A mystery I'll never find out.

On a side street a bit away from the park in the college town that I now live in, there's a small hut-like building that houses an arts organization, and then the other part of it seemed vacant, with old posters from several years ago advertising an evangelistic crusade featuring different travelling preachers, with the posters all in French and different (African) flags by the different preachers' names and pictures. And, I meant to look the flags up, thinking that I'd remember what they'd look like when I got home, but I never could, for some reason. And then, the next thing I know, the local sewing shop that was a few blocks away from me moved and took over that space, and all of those posters are gone. So now, I'll just never know, though I am pretty sure that one *might* have been the flag of a country that gave rise to a pretty large (African) immigrant population here, from what I can tell from a(n African) foodstore here and the country-of-origin of several workers at the new healthcare village that I work at.

Ants everywhere...

...besides my house and the houses of a couple of my former healthcare licensing class classmates: 1) On the keyboard of the family room computer in the one section of the new healthcare village that I work at. 2) On a random coffee table in one random part of that same healthcare village.

"I love a bargain."

In early May, my new, very local bank in the college town that I now live in gives away a ton of tomato plants to everyone with an account, 2 per person all day until they run out. It's right by where I live, so I'm highly thinking of going there and getting some and maybe trying to plant them and have tomatoes this year. My one neighbor upfront said I'd need big pots and soil and stakes and maybe even nets to keep the squirrels from digging them up, though, so I'm wondering now if it would even be worth the trouble. I was imagining some raised bed where I could just fire them in and maybe having to stake them at some point. After my one neighbor upfront told me all of this when I caught them outside in the yard, I got very downcast and offered them the 2 seedlings, but they were like, "Thank you, but they wouldn't be the varietals that I'm interested in."

Another spelling mistake that I recently discovered...

...in like a late 2000s memoir from a major publishing house: "Illusive."

Addendum.

"I also get the sense that none of them have dared, and that has allowed them an easy path to advancement." I feel like in the past few years, bad fortune and being present across many different little groups of people has both made me morose, and observing life like a Balzac novel. More and more lately, I notice myself making these sweeping but not inaccurate pronouncments about life, that are pithy and contain multiple abstract nouns.

Pessimism and hope (2 of 2): Comparison.

The other week, I went to a Zoom networking event for the scholarship undergraduates of my college that I had participated in, and it was interesting to see everyone, now, including the new kids rising up and the recent graduates. There was the wealthy businessman who sponsored it - we're still in touch on email, on and off - and lots of students from different cohorts from the past 30 years. It was very, very odd, since in some ways, everyone was mentioning civic work and academic work or professional work, and I clearly beat them on *all* major fronts -- conducting a major early unionization campaign that was cutting edge for its time and made the press a decent amount, poking around now with this civic group that I'm a part of about maybe trying to revive this one savvy state-level police reform bill, putting together several major financial exposes that caused a big splash and resulted in real world change, achieving huge academic accomplishments that aren't just some b*llsh*t that you're hyping up like so many people were talking about, and that's all besides getting a number of articles on very different topics into different publications, a few major. All of those are substantive and any single one of them would intimidate people, and yet I have all of them, and yet somehow I live in a back alley cottage working as little as possible and doing whatever the f*ck I want on my time off. Life really is jacked now. It's interesting, too, since everyone there presents themselves in a way that I really don't have - some form of poise, this way of self-presenting, this odd way of making themselves out to be big without really talking about anything important at all. And my not having that and the gap between what I've done and where I am, just seems to have made me even more off-putting to people. They're like, "Who is this guy?", and you can tell from the way that they look at me that they find me somehow bizarre. Somehow though they're all on scholarship, too, you get the sense that they're economically at ease, or at least know enough to cover it up; there's no vulnerability about them, like I've had, where one bad turn will disrupt my chances for a very long-time, and the people who have ill-malice towards me can sense that. I also get the sense that none of them have dared, and that has allowed them an easy path to advancement.

Pessimism and hope (1 of 2): Governmental redress.

The one outcome I simply never anticipated after the last presidential election was that Biden would get elected, but he wouldn't have a Senate to work with. I really don't know how things can get economically better now in any reasonable timeframe, now that his "Build Back Better" is dead. I mean, the infrastructure bill might help around the edges, but it's probably not going to be enough, and maybe there will be a shot again at the big change that's needed in like 2-6 years, but I somehow doubt it, and all this after problems have built up for so long, with such decays in cost-of-living and the safety net and economic opportunities. As for me lately, I don't tell people that I "dropped out," but I rather say that I'm "checking out," and then I clarify that I'm "open to better," with it unsaid that I don't know where that might come from or how (people don't like downers). These past 15-20 years are the years in people's lives where people get professionally established, but that's simply never happened with me and a number of others from my generation, so it's silly to think that that might somehow happen now, especially since the younger and more age-appropriate generations are rising up and scooping up any opportunities as they emerge. I mean, it might happen, but it's nothing you can count on or plan for, so you have to plan to live your life without opportunity And besides, what sense does it make to put in the time and energy and 50 hour weeks all over again to establish yourself now, when you're professionally dislocated and it's the wrong time of life and the wrong age of society for that, not to mention that it's not clear in so many places that the goal will still be there by the time that you might be arriving, if somehow you squeaked out all favorable circumstances? For years now, I've had people tell me varities of "something will come your way" and "when you get a chance, you'll rise quickly," but in the past year or two, I've finally started telling people, "I don't think that's true," and I say in so many words that I'm no longer factoring something like that into my expectations, and I observe, "Some generations lack opportunity," it being unsaid that this generation of mine turned out to be one. It really is like a lost generation, where the shifts were so many and so massive, that a good number of people's possible futures just got closed off and swallowed up whole. All that taken together, I tell people sometimes, "There's worse places to be than [the college town I live in] studying [the ancient language that I'm studying]," and to tell the truth, not a few agree with me. It's like this truth is developing, but no-one can quite say it yet.