I find myself in a pop-up shop where local footwear designers show off and sell their side-project wares. It's all pretty remarkable work and knowing a bit about the footwear industry, I find it fascinating to contrast their day jobs vs. their art.
I meet a woman selling a few prints and paintings. She's incredibly nice, albeit a bit shy. I thumb through a small rack of larger prints and ask her about what she does for a living. She starts telling me of her days spent designing boxes, which is simultaneously more interesting, yet more boring than I previously imagined. She asks about me, what I do. I tell her of my new-ish job. I tell her of my near burnout and subsequent escape from shoe game. I almost tell her of being trapped in the suburbs, but I hold back.
Returning my attention to the rack, I flip to the next print. It's a top-down drawing of roads, lined with suburban homes, but things are arranged strangely. Confused, I pull it out of the rack to get a better look. After a few seconds, letters and words show themselves, revealing a message:
"oops, wrong dream"
I pause for a second, absorbing it. A perfectly-timed, coincidental punch in the gut. I do my best to maintain composure as I immediately pull out my wallet, purchase it, frame it and hang it above my bed.
I'd been contemplating it for awhile, but this was the only sign I needed -- Time to pack up this little dream. It's time for something new.
-----
Selling off the big-ticket items (bed, table, chairs, treadmill, car parts, BBQ, monitors, etc) was the easiest part. I'm hella good at Craigslist and know a fair price, so offloading them required little more than coordination.
I parted with the beastly PC I built myself right after I got out of college -- a reward for landing a job. I met with a guy, who turned out to be a recent high school graduate in desperate need for a workhorse computer for his upcoming collegiate career. As it were, he would be attending OSU to study computer science, just as I did. I gave him a discount and told him where to find the secret computer lab.
Years ago, I inherited a giant cache of Playboys from a dead relative, the same one who willed me his computers (which also contained much pornography). The magazines have been sitting in my garage for years. Finding a buyer was proving difficult, despite it being a very comprehensive set (decades worth). No demand. My reasoning? No one ever threw them away.
After months of continual re-posting, I finally find someone to buy them. Someone with the last name of 'McNutt'. No joke. After piling the giant boxes of pornography into my car, I meet up with him after work. Note: switchblade in my pocket. He's driving an obnoxious Dodge Ram pickup, which I complement. He tells me that his day job is driving refrigerated truck. Apparently, it's a very difficult, frustrating job that he is incredibly skilled at.
He tells me that he's already completed one set of Playboys and that mine will round out his second. He's trying to collect four complete sets. He Also tells me of his endgame: to be able to pass a complete set to all four of his sons. Unreal.
Next, I gather all the smaller, non-essentials for my very first garage sale. In order to identify what stays and what goes, I inventoried my entire set of belongings, assessing value. This meant cleaning out every closet, box, drawer and cupboard. In doing so, I experienced so many moments of heartbreak. Old photos. Birthday gifts. A bobby-pin in the back of the closet. Notes hidden years ago but never found. No fun.
In the end, I pocketed a tidy sum of cash. Anything that didn't sell, I gave away or donated. I rented a dumpster and threw away the rest.
After all this, I was left with but a small subset of what I used to possess, a bare-minimum for my version of comfortable living. Despite the emotionally-jarring surprises and weighty malaise, there's joy to be found in discarding the unnecessary.
-----
A dear friend flies in from New York. I pick her up at the airport. We drop her bags at my place and walk to my favorite local bar. It's a dive with a few choice pinball tables and a killer jukebox. Seriously. Any bar that allows me to transition Husker Du -> Wu Tang -> Heatmiser -> Huey Lewis on their juke is a-okay. We drink and catch up, eventually crawling back to my place for some sleep.
In the morning, we rise and crawl to a breakfast spot two blocks away. We come to life as we drink our coffee, both consuming copious quantities of delicious food. Back in the game, we stock up on snacks, drop currency at the liquor store and speed into the gorge -- our mutual friend has rented a classy (and giant) cabin, overlooking the Columbia, for new years eve party. There's 20 people, a fire pit, hot tub, ping-pong table, sprawling yard, 2000 gallons of spirits and 300 pounds of weed. It's amazing.
Intoxication ensues. Ridiculousness ensues. Debauchery ensues. It's 5:30am before I find myself crawling into a child's daybed for sleep. Happy fucking new year.
Later that morning, everyone rises with crippling hangovers. We brew coffee and make breakfast, mostly in silence. After a meal, everyone grabs a blanket and crashes on a couch as we watch Blade and eat snacks. Then Blade III. Then Blade II.
Note: Skipping Blade II made for a more enjoyable, engaging experience, as the shitty movie was made interesting if only by our confusion.
