A blog post about the feeling of wanting, or rather of wanting wanting.

I remember a night cold as this, twelve odd years ago (jesus, twelve!) one of the first times I ventured into Brooklyn as a young student; a classmate who lived out there at a young and early age, no dorms for her, was throwing a house party and everyone from our section was going, including the girl I had an enormous and unspeakable crush on. I remember a lot of talk, and some minor dancing, and seeing her mostly across the room but feeling so damn much.

It's strange. In some ways I remember most sharply these feelings which sprang from fantastical unfulfilled crush-dreams. Times I was in love — which is a reciprocal situation, something of considerably greater depth and complexity — I know about feeling-wise mainly because I wrote about it in one place or another. Of course I remember all the facts, but only bits and pieces of the real emotions: saying goodbye the very first time, at a subway gate; bawling my eyes out on a hardwood floor; romantic petty theft; brief but indelible bedroom moments... still, by in large these quantities of time and whatever ticked by inside me have submerged below accessible consciousness. Amnesia of the heart.

And on a night like this, pedaling a borrowed bike through the city of my birth, a cold foggy Saturday night years beyond years beyond any of these times I remember, remembering those kinds of feelings makes me wish I had some of that kind of jumpy excitement in my life. Honestly I'm inwardly still somewhat Buddha calm about things like settling down and having kids; what piques my angst is this bland numbness, the staggering lack of epic romantic fantasy.

Thus the allure of fanning old flames. Thus the desire to radically switch up my situation. Thus the tendency to rhapsodize the potential of things that never happened. Thus the desire to play the lottery, to strike gold after scaling some yet unknown height.

Back on the west coast, where I'll be for at least the next two or three months. It's been a long and winding road, and lots of fun, but I'm happy to be decreasing my rate of motion. Time to come to a more settled place and process.

There's still a big load of things to get through before the end of the year, and I wish wish wish I had more time to digest and to write, especially to write good big emails to all the people I love. Maybe that's a good holiday project. It's a good way of figuring out where you are in life, writing your old friends.

Anyway, I'm safe and sound in rainy California, getting ready for a final couple weeks before I retire to the relative isolation of Oregon for a spell. More when I get the chance.

There's so much to say. I couldn't sleep last night even though I was totally exhausted. Buzzing buzzing buzzing thanks to the great city of New York, the Brooklyn winter market, and my utterly inspiring friends, family and comrades.

I am in a meaningful way a whole different person here, near the center of the clockwork. I'm looking forward to taking a few weeks off at the end of the year, figuring out next steps. It feels significant, the pull. More than just a jonez for city life.

With a little help from my friends, I had a greatly restorative holiday weekend. Bailed on Oregon travel plans, slept enormous amounts, got out into nature and into the hot tub.

So I don't have a lot to say. I'm kind of simple Buddha happy and looking forward to upcoming travel to LA, NYC, NOLA: final whirlwind before the end of the year.

In the mean-time, I suggest Dr. Krugman's brain-growth brew. He's got a couple great posts up today. One on the creeping undercurrent of political doom which mirrors my own thoughts pretty closely:

I hope I’m wrong about all this. But my sense is that to have any hope of breaking out of this trap, Obama and company have to take risks — they have to propose new initiatives that might not pass, and be prepared to run against the do-nothing Republicans if the initiatives fail. That’s not happening now; as best as I can tell, the administration strategy is to insist that only a few minor course corrections are needed, and to wait for the jobs to start coming in.

The other alerting us to the reality of PIG IN A VAT!!!:

SCIENTISTS have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.

This is probably a good thing. A petri dish will probably yield tastier meats than feedlots, and without all the greenhouse-gas-causing methane (or ethical objections, according to PETA).

Returning to the romance.

It's been a dark fall so far, hard-pressed and shut in. I'm looking forward to getting healthy so I can go back to getting drunk like a sailor, heaving to and fro, freewheeling and going where I will. Getting out on the road was good, but work-travel is more draining.

High time now to ride another wave, to get up on it and roll. It's unlikely that I'll have any less work to do anytime soon, but like every self-help manual teaches (and my own philosophy preaches) the X factor you've got real control over is your mind, not your circumstances. Big changes begin as shifts in perception. Mad lib it. Fill in the blank with confidence and everything will be fine, or as fine as it can be.

So there's an inflection. My situation can be seen as being overwhelmed by an unreasonable and untenable tumult of todos, or a raging whitewater sluice of opportunities to be rafted. We're in the deep fast water now, the difference between going under and riding it for all its worth really comes down to attitude. If we head into this thing with joy, it should work out. If not, well, there's a reason the skaters say fear is the mind-killer.

But what's really missing from all this is the romance, and really it's nobody's fault but my own. I'm pretty much impossible to please, my desires in love taking on the same grandiose scale as the rest of my outsized ambitions, even as my ability to invest time, energy, effort ever dwindles. What exactly can you expect?

Of late I'm all wrung out and hung up, exhausted, scheduled, and sick. No room for special lady friends. No time to be genuinely interested even — so long since I've been smitten — just the dull sense that I'm missing out and a flickering hunger.

Good press for my mom's favorite party. Yes, she's hipper than me.

I'm in Tempe, getting sunblind. Long boards and short shorts. Desert air helping the lungs a bit, evil sickness now moving into sinuses, so feels like someone is taking a drill to my face at times; possible byproduct of air travel. Looking forward to getting home.

I'm exiting Estados Unidos once again, waiting for my flight to Stockholm. I've stocked up on Sudafed and Airborne, so with any luck I'll be able to give some coherent presentations Wednesday and Thursday. From there I fly back to the US, to Texas no less, to spend the weekend in Austin for another conference, and then a two hop trip back to California stopping in Tempe AZ for some work on-site at Arizona State University.

Generally speaking I like traveling to new places, or places I haven't been in quite some time (like Austin). Being sickly puts a damper on things, but hopefully I won't get any worse (it's just been a malingering thing, which is what the Doctor said to expect) and even though I can't party party party like I might like, the brain-shift from confronting new and different environs should provide some welcome stimulation.

And who knows, maybe I'll meet some dreamy lady out there in the world, get jolted awake from my jaded romantic somnambulance. Either way, Kudos are due to Frank for that link, the latest in a long string of evidence that being environmentally aware is fully mainstream in all sorts of exciting and depressing ways.

Well, it's all set up. Facebook users can now log in and comment. I think.

Anybody out there?

Update: ok, so maybe this totally isn't working. Need to sort out some bugs, looks like.

Via Atrios we bounce to BoingBoing:

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad.

There are several parallel struggles going on right now to define the form and structure of the 21st Century economy both globally and here in Estados Unidos. Some are in the headlines (health care, transitioning off carbon-based energy and dealing with climate change, reforming finance) and a couple other big ones are not.

The two things which fly under the radar are that classic favorite, the military industrial complex, which is verboten for polite political discussion, and the struggle to define the balance of power around information. In this latter struggle, we have some real choices to make, and they're pretty important.

If something like this treaty goes through, the future looks pretty damn dim for internet-enabled innovation, culture, and industry. In essence, the treaty denies non-creators any meaningful ability to "own" the information contained within products they purchase. It also creates highly restrictive requirements for "policing" infringement which will create enormous legal overhead for what are today simple staples of online life (e.g. forget about Flickr or Youtube).