sights and sounds

my invention

Surviving Unemployment

This week a friend of mine, who was a great support for me during my interminable unemployment, got laid off.  She called me asking for advice.  Now that I’m gainfully employed, thank the lord, I have some perspective on what was helpful and what was not during that time. So the following is my list of How to Survive Unemployment. Things that I didn’t manage to do most of the time, but when I did, they made everything a lot more bearable.

things I love about Tucson

baby mariachis

murals

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my new room

The Great LTD Taste Off

The Buildup

Perhaps Full Sail’s LTD is not so exciting to people who harken from the left coast where, I’ve come to imagine, microbrews grow on trees like heavy, juicy apples. I don’t know much about Full Sail. I think it’s a small brewery, like many others, an amazing businesses full of creative, conscientious people who make delicious beer. A beer lover has many options in these remarkable times when every town of a certain size and demographic (some sort of coalescence of yuppies and hippies, a Do it Yourself crowd with more education and taste than money) has a local brewery. Many of them are operated cooperatively or with zero emissions and a handful of other admirable commitments. This is how I justify my faithful of consumption of microbrews even in these lean financial times.

LTD, however, is special. My Dad and I discovered LTD last fall, while I was home for a spell in Missoula. I think we bought it all the time, because for weeks it was on sale at Orange Street Food Farm. It was also on sale sometimes at Albertsons. It is delicious and has a higher than average alcohol content. Price, taste, proof: all important factors in choosing a beer.

change of scene. kitty.

i’m housesitting in a new place!  with a kitty! in tucson!  the opposite in many ways to oracle.  i’m in love with tucson.  i spend hours exploring the neighborhood.  crumbling old adobe buildings.  this town fascinates me in so many ways.

this kitty likes to sleep under the covers!

and then there was a christmas snow storm in arizona.  and even though it’s arizona and the snow immediately melted and the sun came out and resumed 60 degree temperatures…  it was nice nonetheless!

my foxy new hat.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

cyber bubbles

Life never ceases to amuse/amaze.  These days the only access I have to internet is at the Oracle Public Library which is closed most of the time and open rather arbitrary hours.  So I usually am checking my email/job searching from a parked car in front of the library.  Makes me feel a little pathetic.  And a little like a thief (when they hack through security systems while sitting in unmarked vans).   Last night I actually got interrogated by the police , well, they were nice enough when they saw I was emailing not hacking.  Nonetheless it’s not exactly conducive to productivity. My elbow bangs against the door handle and the screen is tilted funny against the steering wheel. Right now it is pouring rain, so the whole scene feels pathetic, criminal AND lonely.

Though I have to admit it does seem a little miraculous and sci fi to check my email from a car.  On the list of Things That Were Beyond My Wildest Dreams.  And I don’t really envy my urban loved ones who roll out of bed and plug into Cyberlandia.  Though not convenient, it is a little bit more my style to do things in a slower, more awkward, cheaper and unsaavy way.   I value that mostly I’m disconnected (from the internet, from the buzz, the trends, the hip soul-sucking nonesense), even though that means I don’t feel connected…

Another car just pulled up, so now we sit in our seperate cars, cyber bubbles, 10 feet apart in this rainy parking lot, communicating to some great, mysterious, fast moving other universe.  I tried to wave.  And he paid no attention to me.  Real life’s got nothing on its virtual cousin.

all my love.

Trespasses

This, however, is 93% fiction.

 

 

I saw my first rattlesnake while pulled over, engine steaming, on the gravel of the picnic table rest stop memorializing Tom Mix, a purportedly famous cowboy who had driven off into this desert and died. In the very spot I was standing, I could only imagine.  The plaque wasn’t very specific. 

As far as the eye could see, cactus, dry gnarled shrubs and sharp, peeled-looking mountains in any direction.  Beyond the picnic tables No Trespassing signs dotted the landscape. The rattlesnake greeted me from a warm rock nook just a few feet away from the memorial I had been reading about Tom Mix’s tragic and mysterious death.  I backed slowly away from the snake.  Smooth and gray, curled and moving at the same time; menacing and vulnerable. 

passing the time

camping

It’s still hitting mid-70s during the day in AZ. come on down!

Dog and I enjoy camping and taking pictures of dead trees…  and my pretty room.  and lizards in my room.

Too much of a good thing

or why unemployment is slowly  making me crazy…

It rarely rains in the desert, obviously. Today is the first cloudy day for the last month. Desert rain is miraculous and special, like a meteor shower or rainbow, something to stop and observe, contemplate, appreciate. When it rains you can literally hear the ground and plants drinking. I’m not sure if this is botanically/biologically accurate or just my imagination, but it seems plants open up their leaves, branches and roots to be able to rapidly take in scarce water. There’s one bush in particular, creosote, that releases this glorious smell in the rain. So it is a time when I feel I can see plants moving, drinking, rejoicing.

It’s also just nice to see your surroundings in a fundamentally different way. The clouds change the quality light, and the moisture makes rocks, plants, sand appear to have different colors and characteristics. Normally I can see the desert stretching away from me in all directions, the endless openness and chains of mountains beyond. In Arizona there is nothing obstructing the view of continuous rolling desert, dramatic cliffs and mountains. Today the mountain I’m sitting on and the distant mountains are obscured, darkened, made dramatic by banks of storm clouds. I can see places miles away where the clouds have begun to empty their humidity onto the eager and thirsty landscape.

Unending and beautiful sunshine it seems, is made all the more glorious by occasional interruptions of dark, wet, cold, rain. I hike in the rain every chance I get (my Pacific Northwest friends and family would scoff), but I enjoy the change and the contrast. Too much of a good thing isn’t so good after all.

Petty Theft

This is a short story work in progress. Yes, it is mostly unskillfully veiled truth which i’m clumsily calling fiction, but, well… If any of you reader/writer types have comments or edits, i’d be much obliged!

Everyday hundreds of thousands of people launch themselves towards undetermined destinations. If they glowed somehow and the trajectories of these adventurous souls could be tracked on a giant light-up map of the world like the Pentagon always has in the movies, the continents and oceans would sparkle like a summer night full of fireflies.