let it rain

Can't hardly believe I've been back from England over a month now, nor that I've been home from Korea for over a year. I returned just about this time last July, remember...fresh off a sightseeing sojourn in the Jeju and Jeollanam Provinces. Man, I was riding high. I thought things were finally starting to work out. I figured I'd rest up at home, grin over the respectable wad of money I'd socked away, and then jet off for Alaska in a month or so.

Well, it didn't quite work out like that. I convinced myself that sticking around home, working and living cheap off my parents was a good idea. I could save up a stupendous nest egg. I could get all sorts of stuff done, like finishing that damn novel and the remainder of my flight training. Well, I did both those things. A year's gone by, an entire year, and my money (and my pride) has gone down the tubes. But I got some stuff done. The novel's finished. It's in the hands of my beta readers. My flight training's done. I just need seven hundred bucks, that's all. Three hundred for a three-hour review session with JM1 and $400 for the test proper. Then I'll be free and clear: free to hightail it to a forgotten corner of this mysterious world, and live like I mean it.

Unfortunately there's some things I need to before that. It was a real scramble this month trying to save up enough cabbage to pay off my car insurance. I just got that taken care of this morning. Now (besides paying the bills next month) I've got to worry about my Jeep. The tires are getting bald and the shock absorbers have taken a real beating from the dirt roads I live on. I'd like to replace the entire suspension before I do anything else, and that'll take some real money. Then I can worry about flight training. And even after that's done, I must concern myself with saving up something like $1500-$2000, enough to pay for a ticket to Spain or Japan or Australia or Antarctica and find a job.

I don't imagine I'm going to escape this hellish desert much before spring of 2011.

And speaking of "hellish," that's exactly what it's been. The days are uniformly in the 95-105 degree range. Such conditions are agonizing in the stifling cockpit of a Mooney, without the benefit of air conditioning or even active ventilation (we just have vents we can open to the outside, which is fine if you're at 10,000 feet and it's 60 degrees, but if you're sitting on the runway or flying low you're "sweating your balls off" as JM1 says).

It's been windy, too ("feels like you're standing in a hairdryer," JM1 says...JM1 is a very observant man). I wish it would rain. No, I take that back. If it rains, it won't get cooler. It'll just get humid. And our flying will probably get canceled, too, which is one hit I literally can't afford to take. The job is going well, by the way. JM1 and JM2, our new pilots, have got the program down now and are flying regularly. I haven't seen Dawg, Spud, or Mr. Mooney in weeks. Mr. Mooney and Spud are in Hawaii right now, flying L-29 Delfin jets for the Navy; and Dawg is in Colombia trying to strike up a new contract. All of them are quite happy that JMs 1 & 2 are working out so well. I've been a big help, too, they say, ushering the two of them through the routine. I didn't realize it until someone told me, but I'm actually the most experienced guy in the company now as far as UAV chases are concerned: I've done more than anybody else. I've done almost all of them, in fact, whereas the pilots keep rotating and taking turns. So I'm just helping everybody to get broken in. JM1 got the program down like a flash (he's a very experienced pilot himself, thousands of hours in everything from jets to puddle-jumpers). JM2 was a bit shaky at first, but now that he's over his nerves and has done it a few times, he's feelin' fine. As I may have mentioned, I'm doing all the radio work now, and have become proficient real fast.

I still can't find a second job, though. I've been all over town. Nobody's hiring bartenders around here. Looks like it's Wal-Mart for me. I wouldn't mind learning how to drive a forklift, that's for sure.
So, in short, work's going well, even if I'm not doing it enough; the weather has been blasphemously hot, but I'm coping somehow (drinking a lot of water and going swimming with bikini-clad girls helps; I'm doing both regularly). Flying is on hold until I get some more money; traveling is on hold until I get some more money; and the novel's on hold until I hear back from my readers (and get some more money for copyright applications). Noticing a pattern here? I'm a pauper. This is déjà vu all over again. I'm living exactly like I was a few months back, after I'd purchased my insanely expensive tickets to England, trying desperately to save up enough for the trip itself. I thought I was done with that rot. But no, car repairs and insurance payments blindsided me. So here I am again, scrimping, saving, hardly socializing, putting off all the lovely Led Zeppelin albums and graphic novels I'd like to buy, forgoing the enticing bottles of booze on the shelves (except when the folks take pity on me and buy me some; they brought back some Mount Gay from BevMo the other day, sah-WEET!). It's a hard, hard life, let me tell you. But I could be breaking rocks in the Sahara. That'd be worse. At least I have an air-conditioned home and a soft bed to come back to every night.

And I'm not bone-idle at home, either. I've been helping the folks tear apart the kitchen in preparation the renovations that are taking place this week. New cabinets, new counters, new appliances, new floors, new everything. The whole shebang is being upgraded. And I got to pick up a sledgehammer and smash every last piece of the old tile counter, raising a cloud of dust that settled on every flat surface in the house. That was nice. But I'm also writing. In the absence of my novel, I'm working on my short stories. I'm trying to break into the fiction market, did you know? I wouldn't mind being a published science fiction writer like some of my idols, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft and Isaac Asimov and H.G. Wells and Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp and John W. Campbell, Jr. Those four stories I mentioned earlier are coming along nicely. One of them is finished. I'm handing it off to a friend for proofing and then I'll package it and send it off to Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. Looks like a likely market, and based on what I read of it, I'm up to the challenge of competing with their published writers. And that's the news. In short, I've got a lot of obstacles in my way, but you know me.

I'll get over 'em somehow.