It's the little things

An anthropological survey of the personal ads in our local weekly paper has demonstrated a preference for the descriptor "420 friendly," the West Coast equivalent of which would be "herb friendly." Neither are exactly subtle codes for "I smoke pot," but I have to admit, I prefer the laid back straight-forwardness of the latter.

Nostalgia

I: Life goes on without me

Seeing these brought on some overwhelming pangs of homesickness. I want to go to parties with friends again. In past Big Life Changes, I was dropped into ready-made communities of common interests: a college dormitory, a city of Deadheads, a graduate program and labor union. All of these made it very easy to form durable, lasting friendships. But being transplanted to a large urban environment where you have to do some work in finding folks with similar interests, it's a new experience to which I'm having a little trouble adjusting. With the little one, it's not like we can just go out and indulge in our predilections.

It's not to say that I haven't met some great people. The people in our new neighborhood are really great, but I haven't made those connections that bridge the gap between "person you hang out with at the pool" to "friend." Similarly, the line of work I'm in, social by its very nature, has afforded me some wonderful new colleagues. But the geographic dispersal makes getting together outside of work a near insurmountable adventure requiring some serious logistics.

So I'm pining for the days when a Friday night meant a party with the ones I love, sneaking into the backyard for a puff, and maybe, just maybe, watching someone get naked and run down the road while we all stood and cheered. I miss being able to call someone and say, "Let's go out for a beer." I need those things. Instead I have urban anomie.

II: The past didn't go anywhere

l'il wobs and I went up to Greenbelt today for an annual Labor Day carnival they hold up there. And while the dilapidated rides and grizzled carnies who run them are certainly evocative of my youth, it was the surrounding community that really took me back.

The DC area, in and of itself, is a powerful reminder of my formative years in Tennessee. The sweet, floral smells,the cacophony of insects (westerners would be amazed at the non-stop noise of the Eastern woods; East Coasters, I imagine, would be amazed at the near silence of the Western woods at night), the lightning bugs and thunderstorms, all bring me back to my days growing up. But in Greenbelt, it was the architecture that struck me.

The part of town we were in was Roosevelt themed - we parked at Eleanor Roosevelt High School, the carnival was held in the parking lot of the Roosevelt Center, and we lunched in the New Deal Cafe. Judging by the name and the surrounding buildings, this particular part of town sprung up in the early 1940s - the same time that my hometown, born of the Manhattan Project, mushroomed out of the red clay of the Tennessee Valley. The buildings were near identical to the original part of Oak Ridge: cinder-block apartments, neatly whitewashed; standardized duplexes separated by tiny lawns; and a bauhaus-style shopping center and plaza that was the focal point of the neighborhood. Not much to look at in term of aesthetics, to be sure, born of wartime scarcity. But it strikes me that in their functional ugliness, these buildings speak to a time of shared sacrifice and common strivings that other architectural idioms lack. Not that (in the case of my hometown) the building of the most horrific weapon devised at that time is exactly noble, but the broader context within which it occurred could certainly be construed as heroic.

On the other hand, it could be nostalgia for an age that never existed.

Let me help you save some of your grant money

We're entering a brave new world of drug testing:

Researchers have figured out how to give an entire community a drug test using just a teaspoon of wastewater from a city's sewer plant.

[...]

Oregon State University scientists tested 10 unnamed American cities for remnants of drugs, both legal and illegal, from wastewater streams. They were able to show that they could get a good snapshot of what people are taking.

[...]

[Jennifer Field, the lead researcher and a professor of environmental toxicology at Oregon State] plans to start a survey for drugs in the wastewater of at least 40 Oregon communities.

Let me suggest you save a few bucks and not test the wastewater in Eugene. You won't need any fancy urinalysis to tell you that that city is stoned out of its gourd.

Positively Northwestern

The weather here the past few days has been delightful. Cool, breezy, overcast, and rainy.

Just like home. So much so that on the way to work today, I was looking forward to seeing the nerdy girls with their thick-frame glasses wearing their dark-hued turtleneck sweaters.

But alas, this is DC, not Portland, and standard issue dress is the blue blazer.

