Growing up I never stayed in one place for too long.

My mother’s father was in the Syndicate (Texas Mafia) and this made her neurotically peripatetic as an adult; my father was my father, and stayed generally where you left him.

But with my Mom it was a new place every year: Lubbock, where I lived in the bedroom where my father and uncle grew up. Midland, where my first best-friendships were formed.

The El Paso suburb Dell City, where I was judged a demonic risk and my mother and I were chased out of town in the middle of the night by evangelicals. Phoenix, whence we fled, and where my memories essentially begin; where we joined more religions than anywhere else I had lived. Albuquerque and its suburb Bernalillo, where I was as miserable as I would ever be in life. Then back to Texas, where I attended Robert E. Lee (!) High School in Midland, Texas, and then the University of Houston until 1999.

I continued the tradition as my own adulthood began: I lived in Houston from college to 2001, then a different apartment every year until 2007.

In 2007 I moved into the two-story garage apartment on the giant lot with no accompanying house — just me and a giant tree over a rolling lawn and some Adirondack chairs and a broken old stone wall that looked like a passage to somewhere magical.

It was on the East Side of Austin at the very edge of what was still considered dangerous, which is to say ungentrified. One nearby corner was in fact infamous for its drug trade but I never saw anything untoward nor did I endure anything particularly stressful beyond taxi drivers needing to be coaxed to take me to my neighborhood at night.

Three years is a long time, after 29 discrete years spent in various places and dramatic circumstances. I learned certain practices and rhythms of the householder I’d never had occasion to learn before. Which curious feral cats were which, as they grew. What to do when a stranger yells up into your window one night, looking to sell sex — I hired her to clean my house instead. How to have a washer and dryer, what that’s like.  What it’s like to see the ceiling paint peel in the bathroom after years of hot showers — signs of life, lived.

I learned also how to quit a job that sucks — in this case, most memorably, moderating the TWoP boards which had become less fun as they fell out of fashion interner-wide, and writing about Ugly Betty. The idea of turning down money had never been an option until now, until settling down, and it was a pretty sticky idea. But I don’t tend to look back.

It wasn’t as if I intended to live, wed and die in that tiny house — it was just a kind of inertia, a “not being fired from jobs” sort of lull in the storm, that kept me there. I wanted to know what it was like to live somewhere, so I did. It was nice. My bed was downstairs, surrounded by books, and my life was lived upstairs, surrounded by windows.

As I remember it now, on days my mood was dark, birds would fly into the windows, thudding against them. On days my mood was good the skies were clear, and I could watch my neighbors from very high up. Or maybe vice versa, maybe the same weather or electromagnetism that would send the birds crashing into my windows was throwing my thoughts and feelings against internal walls.

(It is real that the day I was fired from Gawker, I saw one of my lucky cardinals take a beating and sit panting in my next home’s breezeway, a little blood on the sidewalk behind him. I knew I was getting fired within the hour, and so I was. I was burnt out for a million reasons, and it was amicable, but still: a firing. And an omen.)

Four or five years before that particular augury, I was told the two-story was going to market, on an indistinct timeline. In a reflexive coping mechanism, I began looking for new apartments, as almost a full-time job.

When I found the next place, it all fell into place with an ease that I associate with witchcraft: A few phone calls, a meeting or two, and suddenly my landlord on the two-story was calling to ask why he was getting reference calls from my new landlord. “What should I tell them, that you forget to pay the rent nine months out of twelve?” He was a good chap and took it well, all things considered.

The next place, then, my eleven-year home.

I tend to think in these terms: Fourteen years at TWoP means I’d given it one-third of my life when it ended. I was in love with A from ages 19 to 38, half my life. The Casita therefore represents one quarter of my life.

It’s a curious and beautiful property. Half its square footage is outdoors. Two living spaces connected by a covered breezeway, wrapped around a peaceful courtyard covered in honeysuckle and vine. One room the kitchen/living area, where I worked, and the other my bedroom, where I slept.

Through TWoP and Gawker and Screener and Facebook, I lived there, through the gay werewolves I lived there, and until about a month ago I was headed into year twelve with no sense that I would soon be changing everything about my life.

