Not so disappointed after all.

Well how about that? Ocean Properties doesn’t want to redevelop the pier after all. My previous point about disappointment in general still stands, of course. But you know what? This just goes to show setbacks – even big ones – are only temporary. All the more reason to hope for bigger and brighter things out of the ashes of defeat. So cheer up, y’all. Whatever sucks for you won’t suck forever.

Disappointment on the Waterfront

Ah, the Maine State Pier – for a while I had high hopes that it wouldn’t be developed by a bunch of well connected creeps.  Oh well, Ocean Properties has the upper hand for now. Gee, I wonder how that’ll work out for Portland? Snark aside, who knows how the rest of this saga will play out? Will OP have their way and then some? (Would anybody be surprised if Tommy Walsh suddenly decides what the pier really needs is a casino?) Then again, maybe the goliath resort developers will have to contend with the public after all. Or perhaps the OP deal will be torpedoed like the previous deal with Olympia and nothing will change after all. Maybe the whole long fight will be irrelevant 50 years from now if enough bits of Greenland calve off into the sea, thus restoring the old Fore Street waterfront.

For now, the pier debate stands as a parable for all that became of my hopes and dreams, circa 2007. I wouldn’t say they’ve been crushed – just bruised, battered, and deffered. Here’s hoping for a better future – for me personally, for all my friends nursing wounds of their own, and for the waterfront and the city as a whole. Might as well take a breather, take stock of the situation, and maybe try something different if need be.

Missed Connections

I was vaguely aware that Kathie, an old friend from Laramie High School, lived in Maine when I first moved here. For some reason, we never met up with each other. Quite strange, considering we lived literally around the corner from each other. It turns out we did see each other around town from time to time – in the neighborhood, drinking at the White Heart, but we were both too shy to say hello. Eventually Kathie moved back to Laramie, and now she’s my sister’s roommate. Now we’ve reconnected on Facebook and laugh about our squirelly-ness.

Peace Process

I’m back in Laramie in this dream, heading to Coal Creek Coffee for a Middle East Peace Charrette. This isn’t a mere learning exercise put on by a gaggle of idealistic UW students – no – this gathering is being held to establish a lasting peace between the Israeli’s and Palestinians for real. Neighborhood activists from Portland will be joined by the creme de la creme of the foreign policy elite – Dennis Ross, Strobe Talbot, Alan Simpson, Simon Peres, and even the late Yasir Arafat. Together we will hammer out a common sense solution that will make everybody happy. I, for one, am so intent on chatting with Arafat that I forget to change into something more formal. I am thus slightly mortified when I’m the only person there in t-shirt, jeans and flip-flops. Whatever, it’s not a huge deal. In the meantime I eavesdrop on Barack Obama while he regales a friend with the story of a bike ride adventure in suburban Chicago. I find it fascinating that Obama peppers his speech with corny substitution swears. Too square to say “son-of-a-bitch,” our next president instead uses the phrase “son-of-a-bagel.” He then gets up to leave and shakes my hand on the way out. I end the dream feeling pleased that I finally got to meet Barack Obama.

Chapter 5: Resurgam?

Previously: 1, 2, 3, 4

After being folk-diagnosed with Asperger’s, the whole AutoEurope debacle didn’t seem so horrible any more. I felt at ease with myself and didn’t mind if anybody knew about my condition. In fact, I sent out emails to all of my friends and family trumpeting my Aspie-hood. I bragged about it on my MySpace profile. I penned a manic screed on my blog. I felt pretty pleased with myself.

Even now, I think I handled the situation as well as could be expected – never mind my response being perhaps a tad over-the-top. As for the fact that later tests led to a diagnosis more along the lines of the inattentive variety of ADD/Non-verbal learning disorders/Executive functioning inefficiencies, well, the basic truth of my neuro-atypicality remains unchanged. I understand now as I understood then that I would have to embrace the weird if I was going to have any semblance of a happy life. The trick for me two years ago was to find my way to that personal paradise.

