"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

Trends: Positive

Positive things:

  • Back up on the bike! It's hard to underestimate the value of getting natural endorphins in the mix, and circulating the lymphatic system.
  • After a weekend of feeling sort of like a shut-in, having much better social times at work and at home.
  • I (heart) the world cup. It's better than the Olympics, I think.
  • Pandora radio on my Android as I walk and cruise. The two "stations" I am rocking now are Mark Ronson and Wolfmother. I particularly like thinking about the physics of listening to that as I ride said bike.

I know I'm in a better mood because I see beautiful people around again rather than inhabit a dark grey ugly zombieland, and I'm tolerant of failure and setbacks. It's a better way to be – more effective, not to mention more pleasant — and I'm hoping I can sail through the storm like this.

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Refreshing The Old Design In A Bid To Break Bloggers Block

So, in addition to tuning a few things up under the hood and getting my blog posts going back to ye olde Facebook, I decided to bust out some Variation on the Theme in light of the solstice.

I've been noodling on a real redesign with one of my mother's students for a while now, but it's not the sort of thing I've had a ton of time to invest serious energy into, and ergo things have kind of stalled.

But I want to write more, and have been sort of hating on my old rust-colored sexyface theme. Maybe this is part of what's blocking, I think, and I went ahead and cropped myself out a new photo, generated a little background to match, and set some new colors. New coat of paint on this lonely old town; inspiration, I'm ready for ya!

The bigger changes I want to make are about content organization and whatnot, but I think the sad fact is that until I start generating said content, energy invested in organization would be questionably allocated. There's always more time for fancy-pants layouts and whatnot. The more pressing question is what, pray tell, would fill the boxes, and how might it get written?

Scouring The Sources Of My Windless Sails

After yesterday's post, which looked at how my working life was sucking my will to live, I started thinking a bit bigger. Work is top of mind at the moment, so that's the first thing to come out, but getting that out of the way made room for deeper/better reflection.

The existential crisis is of course about more than just my jibity job; it's about who I am as a person, and the world around me.

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Net Worthless

Existential crisis of meaning. Four years in Chapter Three. Leaving Westhaven. A new life is coming, but what sort? Well dude, we just don't know.

So here's this table from a slide from a presentation my business partner sent me as part of our ongoing project to raise the level of our entrepreneurial game. It's about people's motivations for starting businesses:

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Who Said It?

How does this sound?

“The state should not tear down the apples from the tree of economics. What the government should do is help grow our apple orchard, develop our economic environment.”

That's Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, aka shift manager for Boss Putin.

The question I have is why does the President of Russia (in translation, even) seem to have a better grasp of post-free-market-fetish economic rhetoric than our own progressives? I mean, it'll be really unfortunate if the Left in the US doesn't come to articulate a competent vision alternative vision to the current "world order." Though maybe not all that surprising.

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I'm A Bad Blogger

Apologies again for absenteeism. I've been on the run and under the gun. Catching bits of the world cup and feeling nostalgic for what was, after all, four years hence.

A new day will come.

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¡Teatro!

Hey New Yorkers, get your shit together and go see my hombre Andrew Dinwiddie and his resurrection of Jimmy Swaggart. GET MAD AT SIN!:

In meticulously recreating one of Mr. Swaggart’s early 1970s culture-war sermons (from a vinyl record) in “Get Mad at Sin!” Andrew Dinwiddie reintroduces us to a gifted orator, compelling performer and thunderous moralizer in his prime. It’s a surprisingly generous act of resuscitation.

Strutting back and forth on a pink carpet, kicking up his legs and swooning at his own rhetoric, Mr. Dinwiddie as Mr. Swaggart breaks into a sweat but never loses his cool. He tosses in theatrical pauses and even some slang to attack the evils of homosexuality, premarital sex and acid rock. Mr. Dinwiddie’s powerful voice contains the echo of the great Baptist preachers as well as a breathy rumble that approaches the erotic.

But this is no Reverend Billy-like satire featuring winks at the hipster crowd or political cheap shots. The director, Jeff Larson, lets this fascinating historical document, which diagnoses a culture lurching toward oblivion, speak for itself, absent biography, context or comment. It’s an interesting strategy and emphasizes the stemwinder as a work of theater.

