Expose yourself ... to the library

I have no idea if this will work but I signed my short story collection up on SELF-e. I gotta say, the Washington state library system produced a super nice glossy tri-fold brochure ... that explained nothing. They didn't even get the damn website address right. Anyhoo, other authors might be interested, especially if they already did the Amazon thing and got a ISBN:

SELF-e Library Journal

Another freebie

My short story BRAVE SUCKER is available for FREE download on Amazon starting today. You don't even need a Kindle, an iPad, an e-reader, nada. Just a computer with a screen, download it and away you go!

Still more FREE !

My dark satire short story OBJECT OF DESIRE is available for FREE right now, right here.

Still more FREE

Starting June 22nd my short story LAND OF NOD is available for FREE on Amazon. This sci-fi near-future dystopian story is creeping up the Kindle download bestseller list. Snag it while it's free!

Free ebook, that's right completely FREE for 48 more hours

People,

Snag this short story collection while it's F-R-E-E. Don't need a Kindle, a Nook, a nanny, a hall pass, or even matching socks -- just a computer screen with which to download and read these totally FREE short stories.

Let's do this.

Au Revoir, Stump Town

After wasting 15 months of my life, I'm over Portland completely and utterly. No more Portlandia inspired daydreams for me. The last time I strolled across Burnside Bridge at sunset, it was not gauzy lighting and curious Hipsters on bikes. It was dirty, loud and dangerous, like I might be pitched into the beige cesspool of the Willamette the minute some aging infrastructure failed.

There were all sorts of red flags that I shouldn't try to live there, but I had my Carrie Brownstein blinkers on. My first mad attempt should have curbed all my future Oregonian ambitions.

I met a room renter on Craigslist in October 2013 and moved into her 3-bedroom, 2-bath condo the day I met her. Two weeks into our cohabitation, she lost her job thanks to the Government Shutdown and receded into her bedroom for two weeks of Zoloft-inspired texting to her online boyfriend. She emerged long enough to tell me -- without any warning -- that I had 48 hours to move.

Portland invented flakiness and shucking personal responsibility. Now throw in some real Great Recession angst and you've got a recipe for a thoughtless upper middle class ignoring a growing sea of working poor.

The second foray up to the Portland area was more promising. In January 2015, I had a temp job waiting for me and got into a rental share with a nice, level-headed lady who also had a 3-bedroom  this time in Vancouver, Washington, the suburban tumor that clings to the top of Portland like a plastic cowboy hat. All was well for the first two months. Then the elderly bat-shit crazy landlady below us decided on a Vicodan-induced whim that we had to move. This was my first no-cause eviction. I now know they happen all the time in the Portland area, which is second only to San Francisco in pitching tenants to the curb ... for no reason at all. (Really it's about money, rents are sky rocketing in the Cleveland of the Pacific Northwest).

I found housing in Portland to be depressingly like Seattle: slumlords were getting $750 for motel rooms with kitchenettes. First, last plus vague $400 "non-refundable" deposits. That's $1900 for a shed.

I scrambled to find housing, spent a while living with a mean dude who was a quart-of-vodka-a-day alcoholic and finally settled on the last room I rented for $600 a month: a 10 x 10 square foot in the basement of a 75-year-old tract home owned by an Asian Hipster chick who was the definition of Pretentious New Ager. One of her six day jobs was re-aligning chakras. Seriously.

At age 49, I took a job as a landscape laborer when my first temp job abruptly ended (they didn't want to spring for healthcare). I was 15 years too old for this dead-end job and Vancouver in June was 30 degrees too hot for that kind of work.

I interviewed for technical writing jobs at places like Intel where I was told over and over, "it was down to you and one other person." Stable, good-paying employment in Portland was like the summit of Mt. Hood -- pretty to look at and eternally out of reach.

Everyone had assured me that Portland and its surroundings were chocked full of Liberals. People who were avid recyclers, organic gardeners, Unitarian Universalists and believers in book sharing. I'd say this was true about 25-percent of the time. The rest of the time? It was Sacramento with more trees and angrier NIMBYs.

