05.01
I was living in a single room above a restaurant. I was scared that I would have to move back home yet again because I couldn’t cope. I was still missing Arbor Mist and Wild Irish Rose. I was starting to figure out that you build your own life. I was just wrapping up my first screenplay. I was thinking about how quickly and strangely life turns on its axis. I was flat broke and out medical and dental coverage.
Today…
I’m living in the woods next to a stream in a three-room cabin. Milford is home. The winery seems like another ancient chapter. I’ve got a plan. I’m editing that yawnfest of a screenplay. I’ve accepted that my life will never again be boring. I’m flat broke and out medical and dental coverage as well as a car.
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Yes, it’s been a year since I moved to Milford. It was a little bit frightening on that first day, watching my stuff pile up on the bed of the room just above the Muir House Restaurant in Milford. I wasn’t sure how I was going to cope, how I was going to learn to be a writer (by profession, not hobby) just by being tossed into the pool.
I spent the first two weeks keeping myself from hysterics, and the next two months commanding myself to stay the course, to make Milford my home as I have in the past with places like Los Angeles, Doniphan, and Three Rivers. The difference was that this time, I was going to stay. Every other one of my journeys lasted about three months and concluded with me finding a way to come back to Canandaigua.
Passing that three-month mark was a big deal to me. At the end of July 2005, I had passed the bar with no end in sight. When I back to Canandaigua to visit, it didn’t feel like home anymore. It was a strange feeling that a shift had taken place–that I had left my mobile planter behind and that my roots had taken up the soil of Northeast Pennsylvania.
The magazine schedule is a strange thing that compresses time; almost as if I could escape the event horizon and watch the events around me slow down again. It’s May, and we’re working on July. In July, we’ll be working on September. In September, we’ll be working on our end-of-year plan. You’re always looking two months ahead, alost as if you don’t get to experience the month as it’s happening. The season always seems to be the issue we’re working on instead of the month that we’re in.
Though I rarely write about it, Katherine came into my life last summer. Another unexpected but welcome change in life happened around November, when we simultaneously spoke our intentions for each other and held on ever since. I keep telling her she needs to write stand-up. (Think Margaret Cho and George Carlin.)
Winter came and went almost instantaneously. My body couldn’t grasp it, the odd temperature fluctuation here that seems to be nearly 10 degrees warmer than it is in Upstate NY. Somehow, this winter never got cold. It never got hostile. This winter, even more than the last, seemed–benevolent?
In January one of my friends from high school come to live with me in my badly-arranged apartment on Broad St. in Milford. Ben did odd jobs while I worked at the magazine, and Ben would be assigned an article a month until April.
Three weeks to the day I started last year, Ben was hired on as editorial assistant. There are, once again, two creative minds in the office to bounce ideas off one another. Now I sit planning the future of Milford Magazine, and subsequently, my own.
I’ve been talking about the city more often again; I think as summer approaches it becomes an important destination to me because I STILL have yet to bring my guitar to central park, and I crave the surrounds of music and people and the heat of asphalt and concrete.
2007. This is when I want to be in the city. I will turn the prophisized 24, thus beginning the time when I think the real big things start to happen. Until then, I’m not resting on what I’ve accomplished or allowing myself to be lazy, but instead, clearing out my credit and getting myself back on the grid so I can be a financial adult.
Seven is a big deal to me, as is 24. There are a few goofy little superstitions surrounding the numbers and what I think they’re going to mean. 2007, of course, would make my birthday of that year 7/7/7. Despite the fact that my birthday has been July 7th for my whole life, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that my friend Nate pointed out that I have the luckiest birthday in the gregorian calendar: seven-seven.
Where will I be at 24?
Let’s draw a line from 20 to 22 and continue that slope. Wherever that point lies–I want to be above it.
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