authentic experience

Since getting engaged I spend more time thinking long-term about the world and my career. I've always had a yen for the big picture, but figuring out how yours truly factors in has taken on more urgency of late.

Some of it comes from explaining "what would you say ya do here" to a pool of putative in-laws who understandably have a number of questions. Part of it is needing to figuring out how I'm gonna cash the existential checks I've written with my existing career moves, to make good on my potential, to pursue the bigger-vision in more than a hand-waving context. A little bit of it is wanting to feel solid in an identity that's separate from the pop-culture caricature of Silicon Valley that's part of the current zeitgeist.

It's not a simple question. I have the most nebulous career and title in the world, "entrepreneur" and "founder". When I talk to people in the start-up game, I often extend the label to be "utility founder", like in baseball where you have a utility infielder; someone who can play shortstop, second base, or first or third in a stretch. The truth is I don't have a single job description. I have several. People in my field tend to get that. Filling multiple positions is par for the course in early-stage companies.

I've felt that I've been living in a somewhat liminal state for the past several years — "liminal" meaning, literally, "the confusion of being in-between things". It's a feeling that strikes most strongly on long introspective plane flights, the physical dislocation of travel, the surreality of international airports, the sense of being above and beyond any particular home, all sharpening this aspect. I have been in transition, into full adulthood/out of young-adulthood, to the state California, through the stomach-dropping section of a career arc, etc. It's been quite a ride.

Sometimes in life the section breaks are clear: birthdays are a big deal early on, you go to different schools, to college, maybe your family relocates, etc. These often turn out to be the important mile-markers they feel like at the time. Sometimes not, but often. Other shifts in the story are more subtle, hard to detect in real-time, emerging only in the clarity of hindsight.

Tonight I have occasion to remark on both varieties.

A little over two and a half years ago, I met a woman. Rina. At the time I was living in the far remote reaches of northern California, behind the Redwood curtain, off a gravel road off a gravel road, at the edge of the grid, plying my trade as a frontiersman of the internet. It'd been a good run, but I was itching for a change, thirsty to get back into more serious and sustained contact with the rest of the world. Rina was living in New York City, metropolis where I came of age and where we'd met cute, and somewhat more distressingly imminently bound for London, which also happens to be the first "real city" I ever set foot in as a free-standing human being, the place that first gave me the bug to get out and see the world. Improbably, against a daunting reef of timezones and what seemed like my better judgment, I decided to pursue her.

I skipped out on the Tough Mudder. I've been having back problems for the past several weeks (e.g. last weekend I could barely get around the house) and it just didn't seem prudent to try and run 10 miles, let alone subject myself to random electroshocks. It still feels like a let-down/cop-out, but I don't need to injure myself to prove anything. Though it still left something to be desired, training over the summer got my metabolism working in the right direction again — something I plan on continuing — and there's always next year, so no great loss.

Also of no great loss was the little place I rented up in Tahoe! Absent the race, it made a good way to start a week's vacation: getting out of the city, taking in some pine-fresh mountain air. Feeling the unique thrill of being on the Nevada side of the state border.

I'm in NYC now for a few days, then off to Moab Utah on Thursday for my friend Molly's wedding and a gathering of good old friends. I'll be mostly off the grid for the duration (no twitter, minimal email, etc), and hope to return to real life on October 1st with refreshed energy and renewed focus.

A few weeks ago I finished reading Jennifer Egan's "A Visit from the Goon Squad" on the plane, coming back from a visit to New York. It was sort of the perfect book for the moment, an innovative interlevening of lives over time, a meditation on meaning and culture and music.

This is what it prompted me to write.

Another eight-week drought. I also failed to mark the 10-year anniversary of this little publishing enterprise; I'm generally just not moved to write. That's bad.

It's one of a set of symptoms I'd like to address in the New Year. Is that really possible?

It's been a while. I haven't just been neglecting this old blog, but really almost all my social interfaces. So a bit of a catch-up is probably in order. In this edition:

1. Personal life and romance report quarterly update.
2. How's business?
3. And what about all that ranting...

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.