Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Confessions of a Nomadic Urban Professional


This is the barn which has held my worldly possessions for the last 9 months while I was reborn in Florida. Notable possessions include:

1 Sesame Street Lamp circa 1977
1 typewriter
1 felt hat found in Golden Gate Park perfect for mushroom hunting
1 copy of Pulp Fiction
1 cast iron skillet
12 boxes of books and notes

Now it's time to get slapped on the back and start crawling up the linea nigra of asphalt back to the land of milk and honey.

I'm lucky because my work is non-local, sort of like the new physics but without the implicit order. I will merely have to suspend sending zeroes and ones through the air for a week until I can plug my computer into some temporary docking station on the west coast.

With a little more luck, tho, I will be coming home to my own digs with my beautiful and patient lady, who is the midwife to this whole re-entry plan.

I am not very good at being a nomadic urban professional tho because I am longing for roots. It worked well when I was 23 and an archaeologist, rambling all over the southwest, digging up historic whiskey bottles and whatnot. Mornings like the time I woke up in a wildflower meadow in Larkspur, Colorado while visiting other nomadic and piratical friends at the RenFaire.

That was 1999 and now my back hurts when I sleep on the ground; so it goes.

I actually have less possessions than ever before, aside from the books. But the books are now a "library" and they are a mean feat to move around. My archivist nature and my wandering soul collide here, and the archivist wins. (With concessions anyways: the barn was not humidity controlled in the slightest. And spiders currently live in the filing cabinet.)

So I am heading west again with the intention to belong, to come home, to be where I am, to mingle with the oak savanna and the hard clay loam and the wild turkeys and the big laughing Jims and the coyotebrush fusing with the ocean breeze and the intense fluctuations of geomagnetic activity and the traffic and the fog and everything else that makes Northern California the magical place that it is.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well said. Every last word.

Anonymous said...

Its damn hard sprout significant roots in bay area soil. The dry clay ground is jaded from it's overgrazing, and seeing a million perennials declare it home then wash away unprotected with the last of the nutritious detrious dust.

But the ones that dig deep enough here, the ones that fight hard enough... man, they are the tallest, oldest, wisest rooted beings on the earth.

It can be done.

Anonymous said...

Does this make us Nuppies?

Anonymous said...

"Dream of Californication."

Ryan said...

Nuppies, through and through.