authentic experience

Hippy music, please:

One of my most important original philosophical catchphrases is “The Most Important Thing Is To Stop Struggling.” It’s something I remind myself of frequently as my career goes through its whips twists and turns. Sometimes you find yourself in one of those situations where everything seems hard, impossible to begin on, just overwhelming. Sort of like being waist-deep in rubble.

Often the short term answer is to roll up your sleeves and dig out, because this is sometimes a devastatingly effective cheap psychological trick. That pile of dirty dishes never takes as long as it feels like it’ll take, for instance.

But, then there are the times where you feel constantly like you’re getting reset to that buried state, where you’re beating your head against the wall, doing the Sisyphus shuffle. When you notice that, it’s time to take a breath, look around, and see where/how/when to move laterally. Because as much as life is unfair, and full of adversity and strife and honest-to-goodness challenges, it’s also supposed to be — like the CSNY song there — sort of Easy.

And I don’t mean that in a lazing-about-in-the-sun sort of way, I mean it in the way that people talk about spreading a gospel. I can’t site chapter or verse, but there’s some bit I remember reading about how debating a strident non-believer isn’t a good use of time, because when you’ve got The Word you just need to find someone else who’s ready to hear it.

That’s a meta-lesson I take to heart, because really the whole premise of what I’m doing with my life and my company is a kind of gospel. We basically believe there are good ways to use open tools to make it easy, inexpensive and effective for millions of people to put their thoughts on the internet in ways they can personally own and control. We believe that by lining up all the right tools and making them easy and clear to use, we can radically lower barriers to entry in what is still an Emergent global conversation.

Speaking of old hippies, this idea has some roots for me in this passage:

Now I want to get into the idea of what is it about truth that makes truth important, cause there’s something about truth that’s really special … So, think what is truth, and what is it that we’re doing here, and what is it about being a man … like, one of the things about a man is that a man is the only animal that has a choice to make about truth. See, a cat doesn’t lie to you … you know, if cats like your vibes they crawl right up on you. If they don’t like your vibes, they’re not too hot for you. Right? The thing about truth is … God is I think trying to communicate with himself … And he has, on this here planet, about three and a half billion transceivers walking around, babbling to each other, constantly, trying to carry the circuit load for that incredible conversation that’s going on, of God talking to himself. See? And so there’s something that’s trying to be said too … right, and so we have to talk and we gotta listen when we talk as well as when we listen, in order to discover what it is that’s being said around here.

There’s a fundamental belief we carry that if we can open up enough channels and manage the flow, things will work out ok. That’s why it’s important to get people routed around firewalls in Dubai, because only with a greater ability to exchange information will we move, as a species, beyond the petty bullshit that’s tearing us apart.

Because it’s only through individual impulses, millions of honestly aligned little free-will seekers, that things actually get done. You can’t give people freedom or equality. Those are things that need to be taken. All we can do is make the most of our ability to coordinate, to learn, to align, to act, and to do all this in the common knowledge of a universal fraternity (the French kind, not Greek).

This is happening.

And when you’re delivering on the path to that kind of future, it may be hard fucking work, but it’s also easy. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter, as the poet says. And if it’s not easy, ask yourself why. Did you lose the script, or are you missing the easy way forward?

More music please:

This is a top-40 hit at the moment, and in heavy rotation (obviously) back out there in Nueva Jol. The video is a little ridiculous, but I challenge you not to let that chorus stick somewhere in your brain. You just gotta give it up for Jay-Z. He’s been cranking out anthems for the better part of twenty years now. I remember when I first landed at NYU you couldn’t walk fifteen feet without his hard knock life chorus ringing out from a car passing by. It wouldn’t be the city without him.

I arrived back in San Francisco Tuesday morning having caught up on a little rest (better sleeping through chemistry) and in time for a pretty big pitch meeting followed by a couple long days in the office. Drove up the 101 Wednesday night, fueled by mate and hope and glimpses of stars, really dropping the hammer north of Willits and making the whole run in just about five hours.

