Warning; the following is a long wall of words that I have to get out of my head if I expect to sleep tonight.
***********

Tonight I came outside to try to find a constellation I recognized.

I couldn't. There weren't enough stars in the sky.

I grew up in Washington, and even though I grew up in a small city it was never impossible to find darkness if I wanted to. I used to climb up on my parents' roof when I was stressed or lonely or frustrated or insomniatic, lie out on my back, and watch the stars. The Milky Way seemed endless. Nothing ever put the world in the same kind of perspective as a one hundred eighty degree view of the sky, and while the only two constellations I've ever been able to find reliably are Orion and the Big Dipper, I could always find them. Not being able to find them feels a little bit like being abandoned.

A lot of things bothered me the idea of living in California when my husband told me that this is where the job was. They bother me still, but not nearly so much as the things I didn't think of; the noise, and the light. In rural California I have no doubt that it's very different, but here it's never dark, and it's never quiet.

Ever.

I didn't discover Peak Oil or all the related issues it led me to till we'd moved to California. Fortunately, a year and a half ago we had the opportunity to move into a house. Part of the reason that I stopped posting was because I managed to secure permission to rip out some flowers and some useless ornamentation and turn the front flowerbed into a vegetable bed. I got permission to plant pumpkin vines in the middle of the landscaping out front. I got a clothesline. I got a compost bin. And after three and a half years of California I finally made peace with living here. I got a chance to learn my neighbor's names, and I got a chance to get to know them. I got to know the dog walkers and the lady with a native-plants-meadow as her front yard. I gave Christmas cookies to my next door neighbor. When I went on vacation I could know my neighbor was keeping an eye on my house so our door didn't get kicked in again and the rest of my wedding jewelry wouldn't vanish with the next junkie to rob us (we've been robbed every year since moving to Cali, I'm still waiting for number four, the year is not over yet).

Best of all, in the back yard, the fence was high enough to block out the street lights for the most part and create a pool of decent darkness in the back yard, dark enough for the full moon to cast honest shadows. For the first time in nearly three years I couldn't hear a freeway when I stepped outside. I could still hear traffic, but it wasn't the ever present drone of living in a human beehive. The wildlife was louder - we were close enough to a ranch I could hear cattle lowing on quiet nights. A deer scared the shit out of me by wandering into the front yard while I was outside smoking late at night and promptly running noisily off. The raccoons, the birds, the squirrels, the hummingbirds, dragonflies, honeybees...

I stopped posting because I started doing. Taking over my husband's office closet and starting long term food storage. Purchasing my first shotgun. Learning to garden. Learning to knit. Preparing to learn how to can so I could keep the harvest off of the cherry tree.

In June my landlord decided that he wanted his house back.

I suppose it was inevitable. If you make a triangle out of three of the worst cities in the country for the foreclosure crisis (San Jose, Sacramento, Stockton), we were right about in the center. The foreclosure waves have been wiping people out all over the place, and I guess that one of them was our landlord. We weren't being foreclosed out, but it looks like he's going to be living in the house we just vacated. My guess is his residence got foreclosed on.

I damned near cried when I had to rip out my vegetable garden to put in ornamentals.

Rental housing is tight, extremely tight around here right now. We lost out on three houses because I just wasn't fast enough - haunting rental sites eight hours a day and I still wasn't fast enough. There was a house with raised vegetable beds in the back not six blocks from where we were living. We lost it by twenty minutes. The lady seemed genuinely sad that we hadn't gotten there first. I hope that the single guy who moved in there does something with those beds.

I'd hoped to stay in the town but we lost that too. We ended up having to take an apartment the next town over. At least I got to give my neighbor the pots I wasn't going to have a use for anymore.

So now we're in an apartment. There's room on the back porch for a container garden, though half the plants in my containers died when I moved due to a combination of inexperience and lack of time. I tried to transplant one of the pumpkin vines to an enormous pot but it failed - I mostly expected it to. The pot was a moving casualty. I've been informed that clotheslines on the back porch are forbidden since they're "ghetto", and that if we want to block out some of the huge (for an apartment) west-facing windows that pour so much heat into it we have to follow very specific rules to avoid looking "ghetto". Even if I could rig up a compost bin setup on the back porch, it would be stinky and "ghetto". Air conditioning is necessary if I don't want the second floor apartment to end up at Texas temperatures. I was genuinely angry when I figured out that I couldn't get around having to throw all of my food waste and compostables in the garbage again. I ended up sending all of the gardening tools I'd purchased and my compost bin north with my mother - at least someone will be getting use out of them.

The number of lights out here is ridiculous. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. I cast a shadow at three in the morning no matter where in the complex I go. I can hear the freeway every time I step outside of my apartment. I feel like I'm going insane. I've been a night owl since I was eight and there's no actual night here - I'm trying to put my body on a day schedule (which has never worked) so that I don't spend my nights wishing I could just see the stars.

Trying to check out of Cornucopia a little bit is ghetto. Not wanting cable is really really really weird. I am the only person in the entire complex with a porch garden - this makes me feel extremely conspicuous. I've gone from living in a neighborhood to living in an anthill - I'm hemmed in on all sides by apartments and a college and there's a mall half a mile from my residence. I have a feeling that if the apartment manager finds out about my shotgun things will get rather chilly. Not that this place is the slightest bit defensible anyway.

We moved in here on the 25th of July. I already want to be gone but there's nowhere to go. Trying to talk to my husband about this just makes him feel guilty, like he should have magically been able to persuade the landlord that he didn't need our house - his house - after all. I'm trying not to think about my aging, retired inlaws and my sister in law who is on permanent disability and reliant entirely on the government for her schizophrenia meds, without which she apparently cannot function. They're in Washington. We're here. Husband says he'll start jobhunting in the spring when he's within shouting distance of the five years of field time every employer in his field seems to want. We're very lucky that he's a blue collar worker in a job that really can't be outsourced and sometimes people are hiring for his job. Mentally I'm tacking on six months to a year - if we're lucky - of jobhunting to that before he's got employment that will let us move and thinking "Please some friendly god listening just give us that much time..." and watching the riots spread to Great Britain and the world economies totter like a top losing its spin and wondering if we have it.

The part of me that says I'm overreacting is at active war with the part of me that says no I'm not, I'm paying attention.

He says that if it gets bad enough we'll bug out, job or no job. I know my husband and I love him and I would rather be here in the human ant hill with him than safe with my parents without him, but in my heart I know that by the time he's ready to bail, it will be too late. I can't even convince him to stop increasing the contribution of his pay to his 401k. He's collapse aware, but I think a large part of him wishes he still had his head in the sand.

In a week and a half I will go visit my mother in rural Oregon. I will help her put up apples and blackberries and harvest grapes. I will revel in a night that's truly night and the glorious diamond spread of the Milky Way, and I will try to come up with a way to drive out the feeling that I'm an animal who's been driven into a box canyon. I will try to come up with a dash plan that gets us across the Siskiyous and the Columbia and a thousand miles up to his parents given how long I think it will take him to realize that things have gone very pear-shaped and it's time to GO. I will put away my deep offense at the dismissal of the clothesline and the compost bin as "ghetto." I will find a way to live with living here for the next at-least-a-year.

For tonight, with all of this typed out of my head, I will hit post before the part of me that insists that I'm being a spoiled whiny white girl wins and I delete all of this. Then I will go to bed and hope that this time I won't dream about dead people I've loved trying to warn me that you can't root an evergreen in sand.