1987

My life was starting to unravel...or more truthful: it had completely unravelled and I was scraping bottom, but my bar was so low that I didn't see how far down I had gone until my only option was to move far away and to be with the one nurturing person I knew. I sometimes romanticize this period of my life and there were some soaring moments, but underneath it was the beginning of the end of a 16 year jag of what I thought was the true meaning of "fun."

I had graduated college in 83 and moved to NYC the next day. The year and a half in NY has been written about previously on this blog, and it is a harrowing report - I'm just really glad I survived it. I had a caring boyfriend during that time, and that is always what has gotten me through my life until I turned 50 - from the age of 17 I always had a loving, nurturing boyfriend as a web of support that I didn't realize I had until now that I have been single for years. Because of the support I didn't have from family, I needed it badly to help me get through life and it usually showed up as a devoted boyfriend. So thankful to have had that...

So summer of 1987 became increasingly bleak...I had broken up with my boy scout boyfriend for a guy who buzzed by me on a skateboard while I was getting drunk in the afternoon at Les Amis cafe in Austin. I saw this beautiful boy and decided to gamble everything, so dumped K. the next morning over the telephone and went over to Skatbeoy's house for very awkward hang out with no connection or simpatico. K was devastated and his mother was dying of cancer and I spiraled down into wasterville, stopped going to my job, stopped seeing the skate boy, and met another man who would be my rock for the next couple of years...but I had to run away as that seems to be built into my DNA as how I escape escalating problems I didn't know how to deal with.

So I packed up everything I owned in my Hondamatic Civic (looked like a helmet on wheels) and drove to Omaha NE to be with a friend who I bonded with in a fierce way on a summer trip to Ireland in 1984. We met through a mutual friend and both fell in love with boys on the Dingle Peninsula and had the most magical and romantic (and drunken) 6 weeks ever. I went back to NYC where I was living and she went back to Houston where she was in college (but her home was Nebraska). We NEVER stopped talking and writing and dreaming about going back to Ireland. Not necessarily to be with those boys but we LOVED Ireland and made a serious plan to move there. I moved back to Austin in 85 and she moved back to Omaha a year or so later. By 87 my life was going nowhere and I had a boyfriend that I as in love with but felt I HAD to take this chance to follow a really big dream. The sweet guy I had dumped earlier that year drove with me as far as Topeka KS and then I headed to Omaha on my own....looking at a paper map and Julie's hand written instructions from a letter. I pulled up into the old craftsman house's driveway and we gleefully reconnected. We went downtown and drank in the Irish bars and I loved the old brick streeted downtown.

I don't know how long I lived in Omaha but it was only a few months...a giddy, vodka soaked few months of singing Irish songs and driving downtown to pubs and working the worst jobs at call centers, merry maids, etc. J was serious about moving to Ireland and she did it - I was a coward and moved back to Austin to be with my guy. I never forgot about my cowardice and giving up on a dream so avowed to myself that I would not ever do that again. It took 17 years but I got a bigger and better dream and went for it. Loyal readers have read reams about that!

Even though the move to Nebraska was brought about by spiraling downward circumstances, that few months of 1987 remains one of my fondest times. I don't know if I have a long post about Nebraska, but I'll rifle through these blogs and see if there is one. Criminals I just did an extremely satisfying post about one special day in 1984 when I lived in Rego Park Queens. Nebraska deserves a novella.

Sixty Two

 I just read a previous draft post and it seemed good enough to post! It's funny that I'll do these brain drain diary posts and they seems terrible when I read them...then a year or two later when I re-read them they are seem decent and insightful.

I have been off my game this past 6 months or so. Last August I went on a trip that was so fun I was euphoric for 3 1/2 weeks. Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland (and all those places in Eastern Canada I love). I came back and was supposed to go to Taos, but just not ready to go on another big trip where I'd be eating a lot every day. I did something possibly insane: I had two weeks off before work started back up in Sept. I went out and bought a tiny house in the tiny house village about 20 minutes from where I was living. It felt wrong from the start, but I felt like I had to go through with it. My apartment I'd been living in was turning into an awful place to live...I knew I was going to have to move and wanted something totally new and different (as I have just read from my previous post I AM IN A RUT - and no wonder! I just read some Antarctic posts and no matter how hard I try to accept that they don't want me and I cannot get back, I want that lifestyle again. I want want want it. I just went on a cruise...wait, I need to end this sidebar and get back to my story...) so I saw this beautiful, pristine tiny home and bought it.