How not to move away from the people you love

We'll leave aside for the time being the clusterfuck that was the actual, physical translocation process (but to briefly sum up, I wholeheartedly recommend that you not ever consider using ABF Freight Services to haul your shit)...

A wise man recently told me that moving away from our loved ones is one of those life events that is so rare, we have no idea how to emotionally negotiate them. We fall back on dominant cultural narratives (like the "Friends" finale) or just try to wing it the best we can. In my case, if I had to do it all over again... well, maybe I just wouldn't move. But I certainly wouldn't repeat how I left Eugene.

Simply put, there's no good way to say goodbye to people whose lives have become inextricably linked with your own, who you've come to rely on for counsel, for humor, for support. And when I say there's no good way to say goodbye, I mean I did an absolutely lousy job of it for those who actually got a goodbye. And then there are those important people who didn't even get a lousy goodbye, which puts me in contention for the title of Jerk of the Century - and it's an awfully young century. I waited and waited for the perfect time to say goodbye... and then it was time to go.

So to my dear friends in Eugene, I'm still heartbroken from leaving you, and I'm embarrassed and sad that none of you got the goodbyes you deserved - or at all. Please accept my apologies and know that I love you all and think about you often. I'll never be able to tell you how important you've been to my life and how much I value your friendship. And know that the goodbyes we had (or didn't), lousy as they were, weren't so much "goodbyes" as "see ya laters."

Mi casa es su casa

Our cute little house in a cute little neighborhood in a cute little suburb of a monstrous metropolis. Come visit us, won't you?

Idiosyncratic pet causes

Like any other college town, Eugene is full of people who have narrow pet causes that are the Number One Issue of The Day and demand everyone in the immediate vicinity's attention. However, I'm not sure that any other town has someone whose civic mission is to persuade someone from the local transit authority to lick his sweaty nut-sack, as his daily howls of protest have led me to believe.

Be a part of history

I know many of you sit around saying to yourself, "Golly, I wish there was a way I could somehow be a part of wobblie's epic cross-country relocation extravaganza, but I'm not up for a week long roadtrip or moving boxes." Well, now you can.

The good folks at Mapquest tell me that I'll be covering some 2826 miles in the VW Beetle. That's about five days for which I'll need music. Not that I don't have plenty of music, but it's all stuff I've heard. So what I'm asking from you, dear reader, is for you to make me a "road-trip mix" CD. Or two. Get your friends and loved ones to make me one as well. The more the merrier (those 42 hours aren't going to pass without some help, friends). But make sure they get here before June 24, otherwise I'll be long gone.

I'm serious. If everyone who reads this blog makes one CD, I'll have, uh... six for the trip!

Even if you're afield from Eugene, you're still invited! Just e-mail me for my mailing address. Be a part of the adventure, without actually having to experience Nebraska.

A poor labor market

If there's one thing that characterizes Eugene, it's a piss-poor labor market. I've heard that there's 11 applications for every professional job here, not to mention a glut of degrees being churned out by the local institution of higher education. So arriving in 1996 (with a vague idea about wanting to attend graduate school "later"), I had to find work. My first attempt at working was going door-to-door "for the environment" as an OSPIRG canvasser. I wasn't very good at it. I dreaded cold-knocking on doors and hitting people up for cash. I lasted three days, although those three days introduced me to some crazy friends.

My poor first try at post-college made me reassess my life in Eugene by making money the old fashioned way: hawking parking lot items at Phish shows across the country. When I returned to Eugene a month and a half later, a friend of mine had taken a job as the HR person for an agency which ran group homes for people with developmental disabilities. My job was to pretty much helping people with their day to day lives for three straight days, sleeping overnight on-site. Fairly mellow stuff - a little dramatic with the clients, but not taxing work. Nor did it pay well, and we weren't treated particularly well by the bosses, but that's a story for down the road. I will say that the group home scene in Eugene was an odd mix of people. With the minimum work requirements being a high school diploma and a clean criminal record, you came across a wide swath of low-income Eugene/Springfield. I met a good chunk of the radical scene through working in group homes - folks who would work three days a week in town at a group home and then live in a tree for the next three days, with a "day off" wedged between. I met a lot of tweakers, including one woman who always worked the night shift. She had the typical shrunken head look of a crank fiend, and would always ask us if she could take the five-gallon buckets in which we bought laundry detergent.