-----
With new responsibilities at work and trying to execute my gameplan for escaping the suburbs, 30 really snuck up on me. 30 had always been one of those landmark ages that seemed so far away. However, in a blink, it was here. And since noone else was going to throw me a killer party, I took it upon myself to do it right.
When I was ten, I remember hearing about a middle school kid who rented out a movie theater for his birthday. In my small world, that was the coolest, most extravagant shit ever. Coming from humble backgrounds, I knew it was way too expensive for a simple farmboy like myself. Fast-forward twenty years and I find myself with the resources to achieve this long-forgotten dream.
So that's exactly what I did. Renting out the single-screen Clinton St. Theater for the evening, I secured a cache of cheap-ass beer for the drinking and invited nearly everyone I know to partake in the crown-jewel of 1992 cinema: Encino man. Doors at 8, show at 9.
My birthday finally rolls around. I show up at the theater, unload the beer, set up a boombox and wait for people to arrive. People start filtering in, bringing gifts, hugs and even more beer. At 9pm, the theater is remarkably full and people are feverishly downing beer as the movie begins.
I'd expected a good time, as people seemed to be equally excited by the theater-renting birthday concept, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer outpouring of love. The ugly feelings of isolation and loneliness that I'd been wrestling with were quelled by a throng of amazing people who, seemingly, like me (or at least my beer / taste in cinema).
Fuck yeah, 30.
Note: I'd assured the theater staff that it would be a low key event, as it was taking place on a weeknight. After seeing everyone off, the owner of the establishment tells me that we have vastly different concepts of "low key."
-----
-----
I'd taken a mid-week day off for the move, in hopes of lower traffic and a better chance of front-row parking. By 7am, I had the truck in my driveway. Boxes staged in the garage, I pack up the first load by myself. My friend arrives and we drive it into the city. Finding a truck-sized parking spot directly in-front of the building, we quickly carry everything to the top floor, up three flights of stairs.
We grab a bite to eat. Making our way back to the suburbs, we load up all the furniture and zip back to the city. Moving my three-piece sectional couch up the stairs nearly destroys me.
By the time I drop my friend off, return the truck, retrieve my car and get back to the city, it's late and I'm 100% spent. Unpacking only my bedding, I immediately fall asleep in my living room, sprawled across a mattress, nestled between a canyon of boxes, huge smile on my face, no doubt.
-----
70 of us, camped out on some remote acreage towards the Oregon coast. It's 1am and I'm holding an old Sony boombox on my shoulder, a mariachi mixtape blaring. A group of people, sun-kissed from a day by the river, surround a makeshift fire, all wearing thick ponchos emblazoned with reindeer and pine trees. Passing a bottle of tequila around, they take turns jumping over the fire. Someone behind us lights a roman candle and yells 'internet' (pronounced 'innuh-neeeet'). Someone lights a joint. I flip the tape over, revealing my Hall and Oates secret weapon. The crowd goes wild.
These are my coworkers. This is our summer office party.
-----
It was supposed to be a quick, week-long trip down to LA for some training on a particular software framework that I'll be required to use for a big-dollar project on the horizon. I'd be traveling solo, which sucks, but they put me up in a real nice hotel. Class during the day, with my nights spent gallivanting around LA with some long-lost friends. I can deal with that.
I thought I was arriving at LAX, but as it turns out, my flight had been set up to land in Long Beach. It's not that far on a map, but in my rental Kia (fuck), it took nearly an extra hour of freeway travel to reach my hotel. I shrugged it off, but it was indicative of how my week would turn out.
The plan was to study during the day and party at night, with one exception: Monday night. One of the projects I'd been leading was set to launch that night. I'm a fastidious planner when it comes to deploying new software, so the fact that I'd be doing it remotely, off-hours wasn't much of a concern to me. After 8 hours of class, a quick dinner and a little downtime, 10pm rolls around. Five of my developers on videochat, I pull the trigger, remotely rolling out our code to all the servers. For a minute, everything is perfect. Laughter and celebration in the chat, I notice that one of the servers just went offline. Puzzling. As I'm looking into it, another one goes down. Shit. And then another. Panic sets in. Disaster-mode enabled.
Within 10 minutes, the entire server cluster is wholly unresponsive. Everything is dead. They might as well be powered off.
We'd tested our code for weeks without issue, so this is completely unexpected. After some frantic calls to the datacenter, I convince someone to hit the 'reset' button on the block of servers. They come alive, but after a few minutes, flame-out again. Goddamnit.
Another call, another reboot, but this time, I rollback our changes and everything goes back to normal. This means that there is something wrong with our code. Motherfuck.
More frantic phonecalls, we decide to call it quits for the night and try again tomorrow. It's 1am and I'm still at a complete loss as to why this is happening. I feel absolutely horrible. My peers consoles me, but this is the worst roll-out that I've ever been a part of, let alone lead. Defeated.
