The Heat into the Crisp

Hold on while I wax poetic on the changing of the seasons. We are finally leaving the hot, humid, buggy summer for the cooler, crisper autumn. The leaves are already turning golden and fire red and even falling to the sidewalks. This is also the season of anniversaries for me. It’s been the year, it’s been the threshold for change.

I was working on my Cracked Pot Meditations here at this website. I was also working on my Infinite Fool Tarot and the Superstitious Agnostic Substacks, but had to pump the brakes to work on a few things. Hopefully, once I get settled, I’ll get back to working on these projects.

I moved. I had lived in my last apartment for almost two years alone. I am moving in with a roommate, but into Providence and for less money. I was barely scraping by in my old place, and while I will miss the peacefulness and solitude of being alone, I look forward to having some money in my pocket, access to less commuting, and cats.

I was living north of the city in a small Spanish-speaking enclave called Central Falls. While I loved the food and neighborhood-y vibes there, I always had to fight traffic to come into Providence to hang out with friends or to any of my other responsibilities.

Moving is hard, and it’s not just the act of carrying things up stairs and through small doorways, but it’s also the feeling of homelessness that comes with moving. I have drifted through life and never felt the roots of an established home since becoming an adult. When I pack everything up and start unpacking, that feeling of being a stranger in a strange land takes hold and fills me with a deep melancholy.

Maybe it is something I will always feel, but right now I am excited to be right next door to a burger place and near a bunch of coffee shops, restaurants, record stores, and bakeries. A couple of mornings, I just sat on the front stoop and watched the world go by, which is something I haven’t been able to do in a long time.

It’s been two years since my wife and I separated. We are happily separated and have remained very good friends. If I had to grieve the relationship and deal with the blow to my pride of only being married for 4 years, it was the catalyst for significant growth and self-discovery. I remain grateful for the relationship I had with my wife and continue to appreciate the friendship we have cultivated recently.

During those two years, I entered the modern dating world with the apps. Although I have used the apps in the past, I am now in a place where I don’t have a larger friend group to introduce me to other people that could be in my dating pool, so the apps it is.

I went on lots of dates. I liked some people, but they didn’t like me; some people liked me, but I didn’t like them; others were unknown to me, and I didn’t know how to feel about them. I struggled to find common ground and conversation. A lot of people in my age range have been married already and have kids, and because of that, are just getting to know themselves for the first time, and others were very self-centered and thought that they and where they are from are the center of the world. New England people act the same as people from a small town in Idaho.

I dated a woman briefly last summer into fall, and we got along famously, but found that our priorities for the future weren’t going to be a good fit, so we parted ways. Back to the apps I went. The terrible gamification of the apps and the pricing system make the process soulless to the point of making it impossible to figure out if this person would be a good fit or not, or am I just matching identities?

I have started dating a woman, and all that nightmare dating has paid off to find someone who fits me so well. It’s been a long, long time since I have felt the giddiness and excitement of getting to know someone new, and at every learning moment, learning that I like them more and more. I have found a person who is beautiful, wickedly intelligent, and craving emotional connection.

I have hit the eleventh anniversary of being diagnosed with cancer. I have found that while I still suffer some of the physical and mental side effects of the treatments, I have more or less returned to what I can consider an everyday life. I still need to take medication for my nerve damage to manage the pain, and I still have bad body days when I suffer from burning pain, and I still have lapses in cognitive abilities, but more often than not, I am fine. Sometimes the trauma affects me, but most trauma stays like shadows on a moonlit beach.

I am about to go to my annual check-up, where part of the tests are to make sure that nothing has come back, and while it isn’t as invasive as before, I was in remission, and my PCP does it and not an oncologist, I still get the anxious dread of what might happen. Think it’s a little more complicated than usual because things are actually going pretty well, and I have a hard time believing that I deserve a good, healthy life.

On top of the annual health scare, I am turning 49 years old next month, which means I am knocking on the door of the 50s. I know that when I was 29, I felt old, and then I turned 30, and I felt young again. This pattern repeated for the next decade, until I turned 39 or 40. However, I’m not sure that being well over half my life already will make 50 feel young.

Getting this old also affects my poor self-esteem about what I have done with my life. At legacy, will I leave since I didn’t breed? Will I be remembered for a little while? Okay, at these other people my age and younger, and all the things they have accomplished! Comparing myself, especially my whole being, to just the surface world I can see in others, primarily through the lens of social media, is no way to self-introspection. I will have to go by comparing myself to who I used to be.

This is my fourth autumn in Rhode Island. During the summer, I spent five weeks in Oregon, my home state, visiting family and friends. It is the most extended stay in Oregon since moving to RI. It always begs the question, What am I still doing in Rhode Island? What do I like about it? Do I actually miss Oregon and Portland?

Here are my answers today, and they are subject to change at my whim: I am in Rhode Island because I like it here. There are a lot of things I love about Providence and Rhode Island, and yes, even Massachusetts, that behemoth north of here. I feel very comfortable here and have worked hard to build a community; the community has also started to open up to me. I love the beaches here, where I can actually float in the surf. I really get a lot more out of a smaller city, and if I need to, I can go up to Boston or even down to NYC if I need the big city vibe.

The woman I’m dating lives in Boston, which is just over an hour away. However, I can hop on the train and be there at the same time as if I drove. If you didn’t grow up driving here, it is a very stressful place to drive. MA and RI annually lead the country in worst driver lists, and some insurance companies won’t insure new drivers in these states, but the train is a better option for travel. Read, listen to music (or whatever audio you prefer), or watch the landscape fly by and think, and when you get there, I don’t have to worry about parking.

I miss Oregon, and of course, I miss my friends and family, but I find myself missing Portland less and less. Before you think you agree with me because of the “homeless problem”, it’s actually the multi-use buildings and tech bros that ruin every city that makes me like Portland less. I s just becoming another unaffordable San Jose, a Dave Matthews of cities – named for the lack of soul and spice. Sar, Providence has kept its personality and grit, and I’m sure some day that will change, but until then, I love the old, run-down mill buildings and crooked, multi-family homes.

I miss Oregon more than Portland, and it’s the landscape and the ecological diversity that thrive in the state, from the coast to the rainforests, the snow-capped mountains, the desert, and more. I m ss the epic vistas in the gorge and the mesas in the east. When I can visit Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, I don’t feel the same absolute awe I experience in the West. Now we will compare, so I will stop trying to.

So until something changes, I am here in Rhode Island for the foreseeable future, and I’m more than okay with that. Can’t afford to live here for now, and I keep finding things that make me feel more secure in my decision to live here.

That is all the news I have, and my long excuse for not attending my creative projects. thinknk I am close to getting settled in my new digs, so I can start concentrating on this blog and the Substack newsletters. Will also be publishing this over there.