Ok so here's the first installment. It all starts a little slow as I got to meet people and is told in 3rd person. I thought about changing names but I might as well just let it fly. It gets funnier and crazier by the day

Mis-adventures at the Halfway House

A Creede Chronical

Once I decided to move I knew it would be a totally different experience. After quitting my job and going to New Zealand and ending a relationship I knew that new relationships would be very important. Creede, Colorado was to be my new home; I would be employed by some friends from college. I would be a shift manager at the long-standing miners bar in town. This after quitting my first “real” job fresh out of graduate school; financial analysis might have been a little to ambitious of an undertaking for a male in his mid 20’s. So I settled on managing a bar during the height of the tourist season. My restaurant experience amounts to having washed dishes at a banquet hall in Oklahoma City when I was 16. This would be a whole new ball-game. Not to say that I haven’t worked in the service industry before, I have been a bicycle mechanic more on than off in the last decade. Life is about cycles, and I was about to enter a new cycle in my life.

I knew that taking time off work as an American was as close to un-American in the post 9-11 landscape as could be. But the service industry is one of the few markets that has remained strong in America. Consumerism is king. So what better way to come back to America after traveling abroad and reintegrate myself to the US than by living in a tiny town of 500 which blossoms to about 10,000 during the peak of summer tourist season. Mind you I would be living in a place that is surrounded by the mountain ranges which separate the waters flowing east and west. This was going to be a totally new beginning and a summer I would likely never forget. I was girlfriendless for the first time in 6 years and on my own, I had saved a bit of money before traveling and would have to make a decision sometime about what I want to do next. But that could wait, for a summer that would prove one of the craziest of my life.

Halfway House

The house where I was to live in Creede was $175 a month and there lived 6 other service industry employees. I am no stranger to cheap accommodation after spending 2 months living with my ex-girlfriend in a camper van and numerous similar situations of living in 600 square feet or less in the past several years. My previous living experiences included massive flying roaches, filth, meth dealer neighbors, and numerous floods both sewage and otherwise. The frat house had to be the most disgusting, and so I knew I would be able to “handle it”. What I didn’t know was that I was to step into a new world. I would be living in the “Halfway House”. What I quickly learned is that at least half of my co-housemates were on probation and currently trying to steer clear of the law’s eye, while hiding out in one of the most notorious trailers in the town. Proof positive of this point was that one day before I was to move in a search warrant was served at the house; not for the current residents, but due to a previous resident who had hidden stolen property in the room directly next to the one in which I would live. This was going to be an adventure.