If you haven't read Phil Pullman's magnificent His Dark Materials series, go get to it.
These are some of the finest books I've ever, ever read. And this is me talking. I read, oh, a lot.

My sisters took the same quiz - Sarah's a greyhound, and Kaci's a fox. Kaci's beau Chris is a chimpanzee.
Clay's a lynx. Marci's an ermine.

So. What're you?

Today I set my alarm to wake me at eight, just so I could turn it off and go back to sleep. 'Tis Tuesday, and that means sleeping-in-day.

Mid-week work is easy on the James. Today I go into the college at 2:00, for an office staff meeting covering emergency protocols. Specifically, what to do in case of fire alarm, windstorm, power outage, or earthquake. In Michigan that last one would read "thunderstorm" but lightning doesn't happen in the Willamette Valley. Well, they had one thunderstorm here five years ago - folks are still talking about it. By all accounts, it was a lame-ass storm, the sort that back home I'd not even bother going out to the porch to watch. Ah, well. Earthquakes, now. That's new. Mary's Peak, the largest mountain in the Cascade range, is just northwest of Corvallis. I can see it from most of town. It's technically an active volcano. Mt. St. Helens is about seventy miles away, and it's bulging. I used to make fun of the halfwits who chose to live on the ring of fire (cue johnny cash soundtrack), and now I'm one of them.

Anyway, meeting goes until four, then I'm on my own until 5:30. Then I've got to be at the high school to put up Linn-Benton Community College signage, set up our pamphlet table, unlock and prep the classrooms, and purge the area of loitering teenage scum. There's a girl's volleyball game tonight, so a lot of the teenage scum won't be loiterers, but will actually have a reason to be there. Then I read for two hours. Then I go around collecting my signage, and put away my table and propaganda. While I'm at it, I peek into the classrooms and make sure the class actually showed up. Sometimes the teacher is sick, or they're meeting elsewhere - the Wilderness Survival class in particular shows a certain disdain for classrooms. Go figure. Anyway, we don't have to pay the high school for classrooms we're not using, so that's important. Then I read for another half-hour. By then it's almost nine o'clock, so classes are leaving. Starting with the outlying buildings, I sweep through making sure they're all gone, and lock up the joint. If the rooms are left messsed up, we catch hell for it, so I tidy up some. I have to swing by the college again to drop off the laptop and projector kit the Driver's Ed instructor borrows. Then I'm done for the night. Ten dollars an hour to babysit a school. Too bad it's only two nights a week.

Tonight is a Driver's Ed night. They are a bane unto me. They are noisy, messy, disogranized, and a right pain in the ass to coordinate. But the instructor's this bubbly blond, about my age - which makes bubble retention somewhat impressive. Most carbonated girls have gone flat by the time they hit thirty.

I'm broke, too. Seriously, seriously broke. There's empty cans I could return - 5 cent deposit which I know isn't bad - but seems sad compared to the 10 cents I'm used to. Thursday is a Conifer House payday, though, so there's three hundred, out of which I have about a hundred due to Comcast, and that's it. Four days after, is an LBCC payday, which should be around five hundred, out of which three hundred goes to rent. Finally, a decent block of income. The college pays only once a month, and so I'm just now raking in the money from the start of the Fall term. It's a good job, though it takes forever to see the money come in. Next term I get six credits of free classes- and I'm taking them. Damn right. Plan is to start in on the Administrative Professional two-year program. That's what I'm doing at the Registration desk anyway, and if I get some certification along those lines, then I'd be eligible for more hours - which means I could stop going to cook dinners at Conifer House and finally be out of foodservice! Better yet, after a year or two of Registration work at LBCC - and I've already got a goodly chunk of that at four months - I'm eligible to apply at Oregon State. Go Beavers. Seriously, they start their office staff at two thousand a month. Four times what I'm making now, and twice what I'm making if Conifer House pay is factored in. Similar benefits, i.e. free college, plus other bennies too numerous to list here. I'm going for it. Easy, non-food work in an air-conditioned office, with a parade of pretty coeds, a lack of latex gloves and I get to dress nice for a change. I clean up pretty good in a jacket, and Oregon seems to be an almost universally anti-necktie state. Oh, and when I get out of work, I'd still look nice - not all covered in flour and grease, smelling of onions and fish. I'd have all my evenings free, weekends off, and no working on holidays. Heck, once I'm not low on the totem pole, I could even take my summers off. And at that pay grade, I could (gasp) afford to do it! Heck, going to GenCon in Indy would be easily affordable! Why, I could take classes in the summers, and work the rest of the year. I could just collect degree after degree for the sheer joy of learning new things.

Like I said, Eden, man. I have reached the promised land, and found it smells of patchouli and rains a lot in the winter.

