As July crawls to a close it’s become obvious that the AC in our rental townhouse just can’t keep up. Setting the thermostat all the way down to 70F (21.1 C) will take the basement down to about 72F, but the main floor will sit at about 74F and upstairs is now usually somewhere between 76F to 86F on the worst days at the worst times. Yes we have fans, and yes I’ll buy a window AC once next month’s rent is paid. Until then our options are to be outside of the house or not on the top floor when it gets really bad. Just to be spiteful, the clothes dryer also started to chew holes in some of my good work dresses and make horrible squeaking noises.
After I got the second job and before I started working weekends, Devon said I should visit my college friends in East Tennessee and sent me a Greyhound bus ticket. Devon didn’t know how bad Greyhound travel now can be, and I was happy to have a rare chance to see people I haven’t seen since before the pandemic, so I was willing to take the chance. There is a newly rebuilt Greyhound bus terminal at the Garnett MARTA station, and I let the revamped exterior fool me. While I spent most of a day waiting for the bus to Knoxville that was four hours late, I saw three different people get removed from the bus station by security for different problems, all loudly. When the bus did show, it wasn’t the remodeled “Flixbus” promised by social media advertising, but an old Greyhound with cracked seating and a hostile driver who, at one point in our trip, pulled the bus over by the side of a road to get up and yell at passengers for talking. There was no talking allowed on the bus, because our driver - who clearly was suffering from some sort of Greyhound driver specific PTSD - was on a hair trigger the whole time.
I hadn’t attempted a Greyhound bus trip in 25 years, so I didn’t know how far things had fallen apart for regional bus travel. There’s no Greyhound terminal in Chattanooga anymore, just a strange building surrounded by weedy lots on the edge of that city with no bathroom facilities for travelers. The only bathroom stop was in Athens, where a cinder block building in the parking lot of an Exxon had single toilets for each sex and no air conditioning, and smelled about how you would expect. Devon, on picking me up, was shocked to learn that Greyhound had no Knoxville terminal anymore either, the bus unloading in a random parking lot in a bad part of town where cops waited to greet the bus just in case violence should be waiting as we disembarked. I jumped in Devon’s car and we were off. I was grateful for the pickup and trip, but never again will I ride Greyhound - I don’t know how much worse regional bus travel can get, and I’m not anxious to find out.
I did get to see Devon and their family in their lovely house on a piece of land in Appalachia owned by her husband’s family for generations. The air smelled amazing, and Devon’s children and husband were gracious to the giant stranger who came to sleep on their couch. Elle drove down from deeper in the mountains to see me as well, who once went by another name in my blogs before transitioning about twelve years ago. Likewise I was able to visit with my friend Laura, who was once called Ford, and who survived breast cancer diagnosed just before the world changed for good. I hadn’t seen Elle or Ford in five years, and Devon in four, despite talking to all these friends fairly regularly by text or mail or phone. It was good to hug them in person. It was good to see how we’ve all changed. We all knew this time it was the last visit for a few years, where before the pandemic we would see each other about every eighteen months or so. This was the last time for a long time. So I tried hard to make it count.
I took a Lyft back, and what had possibly been a free trip will take me three or four restaurant shifts to pay back. The trip was worth the cost - everyone is so changed, we’re all so dramatically different. Laura who was Ford was the one I had been the most worried to see, but who looked in some ways the least changed. We all may be hanging on by our fingertips, but we are hanging on to our lives as hard as we can.
Appalachia blazed at me in wildflowers and green beauty while I was there. I was again reminded how nice it must be to feel at home in the mountains, but I never have. Knoxville is about as small a city as I’d ever want to inhabit, but is a proper city with architecture and good museums and street art and sidewalks full of people. I like Knoxville, but it’s not for me, it’s for Laura and Elle and Devon.
There’s probably dozens of slight changes in my life during my twenties that would have meant Knoxville was my city, that I would have learned to love the place on a deeper level and adopt it as my own. But none of those things happened, and I think I was destined for Boston once I met Dan in the summer of 1993 when we were volunteers with the National Park Service. Once I understood what Boston was, I was going to find my way there. When you’ve loved a truly great city like that, there’s no going back to much smaller, and of course I always knew I’d live in Atlanta since I was very small myself.
I wish Atlanta loved me back like my friends from college. Laura and Elle and Devon love me, and I love them, like true friends do. But Atlanta has decided that it is a Manhattan kind of city now, and librarians haven’t been able to afford to raise children in Manhattan for more than forty years. I came to Atlanta when it was still possible to live downtown and be a civil servant and have kids. The city has outgrown me, just as my Atlanta-born children are outgrowing me. So my season here is getting late.
