Here I am in Sacramento

Wow, what a week it has been. I am very fortunate to be sitting in my living room, oh, really what is a studio, in downtown Sacramento and I am very happy to learn that I can, indeed, continue to dictate to Apple, using my voice without actually being connected to the Internet. The level of technology necessary for that to happen, which I assume is some sort of embedded LLM technology, running locally somewhere, would have been completely unimaginable perhaps even only 10 years ago but certainly there's no point in the 20th century where any of that would've been feasible. So here we are at the cutting, nay, the bleeding edge of technology, at the same time that the world is in a crisis of so many different kinds, that it's almost tiresome to even point out the different theaters of this war on humanity: climate change, global food insecurity, election interference, and the incessant dwindling of the middle class. Inflation, the cost of healthcare, the cost of living. A lack of affordable housing. And here I am, and somehow thriving in this exact situation, and it is a very difficult feeling to explain. Obviously, there's a sense of being grateful, of appreciating the gifts that I have been given over the years. But there's also a sort of sadness, knowing that I have this luxury of a kind of happiness that's just not available in the breadth that it once was. That's just a fact, it is hard getting by these days, and I am lucky and talented and determined enough to be where I'm at - perhaps all three in equal measure. I almost feel selfish, just saying that. But here we are.

It is almost as if Sacramento wants me to be here. I do not say that lightly. But things have really come together in ways that are beyond my control. For example, I did as much as I could to do the planning from New York where I still had high-speed Internet, and the luxury of time to do some research around where I wanted to be living. I knew where the job was going to be, and I knew where the Amtrak station was, so I had this little zone of mainly downtown Sacramento that I knew I needed to be in in order to be able to walk all the places I needed to. So I stumbled into the Zillow rental application flow, and thought perhaps that would be a decent way to connect with possible landlords in the Sacramento market. That turned out to be a really bad idea. An absolute waste of $35 if you ask me. For whatever reason, in Sacramento, basically, none of the property owners are affiliated with Zillow, and it's just a pointless endeavor. I did end up connecting with only one actual landlord through that Zillow application, and his name was John Adamos. I applied directly for the property that I was interested in, and he was reasonably responsive through the Zillow messaging app. So I made an appointment to go see the property and promptly booked a flight to Sacramento to, as I like to say, ‘git er done’.

So I arrive in Sacramento, I wake up promptly at 7:30 on Monday morning because John had asked me to message him on my way over to the property. So I message this horrible man who promptly tells me that he's already rented that property so there's no point in seeing it. To which I responded, quite appropriately, I might add, “oh, you didn't tell me that you rented the property? So you're saying, I flew all the way over here for nothing?” - to which he said, and I wish I was kidding about this, “I have other properties but with that attitude, I don't think I want to rent to you.”

To which I chuckled, and said, “OK, thanks John,” and hung up the phone. So I decided to walk around in the area that I knew I wanted to live and just start calling landlords from the signs that they always put in the front yard. That turned out to be a fantastic approach, and less than 24 hours later I connected with what has turned out to be an absolutely pitch-perfect property for my needs. So, in the end, John did me a favor. But looking back on it now, I have to say, after 50 years of living and many many handfuls of rental properties, I don't know that I've ever communicated with a landlord who had quite same kind of bratty 6 year old energy. What a tool.

Somehow, without a car to my name, I've been able to settle in relatively well. I've got my office set up, I'm already totally unpacked, I had ordered two small furniture items from IKEA and had a good time putting those together yesterday. Moving in and nesting is fun, this city just has so much available that I am almost in culture shock compared to where we were in upstate New York. I can walk to the Pressed Juicery, I can walk to Safeway, Target, Ace Hardware, on and on. Everything is here. I just wish I had my family here to enjoy it. But I will be seeing them next weekend, and I am very excited for that.

One thing I mentioned to an old friend of mine I was talking with on the phone yesterday, is that mostly people that are here think highly of this place. Whereas, typically people that don't have direct experience with Sacramento, tend to feel negative about it. I finally found one Uber driver out of the four or five that I've connected with so far, who was not totally pro Sacramento. He was probably early 30s or late 20s, still had a bit of an accent from his Boston roots, and really enjoyed his time as a cab driver in New York City. So when I told him I was from New York, he got him pretty excited, and he said that as an Uber driver, there's really no one to pick up after 7 PM until the drinkers downtown start trying to get home somewhere past 9:30. So, from his perspective, that just makes it hard to make a living. But I suppose there's also an upside to having this place be a little bit sleepy compared to the New Yorks and the Los Angeleses is of the world. Just maybe don't move here just to be an Uber driver. I guess that's the lesson.

But now that I've been walking around for basically a whole week, it feels like a very small community at the end of the day. Like already from walking up and down 15th St., I know there's two Samoan dudes staying at the Holiday Inn, one bougie-square family with a dad who wears flip-flops, one large bearded gay man who is constantly walking his two Chihuahuas, and a homeless dude, that camps in front of the Thai Orchid. This is my world now: having come from spotting butterflies, baby deer, and groundhogs eating pears, I now have more of an urban landscape, if you will. But I'm OK with it. This was a bold move, and I stand by my conviction. Coming back to the west coast was the right move. I see it as clear as day now.

Just the mere fact that I've been forced to subsist without a high-speed Internet connection has shown me how dependent I am, and this past weekend, I was forced to create my own playlist from a bunch of MP3s I have on my laptop, and just listen to that, using VLC. Something about listening to the music uncompressed, through real speakers, felt like a lightbulb moment. I have these great little desktop speakers that I got in Ashland and I never even got a chance to set them up in New York. Ironically, with 55 acres of farm, I still didn't have enough space to really set up my home office the way I wanted.

OK that's it for now. I think I'm gonna walk over to Old Sacramento and take some pictures.