Brain Damaged Snowbird

This will be the third time I’ve returned from Florida to Maine, just in time for Winter

Clearly at some point I suffered some serious head injury. Who does this? Who returns from America’s Dangling Phallus State just when all the tourists leave, the weather starts to cool to a temperature just under boiling lava?

Truth be told, I wasn’t returning from Florida. Since about April I was working in South Carolina. I was deep in the rural willywhacks, 20 miles from my worksite, and 45 miles from a civilized cup of Dunkin.

Somebody tell Elon that when he starts training those folks to go to Mars for the rest of their lives, I have a few pointers.

My mouth and the rural Deep South was a combination that was never going to work. It wasn’t about the politics; It was more about a Yankee kid, used to doing things the way we do (you know, with speed, accuracy, perhaps even a sense of urgency) being suddenly thrust into a situation where overnight parts orders even added a second day. Despite being less than two miles from a major drop ship point for a major national trucking company, they still “didn’t go there EVERY day.”

For those that didn’t follow my epic travelogue on the Facebooks, the trip was a challenge. Steaming bubbling radiator attached to steaming pile of shit car. Now, find yourself driving down the Jersey Turnpike at 80 miles per hour. Then imagine finding out quite suddenly that you didn’t have any brakes to speak of.

Had I know this was going to happen, I would have swallowed a few charcoal briquettes first. I puckered up so tight at that point I could have passed them as diamonds and paid for the trip.

Relocating is never fun. At least this time around I had a few decent prospects for a job. With some training I had over the five years I was gone, I find myself coming back to a salary that is roughly double what it was when I left.

Not bad for a kid thrown out of High School. Too bad prices have tripled while I was gone, though.

I’m coming back to a housing crisis worse than it was when I left. I know all the politicians and muckety-mucks think they are the smartest kids in the room. At the very least I expected that they would have made SOME progress on this issue.

Nope, the homelessness problem appears to me to have gotten worse. It’s not quite as bad as it was the first time I ended up in Florida. That was in Sarasota, just when the “bath salts/flakka” thing was going on. On the day before I got to town, a hopped up flakka fiend had decided to peel themself naked, and then jumped in the window of a car that was driving by.

Scary as shit, but still better than the fentanyl/carfentanyl plague that still stalks the streets. I saw it in Sarasota, Jacksonville and several other locations. Its easy to spot, and seems almost impossible to stop.

I’m glad you guys have legal weed now. Even though “I do not partake, I just let it pass by…with a smile on my face and a great contact high” the experience seems ti have mellowed Portland a bit. I do however have to advise you to count your change carefully. Twice in three days I had to make somebody else go back and count.

I see we are still fighting about building housing though. I’m digging deep on one issue I think has a few wrinkles in it.

For now, I’m letting it all set in. Took a walk on the beach this morning in my old hometown, kind of thinking things over. Just before I did, I got the call that I had just formally been offered the job that I had just driven 1264 miles to do.

Its good to come home. Its better now that I’m coming back better than when I left mentally.

Maybe the third head injury wasn’t that bad after all.