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I don't doubt that the Earth, the miracle of life, and probably even the human species have a long future, but our particular mode of living seems not long for the world. When you stop and think about the challenges that we're actually facing, and then you take a look at what we collectively invest our time and energy in, it's hard not to feel discouraged. This is what I'm referring to when I say there's an "undercurrent of doom" out there. I preach a dark future, etc.

Except really I don't. Apocalyptic thinking is contagious but ultimately not very insightful, and dispair has the downside of being both depressing and ineffective. Knowing is half the battle, so one place to start is thinking about the challenge.

I had a dream the other morning, in the fitful and usually dreamless hour between my ambitious/idealistic first alarm clock and when I actually get out of bed. I don't recall all the details, but the gist of it was a scene of opulent excess, an enormous feast, only in that particular dream-like way something was wrong. I don't know whether it was the undercurrent of doom, barbarians at the gate, flood-tide rising, or just everyone's declining cardiovascular fitness; I just remember saying to one of my companions, "hedonism is so distracting".

And so it is, and this is a growing concern of mine.

I am now 32 years old, and it shows. Quite lucky to be alive though. As my good buddy LGD says of getting older in our 30's, "other than the rapid physical decline, it's awesome!!!"

So yeah, I could stand to loose some weight and it'll be many months before my teeth are right, but life is basically good, and I have my friends and fam to thank for it.

I was in an airplane the other day, and got a little meditative about the experience of being a passenger. It might be physically uncomfortable for those of us two or more standard deviations away from the norm in height, for me it also provides access to a special state of mind.

The perhaps inevitable counter-note to the previous upstroke post: another week finds me contemplating my history in the arts and more generally on "the edge" of what people do, feeling — as I put it in a blissfully forced condensation on Twitter — "out of shape and uncool."

And so naturally references to LCD soundsystem and the latest Oscar winner from Aronofsky.

Last weekend I caught up with an old dear friend from college. Mulching that over leads to the first serious post in several weeks: an attempt to explain what I do for a living.

This turns out to be harder than it seems.

Sorry for the downtime, y'all. I have been incredibly busy this past couple months launching Pantheon Systems and neglecting this old blog both from a writing standpoint and from a regular maintenance point of view.

But things are back in order. My domain name is no longer adrift and my creaky old VPS (ironic, I know) is paid up. I'm off to DrupalCon today. More when I return.

As you may be aware, I have been spending more and more time with a certain special lady, including travels to London and Brazil. Things have been going really well, I think. Since one of the purposes of ye olde blog is informing people in my weakly-tied circle of cohorts of life-update kind of information, this warrants a long-overdue post. Read on for the romance report.

I've been doing the politics thing in a mostly mainstream way since 2003, following the action, participating heavily at times, trying to steer the Big Spaceship a little more to my liking. Following the horserace (or sometimes bloodsport, or sometimes commedia) in DC can leave one detached from the original motivation. One of my cousins asked me recently what my "real political values" are, I'm guessing because I tweet about class war and sound generally agitated. It actually made me stop and think, and that was nice. Here's what I came up with...

I took a bunch of books with me on vacation — facilitated while traveling light thanks to the Kindle (that's my one and only plug; I'm aware opinions are mixed) — and over the past three weeks I managed to get through five volumes. Today I'm going to write a little about the two non-fiction works, Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus), Umair Haque's New Capitalist Manifesto and David Mitchell's novelly-structured novel, Cloud Atlas.