I Have a New God
Summer Vacation pt. 2
“The Fool evokes an enormous burst of energy. Wherever he goes, he brings this vital impulse with him,” Alejandro Jodorowsky writes in his account of the numberless arcanum. Thank God I drew him in our latest Full Moon Draw because, as it turns out, we needed all the energy we could muster in order to escape Texas’ gravity well.
Throughout my twenties, I watched friends pick up and move to all kinds of places: (but mostly Austin, Colorado, or NYC) with not much more than a bindle of clothes and vague plans to crash at a friend’s place until they got things figured out. As it turns out, things get a bit trickier once you ebb into your thirties, get married and have a toddler, not to mention two dogs, and a HOUSELOAD OF STUFF. And it certainly doesn’t help when you cannot afford to miss a paycheck.
Yes, it becomes a hell of a thing to make a move happen.
At the outset, it looked simple enough. We thought we’d only need to find a job for myself and housing. My wife had just acquired a remote position and, according to friends of hers who’d worked for the company previously, it was the kind of lax remote work that would enable her to keep our daughter at home, albeit on the hush hush. We were not on a lease, and felt we had the freedom to move, more or less, at our leisure. I was steadily applying for jobs. Surely one would come through eventually.
When Amy’s remote job unexpectedly fell through, that sense of leisure dissipated. We were suddenly in a bind. Now we would need to find two jobs, childcare, and housing, and it would all have to line up seamlessly. And we only had about a month to do it before her paychecks stopped coming in.
It seemed like too much to navigate, especially doing so remotely. If we could just be on location for a month or so, we could figure it out, but that was out of the budget.
With the remote job gone, it seemed as if it was all destined to fall apart. We’d lost our only foothold and were preparing to slide back down into our fated Texas. We’d been Fools to think we belonged elsewhere. But this, too, presented a bind. Amy had already resigned from her previous job in order to accept the remote position, and she was loathe to trudge back into a classroom position in Texas. In fact, escaping that was one of the main motivators for getting out of the state.
For all its endless faults, her district had provided supplemented childcare for its employees which had been the only way we could afford daycare. So if she was to avoid the cruel fate of asking for her old job back and retaping the Ten Commandments poster to her classroom wall, I was going to have to find a better paying job.
Either way, we needed two jobs and childcare pronto.
It felt like we had just blown up our lives. Fools indeed! We stewed in stress for a few weeks, pinching pennies, racking our brains, downright scheming. I worked as much as possible and spent my evenings enmeshed in the soul-corroding quagmire of Indeed and LinkedIn.
But then, suddenly, a shift. Apply enough pressure for long enough, and something is bound to snap, right? or maybe we were just blessed by a bit of that ol’ Fool’s Luck. Either way, in the span of an afternoon a string of happy occurrences all but threw open the doors for us. All we had to do was walk through—tho with some hustle.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!
Wind suddenly at our back, we booked it. We would need to set out with a hell of a lot less STUFF than we currently owned, so we garage saled hard. We flooded Facebook Marketplace with our wares. I even spent a weekend driving heirloom furniture that we were told we were simply NOT ALLOWED to discard to an in-law’s storage facility halfway across the state—not the worst fate as it gave me a chance to say goodbye to the Texas Hill Country and a few favorite gems in Austin.
In the end, there remained just one major elephant in the room: the walls of glass-doored bookshelves which we had been given by my bibliophile aunt when she picked up and moved to a small adobe in New Mexico. Now that it was our turn to do the same, they would have to be addressed. Not only the shelves, but their contents. Oh, I put it off as long as I could. I plotted ways to not have to do it, but there was simply no way around it.
I was good. I pared down the books quite viciously, especially my Moby-Dick collection. Yes, I was like that whale with the spade trailing from a line wrapped around his tail, swimming through the pod, dispatching my fellows mercilessly:
“this whale had become entangled in the harpoon-line that he towed; he had also run away with the cutting-spade in him; and while the free end of the rope attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in the coils of the harpoon-line round his tail, the cutting-spade itself had worked loose from his flesh. So that tormented to madness, he was now churning through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and murdering his own comrades.”
I culled the herd from seventy to four: the Oxford edition I first read, the Modern Library edition, and the oldest two, gifted to me by Amy, each printed in the 1920s. The rest I sold, gave to friends, or seeded in Little Free Libraries.
As for the rest of my collection, I was less harsh than that, but still managed to whittle down several boxes, carting them off to my favorite local bookstores (Recycled in Denton, Recluse in Fort Worth, and Half Price Books if you want to hunt them down) and releasing them back into the wild.
And so that’s what we have been doing all summer and that’s why I took time off from my usual posting. I didn’t even get the chance to write one of these last month and instead had to fire off one of my few canned essays just to keep you jackals satiated. So thank you all for sticking around through the interim. I’m excited to get back to it next week.
Down below is a double helping of my recent reading, covering both June and July. A god emerged from the pages of these seemingly disparate books. Each appearance presented a slightly different aspect, and aided in deepening my understanding. While I did not detect this new god in quite every book I read, I am sure that was more my own blindness than their lack of presence. And besides, I somehow still managed to read a lot of books this summer. Turns out, I can churn through pages even when my life seems in danger of going off the rails. I’m not entirely sure if this is a good thing. To be fair, some of that is because I was doing a lot of driving and a few of these I listened to as audiobooks, and I wasn’t sleeping particularly well on account of the stress, so I got some late night reading in, but most of it was done on the clock at my old job. The dog days of summer get real slow around there. I’ll miss getting paid to sit in a chair, drink coffee, and read.
Rejoice: you can assuage that feeling a bit by upgrading your subscription, thereby allowing me to get paid to sit in a chair, drink coffee, and write. In return, I’ll let you in on the feast behind this here paywall. Maybe even introduce you to this new god of mine.
Whatdya say?