Today's been a bad day.  Blogged twice today and nothing before that for months.  A release day, though.  It's a day of letting go, today is, of dreams and forestalled plans.  Letting go of actual stuff comes first, of course. 

Already over twenty-five boxes of my things have slowly wended their way into the arterial system of the local thrift shops.  If it's good, valuable, solid stuff, it goes to the Mennonite shop.  Because the Mennonites are good, valuable, solid people.  They work hard and usually think of others before themselves.  They get furniture and warm coats.  Televisions and phones whose digits all work.  But I never see fancier electronic doo-dahs at the Mennonite store.  People yet to fully cotton to having accompaniment with their choral music have no use, it seems, for my Throwback to the '80s Master-Blaster Joystick (COMPLETE WITH 12 OF YOUR ALL-TIME FAVORITE GAMES!)  or a bass-booster for a stereo I never actually got around to purchasing.  These go to Goodwill.  Goodwill also gets all of my old kitchen items, because I feel Mennonites are domestic enough already and should probably eat out more.  Salvation Army gets nothing--not a blessed thing--from me because they once petitioned the municipal governments to allow them to accept civic funding while not having to employ gay clerks.  I stopped lecturing the bell-ringers as of last Christmas, but they still get no spoon rests or flannel jammies from my stuff larder.  This left only t-shirts from my fraternity days.  One says "Hop, Skip & Go Naked!  Delta '91." Another shows Calvin and Hobbes passed out by a keg beneath the legend "When the Load Gets Tough, the Tough Get Loaded!  Delta Study Break 1992."  I once donated a huge pile of these to the local Mennonite shop but never saw them put out for sale.  It never occurred to me that there was a censorship function to sorting people's stuff, but then I realized that in all my years of thrift trolling I'd never seen one of those truck mudflaps with a reclining nude chrome silhouette of a naked woman.  Which is a good thing.  And which probably are permanently locked in a special room with the first donated batch of my t-shirts.  So the t-shirts go to a shop called "Mercy House."  I think it's religious, too, but the "mercy" emphasis makes me think they might understand youthful fashion follies and let it slide.  If it were "Judgment House" I'd probably just bite the bullet and ship them all down to Honduras, where a friend tells me you can still run into kids wearing "BUFFALO BILLS--WORLD CHAMPIONS" t-shirts.

And next, I decided this afternoon, should be nicknames.  I have them, but none of them work anymore.

My father used to call me "Herkimer," but he never told me why.  I always assumed it was from the Old Testament, but then I moved to upstate New York and discovered it was simply the name of a village off in the country.  He doesn't know why he called me that, hasn't in years, and didn't remember that he had.  It's out.

We had to pick a nickname for ourselves in my fraternity.  Picking a nickname for yourself is ridiculous, though.  Nicknames arrive or they're earned.  So it's no wonder that my random choice--"Zeke"--never really stuck.  I won't miss it a bit.  (Though it did make the logistics of giving away the t-shirts easier.  Hawk-eyed religious communities about town are on the lookout for a drunkard named "Zeke.")

A couple of friends from my undergrad years only ever called me "Bobby," after my first middle name.  I liked it.  But they both quit the theatre for civilian life and I've not seen them in years.  I release it with fond memories but little choice.

Two other friends called me "Kip," a play on "Kilby," my second middle name.  One of them stopped speaking to me after an argument about historiographical statistics analysis--this is what we did at Cornell--and the other disappeared into the swelter of "the perfect guy" she's been dating for the last few years.  "Kip" was cute.  Playful.  It bounces away from me like a rubber ball down a staircase.

"Cheesedick," a strange moniker an old friend and I heard in a late-night screening of a terrible Charlie Sheen action film, was a term of tremendous affection between the two of us.  We promptly gave it to one another and jousted forever after that to foist it wholly onto one or the other of us.  Miles and years stalled those intentions, however, and when we use it now it's but a brief rejoinder that later has to be ruefully explained to his children under the watchful eye of his otherwise splendid wife.  I feel that when one has children it's time to hang up such appellations as they cannot be worth the grief they will invariably cause at a teacher-parent conference when it arises that young Dax has been parroting the name he heard from Daddy about the playground.  I refuse to be Cheesedick alone and thus lay it to rest beside its matching fellow.

What this really leaves is "Patchy."  The story of how the name came about needn't be told, if only because knowing how it arose is really the narrative shibboleth that separates my friends from my acquaintances.  The nickname has given me nothing but pleasure for fifteen years.  It has survived twenty-six different mailing addresses, four universities, several relationships, countless opening nights, five cars, a vote apiece for Ross Perot and Ralph Nader, and a mien that has, I think, lately grown more contemplative than the puppyish name would imply.  It's been turned into "Patch," "Patchers," "the Patchman," and mercifully briefly, "P-Funk."  If I were running out of my flaming apartment and could save only one thing it would be near the top of the list. 

But thinking of the three people who use it the most these days just makes me sad.  I could never bear to take it to a thrift shop--they would never price it high enough, no one could wear it without stretching it, and I've yet to see a section for it--but will instead, I think, place it in a sturdy shoe box--one from my Chucks would be good--and tuck it deep inside the winnowing detritus that remains in my increasingly spacious guest room.  Perhaps in a few years I could look at it one autumn afternoon, one of those days that feels hopeful without reaching joy and yet sad without indulging moroseness.  But for now I wrap it in old funny papers, lay it lengthwise in the All-Stars box, and tuck in the cardboard tab.

We'll see--for the first time in a long time--how "Patrick" treats me.

        Next up for sorting but never to be blogged about:  the cabinet of commemorative coffee mugs.