For a town of 75,000, Vancouver had a lot of skinheads. And in retrospect, Portland is a city where someone in a coffee shop can say totally straight faced: I'm a vegan and a white supremacist.

Black Pussy. Yes, there's a band in Portland that call themselves this. Read the drama here.

Overall, I found Portlanders to be insular and pretentious on a level Seattleites can only dream of. They're certain they're doing the right thing (their "thing") and they're certain everyone else is not.

Childishness isn't just endorsed in Portland, it's a valid lifestyle. People don't go to parties to drink and hear bands. No, no. They go to "art parties" to "engage in new mix medias". Think: birdhouses out of Popsicle sticks in the second grade. There must be 20 or so Meetup groups in Portland just for people who play board games. Not kids, but adults in their 20s and 30s lining up outside bars to play Clue or Jenga.

Forays into yesterday's fads like 80s culture is fine, but devoting all your free time to a past you likely were never a participant in, is just weird.

Get your own fucking style, poseur.

At least people who were into swing dancing in the 1990s understood it would only be trendy for about 15 minutes and then we'd all move on from the Squirrel Nut Zippers.

I suppose I have too close a perspective on Portland and its Hipsters because I lived with two of them for nine months. But one of them was a trust-fund cunt who had a day job as a Pilates instructor despite the fact she couldn't get sober long enough to teach P.E. to fifth graders and the other was the High Priestess of channeling money out of rich housewives from Lake Oswego.

They talked about organic farming, helping the poor, seeing other people's point of view, blah, blah, blah. But scratch the surface and they were as typically bigoted and selfish as the yuppie Realtor in the Prius next to you in traffic.

Most people are generous and liberal until it's an inconvenience and then they're not. Ah, neoliberalism, you poseur,

Zombies: They're all in your head

I like The Walking Dead. I loved Max Brooks' World War Z, even met him and had him sign my copy of the book. I think Robert Kirkman is a great writer. I listened to his interview on Marc Maron's WTF podcast and he was interesting. And he's a talented storyteller who, unlike a whole lot of white men, has no problem writing about black characters, strong female characters, gay characters, any ol' kind of characters you can think of. Awesome.

She can't be hungry, no digestive system ... at all!

Here's the thing about zombies and the entire sci-fi/fantasy premise: It's complete bullshit. When people die, they swell up because of all the microbes and gases in their intestines, sometimes they burst, they smell real bad ... and that's it. Dead is dead. The very absolute end. Period. I've seen dead bodies a couple times in my life. I saw my grandma when I was 15. My aunt and uncle made the faux pas of having her casket left open. She looked well made up, hair neatly combed, slightly plastic and very dead.

Another time I was working in a retirement home for something like four dollars an hour and one of the long-term vegetative geriatrics in the retirement home died. The charge nurse didn't notice for several hours because, well, he never moved and was always asleep. His gurney was wheeled out of his room and into a hallway. His body was covered in a sheet. Aside from the fact his emaciated chest wasn't rising and falling, it wasn't much of a change from his prior state of being.

Dead people are without exception always one thing; very still. They don't get up and dance and they certainly don't rise up and start roaming shopping malls for human flesh.

If you are medically brain dead, you have no lower reptilian brain. You have no desire or compulsion to eat, let alone breathe. You can't see, hear, smell, taste or touch. Sorry Kirkman, zombies can't "smell" fresh human blood.

Prior to AMC's extravaganza, there was a plethora of zombie flicks. Like The Walking Dead, many take liberties with making zombies look as comically gory as possible. Zombies without limbs come out with their teeth gnashing. Zombies without spines slither menacingly toward the protagonist. Even more improbable, zombies without abdomens come lunging out of the dark, hungry for flesh. The trouble is, nothing without a digestive system, along with that all-important nervous system and circulation, has an appetite. Even invertebrates like parasitic worms aren't interested in lunch if you cut them in half in biology class.

