I walked into the front room of the house. WeeRocket was on Stacey’s cellphone.

Ro: Yeah, so I just went poopy… so that’s good… Okay… g’bye!

He slapped the phone shut like a pro, and dropped it on the couch. He walked past me headed to the kitchen saying, “That was Jay’s mom. She’s still sick.”

I guess three year olds gotta talk about something.

—

Stacey and I watched the first episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm last night. Yawn. We’ll be sending it back on Monday with the remaining three episodes unwatched.

—
August 31^st was my 10 year anniversary of arriving in Atlanta. I completely forgot. Largely because I was at the beach.

Saturday, August 31, 1996. The first meal I had was at Fellini’s Pizza on Peachtree. I had checked into my 1 star motel in Peachtree City (near my first job at Panasonic Car Audio) and made a beeline to the city for lunch. I did not know a soul (or so I thought) in the entire metro area (excepting my college roommate’s parents lived in Roswell).

I had gotten nothing but bad advice about Atlanta prior to arriving, and it continued for a month or two after living here:

1. “Check out Buckhead. That’s probably where you’ll be spending most of your free time.”

2. “Vinings is a really cool place to live.”

3. “You know an awesome place to go? Stone Mountain.”

and so on…

I can probably pinpoint that moment sitting outside eating pizza as the inflection point of the darkest period of my adult life, financially and emotionally. I had had to borrow some money from my parents to get to Atlanta. F***ing Citibank Visa refused to extend my (then maxed out) $1500 credit limit so I could buy gas and other sundries, even though I offered to fax them the paperwork showing I was starting a new job as an engineer. Amazingly, they still maintain the belief that I would become a Citibank customer again with their incessant junk mail.

In the previous couple weeks, I had been cheated on and dumped by my girlfriend of 3.5 years, my car windows had been smashed out just prior to a rainstorm (contributing to the maxed-outed-ness of my credit card), and I’d been unemployed for three months since getting my Masters at Tulane.

Within a year, I was closing on my first home in Midtown, performing regularly at Dad’s Garage, and designing movie theater sound systems. Life’s continued since on a not-too-bumpy ascent.

I gotta go to Fellini’s sometime soon.