If happiness was what I sought, it would certainly behoove me to have some inkling about what would make me happy. First and foremost I couldn’t shake the compulsion to write, so I resolved that I would write for The Bollard. I also made a firm decision to be engaged in the civic life of Portland, especially since it looked like a couple of upstart Green candidates were set to storm city council chambers with a revolutionary agenda. Finally, I needed to go back to school, take those two classes and get that damn bachelors degree already.

For once in my life, I stumbled upon a plan doomed to success. I worked up the courage to introduce myself to Busby and Kevin Donoghue. I began volunteering at Maine Preservation as a way to keep my self busy, which helped further develop my urbanist interests. My attendance at local candidate forums that fall acquainted me with The League of Young Voters. I inquired with USM about taking classes. Things started falling into place as 2006 drew to a close and 2007 would be a watershed year for me – I took the two classes I needed to graduate, I started writing for The Bollard, I was invited to join The League’s Steering Committee, I embarked on a career as an urbanist activist, and John Anton’s city council campaign helped bring the year to a rolicking conclusion.

The two years since my mis-diagnosis have been witness to my transformation into roughly the kind of person I’ve wanted to be for years – before AutoEurope, before coming to Maine, before college. I suppose this is where I conclude with “happily ever after” but that would be facetious. First of all, this story hopefully has many more chapters waiting to be written over the next several decades. Second and more importantly, I still don’t feel fully settled in life despite everything I’ve achieved over these last two years. I suppose that’s to be expected when one’s cognitive inefficiencies are part of a package including anxiety, lethargy, depression, and a general lack of organizational skills. The most stunning life victories in the world can’t undo neurology, although they do often make the mood swings easier to bear.

In any case, my life is kind of at a lull these days. After many long years I no longer have academic anxieties to nag me. Plus, my I’m happy with my writing career, and I’m part of the civic life of Portland. Having said that, I find myself pondering what I really want to do with my life. My writing is more or less where I want it to be right now, although I’d like to broaden my horizon’s a bit. I’m a bit more concerned about my political work. Right now I’m feeling spread too thin and I’m not sure what my ultimate goal as a public citizen actually is. All I can say is I’m interested in becoming a better urbanist – better organized, better informed, and better disciplined. The flip side of that is a desire to drastically scale back the day-to-day political hack work. Finding the right balance promises to be tricky.

A more ominous worry is my continued inability to find a day job. Steady employment would be nice to have right now, especially after the annual grand-parental stipend went on hiatus for a host of reasons too tedious to explain on this blog. Suffice it to say, I don’t know if or when that spigot will be able to be turned on again and in fact I try not to think about it too much to avoid guilty feelings. Meanwhile, I’ve been living hand to mouth thanks to monthly maternal charity. As for wage slavery, I haven’t had a day job since the AutoEurope debacle and still find myself bedeviled by the same anxieties that lead me to flame out of there in the first place. This more than anything feeds my anxiety about life these days. Well, that and my joke of a sex life.

I do know this, though – normalcy will always elude me, no matter how hard I try to grab hold of it. All I can do is use my strengths to route around my weaknesses – even if I have to scrape by to survive. My faulty neural wiring may cause pain from time to time, but it’s a source of joy as well. I see the world as an essentially magical place – it’s vivid and fraught with historical connections and imagined hidden meanings. The fact that my cacophonous and chaotic way of seeing the world is often tinged with melancholy just makes it all the more beautiful.

Best of all, I get to experience this all in Portland, Maine. This is a long enough manifesto already so I’ll skip the elaborate paen to Portland I originally had planned as a conclusion. The most succinct way to say how I feel about my home is to say this is the place I’ve been looking for since before my Mars Cadet days. I poured out my heart and soul to get here. The pain and frustration I experienced along the way was never welcome but so far it all seems worthwhile. Now I dream of staying here for the rest of what I hope to be a long life, whatever may happen to me or my city.