I can't write fiction about zombies or any sort of zombie-sponsored apocalypse because some part of me is still a 12-year-old biology student who is gunning for an "A". I understand the basics of biology too well to suspend belief and stop snickering over the silly premise.

 Totally REAL. Complete, absolutely real and occasionally ridden by Vampire Bill.

I would more likely believe in fucking unicorns living wild and free in Narnia or Middle Earth than zombies stumbling after their next "meal".

Now vampires, those I totally believe in.

"Wil" you write for free?

Ummm, no. I don't work for free. Awesomest post by Wil Wheaton in response to HuffingtonPost. This is great.

You Can't Pay Your Rent ...


And among the replies there was this awesome little social experiment:

Ask non-creatives to work for "free".

Object of Desire (a short story)

One of my short stories is going to be offered FREE on Amazon Kindle starting on Tuesday Sept. 15.

Science Fiction is B.S. - 1982

West of You: short stories

My short story collection is up on Amazon/Kindle and can be bought here: WEST OF YOU.

And two of my short stories are now available on Kindle.

BRAVE SUCKER can be had for the rock-bottom price of $1.29, less than a cup of coffee.

And LAND OF NOD, one of the short stories which previously ran in THE SUBTOPIAN: SELECTED STORIES VOL. 2 can be read for $1.59. That's less than the cost of bagel.

Subtopian

I've been published again. This short story anthology is an earnest labor of love on the part of Trevor and a couple of other people in Portland. You can find their online magazine here: The Subtopian and the print-on-demand/Kindle version of the anthology right here on Amazon.

Everything ...

... is now here on Word Press. I took a freebie class and discovered that Blogger is bad. :( That is all.

Four of the Worst Jobs You Will Never Work

I'm sooo tired of hearing the faux liberal Bourgeoisie expound on stuff they know nada about. 

They think $10 an hour is a living wage. Go get a job that pays $10 an hour and work it for a couple of months ... if you can find one. Make your house payment/rent and your car payments with it. Pay the sitter/daycare that watches your kid while you work this supposed living wage. Buy gas, buy food and watch your paycheck disappear literally overnight, a day after it deposits into your checking. Forget internet service, your phone, car insurance, etc. -- you can't afford that on $10 an hour.

Take the eternal We Hate Walmart gang. Listen, Walmart ain't that bad. If you tell me it is, you're implying that working for Bed, Bath & Beyond, Home Depot, Chili's or CVS is heaven on earth. It's not, it's just as shitty. Ninety percent of retail work pays less than $10 an hour and raises are fairy tales.

Before you get your bought online, hipster panties in a twist I'll enlighten you. There are much, MUCH worse places to work than Walmart. Day jobs that beat you psychologically so badly you have to go on antidepressants or you start engaging in Mad Max road rage, temp gigs so dehumanizing they make wiggling your tits in some slob's face at Hooters seem entrepreneurial. Jobs so fucking awful, office shooting fantasies are the norm.

Some of the worst places to work in America are right here in Reno. Not surprising, since Nee-va-Duh is one of those Bend-Over-For-Corporations stupid Libertarian states.

Take this place for example. On the surface, their website seems legit and they're an affiliate of Microsoft so what could possibly be wrong with working there? First of all, the entire reason this creepy German temp agency was appropriated by Microsoft is because of Enron and corporate accounting scandals which led to the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002. Basically, Microsoft might not have been telling their shareholders how many millions they rake in every fiscal quarter in software licensing agreements, so Arvato-Bertelsmann was created as a way to "process" all licenses. The software and database the company uses is draconian, there are redundancies on top of redundancies, unreadable pull-down menus, etc. because it was created over a decade ago and has never been updated. While temping there I was 1) required to sit and take notes for 9 hours a day, 2) my notes could never leave the office, 3) if I went to the bathroom, I had to put my notes in a drawer or risk termination and 4) I wasn't supposed to "ask too many questions" about the archaic business process. I got reprimanded for trying to type my notes up, this was seen as a waste of time. This place has about a 50% turn-over rate in the first three months. I saw people get fired for refusing to work 16-hour days, failing to punch in and out for breaks and taking more than 28 minutes for lunch.

