November 22, 2006

• Moving, resurfacing and good intentions…

  Well….

  Ahem.

  Back again, in a manner of speaking.

  Appears it has been two months. And a bit of change. Who’da thunk?

  Ultimately, few things end up going as planned.

  In this case, the “intention” was that by purchasing some shyghte expensive wireless Internet service from Verizon, I’d be able to stay connected during my “moving hiatus,” perhaps writing a little, certainly checking and sending email.

  Not so, my friends. The only real connectivity I have had has been wireless hot spots and an occasional “blip.” All for $69.99 a month, thank you, come again. And frankly, where I find myself today is outside Verizon’s service area, even though the “I-know-more-than-you-could-ever-hope-to” salesperson in Austin (who was really “too fine” to be working at such as lowly job as a ”wireless salesperson”) “knew” that I would have coverage everywhere I went. Note to self: Never believe what someone in a city tells you will work in a smaller town, 2500 miles away…

  Some locals tell me we are too close to Canada here to have good wireless coverage, because most carriers don’t want their “unlimited” air to spill over. That way US account holders will have to pay expensive roaming charges north of the border. Whether there’s any truth to this I don’t know– what I do know is that I will be spending some time talking to the snivelling bumfucks customer service reps at the nearest Verizon store, which is about 50 miles from here. Talking about things relating to getting out of this wireless contract.

  Actually, there were intentionS.

  Multiple. Plural.

  Self-moving (as opposed to tossing $15,000 at United Van Lines, or others of their ilk) across the country takes a lot of energy and bandwidth. Or… it could just be that I am getting old. Moving seemed easier when I was in college– but back then it was only a few miles, and all my worldly possessions fit into a hefty bag there wasn’t as much stuff to move (My worldly possessions never fit into a hefty bag. Well… except when I spent a while living on the street. Well… even then I had “stuff” in relatives’ attics. Nevuh mind.).

  Bottom line is that I expect that even if I had had reliable connectivity, I wouldn’t have had the bandwidth to deal with moving and “having a life.” Those of you who have done the cross-country move thing know what of I speak. You prep feverishly up till the actual moveout date, then you travel 2500 miles (which takes far longer than expected because [a] trucks are slow and [b] you’re exhausted and just want to take some days off), then (if you do it this rather unprepared way) you arrive at the other end with really no plan, toss everything in the moving truck into a storage space (hoping you’ll actually find housing not too far from the storage space) temporarily, and try to find a place to live that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

  An assortment of body parts later, you discover that “affordable housing” only exists somewhere east of Jesus… like small towns in Nebraska… yadda, yadda….

  Short answer: The whole process was frakkin’ exhausting, and extremely protracted. All in all, it’s a pretty boring story. Long. Tedious. A bit like West Texas, when it hasn’t rained in a long time.

  Well…. OK… up in the left column here, it used to say that someday I’d be settling down in Port Townsend, WA, Seattle or some other place around the Seattle/Puget Sound area.

  So I did.

  It’s called “creating your own reality.”

  I picked up my entire world in Tex-arse (well, at least the bits I decided to hang onto), moved them across the country, and arrived here, armed with, basically…. nothing.

  At some point, I figured I’d move to Seattle. As it turned out, rents were really too spendy, unless one is willing to live 20 miles beyond BFE Suburbia. Already been down that road… just with some different geography. So now I am calling Port Townsend “home.”

  Where’s Port Townsend? It’s way up in the upper left corner. At the top of a peninsula, surrounded by water on three sides. At the end of the World. Depending on where in town you stand, you can see (at least on a clear day) Mt. Baker, Mt. Rainier, The Cascades, The Olympics, Puget Sound, Discovery Bay, The Straits of Juan de Fuca (practically the Pacific), the san Juan islands and Canada. It’s a six block walk from where I live to the beach. It’s a five block walk to 500-acre Fort Worden State Park (if you suffered through “An Officer and a Gentleman,” it was filmed there). There are apple trees in the yard. The air is cool and I can breathe it. The trees are tall. Stuff is very green– greens, layered on greens, layered on greens– because it rains a lot, and the temps rarely creep above 80. This time of the year they barely creep up to 50. It rains a lot. I like rain.

  And no, I am not afflicted with SAD. Never was; unlikely to ever be. But thank you for asking….

  I was never one who wanted to go to the tropics on vacation. But then you’ve heard me piss and moan complain about that here, for some years.

  It’s an old town, very laid back. Very liberal, about the exact opposite of whence I came, in Texas. At some point in the past, I guess a whole bunch of hippies came here, discovered there was no further to go unless you had a boat, and stopped here. It’s so interestingly different to see women in their 40′s, 50′s and even 60′s with waist length free-flying hair. Men too, for that matter. It’s so interestingly different that the most common vehicles here are 80′s model Volvos and Subarus, rather than brand-new Mercedes, Jaguars and SUVs so large they can be seen from the moon. There are few (if any) “McMansions” here. Most of the town was built before 1950. A lot of it before 1900. People actually ride bikes as transportation, not just as exercise devices. There are more artists per capita here than any place else I have ever been. The biggest bookstore in town (perhaps half the size of your typical Barnes & Noble) carries only metaphysics, psychology and self-development titles.

  We’re NOT in Kansas, anymore.

  Which is a good thing.

  A really good thing….

  I finally have cable Internet again.

  Which is also a really good thing.

  Although the withdrawals from two months without the web were not really as severe as expected.

  I owe 837 people approximately 3,459 pieces of email. Take a number, have a seat….

  No, really… I’ll get there…

   

  • 12:50 am
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