Beyond Metamora

I’ve been reveling in repetition lately. I'm a professional accountant now, which means my days are already very cyclical. Daily checklist, weekly checklist, monthly cycle, annual cycle. “Washing the dishes” is what my cost accounting prof at PSU called it.

Funny thing is, pretty often I’m neglecting to wash my actual dishes. But lately, I’m finding that it helps to lean into that same kind of checklist-y process at home. Does that make my life feel pretty mechanistic at times? Honestly yes. The alternative is to have a tidy and efficient worklife but a cluttered life at home, though, and that sucks in its own way.

So, now my home life is loops within loops too. Laundry, cleaning, grooming... cooking simply, then doing the literal dishes... all things that fall under the category of “maintaining minimalism” in my headspace. Once that’s done, my typical week-night unwind is listening to an album on Spotify and/or flipping on my PS4 to play a video game before bed.

Even the games I’ve been into lately tend to be very circular. In general, big budget game design in 2019 tends toward live services built around endlessly repeatable loops. This makes me think that folks in the mainstream find that appealing too. That it’s normal, actually, to find joy in playing at a thing within a tightly defined cycle, getting a little better each time.  

Most obvious example: a new season of Apex Legends just started this week, and I’ve decided I’m going to spend the next few months trying to get good at a battle royale game for once. “Battle royale” means that the gameplay loop of Apex-- very much like Fortnight, the current most-popular video game on Earth-- is that you start every game by skydiving into the same big arena, then compete with your team to be the last trio standing in a winner-take-all round of laser tag. Live, die, repeat. It’s “violent” in the sense that it’s fast-paced and you’re shooting guns at each other, but in truth the game’s cheerful tone & art style clearly communicates that when you “kill” someone you’re only saying “thanks, see you again next round”. 

The real joy of the game is that, even on the rounds when I get absolutely clobbered (which is virtually all of them), a new drop is just a minute away. In my working life, I would love to be able to fail over and over again until I got something just right; in play, where the stakes are nothing, we get the chance to indulge in that fantasy.

Specifically, did you know that Tumblr will still let you post a thing that is just a fat block of text-- and not even jokey text-- even though absolutely everyone else in the universe just uses the site to share weird pictures?

That seems... wrong somehow, and yet here we are.

This wasn’t a planned blog post or anything, so this is all going to seem pretty stream-of-consciousness. There was a time in my life where I idolized Jack Kerouac. “First thought, best thought.” So maybe the most generous reading is that this is me doing that now. Or-- no, Mike, don’t get distracted into writing about writing. That’s the thing that I default to when I start to get nervous, and want to avoid speaking plainly and proclaiming personal details.

So, personal detail: It’s 2019. That’s not... like... a personal detail I guess, but stick with me. I’m going somewhere. 

Personal detail: I haven’t posted a single damn thing here since 2017. In point of fact, I haven’t really spent much time writing, reading, or thinking about long-form text on the web since... 2012 or so.

7 years. Is a long time. I can say that with clarity, partly because 2011 stands in my past recollection like a tall, tall mountain peak over my shoulder. That was a very good year for me. A summer where I said “best summer ever” and meant it (and still do). 2011 was the last year where I lived in Bellingham, instead of just in the orbit of Bellingham. It was my last year as a professional miller, the year where I was just starting to get good at that, but then I left it, on a backpacking trip that summer in search of something different and... “better”?

Nah, “better” is too loaded a word. I wasn’t looking for “better”. That’s not how I’d frame it then or now. I was just on a certain track back then-- a track that led to a fun-but-samey unambitious life in an obscure NW Washington town, without ever getting a chance to break out of the average-Millenial loop of tenancy & debt I’d found myself it. So, all I was looking for was a different track. It didn’t have to be better, it just had to be a path that would eventually let me do some of the wilder things that I’ve aspired to do all my life. Like: thru-hiking the PCT.  Like: traveling the world. Like: owning a boat. Like: being in a position where I can actually help out my family financially. Like: getting to run a business, not just work for one. Like: buying property in Metamora, returning to my roots.

Q: What do all of those likes have in common? A: Turns out, it’s “Figuring out how to do capitalism in a way that doesn’t make me feel like garbage.”

It’s been a looooong road to figuring that out, though, friends. If 2011 was like being on top of a mountain, 2012 felt like starting out on a trail down into the next valley. 2013, still descending. 2014 was the cool stream at the bottom. 2015 was beginning the climb up. 2016... 17... 18. Still climbing. During those years, I was living in Portland, back in school at PSU learning how to do accounting, putting all of my effort into that.

It’s a weird thing when you’re in the wilderness, climbing up out of a valley. You might get to a spot where you’re objectively way, way higher than you were on the last peak, but you’re not on the top of anything yet so it doesn’t feel as satisfying.

2019 feels like that so far. I’m living in the Skagit Valley now, just south of the Chuckanut foothills where Bellingham resides. (See, it was like... a metaphor. Accidentally.) I graduated from my accounting program with a bachelor’s degree last summer, then got a full-time job at a small 20-person company in Anacortes-- on scenic Fidalgo Island, gateway to the San Juans-- doing capitalism and feeling good about it. 