This place is one of the shining jewels in Reno's light industry crown. It's an example of how well things can work out for a tax-revenue bankrupt state with zero social infrastructure when they fling the gate wide and let any old corporation slink in during the night when OSHA isn't looking. It's a massive refrigerated food processing facility that, until January, paid it's employees $8.75 an hour. They work in a 37F (2.7C) environment for 10 to 12 hour shift while wearing many, many layers of  safe food handling gear. Here's an abbreviated list of the Dos and Donts at SK Foods:

No earrings

No jewelry

No wedding rings

No gum

No hard candy

No water

No drinks of any kind

No piercings of any kind (including earrings)

No iPods

No radios

No talking

If you sneeze, even while you're wearing your "beard net", you have to leave the food assembly line. If you fail to remove the right gear when you go to the bathroom, you're fired. Although they don't pay you, all employees are required to show up 30 minutes prior to their shift. That means if your shift starts at 5:30am, you have to be there at five or they fire you. They have conservatively, a 70% turnover rate within the first week. There are labor temp offices that do nothing but advertise for them. Constantly. One former employee described it as "like prison". Anyway, it's something to think about while you're eating your low-fat egg sandwich at Starbucks which was made by this place.

 

Yes, this is what a call center looks like ... one that
has clean cubicles and chairs that aren't broken.

This place has been up and running since the 1990s. Everybody in Nevada was jazzed when it opened. I've met people who were fired because they were late for work due to a car accident. I knew one person who worked on one of the loading docks during Xmas. He got pneumonia, probably from breathing the frigid desert air mixed with diesel exhaust. They fired him for being sick. I met a young woman who worked there for six months. She was tough-as-nails, a real company person and even she described Amazon's fulfillment center as horrible. She worked 10-hour shifts and got two 15-minute breaks and one 30-minute lunch. If it took her 14 minutes to walk from her picking station on the lower level to the break room and back, guess how long her lunch was? Whatever your quota is at Amazon, it doesn't matter. You will be pushed to always do better. There is no acceptable quota. Everyone is in a constant state of 'not good enough'. Oh, and they strip search people. At random. All the time.

In the rush to condemn Walmart most upper-middle class people are unaware that some of the worst job environments are call centers. They're stressful by design. You're dealing with pissed off customers because their phone, TV, car, internet service, etc. doesn't work right. AT&T runs some of the worst in the country. They have chronic turnover, won't provide references for their former employees even if they leave on good terms, and their pay and raises are laughable.

This place is -- hand's down -- one of the worst I've ever worked for. They psychologically abuse their new hires starting on day one. As a long-time call center employee put it: "The whole thing is a hostile work environment." We were told not to wear jeans or tennis shoes ... by supervisors wearing T-shirts and flipflops. We were given a giddy rundown of who had been fired that day by our trainer at the beginning of every shift. And they fired people every single day I was there. If they fired someone who had been there "a long time" (more than five months) they high-fived each other. Supervisors regularly cruised the break area (a sort of pen with a tiny awning in the parking lot) to eavesdrop on new hires' conversations. People were fired for saying "crap" during break while they weren't anywhere near a phone line or an incoming call. People were fired for using their personal cell phones ... in the bathroom while on break. People were fired for "having a bad attitude" or "asking too many questions" about AT&T's absurd 20-some different databases and software we were required to use to answer dead-simple questions like "how can I order a new phone?" The call center insists that they "want you to succeed and become long-term employees." This is a lie. They only really make money if their workforce is in constant turnover. 

This corporation makes money by billing AT&T every quarter so many thousands of dollars because they "have to train more new hires". It's this silly pyramid scheme where new hires lose every time. The whole thing from start to finish is designed to either get you fired or make you quit. When I was actively encouraged to rat out my fellow workers by telling supervisors if someone was "using their mute button too much" I quit.

Actual note forbidding personal cell phone use in the restrooms.

