10/13- Eugene, Oregon

Waking on my hill it was overcast above and starting to drizzle some. It would prove to be a grey day throughout, but I still sat up and cooked myself some oatmeal before packing up and heading down to explore the town. I text Penney as well to let her know I was in town so that she could let me know where to meet up later in the day.

I wandered down toward the library first off. Along the way I attracted a busker kid who wanted to get some money out of me to afford a sixth string to his guitar. When I told him I was broke too he simply joined me on my walk into town going on about his ideas of the universe. I'm not sure if he was high or not, but it seemed pretty clear he would be soon if he wasn't already. I didn't get the impression that he had too many minutes with sobriety. Then again, I'm sure people think the same of me often, so who knows, but his tale of sitting down with the Universe Elephant admiring the flowers was an interesting one to listen to. It was akin to how I read a lot of religious dogma, between the lines he seemed to have a lot of good things to say but the surrounding "flare" made the whole thing sound completely disregardable.

Once at the library my busker and I parted ways and I sat for my turn at the lone 15 minute internet terminal. It was the first library I'd been to where they actually charge for internet use, save for this one 15 minute use computer. I was a bit offended until I discovered it wasn't a public library. In fact, there was no public library in Eugene. Turning the town library private was the town's way of saving it from state budget cuts. Everywhere else libraries are suddenly open only Tuesday's and Thursdays from noon to 4pm, or something along those lines, Eugene's is open 8am to 8pm 7 days a week. Three dollars for two hours, one per day, over two days suddenly didn't seem so bad, but given my schedule the 15 minute one was well worth the half an hour wait. After my 15 minutes of fame were up I spent an hour reading/translating the first page of my new Spanish book, A Orillo Rio Piedra Siento y Llamo.

From there I just ambled around town. The sky continued to be grey and leak water off and on through out. Penney text me back sometime in the afternoon agreeing to meet up after work, so I made my way to her neighborhood and found a coffee shop to drop into. She was only about two hours behind me which gave me plenty of time to eat, drink some Joe, and do a bit of reading and writing.

Once she arrived, however, it was really great to see her and my energy picked right up. I had been in mosey mode all day and suddenly found myself in an energetic social mode. Her house was around the corner and I got the gossip on all the landlord drama she and her housemates were going through. It was interesting to hear about from my perspective. As she told me her story about driving out from Denver, meeting all these people in Eugene, a great job landing in her lap, and the house situation working out perfectly all of this flow of good fortune finally slammed down with the return of a self involved landlord. I couldn't help but find myself reading the whole scenario as a test, much like the ones I see myself in from time to time.

I met the orchestrator of the house, Crystal, and later on another housemate as well. All of them seemed very big on energy, signs, that sort of thing so it wasn't a foreign thing for me to start speaking in those terms as well when they were asking my thoughts on the whole ordeal. The landlord is apparently a notorious slumlord. He has been in and out of court with many of his tenants and has a reputation as being impossible to deal with. He also seems to come out on top with these cases from what seems like a case of having more resources to fund his way through it and the stubbornness to not back down. Apparently he is not well liked in the community.

I'll spare you the details of the case, but what I saw, at least from Penney's point of view, was a series of events that all pointed toward her living there in Eugene with these people and this shady landlord as their one obstacle to overcome. Having met Crystal and hearing a bit of her story, it seemed to fit as well that she had a good series of great fortune that was only interrupted by this landlord trouble. To me it seemed like challenging this landlord as a united house with a case that sounded 90% solid, since some of the questioning agreements were verbally arranged, felt like their test with a built in reward. All of the housemates were after solid community and it seemed like this challenge would address each of their issues in one way or another and they all seemed to be pointed in the direction of facing it together. Even the third housemate had plans to work down in Northern California but those plans were suddenly cancelled and she found herself back at the house ready to fight.

Who knows? It could be the road is having an affect on warping my thinking, but perhaps the more important thing to note out of this is that my perspective on how the world works seems to have irrevocably changed whether accurately or not. Penney and I retired to her little carriage house in the back afterward and chatted some more about these things while I picked through the bag I'd packed back in Denver and given them to carry in the truck. I got out my winter coat, gloves, long johns, and metal water bottle for my agave then we called it a night.