Coping With Victory

 I spent three hours this morning on X, formerly Twitter, both reading posts and making ones of my own. Never has it been so much fun. It reminds me, in some vague way, of what it was like to be a child, and to voraciously gobble up the news from the newspapers and television, because I wanted to know as much as possible about the world out there. It also reminds me of being in New York City back in the 1990s, and walking amidst the crowds pouring out of the ferry terminal in the Battery, the warm bath anonymity, that one is a small nobody, but that's ok because everyone is on the same level of nobody-ness. 

Except we aren't a nobody to God. That's the piece of the puzzle I have now, that I didn't back then.

In any case, it is great fun rejoicing in the impending massive victory of our side. I pray our great victory will be put to good use.

Area Code 503

 Overnight I got a text message from an old friend. I almost didn't see it because I thoought it was Spam. I get maybe thirty a day, most of them because of previous political donations.  I thought the text was one of those. I didn't recognize the number and I almost deleted it from the notification on the screen

The area code was 503--Oregon, but that meant nothing because that is still my area code from the phone I bought in the mall in Beaverton ten years ago when I got first i-Phone Then I saw the name at the end of the message and I knew who it was. 

I have gone many years now without conversing with him. But we did not see each other many years after college as well, and once you have a long gap with someone, followed by a time of reacquaintance, one knows that at some point time doesn't matter. Both of us have a bearing on each other's characters that stretches of time, in a temporal triangulation over decades, such that, especially after a certain age, we can never be strangers to each other.

He still lives in the small small town outside of Portland where he and his wife have operated their law practice for many decades. Since I last talked with him, they sold the law practice, and the building it was located in, and are now retired. 

He asked if I was still in Oregon. I haven't lived there for eight years. I told him I lived in Arizona now. He asked me if I liked Scottsdale. I said it had great medical care---best specialists in the world---which is something that can be plus especially as you get past a certain age in life. That's all I said about it.

I explained how we wound up here, and how we moved here for Jessica's job, and later for her practice, but now she is completely remote, whereas I am the one with the hybrid office job. Also it is quite enjoyable that Jessica's parents live in the Valley now, in a 55+ RV and trailer-house park in Mesa, which is like a non-stop Boomer party and summer camp eight months out of the year. The community of it is amazing. I tell them I don't think Generation X can pull off a continuation of it. Starting with my cohort, youth lost its communalness of youth culture, until it came back with a vengeance with the current rootless  identity tribalism of today's young folk.

I told him I'd love to come back to Oregon sometime, and to visit the suburbs of Portland. 

My Favorite Creekbeds

 Woke up in the darknesss last night as I regained consciousness I noticed that a rainstorm had started. A more beats of consciousness brought to me the awareness that it was a ferocious storm of heavy hand and strong winds, the kind found at the front of the storm as it comes in. My instinctual reaction to panic slightly that something might be getting rained on, that I would prefer not to get rained on, kicked in, and it was confirmed in my conscious mind by the remembrance that I had used the rice-paper folding screen on the porch the previous day but had not put it away the night before, but left it out by the edge of the patio. Even in mild winds it is prone to tipping over, and then of impaling itself (yet again) on the posts of the bamboo folding fence, which is sturdy in all winds, but not high enough to provide the necessary shade for the sun in the morning hours. The rice paper folding screen is higher, and serves that purpose well in the morning despite multiple punctures from my negligence.

The rain was hard and I sat outside savoring it in the pitch darkness, on the rustic rocking chair that belongs technically to her mother, as it sat on their porch in their log cabin in Ohio before they moved to Arizona.

The peak of the ferociousness of the wind passed and gave way to mild gusts amidst a heavy steady downpour, which splashed onto the tilied roofs of the building and the asphalt and concrete below. Such a rain here is rare. "A monsoon rain at last," I said. We had gonie long into the summer without one, even as storms hit other parts of the Valley. We had seen dense dark clouds over the mountains, and rain had come to the far side but not to us. Finally we got some relief. 

I imagined out in the darkness the stream beds gathering up into a laminar sheets of water in the depressions, and then elongated into longer sheets until they connect and like a train, begin rolling downhills on the soaked ground, held above by the surface tension of the water. My favorite creek beds would begin flowing, even they have been re-engineered by the landscaping needs of development.