Okay, that's enough for today. I've covered my plans for the day and for my future career.

Oh, and how did I luck into this job? Not having any office experience or training, or even an in-state reference? I modeled for a couple art classes early in the summer term. I needed money, bad. I did the portaiture class, and the office staff (all women) warmed to me, and then I did the nude study class. Both professors went on at some length about how congenial and professional I was, and the office staff found me charming and handsome - or so I was told. When the positions at the high school and the registration desk became available, I didn't even have to interview. Two of the admin staff called on the same day, offering me steady work. And, unbeknownst to them but very much knownst to me, an open door to a better life.

Next time: James and the dreaded Pon Farr.

So I was really early for my meeting at the college today - about an hour. Must learn to read my own handwriting. Being ever-ready for such events, I had a book in the car with me. So, I found a good parking spot adjacent to the school and a park, with a pleasant view of sun-dappled fall trees aflame with reds and oranges, the mountains in the misty background, and a baseball diamond on the far side of the park. I settled myself in to read and enjoy the warm fall breeze.
After some time I looked up, and saw a boy wandering around in the park. He was quite young, maybe nineteen, but I'd guess two years younger. He was dressed in loose white slacks, with a navy blue blazer and a straight black necktie worn in a loose, dangly knot. He was pale, but I'd guess he had some arab or greek ancestry, as his hair was a mass of curly black ringlets worn long over the forehead and trimmed short on the sides. He had both hands shoved deep in his pants pockets and was wandering aimlessly, staring off into space. He looked right at me for a little while, but he wasn't seeing me, or the cars in the parking lot, or the girl with the yappy little terrier on the sidewalk.
He looked so goddamn sad. It struck me that this kid would look perfectly at home in 1988, and I turned the radio to a station that plays music from twenty years back. A Sir Elton John from back in the days before he'd been knighted started singing to me what I can't help but hear as "hold me closer, Tony Danza." The boy stood about a hundred yards off into the park, in a sunny patch of impossibly green grass under an impossibly blue October sky, looking up at the sky, his profile to me. I swear I saw a tear on his smooth cheek. I wondered what on Earth could make a handsome young man like that, in such a beautiful setting, seem so hollowed out. Like his very soul had been gouged out with a rusty ice-cream scoop. He seemed to have enough sorrow in him for a man of eighty years, or more.
Boy George was asking if I really wanted to hurt him now, and I wondered if the disc jockey had the same view I did. It worked with the scene almost too well, like I was watching an old John Cusack movie. The boy was strolling toward the baseball diamond, moving each foot with the finality of a man leaving home with no hope of ever coming back. He held his head high, but seemed to be carrying, no dragging a weight too great to measure.
A bluejay flew by, chirping madly, and knocked a yellow and gold spray of leaves off one of the nearby trees, which the warm breeze pushed across the scene like an artist who wanted to keep painting, but was afraid of ruining an already perfect picture. The boy spent some time in the outfield, moving from right field to left as though if he were to stop he would just lie down and die, but since he had no place left to go he was giving the idea some thought.
The Bangles started singing that the leaves were brown, and the sky was a hazy shade of Winter, proving that the disc jockey was looking out his window at a very different scene indeed. The boy, meanwhile, was facing away from me, toward the infield. I imagined a look of longing on his face, as if he wanted to go there, but knew he belonged where he was. Outfield, away from the game, alone in the green. Ignored by the fans, resented by his teammates. Nah, I thought. Sports metaphors weren't cutting it. Besides, the boy was leaving the ball diamond now, was taking off his jacket. The shirt underneath was a white button-up job with an oversize collar, and no sleeves. His arms were thin, and I realized how the jacket had hidden how very gaunt he was.
Maybe this was a ghost. Haunting the park in dazzling broad daylight, this was a shade from the eighties, forced to remember some great sin, some awful deed that he either did, or had done to him. Year after year he would walk this park, growing more and more emaciated. Consumed from within by despair and sorrow, until the burden of grief became too great, and he could bring himself to walk no more. His spirit would never know rest, would only one day abandon the quest for answers. He would lie uneasy in his grave, too wasted away by his endless torment to wander, and too miserable to care.
The boy lay down in the shade of a century-old oak, and made a crude pillow out of his jacket.
Huey Lewis began crooning about how he wanted a new drug, and I turned the radio off. It simply wasn't cooperating anymore.
I went back to my book, but couldn't shake the image of the sad anachronistic boy in the park. I looked up, and he was gone.

That would actually have been pretty cool, and a great way to end a story, but ten minutes later when I was going in to the meeting, I saw the kid coming out of the men's room. October ghost stories rarely incorporate a potty break.