After Screener was closed down and bought by the hideous archgoblins of Sinclair — what I preferred to think of as a pronounced sabbatical, rather than a jobless time — I offered to AirBnb the place on weekends in order to pay the rent, and ended up getting a fair amount of money off the whole deal. Enough to live on.

But where did I go, you are asking. Well, all my friends have kids now and can no longer have what we used to consider “fun.” So the best way to see them was to visit, which turned naturally into overnights, which then became standard weekend visits. Couch surfing became my main social outlet. I suppose this means that in some small way my friends were subsidizing my AirBnb rental, but I gladly would have paid for room and board, if asked. Turns out that’s not how friendship works!

I also got into camping, which is another post altogether, but was a Pandora’s Box of personal revelations — I don’t mind sleeping in the wet or the cold, as it turns out. I simply am not bothered by those things, which is a drastic rewrite of my character as I understood it.

Part of this too is that bizarre thing we’ve talked about before — the way a real depression takes you down to your studs and gives you at least the illusion of choice as to who you’re going to be when you come back to life. I was no longer a writer, or a person who hated camping, or indeed a person perplexed by pet ownership — and these were all conscious choices.

When you’re nothing, the roads presented to you are nearly infinite.

Running an AirBnb is instructive in a lot of ways and gross in a minimal amount of ways but one thing I will now always be able to do, one power I now have based on condensing the vapor of nuance, is being able to spot by his walk the type of man I call a “Pull-Out King,” which I won’t go into further except I knew I’d be doing extra laundry when the Pull-Out King and his lady were done with their stay. There’s an oxen-ish look to them, the broad strain of their backs, a barely contained rage in their faces and gaits.

I learned the cuter fact that men who shed their undies down to the bottom of the bed, under the sheets, sometimes just leave them there. It’s cozy and funny to think about, a nation of Porky-Pigging young urban professionals. I learned two earrings are worth the hassle of mailing them back to you, but one earring is not. I learned not everybody knows how to light a boiler pilot, including myself in the new place.

Anyway. Then the Pandemic hit and travel was no longer an option for all but the Pull-Outiest of Pull-Out Kings, who by now were wearing their masks below the nose if at all. I informed my landlord the AirBnb was off the table, I’d be making other payment arrangements for the rent, and that more formally I would be getting a dog.

I started with a hedgehog, of course, to stave off my desire for a dog. But soon enough I found myself flicking through Craigslist looking for mutts or surrenders, late at night when I should have been asleep. And then, much like the lease for the house I’d spent so much time in growing — another way to say “quarter of my life” is to say the near-entirety of my thirties and into my mid-forties — suddenly there was a dog,

Zooey the Malinois Belgian Shepherd/Corgi Mix. The first thing she did was make it clear David Hedgehogg better find a new place to live.

Then comes the Ballad of the Front Gate, which I cannot go into again, but represented not just the desideratum of a born wanderer, not just the green light across the Bay to East Egg or whatever, but something deeper and more complex.

A dog is half best-beloved companion, half unknowable alien being, and Zooey’s alien-ness lies in her innate certainty that she knows best about certain things. I’m convinced the Gate took up her idle thoughts as well as her more active plans and schemes; watching her kick in her sleep it was always easy to imagine the magnificent Gate through which she must be triumphantly prancing, the better to sniff the neighborhood’s particulars and, to be perfectly honest with each other, run headlong directly into traffic for the sole purpose I think of giving people heart attacks.

Homegirl has only escaped at the new house once, and while it is quite a tale it’s not what we’re here to revisit. The new house is a little spooky, a little witchy and getting moreso as I make it mine. There is a theme of antlers — rabbits with antlers, and girls; shelves, clocks — running through the art and decor which should not surprise you.

There are creaking wooden floors, and a staircase up to a tiny loft with a skylight, and books everywhere you look somehow. There’s the tiniest kitchen I’ve ever seen — even the realtor called it “a kitchen for a doll’s house” — and a bathroom with a tub, which I haven’t had in eleven years.

I haven’t received my first electricity bill so I don’t know how “impossible to cool” it is yet. There are gas heaters in two rooms I’ll not likely ever deal with. I’m drowning in used cardboard, with about six boxes left to unpack and nowhere to put them just yet. All of which is to say, I’m very grateful for a lot of things — but currently, it’s the roof over my head, and that in turn is thanks in part to: you.

So thank you.