now that my ladder's gone

This entry is brought to you by William Butler Yeats, who as an old man wrote:
...Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
(read the rest of The Circus Animals' Desertation at http://www.epicureaders.com/poems_apr00.html)

After a while, home just becomes the hell you want to escape from, at whatever price. That's how it is around here. In less than 48 hours, we will sign the papers and this beautiful house, which I have loved like a person, will no longer be our house. (Did slave owners cry, I wonder, when they sold their favorite slaves for what seemed like perfectly reasonable reasons? Can you love something like a person when it is, in the end, an asset?) The worst part is, I don't care anymore. All day, piling up trash and hauling it to the landfill, sorting, packing, discarding, plus home repairs in the middle of rainfall that gradually turned torrential, turned to hail, and finally produced thunder and lightning. It was like "This Old House" meets "King Lear." (The ripeness is all.)
So much stuff, the emblems of so many postponed decisons that I am disgusted with myself. I want to be somewhere else, leading another sort of life. In Brooklyn, leading an orderly, calm life free of home repairs in hail storms and reminders of the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. For instance.