Best moment was that stretch between Laytonville and Legget where the road opens up to three lanes to accommodate slow truckers and you get that huge vista of the eel river canyon just packed with great old trees; moon was just starting to rise up behind me and at that point I was up above the fog level, nobody else on the road. Rolled down the window and let the world in; pure north coast magic.

I’ve been starting to notice all the things I’m going to miss about this place. Not just all the wonderful people, but the little things like the view out the kitchen window, the bustle of the old lady bartenders at Everett’s.

But it’s back out into the world for me. If I’m good and lucky, I’ll always have a place here, a toe on some of the best the ground in America, but it’s completely undeniable that my destiny is in some more densely populated space. The future is still uncertain there, but my latest trip back east made a very strong case for stepping up to the eternal challenge that city represents.

And so I’ll take these last months as a blessing. Most beautiful things are at least in some ways ephemeral. Knowing I’ll fly away increases the appreciation, and maybe that means my late days here will be the best yet. Sure hope so.

Music Please.

Looking out over the man-made mountains of Manhattan, full moon reflected off concrete, the lingering bite of snow in the air, wrapped up in shadows out on the fringe of exhaustion, pushing finally to the borderline of innocence past all the complications and angles; there’s where you find the essence of your reality, where control and construction fall away, where you are overtaken by events, have no choice but to Be There, suffering your nerves, grinding your jaw, feeling your guts churn, your heart about to leap or sink or smolder or burn.

And even though this can be at times quite unpleasant, the greater way is to ride these waves, breathe deeper into the butterflied tummy, the tensed-up shoulders; to channel all this energy, to let it all flow, to have the essence of original cool, neither loosing or asserting control. Because this is your life, and it’s not really something that should be rationalized. It’s something you aught to live, deeply if at all possible.

A pretty smart and pretty passionate (and it should be said, pretty pretty) woman I know explained to me once how getting out on a long road trip was a good way for her of “hitting the reset button,” getting re-acquainted with what’s important, real, true, etc. I know the feeling, but unfortunately don’t have a personally reliable formula for getting there myself. So it’s blessed when I’m transported thus, smack dab back to the moment.

It’s not really like turning your mind off so to speak — just drink five shots of whiskey if that’s what you’re after; gets boring, don’t it? — but more like getting your brain to take its foot off the brake. Scary, yes, but scary good, or to be more specific scary in the only way that anything will ever matter.

The cliches run faster than I can parry here — fortune favors the bold, risk is our business, etc — but it’s a lucky day in Koenigville. I feel closer to the truth for a change. Worn thin and frankly a little cranky from plane-sleep and whatnot, but charged up in a deeper more soulful place, with an energy I hope will last in the weeks and months to come.

Man, I wish I could write and drive at the same time. Last weekend headed up to my old homeland on some unfamiliar highways, Rolling through the town of White City, Oregon — gun shop, churches, VA recovery center, two kids wearing weird mascot-type costumes dancing on the side of the road to entice drivers-by into struggling strip-mall businesses — and on up the Rogue River valley, eventually into the high national forest above Crater Lake. Got a bit dicy in the pass: snowfall, sunset, fuel level and elevation all hitting at about the same time combined with me not being 100% sure I was on the right road; made for an exciting hour or so while I wondered if I’d end up hitching my way back in conditions that reminded me of nothing more than the Donner Party.

But of course I made it with some skillful no-chains driving — light touch and steady speed is the key — and crossed into the relative civilization of the Central Oregon valley. Had a great time doing not a whole lot with some old friends there. Parlor games, kid wrangling, gumbo, scotch, lots of laughter, etc, all in a big warm house in a pretty (if slightly Stepford) “Golf Community.”

I didn’t even feel out of place hanging out with a bunch of common-law/married/engaged couples. Just grown ass people enjoying their time. It did hit me a little when I left though, after cruising over to the Euge and enjoying a lovely Valentines dinner with my Mom, that itchy urge to email all my old ladyfriends or fall down a bottle, or possibly both. Couldn’t get to sleep in any case.

