I need a good BART image. There’s something about the “I’ve got 7 minutes to kill at the Embarcaderro station” post that really appeals to me.

Anyway, just came from a great little convo with the inestimable Dan Droller, who’s back out in SF from business school. Great to catch up. He seems to be doing well, and chatting it up with him makes the weight of my world seem a whole lot lighter.

On the other hand, I didn’t pee before entering the mass transit system. We’ll see how two pints of beer sit with me on the train ride home!

Things are churning here. The Netroots Nation scene continues to evolve. It’s a younger crowd every year it seems, though still wonky and sometimes a bit paranoid (the cute blond girl I chatted with complained of accusations of being a Republican plant), but overall everyone looks good. People have lost weight and look healthy; they know they’re winning, even if the win is questionable and the progress seems too slow.

A great find has been hanging w/the coolkids behind Music For Democracy, which is shockingly familiar, and fun. I also got to play Phil Donahue — microphone man — in a nice little “Dean to Obama” session. You might have seen my somewhat poofy hair on C-Span there.

It all makes me consider my own future. This world is one I’ve grown ever more distant from over the past four years, and a world in which I feel like I’ve let a lot of people down, or at least not realized the great expectations that I and others helped to engender. For instance, we evangelized Drupal as a platform technology which helped break up the DC tech oligarchy and drive “the .org boom,” but ultimately that promise remains unfulfilled, and our personal interests become diffused, focused on other things. The technology is better than ever, but our crucial human energy is missing, and so the value remains undelivered.

As I said before, it feels like my immediate first-degree network is coming up in the world, starting families, careers, etc. As I said before, it’s a wonderful thing, but I feel the spread, the phenomena of “continental drift” as my Pa used to say.

I realize the impossibility of holding on to the past. In truth there are more people I love and cherish that could ever be knit together directly. I just worry that in the midst of everything everyone will just slip slide away, that I’ll say stuck where I am and the distances will continue to grow.

It’s been an interesting couple years. It’ll be interesting times ahead I’m sure. What’s next is unclear beyond the frenzy of the moment, but looking out over the hot Texas plains lit up with ghosts of past and future, my feet itch to move again.

And that’s the rub. I can’t ramble forever, and there are more people hitched to my waggon than ever before. I’ve done a lot of things, but I’ve yet to sense that anything’s really been accomplished. In some dark, low, hungover moments it feels like failure, but in better times it feels like mountains beyond mountains. Not to compare myself to Paul Farmer, but the capital-t Truth is that there’s always work to be done, and songs to be finished (and it keeps coming until the day it stops).

Anyway, existential ennui aside, good BBQ is a blessing, and even though there are lame-ass hipsters who stand around cross-armed at the late-night psychedelic pop show (though they get physically confrontational in defense of their posture, which is interesting and I back down), Austin is an awesome city. I wish I could spend a week or two here.

Quick note: I’m back in Albany/SF for 24 hours, then headed to Austin to schmooze it up at Netroots Nation (while furiously trying to close out some work, natch), then will fly back to hang here in the Bay for a couple days, then head back up to the HC a little advance of this year’s Chapter Three Retreat.

Quick observation: everyone seems to be dating. At least, all my roommates.

More from Austin, most likely. Looking forward to some real heat!

More resisting apoccalyptic thinking: researchers at MIT improve solar cell performance:

As a result, rather than covering a roof with expensive solar cells (the semiconductor devices that transform sunlight into electricity), the cells only need to be around the edges of a flat glass panel [e.g. a window]. In addition, the focused light increases the electrical power obtained from each solar cell “by a factor of over 40,” Baldo says.

The real solutions to all of humanities problems are energetic in nature. Currently, as we confront an end to the burning of a billion or so years worth of stored photosynthesis that we dug out of the ground — that’s what oil, coal and natural gas are, really — we look in new directions. The future is in fusion, and while there are some exciting things (which aught to get funding) happening with small-scale earthbound actions, we have a pretty functional fusion reactor up and running in the neighborhood. It’ll burn you too, if you’re not careful.

The Sun is the root source of almost all energy, of all life on our Earth. With the exception of geothermal, tidal, and nuclear power, everything else comes exclusively from the Sun. It’s a mind-bogglingly huge thing, a mas of incandescent gas emitting literally incomprehensible amounts of energy. There is no scale of reference that can even begin to convey the reality of what the sun is, it’s power.

It is truly the most God-like for 35 light years around. We should do a better job of worshiping.

And we will, I feel. Along with getting smarter and more efficient about how we organize ourselves, the biggest problems we all face — water, food, atmospheric carbon — will all be solved with better energy. They’re all at their core related to the availability and side-effects of power. Not (except tangentially) of the political sort though, but rather in the way that physicists talk about: the ability to do work.

Five or six thousand years ago, you had to organize an agricultural system that could feed thousands of enslaved workers in order to build some pyramids. Nowadays we have better alternatives, and new options such as desalinating water are on the table, just as long as there’s enough energy to get the job done cheaply.

The 21st Century will be made or broken by our ability to harness more energy while reducing specific negative impacts like carbon saturation in the atmosphere, to cheaply and cleanly put more joules in more hands. Better solar panels, industrial photosynthesis (think algae farming), clever ways to tap into ambient sources — waves, tides, wind, temperature differentials, etc — and real breakthroughs like neighborhood fusion are all a part it. So too are improvements in how we transport and store energy, such as superconducting power grids, nanotube capacitors, and the ability to use hydrogen fuel cells (which requires figuring out how to safely create and transport hydrogen). We should, as a species, be focused on these kinds of issues like no other: funding basic research and bringing new advances into the real world, retooling the first world and building up everywhere else with safe, clean, reliable, sustainable ways to generate and transport more power.

