Episode 7 : Weston

The narrator is currently in Kansas City, attending DeVry University and studying systems analysis and programming. They are in a relationship with someone who is newly separated and has three young kids. They have two main groups of friends, one living in a party house and the other in nearby apartments. After a year, their housing arrangement changes and they move to a new place in Weston, Missouri. They continue working at Montgomery Ward's and attending school. They receive an invitation from a friend in Alaska to come and work there. Eventually, they decide to take up the offer and make plans to move to Alaska. All right, welcome back for Episode 7 of the AlaskaDub Chronicles. We currently find our hero in Kansas City, attending DeVry University, studying systems analysis, programming with a lot of business and accounting thrown in there. Let's see. I'm partying a lot with very smart students, other students. Most of them not older, but further along in school. And I'm in a relationship with a newly separated, to be divorced... I guess I didn't mention this in the first one. She had three young kids, too, so that's sort of an interesting complication, which we'll get to. Let's see. I have to think about my friends at that time. I mentioned one young coworker who had a fiancé. He lived with his fiancé pretty much across the street from my duplex in Grandview, not far from the Blue River Parkway. When I wasn't studying hard or at home just relaxing, there was a very fun house about three or four houses down on my same block. This ended up being one of my two main groups of friends. It was like four guys living in this trashed out, just total party house. Just a lot of loud rock and roll parties. I think hallucinogenics were pretty popular in that crowd. And then the other group of friends, just a couple of roommates, both, again, very smart, smart, funny people, just weird, quirky dudes. And they lived in some apartments close by. For my first year, I had the housing arrangement I described before, renting one of four bedrooms in a duplex in a residential area, not far from DeVry Institute. I think after a year, everybody was sort of tired of each other. I think one of the ladies graduated, and so the house kind of dissolved. The other guy, as it would prove influentially, actually left Missouri to go commercial salmon fishing with his uncle in Alaska. So just kind of put a pin in that one for future reference. I was still working at Montgomery Ward's clearance outlet, and getting supplemented with student loans, which DeVry Institute very much encouraged. And we found out later, in sort of a skeevy move, here's all these impoverished students trying to improve their situation, very dependent on these student loan checks. And the checks would arrive to a DeVry account, and they would hold on to them long enough to collect some interest while we're eating ramen, and so they get to earn their extra percentages off that while we suffer. I didn't think it was very cool at the time, and I think they later got sued for that practice, which is good. I've got mixed feelings about my DeVry experience. I can't say I completely maximized it, nor did I graduate. So I didn't see as much benefit as I could have to sort of balance all the effort and some of the frustration. But I did learn good things. You know, here's probably the most important thing I learned from DeVry. It was, it may have been my very first class, but it was the first meeting of this particular class, and it was a, okay, let's all take turns standing up and introducing yourself. And maybe it's similar to whatever prompted me to start a YouTube channel or begin these podcasts, but I thought for a split second how it wasn't the actual speaking of or introducing myself. It was dreading waiting for when it would be my turn and not that whole dreading being selected. So I just popped right up, and I said my thing, and what was great, what I learned there is, one, everyone thinks you're brave. Maybe not, but you know what I mean. And two, they don't have anything to compare it to, so it's the best one they've heard so far. Anyhow, if there's something that has a dreadful, in a literal sense, quality to it, I encourage you to just pop up, do your thing, and then sit back and watch everybody else twist, because that part is actually, I know there's the German word for it, the schadenfreude, which I know I just... Anyhow, look that one up. But it's the shameful joy taking pleasure in someone else's suffering. I kind of felt the same thing later when I was a hiring manager, and just being the most polite, gracious, welcoming person at job interviews, and still seeing people sweat bullets and twist, and oh my God. Some sick part of me felt a little bit of glee, I don't know, I got tickled by it somehow. Anyhow, that's my big takeaway from Divide. And work hard, and even if it sucks, you should stick with it, because the suck will last a couple years, but the regret will last decades. So there's two. You can get a bonus takeaway. To get back on track, when that house dissolved, I had the means to have a little place of my own. Looking back, I don't know how it never got broken into, because it was ground floor, still sort of in that same neighborhood, had a big sliding patio door. I just remember, I don't know, it was just a quiet little place. I don't remember much. I wasn't there super long, until the mother of three and me ended up getting an apartment. So, I think it was probably double household there for a month or so. I don't know. Looking back and practical, sort of framing it, most likely she probably got a boost from her family to get out of their house. I'm sure the two ladies, her mother and grandmother, had established a routine and level of quiet comfort in their life that having three small kids and a stressed out daughter who's going through a lot. Just best for everybody. Everybody more happy, getting back on track with a new place. It ended up being, I actually did pick this up just a moment ago, in Weston, Missouri, which is really cool. It's right on the banks of the Missouri River, and they're by the Kansas-Missouri border at that place. Your typical apartment, three small kids, student trying to do his thing, mom trying to, what was she doing? I think she maybe was working for her mom, doing some artistic, something in the artistic, in her mother's artist business. Weston itself was pretty cool, I recommend checking it out. It had, I remember like an antebellum brick downtown historic district. I mean, quaint antique places and what have you, but if you like