material is particle board; sawdust and glue formed into planks designed to lose their shape after two years so that you must return to buy another desk or cabinet or whatever. Such desks look sorry indeed at roadside garage sales. You wouldn't even want to take one of those home for free, and that's the whole idea, I think. Everything has become disposable these days. But my desk endures.

And, in a very curious way, it is quite mine. --If we had ever been at war for domination, then I have won, but I don't think it was a fight at all. Quite simply, over the years, this piece of inanimate furniture, now scratched and dented and worn from conducting the flow of so much creative energy, has become completely infused with my character and my own personal story. It has seen me grow up from a wirey, sun browned teen, all the while sitting squarely, solidly through my young-adult plights and adventures. It has hosted all the various writing machines where I have poured my million thoughts. This desk laughs with me on the days when I am happy. I can hear it. It will never return to a grim office. Dents and scratches are not welcome in such places.

2. My drafting board. Made from pieces cut out of a single sheet of 4' x 8' plywood, with almost no scrap left over. It was built reasonably well given that I was a hackneyed teen. --I drilled rows of holes into the two wide legs so that the table height could be adjusted up and down by un-bolting and then re-bolting at different altitudes. --A blunt and basic system, which means it is also a strong and unbreakable system. --If it worked, that is, which it does not. I was 19 years old and so anxious to be sitting at my new drawing table, that I failed to drill all the holes as accurately as I might have. Consequently, they don't line up properly at every notch. Go up three inches, and only two of the four bolts fit. Go down six inches, and now the other two bolts fit, but not the first two. In fact, the only configuration where all the bolt holes line up together is, luckily enough, at just the perfect height for me, thus the remaining twenty eight mis-matched holes have never been anything more than a curiosity. So long as I draw pictures, my drafting board will never languish on a roadside with a masking tape price tag, and it will certainly never accommodate a shorter or taller person than myself with the same comfort it provides me on a near daily basis. Like my writing desk, my drafting table is an extension of my spirit. It was made for me alone.

3. My artwork cabinet. Also big and also heavy. Like my drafting board, made by me for me. Like my desk and my drafting board, it is an absolute terror to move. Paper of all things in this world is the most deceptive. You pick up a sheet of paper, and it is weightless. You pick up a book and it presents nothing more than a comfortable, proper relationship with gravity. But when you put together the hundreds of sheets of paper which one needs in my profession. . . The pen may be be mightier than the sword, but it is the paper which carries the battle! The deluge! The nine hundred or so pages and paintings which make up the original artwork for Thieves & Kings, all on heavy stock, is a monster to move! And on top of that are hundreds more pages of half-finished drawings, sketches, plans and doodles. . . I break the art cabinet down into pieces each time I move. It would be quite impossible to shift otherwise, so incredibly heavy as it is. I unscrew all the screws and pull the sliding shelves and side panels apart, I move them a bit at a time, each geologic strata of plywood-protected artwork a delicate tonnage in my arms. And I must carry each of them myself. Friends and movers are not allowed. If any piece of that were to come crashing, spilling across pavement or front lawn, it must be me alone who bears the responsibility of it.

4. Books, books and more books. Tall shelves filled with comics I liked and kept, big picture books I use for drawing reference, and books of text and fiction. Also stacks upon stacks of mail-order stock. They line one whole wall. Cardboard and manilla under a sixty watt bulb take on a warm, golden color. Like all things made from trees, cardboard is pleasing.

5. Chairs, a bed, clothes, and other stuff. Tools. A drill. A statue of Soracia which Tara made for me when she was only twenty and I was twenty-five. Some lamps and other sundry items which come and go, some of which I love, and some of which I am merely on friendly terms with.

I have no television or VCR. I don't mind this at all.

Things I am doing:

1. Working and wrestling to meet the deadline for issue #43.

2. Coming up with new stories to tell at a yet to be established story teller's night in town with a few other story tellers I have met since having moved here. We are all quite enthusiastic about this! We will perform at the local coffee shop or at the library once a month. Maybe twice. There will be live musical accompaniment as well, if all goes according to plan. I must brush up on my public speaking voice!

3. Writing other new stories which I think may end up being something more, but which I do not want to say anything else about in case it turns into one of those eternally on the back-burner projects, never finished, all but forgotten. Although. . . It calls to me even as I am working and fretting to meet the deadline for issue #43. . .

In this new country bachelor apartment, ('country' because it is bigger and could fit one and a half city bachelor apartments, kitchen and all), I have things working nicely. I look forward to all the fictions I will be able to breathe life into, uninterrupted, without blaring televisions or distracting room mates and their swirling lives competing for space with my own. I have certainly absorbed the liquid essence of enough stories and dramas over the last ten years or so to fully fuel my endeavors well into the future. My mind is full to bursting! It is time, at last to exhale deeply, all the way I think for the first time since I was a child. . .

-Mark

November 5th, 2003
Wolfville, Nova Scotia