This One Time
This One Time · 28. January 2020
Someone asked me fairly recently what the most self-reliant thing I’ve ever done is and I glibly relayed an entertaining true story, but I’ve been thinking about it. Now, see, that could be a lot of things, actually. I know I can't “compete”* with people who were abandoned or structurally neglected as small children, for example, or who single-parented their way through major surgery or overcame blindness or brought water to their village or left an abusive relationship, or all kinds of...
This One Time · 21. January 2020
This one time, way back in the days when I was still an illegal alien, I was very seriously injured by both someone else’s incompetence with a horse and my own shameful unwillingness at the time to stand up to my boss. I do accept now that I was young, and intimidated, and I really, really needed to keep that job, though, so I don’t blame myself as much as I used to. I wonder how many of the people reading this have ever been in the position where this one thin, oily, scum of employment on...
This One Time · 21. January 2020
This one time, I was working at a psychedelic mushroom farm and I got trapped. This was some decades ago, when I was not as old as I am now but wasn’t as young as all that anymore. When one is unintentionally shiftless, intentionally displaced, and in no way part of any system anymore or yet, one must needs accept varied forms of employment. This was one of the funner jobs I’ve had, although, like many of them, the manual labor factor was high. This had been a long day. We’d unloaded the...
This One Time · 21. January 2020
When I was little my grandfather, an oceanographer and marine biologist, would take me tidepooling. I think the last time we went was in my very early teens. I’m pretty sure it was his knees, why we stopped. It’s not like we abandoned the beaches and canyons and cliffs, but at some point we didn’t go clambering out over the slick jagged rocks before full sunrise anymore. As with every time I was able to really get out into nature, I felt at these times at my most free. Scrambling with...