This is the end

I am done. It is time for me to fade away.

Thank you for ten great years!

Bygones

9:06

Amy, the girl from nowhere, protagonist of THE PASSAGE trilogy.

It's Thursday and I have the day off. I have bills to pay, a job fair to go to, and all sorts of other crap as it's my only day off. I've doing maintenance and clean up on all of my electronic devices. 

My plants are doing very well. 

But in the interim, I am off for a quick soak in the hot tub. I pulled a muscle in my back last week, just reaching across the trim table. Now I stretch before work. I need to remind myself that I am doing physical labor and that I'm 48 years old. While I've taken to it pretty well, I am not 21 anymore, when I could party with abandon and then wake up at 6:30 and mow lawns in 90 degree heat for 8 hours. I can only imagine that I was made of rubber back then. and really stupid.

I finished Justin Cronin's City of Mirrors, the final book The Passage Trilogy. Firstly, its scope is amazing, spanning 1200 years after a viral vampire outbreak which completely destroys North America, and eventually the world. I cannot recommend it highly enough. 

While I adored The Stand, by Stephen King, The Passage makes it looks pedestrian in breadth. And "the Hand of God" doesn't come down and miraculously fix things, as in The Stand. No knock on King, as his work, published in '78, was like nothing I had ever read. I read it much later, after the unedited version came out (almost twice the size of the original at 1152 pages.) 

But it's been almost forty years since King wrote a masterpiece, and we live in a much darker, visceral world than in 1978. The world is running down. We are maybe fifty years away from devastating events that will change our planet forever. We soon will be living for the basics; food, water, protecting our loved ones, and surviving.  

The biggest threats? Climate change, rising oceans (see ya Florida, NYC and London, just to name a few,) oil running out (which will start wars between the strongest nations,) and a lack of fresh drinking water. 

The most brilliant aspect of Cronin's trilogy is that after a thousand year nightmare, the population returns to sustainable levels. Having suffered such horrendous loss, with all of the former nations of the world vanquished, humanity has a fresh start, and a real chance at not fucking it up this time. 

Fiction like this is why I began writing, why I will always write, and my hope that someday I will add something significant to our planet's literary canon.

Until then, you're stuck with this shitty blog.

Bygones!

Here Again

All is well. I am in constant motion of places to stay. Kinetic. I didn't think you could get used to a thing like that, maybe I have. This place is bedlam. Makes for good tales, at least. 

Exodus

2, 3, 4: Exodus; movement of Jah people! Oh yeah!
(Movement of Jah people) Send us another brother Moses
(Movement of Jah people) From across the Red Sea
-Bob Marley


Today I leave! My life has oft been awesome and oft been terrifying. But alack, never boring.

No more olde English, I swear.

Thanks to my friend, Linda, in her sixties, for letting me move my plants to her house. We work together and she is hip. Some people I've met out here have been so nice to me. Others have been complete assholes. That's how it goes.

Welcome my son
Welcome to the Machine
-Pink Floyd

Soon I will be free of my roommate, his paranoia, his debilitating OCD, his self hatred, his belonging to an evangelical sect of Christianity that condemns his homosexuality and his hypocrisy. Now that's what I cal a good day!

I will still get my chance to grow. Look out Maine, I'm (eventually) coming home!

But today, I step off the ledge into that wormhole of uncertainty that is my life.

Wooooo Hooooo! ..........

Game of Rooms

At a time like this, which exists maybe only for me, but is nonetheless real, if I can communicate, and in the telling and the bearing of my soul anything is gained, even though the words which I use are pretentious and make you cringe with embarrassment, let me remind you of the pilgrim who asked for an audience with the Dalai Lama.
He was told he must first spend five years in contemplation. After the five years, he was ushered into the Dalai Lama's presence, who said, 'Well, my son, what do you wish to know?' So the pilgrim said, 'I wish to know the meaning of life, father.'
And the Dalai Lama smiled and said, 'Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?"

-Procol Harum, In Held 'Twas In I 

Are you tired of hearing me talk about looking for a place to live? I am too. Seems like a lifetime ago that Doctor Wu and I lived in Mum's old house in CT. I've lived in 3 places since December and go back to an extended stay on Friday. And poor Doctor wound up in Jersey! Oh, how the mighty have fallen. 

Some say that I'm a wise man, some think that I'm a fool
It doesn't matter either way: I'll be a wise man's fool

Work from 10 - 6:30 today. Tonight I'll pack the nightstand and winter close in the car and bring them to the storage unit mañana. 

The hardest part of finding a place is finding someone without a dog, as this is dog country. It will be good to leave my OCD roommate behind forever. He's a self-hating gay man who listens to bible-thumper radio and gets Watchtower Magazine (Jehovah's Witnesses.) Witnesses believe that the destruction of the world through Armageddon is imminent. Good luck with that. My journey continues, far away from this moron's cycle of madness. I leave him to wallow in his own despair. 

As for me, to brighter things on distant shores!

In the autumn of my madness when my hair is turning grey
for the milk has finally curdled and I've nothing left to say

Looking Around

Growing up (growing up)
Looking for a place to live 
-Peter Gabriel

It has become my mantra.  I've had today off and have been burning down the phone lines/emails/texts.

Then I work all weekend. I guess I'll have the 4th off. Time doesn't really seem to matter anymore. I just have my own schedule to keep.

When I actually get a moment to relax, I've been reading City of Mirrors, the final book in Justin Cronin's The Passage Trilogy. It's like The Stand, but it's a vampire virus that breaks out and destroys the world. The few survivors are left to fight the virals. Great stuff. Unbelievably heart wrenching and well thought out, massive in its scope.

Hee Haw, Walking Dead, Crack House

Well, I saw a place yesterday, but it was a glorified trailer. The husband was in a wife beater and Jacqueline, who I had spoken with on the phone, was young and emaciated. Too young for this guy. The half of the trailer that would be mine had stuff strewn all over the place. It was dark and damp. I thought, this place has double murder/suicide written all over it. If the zombies don't get me first.

So I followed the sage advice of one Homer Simpson;

Walk away slowly and don't make eye contact.

Next!