Right here, 130 years into the past. There’s pavement now.

And other mixed blessings, everywhere I look.

I was up early, more than 5 hours before my interview.

I cannot tell you how much I am enjoying having a bathtub again.

Out among the healthy monsoon-fed violets running riot in the yards, I completed a long looping circuit from twentyfive years back by saying hello to a hummingbird who actually perched on a branch for a minute and bowed namaste to me. I responded in kind.

I drove around for a few of those hours, scoping out where to park the big truck up near the Uni without having to walk too far, measuring distances from the temp home and the fresh lot and the coffee place and the Co-op and the Library. All of it is within two miles or thereabouts. I expect to be biking it on an average day, but I was intending to look like the successful candidate on this one. So I laid out an extra shirt on the passenger seat, instead of stuffing one into the saddlebags; a small concession to the way things are in the gainfully employed world.

Just a little, you gotta keep up appearances … speaking of which …

About 45 minutes before showtime, I stopped back the house, intending to use the bathroom.

The rental house kinda has two front doors, with a mud room in between. It’s like that at my house in SandRock too … I consider this little portal an essential for a residential space–keeping bugs out, keeping cats in, and other happy things.

However.

The key provided by the landlady worked fine on the real front door, but …

Not on the inner one.

Which I had locked from inside and pulled shut when I left. What. The. Fuck.

So here’s what I did, you ready?

In the mud room, with the curtains carefully drawn, I took a dump in a mostly empty bag of birdseed and wiped up with fastfood napkins from the glovebox.

Yyyyep.

Then I hosed down my hands with peroxide (still carrying that around from the covid days), and I went straight to my first job interview in five years.

It went very very well, thank you.

The whole thing was some kind of twisted perfect metaphor for my entire mad fucking life.

On the way back I stopped at the Co-op and I bought water, and milk for coffee, and hummus, and a very nice seven-dollar sandwich: turkey bacon avocado.

If I had any sense I would have bought some lockpicks too, but I don’t.

I came back here and parked and ate my sandwich and considered my options.

I tried every other screen, window, door, but nothing doing.

The offending door has a pane of glass in it on the top part. Giving that a good smack and replacing it would have worked, but I wanted to try something with a little more nuance first.

I watched a lot of YouTube videos about picking locks, and I tried all the advice that I could, given what tools I had on hand. None of it worked, but I’m glad to know some of those techniques, which may come in handy someday where the security isn’t so stout.

I worked steadily and stoically on the job for three sweaty hours.

In the end, with the sky darkening and getting ready to pour, I grabbed the stubborn knob with a pair of vice grips and twisted it until it gave in with a groaning death rattle.

So now I have to replace that shit, but I can do it myself at least, and it’ll set me back about twenty bucks, and it will take me way less than three hours I’m sure.

Plus, I’ll have a lock with a damn key, and so will the landlady, when she makes it back from her sojourn in the Peruvian highlands.

I got a good story out of it …

The moral of which is …

All blessings are mixed, and our brains and selves make up the mixtures personally. It’s the universal human job.