The weather is weirdly awesome. It's currently 86° at PDX, which means some tropical pockets of Portland will probably hit 90° in the next few minutes before cooling back down to 60° overnight. While it's not unheard of, it is pretty unusual for the weather to be this warm in early October. I went for a trot in the park and soaked in the heat through my scrawny pale legs, wishing I could stop time before the leaves turn orange.
Yesterday I drove over to my mother's condo to help celebrate my little brother's birthday. He's turning... let me think, I guess he's turning 54. Yipes. My baby brother is over the hill. Guess that makes me over the hill and halfway into the graveyard. Well, no use complaining, especially where the really old folks can hear. Don't bother looking for sympathy from old people; that is like going to the garbage dump for bread.Two of the neighbors who came to the party, a couple in their mid-80s, sharp and caustic as ever, were not inclined to hear my brother whine about how his joints ache in the morning. I knew better; I kept my mouth shut.
Birthday parties never have amounted to much in my family. I'm not sure why. I have my theories. This party was relatively painless as birthday parties go—all of us were ready for a nap after barely an hour. I managed to leave all the cake and ice cream with my mother, although my digestive system paid the price today for what I ate yesterday. I think that if I'm going to get sick from eating cake and ice cream, the pain ought to be worth it. Like excellent tiramisu or German chocolate cake. Sadly, 'twas not the case.
It's hard to sum up life these days. From one angle, everything looks like crap. I'm barely earning, doing something I hate almost as much as I hated sewing and driving a school bus and teaching keyboarding, and I'm wondering why I seem to figure out what to do by doing everything I don't want to do first. I know I'm running out of time. The thought makes me want to give up and embrace my inner homeless person.
On the other hand, I'm not sewing, or driving a school bus, or teaching keyboard! Yay! On top of that, the weather is awesome, and while I don't have a steady job, well, I don't have to get up tomorrow and go to a steady job! No getting up early, no dressing up in a uniform, no worrying about my nose hairs and my blossoming sideburns. That's pretty great, don't you think? Actually, I think the longer I'm out of the workforce, the more unemployable I get, sort of like the opposite of a fine wine, more like a stinky cheese.
I would take all the blame for everything, but I think there might be something going on in the local economy. For example, the rental market is tighter than a frog's sphincter, and as a consequence, my friend Bravadita is dragging up on her cute apartment in downtown Portland in favor of shared housing in Gladstone. Her rent decreases in inverse proportion to her public transit commute, which extends an extra hour per day. I find it sad; I fear something similar will happen to me in the next year. My landshark and his wife could boot me out of the Love Shack, fix up the antiquated bathroom and kitchen, and easily lease it to some marketing wizkid for double the rent. I would find myself rooming with my mother, or possibly hunkering down in the Section 8 housing across the street from her condo, where police seem to be on standby.
It's an unsettling, unsettled, yet oddly fertile time. As I approach my 58th birthday, I don't have a whole lot of hope, but freefall is a surprisingly freeing state of mind. My life certainly doesn't look the way I thought it would. I aimed for Santa Barbara and ended up in Pacoima, figuratively speaking. Maybe more like, I aimed for Fiji and ended up in the armpit of Portland. Whatever. I'm trying to live fearlessly, and failing daily, but fearlessness is something to aim for, in the absence of job security and impending old age. The good thing is that since fearlessness is a state of mind, I don't have to leave home to find it.