Chapter 4: My brain on my mind

Previously: 1, 2, 3

Surely I wasn’t the first person in history who failed to master complicated software and thus failed at employment. Indeed, I have reliable sources who tell me Sabre has felled many a potential AutoEurope wage slave. I can’t imagine any of those casualties were happy about losing a job they had so recently worked hard to obtain. It’s probably safe to say many or even most of them were depressed to find themselves back in the unemployment line. At the same time – keep in mind I’m pulling this theory out of my ass – my guess is that most AutoEurope failures get up, dust themselves off, look for an easier job, and attempt to forget about the whole embarrassing AutoEurope ordeal. Since I don’t roll that way, I panicked and had an existential crisis instead.

Really, I can hardly be blamed for freaking out. My struggle to craft a decent resume and find a simple job in Maine had been both Herculean and public. Watching my triumph crater in less than a week was mortifying. Then again, I also felt a sense of liberation, and not just because I was cast free from a job that would have filled me with daily anxiety and dread. I now had no other choice but to face some blunt facts about my life, facts I had long been loathe to address. A weekend of brooding produced a lament about my lifelong inability to navigate square society, which I then emailed to my mom. Her response was enlightening – maybe I had Asperger’s Syndrome.

Sounded about right to me. I certainly fit the profile of someone afflicted/blessed with this close relative of Autism. I was happy to learn that my cluster of difficulties with social interaction, cognitive inefficiencies, and clumsy motor skills had a name. This wasn’t so much a revelation as a confirmation of long held suspicions – this wasn’t even the first time I’d heard of this strange condition. Some months earlier I had stumbled upon Wikipedia’s article on Asperger’s and immediately recognized aspects of myself in the definitions, only to carry on with the night’s aimless internet surfing. Nothing short of disaster would force me to fully examine my neuro-atypicality. Well losing a job – even a crappy one – qualified as a disaster and I went about the task of self examination with gusto.

This layman’s diagnosis of my Asperger’s had a lot of supporting evidence, even if it turned out to be not quite accurate – something I promise to elaborate on in a future post. Long before the events described at the beginning of this saga, I was always a strange one. I never drifted into Rain Man territory – I have always been what is called “high functioning” in whatever it is that ails me. Nonetheless, the developmental delays were noticeable enough for my parents to start sending me to various specialists at an early age – something that would remain a constant in my life until I was about ten. Despite their best efforts the doctors were never quite able to find out what was behind my quirks and the thick file they produced is a chronicle of them scratching their heads. This was the ’80’s, after all, a time when scientific understanding of how the mind works was even more primitive than it is now. Nonetheless, from 4th grade on it became clear I need not join the ranks of the Special Kids and was allowed to join the ranks of the normal.

Of course I wasn’t normal at all. In 5th and 6th grade my tics weren’t so obvious, even after I retreated ever further into my own little fantasy world after the divorce of my parents. This was when my obsessions with outer space, time travel, futurism, and other sci-fi tropes began to take root. (Common obsessions among many Aspie’s in the late- and post-modern era.) I developed a keener interest in history and politics than others in my peer group – perhaps my susceptibility to Utopian schemes has it’s root here. Even so, elementary school remained a safe haven for me. My teachers knew all about the earlier bouts of testing I endured and my peers had not yet learned to be mean.

Such was not to be the case in Junior High – I had a few nice teachers but my fellow 7th-graders turned vicious, so further down the fantasy world rabbit hole I traveled to escape the pain. As the years passed I lavished my attention on that fantasy world to the neglect of the real one. That isn’t to say I was a horrible student – I was quite capable of brilliance when I applied my self. It was when social skills came into play that I found myself flailing. Even after I started to develop friendships in 9th grade, I was too timid to ever actually hang out with anybody after school. Along the way I missed out on picking up other basic skills such as driving, using a computer, or holding down an after school job. Perhaps worst of all I was terrified of asking any favors of anybody, even my own family. Nonetheless, the structured nature of junior high and high school ensured my graduation, I was able to embark upon my intermittent involvement with the workforce, I eventually obtained a drivers license, and was accepted into college.

