I’d rather get fisted than ever move again.

Maybe that’s not saying much, but you know what I mean. The packing and cleaning and scrubbing and hundreds of dollars at Target and other people’s curly hairs and shit-splattered toilets and driving trucks with blind spots bigger than first downs and fights with my wife about pictures being level and my dog freaking out, change for him like the most potent of Ex-Lax capsules.

But like most of my life, maybe this is an issue of perception. Maybe it’s me seeing everything as shitty, as an inconvenience to my precious time. Half empty. That kind of thing.

And here’s the thing: I love our new place. It’s in the city. It’s in a neighborhood with store signs in Spanish (rapidly gentrifying, but more diverse than I’ve ever lived in). I can walk to work. There’s not an Applebee’s or Chili’s in sight. I saw my neighbor’s left tit—big bitch of a girl, rocking a cut-off t-shirt with no bra, reaching to get her mail, hello left tit out of the armpit sleeve, a CD sized nipple a pleasant afternoon surprise.

Things are good.

But Comcast can’t come for a week and this makes me lonely.

It’s perception, I know it. For example, over the Fourth of the July, my wife, brother-in-law, and I sat around bored as fuck. It was hot. We had no money and don’t drink and we live in a landlocked state and have no real friends to speak of. We watched men eat hotdogs. I wanted it to be the Fifth so I could go to work. We decided to go to the dog park.

My wife recorded a video of us in the car with her phone. We drank Rock Stars and had Kid Cudi’s new song playing and I ate my psych meds and we drove. The dog park was a disaster. Hot. My dog walked around the perimeter shitting every ten feet (perhaps sensing a relocation was on the horizon). The whole thing was miserable. I salvaged the night a little by finding a clip on Redtube of a woman who looked like my tenth grade American History teacher getting DPed with a yardstick in her hand.

The thing is, my wife showed me the video of our car ride the next day.

It looked amazing.

It looked like we were the coolest motherfuckers ever, having the best time, pounding tall boys, eating pills, so happy, in love with each other, our lives, our Nation’s birth. It looked like a rap video if rap videos were of white people and dogs and energy drinks.

This, of course, brought me back to the shit people have been telling me forever: It’s all about perception. It’s half-full. It’s blessings in disguise. It doesn’t matter that it’s rainy, the burning and itching is an excuse to get a physical, every rejection is an opportunity to improve a piece.

Fuck my throat with that shit.

I know it’s true. I know life is better not hating it. I know there’s work I can do that puts me in a better state of mind, one of gratitude. I know I am a happier person when I do this work.

So here’s what I meant at the start of this post—I’m so psyched to be cleaning the toilet of our new place. I love the ring of explosive diarrhea that was missed by some unnamed assailant. I love the growing opportunity that hanging pictures affords my wife and I. And creeping around the neighborhood in the Subaru late at night looking for unlocked dumpsters? Yup, love that shit too. And lastly, I’m so grateful for a week without the devil of TV—the loose-stool pants of my dog and the loving calls of my wife to move the fucking dresser are the only sounds I need to break in a new apartment, to make me feel at home, the loneliness slipping away with each passing second.