This company mismanages its workforce so badly that one of their call centers in the Philippines filed a labor suit against them. The Philippines! A part of the world where teenagers are regularly chained to sewing machines to work for pennies a day making clothes for rich Westerners.

I'd like all the people Thom Hartmann calls the "Bourgeoisie petty rich" to please shut the fuck up. If you and your spouses' combined income is $75,000 to $250,000 annually, just shut up about Walmart. You don't know what it's like to work at one of these places day after day, month after month, to have to choose between worse and much worser, to have to choose between crashing at a relatives indefinitely until this Recession (read: Depression) subsides, if ever, or checking into a homeless shelter (if they aren't already full). 

If your annual gross income is between $75,000 and $250,000 you have no idea what life for the working poor is about. Poor is something you drove by in 1989 on the way to your graduate classes at a prestigious university your rich uncle or generous grandma paid for so you would never have to endure this kind of slow spiritual death. If your dotcom startup has finally taken off, if your career as an anesthesiologist or a real estate agent or software engineer is stable, you have no idea what I'm talking about. Poor is just a bad rumor to you. Poor is somewhere you went slumming in 1992 when you worked for Cinnabon for a month between semesters at that nice private college I never so much as toured. Poor is something you contemplated when you pulled $15,000 out of your $300,000 trust to get yourself through that "rough patch" between 2009 and 2011 when you were trying to find gallery space for your performance art.

P.S. I hate the Waltons and everything their grasping, despot family stands for but they are not the only monsters in this new Gilded Age. The real Godzilla is what it has always been, apathy.

More online publishing

Two of my short stories have been published in two different online lit sites.

They're very different sites. One is very hipster-ish and the editor is very Los Angeles.

The other is survivalist-meets-vegan-sci-fi-fan and is rather Portland-ish.

Grays Harbor at Subtopian.com.

Love You Long Time at the Los Angeles Review of Los Angeles.

I take no responsibility for layout, readability or art work though, these two are actually quite tasteful.

Thank you Trevor and Robin.

Dystopian on Subtopian

I'm published again. No money for any of this but it's still nice, especially when I'm getting shot down for day jobs right and left.

http://www.subtopian.com/?p=65915

Ironically this story is about real class warfare in a dystopian America 50 years from now.

Existential attitude turning on a dime

When I was backpacking through Australia a dozen years ago, I saw something early one morning that has stuck with me for years. It was maybe 6:30am on a Sunday. Sydney was still waking up. The hostel I'd been staying at was in Potts Point, north of the crazy vibe of Kings Cross.

I was walking near Bourke Street which is kind of steep and overlooks the Botanical Gardens to the west. It's an area with elite cafes and arty gentrified Victorian townhouses most Australians couldn't begin to afford.

I was coming up this steep section of old sidewalk using all the physical fitness I'd gained while working for the Forest Service in Colorado earlier in the year. The morning light was golden and everything was misty and haloed, even the parked cars. The numerous cockatoos and parrots that permeate the city were making their wild morning ruckus. The air was cool, limpid and the harbor gave everything the exotic tang of salt air.

At the top of the hill I was scaling were a pair of birds making a joyous clucking and buzzing sound as they pecked at something on the asphalt. They were dandy creatures in neat brown feathers with neon-bright yellow beaks. They kept pausing in their pecking to squawk at each other as if they were having an intense conversation.

Indian myna birds are one of many invasive non-native species in Australia.

This was one of the few times I've felt at peace with myself and Sydney was one of the few cities I ever felt at home in.

When I reached the two birds standing in a pool of gold light I realized they weren't eating crumbs from a sandwich or something equally agreeable. They'd found a puddle of puke left by some blind-drunk tourist and were nimbly eating it.

I walked past them carefully, suddenly feeling like I'd mistaken some gauzy spiritual moment for another crude foul example of human imperfection. It was like witnessing two people in a graveyard and assuming they were mourners or relatives paying their respects only to realize they were grave robbers looting the dead.

I've been juggling the contradiction of that scene in my head ever since. On the one hand, it was a beautiful morning and the birds did look sublime. Everything looked right. On the other, the ugly reality of vomit in the streets.