But hit the road early next day, maté and I-5 all the way to San Francisco where I lurk still, doing my best here in the Office and trying to make it all count. I got some tickets to jet to NYC for a quick visit not this weekend but next — see my sis and mom, visit with another fabulously engaged couple — and still need to figure out how March is going to work with deadlines and getting to Austin for SxSw.

I got a bunch of books, and am loving Chronic City and it’s alternate universe Manhattan. Makes me ponder again the life of the mind. I wish I wrote more. I wish I could relax and have fun with greater ease in my day to day. I miss my bohemian ecstasies and revolutionary flair. I miss my makers hours and ending the day feeling good about what got done rather than worried about what didn’t. It’s all adding up to something, and something good it seems, but here in the middle time the spread feels thin.

Last night I tromped around in the woods with my roommate, us and her wolf-dog on a jump-roap leash, ranging on up and around Westhaven hill, cutting back through the creek bed by the Arts Center, and finally returning home to simmer up some steak bits with Larrupin’ red sauce. An ideal evening in the Redwoods.

So it was with more than a little preemptive nostalgia that I had to break the news to Kells that I’d be probably moving out this summer. This decision came to me over the holidays, and I’d been digesting for a while, waiting for the right time to vocalize it. Much as I’ve loved my time here, and it’s done some really good things for me, my future is pulling me back out into the world, and into the world I must go.

But no rush; I don’t have a destination set yet, and I won’t be clearing out until June or July. That’ll make it four years in this place, the longest I’ve stayed anywhere since I was a teenage kid leaving the little Eugene house I grew up in for the big city. That was quite a while ago, but the idea of getting back out there has the same whiff of adventure.

I’ll always have a little piece of my soul here in the HC, and hopefully will be back through to visit on a regular basis what with my company having an office and so many wonderful people around. Expect to be on the scene for 2010s Christmas party for sure.

First of all, some mood music.

Lord I just want my life to be true
And I just want my heart to be true
And I just want my words to be true
I want my soul to feel brand new

I want to hold hands yeah
Yeah and I want make love
I want to keep running all day and and all night
Even when my mind tells my body that's enough

And I want to stand up yeah and I want to stand tall
If I ever have a son, if I ever have a daughter
I don't want to tell them that I didn't give my all

I just finished reading Jonathan Franzen's first novel, Twenty Seventh City. It's a really wonderful story of political intrigue and personal neurosis, and there's a killer line towards the end from the perspective of a young woman upset with her somewhat pedantic boyfriend: "Suddenly she was living in a new world made for people like him, for people who can despise it and succeed in it anyway."

(man, google books is cool)

In addition to being a well-crafted line in a segment that portrays the ideosyncratic hypocrisy of well-educated/elite criticism of the status quo, this quite effectively captures the essence of my particular angst du jour, that I might end up being more than just middle-class successful — what with my structural hole oriented persona and all — but without actually mattering in the ways I genuinely care about.

See, I'll frequently rattle on about how I'm "ambitious" or that I want to "change the world," but what does that really mean? It means I want more influence. As I develop economically useful skills, and in particular build a highly effective organization around these skills, I've come to realize just how power-acquisitive I actually am. To wit, for the first time in my adult life I'm not in debt, and aside from some class-wariorish vibrations around the edges and the occasional adolescent yen to drive a really fast car, my primary financial interest is in figuring out how to apply this newfound economic capacity towards constructing that proverbial lever big enough to move the world.

Because look, if I'm able to realize my life's goals, by the end of this decade I'll have mouths to feed. That's a real thing that I want to do. No rush, but it's there. In the interim, I've got this opportunity, this liberty to move/spend/risk, and it doesn't make any sense to blow it getting sucked into some kind of rat-race or hamster wheel, even my own groovy alternative-looking one.

The way I see it, the big opportunity isn't in direct opposition to the floundering establishment but rather in the lateral development of alternative mechanisms which outperform the entrenched. I've got nothing but love for kids who want to take it to the streets, but I'd rather spend my energy creating another option than pretending we can tear it all down. My operating assumption is that the cancer-causing global system will keep sputtering along — possibly more lost years, but slow collapse if any for the American Empire — and that we are going to have to deal with that.

