Outlandish Josh

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.

I’m reminded of an old girlfriend I had back in the day who related some advice from her mother upon hearing that she was feeling stressed and overwhelmed at college. “I think you should be having sex,” was the gist of it, pointing out that getting laid can be quite the boon to ones self-confidence in addition to providing a bit of an endorphin rush and being a way to get unstuck from a situation. Pretty logical family; Russians.

So it occurs to me now that in the same way that going and running on a treadmill would be a good thing for me, so might participating in some uncomplicated physical congress.

But how long has it been since that’s happened? Quite a while, I think. Years even. Somewhere in the mid-decade I lost the whimsy jaunt one really needs to, as the kids say, “hook up.” Not that it hasn’t happened, but it’s been different. More laden with expectations and baggage, even if only my own. I miss that old swashbuckling sexual goodness, that simple faith in fun.

It takes a certain kind of purity of the heart, an essential self-trust and self-love that I seem to be lacking. Is this something that can be recaptured? I’m not sure. Maybe this is why people go to therapy.

Actually, scratch that: I’m pretty sure it can be recaptured. When I was down in Uruguay, on my last night in Montevideo I met a fabulous girl and had just that sort of time, carrying on in the streets and making a bit of a scene in the hostel hallway. It was another of my “king of second base” experiences (no sex, even by Clintonian standards), so perhaps this doesn’t quite prove the point, and it’s probably getting a bit of memory gloss, but I think that essential feeling of freedom and rightness was there.

It’s a bit cliche, but the traveling connection creates a situation where you have no choice but to embrace the moment, move with what’s happening. There’s also a lot less in the form of accountability; no reason not to say, do, feel, act. No day but today.

Finding the equivalent moral and emotional latitude in the day to day is somewhat harder. And to be honest that whole thing probably wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t spent 10 days decompressing on a remote beach with no cellphone or laptop.

So there’s a lesson there. All work and no play makes Josh a dull boy. Blindingly obvious as this sounds, it won’t be until I can regain more of my schedule to myself that the romance returns. “Now You Labor Every Day / Love Life Drifts Away.”

Anyway, good to be back in California. Stockholm was a great old european city where all the pretty girls ride bikes in freezing cold weather. Austin is a mecca, the Portland of Texas, and full of fabulous friends and collaborators and (apparently) cheap rents and wild wide-open american scenes. Tempe/Phoenix is a desert dream city, full of neon and fresh asphalt and the wide open blue skies that only the Southwest can deliver. But I’m happy to be back home.

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).

The mindset behind these treaties is a dictatorial one. The powers that be in the information economy — large scale copyright holders — want the rest of us to remain dutiful non-threatening consumers of their data, digital serfs. If they are successful in cementing that vision in law, it will create at best a two-teir economy, with the conventional/commercial “mainstream” plugging away as a sort of digital shopping mall of culture, and a secondary, underfunded, alternative information underground of Free Culture competing. At worst, the shopping mall will strangle the alternative, and the underground will be reduced to simply grey/black-market activities.

This isn’t what any of us want, really. We want the whole of culture to be Free (as in speech, not as in beer) and for all the mighty talent and resources currently contained within the mainstream to be a part of that. This means change, which isn’t pleasant for the powers that be. However, it really will be better for everyone if the focus is on creativity and delivering value rather than hoarding and punishment.

So, it’s unclear what kind of leverage can/should be exerted on these secret treaty negotiations, but I’ll keep an eye on it.

Krugman:

I guess my dreams of washing out and starting a second career as a tin-pan-alley vaudeville hobo will have to wait.

Where we beat up on USC, and white men vote Obama.

Staying in on Halloween hopefully helps my cough. Definitely helped me knock out some updates. Best part: facebook integration. More to come here, but the basic login to comment is (I think) working.

Health Care Reform is on the table:

This is a history- making fight, one of those huge moments in American history, and if we win, this progressive movement will be written about in the history books the way the big change movements of the 1960s, 1930s, 1900s, and 1860s are. This is our time to deliver, too.

Now would be a good time to familiarize yourselves with where your local representatives stand. A couple points:

• We can/should be able to make the plan better in committee and by amendment. If you like to follow inside baseball I’d stay tuned to all of that.
• It’s time to dust off some of those Bush/Cheney buzz phrases: “elections have consequences” and “up or down vote” come to mind.

• Overall, the more noise we can make in support the better. Do whatever you feel, but keep in mind the broadest things are harassing lawmakers who look soft/skittish, rewarding those who lead, and beating the drum of general public opinion support. This is what the people want, so lets do it.

Anyway, good times.