The Stationary Life (Part One)

Setting the scene: East Sacramento, a couple of miles from Downtown; an established neighborhood bordering a small park, trees letting go of their leaves, modest two and three bedroom homes. That is where I find myself living---who knows for how long: A low slung house with a shallow front yard. Wood floors. A piano temporarily in the front room. Like me, my roommates do not wear shoes in the house. My room is large and in a back corner of the house, still mostly empty: The bed from the van. My books. A small table I type this at. It feels odd; not bad, just odd---not living out of the van, having a room, a fixed place, the stationary life. Several miles across town is my job delivering auto parts. Am I really doing this? For how long? Unknown.

I got a full time gig at a nationwide auto parts store doing deliveries; it pays a dollar above minimum but I’ve done the math and it should be okay. Driving through Sacramento ten years after leaving is strange and brings up emotions, some from memories, others from the conflict I am feeling: Am I really doing this again, back into the urban/normal job thing? I'm stunned, in the headlights, somewhat---here I am living in a room in a house again, commuting to a job---how long will I do this before it becomes a drag? At my job, as with the last job, I will have two days off, not much ability to travel; of course, it is winter and the plan has been for some time to just hole up somewhere in a house or apartment and record music. I drive on. There’s our old grocery store. Going up J Street makes me remember driving out to visit my grandmother. Are there more tarps and tents or is my memory clouded? At Howe and El Camino there’s a guy walking up the median with a piece of awkwardly torn cardboard. On this remnant “5 cents” is written. He talks through windows but everyone is ignoring him; the man walks down the line of cars then back to where he started.

Work is in Del Paso Heights. The mentally ill wander around screaming, hood dudes spar on side streets. Drive a few blocks and there's a new brew pub where people in casual clothes that are none the less expensive chat happily next to their Audi and Lexus SUVs. After watching a video on what to do with a discarded ketchup packet, I am told to ride with another driver, a woman somewhere around seventy. She tells me that she has twenty-one grandchildren and that she grew up in Guerneville---a small town in Sonoma County---and that after she married her and an ex-husband poached abalone. The story resonates with me: The two of them were using their wits to survive, doing something illegal with a lower case “i” to make it. I understand, there I am, in my middle fifties, picking up another service industry job to pay the bills and buy food. The driver drops me off and I return to watching more training videos.

After work, I join the commuter traffic back to the house I am living in. I make food, I drink wine, and watch videos. There is so much to do with figuring out the future and promoting books but I am drained; the shift back to a “stick and brick” life is overwhelming---not bad, just weird after a year and a half on the road, leading a life that had become normal for me. Now there is no idea how long this will go on, living in a city again, not forever, at some point I will pack up Pandette and move on. Six months maybe, time will tell. If any town is home, this is it, I just can't unsee how two so different worlds share the same space and yet they do not. Every time you have a roof over your head or have food you are fortunate. Anytime you don't have voices in your head, paranoid delusions, you are fortunate. You are also fortunate if you grew up in a world of possibilities, of options, of your world being open to more than the same twenty blocks in a bad part of town. These realizations are not new to me but living in a city again they throw up neon signs and play trumpets.

Nostalgia is like opium: A little is comforting, a lot is bad for your health. I often ask myself why I am back in Sacramento, a town I took part in so many things that are just memories now: The house my ex wife and I lived in where we hosted parties. The rental where a friend committed suicide. All the homes and bars and streets my friends and I drank in and stumbled around. Those friends are grown ups now with mortgages, careers, and children. I’m not the same person, either, and it’s not 2002 or 2008 or any other time in the past.

This afternoon I walked around Tahoe Park and then down the same streets I walked fourteen years ago. What am I doing back in Sacramento? Clinging to the past is a waste of time, but I love this town. I could never afford a house here but it will always be a home or one of the places I have called home.

This is where I am supposed to be now, all the signs point to that despite my misgivings and the awkwardness of memories. It is where I am supposed to be but I understand it is not forever; my instincts are telling me six months---and then what? Pick up remote work I can do anywhere? Okay, how do I make a homebase happen? Or, maybe this time back in the stick and brick world is to remind me that I am more comfortable living out of the van. I have no idea, I just go with what feels right.