There are other cities out there, ones like Knoxville but not in the mountains. There are cities where I can fit that are still affordable. I will spend the next three years finding my next place, unless Atlanta changes its mind about a great many things. The mountains were cooler and beautiful, but they’re not for me, even if they’re filled with people who I love. I need to find a path to my own autumn in a place with a lot of red bricks, books, and hopefully a proper riverfront. Until then - until my summer children are ready to leave the nest - I’ll be here in Atlanta, covered in sweat.
Saturday, July 29, 2023
Tuesday, July 18, 2023
After a cool June, July has been pretty hot
Ten years to the day I turned in my resignation at the Mega Corp that made my career in Digital Asset Management – ten years to the day from when I scored a quarter million-dollar contract as CEO of my own company – I’ll be starting a second job as a hostess at night at a local restaurant. This isn’t where I thought the last decade would take me, but this is life. I haven’t written since June because I was digesting the reality of the next three years to come, deciding how I would tease out the end of my forties. Before you read the rest of this post, just know: I’ve got this. It’s all going to be okay, and even if it’s not okay, I’m making the best choices I can to get to where I want to be as I approach the third quarter of my life.
I stayed up too late at the beginning of summer watching the longest-ever Atlanta City Council meeting as Cop City funding was debated. After staying up to watch the meeting it was as if I had missed a rung on a ladder I had been climbing. I couldn’t get my sleep schedule right, and the debate tumbled and tore through my mind. This can’t be Atlanta. This is Atlanta. Who we want to be, who we think we are, and the truth of lived experience can be very different things. I wasn’t in the best place mentally as I grappled with the fact that selling the Lake Claire house wasn’t enough to save our finances on a monthly basis AND that my taxes were going to fund a military style police training camp where once in childhood I thought ghosts haunted the woods. I felt like the city was sliding out from under my feet, where once I knew how to stay upright when MARTA buses lurched along Ponce and how to get anything I needed from this place that I have loved.
My sisters were worried. The second week of the month Abby came up from Augusta for dinner, and Sara surprised me by flying in from Portland to visit. The third or fourth time I started talking about the city hall Cop City meeting, Sara grabbed my shoulder. “You have to stop talking about this.” She said. I realized my sister was right. I was acting like a crazy person. The two of us spent the first night she was in town out on Wylie Street, where I helped her scrape down old wheat paste posters off the wall against the train yard so she could properly place her tag on the Beltline for the first time in five years. We talked about how much things have changed and haven’t changed. We gave each other the support we could, and then she left for an art show in Asheville before she had to fly back west.
The third week of June I barely remember, other than that I worked to make up time I took off with my sisters and got my sleep schedule back on track.
The fourth week, Kati came to visit from Maine, another concerned friend. The last time we had spent any extended time together was nine years ago, when I had just published a textbook and Kati was finishing her PhD in Honolulu. I had seen her since then – we met up for dinner in London once and just missed each other in Germany a few months after that. Kati and I had the best vacation, riding eBikes around the city and just talking. We stopped at the MLK tomb on Juneteenth and talked about Cop City, about Kati’s upcoming social justice conference at the HBCUs in town.
I took her to Peachtree Center and Kati bought us sandwiches from Beni’s and we ate them at the loft inside the Marriott Marquis, one of my favorite places in the city. We sat and laughed where Jeff and I used to sit and laugh at DragonCon, and I took her through the habitrails a little. It was so, so good to see my friend, and to know I wasn’t the only one feeling like these fights that we have about the things that really matter – Cop City, the heat, the daily grind of *I have to do something to make it better* - weren’t really crazy. I just can’t let myself be eaten alive by the history happening around me. I’m not the only one struggling with the way I think things should be and the way things are. By the time I dropped Kati off for her conference at a seriously sketchy hotel near a shelter for the unhoused, I was feeling wholly myself again, and I hugged my friend, and I had a good mood for another week.
Then it was time to pay the rent.
I realized then, the fourth week of June that I owned nothing of real value.
There was no way we were going to make July rent. I had spent money to support my oldest in her college program. I had gone out to eat with my sisters and my friend, and even those expenses were modest, they were money we didn’t have. I thought about selling the antique oak blind cabinet we own only to find that the market is flooded with antique furniture right now because everyone else is selling. I’ve never bought expensive jewelry or fashion label clothes anyone would buy secondhand. We own one 2008 Toyota. I sold off my graphic novel collection a year ago. There’s nothing left to sell, and I even went and priced out my wedding band, platinum with small diamonds. Everyone is selling their diamonds, so the band was worth, in the last week of June 2023, just $100. The market for everything is flooded because everyone is desperate.