The die, however, was cast. What were probably minor tics ten years earlier had snowballed over the years into something monstrous. In retrospect I know I must have had some inkling of the true magnitude of my deficits in basic life and social skills, but the truth was just too terrifying to confront. In fact I actually tuned out reality entirely and convinced myself that the college life was going to be glorious. I would choose a degree program that would dovetail perfectly with my life goal of colonizing Mars, I would move out of my mom’s house into an awesome bachelor pad, and I would sail through my classes on my way to a degree that would launch my brilliant career as one of the Colonizers of Mars. Along the way, of course, I would have sex with a lot of beautiful women.

When that scenario failed to unfold according to plan, I became discouraged and allowed minor slip-ups to balloon in to massive failures. And so for years I languished in the chronic state of depression detailed at the beginning of this saga. That led me to Maine and an abortive career as an airline reservations agent. Along the way I cast off cherished old notions of how the world should work. I finally realized what a colossal failure I was and I couldn’t have been more elated. From the ashes of defeat I would emerge a new man. Maybe.

Chapter 3: Rough landing

Previously: 1, 2

In retrospect, my transition to a new life “back east” (as we westerners call it) might have gone a little more smoothly had I done more homework ahead of time. I suppose I could have saved myself a lot of hassle by actually finishing my degree, or at least being more honest about my failure graduate. Then again, maybe that would have made my life too easy. Perhaps my path to relative happiness needed to be serpentine and torturous. In one nightmare scenario, a more competent me might have had just enough confidence to apply for a job at the Portland Press Herald and had just enough in the way of qualifications to be hired. Had that scenario played out, I’d likely be in the same soup some 35 other former reporters are finding themselves in this summer. This is why today I am grateful for having had such a spectacular flame-out.

That isn’t to say I knew I was so lucky at the time. I was able to stave of the dire sense of panic for a short while. I stayed positive on my drive across the country, I didn’t let it get to me as I imposed myself on long-lost New Jersey relatives for a relaxing interlude, and I after I arrived here on July 5, 2005, I kept an upbeat facade as I went through the bustle of settling down in my new home. I was able to ignore reality for a couple months but I couldn’t postpone my crash indefinitely. After I half-heartedly submitted my resume and clips to Portland Magazine, I concluded there was no way I’d make my way as a writer in this town, so I began my intermittent search for a regular job. Sometimes I was able to fill out the job applications, but mostly I just stared blankly at them. I looked into USM to see if I could register for my few remaining credits, but even that seemed like an impossible chore. On top of that, any remaining obsession I had about colonizing Mars was fading away, and Hurricane Katrina left me outraged, depressed and utterly disillusioned with my old wingnut politics. I had become unmoored and no longer believed I had a purpose in life. All I had were my regular spots for moping – The Wine Bar, Acoustic Coffee, JavaNet, and the Borders out by the mall. In my boredom I would fire off volleys of random text messages to distant friends and former crushes.

As bad as things were going, a few things kept me sane. There was the kickball league I joined on a whim – that gave me something to look forward to each week. I soon developed a keen interest in the history and urban fabric of Portland, especially after I started reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Then there was that old internet addiction of mine to keep me enlightened and amused. I even got to be in a movie, albeit as an uncredited extra who likely wound up on the cutting room floor. Such was what sustained me during the discouraging job hunts, the occasional doubts about sticking around town, and the mounting guilt I felt about my Big Lie. Despite my doldrums, I was able to connect with my kickball teammates and forge friendships out of acquaintanceships. For someone who had a hard time even making a simple phone call to my few close friends or even family when I still lived in Laramie, this was a huge deal. Even though I was rapidly reaching the end of my rope, I now saw that a soft landing was possible.

