I’m writing this in a studio apartment with a shared bathroom, on the fifth floor of a building that was built in 1902. If I was in Albuquerque, I would be wondering how my life managed to swing towards failure so quickly after finishing college–though I would also be wondering how I managed to find a century old five story apartment building in Albuquerque, since such things quite simply do not exist in that city.

Of course, this apartment is NOT in Albuquerque. It’s in Seattle, about a mile from the waterfront, just a couple blocks east of downtown. And while the job I’m doing is not one that I imagined doing when I set out on my faithful motorcycle, it is one that, more and more, I’m finding to be satisfying. Not particularly lucrative, but definitely satisfying.

Finding myself as a freelance writer in the middle of a city of three million wasn’t quite what I had in mind, but it’ll do for now.

In the last month alone, I’ve probably put down a good 20,000 words, easily. Which is about half of the output I really need to be hitting, but it’s a start. It’s enough to pay the rent, and my internet bill. Not much left over after that. The more I write, the more money I make. I do wish I could spend all of my time writing in a blog and make a living doing that, but let’s face it, this blog is probably never going to be getting 5 million page views a day.

I would have to wonder about the sanity of the human race if it was.

Last week, I borrowed a car and drove down to Bend, Oregon, to watch my nephew compete in the Cyclo-cross nationals. He didn’t place, but he did pretty good, came in about in the middle, which isn’t bad at all considering that his starting position was near the back. On the way back from Bend I drove through the Santiam pass down into Salem. About halfway down, as I was driving past the vantage point with a view of Mount Washington (ironically located in Central Oregon,) I realized I had been on that road before, about 22 years ago.

Putting aside the fact that I’m now old enough to clearly remember things that happened more than two decades ago, I was reminded of all of the road trips that my family went on when I was a kid. I remember how happy I always was when we were travelling, and how actually reaching a destination was actually a bit of a disappointment. It was the trip that was exciting. The place we were going was always irrelevant to me.

I’m enjoying my time in Seattle, but I think that my time here may be limited. No more than a year at the most I suspect. I think after that, the old travel bug will starting biting my feet again.

The nice thing about freelance writing is that all I need to write is an internet connection, and little else. I can go anywhere, and see anything I want, and I’m at a stage in my life where there is absolutely no reason for me not do so. I think it’s time to head down to the local post office, and fill out an application for a passport. I’ve seen a lot of the good old US of A, and very little of the rest of the world, and Toronto barely counts as the rest of the world (apologies to our Canadian friends to the north…)

London, Paris, Berlin. These places tug at my soul, and not because I wish to live in them. Because I wish to see them, and move on.

I wonder what will be left for me once I’ve seen all I can of this world. Perhaps we will have figured out Faster than Light travel by then, and there will be whole other worlds to explore.

One can hope, right?

The tire is completely shot. Parts of the tread are missing. The worst part is that I know from the last time this happened to me, I ended up paying almost 200 bucks to replace the tire. At least this time, my truck isn’t sitting on the side of the freeway, with traffic wizzing by at half the speed of light (eighty miles an hour.)

It gets better of course.

My friend Josh shows up to take me to go get a tire. I get to discount tire, and they – of course – don’t have the tire I need. I already called Big O, and they were asking almost two hundred bucks for the tire. Not going to happen. So we left, and after stopping off at Sportsman’s Warehouse so Josh could buy their entire stock of .308 FMJ ammo, Josh dropped me off at the truck, while I called a tow company.

To top it all off, I was very late for work. At least my boss is a pretty understanding guy.

P.S. My motorcycle now charges, but it sat so long that I need to replace the air filters and clean out the carbs, maybe rebuild them. IT NEVER ENDS!

The Wordpress app is particularly awesome. The lack of a delete key or the ability to copy & paste is a little annoying. That’s pretty easily overlooked just due to the fact that it is so easy to type up a blog and post from where ever you happen to have wireless.

That’s the one thing that would be better about having an iPhone instead. Because then you aren’t even tied to a wireless hotspot, which I have to admit would be pretty cool.

Of course, given how often I actually post to this blog, it probably doesn’t matter. Hopefully the coming fall semester should give more material to blog about.

UPDATED:

So now I’m writing this on my brand new iPhone. The 3G Internet more than makes up for the fact that I had to pay a $200.00 deposit to AT&T.

T-Mobile is of course being a pain in the ass as regards my old phone. They insist that I have a contract even though I never signed any such thing. To counter this I changed the credit card number to a Paypal generated one with a one time use, and then immediately canceled it. Assholes.

At any rate, I can’t even begin to describe how cool it is to walk down the street while listening to a Pandora station. It is quite literally, the bees knees.

I’m putting the touch for sale on eBay to recoup the costs. I’m also throwing in my old iPod dock, as the case I bought wouldn’t allow the phone to fit into it, even if I had the proper dock adapter, which I don’t.

I’m getting pretty fast at typing on this thing now. It’s pretty impressive what this thing will autocorrect from. You can hit completely the wrong keys and still get the right word. Kudos to Apple for that.

Unfortunately this brings with it the totally unpredictable rain that is one of the signature elements of life in ‘Burque. I’m perfectly comfortable right now, but it might be pouring rain in 20 minutes. Twenty minutes after that, it’ll have probably stopped.

Back in the day, these rainstorms use to mean that the entire valley would flood on a fairly regular basis. All of the main streets on the slope from the foothills to the Rio Grande would become minor rivers a couple of times a week. This was a bit annoying

These days, we have a fairly extensive network of concrete drainage ditches, locally referred to as arroyos. If you were to visit ‘Burque in the late spring, when it rarely rains, you would wonder why the hell we have them. If you were to visit during a rainstorm in the monsoon season, your confusion would be quickly abated as a wall of water slammed down an arroyo, typically with a greater water volume than the river usually has.

Some of the streets still flood, particularly Lomas Blvd. Every couple of years the local news gets to report on how someone in a Chevy Metro got swept down the street and drowned. The really frightening thing about the monsoon storms is that they can deliver the same amount of water in 20 minutes as a three day thunderstorm might in Seattle. If it ever rained for three days straight in Albuquerque, there might not be a city here anymore.

In the meantime, I’ll take my 75 to 80 degree July days and laugh while people boil in their own skins in Phoenix.