All this is made possible by expanding the scope of our knowledge as human beings, of things very small and impossibly large. As we peer into new realms and begin to manipulate complexities that were heretofore only roughly and approximately modeled, fantastic possibilities emerge. Fantastic dangers as well (with great power comes great responsibility), but I like to think that these challenges and the advances we undertake in meeting them are helping to manifest a practical (as in real, not spiritual or figurative) global consciousness, a global Public.

It’s true, I’m hippy-dippy in a lot of ways, and I believe in the enduring goodness basically simple things like growing your own food, riding a bike, etc; but there’s no going backwards, and a rapture-like Fall and return to primitivity is both unlikely and undesirable, seductive and pervasive though the idea may be. To put it bluntly, if we don’t figure this shit out collectively, but your ass that we will in a factional way — though that might result in everyone speaking Mandarin by the year 2108, so maybe collectively is better — because those who do will be the undeniable winners of the globe.

We can be heroes, as they say. All of us. And God, looking down from the Sun, will no doubt be smiling.

Check out photos of the new office, if you’re so inclined.

Baby pictures are in: Frank Edward Robbins VI; aka “Freddy”

It’s time for a good old fashioned post, like back in the day. Contrary to what you might think, literary exhibitionism and all, I do all this first and foremost for myself, as way of processing my life. In the 21st Century, blogging is the fist draft of history, and doing ones own autobio in real-time is a powerful way of controlling and making sense of the personal narrative. I’m glad if it brings some light into the reader’s world, but the main thing for me is pursuing my life goals; truth, presence, appreciation, flow.

Today was my first day working in our brand-spankin’ new Humboldt County office, located in Old Town Eureka. It’s going to be good, a really nice feeling. Currently it’s somewhat empty as a space, but the potential is palpable. It feels like the beginning, pun intended, of a new chapter.

My life for the past few months has been — more than my life already was — consumed by my job. Workaholism runs in my blood, and it really does have all the lovely features of addiction. Patterns, void-filling, debilitation of other life-aspects, the whole gamut. If I really were a devotee of the bottle, say like Charles Bukowski (we should be so lucky), this would be the part where I’m haunting some seedy bar where I get a few pints for free in the morning, and the bartender lets me sleep away the afternoons on a pile of cardboard boxes in the alley out back.

But I’m not writing epics of the lush life, and so the outcomes are different. Arguably favorable. And yet I wonder where this leads. Conventional career success feels more and more like a potential bait-and-switch. As the hippy engineer used to say, “don’t get a job, get a life.”

That’s not necessarily the case with my scene now: the suit isn’t really growing around me, and as the extreme compression of the last few months begins to lift I’m sure that better perspectives will prevail. Still, I miss being footloose, a ramblin’ man. There are so many parts of me that have been boxed in storage, I start to wonder if they’re really any good anymore, and what else might emerge instead.

I look around and it feels lately like my cohort is on the rise. Partners, children, careers, creations; the people I know and love are kicking ass and taking names. It’s great, but some part of me is unnerved by the way our momentum is carrying us in separate individualistic directions. I’ve had more than one conversation lately about how nobody wants to end up hunkered down in the suburbs, but sometimes it feels like in absence of some better plan, that might be where we’re headed. Not to the white picket fence necessarily, but definitely into something differently settled, and a far sight from various bohemian ideals.

Not sure whether there’s really anything to be done here. One of the downsides of living life in the long tail is the lack of collectively-binding causes, passions, pursuits or beliefs. Friends have things in common, shared history and compatible nature, but in a world of easily-maintained loose ties, making strong connections work seems not only hard, but also somewhat passe, embarrassing.

This morning the sunlight was dark and golden, filtered through smoke from the inland wildfires blowing out to sea. Good sunsets too, Southern Californian. It’s a very summery kind of light, a changed atmosphere, watching the highway lines tick away behind me in the convex blind-spot side-mirror of my beleaguered little pickup. It feels good, and also a little lonesome. I’m not in my nature a solitary man, but the house is kind of empty these days, so I find myself talking to the dogs a lot. You don’t have such great conversations with dogs, worthy and lovable distractions though they may be.

So I washed my car, got some slices of pizza, took a stroll and drank a beer on the beach.

I suppose I am kinda lonely, but I don’t feel like complaining. It’s my own little nest I’ve built over the past couple years, the home-base I came out here wanting, and when I really let myself reflect, I’m proud of that. Soon again I’ll be venturing out, both in world-wise travel (planned) and in coming-out-of-shell personal growth and exploration (hoped for). With any luck, having a solid base will be a source of power, greater freedom.

It takes time, space and energy. Life is holy and every moment precious, and I need to start listening to the universe again, looking people in the eye, hearing music, finding the moments to start unpacking those boxes, unwrap the sweet-smelling mothballed passions of yesteryear and maybe even discover something new in the offing.

For now I’m bittersweet happy, content to wonder what will happen next and secure enough in all my good luck so far that no matter what it can’t be all that bad. I’ve got a life-item todo list a mile long, and I intend to continue getting out from under the weight.

Farsheed makes music!

Awesomesauce.

There’s a new group — backed by unions and fronted by Elizabeth Edwards — to put big pressure on Congress to actually for real do something about healthcare. I agreed to be spammed.

They’ve been talking about a big grassroots campaign push as well. That’ll be somewhat important during the election, and very important should the election go well. I’ll be keeping tabs in addition to getting spammed. Maybe you should too?

Joe Felice is blowin’ up bigtime. This was on the frontpage of youtube.com, and is smart and clever to boot. Go Joe!