If I ever meet the Dalai Lama I'll ask him what he thinks of this.

Inertia ... creeps

Essential rain/snow blowing down over the eastern Sierras into Nevada.

I've been staying in a friend's spare room for four months. I spent two of those months working a funky, seasonal warehouse job for 10 bucks an hour. It was a nice diversion from the reality that I'm almost 50 and -- for all intensive purposes -- homeless.

I've been working since I was 17. I'm flabbergasted by the whole Pirates of Wall Street /Predatory Lending/One-Percenter economic ass rape that precipitated this current Recession (read: Depression). I have never in my life seen anything like it.

Even at the nadir of Reagan's regime, in 1986, I was able to find a myriad of temp jobs while living in Sacramento. Jobs where I put shit in boxes for a month and then that ended. And I moved on to cleaning luxury homes in the Sacramento Valley for seven bucks an hour. Homes with ridiculous floor space, sunken living rooms, multiple hot tubs and three-car garages overlooking the baked, flat haze of central California.

I lugged turf on landscaping crews and pulled thousands of weeds alongside Interstate 5 in 100-degree heat. Thinking back, the outdoor jobs were usually the best ones. Something about the Pink Collar Ghetto always made me wince. My mother was a slave in that ghetto almost until she died. Her servile role in office bureaucracies was the reason why I balked at learning to type until I was 23 years old. I just took a typing test the other day and I'm now clocking at 62wpm, which is 7wpm faster than I was a couple years ago. It's like the older I get, the less needed I am in the workplace, the ironically more efficient I become.

I've been misled, deceived and had smoke blown up my ass by so many contract temp agencies, I've lost count. I've been promised jobs that were a "shoe in", that were "virtually guaranteed" and that I'd be "an ideal fit for" only to have the recruiter lose my phone number three days after submitting my resume to Intel, to Microsoft, to Amazon, to (insert dotcom name here). The IT industry does not like women, especially women over 40 who come from a non-technical background (English and journalism) and they openly despise older job applicants.

Usually when my resume gets flown by some tech firm, I slack off a bit, some weird naive part of my brain thinks this is it, the tide's turning. And almost always, I don't get picked.

Maybe Michael Ruppert is right. Maybe this is the last gasp of our petroleum and consumer-based society. I had no idea collapse would be this anti-climatic, this monotonous.

Enjoy your PM10

This is what the air looked like in Reno, Nevada (aka Truckee Meadows) on December 20, 2013. Isn't it lovely? There are two freeways that intersect in Truckee Meadows: I-80 and 395. Commercial trucks, travelers, tour buses and locals drive on these freeways 24/7. The air, and our lungs, never get a day off.

The preferred personal vehicle in Reno is a full-size pickup. The favorite make is the Dodge Ram, which gets about 11 mpg city and weighs 4,600-5,000 pounds depending on the model. The second favorite is the Toyota Tundra -- the oxymoron of Toyota because it is neither compact nor economical. It weighs in at about 5,500 pounds, again depending on the model and modifications. When I was on the freeway a week ago, I counted four Dodge Rams in my lane and two Toyota Tundras in the lane to my right. These massive pickups outnumber passenger cars in Truckee Meadows about two to one.

I first heard about PM10 in 1995 when I was fresh out of journalism school and working for a newspaper two hours northeast of Los Angeles.

Modern vehicles along with modern tires have created particulate matter at atmospheric levels never seen before on earth. When cars first became common, in the 1920s, the average vehicle topped out at about 45mph and their tires were made from actual rubber from rubber trees. Ford Model Ts weighed about 1,500 pounds and did about 13 to 20 mpg. Tires are now rarely made from rubber trees but rather polyester and nylon -- two prominent petroleum by-products made from crude oil. They're much harder than early tires and they hit the asphalt as they're spinning at twice the speed of early tires. Basically, a car or truck tire, is a spinning crusher that pulverizes sand, dirt and debris and makes it smaller -- usually 10 microns all the way down to 2.5. This ultra-fine dust rises into the lower atmosphere.