I get in bed and try to sleep, but my brain is humming. Despite having a top-notch team, I'm really the only one capable of figuring out what the problem is. After 30 minutes of staring at the ceiling, I realize I won't be able to fall asleep. Thusly, I hoist myself out of bed and perch in the warm glow of my laptop, perusing through stack traces, server configurations and logs.
At 5:30am, I can barely keep my eyes open. I'm about to call it quits again in hopes of getting some sleep before I have to head back to the classroom. As I close my connection to the server, I notice something blink on the screen. I quickly reconnect and take another peek. Eureka!
I stand up, kicking my chair back. Arms over my head, clad only in my underwear, I yell "fuck yes." After hours of complete cluelessness, I'd found the smoking gun. Mind you, it wasn't a fix to the problem, but I at least knew what the problem was. Half the battle. It's 6am when I finally crawl into my bed with a smile on my face.
The following day, after class, I immediately returned to my hotel for some hardcore hacking. After some research, I learn that the ultimate 'fix' is ridiculously complicated and will take some heavy lifting to pull off correctly. Again, I'm the only one on the team who could make this work. Pressure. The next two days were spent in similar fashions: class during the day, solo coding during the night in my lonely hotel room.
Thursday night, my fix in place, we try again. This time, everything works as expected. Perfect. I'm over-fucking-joyed.
The final session of class on friday, I feel like I'm going to lose my goddamned mind if I have to look at ant more code. Thusly, I skip out mid-morning, taking my shitty rental Kia (fuck) to venice beach for some sunny day-drinking with my friend, which turns into an LA adventure as the sun sets. A very suitable way to end out a ridiculously shit week.
-----
I'd moved out, but the house required a deep-clean / paint touchup / minor repairs / yard maintenance. So close, yet still tied down by dirty floors and paint and broken light fixtures and landscaping.
Again, underestimating how long things take, I spend entirely too much time commuting from the city to the suburbs to wrap things up. Painful.
And then, one day, without really realizing it, everything is perfect -- there's nothing left to be done. Thusly, I drag the trashcan to the curb for pickup and pack assorted cleaning products in the back of my car. Driving home, windows down on a gloriously warm evening, I feel so fucking happy.
-----
Meredith grew up on a farm, riding horses in the high deserts of Oregon. Now she lives in LA and designs clothing for a fancy couture brand.
I met her at the beginning of her transformation: college, freshman year. I had a big crush on her best friend, who lived in my dorm building. Keeping in very loose contact over the years, I'm delighted to find a text message from her. She's in town and wants to share a meal. It's been a few years since I've seen her, so I jump at the chance. I suggest a venue. She obliges, telling me 8pm.
I arrive expecting a one-on-one dinner, but instead, she has three of her (fuckin' foxy) colleagues in tow. All on vacation, all looking for some Portland-style fun. One million thumbs up.
We feast on Japanese food and drink sour whiskey cocktails for hours. It's coming on midnight before we make it outside.
"Where now?" one of them says.
I suggest a few of my favorite haunts within walking distance. As we discus options, one of them pulls out a bag and proceeds to roll a fine-looking joint with mastery.
"Isn't Portland, like, famous for it's strip clubs?" she asks, licking the paper and twisting it between her fingers.
Thinking she's joking, I laugh, telling her about Sassy's, a Portland institution. I haven't been in years, but it *is* just a few blocks away...
"Well then, let's do this" she says, lighting the joint. Not joking.
Note: later, I come to find out that three of the four attend a bar-dancing class together and are looking to see "how the pros do it"
With a brief walk and a flash of out IDs, we're in a loud, crowded strip club. I find myself in (long) line for the bar while the girls hit the ATM and find us some seats. I wait for what seems like ages, nodding in approval at how the DJ just made a seamless transition from Waka Flocka Flame into Talking Heads, when I suddenly hear a man excitedly say my full name.
Looking over my shoulder in surprise, I see my old college roommate, whom I haven't seen or spoken in nearly 8 years. Not by accident, either -- he's kind of an asshole.
Note: also a slob (evidence from 2006) -- 1 & 2
He gives me a high-five and tries to do the catch-up thing, despite the glaring fact that it's so entirely the wrong venue for such discussions. I don't really want to talk to him right now, but I manage to be cordial (and concise). I allude to the fact that we should postpone this until later, but he misses the point. He humble-brags about his grad school program and scuba certifications. I feign interest.
And what follows is undeniably the coolest cool-dude moment that has ever happened to me:
"So wait, are you here alone?" he says in a mildly joking / mocking tone.