So after an utterly miserable holiday season spent wallowing in guilt and loneliness, I lost patience with the stupid cover up and came out as a college dropout. My family responded much as I would have expected – with the patience and understanding outweighing exasperation. My new friends, meanwhile, weren’t too concerned about my fib and we carried on with our off-season socializing. Around this time, I also received the welcome news that I could indeed take those two remaining classes at USM and transfer them back to UW. My ascent out of the funk was slow going, but the worst was over. I once again had it in me to update my blog on a regular basis, I enlisted the help of my friends in punching up my sorry looking resume, and as the ground thawed I started to really discover the spectacular strangeness that makes Portland Portinsula – by reading The Bollard, by drinking at the newly opened White Heart, and through stumbling upon our gem of a local music scene. I wasn’t too happy after a fender bender in Morrill’s Corner returned me to the Pedestrian Life early that summer, but I kept on keeping on. Before I knew it, I had been in Portland a full year. That’s when AutoEurope called and told me I had a job. Finally! My life was on an even keel.

Or so I was lead to believe. Turns out AutoEurope expects their customer service reps to master an ancient rickety software system called Sabre. Maybe it was user friendly to the long lost tribe who invented it. I, alas, felt like I was back in algebra class. My training supervisor was certainly not amused by my lack of progress. I could tell which way the wind was blowing and decided to cut my losses after one useless week of training. Once again I had failed in a most spectacular manner. Once again, it was time for some serious self reflection.

Chapter 2: Seeking my true habitat

Previous installment: 1

As I was saying before, by late summer 2004, I rediscovered my resolve to seek pastures greener than the high plains of Wyoming. Having discarded any dreams of the expat life, I pondered my options before zeroing in on a place that had long tugged at my imagination – Maine. I still don’t know why, exactly, I found the idea Maine so captivating. Maybe that puzzle of the United States I used to play with as a child planted a seed – Maine looked like the head of some scary beast and I was drawn to that which frightened me. I do know I later came to be hypnotized by pictures of the stormy rocky coast. Later still I would be impressed that Maine once had an Independent governor who wasn’t a wrestler. Most of all, Maine was far away from Wyoming in distance and environment – that sealed the deal for me.

Now I had to figure out where in Maine I should move. That decision was easy – my new community couldn’t be some dinky-ass cow town. (What is the Maine equivalent of a cow town anyway? Fishing village? Dying mill town?) That basically narrowed it down to Portland after my Wiki-ing of Lewiston, Bangor, and Disgusta left me unimpressed. Truth be told, I knew absolutely nothing about Portland when I decided to move here. Maybe not quite nothing – I knew it was the namesake of Portland, Oregon. I was also aware it was a seaport and a largish small city. With those scant scraps of information at hand, I figured that Portland must be a wonderful bohemian place to live.

Of course, a bohemian mecca might seem like an odd place for a chicken-hawkish libertarian space cadet to select as his dream community. Wouldn’t an exurb of Houston or Phoenix be more to my liking? Well, hell no. I’ve always been attracted to the counterculture. I don’t mean that in the narrow tie-dyed, jam-band enjoying sense of the word. I can’t quite put my finger on what I mean by that – all I know is that I’ve always preferred to walk the crooked mile, mainly because the normal people wouldn’t find me there and tease me for not being a jock. Thus, being cast as the purple starfish led me to see the world as a cruelly ordered place that could only be fixed or escaped from – perhaps both. It’s why the idea of colonizing Mars was so appealing to me. That mind set led me to vote for the Green Ralph Nader in 1996 and the Libertarian Harry Browne in 2000. It also explains why my reaction to 911 was something akin to what happened to a certain class of left-wing intellectual who became disillusioned with the Soviet Union in the 1930’s and 40’s – think Whittaker Chambers or George Orwell. My contemporary “compatriots” were people like Christopher Hitchens and war-blogger Michael J. Totten. These people all started off as misfit bohemians to one degree or another, yet couldn’t purge that “counter-culture” streak from their being even after a horrible catastrophe shattered their long cherished world views.

