Old Man Look at My Life

This was not submitted for publication and is personal correspondence. It does contain information about the possible future direction of this blog.

Dad and Trout,

Glad the holiday circular is going over well. The initial development was fun, working with so much more space than in years past. But as with most creative endeavors the fun gradually transformed – first to annoyance after I bought out the town's stock of 9x12" envelopes and then also the town to the south's, then to drudgery as I meticulously folded each unit in half and inserted into envelopes, then to supreme frustration as I tried to interface various computers with the office printer and the address label sheets that caused it to choke repeatedly, and finally to the anxiety that attends a near lynching when, on an unassuming Saturday morning, I dumped well over 100 envelopes in front of the sole clerk at the local post office and caused a rather impressive backup.

I offered some time back to work for their critically understaffed office. They seemed eager to hire me until it emerged that I lived abroad until 2018 which disqualifies me to deliver the mail. Maybe a smart move on their part since terroristic ideation was not absent from my expatriation impetus.

Our time in Colorado would seem to be coming to a close. Despite my best efforts at conveying the root causes of and possible remedies for the area's housing crisis through reporting, research, and analysis in the local newspaper, "stakeholders" (how I've come to loathe the word) seem to prefer a mentality of near-total denial.

Before the let-down from the PO, while it was still seemingly a viable job offer, I waged a hard-fought battle to achieve a raise amounting to $2,320 (gross) per month. Meanwhile our (low-income subsidized) rent and utilities run easily over $1,000 per month. The paltry raise would seem to have fallen well short of turning the tide of the war.

Regarding Boulder and the Marshall Fire, then, relatedly. While undeniably a tragedy, my mind turned swiftly to questions unasked by media coverage.

How many burnt structures were "second homes" (cunning of those who own multiple homes to have limited the references to their surpluses at "secondary." But then I suppose even I, a hack wordsmith with a slightly above-average vocabulary, don't immediately know what comes after tertiary) and/or AirBnBs?

(Disappointingly few with respect to the latter, I have just deduced via AirDNA and the Denver Post)

How does losing insurance-backed possessions and being put up in a hotel for a year by the insurance company compare to the daily experience of houseless people in Boulder/Denver?

But of course the definition of tragedy is when the aristocracy experiences a discomfort and so the narratives must dutifully obey. Wasn't Dostoevsky's Idiot about a guy whose shit life goes from bad to worse, though? I'll have to re-read it and see how the evolution from disaffected youth to disaffected adult might have altered my interpretive lens.

About 14ers, people get hooked and age doesn't seem to slow them down all that much. Rising at the ass-crack of dawn or earlier and taking obscenely long walks for what is inevitably the same vista (more mountains) seems to fill up all the empty spaces in a surprising number of people's lives.

And speaking of vistas, Trout, I'm not sure that the local and very official pronunciation, "Byoo-na Vista," translates properly into good view. Whenever I hear it my mind parses the moniker as twice-stolen view. To the south is Salida, Spanish for "exit," somewhat more understandably mispronounced. Meanwhile don't dare emphasize the first syllable when admiring anyone around here sporting expensive Blizzard skis.

I do enjoy writing, although I'm not sure I'll be able to keep it up without some kind of external source of focus. (So far no publications have been eager to hire on a mid-thirties vagabond with less than a year of journalism experience)

Taking interviews this week with some northern Michigan employers: M----- Healthcare - BREAKING - OFFER EXTENDED - (clerical), and BATA (bus driving). The time might be right, as offered wages are higher in the context of the Great Resignation and a labor solidarity renaissance. One hopes this progresses next to a repeal of pernicious "right to work" and "at-will employment" laws which ought to have been clear to any worker to be intended to work in one direction only.

I'd like to continue with more creative stuff but the title of my blog (see an in-depth account of my first 14er climb there) will make significantly less sense when I'm not submitting regularly to an editor. Although I suppose I could submit more pieces that are 300% over the word limit "suggested" in the publishing guidelines for the Industrial Worker like I did here. I fear rather than outright rejection they'll probably just hack it to absolute pieces and publish it in unrecognizable form like they did here. Maybe some NoMI paper will take me on as a correspondent and semi-regular contributor.

Well this has taken a turn for the self-indulgently verbose and link saturated. Either compensating or augmenting this narcissism, I invite you to enjoy a few more photos of my primary reason for continuing being. Gotta go pick her up from preschool now.