If you live in a fairly verdant region that sees a lot of precipitation, like New England or the Pacific Northwest, the particulate matter doesn't stay in the air very long. It's knocked by frequent rains or snow to the ground where it sifts into the water table. Unfortunately, in desert environments like the American West, northern China (Mongolia), the Middle East, Bolivia, etc. -- where there is little or no precipitation, this particulate matter stays in the lower atmosphere. In northern China, cities like Gansu situated near the Mongolian Desert have some of the worst air quality in the world. Granted, this is partly due to the fact the Chinese burn coal to heat their homes but it's also because Mongolia is a desert much like the Great Basin. Also, the booming middle class now own personal vehicles in record numbers. There are even off-road 4x4 clubs in China.

There is very little information on particulate matter -- its sources or where it ultimately ends up. This is not a coincidence. Just as Googling the torque or engine size for a Dodge Ram or a Toyota Tundra readily yields answers, try searching for the mpg or weight of these vehicles and the stats become mysteriously difficult to find.

As populations in desert cities grow, particulate matter accumulates in the air above them.

We inhale this PM10. And all animals (birds, dogs, cats, beef cattle, etc.) inhale it. It drifts down into creeks, rivers and lakes when it rains or snows. Children inhale it.

Air pollution in China

It's ironic that in the arena of global climate change debate, the issue of particulate matter generated by cars and trucks almost never comes up. Apparently CO2 levels, mercury and withering ice caps are such depressing and huge problems, there's no room left to talk about the most visible form of atmospheric pollution.


Sources:
Badwaterjournal.com

Wikipedia - particulate matter

Particulate matter map

Farewell Detroit in the Desert

I was barely in my old hometown five months and now, because of economic necessity, I'm heading back to the Pacific Northwest (at the start of monsoon season).

It's bittersweet. On the one hand, I felt socially and culturally stifled here. What with all the 'SAVE AMERICA, KILL OBAMA' bumper stickers and the bizarre, enraged disposition of about 35-percent of the white-male population. On the other hand, I kept bumping into transplants from the PNW, from SoCal, etc., who always defended Reno, Nevada the same way: "It's so much better HERE, than where I'm from." So much less traffic or so much more sunshine.

Secret Cove, Lake Tahoe, NV Sept. 2013

What an odd way to decide on a community. I'm pretty sure Indiana and maybe even St. Louis are a step up from Los Angeles. I think Nebraska might be too. Tampa and Los Alamos are surely held in higher regard. One has tropical weather and beaches, the other some of the prettiest desert in all the American Southwest. So pretty one of our greatest living writers, Cormac McCarthy lives in Los Alamos.

Past and present Renoites touchy about my criticism of northern Nevada would be surprised to know I spent 15 years living here. I originally moved here in August 1988 at age 22 after finally breaking free of the comfortable shackles of Elko. I stayed here until 1995, that's seven years; an eon when you're in your twenties. I moved back in late '95, then left again, for another job in summer '96. Moved back in spring '97 and stayed here until early 2003 when, spurred on by my first trips overseas (England and then Australia), I got the hell out of Dodge.

A lot of stuff happened to me in this dusty, blusterous town on the edge of the Great Basin. Some of it was good. I had genuine friends like Louie and Angela and Cody. I had sworn enemies too. But a lot of super bad stuff happened to me here too.

I buried my mother here in September 1993. I buried a failed relationship-slash-engagement here too. That's almost a cliche as so many women came here in the 1950s and 60s to pitch their wedding rings into the Truckee River.

In the end, I think this place is too rough for me, too raw. It's all glassy-eyed tweakers and gasping yuppies gunning their enormous pickups for the next stop light, the next party, the next sale at Walmart.

Nevada, especially Reno, is a place that even after a century of existence, still can't define itself, still can't pick the right things and say "these are important, these matter."

It's too much like the rest of middle America. This is why I'm leaving and going back to the self-analysis and geeky introspection of the cloudy Northwest. There's time to think under all those big trees.