Tag: Male

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Endings / Beginnings

My time in San Diego is drawing to a close. Approximately T-minus 6 hours.

When I first came here I thought it was a nice place and the place is picturesque when you get to the coast. In all the years I’ve spent in California I’d spent very little time in San Diego and that was always as a visitor.

I came here with high hopes of restarting a career and making something of the opportunity. 

I found out this area is a hard place to meet people and that the job market is not the best. In that it’s much like the rest of California but San Diego has something else. It’s hard to put into words, its like there’s a standoffish attitude. Perhaps it’s because of the strong military presence. Perhaps it’s something else entirely. The practical reality is that it’s difficult to get to know anyone because everyone is on the move, myself included.

This city feels like everyone is just passing through. No one, it seems wants to make attachments of any kind. One of the things that caught my attention was how many people park nose out.

You’ll see this in shopping malls, businesses, and apartment parking. It’s as if everyone is preparing to leave, even when they’re at home. The shopping malls and businesses amazed me, people will back in to parking spots regardless of how many other people they slow down in the process.

I’ve seen traffic jams caused by person after person backing into spots at their place of work. They’re completely oblivious to the fact that their actions were causing the problem. At work I’ve heard people say they didn’t understand why there was a jam up at the entrance to the parking lot every morning. 

It speaks to a blindness about consequences of your actions. It’s a delusion shared by more than a few people here.

While I will miss having my own space. I won’t miss San Diego. There are nice people here, and there are some damn good people here, they’re very hard to find, but they’re good people.

So I have mixed emotions about leaving here only because I liked living on my own.

San diego trafficI won’t miss the crowds, traffic, noise, or Comic con… Not one little bit.

It’s been a couple of weeks since the layoff. I’m still tired as hell and occasionally a little blue, there’s a feeling that I and my colleagues were all used and then thrown away. I’m not looking forward to sweating over finding a new job full time.

But this “Ending” is a “Beginning” too.

That’s what I’m reminding myself of as I box the last of my stuff here.

I’m putting things into boxes and storage as neatly as possible with the intent that I’ll begin again, somewhere else.

Call it hope.

Comiccon foot trafficI do know that, long distance commutes are out of the question in Southern California. They used to be possible but those days are long gone. Where ever I end up working, I’ll probably have a small apartment nearby. Ideally, I’ll have an actual home that I’m earning equity on. But houses nearer the working centers of any city in this country, much more-so in the state of California, are beyond expensive for what you get.

I don’t know what the future holds for me, but I have at least a little hope.

I’m planning to take some time for myself, maybe a week or two where I can just turn my brain off, have a little fun and relax. I need to go walkabout and see some things I either haven’t seen before or revisit some things or places that I’ve enjoyed in the past.

Then I’ll tackle the business of looking for a new job, cleaning up around the house and working toward defining and building a future that I want.

I know it’s all up to me, but I question if I have the strength at this age to pull off reinventing myself and defining the future I want.

We’ll see.

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Was quiet and blue all day yesterday

SCAN0117I realized that yesterday was the anniversary of my Dad’s death.

It’s funny, it’s been 27 years it still gets to me some years. Perhaps I’ve just been very retrospective recently.

I miss him. 

I was so busy packing and planning how stuff would be loaded and moved I wasn’t really thinking about why I was blue. I was chalking it up to the move itself and the feeling that I was giving up something that I didn’t want to give up.

Perhaps it’s a combination of the two. I didn’t want to give Dad up, and I don’t want to give up a space that is mine alone. Humble as that space may be, It’s my space and I like it.

That being said, there are times when you have to give up people you love and things that you like.

This is a photo of my Dad, Mom, and the little guy is me. Yeah I should have been looking at the camera but hey, I was a kid. The funny thing is, In this picture my Dad’s expression is the expression I remember most.

This is Dad. My Father is eternal in my memory he’s forever this age and even when he was in his 50s he looked pretty much the same. Yeah, a few more wrinkles but he’s the same man.

I can only hope I age as well.

So Dad, you’re remembered, missed, and regardless of any disagreements we had, you’re loved always and forever.

Now I have to get on with the final packing and get this move out of the way.

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Mixed Emotions

This whole move thing has me filled with mixed emotions.

On the one hand, I will not miss the noise of the street behind the apartments. This street is more like living next to a raceway than living in a residential neighborhood.

The only time that street is quiet is between 2:30 am and 2:45 am any other time it’s an endless parade of cars zipping along, motorcycles, and modified drift car wannabes roaring by, and various larger trucks rumbling along. 

Sirens and ambulances scream by at all hours of the day and night.

After a while you start to ignore most of the road noise.

The Apartment complex is an older one and has older people in it. Ambulances and paramedics roll up at least once a day to cart some unfortunate person off to the hospital, or the morgue.

2 Zen living room

This is a plain no extras complex and it’s showing it’s age. The walls are paper thin and the windows single pane. You can hear everything. People having conversations in the parking lot, some of the younger folks are still sexually active and so you hear them pounding away on creaky beds. The tenants that are hard of hearing will let you enjoy their movies, music, or operas at all hours of the day and night.

It’s not restful and it’s hard to sleep.

We’ve just had 4 weeks of tree removal. They came through and took out all the grand eucalyptus trees that provided shade and put a sweetness in the air. Now we’ve been dealing with plumbing issues and the sidewalks are all torn up with the attendant heavy construction crews coming in at 6am to haul away broken concrete jackhammer up more sidewalks and generally yelling across the parking lot at each other. 

It’s been a dusty noisy environment and parking is a nightmare. 

All that being said, this was my place. Things remained where I put them and I was in complete control of my little space. It has been home to me and I’m not really looking forward to sharing my space with another person again.

The plus side of the mountain hose is that it’s quiet

HoardingI have a monumental cleanup task waiting on me at the house in the mountains. Part of that task is a creation of my own in that I haven’t been there with enough energy to clean out the stacks of frankly un-necessary paper left in my office on my desk. I’ve already had trouble putting my stuff back in the house because the other person that lives there is a major packrat.

Before I got this place, I had been feeling compressed into smaller and smaller space. My absence has compounded the problem. I can’t get to my workout bench anymore, There’s no way I can get my motorcycle out of the garage and I can just barely fit my car in the 2.5 car garage. The basement storage area is a fucking disaster with barely a path between junk that hasn’t seen the light of day in 10 years, longer if you count the time pre-fire. I know I have stuff in the basement that needs to find it’s way to the trash heap, I can’t find my stuff that needs to go away, because of all the other stuff that’s been stacked around it. That all has to change, and it’s going to be a battle.

This is a battle I’m not looking forward to.

There will be hurt feelings  and passive aggressive anger and I’m sure it will be an unpleasant time. But I need to focus on trimming down all the shit because a longer term goal is my future. If I find a position with a company outside of California I want to be able to make a clean break of it. I want to take all my shit from well defined areas and put it in a truck and be done. I don’t want my stuff in 3 or 4 different places I want everything in one place Easily accessible, defined, labeled, and movable.

The storage facility I just rented may provide a space in which I can move, sort, trash, and store my stuff.

2014 04 20 15 45 131I suppose I’m getting to a point where I don’t place the same value on sentimentality that I once did. Things don’t matter all that much to me, Stuff is an anchor that makes it hard for you to move literally and figuratively.

I’d like to be able to haul anchor and go. I want simplicity