At that moment, Meredith appears with two drinks in her hand. Completely disregarding my old roommate, she hands them both to me. I accept. Digging in her purse, she procures a giant fucking stack of currency. She cuts it in half.
"Here, trade" she says, handing me a wad of cash in exchange for a drink. "Merry Christmas".
"Someone came to party" my old roommate says.
"Yeah, let's go have fun" she says, motioning across the room with a fistful of dollars. All three of us look in that direction, seeing the other girls, seated at a prime table. They wave back.
"Sorry Mike, I gotta go." I say, lifting my drink and doing a farewell wave with my cash-filled hand.
-----
Software, as a career, is full of ego, nerd-posturing and one-upmanship. I pride myself on avoiding this behavior at all cost, but there are three distinct ego-stroking moments I've experienced over the last few months that seem notable:
_ Making it to a third-round interview for a CTO position with very well-funded New York startup.
_ Contracting for a giant (and recently IPO'd) social networking site to solve hard problems they can't.
_ A 1% share of company profits with my current employer.
Baller.
-----
The next time that we cross paths, it's at a birthday party for a mutual friend. We drink and laugh and flirt and joke. It's probably not the right thing to do, but it feels good. Just like old times. And we both realize it.
After that, we start making excuses to cross paths.
This continues until we start toeing the line of "just friends." A loaded phrase. This is starting to turn into something else. And we both realize it.
The correct move would have been to keep my boundaries in check, to stick to my guns, to stay strong. Instead, I do the complete opposite.
And then we go way over the line. And we both realize it.
I'm so foolishly weak.
Love your abuser.
-----
Someone brought a cheetah into the office. I watched it devour a giant, raw steak in a matter of seconds.
-----
After sealing the house, I take a one week break to situate my apartment and enjoy the city while the weather is still nice. Once the blur of unpacking and staying-out-way-past-my-bedtime-on-a-schoolnight diversion was over, I get back to business. Having read a bunch of shitty books and armed with some guidance from one of my colleagues, who happens to be a land baroness, I put my house up for rent and waited.
The response was remarkable. Within a few days, there was enough interest to fill out a saturday with 30-minute walkthroughs. Everyone who visits takes an application. Towards the end of the day, a younger couple arrives. We make small-talk as I show the house. They're incredibly pleasant people, far nicer than anyone else I talked with that day. Oh, and they're recently-married doctors who work all the time. No kids and no pets.
Perfect tenants.
They immediately fill out applications and cut me a check for background checks. After a green light on their rental history and background checks, they send me a deposit.
I meet them at the house on a Wednesday night to sign final papers. They cut me a pro-rated rent check, at which point I shake their hands and hand over the keys.
Smiles abound as they walk me to the front door. Exiting, I stand on the porch, telling them to call me if they need anything. They thank me, waving as they shut the door. As it clicks shut, I realize it's the first time anyone had closed that door on me. A certain sense of finality rushes over me. All the good things that have happened under this roof, and all the bad, it's doesn't matter anymore -- this isn't my house anymore, it's just an asset.
Liberating, yes, but sad all the same.
Shutdown sequence: complete.
-----
After that night, I'm a fucking mess. All these feelings I try to kill: they persist. All this baggage that I thought I'd offloaded: still securely stowed. A mild, mini identity crisis, as I've built my current self around the notion of moving on -- shutting down the past, trying something new, growing.
I thought I'd put some distance between us, but after turning around, it's still within reach. And that's disappointing.
There's still comfort to be found in her arms. And that's conflicting.
After an adequate moratorium, we meet up her place to talk about it. About us. About what to do with all of this. She makes makes a meal as we skirt the subject.
After the meal, as the tension fades, we open up. We talk, for a long time. Spilling our guts, I tell her that I think I need to walk away.
Truly, my love of this woman is immutable, but simply I can't bring myself to do it again.
"We had our shot."
Shortly thereafter, she asks me to leave. Standing by the door, we embrace. I kiss her on the forehead before I exit to the hallway, head spinning.
The gravity of it all doesn't hit me until I get home. Passing a mirror, I notice something on my jacket -- two perfect tear stains on my chest. Devastating.
-----
After executing the suburban escape plan, I reward myself with a gorgeous bass that I intend to keep (and abuse) for the rest of my life.
-----
City living is glorious. Convenient. Vibrant. Exciting. I love my apartment. I love my commute (< 1 mile). I love the coffee. I love the parks. I love the women. I love the women. I love the pinball. I love how everything just fell into place, once I started the ball rolling.
-----
I expected more. I expected a modicum of resolve, resolution. Instead, little more than the slow-fade of smoldering flame.
I hate it. I hate how it ended. Bittersweet.
Not only did I watch the dream fall apart, I somehow managed to start a fire with the rubble.