a slight­ly sur­re­al day

Okay. I ful­ly accept that I have, in the past (all right, also fair­ly recent­ly) made some inter­net-pur­chas­ing errors. Not seri­ous errors. But some­how the cat lit­ter I order dou­bles, or even triples in quan­ti­ty before it arrives. Not that we won’t use it, but still, stor­ing 40 kilos of cat lit­ter in a rel­a­tive­ly small flat can pose unusu­al logis­ti­cal issues. My friend Becky can relate to this, once hav­ing acci­den­tal­ly ordered some­thing like ten years’ worth of guinea pig bed­ding all at once. Fair enough.

How­ev­er, after my lat­est screwup (don’t count on using the guest bath­room any­time soon unless you want to share it with a life­time’s worth of Klumpfen­bildende Katzen­streu), I thought I was fin­ished. This morn­ing, unac­count­ably, arrived YET anoth­er enor­mous­ly heavy box. “Cat lit­ter,” John said suc­cinct­ly. “But how? I haven’t ordered any,” I protest­ed. “You have no idea,” he replied, and that’s prob­a­bly true. “You know what you’ve done?” he asked. “No, go ahead, what have I done?” “You’ve enrolled your­self in the Lit­ter of the Month Club. This month it’s “Kiwi and Vanil­la,” next month “Pine Nuts and Sun­dried Toma­toes.” You’re done for.”

As if that was­n’t enough, then we turn on the news as we’re get­ting dressed to go see a (yet anoth­er) house. In Ham­mer­smith. John sud­den­ly said, “Wait, that’s where we’re going.” And it was, trag­i­cal­ly and odd­ly enough, the same street where a rare and vicious mur­der occurred yes­ter­day after­noon. Hmmm. “Well, it can’t hurt to look at the house,” John said.

So as we’re approach­ing it this after­noon, we come upon an enor­mous traf­fic jam, and tele­vi­sion vans, snap­py-look­ing pre­sen­ters, and the loca­tion itself, crowd­ed with bou­quets of flow­ers (why don’t the peo­ple donate the flow­ers to the hos­pi­tal which doubt­less tried to resus­ci­tate the vic­tim? much more use­ful than lying on a pave­ment). “Lordy, it’s not even a block away from the house we’re see­ing,” I said. Dou­ble hmm­mm. The estate agent met us at the house and said regret­ful­ly, “I can’t tell you how upset the sell­er is. Today, of all days, just when her house is going on the mar­ket.” A slight dis­arrange­ment of rel­a­tive bad luck, I would say, con­sid­er­ing that an actu­al per­son had died, as com­pared with her poten­tial drop in prop­er­ty val­ue. But such is Lon­don real estate these days. That sell­er prob­a­bly does find her mis­for­tune to be quite on a par with mur­der. It reminds me in a sick way of the line in “When Har­ry Met Sal­ly,” when Har­ry won­ders why the New York Times nev­er thought to com­bine the obit­u­ar­ies with the real estate sec­tion… “Mr. Smith leaves a wife, three chil­dren, and a love­ly two-bed­room duplex on Cen­tral Park West with a fire­place…” All suc­cumbs to the irre­press­ible ener­gy of real estate.

And it was a nice house, too. A real fix­er-upper, but with poten­tial. John has all the vision for this sort of project, while I pre­fer to sit back and imag­ine our first din­ner par­ty in the kitchen that as yet does­n’t exist.

Ah well, it’s Fri­day, we’re all togeth­er, and after a good night’s sleep I’m sure all will look brighter. And hey, maybe tomor­row will bring “Parme­san and Ched­dar” lit­ter. You nev­er know.