Packing the Slappa. Maybe more excitable about this than I have room to be. I warned Tom today, as I maybe should have already: I’m coming back Friday, and if you’re not done it will cost me $200 to change the return ticket. He seemed to take that into consideration, saying “Ooooh, I hope he (the contractor) can finish by then”, meaning Friday, when I shall return. I actually added an extra day to my time in Tampa specifically because he said 3 days would be more than enough time. So I gave him 4, really 5 since I won’t likely be back until Friday in the P.M.

I decided on the Slappa, which I’ve barely used since I got it about a year ago. It’s a monstrous laptop bag designed for 18+ inch laptops like mine. But I did not get it intending to use it for that big fat laptop, except possibly to get it from here to the library. I just thought it looked like a good around town bag to back up the Jack Spade bag to which I most frequently return. The Slappa bag, I thought, could even replace the vaunted Jack Spade bag, which has as its sole problem being just a sliver too small.

Alas, the Slappa bag is just too Marmaduke for everyday around town use. I kind of regretted the $115 expense, although I have to say that’s a damn good price for what a beautiful bag it is. So if I can manage to actually use it for this and future trips it will pay for itself in saving me the $25 baggage check fee.

My dad used to travel with nothing more than a briefcase. He stayed 2 or 3 nights here, and we traveled to Tennessee for 2 or 3 nights, and all he ever had with him was his briefcase. He said ti wasn’t so much that he liked wearing the same underpants for days straight. He just didn’t trust baggage check at airports.

I have been packing this bag for three days now, not because I need three days to decide what to bring but because I am thinking of this packing job as a template for future things, as if I will be doing more of this in the coming months. More going places for short trips, as cheaply as possible. This jaunt is already over budget but that’s ok. I planned it relatively late, but that’s just how circumstances arose.

Originally planning to use the Samsonite I opened that old hard-shell beast to a bit of melancholy. Scraps of papers and such from Philadelphia, the last time that suitcase saw any use, fell out. I guess that was August, 2015. That was a fated, almost fateful trip, which I think about almost every day. I would have just gone home from the 30th Street Station if I could have. But we made the best of it, and had some good times. I referred earlier to how uneasy it was seeing the Macy’s Wanamaker organist. Yeah, there was that. But the earrings we got with some online shopping $10 gift card were cool, even if they fell apart.

The first scrap of paper that fell out of the Samsonite was a 1:00am GrubHub order for a cheeseburger and (I think) chipped beef. The other stuff included pens and unused notepads from the Holiday Inn and postcards from McGillin’s Old Ale House, a place which unlike other things from that trip I have absolutely no memory.

…

My new love is Schubert’s Sonata #16, D. 845, in A Minor. I’ve known it about two-thirds since high school but never got all the way through what I now know to be its magnificent theme and variations, and even its almost programmatic finale. It’s just so fucking good. The ease of the composer’s craft is enviable, and inimitable. You hear lifetimes lived in these pages, in these altercations among key signatures.

Going to try and do something that civilized Tampanians consider absolutely batshit insane. I am going to take the bus. That’s right, from walking distance of my old house I’ll take a bus non-stop to walking distance of the Ybor City Historic District, where I expect to meet Stephanie and her husband, friends from Sunswick who moved to Tampa and got married there a few years ago. That will be hilarious. I took a bus one time in Tampa, from home direct to the University of Tampa, an approximately 2-hour trek that my mother refused to acknowledge because she thought buses were for winos and indigent derelicts. I don’t remember anything weird about that bus ride except that no one looked at me or said anything. I was in high school, and in those days I expected that when I entered a room as an unfamiliar smiling face everyone would be like “Heeeey, who’s the new kid?” But no. No one cared. And that’s how I hope it will be this time around. Hah. This bus ride rolls through some of what used to be the seedier parts of Tampa. Maybe they still are shady. I don’t know. Will learn.

…

It’s later. Got a haircut. The barber remarked on how much hair I left behind. “So much hair!” Last time I went there he made positively surly remarks about how long it had been since I last checked in. This time, jokingly, he looked at my hair and asked “What happened?” then asked something like “Where did all this come from?” I laughed and said I was going down to Florida soon, so I won’t be needing all this hair making the heat seem heavier on my tender, precious head. He replied “You head is, indeed, precious and tender, and I shall clip your hairlets with appropriate care and respect.”

That was our exact conversation. I tipped well, by may standards at least.

It has not been lost on me that I need to find room for The Wild Thing in the Slappa. He is, after all, the wildest slappa of them all. I should find room for The Wild Thing now, before he scrambles and runs across the living room into the Slappa bag, thinking no one saw him. Gotta make room for The Wild Thing.

Going back to keep perfecting the packing of the Slappa. The Slapping of the Packa.