Downtown Seattle from Beacon Avenue. This is what you might call the “long way home”.

This was a self-portrait I took with my tripod above Interstate 5 between Pike and Pine Street, at the dog run.  I had been crying, and for some reason I thought I should capture that on film.

February: My favorite camera broke after I slipped on the ice outside my house, leaving most of the month uncaptured.  But once I sold my computer and bought a cheaper netbook, I found enough money for a new camera and managed to document my last few weeks of living in Seattle.

I always loved hiking up to this viewpoint — in the Mount Baker neighborhood, high above the tunnels that carried Interstate 90 to downtown.  This is facing Mercer Island and points eastward in late afternoon.

I loved the double meaning of this place.  I also loved that I was one of the few people who actually walked through my neighborhood on foot.  People used to talk about how ghetto Rainier Valley was, but I loved it.  I may have not liked living in Seattle, but I adored the city itself, who is defenseless and held captive by its largely annoying citizens.

March: A major transitional month, as I moved from Seattle on the 1st and visited San Francisco before moving back to Austin.  I met a very special old friend there and fell in love with San Francisco’s cheerfully painted depravity.

Goodbye Seattle.  At the time I would have laughed at the thought of missing the city, but somehow I do.

The people and the buildings of San Francisco are so inviting and too pretty, even if they remain largely unkempt.

April: Getting used to the reality of having to live in Austin.  I didn’t have a car yet so I managed to capture a fair amount of the city at street level.  I was still in denial about the terrible, terrible summer that would soon be coming.

It might be exciting to see all these new buildings sprouting up in Austin, but I only photographed them out of lack of anything else interesting in the city.

May: More of the same.  I was about to sink into a deep depression that coincided with the extremely hot weather that began in the middle of month (and lasted through September.)  I also lost my camera on a bus (these were from a borrowed camera).

June: I got a new car and a new camera, but the heat and the loneliness make it perhaps the most depressing month of my life.   (And that’s not exaggeration or hyperbole, it’s the truth.  I cried almost daily.)

July: another terrible month spent in hell (temperature-wise, employment-wise, and in a number of other ways).  I was beginning to wonder if my life was in a tailspin that I would never be able to overtake.  It was over 100 degrees most days.  I spent most of my time doing very irresponsible, harmful things.  But I also did a few harmless things, like drove around the hill country and photographed the dry nothingness.

August: Everything had come to a head.  The weather, my personal situation, the direction of my life.  I had to get out of town to think things through.

September: became suddenly unemployed, had to sell my camera that I had just bought.  But I moved in with my aunt and that lifted my spirits somewhat.  The drought was still terrible.

October: The drought subsided, I had a birthday and began to get desperate for money. My love for photography decreased dramatically, but only out of necessity and the austerity of the moment.

November: Started working part-time to make ends meet, applied for food stamps multiple times but received no response, gained probably 8 pounds. Went to Houston. (Woo!)

December: the first hint at financial solvency comes in the form of a phase I clinical trial. My passion for almost everything has been stunted, but I’m saving it for a place that I can really belong to instead of simply exist in. 2010 has to get better, it just has to. Because I can’t do another 2009, I just can’t.

Best wishes to you in the next decade.

I know, because I’m originally from Seattle!  Thank you, Hunter for finding this.

View The Main Line of Oklahoma in a larger map

Anyway, it was a lovely surprise and a nice buffer between the very flat Dallas and very flatter Oklahoma City.

Truth be told, I am more historically Oklahoman than I am Texan by far. And that right there is the essence of today’s Oklahoma City — it is more Texan than Texas. It is what Texas was, before the era of mass suburbia, mass immigration, corporate relocations, and office parks. OKC’s skyline had its adolescence in the pre-war period, and has been stuck a marvelous jello suspension since the 1970’s. It’s a delight to be able to walk around a central business district as if it were a museum exhibit, with nobody there to bother you, the buildings sequestered figuratively behind an imaginary velvet rope.

Oklahoma City is sadly one of the most conservative cities of its size in the United States, but my cousin Carrie showed me that there’s still a bit of a deviant, almost hipster like quality to some of its attractions — it certainly blows the pants off of Austin in terms of architecture, vernacular architecture at least. If you want a hundred year old house with dumbwaiter and quirky paint job, you can take your pick, and pick it up for a song.

I will hopefully be back in November for my cousin Carrie’s wedding. But for now, I have to head back down to Texas, where I live but not where I love to live. Before I go, I’ll pull down the roof on the convertible and enjoy the 89 degree dryness that slides though the gaps in the six-lane roads with impossibly wide rights of way. Just like Texas, it’s one of the few places that seems sad and gloomy when it’s sunny. I could go for a thunderstorm right about now, but in the absence of rain, a song about gloomy sundays will have to suffice. I’ll be sure to share all my photos when I get back.

• The Associates — Gloomy Sunday

I don’t know about you, but I need to get out of town; I am getting so tired of photographing the same things over and over!