The application on my new place in Hood River went through, so I am now the proud lease-holder of… well… a lease. I’m moving into the upstairs unit of a duplex that in the last two years was completely remodeled with new applicances, new carpet, picture windows, a deck, and a killer view of the Columbia Gorge and Mount Adams and the White Salmon River.
Of course now that everything is dead and done, I can start wringing my hands and fretting myself into a frenzy. You see, I haven’t actually seen this place yet, and while I’ve been getting an awesome vibe from my new/future landlords, I still worry what I have committed myself to, sight-unseen. No doubt they’re worrying about me just the same. I mean, even some grainy digital photographs would have been comforting, but since that wasn’t an option for these folk I was forced to fly completely blind.
In all honesty, beyond satellite photos from Google Maps I don’t even know if this house exists. I very well may have put a security deposit down on a house that’s infested with bats, or has carpet made out of bent staples, or is in the process of burning to the ground. In hindsight my actions seem uninformed and hasty, but I can’t really see that I had any other options. There were a number of other available properties that I called about, but I got really bad vibes on all of them.
I could have moved to Hood River before securing a place to live, I suppose, but then I would have found myself burning money like crazy, renting storage space and shacking up in hotels and losing all my work productivity. Through all of this, my entire business infrastructure (computers and monitors and other expensive technical gewgaws) would have been rotting in my car, waiting for someone to walk by and pinch it.
No. I had to make a decision, and I think it is better this way. I hope.
Maybe this is a good sign. Whenever I feel like I’ve made the biggest and dumbest mistake of my life (moving to Hood River for the first time, moving to Bend to be a ski bum, taking the job at Alpine, starting Brainside Out) things have a way of working out anyway. They don’t necessarily turn out the way I had hoped or expected or even anticipated, but they typically turn out in a manner that I find acceptable.
What matters most is not that I always make the right decision, but that I’m learning throughout the entire process. Failure, as much as we go through life trying to minimize it, is often the best and most efficient teacher available. I’d be a fool to stop taking these risks in an effort to avoid failure altogether, because at that point my intellectual and creative growth would stagnate. I can live with dumb decisions, but I can’t live without making decisions.
So yeah, at this point I say bring on the fucking bats.
