Transitions

This is my life today. I'm sitting in Coffee to the People at the corner of Masonic and Haight, San Francisco. One block to the east is my home, next door to the former residence of Jimi Hendrix. One block to the west is the famed Ashbury part of Haight and Ashbury, a street corner immortalized by a single rowdy summer and mountains of press. I still don't quite understand why that corner in particular - Masonic is much more of a happening street. And Central, where I live, is at the edge of "Hippie Hill", aka Buena Vista Park.

In any case, it's a pretty mellow day. Not packed, like usual, possibly because of a light drizzle outside. Tourists trickle in, sit for awhile with local shopping bags, have some coffee or one of the exciting and unusual espresso drinks, plan their next excursion, then trickle out again. A few of us are regulars. I recognize the others and they recognize me. Sometimes, if we've had a particularly meaningful encounter, we may acknowledge that recognition with a nod. Otherwise, we pretend the other doesn't exist.

This is my life in San Francisco for the most part. I don't exist. To 99% of the people I see in a day, the thousands of people I press up against on the bus or the subway or pass walking down the sidewalk, I'm an anonymous biomass taking up space. Just as they are to me. Now, after about 4 years in the city and 9 years in the area, I understand that hard shell that forms around the soul to protect it from the sheer crush of chaos, insanity, and life. It's with a mix of relief and regret that I've formed one myself. A shell, perhaps a toughness, perhaps simply a surrender. Whatever it is, it allows me to stand firm while unwashed schizophrenics dash themselves against me and bounce off. It allows me to step over a pile of dog crap, human crap, stale lunch, someone's leg, without breaking stride. I can walk down the sidewalk checking email on my iPhone and barely register the half a dozen homeless, pushing shopping carts while screaming at invisible demons, that I pass en route to my next appointment. Did I say half a dozen? Make that a dozen. Two dozen.

The music at the cafe today is lazy, grungy, distorted. It fits my mood. They added new food to the menu a couple of days ago. I tried the breakfast burrito. I can't really afford it but I won't be here much longer and thought I'd indulge. Now I'm sipping my quadruple cappuccino. My external hard drive sits on the table next to my iPhone and is plugged into my computer so I can continue editing some dance footage I should've finished two months ago.

I didn't finish because I've been looking for work. Scrambling to earn a few bucks here and there in between bidding on projects, sending out resumes. It's been nine months since I quit my "job" as a consultant/journalist. It was killing me. Seriously. I'd reached the point at which the work was dead to me. It wasn't what I wanted to do, wasn't what I was meant to do. And that knowledge, no matter how buried, bubbled to the surface in toxic belches of incompetence. I was beginning to fail, frequently and in rapid succession. The failures, the pressure, the vain attempts to cram 30-hour days into 24 hours, the broken relationship, the neverending stream of disappointed and frustrated clients, the cat who kept shitting on my bed - all sent me into a death spiral of depression. Every night I would go to sleep wishing I had the strength to end it once and for all. So when I finished my last assignment, I said no more, cashed the paychecks, and coasted for a couple of months with a renewed sense of purpose and redirected ambitions. Then the economy went to shit. And when it was time to work again, there was no work to be had. Since then I've sent out well over 100 resumes and out of those got about 10 or so acknowledgements that my resume had been received. And out of those got about 3 phone screenings. And out of those got 2 in-person interviews. And out of those got 0 jobs. I've been to two job fairs, standing in line for multiple hours with multiple hundreds of other people competing for less than 10 jobs in the entire room. I've bid on at least a dozen coding projects and lost them all, some of them mere moments before signing the contract. Maybe someone with more fortitude, or self-delusion, could push through and restart an abandoned career. But it's just not in me. New Agers would say, "You can create anything you want." And that's true. And I don't want this - not tech work, not really. But the things I do want take time to develop. And how can you develop and nurture a new career when you're scrambling to subsist? It's a no-win situation.

Time to make a change. This isn't where I want to be. Broke, indebted, unemployable, hardened, callous, shut off from humanity and my own spirit. Something is broken. I have so much more potential than this.

Fortunately I also have something that few other people have, something for which I'm more grateful than I can put into words. I have a family who loves me and a wide circle of friends, some here in San Francisco, but many, many more in Texas. And I have an opportunity. My dad wants me to take over his job managing a storage rental facility in East Texas in exchange for free housing and a small income to cover monthly expenses. When I say it's in the middle of nowhere, I mean it - it's in the smallest county in Texas and the nearest community is two miles away and has a population of less than 200. The entire county has just over 5000 people and the county seat, my official residence, has just over 2000 of them. Dallas is one and a half hours away, though. A morning commute in Silicon Valley.

In other words: it's a writer's dream. It's my chance to check out for awhile, focus on my writing, get reacquainted with myself. There are huge downsides, of course - small towns tend to inbreed astonishing ignorance. It's also one of the few counties to become MORE red in the last election, primarily because the alternative was to elect a black man. As a whole, the people are racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and ultra religious. Shooting animals is considered pleasurable, a concept I have never understood, while selling alcohol is still illegal, a holdover from the Prohibition.

Is this a good move? An upgrade? Downgrade? Lateral move? I feel like I'm traveling between dimensions. I wonder if San Francisco will still seem real or if my memories will take the tone of a strange but distant dream. Regardless, it's the right move. Of that I'm sure. I've asked the hard questions, looked for the signs, done my research, and undergone all the contemplation I need to feel comfortable. It's a strange decision, completely out of character. This is not about "going home" - East Texas has never been my home, despite the fact that every single member of my immediate and extended family, without exception, lives or has lived there. I'm an anomaly in every sense of the word. An outsider.

But for whatever reason, I feel that East Texas is where I need to be right now. My work here is done. I've tried to hang on but God, the Universe, What Have You, is nudging me a little further down my path. Everything has lined up too perfectly to be other than destiny. The stick behind me, the carrot in front. And my true desire, to live a contemplative life of solitude and writing, looms despite every effort to deny it.

The line here is getting longer, both tourists and locals queueing for their fix. The employees are scurrying - one on food, one on register, one on espresso machine. They all know me, the employees, and I know them. I've been to their parties. I've been coming here two years and I've almost got their names down. They know mine. They know all the regulars. We say hi and we say bye and in between sometimes we chat about things. It's always a little stilted, like co-workers at a water cooler who don't really know each other or want to but are familiar enough to be friendly. When I stop coming here they won't notice. A couple months from now someone will ask "I haven't seen Justin in awhile, have you?" And the other person will respond, "Who?" And the first person will answer, "That tall guy with a beard? Filmmaker? Kinda nerdy?" "Oh yeah, no, I haven't seen him. Double cappuccino!" Or maybe I won't come up. Maybe they won't even think of me.

But then, I won't think of them, either.

This is my life today. An outsider. Alone, tribeless. And this is my life tomorrow.

And I'm ok with that.