Ferocity Mill

There he goes again, off on tour. It’s not the first time we’ve been apart since we got married, nor the longest, but every time he goes, the house gets quieter. No instruments being plucked or plonked, no sports radio turned all the way up so he can hear it from the kitchen, no foot or hand tapping, constantly, upon the nearest available surface. I would call it peaceful, except that we still live on 14th Avenue, and there will still be sirens, shouting and the occasional gunshot ringing out periodically in the night sky.

It’s part of Oakland’s charm. The neighbors behind us have chickens for eggs and roosters for fighting. The roosters crow angrily each day at six a.m. to wake us up, at noon to remind us that getting up should be followed by dressing, and at five p.m. to let us know it’s happy hour. The neighbors’ dog, Brownie, has no voice box, which doesn’t stop him from barking every time we enter our backyard. We’ve lived here for a year and a half now and still, the second I step into the garden, I hear Brownie’s hoarse wowwr! wowwr! I tried to go back to their house and meet him once, but as I approached, he lunged toward me and into the fence. It held, surprisingly.

Eric and I have made this strange setting our home, not because we’re trying to prove anything, but because we can’t exactly afford the Berkeley hills on his income and my lack thereof. Luckily, neither of us minds our neighborhood, probably because we’re away from home often enough that all the things we’d find annoying under normal circumstances, we instead find appealing. The landlords don’t speak English? Great, we can maintain a friendly distance, convincing them of our upstanding character via enthusiastic waves and sparkling smiles. The neighbors are loud at all hours of the night? Well, as it turns out, so are we. We also like to have parties, which they never crash or complain about. There’s a bus stop and a shady liquor store across the street? Yep, and they sell cartons of a half-dozen eggs, which is perfect when you’re only going to be home for two days.

As G.K. Chesterton said, an inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered. I firmly believe that applies to our living situation. After all, what are we doing in this low-income, high-risk city if not having a twisted little romp through reality? It’s definitely a step or two closer to safeness than Baghdad, the only other place I lived for more than a year after the age of sixteen, so it seems I’m doing something right.

The inconvenience-as-adventure idea comes in handy when he’s off in another state while I’m at home. Sometimes I go into my happy-housewife routine and clean up some dog hair from the couch or whatever, but usually I use his tour schedule to plan my own. Of course, he makes money on his tours, while all I usually make is friends and sometimes a wrong turn in Wyoming or what have you, but it’s still in my heart to travel. If it’s beyond the realm of rationality for me to accompany Eric to Chicago, Denver, New York City or anywhere else equally appealing, I make peace with the situation by simply going somewhere else, usually in my car. Sometimes it’s nearby (today, it was Sonoma, only a ninety-minute drive) and sometimes it’s not (the car and I made it to New York this summer, then stopped in Colorado for a couple weeks before heading home through Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon). Either way, it makes me feel better.

I have to wonder, though, if this is how I’m going to be forever. I know, I know – I’m still relatively young and full of energy and blah blah metabolism etc., but sometimes it seems like I’m doing all this traveling compulsively, you know, the way alcoholics drink and politicians lie. I do it even when my body is tired and my mind dulled by the white noise of the interstate. I do it when I can’t afford it. I have trouble driving onto a freeway without being nagged by the urge to keep going to the end! until I reach my exit and breathe a sigh of relief. I can’t help but ask myself: Self, do I have some form of addiction? Well, maybe I do. But I also have a whole fuckload of adventure.