mid August 05

This is my first journal entry in quite some time. I accepted a job writing real estate ads for TV. I trained for two weeks in my hometown of Klamath Falls. Then I moved to Portland, a much larger city in our state. I arranged to stay for nearly free at the home of my dad's best college friend, Rich. I would get up early in the morning and walk about 1 1/2 miles. Then I would take a long bus ride downtown. At the job, I would write these narrow-minded real estate ads. Now and again, there was an opportunity for creativity, sometimes cynical but sometimes genuine. There were some factors that displeased me about the job; they often expected me to work over 8 hours a day. Perhaps worst of all, they had me voicing half of my own scripts. Admittedly, I originally volunteered to do this out of vanity. But the way I speak is far from enunciated and it soon became an unwanted responsibility, one which I couldn't withdraw from. So I quit the job; I simply walked out at my lunch hour. Some of the people at the job were decent people and this left them in the lurch.
After I quit the job, the time I spent with Rich's family was extremely enjoyable. Aside from Rich and his wife, there are three daughters, the oldest being 13 and the other 2 being twins of 9. Rich had an extensive library on many subjects, perhaps the most interesting being Asia. I enjoyed reading parts of a couple of his books on Zen buddhism. Rich is a wild-hearted but civilized man and I have always extremely enjoyed visits to his home; he's now a successful high end car salesman. After attending a concert, he became passionate about a hip-hop artist named Matt Kearney. I also bonded with his wife Jeanne, who's a highly intelligent woman who's tuned in to the higher possibilities of the world.
Now I'm back home in Klamath, Oregon. I sleep in a now primitively enclosed room that was the bedroom of my youth. I haven't slept on a real bed in over 4 months. I have some saved up spending money, around $700. I'm trying not to spend too much but I've developed some expensive habits since my break-up with Fawn. I love to drink copious amounts of espresso and beer. My tastes could be called aristocratic; I love nutritious food and even good, sometimes exotic meat. I guess I love art and literature. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure what I love anymore. But I've been quite enjoying reading Will Durant's "Our Oriental Heritage," the very first book of his epic work of history: "The Story of Civilization." I think in his earliest work, he expresses so many of the fundamentals of the human experience.