All That We Need Is To Plant The Good Seed

All that we need is to plant the good seed; something to live for, something to believe.

My life, it must be said, is good. Enviable, even. Yesterday after work I hit the gym for the third time in a week. Just a minimal 30-min session in the elliptical machine, but getting that pattern started again is a big win. My, eh, maturing metabolism rapidly reacts if deprived of regular rigor. Six weeks of sciatica-inspired sweat-lack stacked up six or so pounds of gutfat and buttsag, plus a lower resting energy rate.

Following that a little sit-down in the heart of Arcata. It’s a strange mash-up of a place. Park your car and hear the crowd singing “take me out to the ballgame” at the seventh inning stretch. Sit down at the chic continental cafe/bakery on the corner, sip a glass of amazing locally produced red wine and listen to high quality live jazz surrounded by retirees, hippies with wolf-dogs, bikers, a mexicali couple dolled-up on a date, burning man freaks, shambling giant man with an afro pushing by on a longboard, broad-shouldered short-haired mother-gang with their scrum of rascals and swaddling babes. It all fits together in its way, wonderful and strange. The awning xmas lights click on and I feel kind of like a tourista in this my own town.

I head on home and stop off at the Moonstone Grill for another glass of fabulous wine and some chocolate cake, possibly even some harmless flirting with the bartender. Lots of big tables finishing dinner, but nobody at the long bar, so it’s two glasses and a pleasant little chit chat. Then home, where I fall asleep on the couch, dream about going on a last-minute run to a Country Fair-like festival with a girl I fancied back in high school.

So you see, I feel a little bad doing anything remotely like complaining. Still, laden down with all my labor, and a little lonely in the grey saturdaymorning fog, I feel once again the old crisis of meaning, and I stop to take stock of my surroundings.

Thanks to the highly user-friendly Mint.com (who are datamining the shit out of their userbase, but at least offering something in return) I have discovered that for the first time in my life I have a net worth. I’d like to learn to take it easier and cut back on my hours, but all the hard work is beginning to pay off both financially and reputation-wise.

The problem is I don’t really care very much about these things. It’s a great thing to be debt-free, and being able to buy wine by the glass without worrying about the expense is certainly nice. But beyond easy access to food and drink, I’m uncomfortable with lucury, and in generally I’m a non-materialistic person. I don’t crave stuff.

And while I like being well-respected in my professional field, I’m not ambitiously tickled by the social aspects of open-source tycoonery. There’s a service ethic that I really love and wish spent more time on, but I’m not driven out of a desire to be “the best” at any of this. It’s just a relatively decent thing I do a little too much of, and happens to momentarily produce a profit margin.

That’s no small thing in the middle of a global economic crisis, but the truth is I’m a bit aimless. I need some goals, something that will actually motivate me to reallocate time from my dayjob. Other than keeping up with the treadmill (which starts to feel very rat-racy) don’t have much pushing me forward at the moment. The internet revolution seems to have dissipated into a new normal, progressive politics a depressing mainstream bore.

It’s a never-ending conundrum. In the short term, I’m looking forward to a short break at the end of the month, followed by a concerted push to make it big in the fall and 2010. Maybe I can retire at 31. Still, the question will be sitting there: what next?