While I'll support those with the right temperment for the work, and I sincerely hope for the best from our post-modern aristocracy, who as I see it we're sort of stuck with, I really don't think the idea of an establishment takeover, the long march though the institutions is really my cup of tea. I don't fit the profile.

But that's ok. The way I see it, nothing succeeds like success, and results still matter even in this tragic and corrupted world. My place is in the greenfields and blueskies, coming up with more of the Crazy New Shit. There's maybe more meritocracy out there than it often feels like and I think if I can get some wins, interesting things might start happening.

Really I'm contemplating the whole multiple bottom lines thing. Investing is about returns, but also overall outcomes. A savings account is the worst of both possible worlds, because you get a crap percentage and the Bank gets to play with your money. I am not about to start into a 401k. Alternatives: Move your money, boostrap a project, start a tribe!

The way to cut my personal gordian knot lies in putting enough meat on those bones, enough specific postulates to the general theory, enough stories in the backlog, that it starts to feel more like a really actionable set of objectives, and less like an underdefined nebula of potential. It's the resurrection of the super-project, the thing that goes above, beyond, around and through my normal work.

So the tangible steps here are:

1. Finish tinkering with the old website so that it more supports this project from a writing standpoint.
2. Start more serious planning/networking with my people about how to leverage our resources.
3. Figure out an intake process for new participants.
4. Likewise, an outreach process.
5. Produce culture.
6. ???
7. Revolution!

I'm more than halfway serious. I think the time is now to shoot the moon, because if it don't work out I think I can pretty much always settle down and cruise, and in another five to ten it'll be harder to do anything so uncertain. In brief, I detest the world and intend to succeed on my own terms in a way that's hopefully both enviable and replicable. I want a family, but no picket fence. I want a compound, but not some "back to the land" anachronism. I want a direct line to every center of humanity worth being wired into, and the ability to cross-connect at will.

I want the world and I want it pretty much now. Fortes fortuna adiuvat, will to power, etc.

So, in the semi-working part of my vacation (mucking around with servers while the team is offline) I’ve also been trying to do some thinking, some writing, and have ended up re-reading a lot of my old shit. I have mixed emotions about this.

On the one hand, I’ve strung together some decent words. That’s always nice to remember, and it makes me feel better about my currently fumbly half-blocked state as a writer.

On the other hand, even though I also keep a personal paper journal, reading your own blog is a little like reading your own diary. It’s a little embarrassing, but that’s to be expected. The worse part is that really slaps me in the face with how consistent my complaining has been. For years now, the same old song.

An easy answer to this is that I’ve been focusing on “my career,” which is factually true, but it’s an inductive dodge in terms of addressing the state of my personal life. There are more than enough hours in the day, even when you work as much as I do. I’ve worked harder and lived better in my day.

Living the dream requires… a dream.

Everybody keeps on talking about it
nobody’s getting it done
Everybody keeps on pushing and shoving
nobody’s got the guts

It’s a damn hard thing to write/think through, the Gordian knot of your psyche. No end to the chicken/egging.

With a good four full days off work now and no other project to fill up my mind, I begin to really honestly decompress, and this is where the scary part begins. This is the part where I have to face head on the fact that life outside of professional nerdly pursuits has grown pretty barren. Much great promise withered on the vine.

Some of this is a feature of my genetically-destined workaholic lifestyle — devote yourself 110% to anything and you'll find the rest in neglect — but it occurs to me now as I start in on this sad-sack self-pity topic that a greater portion of this barren sensation is really due to a failure of imagination, confidence and will more than anything else.

I mean, as a for instance, I know people who work professionally in the entertainment industry, and contra what you might think about the glamour of stage and screen, when you're working you're fracking working, and there's not much room for anything else if you're more than halfway serious, which, if you got there, you'd better be.