I saw some really bizarre shit working in that business. There was one client who, every day, we would have to comb his apartment from top to bottom to make sure there was nothing there - staples, loose paper, anything - that he would eat. This person had eaten part of his couch before. And the leather uppers of a basketball shoe. Another client was perhaps the sweetest woman ever, who loved to kick back with Hamm's beer and grunt "party," but because of her experience in the state institution, she freaked out when it was time to be showered. On at least four separate occasions that I can recall, I had glass bowls that she had launched narrowly miss my head.

I had a client miss the bus and try to drive his battery-operated wheelchair down the freeway to get home.

I worked in the field for five years. An important five years, to be sure, but I wasn't sad to leave it to return to graduate school in 2001.

Tangential

Discovering that ash moved to Eugene within about three months of when I did demonstrates one of this city's charming quirks - it's illusion of intimacy. Eugene has a really small town feel, and you see the same people over and over. Indeed, I keep running into people I met in my first half year enough to count them as "friendly acquaintances." On the other hand, for five years before I actually met her, ash and I lived within five miles of each other and knew many of the same folks, but by accident of personal biographies never crossed paths until 2001.

That first November in 1996, I started seeing Eva and Erin behind the bar while drinking the day sunny at the Vets' Club. Then, we simply knew them as the "Vets' Club Twins," and we knew one of them was dating the guy working the door who looked eerily like Frank Zappa. One of my many friends named Dave later worked with Eva at the Craftworld (the one that's now the Mexican supermarket on 7th), and every now and again I'd go see their band play at the Tiny Tavern. Eva ended up living with some friends of mine who were in my graduate program.

I also see this woman Beth, who I traveled across the country with during the summer of 1996, from time to time. In a testament to what I month cooped up in a car with someone will do to a relationship of any sort, I still loathe her. ms. wobs's former evil roommates, however, seem to have fallen off the face of the planet, despite us knowing exactly where they are.

There's the guy who rides his bicycle around in the dead of winter wearing shorts and no shoes. There's Frog. There's the same hippies who've been there since 1976 at the Saturday Market. You see them all the time, yet they possess vistas of Eugene still unseen by the likes of me.

11 years down, 1 month to go

I pity you, dear reader. I pity you because this blog is about to take a drastic turn towards the sentimental. I've lived in Eugene for eleven years, arriving in town on a cool summer evening in 1996. That Monday evening in June was the first time I ever tasted Terminator Stout. Within a month's time, I had tried my first Terminator float (stout with a scoop of Prince Puckler's mocha almond fudge ice cream smuggled into 19th St.).

See? Sentimental.

So I'm writing a big old mash note to those who made Eugene such a special place to live, and such a formative part of my being. And by "big old," I mean over a series of posts, loosely organized around something significant. Jeebus, I don't know.

Emily is the woman I moved out here with, ostensibly as a couple, although she disabused herself of that notion far before I did. Somehow, after a rough first few months of living in the same massive flophouse, we became good friends again. She decamped for PDX years ago, but she remains the catalyst to everything that's occured since that weird summer.

When I arrived in Eugene, I initially crashed with my friend Andy (short for Andrea). That summer, she patiently supported my ass on Phish tour in August, got me back to Eugene, whereupon we rarely spoke to each other until she left town, late in 1996. Since then, we've had waves of communication. I'd piss her off, we wouldn't talk for three years, all of the sudden we'd have a reason to talk again, we'd regularly correspond, I'd piss her off, etc. We're in one of the communication black-outs right now.

In 1996, I saw rain like I've never seen before, nor have seen since. Three straight days of torrential downpour in early November, causing a lot of flooding. And my ass, straight from Florida, was thus thrust into my first Oregon winter. I lived in the basement of a house on Willamette street at the time, and came home from work to an inch of water in my bedroom.

I shared this house with 7-12 other people. We scavenged dumpsters and returned bottles to buy food.

We spent an inordinate amount of time at the Vets Club. And on drugs.

Christmas in 1996 was the worst I've ever experienced. Five days before the holiday, I adopted the DeeOhGee from Greenhill.

New Year's eve was ok, but I didn't have anyone to kiss.

Thank you for indulging my reminiscening. More to follow.