Well, this is it, isn’t it. The last day the Bleat can be assumed to be broadcast from Jasperwood. Wednesday is the First of the Month. Wednesday I get my key.

It has been five months in the making. It began, of course, with The Letter, delivered and read on a clammy misty morning in a chair outside the Hutte in Walberswick, heart hammering, brain exploding, sparks everywhere, a spike in the sternum. Dear Johning me while away in England. Such a lousy thing to do. I mean, it’s not as if I was storming Normandy the next day and this would really douse my spirits, but still.

The good thing: the extraordinary amount of sturm AND drang has attenuated time, so the days haven’t galloped as they often do at my age. The bad thing: same. It has been five years in five months. Each has had their own mood and characteristic, underlaid with the same decision to be Nice, and be Good, and keep the mood in the house Normal. It has driven me to the point of madness, because I’ve lived a bifurcated life: cheery good-mornings, casual chats through the day, dinner - cooked by me, as always - with earnest inquiries about her work, evening conversations, a hug goodnight. One must pretend to ignore the situation to get along, because otherwise you’re just . . . screaming at being dunked in this pit of shite every day. Everything normal until the day when I slap my hands on my thighs and say “welp, gotta go move my boxes to my new apartment. Probably won’t be home for dinner.”

I will not, in fact, be home for dinner on Wednesday. We used the phrase “fend for myself” whenever common dinner didn’t happen because someone had plans. She’s going to have to fend for herself this week. I don’t think I’ll be here for Friday pizza.

Damned sure I won’t be here for Friday cheese.

I debated doing that last Friday. I remember I said, last month, “only five of these left,” and she made a sudden sighing sound of sadness. Well, that’s how it goes. In the morning the coffee maker will not be set up with your particular K-cup ready to go, something I did every night before going to bed. When she wants to turn on music for work, it’ll be that tinny Echo, because I’ve repurposed the HomePods for the new place. Yes, I took the big HomePod in the kitchen. Was that petty? I took all the home-automation bulbs that light up the house on schedule, because I need them in the new place; you’ll have to turn everything on by hand. Was that petty? I’ll take the Apple TV in a few weeks, and you’ll have to watch on your iPad, I suppose. Will that be petty? That show you really like is coming back, and it’s on Apple, and you’re on the family plan because of course you are, but why should I pay for you to be on that? Is it petty to take you off the family plan when you broke the family?

By the middle of the month I’ll be taking the dog. Miss him? I suppose you do.

When it’s put like this is sounds punitive. I don’t know how much I’m supposed to bend backwards. Back of my scalp touching the pavement, perhaps.

It hit me last week when I was looking through the fridge for dinner material: last week I bought something for a meal I’m not going to make. Habit. Twenty-five years of habit. Now I take that bundle of sticks and bring it down on my knee, hard.

PS: Also I don’t want to do any of this

LATER I went to a mattress store today. It's a showroom for online brands, which somehow brings it all full circle. I wanted to check out the Nectar, but it felt ilke I was sinking in wet cement. I had not intended to try a Puffy, since it sounds too soft and too cute. But the Puffy was just want I wanted: good sink with immediate firmness. I felt like a salesman saying it. I felt like someone who'd been reading 47 mattress review sites.

The store said they had the same places as online. They did not have the same price as online. The website pricing was rather ridiculous, though: give us your email for a coupon that cuts $1,400 off the price! Oh COME ON. You might as well say the mattress costs $375,000, but if you sign up for texts you get a discount code that shaves $373,500 off the total. The online store, unlike the brixenmortar store threw in two pillows - actual throw pillows, I suppose - so that sealed the deal.

When I was finished I drove the backroads of Edina to the gym, where I discovered I did not have my Airpods. A look at my phone's location app showed their current location: on a Puffy mattress 14 minutes away. Sigh. Finished up, returned to the store, got the Airpods, then drove home thinking about the rebooting of the Diner. I'll be doing it from the counter of the Hip New Place. For the first time: live from an actual counter.

I got thinking about some old Diner tropes and plots and references, and one name defied retrieval. I could see the name. I could hear it. Then it snapped into place: our old friend, the failed early rockabilly / country guy from the Sun records era. Bufus Parsley. (Link goes to a 1997 fan site.)

An idea appeared. Bufus, I thought, is due for a comeback tour. But we'll get to that later.

When making dinner Monday night I noticed that ETBF had bought some dishes at Costco we have once a month or so, and I askd her: why are you shopping as if I'll be living here? She said, correctly, that she has to eat too - but I think it's the same autopilot. Everything being normal right up until it's not. It's normal right now. And then the new arrangement - he's here, he's not - becoms the new normal, for a fortnight. It's going to be peculiar to have a home here and a home there, the former intact until the estate sale, the latter gradually filling up, but a place I go to after I wake somewhere else. The more I think about it the more I realize that April will be a trial in its own way.

Now we're down to rugs. Have to have a rug. Something to tie the room together, you know. The usual drill: looks nice on the website, half the reviews complain it's thin as a Saturday newspaper, and arrived with folds and creases that will not even out, and the non-slip backing isn't, and the colors were different, but the dog seems to like to throw up on it and it washes clean because it's pretty much plastic. I wonder if there are two or three people who order everything from Amazon and are disgusted by 93% of their purchases and spend hours writing bitter reviews. I confess I have added to their number, trying to warn the world about the egg whisks that dumped black oil all over everything. I hope I made an impact. I'm sure I saved one person the trouble. We'll never meet. Life is like that.

It’s 1937.

I wonder if they took the name from the camera, as a sign of forward-thinking high-tech modernity.

		Well, anyone hear much from the Assyrian empire these days?

We need a new Uncle Sam!

		Hey, who’s this Professor Clyde, anyway? What does this egghead know? Clyde Raymond Miller (July 7, 1888 – August 29, 1977) was an associate professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University who co-founded the Institute for Propaganda Analysis with Edward A. Filene and Kirtley F. Mather in 1937. Yes, you are correct about Kirtley’s parentage. A descendent of Increase and Cotton.

		The what?
		A bit of slang whose meaning eludes us today.

		Really?

Not entirely.

But mostly.

		Poor kitty. Wonder why it didn’t make the front page!

The Elevator today:

Well, imagine that. What a boon

Just mail in your vest!

Bell-Ans. What is that?

Sodium bicarbonate. So many companies made this stuff. They all had their own claims. I’m thinking that people stuck with a particular brand because they remembered the time when it worked, once.

What a journey this must have been.

Info:

SS Belgenland was a transatlantic ocean liner and cruise ship that was launched in Belfast, Ireland in 1914 and scrapped in Scotland in 1936. She was renamed Belgic in 1917, reverted to Belgenland in 1923, and renamed Columbia in 1935.

A Harland & Wolff ship, as you might imagine from its Belfast origin. Scrapped in 1936. This ad celebrates its first journey around the planet.

Corns just seemed like a much bigger problem back then.

		Personally, I’d chose a product name that didn’t sound so . . . pointed and painful.

That will do.

Wednesday Noon: Here we go.