Ripley repaired the damage to my bathroom wall on Monday. She also took the liberty of cleaning the rest of my bathroom; turns out out my shower door is clear. Who knew? I'm once again considering painting the bathroom walls, and Ripley brought along paint chips in various shades of green and blue. With my landlord's permission, I'm also tossing around the idea of asking my mom's boyfriend Cal how much it would cost to have hardwood floors installed. (It's what he does.) I think what I'm doing is trying to take back my sense of home from the horrible fucking people upstairs who have taken away the sense of solace it once provided. Worth a shot, anyway.

Had lunch today with Horehound, who literally lives down the street from my office. Terribly convenient.

Having just returned with the car from Sacramento, I was in the customer service section of the Circuit City at Van Ness and Post when the earthquake hit last night. There was a rumble and a shake, but beyond the hooks full of gift cards behind the counters swaying for another minute, it didn't feel like much. To Vash in Oakland, and especially Ripley in South San Francisco, it felt much more scary and intense.

I drove my condemned Neon to work on Sunday, since the gallery in which Vash was participating in Open Studios was kind enough to be located literally next door to NakedSword. The gallery was on one side of my building, and I parked on the other. We were going to be going in different directions that evening, plus it seemed like as good a time as any to give my car the cleaning it so desperately needs before being dismantled. Not to make it shiny, but to get rid of all the garbage and stuff which had accumulated in the trunk and/or under the seats. I did manage to find a flash drive in a ziploc bag in the trunk, among other things.

So I was cleaning under the driver seat, leaning across the passenger seat, my left arm slightly twisted under the driver seat, and...it didn't want to come out. Huh. That wasn't so good. Tried again. Nope. My arm was stuck. Christ. I'd gotten my arm stuck under the seat of my car. Or, more specifically, the black metal wire lever thing used to scoot the seat back.

Wow. Normally I consider myself to be reasonably intelligent, perhaps slightly above average, but now I knew better. The adrenalin started pumping, panic set in, I breathed deeply, and told myself to remain calm. Which I did. I'd just been on the phone with Rimma a few minutes earlier, and my phone was still within reach. Vash wasn't too far away, and there was a good chance that she had her phone. Whether or not it was turned on or someplace she could hear it, there was no telling, but I called her anyway. She answered, and as casually as I could asked if she could please come down to the car. I chose not to mention the highly stupid predicament into which I'd gotten myself. Vash had promised herself she wasn't going to leave her post at Open Studios, but she immediately said yes.

Meanwhile, there were about a half-dozen motorcycle dudes wandering around the little alley which functioned as parking for us during the dayand as a smoking section for Popscene at night. My legs were sticking out of the car on the passenger side, and there was barely enough room for them to skooch past, but they did so quite gracefully, not asking why I was in this peculiar position. I'd never seen biker dudes in the area before, but it figured they'd be around now.

Vash appeared after a minute, and I told her as calmly as I could what had happened. I was much calmer than when I called my landlord about the neighbors drying my clothes, to be sure. After realizing that brute force wouldn't do it, we decided that lubrication was necessary (when isn't it?), and she went back inside, returning a few minutes later with a can of WD-40. Eventually we got my arm free, without needing to cause any damage other than the still-tender bruise.

It's scary to think what would have happened if my phone hadn't been nearby, or if Vash hadn't been so close by (my second plan was to call Rimma back if Vash didn't answer), or if I'd been in a more isolated area; at least I could have asked one of the inexplicably timed biker dudeds to help, however more embarrassing that would have been. They never did even ask what was going on, probably because I'm pretty good at keeping my shit together outwardly.

The great part is, having since googled the name on their logo, they totally would have been willing to able to help: not only are the violent and antisocial tendencies of bikers overhyped in general, they were the Wind & Fire Motorcycle Club, goddamned firefighters. I wasn't too far off from being a cat stuck in a tree, after all.

Probably due to various emotional stresses and insufficient sleep, I feel like I'm getting ill. However, I'm having dinner with Ripley tonight and Creepshow tomorrow through Saturday, so sickness will have to wait.

Returned home around six to discover that the upstairs neighbors had taken the liberty of moving my clothes from the washer to the dryer, and then from the dryer to the top of the dryer. This, of course, include my shirts and blouses which I drip-dry so they don't shrink, and I never touch their clothes even when they leave them sitting in the machines for days at a time. I called up the landlord and very nearly lost my shit. Got worse when I talked to him on the phone a little later; I was crying by the end and had to hang up. I'm just so tired of them pushing me around, acting like I haven't lived there for over a decade, and constantly making the worst kind of notice. They knocked on the door at one point, but we didn't answer.

We spent the night at Wonderland, and I took the train home. I hadn't planned on going home at all today since there was going to be a birthday party today, but I needed stuff for rehearsal. While I was standing at the sink, listening to rampaging upstairs and one of them turning on the washing machine in the garage, I screamed and lashed out at the wall. Left a hole. That's going to be fun to explain.

Jim, Nancy and I had a director-less rehearsal at the Dark Room this afternoon, and now I'm at Mission Creek Cafe. In spite of the fact that I got eight hours of sleep last night (which never happens at my place), I'm tired and drained and exhausted and generally fucked up. I can only hope my wits, or at least my wittiness, returns to me by Bad Movie Night tonight.