Maybe it's just the grass being greener, or deeper personal shit I'm not privy to, but none of these successful working actors and musicians I know feel like their lives are empty or barren when a gig runs its course. Doubtless there's some let-down and a rough reentry to a more normal civilian life, but by in large these folks seem to bear up over the longer haul because they have a whole inner world that fits with this, they're living the dream, and nourishing creative embers that burn even through the longest roughest stretch of worky working, ready to flare up the moment oxygen's back in surplus.

And for me? To quote Forest Mars – the only individual I've met who crosses the streams: Freaky Experimental Theater and A-List Internetting — I don't know where, but somehow I lost the script. At some point along the path of following the next logical move to the next logical move, following feelings and moments, all the while making some considerable progress, I passed beyond any master plan or vision I may have at one point had in mind. I'm out now beyond any dreaming, in a place I've arrived out of fortuitous circumstance, unsure of what if any next step would beckon my rambler feet.

I think this is a core root deep down Big Thing for the old Joshman to deal with in the new decade. Survival ain't no thing to eek out, but what exactly am I attempting to accomplish with this embarrassing surfeit of opportunity? Well dude, we just don't know.

Driving up to Portland today with the Markman and talking about our lives, I was struck by the pointlessness of ambition without focus. Everybody wants to rule the world, or at least we all want the revolution, but the means are the simpler part: give me a lever big enough and yadda yadda. Here in Estados Unidos, it's the specific end that vaxes. Without that, you're just acquiring juice, and if all you want is power and respect, on some level what makes you anything more than a thug? Because you're nice and cultured? Really?

We're a leg down on most historical revolutionaries in that we lack real enemies. Even the Bush "regime" failed to qualify there in anything but a rhetorical sense. Meanwhile, in Tehran, it's popping off again, and seeming to be a lot more bare-knuckles this time around. In a state which regularly hangs people and pays paramilitary dudes to keep order with dirtbikes and clubs, the people have an enemy, and even if the actual coalition behind the "green revolution" is a disparate and shifting mass-marriage of convenience, the dictatorial establishment provides a crucial focus, and excitingly seems to be slipping. Good times to be speaking Farsi.

And for me, there's an inescapable sense that these questions of purpose and my lonesome laments are bound up into something approaching a grand unified theory. I believe it's out there, though I also believe it to be elusive. It requires a keen and dedicated combination of imagination, confidence and will — to dream the dream, believe it is possible, and work to see it realized — for the secrets of the universe to unfold, for you to ride life straight to perfect laughter.

But this is the only way worth being, and the only way to morally really be given that you have the option, and aren't beaten down by starvation or oppression or a terrible abusive past. We have no choice, us pampered intelligent charismatic creatives. Anything less is a slap in the face to worldwide life chances, the actuary would have a field day if we shirked.

So yes, in the new year and the new decade we have to risk it all on hopes and dreams. Hopes and dreams to come.

Afterward I discover this related older post, and the lamentable fact that I haven't tagged anything "juicy" in nearly a year.

Back when I was a teenager, my Dad took me and my step-mom and sister to Europe. In retrospect, that trip was a big deal for me. It gave me a real taste of (and for) the big wide world. One of the things we ended up doing was peeking in on Palm Sunday mass at Notre Dame Cathedral, and seeing all those Catholics in that beautiful building singing in French was really something. Ever since, I’ve have an abiding affection for other people’s religious rituals.

As a confirmed agnostic and dabbler in personal mysticism, it’s a real treat to be welcomed into another cultures’ spiritual practice as an observer or novice participant. Today I had the distinct pleasure of attending my Nephew Jacob Friedman’s Bar Mitzvah. As the Rabbi rendered, the kid’s a mensch. He did a good job with all the tricky rituals and language, and more impressively rendered a philosophically sophisticated opinion on the meaning of the Tower of Babel story that was the subject of the service.

To wit: if all people were united and making the biggest tower ever, why would God break up that scene? There are traditional answers about idolatry or excessive materialism, and about human hubris, but his reading was a bit deeper I think. If we have everything, we cannot really be happy. Thus the scattering and confusion assist humanity by creating adversity, challenge, difficulty and loss. Only in the presence of sadness is there joy.

Anyway, smart observation; especially for a thirteen year old. Mazel Tov to him.

