Yah, Baby!

When mid-May arrives, and the temperature in the SoCal desert quickly climbs toward the one-teens, the cool breezes and embracing fogs of the Pacific Northwest -- that long coastal stretch running from San Francisco Bay to the Canadian border -- become awfully inviting.

And I'm glad to say that by the end of this month I'll be out of here, and only returning briefly at the end of June to pick up my car for the drive up to Puget Sound. I'll be either in San Francisco or the Seattle area for the next four months, and won't come back here till October.

Or I may never come back.

Goin' away, pretty mama,
Won't be back till fall;
If I don't get back then
I won't be back at all.
--Traditional (and ubiquitous) Blues Lyric

By October I'll have a much better idea where my life is going. I'll have a handle on what's possible (in terms of rents, living conditions, possibilities for work and/or employment) and what's practical, as opposed to wishful thinking. And I'll have a social network. I do have friends and family, thank God.

I might as well make plans for the future. My physical health is so ridiculously robust now (to use a fashionable word) that it's pretty certain I'll have a future, and I don't think it'll be here in this desert, where the winds blow night and day, the underbrush is always burning somewhere, and the coyotes howl and, with increasing and inexplicable frequency, attack people.

My ex-wife brought me here, then dumped me, and left me sitting alone on this patch of dry sand with nothing but my eyes to cry with. In matrimony and Social Security I trusted, and in Desert Hot Springs I busted. Now it's time to stop weeping, and to get back on those funny looking appendage endings called "feet," and get moving once more.