Gen X Work Pride in the Days of the Remote Longhouse

The lobby lounge at the Element Reno

 

Yesterday on our last day in Reno,  I was in the lobby of the hotel waiting for Jessica to come back from her last session of her drawing class, for which she had flown to Reno to attend, and which the official point of our trip. Jessica had called our hotel "Millennial hipster", and the description seemed perfect. It was a brand new modern place, with Deep Elm style furniture, located amidst similar new apartment complexes, in a mini-walkable neighborhood on land in the center of the city that I recognized as having once been an old shopping center. I have enough of a history in Reno, going back 40 years as of this year, that I know places by what used to be there.

In the lobby, with its deep backed couches that force one to use pillows are to recline back, I had been working on my laptop for my dayjob, as if I were in the office. I have enough freedom that I can take off for a couple days and tell my boss "I'm working from Reno for a couple days", and everything is cool. Part of it is that I am very good at what I do, and provide tremendous manifest value to my company.

I have believed nothing about recent Millennial and Gen Z work trends about having all sorts of privileges. "You guys have no idea what it will be like when the pendulum swings back." My strategy is as it always has been---pure Generation X---I am as valuable on my job as what I provide day to day. So I will so fucking valuable that my leash gets longer and longer, by earning it. "How would we get along without him?" I want them to ask. Of course they would get along without me. I'm not indispensable, so that keeps me humble and focussed on work. I am survivor of multiple rounds of layoffs in a tiny company down to a skeleton staff putting out and supporting a complex platform of sensitive data transmitted over the Internet.

The last time I was in Reno almost three years ago for Dick's funeral, I worked for a horrible company (Satan Inc.) of 1000 employees where almost everyone was remote. That meant the Longhouse controllers (the young women in HR) also worked remotely and this ruined remote work for everyone. Now remote work is as bad as the prison of the office, but the young women of HR know only slavery. They are born slaves, and in the Longhouse everything trends to towards the feminine values of accepting slavery and submission and being happy about it, and in turn getting be the enforcers of all the rules. (see "What is the Longhouse?" here)

I remember working from the airport and getting scolded by my boss for it, for no reason at all. All they could do was scold me. I was made to feel awful. They tried to put me on a performance improvement plan to get to me to quit, so I did just that. Within an hour of my resignation, the laptop they had supplied me via registered mail when I began working restarted itself and "bricked" itself, removing all my accerss from everything company related immediately.

The company was a billion-dollar startup. Within six months of my leaving, the company laid off three quarters of its staff and all but shuttered its doors.

In reality I'm convinced it was a CIA-funded spook operation designed to hook into the data of all the hospital systems in the country and gather all the patient data from their databases. It was a Deep State scam. Good riddance to it. The low point of my recent career.

My new job is demanding but much more rewarding than the billion-dollar operation I worked for in 2021. As much investment money my current company eats up, it can never be as big of a boondoggle as Satan Inc. 

(See https://x.com/shagbark_hick/status/1824818147381149858

Down to One City

 After having spent my life wanting to travel America to every state and city, and fulfilling that, to the sacrifice of many other things, I am down to one city in which I feel at home, and could at the moment, contemplating movin to--Reno.

I did not see that coming, but it makes sense. Reno and I have a long history together, good history going back to the 1980s. The last of my family I can be with, and be relaxed with, not on guard against things that might blow up the conversation, is there. This is despite my great-uncle Dick passing away.

I didn't get to see my second cousins this time, but I got to spend a lovely evening with my my mother's cousin (Dick's daughter), and her husband. I last saw them when visiting for Dick's funeral and memorial service (two different things) in 2021. It was a rough time for many reasons, not the least of which was a dreadful day job that felt like I was working for Satan Inc., but I soldiered through, wearing the leather jacket that Dick gave to me the last time I saw him. Right as I was walking out the door and knowing I would not see him again in this life. 

We talked about him, and about his parents. I knew his mother, my great-grandmother, but I never met his father, my great-grandfather, and the great-grandfather of my second cousins. One of them lives in town and turned Dick's old house into an AirBnB after renovating it. Dick's daughter showed me photos of it. It looks very nice and new. I recognized the shelves where the photo of his mother used to sit.

Jessica and I both loved the cool nights. Such a break from Phoenix, where neither of us feels truly at home, for various reasons. We moved there for her job in 2016, when I worked remotely. Now she works remotely and I have an office job here. Hybrid situation. I worked remotely from the hotel in Reno, while remembering all the good vibes I have felt here over the years.