Well, how about this? It's, what? Eight years since my last communique, and the old blog is patiently awaiting my return. Hell, I was even still signed into my account.
Doubtless no one other than me knows this blog exists or cares that it does, perhaps they never did. So why come back? Perhaps nostalgia, perhaps a need for a safe place to write what I feel without my entire social circle and beyond ready to cancel me into oblivion for saying the wrong thing. Not that I would commit such a severe faux pas, but you know what I mean. I gotta talk.
And there are lots of things I want to talk about, too. As always, I do a lot of thinking, some of it out loud, continuing to try and make sense of my life and the ever-fermenting soup I swim around in every day. I learn something new, I gain a new insight, I grow a little (maybe a little too much around the middle, but nevertheless), and I still don't know if I'm a better person for it; but I keep moving forward in my continuing long-distance walking trip, because that is what I must do. What else is there?
So hopefully I will pick up this written record of my travels where I left off, and keep adding to it. Certain activities need to be done if I am to stay sane and happy (metaphorically speaking). Music is one. Drawing is one. Writing is one. They don't need to be huge projects. They don't need to be technically perfect or sanded to a mirror finish, they don't need to be profound. I will make an effort to not go back and edit. This is an approach I picked up relatively recently when I developed an interest in typewriters. Also reflected in my gazillion doodles that I make at work when I don't have customers (mainly when I'm manning the Starbucks kiosk, where I have an endless supply of unwanted receipts piling up). Joyfully rough and spontaneous.
Starbucks? What? God, I really have been gon a long time. So to quickly bring you up to date: after an ill-fated nine months or so at a Whole Foods Market here in Columbus and a brief blip at a local restautrant that I won't even give the courtesy of naming, I have been working for Kroger since about October 2017, at the Graceland Shopping Center location. I've bounced around several sub-departments within the Deli-Bakery department, including a spell as the lead in our Starbucks kiosk, and now currently the lead in our Murray's cheese shop. At nearly 8 years on the job I've become one of the long-timers at our store, hopefully that means something good to the people that matter. It seems I've earned a measure of respect and trust. Yes, this lowly supermarket gig is shaping up to be the longest stretch of continuous employment in my odder than odd "career". This after my second longest stretch...also working for a supermarket. I think it's safe to say that my youthful, naively optimistic adventure in the respectable middle class world of the creative professions is well and rightly ancient history now, dead and full of cobwebs. That world doesn't exist anymore. Print gave way to the web, which gave way to social media, and now we've got artificial intelligence making human designers/artists/musicians/writers/etc obsolete. Last time I wrote here, that sort of AI was still science fiction.
So yeah. I'm 51 years old now. I work in retail now, and I probably will for the forseeable future, and I'm cool with that. I ain't going nowhwere, no how. Fuck that job-hunting rat race shit.
Remember who I referred to as my "former partner"? She's back in my life. As of 2022 we have been living together again. The short version of the latest section in our long and convoluted shared novel: after I returned to Columbus to continue on my merry solo path, she got involved with another guy, that relationship turned into a dumpster fire but not before producing two children, and after a few years of hardship I invited her and her kids to come live with me here so that I could help her get back on her feet and help raise her kids in a somewhat more congenial environment than northeastern New Jersey (blech). She accepted. And so, for the second time in her life, she lives in Columbus; first time for the kids. We're platonic this time. We're both just fine with that. I'm trying to be, if not a surrogate father, then at least a positive male adult role model for the kids. I like them. They seem to like me. This may be as close to a family of my own as I'm ever likely to have.
We live in a rental house in the Linden neighborhood. Along the way I had to give up both of my cars; since winter 2022 I have been relying on COTA and less often Uber to get me around. It's expensive for one breadwinner on a supermarket wage in 2025, but somehow, some way, we're hanging on. We're nothing if not resilient.
Certain people were urging me to give up and abandon my partner and her children on the grounds of "this isn't sustainable", "supporting them is neither [my] responsibility nor [my] problem", and pressuring me to quit Kroger and return to the job market to look for a "real job" because "[they] can't figure out how [I'm] doing it"...they were saying this three years ago.
I'm still here. Ha!
I need to get going for now, it's already 1:30 am. More soon.
