Musings and Memoir

That rustic, restless beauty seems to be the thing that pulls my dream self back to Humboldt. It's a recurring dream where my husband and I plan to relocate there from Oregon.

Last year I turned forty-two, and it was the first time my eye doctor mentioned the probability of bifocals. He said I'd likely need them within the next five years. I said okay, sure; it didn't quite seem real. Bifocals are only worn by kindly grandparents and cobblers.

People love to recirculate the iconic images that remain in the popular imagination as defining of that period; they pick out the most charismatic, easy-to-enjoy parts of an era ... It's like claiming to be a wildlife conservation activist because you feel sorry for the adorable polar bears.

I don't want to be truly sick, but I would happily submit to a doctor's orders for bed rest due to a mild condition like the vapors. The full cure would involve two days beneath the covers and a complete reprieve from my usual mental load.

Maybe there is something objectively dystopian about a town where you can draw a five-by-five-mile plot anywhere and record the same composition of snaky residential roads, stucco houses with open concept layouts, and a strip mall composed of the usual suspects.

As an adult, I can still be jump-scared, but instead of acting frightened I just get aggravated. What an inconvenience to be reminded that I still have half a lizard brain, which interprets ordinary creatures as boogeymen when they come at me without warning.

I still think rampant consumerism is a scourge, but here I am with a new 2021 car in my driveway, having traded up from a 2020 version of a similar model. This probably wasn't a financially wise choice.

I grew up in an era where shittiness and cracks in the system were much less evident ... I believed that things were set up in my favor and that stuff just worked.