Learning to Live with Myself

Yes, let's just name every post after a Merle Haggard song.

Working from home. I've been at this job nearly two weeks and have just been doing training on my laptop, using my TV tray and my WalMart folding chair. That's my only furniture other than an air mattress. Suppose to have all my other stuff moved here maybe next month.

The first weekend was the hardest, when I first got here. It's still not easy. I don't go anywhere other than my immediate area here. I like the town I'm in. There's a lumber company nearby that looks like something out of Twin Peaks. I walk along the river. Other than the occasional trip for grocery shopping, I try not to go anywhere if I can't get there on foot. There's public transit here, but I feel like it's irresponsible to travel that way unless it's important.

I may have already had COVID and not really known it. My wife had bad symptoms [though no fever, so her doctor couldn't test her.] I had a mild sore throat/congestion and a slight pain in my lungs, but that subsided eventually. We'll probably never know. My parents' area in Oklahoma has been hit really hard considering how small a town it is. They think they had an outbreak at the small country church they attend, even though they quit holding services a couple of months ago. My parents most likely had it, they were both pretty sick but have recovered. They tested negative, but I think were starting to recover by the time they were tested.

I don't know if I like my job or not. It feels like it hasn't really started. My life here hasn't really started. I'm only sad some of the time now. But it's hard to get used to. 2020 seems to be all about getting used to things that we didn't think we'd ever have to get used to, on every level.

Wishing All These Old Things Were New

This is a 2000s era Merle Haggard song. The title makes you think it's about regret and lost opportunities, but it's really about the desire to take up one's old addictions again, as if it were the first time, and bemoaning sobriety. Leave it to Merle to swerve into bad behavior.

Nevertheless, the title resonates for me as it first appears. I do wish I could go back again. I think a lot of my life has been spent trying to re-do things and start over. I transferred colleges like nobody's business as an undergrad, each time hoping that the next place would be more of a fit. I didn't have the experience of returning to the same college after summer break until my fourth year of school [and of course, due to all the transferring, I was only a junior by then.]

I went back to school to become an accountant, and only after about nine years and five different jobs do I feel like I may have succeeded, but I see the same pattern of leaving. Now I may be about to start what will probably be my last job at least for a long while, maybe the last ever.

Always trying to move on, looking for a better place. I married someone who had the same habit, and that caused an exponential increase in the behavior.

Now as I'm starting to approach the last decade of what could be called middle age, I may be finally somewhat settled. Depends on if the old things can remain old, and if new things can be learned. Guess we will see.

I'm trying to post more. I got nothing better to do these days.

Quarantine days

Ended up not flying and just renting a place sight unseen. I leave in a couple of days. Ending this chapter of my life. Feel like I'm going backward, but at least I'm moving to a new city.

The quarantine really starts now. I'll be living alone, and working from home until things change. Sleeping on an air mattress. Will probably buy a lawn chair or something. Gotta rebuild everything. Gotta start over. Still in a better position than I was, in some ways.

The Micro and the Macro of Misery

Several years ago, my father-in-law suddenly felt and looked very unwell. It was very difficult to get an official diagnosis, but we eventually learned he was terminally ill and did not have long. We were all watching television one morning and trying to adjust to the news when we saw the footage of the tsunami in Japan. It felt like the world was ending.

Now in a time of great personal upheaval, I feel that way once again. It's amazing how quick the wheels come off, and how the center not only cannot hold, but maybe wasn't even there to begin with.

I have to fly out of state soon to scout for a new place to live, and have no idea what I'll be facing. I'll be travelling from one virus hotspot to another. I'll be starting my new job in just under a month and I'm pretty sure they're not going to delay for anything. They are paying for the move, so I'd rather find a place I want to stay at for at least a few years. I'm going to start making calls tomorrow and I guess I'll have a better idea how it's going to go. It's a place I always wanted to live, but I'm probably going to spend a lot of my time this weekend in my hotel room eating takeout. Might go walk around if it's safe to do so....

It's all happening....

In a month or so, my whole life will be different.

What I had is fading away just like the radio signal as I drive to whatever lies ahead. Memories like the ghost voices from faraway places that somehow make their way to me in the middle of the night. It’s a frequency that reaches me only at night, when sound travels differently. News of people and places I don’t know and never will. Songs and singers that seem familiar but don’t quite sound right, like half-realized cover versions.

It's odd how life works. You want something for years and years, you move on and forget about it, then somehow it comes to you when you're not even sure if you want it anymore.