A few other things came to me in the service. The first and foremost was the primacy of family, both that we are given by blood and that which we take in by choice — close friends, lovers, colleagues and mentors — as well as the wider community we inhabit. These are hugely important things in human life. I sometimes think these are the most important things beyond simple survival, and it’s a worthwhile temper to my internal ambitions and drive to consider what it’s really all about in that context.

The other thought I wrestled with started as a famliar gut level reaction to the implied subservience resident in most religious texts. Exalting your deity, proclaiming his/her/its glorious supremacy and promising obedience aren’t actions I associate with freedom or liberty or enterprise or creativity, so I sort of recoil from that at first; reject it out of hand. But in reading through the accompanying text analysis in the service book around the story of the Tower of Babel, I started digging a little deeper.

As I said, the typical lesson of Babel is that we shouldn’t get too big for our britches as a species, and basically I disagree with that. I believe that people are what should (and in most cases do) matter to people. As per the above note on family/community, first and foremost we are all about us: we exist for, by and through one another. As such, I’m all for the exaltation of human works. Let’s go ahead and build mighty towers — or maybe shoot a few people off to the moon, or whatever — as a way to flex our muscle, make some history, and celebrate ourselves.

However, without some careful steering that line of thought does run us right into the Icarus ditch. Technological idolatry (fanboyism) isn’t particularly effective, and what’s worse it can blind us in important ways. We currently struggle with a global/generational crisis because for centuries we thought that treating the air like an open sewer was pretty much fine because of how awesome coal-fired power was. Flew too high, now the wax is melting, our wings are coming apart, and it’s a hell of a long way down.

It occurs to me that you don’t really need to subscribe to the notion that some sentient force created the universe to realize that the universe is frackin’ awesome, and that some consideration and awe of this creation is justly due. Whether this deference is to creation itself or to “the creator” is largely a matter of semantics, and perhaps the attendant humility is more important as a best-practice compliment to the manic, churning, can-do spirit of industrialized man.

So, for instance, I’m an environmentalist, but only of a sort, more on the spaceship earth trip than concerned with saving the whales per se. I believe need to manage the planet better because if we don’t life will suck and we may die in large numbers. That said, I really don’t want Polar Bears to swim to death, and I think maybe it’s a Good Thing to imbue the rest of the biosphere with a little divinity.

Quite often I find there’s real value in the ability to blend seemingly inconsistent or irreconcilable ideas and traits. The Jungian Thing. In the Rabbi’s discussion of what made Jacob a mensch, she gave a compelling case for moderation — something that’s too often associated with bland, watered-down timidity, or bullshit equivocation (c.f. “bipartisanship”) — by talking about the need to be passionate, but not uncontrollably ruled by passion, and so on. Feels like the old, Romantic Polytheism.

At the end, I come around once again to a familiar vision in which the creator is creation, and moral necessity springs from the necessary practice of enlightened people existing in simpatico. Being right with one another demands some honesty, trust and charitable spirit, but it’s generally not rocket science to do the right thing. Like the soap bottle says, we’re all one or none.

It’s a great little suite of posts over there on “Top of the Pops” tonight. People are reading my best stuff:

• Don’t Give Your Heart To Any Old Ramblin’ Man captures the feeling of life maybe passing by while other things happen, and being torn because other things are also important. “I’ve never fallen in love in the midst of a workaholic bender. I’ve never even come close.”
• My Favorite Soul Songs From The ’70s goes right along with It’s Our Turn and all the other good feelings I got out of being in NYC when Obama won; good candle-lit conversations in the back of a bar with very old wooden floors and cold breath-freezing mornings with a long overcoat and Gimme Coffee.

• Johnny Sunshine Blows It On Healthcare is a now outdated topical lead into a good rant about what’s wrong with our system, while Fumbling the Flutter is sadly still kinda relevant.

I’m done with my antibiotics, warn out and paranoid that I’m going to get sick again. Lots of possibilities floating out there in the world, but really I just want to unplug for a few days and hibernate. Maybe a bit of that in North Carolina.