Catching Up 1: I, me, mine

It's been so long since I've really posted anything here that I thought I'd begin with a quick "okay, since this is a personal blog I should probably add some personal information." 

Okay, no. I'm just a fucking egotist, so it's all about meeeeee!!!.

Kidding aside, well. Here's the basics.

I'm just a couple or three months away from my 69th birthday so, yeah, fuck, I'm old.

Throw in the whole "multiple joint replacements and Parkinson's" things and I'm not exactly heading into old age physically robust. That kinda sucks, given that I've tried to do all the "right things"; exercised, watched my diet, kept active and intellectually curious and engaged.

It seems pretty ungrateful for me to have taken at-least-decent care of my mind and body for them to decide now that I'm old to turn on me. C'mon, guys! All this time and finally you just give me the I'm-gonna-stop-making-dopamine finger?

Ingrates.

The other ugly reality is that I'm about two years into the post-second-marriage phase of my life, and that sucks on multiple levels.

On the obvious, social one, it's lonely. I've gone from being part of a family; wife, kids, a cat, loving and living together in a cute little house I had spent twenty years loving and working to make cuter and better.

So that whole two decades now feels like a lost sunk cost. All those years and work and love and caring...vanished as though they had never been.

 
On the physical level, well, I'm alone in a small apartment.

That turns back to the social-suck, because for twenty years my best friend, my companion at home and abroad, the person I liked and cared for the most, who shared our adventures together and apart was Mojo. She was my "working week and my Sunday rest".

And now she's gone. Not just physically, but emotionally; she's made it clear that she doesn't want anything to do with me. Not even the slightest, most casual contact. That hurts, a lot. I'd hoped we could at least remain friends, but Mojo has made it clear that she will not tolerate that.

Ouch. 

And the hard truth is that no other friends, as dear as they may be, can replace a best-friend spouse. For one thing, they have their own lives to live. I'm a third wheel, at best, emotionally, and distant physically; it's not like I or they can just stroll around corner or up the road to say hello and pass the time.

I do try; try and get out, try and go to places to meet with friends, or people I share something with.

I've even tried one of those on-line matching things, and met some good people there.

But, still, the bottom line is, well, what I've just detailed. 

 
What remains?

Well, the essence of my heart and mind. Me, who I am, for better or worse.

Retired now for almost four years I'm finding a lot of pleasure in having the time to myself, to exercise, or travel (locally, for the most part - I have time but not money), or just read or screen (and thank you, the shade of Ted Turner, for the TCM old-movie channel!).

I've been keeping my hand in the soils game until this last year. It's been good to use the skills I spent much of my life honing, and the income didn't hurt, either.

The last engineer I know who still called me in for that contract work is sliding into a different track in the geotechnical business and one that doesn't really require a field guy, though, so it looks increasingly likely that this will be the first real year of "retirement", the last soils work I will ever put my name to.

That's fine. I had a good run, did some good work, and I'm ready to hang 'em up. 

My children are almost man-and-woman-grown, and are a lot of fun for it. The big dude who is the Former Peep is in his third year at university here in Portland, studying geology, of all things. Missy is downstate, planning to be some form of botanist or agronomist. I try and see them as often as their time permits...which isn't the same as living with them.

That's probably the hardest part of post-divorce parenting, not being physically close, missing those little daily collisions, the small change of domestic life. Instead I've become the cliche' "divorced dad", seeing his kids every so often, unaware of and uninformed by the day-to-day happenings that make up their lives.

Still, they're good people and I love them to pieces. 

I still enjoy a lot of the activities I did in the Before Times.

Writing? Sure; not here much, though I'm thinking I want to change that, but quite a bit over at my soccer site. 

Soccer; indeed, it's been an intriguing year for pro footy here in Portland. The Timbers, having struggled through several difficult seasons, finally canned the manager that proved incapable of solving the troubles therein and are using the current World Cup hiatus to hire a replacement. The Thorns are playing surprisingly well, having also shed their gaffer at the end of the previous season.

Reading and thinking about the world around us has become a huge time- and energy-suck, given how appallingly ridiculous and idiotic (and dangerous) the current MAGA Regime has become. I agree with those whose loathing of Trump comes as much for the degree to which his freakishly bloated public presence doesn't permit me and anyone else who bothers to pay attention to public life to ignore his ignorance, stupidity, venality, and cupidity.

One reason I've blogged so little here is that grotesque presence, looming over us all like the giant stone head in the movie Zardoz, makes it damn near impossible to write about anything without having the orange (well, sort of; his face makeup seems to be more like that brownish shoe polish color "cordovan" recently) sonofabitch constantly poking his fucking nose into the story. Corpse at every funeral, by God...

I'm still hanging in at kendo, despite getting older and slower every week. I still enjoy it, and hope to postpone the day that I become too old and slow to represent my dojo honorably. I've picked up a related "sword" art, iaido, which is pure fun; a sort of "internal chanbara movie" thing, cosplaying samurai. Plus it's a way of trying to master myself; it's all about perfecting a series of forms. You're not fighting an opponent outside yourself but, rather, mastering your mind and body, a kind of meditation in motion. 

One thing retirement has gifted me is time to resume an old pastime, birdwatching, and I've been getting out as much as possible to scope the local patches. I'm not yet thinking of doing the sort of "big trip" sorts of adventures I did after my first divorce., but perhaps in a bit...

 
So I guess the final sum is that, while there's a lot about the last couple of years on me that I'd undo if I could, I'm still here. Still trying to live as full a life as I can. Still hoping that I can make of that something worth others remembering me fondly when I'm gone.

While all around me...

...well, that's for the next part of this.