I asked the landlord for a grace week as the first was over the July holiday weekend. The oldest daughter came back from her month away, and for Independence Day all four of us went to watch fireworks from the North Avenue bridge. It threatened to rain most of the night, and the air was hot and thick, but people were still out having fun. The youngest – she’s fifteen – and I had an argument about her cell phone. We left the fireworks early, the angry teen walking far ahead of me as it started to rain on all of us. I let it all get to me and yelled at the teen once we were home after she acted out again. Then the husband and I argued later as a proper summer storm let loose outside, and that was how July started, with all of us feeling like we did the wrong thing on a holiday night that should have been enjoyed as the start of the last full year we’ll ever have all living together. Next year the oldest will leave for college for real, and nights where the four of us are together are on a timer now, ticking down to the end of an era.
I borrowed 1k from an old friend for a week to make rent on the 7th. He’s a solid almost family kind of friend that I helped in the past when he was in a similar spot a decade ago and I was flush. I paid him back this week, the second week of July, and we had lunch yesterday where we talked about how things are now. This is life after the pandemic. For the first time he is dating a woman in a similar position as me, someone who owns nothing of value, someone starting over from zero. This is new to him, and I think he just wanted to validate with me, the formerly successful, that yes, this happens, yes, we start over sometimes mid-life. It sucks, but it happens, and you get a second job and just keep moving forward.
I probably should have gotten a second job sooner, but I needed the time between the house sale and now to recover from the old second job of constant repairs and maintenance of the Lake Claire debacle. I needed to just work 40 hours per week for a few months while I healed up, emotionally, from the experience of investing all my time and money in a property that was lost. I needed to do physical therapy in March and join a parade Krewe in April and help my kids in May and ride bikes with my sisters and Kati in June and gather signatures for the Cop City Vote in the first weeks of July. And now that I’ve done those things – now that I’m as recovered from the end of the pandemic as I can be – now it’s second job time.
This is the plan I will work until the end of my forties: for the next three years I will have a second job at night after my day job, just like many other adult professionals responding to inflation and our new shared reality. I’m going to accept Atlanta for the city it is now, knowing we’ve all changed, knowing that we’re all recovering, knowing that things were once different in ways both good and bad. My new second job will be working with some people who are great and some who aren’t, but we’ll all be working in the city at a location some people would give anything just to visit for one night. When you step into the door at the restaurant, I’ll make sure you have one of the best dinners you could possibly have, because when I ate at restaurants in New York and Chicago and London and Berlin I had the best dinners too. When I go back to my day job in the morning I’ll be doing everything I can to make Atlanta an easier place to live in my own way, because even though my day job pays shit I believe in the city. We’re all working too much, and we’re all tired and it’s going to be ok, it’s going to be just fine, because there’s always times when you get to eat at the table and there’s always times when you serve. This is just the next three years, and if the last decade has taught me anything, it’s that I can’t know what will happen in three years after that. Summer is almost over.
I stayed up too late at the beginning of summer watching the longest-ever Atlanta City Council meeting as Cop City funding was debated. After staying up to watch the meeting it was as if I had missed a rung on a ladder I had been climbing. I couldn’t get my sleep schedule right, and the debate tumbled and tore through my mind. This can’t be Atlanta. This is Atlanta. Who we want to be, who we think we are, and the truth of lived experience can be very different things. I wasn’t in the best place mentally as I grappled with the fact that selling the Lake Claire house wasn’t enough to save our finances on a monthly basis AND that my taxes were going to fund a military style police training camp where once in childhood I thought ghosts haunted the woods. I felt like the city was sliding out from under my feet, where once I knew how to stay upright when MARTA buses lurched along Ponce and how to get anything I needed from this place that I have loved.
My sisters were worried. The second week of the month Abby came up from Augusta for dinner, and Sara surprised me by flying in from Portland to visit. The third or fourth time I started talking about the city hall Cop City meeting, Sara grabbed my shoulder. “You have to stop talking about this.” She said. I realized my sister was right. I was acting like a crazy person. The two of us spent the first night she was in town out on Wylie Street, where I helped her scrape down old wheat paste posters off the wall against the train yard so she could properly place her tag on the Beltline for the first time in five years. We talked about how much things have changed and haven’t changed. We gave each other the support we could, and then she left for an art show in Asheville before she had to fly back west.
The third week of June I barely remember, other than that I worked to make up time I took off with my sisters and got my sleep schedule back on track.
The fourth week, Kati came to visit from Maine, another concerned friend. The last time we had spent any extended time together was nine years ago, when I had just published a textbook and Kati was finishing her PhD in Honolulu. I had seen her since then – we met up for dinner in London once and just missed each other in Germany a few months after that. Kati and I had the best vacation, riding eBikes around the city and just talking. We stopped at the MLK tomb on Juneteenth and talked about Cop City, about Kati’s upcoming social justice conference at the HBCUs in town.
