flashback, part 63 of n

Nine years ago this morning, my fiancee and I woke up early and quietly let ourselves out of my ex-girlfriend’s place, where we spent our last night as residents of greater DC – because almost all our worldly goods were on a truck for California.  We stopped back by my old apartment, stuffed the last things into the cars, and I locked up and walked to the office to hand over the keys and the parking pass.  And when I walked back from the office to my apartment, I had the strangest sensation that I was rolling back the last seven years and for one brief moment, I stood there in front of the old WPA-era brick apartments as if it were the trailing days of autumn 1997 and I were seeing it for the first time.

And then we left.

The drive took two weeks, first swinging down south and then back up to St Louis before setting a more even western course – including a night at the Peabody in Memphis, a dash through tornadoes to a hotel in Russell, Kansas, a three-day stop in Colorado after my Saturn’s fan stopped working properly, and my worst night at a craps table in history at the Silver Legacy in Reno.  But for the most part, the memory is of emptying another $2 12-pack of soft drink cans into the front-seat cooler and covering it with ice from the motel’s machine, then flying down the road at a steady 75-mile-an-hour clip, smoking cigars from the care package my DC tobacconist had prepared as a parting gift and playing the BBC World Service on XM (occasionally interspersed with Top 20 on 20 or maybe even the Broadway channel if I felt particularly cheeky).  There were days we knew we had to make 500 miles before dinner, and there was nothing for it but to check the handheld radios, make sure we were in range, and put the hammer down.

It was a highly liminal state of being.  Ever since committing to the move a couple or three months earlier, I had resolutely not thought about California.  Wouldn’t allow it. I didn’t want to develop any expectations or preconceptions or anything that would ultimately lead to letdown or disappointment.  Didn’t think about where I might end up working, or where we might end up living – the one slip-up I did have was thinking “not long until I get my VW New Beetle!” and sure enough, it didn’t come along for over two years and had become a Rabbit by the time it finally did.  But in all other respects, I was blindly charging into the future and trying hard not to think about what came next.  The devil I knew, for once, was worse than the devil I didn’t.

Nine years ago.

That’s longer than my entire college life combined, longer than I spent residing in the DMV, damn near three-quarters of my entire relationship with my wife.  I did visit DC four times in the first year, and I’ve made it back four times since then.  I miss my gang to this day, I miss the mere fact of having that sort of gang, I miss being shoulder-to-shoulder with the Rifles of the–

–and yet it turns out that wasn’t enough to make work tolerable when California beckoned.  So it’s probably foolish to think that having that sort of crew again, even if it were possible, would be enough to make tolerable a job that in every particular is the equal or worse of what I ran out on in 2004.  This heat wave has even taken out the climate advantage, the last thing holding an edge for NowJob.  Workload? Same.  Responsibility without authority? Same. Duties well outside the remit of my actual job responsibilities?  Worse now, and with fewer co-workers and without my gang backing me up. Cigar shop to escape to? Shit, are you serious? This is California. Management without a clue? Worse, because instead of reporting to the best boss I ever had, I report to the sort of clueless hack who was his boss back East.  Money?  On paper I make more money – but once you adjust for the passage of nine years and the cost of living from Northern Virginia to Silicon Valley, I’m prepared to bet (but can’t afford to pay up) that the actual value of my compensation is, at best, dead level.

But I think the bigger issue – as with everything that seems wrong with my life these last sixteen months – is the age. Things that seem surmountable and plausible at 32 are a lot less so at 41. I’ve gotten married, I’ve got a house, I’ve been to Europe three times and seen the revival of Vanderbilt athletics and the reinvention of mobility computing – but because I’m doing the exact same job in an environment as close to the same as makes no difference, it feels like I’m stuck in the mud while my friends join new companies or get amazing promotions or just take the reins of their own lives and strike out in their own direction rather than treading water.

At some point – some way, some how – I have to stop defaulting to the devil I know. And that means learning to seek out the devil I don’t.  It’s not a small shift.

One Reply to “flashback, part 63 of n”

  1. “At some point – some way, some how – I have to stop defaulting to the devil I know. And that means learning to seek out the devil I don’t. It’s not a small shift.”

    That’s the real trick. It’s not something you have a lot of experience in, but it’s always one I hope you’ll be willing to work on. To have enough faith in yourself and your abilities to find *some* way to bounce back from (in retrospect) an unfortunate/bad/unlucky decision that you’d be willing to take some sort of risk.

    Everybody else believes in you. It’s a damn shame you don’t share that belief with us.

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