 
(Next: Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?) 

In passing

I've been working all week (You: but...but you're retired, right? WTF? Me: Ummm. Hang on, I'll get there...) and I've been getting up at 4am to get there, so I'm gonna do the old retired guy thing and take a fucking nap.

But first, I wanted to drop in here and throw out some passing thoughts.

So...retired.

Yeah, well. I didn't want to just drop into the rocking chair and find myself dead of some sort of aneurysm six months from now like every other retired dude. I asked around among some friends still in the biz to give me a call if they needed a hand with anything. One did, so I'm dirt-nannying a job up outside the tiny no-longer-a-real-town of Goble up in Columbia County.

It's irritating, like all this dirt-nanny work, but, hey...it helps pay the bills, and it's only for a month or two.

But that wasn't what reminded me of "working". 

It was an e-mail from my last chief engineer, from where I just retired out of.

He said he wanted to talk; specifically about my last annual "bonus" from the outfit we work(ed) for.

I assume if you've worked for any sort of big business you know what I'm talking about. At the end of the calendar year corporate masters hand out an envelope with some extra jack in it.

Or not; if business has been bad there may be nothing. My first workplace, David Newton Associates, tended to have fat years and lean years and the year-end kick tended to vary depending on how fat or how lean. 

One of the lean years our "bonus" was a fucking frozen turkey.

But this last outfit has a peculiar addition to that tradition; your immediate boss is supposed to "tell you about" your bonus - hence the e-mail from the former CE needing to have a FTF with me about this bonus.

What it reminded me was how I hated that little talk with the heat of a million suns.

What it always did was remind me how much my corporate masters seemed to think what a huge fucking favor they were doing me by handing me this cash bolus which my work earned for them in the first place.

It was a sort of 21st Century largesse, the coins tossed into the crowd of grubby proles by the noble on horseback, and the little talk that came with it irked me more every year I heard it.

Didn't matter if the speaker was someone I liked or, as this guy, was someone I wasn't particularly fond of.

It got to the point where I had to bite my tongue to respond with something biting. One thing I did early on was stop thanking the person. 

Why? Why thank them? How in any way was this a gift? I worked, and worked well, for it. I earned it, it wasn't largesse, it was a measure of my value.

But the corporate requirement to present it as a gift, to "talk" about it as such, made the company's rep come off like they were handing it down as a favor that they should be thanked for, and this time - he finally caught me on the phone - was no different.

I didn't thank him; I agreed it was a nice kick, we talked a bit about work, and he buggered off. 

That was my last one of those little talks - I'm no longer a salaried employee, and I'm no longer eligible for the thing.

Good. We may be in the Second Gilded Age. But I don't need an annual reminder that the coal barons still want to shove us back into company towns, thanks.

The other thing that I wanted to mention was the continued Twitter tsuris.

Jim Wright at Stonekettle has a long post about his thoughts - which, as usual, are fairly well-reasoned and to the point - about this flaming trainwreck, but my own perspective on the issue is a peculiar one.

I read a lot of politics and a lot of political blogs, so I hear a lot about the nonsense. And I can see how it is entirely within the bounds of possibility that a high-function autistic, obscenely rich white boy marinated in the toxic shitbrew of apartheid South Africa could, indeed, be an unhinged shitposting MAGA nutball who is turning a social media platform into a fairly accurate resemblance to his own freakish internal headspace.

But the thing is...I don't get my news off the platform. 

I don't use it to communicate with others. 

I pretty much just read; read the content generated by people who write about soccer, or art, or history. I do read some lefty political accounts, like Roy Edroso, but I don't engage with anyone there other than that.

Some, or all, of the people I follow may be taking incoming MAGAt fire...but I'm not in the beaten zone, so I have no idea what the hell that looks like or is.

So...what's kind of weird is that while I know about this shit, I don't really...know it. 

It's like I'm sitting quietly while a knockdown brawl is going on in the next apartment. I hear the thumping and screaming through the walls, raise a brow, cock my head, mutter "Hmmm...", and carry on.

So while Twitter may be just another part of this country overrun with wannabee Blackshirts, looney anti-vaxx 14th Century cosplayers, and Donald Fucking Trump...I'm luckily enough to be in another part of the country.

And I'm fine with that.

Okay. Got to go finish up the paperwork from today's nannying.

But I'll be back in a bit. I've got some more stuff on my mind.

See ya then.

The engineer will see you now.

 I sent this to my corporate today:

"Here’s my thoughts at the moment.

My point in retiring is to step away from the need to punch the clock every week; I’m ready to start doing geology/engineering geology on projects that I enjoy and challenge me rather than worrying about getting in X hours a week and fretting about not making my billable target.

AND I’d like to be able to schedule out my work/life balance (as corporate likes to call it!) further out that day-to-day and even week-to-week, so I’m not getting a call Tuesday that I have to be on a drill rig in K Falls on Wednesday when I’ve got a romantic getaway planned for that day, or some volunteer work for Habitat or DOGAMI.

So what I’d like to do is help out with things that you can use my actual value for – tough stuff, local/regional knowledge, experience – more like a consultant than an employee. You have a big proposal and want research on local geology? Call me, and I’ll get on it. You have a big project next month? Let’s get that scheduled!

Now…I understand if that’s too big an ask. It’s kind of a weird setup. But that’s why I’m putting it out as an option, the option that I’m excited about."

My immediate boss - the chief engineer in Portland - said nothing. I think he may have thrown a plate of spaghetti against the wall, tho; he's that kinda guy.

His superior - the West regional chief engineer - agreed to my terms.

So. 

Now, after thirty years, I'm going through the door into the next part of my life.