That’s the best I can explain it – I was a leftist turned libertarian who thought he got mugged by reality on 911. Yet I was still the same misfit I was before and I disliked the flag waving frat boys just as much as the hippies who’s answer to every problem in the world was to start a drum circle – they were all a bunch of squares as far as I was concerned. One of the few other true neocons in town was a coffee shop compatriot of mine who liked to rattle on about the virtues and failings of punk rock, the awesome institutional stability of the Roman Catholic Church, the depravity of Feminism, and the demographic disasters awaiting decadent Europe. Some of his rantings – about feminism and gay rights especially – didn’t sit well with me. At the same time, Joe did plant the idea in my head that bohemia was more than just hippies and beatniks. Rather, a true bohemian community consisted of cranks and dropouts of all stripes. Laramie definitely didn’t rise to the challenge, and nor did any random chunk of Arizonan exurbia. Thus was the logic behind my choice of Portland as the place where I could find refuge. Sure, the wingnut Kool-Aid made me think this place might be ridiculously leftist – why, I even heard a member of the Green Party managed to get elected to the state house! – but somehow I knew I would find a way to fit in.

With that, I began half-assedly researching my new home. I poked around on JobsInMe.com, contacted a couple of people on Friendster, Googled around for potential living arrangements, and studied maps of the city I found online. Other than that, I decided research and preparations were for suckers. Instead, I focused on wrapping up my life in Laramie. I drastically curtailed my involvement with Student Publications, which did much to unburden me of unwanted stress. A further break in my favor came from my grandparents, who decided the time was right to begin unloading their accumulated wealth onto their kids and grandkids in annual chunks of free money. This unexpected windfall wasn’t exactly large, but it was enough squash any worries I had about financing my move to Portland. At this point all I had to do was finish my degree and pack up my car. It really was nothing more than a waiting game, and I had never been happier in my life. I socialized and hobnobbed like I never had before and I was able to enjoy myself without worrying about problems real or imagined. I wasn’t even worried when I realized I would fall ever so short of graduating on account of neglecting a couple of classes. I was not about to be held back now, even if it meant I had to finish up those last couple of classes in Maine at some undefined point in the future. So I went through the motions of graduating, said my goodbyes, packed up my car, and left. Damn the loose ends and lies – I’d deal with them later. Portland wasn’t going to wait.

Chapter 1: A rut called Laramie

I love it when folks from around these parts ask me where I’m from. I love it because I get to tell Mainers I’m from Wyoming, a claim to fame not many other people are able to boast about – especially in this far Northeastern corner of the USA. My audience typically displays a mixture of puzzlement and awe when I tell them I moved here out of the blue, for no other reason than because I felt like it. That’s where the story usually ends. I typically don’t elaborate – mainly because it would take to long to explain. Also because I don’t always talking about crappy times in my life, and the early part of this decade was definitely one of those crappy times. But what the hell, the rest of the story is ready to be told.

For five years, I had been a student at UW, yet I still wasn’t close to graduation. The path to success in college for a hack like me required a delicate balancing act between studying for my classes, my duties as a reporter for the school paper, and whatever day job I might or might not have been holding down at the time. I happen to have terrible balance, so I opted for triage instead. I always put the paper first, which required a lot of my time, which I subtracted from academic pursuits and work shifts. I never started any of what seemed like several dozens semesters with that particular goal in mind, but that was always the end result come December or May. My glacial academic progress and the mounting credit card debt did my psyche no favors and the resulting anxiety was a drag on my ability to function as a good journalist. I was beginning to think my dream of colonizing Mars with the power of my pen (Yup, an actual career goal) wasn’t going to happen. I was even beginning to doubt if any the rinky-dink Wyoming papers would hire me. Lord knows my social anxiety and lack of a vehicle kept me from networking or interning with any of their editors or publishers. But did I despair? Of course not! How could I when there was such a historic movement afoot.