I took her to Peachtree Center and Kati bought us sandwiches from Beni’s and we ate them at the loft inside the Marriott Marquis, one of my favorite places in the city. We sat and laughed where Jeff and I used to sit and laugh at DragonCon, and I took her through the habitrails a little. It was so, so good to see my friend, and to know I wasn’t the only one feeling like these fights that we have about the things that really matter – Cop City, the heat, the daily grind of *I have to do something to make it better* - weren’t really crazy. I just can’t let myself be eaten alive by the history happening around me. I’m not the only one struggling with the way I think things should be and the way things are. By the time I dropped Kati off for her conference at a seriously sketchy hotel near a shelter for the unhoused, I was feeling wholly myself again, and I hugged my friend, and I had a good mood for another week.
Then it was time to pay the rent.
I realized then, the fourth week of June that I owned nothing of real value.
There was no way we were going to make July rent. I had spent money to support my oldest in her college program. I had gone out to eat with my sisters and my friend, and even those expenses were modest, they were money we didn’t have. I thought about selling the antique oak blind cabinet we own only to find that the market is flooded with antique furniture right now because everyone else is selling. I’ve never bought expensive jewelry or fashion label clothes anyone would buy secondhand. We own one 2008 Toyota. I sold off my graphic novel collection a year ago. There’s nothing left to sell, and I even went and priced out my wedding band, platinum with small diamonds. Everyone is selling their diamonds, so the band was worth, in the last week of June 2023, just $100. The market for everything is flooded because everyone is desperate.
I asked the landlord for a grace week as the first was over the July holiday weekend. The oldest daughter came back from her month away, and for Independence Day all four of us went to watch fireworks from the North Avenue bridge. It threatened to rain most of the night, and the air was hot and thick, but people were still out having fun. The youngest – she’s fifteen – and I had an argument about her cell phone. We left the fireworks early, the angry teen walking far ahead of me as it started to rain on all of us. I let it all get to me and yelled at the teen once we were home after she acted out again. Then the husband and I argued later as a proper summer storm let loose outside, and that was how July started, with all of us feeling like we did the wrong thing on a holiday night that should have been enjoyed as the start of the last full year we’ll ever have all living together. Next year the oldest will leave for college for real, and nights where the four of us are together are on a timer now, ticking down to the end of an era.
I borrowed 1k from an old friend for a week to make rent on the 7th. He’s a solid almost family kind of friend that I helped in the past when he was in a similar spot a decade ago and I was flush. I paid him back this week, the second week of July, and we had lunch yesterday where we talked about how things are now. This is life after the pandemic. For the first time he is dating a woman in a similar position as me, someone who owns nothing of value, someone starting over from zero. This is new to him, and I think he just wanted to validate with me, the formerly successful, that yes, this happens, yes, we start over sometimes mid-life. It sucks, but it happens, and you get a second job and just keep moving forward.
I probably should have gotten a second job sooner, but I needed the time between the house sale and now to recover from the old second job of constant repairs and maintenance of the Lake Claire debacle. I needed to just work 40 hours per week for a few months while I healed up, emotionally, from the experience of investing all my time and money in a property that was lost. I needed to do physical therapy in March and join a parade Krewe in April and help my kids in May and ride bikes with my sisters and Kati in June and gather signatures for the Cop City Vote in the first weeks of July. And now that I’ve done those things – now that I’m as recovered from the end of the pandemic as I can be – now it’s second job time.
This is the plan I will work until the end of my forties: for the next three years I will have a second job at night after my day job, just like many other adult professionals responding to inflation and our new shared reality. I’m going to accept Atlanta for the city it is now, knowing we’ve all changed, knowing that we’re all recovering, knowing that things were once different in ways both good and bad. My new second job will be working with some people who are great and some who aren’t, but we’ll all be working in the city at a location some people would give anything just to visit for one night. When you step into the door at the restaurant, I’ll make sure you have one of the best dinners you could possibly have, because when I ate at restaurants in New York and Chicago and London and Berlin I had the best dinners too. When I go back to my day job in the morning I’ll be doing everything I can to make Atlanta an easier place to live in my own way, because even though my day job pays shit I believe in the city. We’re all working too much, and we’re all tired and it’s going to be ok, it’s going to be just fine, because there’s always times when you get to eat at the table and there’s always times when you serve. This is just the next three years, and if the last decade has taught me anything, it’s that I can’t know what will happen in three years after that. Summer is almost over.
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