Summer 2021. Vagrancy revisited

 092810 Part 19 Hope, Patience and Grace I have been lightly reading the old Greek philosophy of Stoicism for awhile and have found that it has helped me in dealing with events over the past few years, and most specifically in dealing with the aftershocks of what happened to me during the years of 2015-2017 or so, where I went from being a father and raising two kids, having a technology career, and having a family, a functioning and active sexual body, being a husband in what I thought was a happy marriage,  with a house, two cars, the works.    I had it all.      Within two years I had lost it all, and with it any sense of self I had.   What I thought was the solid foundation of my life  - my marriage - fell away beneath me as she had just "changed her mind".    My technology skills waned, half intentionally in retrospect, as I was beginning to look for another path.   My kids grew up and began leaving home.    Somewhere along the way my sexual impulses faded rather quickly

  Part 18 My 4th Summer Bike So as it turns out I now have my fourth bike of the summer.     About 4 or 5 days after I bought the 125 dollar Walmart bike, I found a used trek bike in a bike store for 150 dollars.    With granny gears!     Getting it was a no brainer.  6 weeks left here at the time.  That's a lot of days and prospective miles.   The trek bike has made the 1.5 mile climb (2 miles total) from Jill's house to the local Starbucks and my morning coffee much more tolerable.  The Walmart bike with only 7 gears was - doable - but a lot harder. So now I have two bikes here in Prescott.    This has changed my plans a bit, because now I want to get a bike rack for the trek and bring it back to Bandon with me.   The Walmart bike I have only ridden 2 or 3 times, so it still looks brand new, and will be a suitable gift to Jill and Joe when I leave.     They are not serious riders, nor is anyone in their family that I am aware of,  so it will be fine for them, however they dec

Part 17 When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers Oscar Wilde quote.  No current allusion to the above.   I just heard the quote the other day and liked it.     I remember in high school praying to God that if he would only get Peggy back for me that I would never ask for anything from him ever again.   He never answered.  Or maybe, he answered in the best way he could.   There is a song by Garth Brooks about this called "Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers".   Here is a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXzdm1cz1XU The same path that looks scary walking forward, makes more sense looking back on it.  The things you think you want today may hinder you tomorrow.    Walking through life is like walking through tall weeds.  You can't look ahead.  You can barely look behind you and understand what the hell just happened.   When I ran technology projects, we would get to a version 7 or 8 and one of us would suddenly have an inspirational id

  Part 16 My summer 2021 bikes Mid September and I am back in Prescott.     I have now bought two Walmart bikes this summer, the equivalent of cheap tools that you expect to use only minimally.     Bike number 1 was from a Walmart in Anchorage Alaska that I knew I would only be there for a week or so.   Not worth spending the money for a good bike, so I bought a simple beach cruiser for about 100 dollars.   The anchorage area is mostly flat, so I knew I didn't need gears.       I spray painted it yellow to give it a Chip look, and it worked well for me while I was there, and the day I flew back to San Francisco I found a women's shelter a couple of miles from the airport in Anchorage and dropped it off there, with the helmet and the lock. Bike number 2 was my bike in Denver for a month, and was a great Trek bike that Scott had in his garage,  a leftover from his first marriage and that was initially known as "Donna's bike", named after his first wife.   Great Bike

  Quince Time does that to you He stood on the beach, cool grainy sand between his toes, as he watched the full sails drift away into the distance, and out towards a sea that seemed to go on forever.  a growing emptiness sat like a cold stone within his chest.  A life fully lived, now pulling away on time's strong winds and swirling tides, taking a large part of him with it, leaving him slightly unbalanced.    But he had the sun on his face.  the wind on his cheeks.  the sand between his toes.   not everything was bad. He thought of a young woman with a hesitant smile that he had once met so many years earlier, the one that had eventually left him alone now on this beach.  if he could do it over.  go back to that first moment, would he distract and turn the young man away so that he and the young woman would never meet?   a complete life turns on just a few moments, and that one particular moment avoided would surely lead to a different future, but a future containing its own unpre

  Part 14 By a meandering stream Christopher Walken, a contemporary actor who always played tough guys, but also slightly unbalanced tough guys in movies, was asked once where he got that persona from, and he replied that when he was young an uncle of his walked up to him and said "You're a tough guy, aren't' you?" and that ever since then he thought that maybe he was. One day, when I was young, there was a song playing by simon and garfunkle called "Continue to Continue" and my mom looks over at me and says "This song sounds like you" and whatever she meant by that, or not, that comment always stayed with me.    She also hung a poem above my bed from Henry David Thoreau: If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. Whether these two things defined me or not, or whether I was already this way and my mother's was j

  Part 13 Wednesday Man He swept his driveway maybe a little too often these days.   Maybe 3 times a week.  Certainly more than it needed, but it got him out of the house and breathing some fresh air, as well as whatever marginal exercise that came with it.      The driveway ran along the side of his house and into the back, so he found that it was a way to get out, without attracting too much attention from the sightseers.   His house had become famous in a somewhat earlier part of his life, and even though it had been 30, 40 years - somewhere back there - he would still find people walking slowly by the house from across the street and gawking and taking pictures.    Funny people.    After all these years, and he was never quite adapted to it.   Maybe that's what she always saw in him anyway.   The strangeness.   Like living on Wednesday when everyone else was on Tuesday. He swept and thought a little more on it.   She was gone now, but they had two grown kids, Ellie in Chicago,