Now I'd been looking out there for several years so it wasn't a total impulse decision...what ended up happening is I could not adjust to how far away it was from everything I like to do. I was 9 miles from a grocery store and no restaurants around. Here, I can walk to everything. I can walk to grocery stores, restaurants, am a short bus ride to downtown, and am near EVERYTHING. It was just too strange out there...so not me...I would walk around the "village" and pretend to like it and care about everyone but I couldn't freaking stand being out there. I would drive into town every day and spend all day here and would feel despair if I spent any amount of time out there. The people out there were nice, but there it was like I had moved away from Austin, into some experimental community that just didn't work for me. And when I tried to force myself to be a part of it, I felt very sad, and like the best part of me was being crushed. The part that is urban to the core...that likes a total private and hidden living space...not having to interact with my neighbors if I don't feel like it. I moved into he tiny house in mid September and moved into my Hyde Park apartment on March 1st. So I spent around 5 months out there and every single day I KNEW I would be moving back into town. The apartment I am in is darling, perfect, quiet, in the heart of the best neighborhood (to me)...a neighborhood of old historic homes and funky old student apt. complexes. A neighborhood that I lived in for most of the 80's. This is my 5th address in Hyde Park, and exactly 40 years ago that I first lived in this neighborhood.

Every time I go on a walk here I feel the ghosts of my college years and the time I moved back from NYC. My first Hyde Park address was on 38th and Speedway in an old wooden 4 plex that is no longer there. It was at the height of my punk rock days, my last year at UT, the end of my relationship with Mike and beginning of the one with Steve. So many shows, so much booze, so much crank.

I moved to NYC in Fall of '83 and back to Hyde Park in Jan of '85. I lived at 43rd and Ave B in a tiny room attached to a large old house that I dubbed "hovel". I think the house is still there but my apt. may have been absorbed back into the house. Then I moved to a darling backyard house '86 on 49th and Caswell (that just got bulldozed) and set it up as a darling little cottage that I sewed in and my boyfriend Kenny stayed at most nights. That was a fraught time as I was trying to be a good girl and not go too off the rails with partying. I was jogging and running in races with Kenny, and we had a little domestic bliss thing going on, but then I'd start partying hard and would run off with other boys and live a double life, like I'd been doing in college: the good girl, bad girl thing. When I went full bore with the drinking, I'd find more boys and get into intense relationships with them and hide it from my stable guy at home. Eventually the stable guy thing would fall apart as I would train wreck my life by dumping him for some other dude and start the whole thing over again. I was going down a dark path and by summer of '87 I had decided to move to Nebraska to be with Julie and plan the move to Ireland. I had dumped Kenny for some guy I just saw on a skateboard and he turned out to be a dud. I stopped going to my job, was living at the dope man's house, and decided it was time to vamanos. All my friends had moved away. It was time for me. BUT, I had fallen in love with yet another guy before moving to Nebraska...

I was EUPHORIC in Omaha! It was like when I first moved to Austin (McMurdo, Portland, NYC, back to Austin). It was 4 months of the most insanely wild time with Julie and the Irish pubs downtown. I lived in her basement and did a bunch of stupid jobs and talked to Michael every night on the phone. Julie and I drank a LOT of vodka and she was very upset when I said I was moving back to Austin in November, but she said the good thing about me leaving is that I was turning her into an alcoholic (first hint!). I drove back to Texas in a snowstorm and Michael was waiting for me at the four seasons hotel in Dallas. We had a rapturous reunion and I came back to Austin with my tail between my legs as Julie went through with our dream of moving to Ireland (we had travelled there in '84 and fell in love with Irish boys and drank and screwed our way though the island...and had talked about moving there every day since). I got my first UT job in a horrible basement of a brutalist building and did the 8-5 thing in a windowless room while Julie went to Ireland. 

For the first time in my life I truly felt like I'd let myself down. My mother had thought I was a failure for not getting a job in film upon college graduation, but I moved to NYC which was a huge win for me so I knew I was no failure...with the amount of partying I was doing I knew I was winning, at least in the high functioning category. I would sit outside on my lunch hour and stare at the clouds in the sky dreaming of doing something fabulous with my life. It was 1987-88. It would be 17 years before that fabulous thing happened. In that 17 years would be many boyfriends, a husband and divorce, more boyfriends, many job changes at UT and the State, and in 1992 I quit partying for good. So in 2004, 20 years after that Ireland trip, I deployed to Antarctica, and had a life of joy and meaning beyond anything I could have ever imagined. I had it for 8 seasons, and I don't have it anymore. I just read some Antarctic blog stuff I wrote on my other blog and I ACHE for that life again. I'd give anything for it again.

Yes I am grateful for my sweet little life...but I was not built for a sweet little life.

Random stuff from a couple of years ago...now posting

 I have not been writing much and at all...and then I'll get a wild hair and read an old post and BAM! There it is...a magic sauce that comes from not me and transforms me in the doing of it - the Writing. The writing is something I have always done, from earliest memory. It was like my soul knew that it was the thing I had that could connect me to myself. I read a post from Skiing and Knitting this morning that was so good it took my breath away...I thought, did I write that? It is so good! And I wrote it how I am writing this and how I've always written everything: fast, free flowing and automatic...it just pours out of me and there is editing going on...but mainly I am trying to get to the vein of what I am trying to say...