See, this was right around the time Bush launched that little kerfluffle known as the Iraq War. My politics then were different than they are now; my original adolescent progressive credo having been warped by a strange obsession with colonizing Mars, an addiction to the libertarian Kool-Aid, followed by an inappropriate reaction to the events of 911. I read a lot of “war-blogs” back then. You remember those guys – the keyboard commandos who bravely typed angry screeds reminding us that September 11th changed everything, including the laws of thermodynamics. I have to admit, I was pretty pumped about that war. We were liberating those Iraqi’s, man! Just wait till the Syrians and Iranians and Saudi’s got a load of all that democracy sprouting up right next door! How can it not be like 1989 in Eastern Europe all over again? That settled it – I wanted in on the action. I wanted to be a war-blogger.

Of course I couldn’t be a war blogger in boring old America. No, I wanted to liveblog the inevitable Velvet Revolution in Tehran. This brilliant idea came by way of Matt Welch, an original war blogger from late 2001. He was more of an ex-war blogger by the time of the Iraq War, but I latched on to him anyway. I did so mainly because his personal story reminded me of my own – if I recall correctly he was more of a college dropout than a college slacker, but in any case it was 1989 and he was languishing. Then the Berlin Wall fell and his life changed forever. Before long, he was in Prague, writing for an English language rag and living the dream. So I fired off an email to him and he humored me with advice.

My plan such as it was, wasn’t a carbon copy of the Matt Welch experience. For one thing, I saw no point in dropping out of college, especially if I took a full load of classes for the next two semesters and applied myself real hard. On top of that, the student publications board had hired me to be the editor of the student magazine for that academic year. I only had to put out one issue a semester, how hard could it be? And while I was busy with all of that, I also figured I could hold down the full time job I would need to pay off my credit cards. Come summer of 2004, I would be ready to board that plane to Tehran. Or Almaty. Or Tashkent – I kept changing my mind about my preferred locale. This plan was so genius, it could have been written by Donald Rumsfeld himself.

Alas for reality, my plan was an utter failure – it might as well have been written by old Rummy. I quit my day job and flunked most of my classes. And the magazine? Almost an utter failure as well – I certainly didn’t feel proud about the final project. Finally, in the summer of 2004, I kind of had a nervous breakdown and came clean to my family and peers about being a depressed failure. I shuffled into the campus counseling center and began to feel better. The belated spring issue of the magazine finally made it to the printer. I enrolled in classes for the fall and made plans to graduate in the spring while scaling back my journalistic duties. Most importantly, I resolved once and for all to leave Laramie behind that spring, no matter what. Those crazy overseas options were off the table, but I had a car now so at least the continental US was my oyster. Soon I would be outta there and my destination would be Vacationland.

How I came to Portland

How about that? I’ve been in Portland for three years, as of last Saturday. Naturally, there has been more than a little navel-gazing going on in the Banks household of late – idle hours spent comparing “then” with “now”, late nights lamenting various fuck ups, early mornings celebrating dark roads not taken – just the sort of self reflection one expects to accompany an important anniversary. More specifically, I got to thinking about how I’ve never really been able to adequately explain why I moved from Laramie, Wyoming to Portland, Maine. People ask me and all I’m able to tell them is some vague shit about wanting to get out of a rut and see new landscapes and eat freshly caught bottom-feeding crustaceans and all that jazz. If I ever want to be more specific and indeed to find out for myself why I made such a big move, I decided it was time to sit down and write.

So, over the course of the nearish future I will be doing some personal history blogging. My promise to you the reader is:

Chapter 1: A rut called Laramie

Chapter 2: Seeking my true habitat

Chapter 3: Rough landing

Chapter 4: My brain on my mind

Chapter 5: Resurgam?