Away We Go
The first time, it was a wee yapper-type dog the fall after my first Burning Man. Just a small nip, but the wound festered as it taught me lesson after lesson. I'd wandered into a minefield of free love, droogs, and a menagerie of San Franciscans that I supposed were having much more fun than I was in Austin. I was weary of showing up everyday to this startup that hadn't yet realized that it was marching to its own grave. I was stiflingly bored. So, I quit. I wrote up a twenty line resignation notice, handed it to my boss, and walked away. There was no apprehension or fear, I didn't get that panicked little oozing drumbeat in my chest as I have other times that I've told bosses that I was cleaning my hands of this food fight. I was calm, clear, and though I hadn't a fucking clue as to the means, I was going to San Francisco, or so I thought.
I pissed away my savings over the next few months on cigarettes and Whole Foods, all the while pretending that I was peering over a nameless precipice at some great leap forward. The eventual result was me, penniless and despondent, weathering the winter up to my ears in job postings. I hadn't the vision or gumption to actually end up on the West Coast. Silly, silly little boy. The saving grace of my folly was I learned well that without forethought and desire, you won't get far.
I ended up landing a job in late December and began clawing to get back to where I had already been: employed and certain of nothing. The job was grand for a time. I learned volumes about Magento and got to sharpen the PHP skills to a razor's edge. However, the honeymoon ended abruptly three months in when I looked at the sea creature I had bedded with sober eyes. I realized that I was stuck in a four-person startup working at least sixty hours a week with no hope of ever seeing the ill-equipped venture become anything other than an itsy bitsy development shop. I worked from home, rarely saw the sun or my friends, and was baffled as to how I'd dug and climbed into a foxhole that bore an uncanny resemblance to the one I'd taken a shit in and then promptly hopped out of several months prior. I ended up getting canned after ignoring the iPhone marimba-bim-bah-ing one Sunday morning after working all Saturday. "Uh, I just wanted to make sure you knew that we did start at the, um, usual time this morning. Yeah, it isn't a half day or anything like that."
Enter joblessness, stage right.
My second round navigating the bread line was a cinch compared to the last. It did, however, require a great deal of deep-throating my pride. I was tapped financially, utterly tapped, and so I moved from Austin back to my hometown, San Antonio. It's the kind of city that was still frenetically building strip malls in the throes of the housing bubble recession. The city was unfazed by the entire fiasco. It is a beacon of isolationism, conservatism, and consumerism. I will refrain from judgement, I just calls 'em like I sees 'em. The place is dedicated to nuclear families, they strive for that one-to-one ratio of cars to people, and, coincidentally, it's ranked the third fattest city by Men's Fitness. It was a backward way of living to me, but it was the only major city in North America that I had absolutely no fear of. It's dirt cheap, there were jobs aplenty, and I already had friends there. If you can't make it in Austin during a recession, try San Antonio, and if you can't make it in San Antonio with a degree and some smarts, you must not be breathing.
Four weeks in, I had a cushy job at a company that Fortune listed in its top 100 companies to work for, working eight hours a day playing with Linux and solving complex issues, talking to actual people all the while. Workplace happiness, thy name is System Administration. I kept my head down and walked that path as far as I could, turning over each rock along the way as all these little tidbits of undiscovered San Antonio cool scurried every which way. I'd lived there for decades and it was only now that I found the place tolerable, nay, damn near enjoyable. The little devils, you just had to know where to look.
The second time, it was an Irish Wolfhound with a look that spoke to its intent to eat my shoulder while mounted securely from behind. I didn't argue, I just douched and began stretching in preparation. Let the feast commence. Another Burning Man left me again with that indelible, incessant calling to get Westward with incalculable quickness. There is something to be said of the divine inspiration one can experience in that place, but it was the rational voices of the people I love there that banished every hint of excuse or half-measure. There is no arguing for remaining in a place that I don't want to be. I'm young, I have little responsibility save my favorite feline, and I loves me some California. With sanity and rationality properly disspelled, I put a plan into action and had a loving guide all the way to prod or comfort me as required.
I turned in my two weeks eleven days ago. This time, I'm answering the call with pithy brass balls and shameless ferocity. Hear me roarz. (rawr)
This is the documentation of the migration, the awakening, and the befuddled pondering along the way.
