so much

I was explaining to someone from La Paz, Mexico this morning, a current housemate, that when I announced the third week in January of this year I was going to begin a daily Monday through Friday Blog post that what I would be reporting on any given of those days would be what I called “my daily weather”. Here’s today’s.

I arrived safely and relatively psychotic in Encinitas late Saturday afternoon. Two days of insane driving – forest fires, endless stops and go’s, tailgaters, brake-tappers, two lanes, five lanes, nice people and not so nice people, lots of truly bad scanning radio, and a final dead stop endless jam some 15 north of Encinitas driving me to flee the freeway to the coast highway and sit in red-light, tourists-are-us, when’s-it-end last 40 minutes – two days of all that and noticing and rejoicing along the way with first palm trees and first eucalyptus trees and the entering “Irvine” sign and my favorite bougainvillea, and I was tired and 72-year old wrung out beyond imagination. I last did something this extreme 13 years before, geez, I was still in my 50’s. I found the house where I’d rented a room – a room had been promised to me – and there was the owner, my new landlady you could say, and her friends from La Paz and they were on the way out to a party and I unloaded everything I’d scavenged from the divorce, not otherwise stored in Joyce’s Portland garage, and got back in the car against all sanity instincts and drove to the ocean and took a couple of selfies to prove it to you and, yup, me too, then wandered what might be called Main Street on the lookout for a cheap Mexican place and a burrito, my third in four days and so much for no grain ever and the pledge of allegiance to Keto, and I accosted two young women who directed me to that joint and – no food all day – I wolfed down a veggie burrito and came back to my new “home” and got the laptop working and even the desktop working and took a Tylenol pm and crashed out.

It’s a huge house with insanely beautiful tile work and my favorite-in-life succulent plants everywhere in a swirling never-ending yard and I’ve been filled with joy and out-loud counting my blessings and it hasn’t been two days yet and this morning I vowed to myself to go to the ocean every day I’m here, and this morning the printer still wouldn’t work (forever ‘offline’) and this morning I found I had 10 days to get a California license and 20 days to get Cali plates and I have no evidence of residence, no mail, no utility bills, and it’s been a little funky between the landlady and myself and I keep reminding myself to be in the now and rejoice in waking up another day and me living a life-long dream – a life on the coast of California – and I thought I’d have the big exhale after finally arriving down this path which has been placed before me, knowing that’s when the serious sadness of no longer having my wife, my soulmate, and having left my son (in angelic hands) would arrive to stay a while, but there is more to do and more to do with big deadlines looming and the landlady made a snarky crack which had me wondering how long I’ll be here and, that’s cool, because I’m here now and for sure through July 31 and then maybe a free place to stay for a couple of weeks if things don’t work out here, though I may be so exhausted as to be clinically paranoid and me and the landlady may be toasting sparkling water as best buds four July 4ths from now. And this is my weather today. This is how I am today. Like I like to say to myself – right here, right now. Like Dick M was always telling me – right where I’m supposed to be.

I do not feel a need to be all warm and fuzzy this Monday and I don’t feel like I’m complaining either. Not really. I kind of thought there’d be something like the big exhale and a serious period of relaxing, but say la vie say the old folks, I guess you suit up and show up and do whats you gots to do, and with a heart filled with kindness and the ever-present gathering of grace, even with new and more stuff, here I am in Encinitas.

Living the dream.