I feel I've been in a rut for a few years. Either Covid or aging has made me less excited about things. Maybe that is good? To be more serene and peaceful...just to live an ordinary life and go to work and have my treats be these simple things I really enjoy: AFS, driving for early voting and Eday, my NYC & Taos trips, going to shows and seeing my new friends. Yes I have built an interesting Austin life! Post pandemic it seemed we were all so ready to connect...I fell hard for some dude who I never think about anymore, and that was several months of distraction, but something else is going on as well that is mysterious.

I seem to have low tolerance or interest in peoples b.s. anymore. I am happy enough with my own company and work conversations and talking to the poll workers but old friendships seem to be not as satisfying as they once were. The friendships feel like a rut...but then I feel like I really need them sometimes. I have a very confusing relationship with myself over romance - sometimes I think I really want it and other times I'm not interested at all...it may present itself right in front of me and it's just a big fat NO from the universe...

And yet, driving my Travis County van to the Flawn center fills me with joy every time. The building right next to the Tower, that was called the UGL when I was in school at UT, that building on that campus, that I am at for work reasons feels like one of my "homes". There's Austin, NYC, the Ice, and UT Campus...I have so many memories from that campus: the 4 years I was in school, the first job after moving back from Nebraska, then the many years of work there until 2004 - then Antarctica, Oregon, and a move back to Austin that had me temping at UT again and having a BLAST in the libraries and working with plants, and a weird clean out job at Psychology school, and the the UT Press, followed by Drew asking me if I wanted to be at Elections and I said yes! Elections led me back to being on the center of campus again.

Tonight I had my van parked at Flawn for two hours...the evening was cool and beautiful after a heavy rainstorm all day...ending my day at Flawn feels like coming home...the nostalgia is so big and so heavy...the Union, Cactus Cafe, meeting Erica on the west mall and grabbing the Chronicle too see where the Punk shows were. Mike M waiting for me every day after class...sitting in wonderful classes hearing amazing things and enjoying so much of what I was learning. The awful times with David F and hating him. 

But in the beginning was Richard R who I met in his Plan B English class when he was a brilliant 17 year old prep school dropout. I was wearing my Elvis Costello glasses and a tie, and my friend said I have a guy you should meet - it was instant, I fell hard, we hooked up and were lovers and in love. We were in NYC at the same time over X-mas break...I went every X-mas to see Gary and be in NY over New Year's. We met at Elaine's, because that's where Woody hung out. I wore a beret. We sat at the bar and I knew he was seeing his other girlfriend there. When he came back to Austin, where I had been thinking about him every single moment of every day, he dumped me first thing. He came to my Jester dorm room and said he was breaking up with me because he was in love with Arabella and had actually just been using me the whole time. But before that he had told me he loved me, and wanted me to say it back and I couldn't. He was a terrible lover but we hooked up over the years several more times...and then we'd visit in NYC when I'd visit later on..and there was that ridiculous time when he stayed at my Queens apt for a month or so and talked on the phone every night with his girlfriend back in Austin.

How strange to write all that and know that it all started 43 years ago...43 years ago I moved to Austin to be a freshman at UT and what a wild ride it has been...but I keep circling back to campus...a place I lived next to when was born, a place I came back to 18 years later for college, then many years of work, and now I drive there in a completely unrelated job by some freaking miracle...yes this campus is my home - and not because I was bleeding orange or involved in campus activities, sports, or even friends with any other students...this campus was the first place where I got to grow into myself and explore me..the first place I got to break free from my parents rules and be my own person. I was a wild drunken party girl who was also a talented student in some areas (absolutely clueless in math/sciences from day one)..those are ecstatic memories. I think I always tried to recreate that magic by changing jobs every year at UT trying to find that just right FIT and it never really worked...never really worked until I started temping and then now feels perfect as I'm just cruising in in my van and doing a service. I am servicing the polls. I get to see my friend James Thomas a lot. I get to see someone from high school whose life revolves around the campus also...especially west campus...oh those magical days of running around from Radkey Manor all over town. That was a God moment (1988), when I ran into Michael's friend who needed a roommate and it all fell into place. Another magic moment (2010) was when I went up and asked to be duty fork operator and Todd said YES and gave me a contract. And going to NYC at 18 for the first time...going to Europe at 17 for the first time...my life feels like it was designed for me, like it is not random...this beautiful life was designed for me...and I've had so much fucking fun...nyc with Kate, my 25th aa birthday...the cruises with mom, the cruises with myself and with sober people...the super fun job I have now...the fun people I've met: Dana Norman, Paul Rodden et al...the first few years post divorce -wow!