Probably 1990 to 1995. I was living in a board & care home but I was only unemployed for a month while I stayed there. I worked at Sears, mainly unloading trucks, driving a forklift and putting merchandise in customers cars. We had an eight man crew of mostly teens and guys in their twenties but I was like one of the top two workers and I was in my mid thirties. I did everything at breakneck speed.
I was also attending community college two days a week. I caught the bus for an hour and a half to get to work and then an hour and a half back. School was a 40 minute bus ride. After school I had a favorite restaurant I would stop and eat at right across the street.
On my way back from work I used to stop downtown at Woolworths and eat at their lunch counter.
If I didn’t stop at Woolworths, there was a Chinese restaurant a little closer to home that I often ate at.
I had just gotten clean and sober when I moved into the group home and I was walking or catching the bus to 5 or 6 AA, CA or NA meetings a week. My mom happened to live near Sears and a lot of times after a hard day at work I would walk over to her and my step dads house and do a couple hours of yard work and then stay for dinner. My step dad would give me a ride home or I would catch a bus home.
I caught the bus a lot back then. I lived in a large city and traffic was terrible and when I caught buses there was usually standing room only.
I usually rode the bus every day. Sometimes three times a day.
I made one friend at the board & care home and he started coming to meetings with me. We would go to AA functions like dances or picnics or holiday meals.
I usually had weekends off and me and my friend would catch the bus to the movie theaters or Tower records and other places. If I don’t hang out with him on weekends I would catch the bus to my sister’s and her husband’s house. They found a bar/restaurant that had a sand volleyball court in the back and for quite awhile we would go there with my sisters and her husband’s friends and play volleyball for a couple hours with whatever strangers at the bar wanted to play with us.
Those were my productive years. I just did so much crap. I went to several concerts while at the home. I saw Pink Floyd once and U2 and Aerosmithand a couple others. Bruce Springsteen. Bob Dylan.
My brother in law at the time was running a startup company and this was during the 1990’s technology boom when there were millionaire’s being made every week. He hired me to work at his business and paid me under the table. But that’s how much he liked my work.
Me and my friend used to go places. The library was a 15 minute walk away and we would go and check out tape cassettes. And I went to my therapist weekly, they were about a 15 minute walk away too. The city was predominantly Hispanic and we used to walk to the Mexican restaurant at the end of our street and get Horchata drinks or sometmes a burrito. They treated us funny there, we never knew where we stood with the workers there. They seemed kind of friendly but tended to come across as a little hostile since we were usually the only white people there.
I did all kinds of miscellaneous stuff.
Went and saw a talk by Smokey Robinson. We went there expecting a concert at this church but all he did was talk for an hour about his religion. Me and my friend went to a prayer meeting at this woman’s house that I worked with. It was a bizarrely funny experience but I won’t tell the
story.
IDK. I just really got around a lot back then. I was healthy and in good shape and just really active.
Probably never be that productive again.