history, I'm sure there's a good amount of history. I remember there's a nice nature preserve and walkway along the river, and so that's always peaceful, and I'm sitting along the banks and just, that was a big river, big, wide. It's just a really engaging thing about the history that's gone up and down that river. It was pretty cool. I do remember the little girl, the daughter was the youngest of the three kids, and I remember we were all walking down that path, and she asked, she's like, can you hear them? I'm like, what, hear what? She's like, the trees, they're screaming, and this is like, I don't think she had heard the Seattle band screaming trees at that time, but that was kind of weird. I mean, I don't want to read too much into any of it. She did happen to look like the little girl from Poltergeist with the blonde hair and bangs, and was about that age too, maybe she was younger. It probably wouldn't have been as notable if she didn't have sort of a paranormal experience later too, which I'll relate. So, yeah, that was kind of what was going on. I was working at Montgomery, still working at Montgomery Wards, still going to school, still seeing this lady, still driving the Corps of Engineers green 66 Chevy Stepside, and I think we did that for, I did that for almost a year. So you'll have to forgive me for when I hit some pauses inadvertently, just with, I'm trying to think of really how things went, because I know what two steps down the line was, but I can't remember. Well, anyhow, we decided to take a break. I think maybe I had... We decided to take a break. I moved out. There was an interim place that I'm having trouble remembering where, but it came to pass that during this year that we were living together in Weston, my friend, the former roommate in Kansas City, who had left to go fishing in Alaska with his uncle, had sent me a packet of pictures. This is back when you printed pictures and sent them in little envelopes. It's your typical 20-something dude fishing on an Alaskan fishing boat, big 15-pound, beautiful, sparkly salmon in each arm. He was based out of Elfin Cove, which is very picturesque. It's like a boardwalk, a quaint little boardwalk hugging the water. Just pictures of the mountains, southeast Alaska, beautiful summer, glorious, lots of fish. And he's like, it's great up here. If you ever want to come, I got a place. I got a place you can stay, and I can probably set you up with a job. When that invitation and pictures first arrived, it was sort of like, oh, cool, noted. As a situation, from when my new home situation evolved to whatever, that offer became foremost in my thoughts. Eventually, it was like, why not? The situation I was in wasn't working out. It was untenable. I don't know if I was ever meant to be a parent, but I know I certainly wasn't meant to be a parent in my 20s to three young children who had an emotionally unstable mother and had been subjected to trauma by their father in their prior living situation. That's a lot for anyone at any stage of life to voluntarily commit to. I had made my plans. I had planned on taking a bus from Springfield. My plan was to pack up all my things from this interim, temporary place I was at. I had planned on taking a bus from Springfield. My plan was to pack up all my things and take them down to my parents' place, throw a thing or two in the, call it the chicken coop, but it was just a little storage shed, and leave my truck, and then I was going to take a bus up from, bus across from Springfield to catch the ferry in Washington in Bellingham, Washington, just north of Seattle. So this must have been obviously before I took that final step of going down to Springfield with my junk, and so I say my goodbyes, and at the party house that was down the street from my original place, I was, I told him, yeah, well, you know, it's been fun, but at the end of the semester, I'm going to go join our buddy up there in Alaska. He said he's got a place for me to stay, and he can probably get me a job pretty easily, and, you know, I'm just going to go for it, and, you know, everyone's like, either thought I was so cool or thought I was so foolish or was envious or thought I was dumb, but I have one friend. He had just graduated. He would be graduating. This was, like I said, probably a few weeks prior to the end of the semester. He would be graduating. He wasn't happy with the job prospects that he had. He was sick of the job he did have. I remember he worked in a radio shack in a small strip mall, and he'd seen people shot in his parking lot more than once. At that time, Kansas City was just overrun with, you know, crack was starting to come out, and there was, like, 50 distinct gangs, active gangs at that time. I do remember that figure. You know, so he basically said, socket man, can I come too? And so what happened is my solo bus trip turned into a duo road trip, you know, which had so many elements of your classic buddy comedy, probably the most evident being he was also, like, a 6'3". I think he was 6'2", more of a string bean. And I followed through with my part of the plan of throwing my stuff in storage, leaving my truck at my folks, and he followed me down down to my parents' place outside of Springfield in Pleasant Hope. And, you know, spent the night, said our goodbyes, packed up and split. It looked like we were packing to a clown car because this was a Honda CRX with everything two dudes are taking to Alaska to live, and plus we're both over 6 feet. I don't know if you look up 1990 Honda CRX, I read, oh my God, I don't, it must have been hilarious. So from there we went to his, to say goodbyes to his parents. They were in Kansas someplace. I was really surprised because it was around some lake and it was so scenic, beautiful lake, and his dad had the most interesting job as a piano tuner slash repairer. I know there's some classy professional name for it, and the dude was super cool, but yeah, his workshop just was all full of pianos and people replacing hammers and, you know, a tuner and all this. It was pretty cool. My friend was a pretty good musician. He played, he likes guitar, and yeah, he kind of, he attributed some of his musicality from his dad. I'm sorry, I got a little distracted. I had just seen someone who completely disputed the theory of inherited musicality, but again, I digress. So yeah, there we were in Kansas saying our goodbyes and getting ready to head west, to head west, hit the coast, and then head north. So with that in mind, I think I'm going to take a pause and when we resume, we are actually on the road to Alaska. Until then, be good folks.