I’m saving up cash to move from the valley to the islands in November. (Kind of a lateral move that doesn’t strictly make sense within the climbing metaphor I’m building here? Whatever. Like I said, I didn’t plan this post.) Emotionally, socially, and financially, it feels like I’m on a path that’s just about to reach a broad shoulder. A good place to look back, and look ahead, and maybe even relax a bit.

Some food for thought, from Greek poet CP Cavafy, written in 1898.

“Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? (How serious people’s faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home lost in thought?

     Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.      And some of our men just in from the border say      there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.”

Last year I started sending a monthly email about my travels & hobby obsessions via Tiny Letter, instead of via this blog here. You can catch up on my more recent Beyond Metamora updates there, and get new ones sent straight to you!

The window of a camera shop in downtown Portland, 25 Apr 2015

Handlebars on Flickr.

I have another, fancier blog on Ghost.io now, but ever since my daily routine got upended last summer I’ve barely used it, and ever since my desktop PC died last month I barely *can* use it, because their mobile interface is frustrating as hell.

The bad news is: my plan to go back to Whatcom Community College this fall is a bust. The good news is: my plan to transfer into Western Washington University next fall is still on-track.

The longer version of that is this: I did an academic planning session with the counselors at Whatcom, and what we ended up deciding is that I'm basically don't belong there. I already have the qualifications to be a junior at Western right now. There are a few holes in my transcript that I could fill by taking classes at WCC-- e.g. 200-level Economics and Accounting classes-- but there aren't enough of them to fill out a full-time, 16-20 credit-hour schedule. I could go part-time and squeeze a class or two into my existing 40-hr work schedule if I really wanted to (I don't). Also, that might even be a bad idea, because having too many excess credits on my transcript could end up reducing my financial aid, and costing me more in the long run. So all I really need to do now is apply to WWU as a transfer student and get accepted (which I've done before, w/ no difficulty) and then assemble enough student loans to pay for tuition, housing & basic needs for 2.5 years of higher education.

That's all fine. But it's like... okay, the f**k do I do now? Bare minimum I could apply to WWU and begin taking classes in April 2014. More realistically, I could apply now and get everything lined up for Summer quarter in June (if I'm feeling ambitious/impatient) or Fall 2014. That's a 6-12 month hole in my life that I'm going to have to fill with something.

I guess I just keep doing what I doing? Stay in Lynden and continue durdling around at my boring dead-end job? Blerrrrrrrgh. The thing is, I'm massively frustrated with what I'm doing now, that's why I'm going through all this trouble to finish the college plan that I started a decade ago and level-up my life here.

One alternative, which I've been giving a serious amount of consideration lately, is to pack up my life for a few months and go hang-out with my family in Florida for the winter. I know most of you are hearing about that for the first time right now. But just a few weeks ago, when my aunts from Fort Myers were in-town for a visit, I was talking up that plan so definitively that it seemed like a great idea to me (and to them). Now....

I just. I don't know. Staying here in Lynden for another 6 months or a year seems bad. I'll be grouchy and isolated and feel like I'm wasting 95% of my time on this planet. Going to Florida for 6 months or a year seems great! But it probably also means that I'll be pretty broke, even if I manage to land a seasonal job for the winter.

And I'll have to buy a car again. And I'll miss my friends here in the PNW pretty bad. But the most frightening part is that it could mess up my Washington state residency in the eyes of the college's admissions office. That doesn't sound so bad until I tell you that in-state tuition at WWU is $10,000/yr while out-of-state tuition is more like $23,000/yr. So that 6 months in Florida might end up costing me something like $30,000 in extra student loans.

When I put it that way, 6 more months in Lynden is starting to sound like the saner, more adult thing to do, if only by comparison. It won't be so bad. I'll get through it.

I miss my family sooo much, though. Next year-- starting in January-- I'll have two weeks of paid vacation time from work to use. I wasn't planning on actually being around to use it, but now I guess that's the direction I'm headed so... yay? I could stack all of that time into two weeks in late winter, when the weather in WA is really depressing, and take that cross-country trip to Florida that I've been hoping for. I wouldn't even need to fly there, I could take the train. That'd be great.

fall 2013 (only a 27 days away!): Back to Whatcom CC, study accounting

winter 2014: cross-country trip to FL & back

spring: more Whatcom

summer: cross-country trip to MI & back

fall: transer to Western

winter 2015: another trip to FL

spring: more WWU

summer: another trip to MI, month-long hiking trip in WA

fall: senior year at Western

winter 2016: now-totally-annual trip to FL

spring: finish degree at WWU

summer: graduate, totally-annual-no-backsies trip to MI, another hiking trip

fall: get a comfortable accounting job in the PNW with a salary somewhere above the median

2016-2019: do good work, take trips, visit people, pay debts, play games, save money

2020 (age 38): leave accounting company, start a successful sustainable food production/processing business

2030-2050: run business; weather the global shocks of peak oil, climate change, and freaky technology; safeguard the health & safety of my family & community.

2051 (age 69): a.i. singularity and/or global collapse of the military-industrial complex and/or everything is basically okay and I just get to go hiking a lot. hang-out with surviving friends, family.

2052-2132: haven't really decided yet. pretty keen on visiting Mars though, once they get that colony set up.

2133 (age 151): pay-off student loans, maybe start going into work somewhat less.

Lynden, a set on Flickr.

(new photos)