New horizons
At the end of April, I will be leaving California. My move will fall just a couple weeks short of four years here. (My wife, however, has lived here her whole life.)
I moved here in 2019, broke, depressed, stinging from a big break-up, and only taking what I could fit in my car or mail to myself. The first night in Mountain View, I slept on a camping mat wrapped in a random sheet on the floor before getting an Ikea mattress the next day, cobbling together something like a functional apartment slowly over the next few months.
It’s been an usual ride, and a place I’ve never really fit in. I’d eventually move out of Mountain View—a lonely place I called a “simulacrum town” because of its uncanny valley-ish feelings as a place to live and function—for San Francisco, then Oakland. I lived through a fire season that broke me. A majority of my time here was defined by the pandemic. An ill-fit at my first job led, of course, to the creation of this newsletter.
There has been both good and bad here. My car has been vandalized and stolen. I lost a pet that had been with me for more than a decade, watched him slowly waste away before having to make the difficult call to let him go. I’m grateful that the vets broke Covid protocol a little to let me hold him as he slipped away, a small mercy. I couldn’t have beared with his last experience in life being without me by his side. My poorly-and-hastily written book landed with a thunk, and I never felt great about it. The cost of living has ensured that I never quite broke free of that paycheck-to-paycheck life. In a bit of a personal dig, I’ve found the food here underwhelming. A few times, my mental health veered out of control, burning some bridges and straining some friendships and relationships, whether through absence, being overwhelming, putting out negative energy, or leaning into my tendency to self-isolate. I hardened emotionally in a lot of ways and experienced a sort of life burnout that leaves me in a fog some days. I’m sorry if you were one of the people affected. I encountered weird new health problems.
I’ve also wholly lived in a kind of false progressivism of California we can call the “namaste to our unhoused neighbors.” Using the right words and language, but never really working on outcomes beyond that. Don’t say homeless, that’s mean. But also, don’t put affordable housing in this neighborhood, it’ll change the “character.” It’s made me regard the state as still, at its heart, a place of individualism that can approach the language of solidarity but reject the core premises that can get us there. I think if I have any gripe with political correctness (don’t worry, I’m not going Matt Taibbi here) it’s that the words we use can mask the intent to keep the status quo and continue policies that keep inequality intact. Identity signifiers that, for some people, have no meaningful intent toward coalition building.
But I also met my wife here. I adopted two new cat stepchildren. I found a renewed love of nature. I lived in the same relative area as my best friend again. I switched jobs and re-found a bit of drive in my industry. I got more involved in the union at the new job. I found haunts, like indie comic shops, an alleyway coffee shop, favorite regional parks, a bike trail that took me around NASA Ames when I still lived in Mountain View, and more. I was lucky enough to have access to media trips to SLAC to see some of the coolest projects out there, like the camera to the Vera Rubin Observatory or an X-ray machine scanning Gutenberg Bibles and Confucian documents to figure out how, precisely, the printing press made its way to Europe. I tried lab-grown chicken at a start-up and got hilariously bad gas. My wife asks me to find gratitude. In the fog of depression, anxiety, and insecurity, I’m trying.
So in April, some movers will put all our belongings in some crates and haul them away. A week later, a close friend and I will embark on a road trip to get our car out to the midwest. A few days later, my wife, her mom, and our cats will follow on a plane ride that will ensure those three poor travellers don’t have to spend three days in a car (nor their owners have to listen to them for three days.)
Anyway, Milwaukee, here we come. Here’s to a new chapter in life.