I'm going back to a lifestyle I had for my young adult years. I feel like it's a revival of a TV show but with the original actors. With no acknowledgement that the actors have aged or changed in anyway. Senior citizen Henry Winkler in his old leather jacket, risking injury when he smacks that jukebox at Arnold's.

Slacking again

I swore I would keep this up and do a better job. I guess I'm doing about the same as some of the other blogs I follow these days [mainly RVers.]

Filling out the same forms and paperwork as I've done in the past. The funny thing is all my info is saved from the previous two times, so I have stuff in there from 2012. Who says the government is inefficient?

Excited for and depressed about future changes at the same time, if that makes any sense, and it probably doesn't.

I need to go back to writing about books. Here's my list of favorite books I read last year:

Bowlaway, Elizabeth McCracken

The Border, Don Winslow

The Bird King, G. Willow WIlson

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer

Norco '80, Peter Houlahan

Rabbits for Food, Binnie Kirshenbaum

Marilou is Everywhere, Sarah Elaine Smith

Mostly Dead Things, Kristen Arnett

Hollow Kingdom, Kira Jane Buxton

A Cosmology of Monsters,Shaun Hamill

The Lager Queen of Minnesota, J. Ryan Stradal

Hollow Kingdom was my absolute favorite, a post-apocalyptic novel with a crow as protagonist. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee was probably my favorite nonfiction.

A Brief History of Where I've Been for the last 8 years, Part Two...

The job was located on tribal land which isn't that unusual in my home state, but I never really worked that directly on tribal land before. This tribe was a small-to-medium sized tribe. They had a section of land on the edge of the small town named after them. It was a mix of new and old buildings, the old ones obviously going back to the late 19th century. Many of them were boarded up but some were still in use. There was one that was more like a house that had been boarded up. I was told that had been a boarding school. Often wondered how much bad energy was in those buildings.

The tribe was always building something, new bridges, a senior center, a new gathering place for their pow wows, which were always the major events for their community. They had a police station which was one of the newer buildings. There was a dog who had the run of the place. The tribal employees paid for her food and shelter. She had a fancy dog house behind the police station. When the weather turned cold, the dispatcher at the police station would put a sweater on her, though this was a long gradual process that started in the fall. The dog occasionally was allowed inside the police station, though I was walking by once when I saw her being shooed out the door by the dispatcher, who was giving her a dirty look. Her name was Ju-da-ke, which was "girl" in the tribal language.

The people were probably the friendliest of anywhere I've worked. I'm still in touch and friends with many there, and they helped me with references at this most recent job. I often wish I hadn't left, though it was not really my idea to leave. I have many happy memories of walking outside, past the old buildings and wondering about how they might have looked 100 years before.

My office roommate was Osage, and always kept me informed on the latest goings on with their tribe. I learned a lot about their traditions as well...yearly dances for each of their three districts. She often complained about the Osage from out of state having too much sway in tribal elections. "They vote these people in but we're the ones who have to live with them." This is a common complaint with many of the larger tribes, including mine. Their chief was removed from office while I was there, and that was the talk of the clinic that day.

Many of the employees wore military uniforms to work each day. They were part of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. This was a quasi-military branch that held positions in many of the healthcare facilities operated by the federal government. You've heard of the Surgeon General. These are the other people in the army. In that particular region of the agency, the commissioned officers more or less ran the entire organization. I've since learned that this greatly varies by region, though at the headquarters level it is also like that. Generally, the officers were in the healthcare professions, though they also were in I.T. and engineering. My coworker did not like the Commissioned Corps. Her husband and son were combat veterans and she disliked how many of the corps members thought they were equivalent to the military. They also were much more expensive to employ than the regular "civilian" employees. When we had a government shutdown in 2013, most of us had to work unpaid--except for the Commissioned Corps because they were technically considered military and exempt from the shutdown.

My wife finally joined me just over a year later. We bought a house in Tulsa, which was probably a mistake. I had to commute a long way to work each day, about 75 minutes each way. The job didn't pay as well as I'd hoped, and we were struggling financially. The job market in OKlahoma was not that great for public health jobs, and my wife struggled to find anything above minimum wage. That's the thing about a lot of these states that claim low unemployment---most of the jobs are in the low wage sector. She was offered a position with her previous employer, a promotion, but it would be in the Bay Area. We had to prepare to leave and move back--just a few months after we'd moved all our possession out of our multiple storage units from California.

To Be Continued, eventually....