I'll spare you the lengthy cultural diatribe, but I'm fucking pissed that I'll miss this by a week. It's exciting to see my erstwhile creative peers begin coming into their own, and I really like the sound of this work. First of all because Andrew could conjour humidity on stage like nobody's business, and I have no doubt this performance is something of a tour-de-force; but moreover because of how it's constructed.

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Political and Funny

I got handed a voter guide from The League at the 24th and Mission Bart today. Gave me a warm and fuzzy. Love this stuff:

How crazy is San Francisco politics? We're endorsing Gavin Newsom, a guy who blocked us on twitter! We disagree with Gavin a lot. He talks a good game at being progressive, but most of the time he's on the "big money" side of crucial local issues: selling out Bayview/Hunters Point to Lennar, siding with PG&E against public power, etc. His policy of reporting immigrant youth to ICE before they've been convicted of any crimes is horrible. But when you take him out of SF and compare him to the usual hacks who run for office statewide, Gav looks pretty good. He supports reforming Prop 13 and is semi-serious about addressing climate change. His opponent in the primary is Janice Hahn. Her politics seem pretty good, but we don't think she's ready for prime time. She's gotten by on her family name and just doesn't have the experience.

Pssst! Here's a poorly kept secret: the main reason we want Gavin to become Lt. Governor is because if he wins, the Board of Supervisors gets to pick his replacement, and we're hoping that would mean that we'd finally get a Mayor we could be excited about! Some of us are afraid this could backfire on us: Gavin goes on to become Governor or Senator and uses his clout to support candidates and policies that we don't like. Hmm. It's a tough call.

And then there's the comedy. Here's a real ad:

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It Seems I Have Been Walking For Years and Years and Years

Mood music from some kind of genius.

I'm coming unmoored from the patterns and places that have been holding me down (or stabilizing me) for the past four years. Like a piece of space-borne high tech equipment that becomes disconnected from the mothership, my relationship to my previous live becomes more and more a product of literal inertia. Gaps begin to emerge.

Nothing as yet is rushing to fill in the spaces. The new direction is unclear, less a product of intention and energy expended than drift. I am shifting geographies and societies, but this is a broad infrastructural initiative — like vowing to lose 10 pounds or to read the classics — and not an end in and of itself. Something that I'm doing the hopes of causing something else to happen.

I'm feeling increasingly strongly that this little fugue should resolve itself in another iteration of various life philosophies. Another turn of the wheel, at which point I'll be inspired and driven to start communicating The Word again.

Finally, apropops nothing, here's a nice little piece from William Gibson about how his novels have always been about "now", and have gradually made the transition in setting from being 300 years in the future (when he was writing in the '80s) to being set in about a year ago (as he writes now).

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Even Flow

I've been on a new kick this week, trying to set small and achievable goals for myself both in terms of taking on the often overwhelming sea of responsibilities with which I contend, and in improving the general quality of my life. So far I have a few things working:

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In Which I Enumerate What I've Been Doing Instead Of Blogging

So, what's been going on? Clearly I'm not doing a great job of expressing myself in the written word, and aside from what you might intuit from Twitter there's been precious little to go on in terms of my life and times. If it's any consolation, I've been similarly vague and opaque in real life too; when conversation turns to me and myself these days I've been full of noncommittal generalities.

The truth is, a lot is happening, so much and so constantly that I'm not really keeping up with the processing. The spiritual backlog is growing, technical debt to the soul.

One big thing that's been happening is that I met a woman. When I've revealed that to my friends of late I say it with italics — "I met a woman" — and with a kind of level eye-look that tells them I'm serious. She's out in New York City, a Lawyer by trade, double Ivy, South Asian, whipsmart and gorgeous (natch) and loves to dance. Her name is Rina and she's inspired some quality prose and two weekend visits back East this spring thus far.

It's geographically improbable, but I'm uncharacteristically sanguine. We have passed beyond initial worries that spending 72 hours together might become unbearable — that we won't actually like one another upon close examination — and into the subsequent worry that oh hey we actually do, and so now what.

Did I mention she's moving to London? Oh, yeah, she's moving to London, but again I'm uncharacteristically optimistic. However, it is beginning to dawn on me that this may actually be kind of unpleasant. Time will tell. I play the long game.

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