Looks like it's moving time

And, back to an old position, at an old paper, but under new ownership.

Back to the town where I found this hat on the road.

The working out of the kinks on this has led me to some free association type thinking about previous cities I've lived in or at least visited regularly.

One-word/phrase word associations with various cities:

Flint — GM. Specifically, the town GM built and GM let die.

Bonham — Transitioning. Did it ever finish that? What’s the town like today? Why couldn’t things have been different when I was there? Before CNHI bought?

Honey Grove — silently dying. Like we all are. Sad.

Hobbs — Why? Why didn’t I see Mary Bearden’s manipulations better? Hah! Remembered her name. Why do other people advance and I don’t?

Jacksboro — Sorry. Sorry I screwed up with Roy. Sorry I didn’t look at good side. Sorry I didn’t do more with sports. Sorry it wasn’t 5 years later in terms of Internet. Sorry for all sorts of stuff. Town sorry too. Struggling. Oil not helping it. Only further east in county, with workers in Wise County.

Mineral Wells — Hypergritty. What will turn it around?

Lancaster — Bypassed. Bypassed by most white and much of the better black migration out of city of Dallas. Kicked? Failed city-state, with Chamber implosion?

Navasota — Depressing. Literally, for me, and thank doorknobs I got past that. Ugh. Sweaty. Missing its chances?

Cedar Hill — Boomtown-bust. The desert mall. Hypocrisy alert on Franke et al.

Odessa — Trying. Oil. Climate change looming as it gets hoist by its oil petard. Denialism.

This is from Dripping Springs, near
Marble Falls, where it eventually
was the perfect time to move.

Marble Falls — Gaslighting. That’s the way I felt with Schock. Really? That’s the way I felt with Roy’s wife. As Chuck said: “Marble Falls is not Fredericksburg, it never has been Fredericksburg and it never will be Fredricksburg.”

Marlin — Gritty. And, I guess, about to become home again.

Center — Clusterfuck. Brandi bought the Light and Champion out of nostalgia. Didn’t do due diligence with the presence and strength of the other folks and didn’t have a real plan. Clusterfucks on publishers, there and Mount Pleasant alike.

Sulphur Springs — Pretentious. In several different ways. More details later. Kind of like a bigger Marble Falls but with less reason.

==

I"m going to write more about these cities.

I lived in Flint two summers home from college in the mid-80s, half a year, again with dad while working in the late 80s, a couple of summers home during seminary time, then 18 months moved in after that.

"GM"? If you've seen Roger and Me, you get it. I saw a fair chunk. AC-Delco started there. Half its manufacturing now gone. Fisher Body of old GM cars, closed. GM Truck and Bus plant, closed. Other GM plants closed or cut back. That was before Rick Snyder's lead-laden pile-on. It's a shell of what it was 30 years ago, and pretty much a shell of 20 years ago, though changes were starting already then.

Bonham? My first newspaper job. I think my dad was right — I moved down with him, nothing keeping me in Michigan, to the nearby town of Honey Grove. To some degree, the town was living off old largess of Sam Rayburn, though Mr. Sam really wasn't that big a pork-barreler. It's gotten new life since I left, primarily being an exurb commuter town for the northeastern sprawl of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Neighboring Honey Grove, aka "the sweetest town in Texas"? Dying town, as I could tell in person recently. The 2010 Census declined almost one-third from 2000. Members of dad's church dying; saw one's grave at an old country cemetery.

These sentiments are still true, even though in my return, I found out the previous publisher, and still publisher of the next paper down the road, had been committing seemingly unethical and possibly illegal predatory sales actions on advertising customers, along with other issues. So, I'm back to pretentious Sulphur Springs, and still wanting the fuck out of a dying newspaper industry

The Donner Party, struggle and motivation

California was a land of lore and lure even before John Marshall found gold traces in 1848.

Farming, ranching, mild climate and vast unclaimed, untamed acres all called across the Sierras to Americans, even before the land had been wrested from Mexico.
Among those listening?

Jacob Breen and family. George Keseberg. And, the eponymous Donner family.

Unlike the Founding Fathers, these people had no fortunes to give. But they did give most of what money they had to make the trip. And, they certainly, in cases such as Jacob Breen, had honor, whether sacred or not, to pledge to their fellow travelers.
While on vacation recently, I visited some Donner Party sites. Though I had driven I-80 before through the area, I had never gotten off the freeway at the Donner State Party site. And, since I had come from the north, on a California state highway site, about 7-8 miles north of the interstate, I saw the Donner Meadows, where the Donners themselves wintered in 1846-47.

I asked myself, rhetorically, what would I be willing to do to get to California today? How much work would I be willing to expend? How much of my current “baggage” would I be willing to discard? What is my goal in getting to California — am I moving to something or just away from something?

I haven’t pondered those questions too much yet. Maybe I’m deliberately avoiding them a little bit. Maybe, like many other things in life, I want a surer goal before committing to them more.

That said, let me look at the Donners more. Yes, they knew about California the potential agricultural paradise. But, gold had not yet been discovered. They were simply looking for a better life, not to get rich.

Beyond that, how much am I willing to surrender of my old self for change today, in general? As I get older, do I get more attached to what I already have? Less willing to take risks?

How much is pain in my current life, combined with hope for the future, going to be a motivator?
And, by the time I had gotten back home, or soon afterward, I had at least one additional question for myself.

Is the desire to move to California a search for a “geographic cure” for issues that need help in other ways?

All good questions. To some of them, I don’t yet consciously know the answers, though I may have partial answers in my subconscious. Others I can answer more fully right now.

As for a geographic cure? No. I’ve been interested in moving to California for years.
As for pain as a motivator? It may continue to grow, and maybe I need that.

And, “surrender,” or another term? How much am I willing to let go of old attachments, such as what job or career path I should or should not follow, how much anxiety I can tolerate in daily life and more? At least at the conscious level, I don’t have answers here, though I suspect that I have more letting go to do — letting go of preconceptions about myself, letting go of attachments to old emotional patters, and things like that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_party