A lot of people who know me think that I have only lived in two places – Washington and Florida. But there was a time when I lived in California, too.
I had just started dating Psycho, you know, the Texas Twister. This was back when she was still a fairly normal girl, one who had moved from Texas to San Francisco. She had gotten a new job, one in sales, and had packed it all up and in to go to the city by the bay.
No, not San Francisco. San Mateo. I said “by the bay.” No one can really afford to live in San Francisco.
But San Mateo was a nice place. As noted, I drove down one weekend to see it. 18 hours each way, just to get a little sack time with Psycho. I wonder who really was nuts in that regard.
Anyway, my job at Associated Grocers was quickly heading south. I could hear the spectre of unemployment following me, so I had to act quickly. I resigned before they could give me the heave-ho in April of 1990.
I had never been unemployed before. It was kind of scary. So I did what most guys do when they are scared and unemployed. I decided to make a major change in my life.
Yes, I decided to move to California. What the heck. Make a fresh start with my girlfriend. The romance of it all. I could easily get a job in PR down San Francisco way and carve out a nice living in the sun and fun of Northern California.
As usual, I called on my friend Bobby to help me pack everything up and move. I really don’t know why he still talks to me, given the number of moves I’ve made with his help. But no matter. I gave notice on my apartment in Bellevue and packed up all my worldly possessions.
Hedging my bets, as I often do, I stored it all away in a 10′ x 10′ storage room down the street. I figured Psycho had all the worldly possessions I needed already, so why not just leave everything here for now and come back and get it later.
I only took the things I really thought I needed. Looking back, it was an odd assortment of things, too. Some pirate clothes, even though there were no pirate events to be found in San Mateo, some interview clothes, a hot HP luggable PC I had purloined from my old employer, a dot matrix printer (uber high tech back then), and my Playmobil pirate ship. And no, I didn’t have any children with me.
The move down was pretty easy. I had done that drive before for the Stupor Bowl that January. I just pointed the old Honda south and kept driving. And driving. And driving.
Finally, I made it to my new home in California. I was ready for a fresh new start. Well, I thought I was.
Things went well for a time. After all, who doesn’t love the Bay area and it felt for a time like I was on vacation. A long vacation. But by the third week, it didn’t seem much fun.
I was running into a brick wall in the job hunt world. Everyone there asked where I lived and then said it was too far to commute. Imagine that! Too far to commute. Wasn’t that my choice? So, no job.
That left me in the house during the day. I would do my job search old school, the newspaper, write cover letters and then send them out. The next four or five hours I did nothing. Oh, I sang a bit. And then I’d end up thinking to myself that I should do nothing some more.
Eventually, I streamlined the whole process to the point where I just did nothing all day. I was so good at it that I didn’t even bother changing out of my bathrobe I put on first thing as I rolled with the waves out of the bed. Yes, a waterbed.
That bathrobe must have been extremely comfortable for it didn’t come off for an entire week, maybe a week and a half.
Unknown to me, I was in the throws of a complete, full on, no holes barred bout of depression. I missed home. I missed my daughter. I missed my friends. And I missed pirating.
There was no way out of it. Well, at least not while I was still living in the Bay area. As if I needed one last push, Mother Nature sent some earthquakes my way in that last week – something called swarms – that lasted about an hour. I had definitely had my fill of living la vida loca so far away from home.
I guess I wasn’t ready to live somewhere else, even though I thought I was madly in love with someone and that love could keep us together. I guess that works in Carpenter’s songs, but it didn’t work in the case of Psycho and I.
At the end of May – just four weeks later – I packed all my stuff back into the car and headed back to Seattle. Psycho thought it was over between us, and perhaps it should have been. But no, I convinced her to move to Seattle as we all know, and then it took two years to get her out of my house and my life.
I sometimes wonder why I ever moved there in the first place. Oh, yeah, that’s right! I was running from my life, the same thing I did in 2004.
There’s an upside to all this. My running days are through. Not necessarily because I’ve seen the light or the error of my ways. Unfortunately, my knees aren’t what they used to be and I just can’t really pick up enough speed to call it a run.
Maybe my walking real fast days are still ahead of me. Hhm, I think that equates to a move across town, not across country. I think I can still muster up the oomph for that kind of life change.
In the Emerald City, still saving the moving boxes, but I know longer know why,
– Robb