friends

So this weekend I’ll be jetting up to Mighty Oregon for a weekend retreat at gorgeous Black Butte ranch. As a sign of my continual resistance to maturity, the guest list:

• Steve and Hannah
• Chris and Meadow (and Logan)
• Zya y Marko
• Gina and Luke (and Elle)
• Hope and Bond
• and Josh

Perhaps I should be exiled to Mt. Bachelor! (to my national audience: that’s a Central Oregon joke).

Anyway, after that I’ll shoot all the way down to SF for a couple weeks. Need to figure out if/how I’m going to jet out to NYC while my moms is on the scene there, and also how I’m wrangling travel to/from SxSw in March. Looks like I’ll be something of a road warrior again!

This idea came up a few years ago. It’s been kicking around. Someone finally made it happen:

http://dearmarijuana.blogspot.com

Oh man.

Can you spell SuperFuckYeah?

Samuel’s going to the bigtime. Hopefully he can get me Omar’s autograph.

It’s been a hell of a good hot run this week, sort of like what I imagine a highschool reunion would be like if you only allowed the awesome people to come. Great wedding up on a bluff up above the gorge. They stride out man and wife to the Imperial March. String band, trancycake, camping by the highway.

Next day a quick flashback to my young young days stopping off in the town of Hood River — outside of which I lived communally and naked for a few good years, nostalgia for some (kindergarden?) school trip to the applesauce plant — as I headed south through the Mt. Hood wilderness area and into the golden folds of Central Oregon for a lovely (if abbreviated) visit w/my father on his and the step-moms little slice of heaven. I snag a piece of Juniper tree to keep in my car for the rest of the trip.

And then chugging up and over the Santiam pass — all the more striking being wracked from a king-hell fire season last summer — and back into Eugene. Vehicle running like a top, and new stereo blasting out great driving tunes. It’s been a flurry of reconnections and renewals, reminding me once and again just how effing lucky I am, and bringing back that great old sadness that we’re all spread out and only get together every so often. Seems like the reasons people peel off into their own worlds are silly (careers), compared to the reasons (the true postmodern family) you might stick together. But I know it’s more complicated than that.

All food for future though. For now a last little loose end to tie up at work, and then to see what exactly my mother has been cooking up down at the university.

It’s been a hectic week. In the words of the Gleemonex pitchman, My Empire is Crumbling. Things have been hard and rough on the work tip — the thing about the internet is that it’s a big web of interconnected things, which means that stuff well outside your control can fuck your shit up — and my personal sphere/living conditions are now in a state of freefalling flux.

Bike needs a tune-up, and we took a hard spill on a rainy metal grate on friday. It’s also tax season. Always a pleasure.

But it’s not all bad. The tree of liberty must occasionally be watered by the blood of tyrants after all, and the old empire needed to fall. Still, the loss of agency breeds insecurity and nerves. Change, yes, but is it really the change I want to see? Is this my idea, or just some stuff that’s happening to me?

On the upside, have had some good times in the East Bay with big dinner parties and svelt trouble busing in from out of state. Quote of the weekend: “why don’t you take your pig-love somewhere else.” Apologies are in order around that one, but it’s a undeniable gem of human language. Also, creative conspiracy abrew w/the one and only Joe Felice.

Later today I’ll roll back up to the HC and start my move there.

Crisitunity.

The hits just keep on coming. Here’s Chelsea in New Zeland:

http://chelseamotel.wordpress.com/

10 out of 10 for branding: an excellently clever title (Chelsea Motel = where Syd stabbed Nancy) and tagline. Who among us does not love Dogs, Weird Trucks, and Guitars?

Also, the Girth returned from Brazil last night with stories of visiting steel mills and dallying on Yachts. All this makes me wish I were on the road or something, but for now I’ll have to make-do with my fixie and the apocalyptically pleasant January weather here in SF. It’s comforting to know that when the world ends, we’ll at least have nice tans.

Follow the Redman and Dirt Woman through South America!

http://markandzya.blogspot.com/

Zya takes pretty good photos, so if they can manage to post those it’ll be pretty rad. Hopefully some documentation of gypsy button-making in action.

I’ve never been much of a scenester. As a younger man I hung around with a pretty punk rock crowd, and later I lived within spitting distance during the great metastasis of hipsterdom in Brooklyn, but as often as I’ve stylistically appropriated elements of those (and other) cultures, I’ve never really felt like calling any of them home.

I wonder about this for a few reasons. I’ve been considering my relative lack of a peer group anywhere in California. LGD and the Redman are moving on up/out, to Portland and South America and various new forms of domesticity beyond. I say more power to them, and in a lot of ways it’s possible that having them on hand as my crew was a contributing factor to my late psychosocial cocooning. Nothing like your old friends to make you feel comfortable. But the takeaway is that with them on the go, I’m going to have to find some new ways to spend my time.

Another prompt for this thinking is that the bounty of Facebook has been visited upon me in spades this season. In the past month it seems like there’s a been a surge there outside the nerdy/poitico factions who heretofore were in the majority of my connects. I’ve discovered/been-discovered by old lovers, highschool and college crushes, and most interestingly a whole slew of my old fellow-artisans from the Experimental Theater Wing.

For, you see, this brings me to reminisce about those heady old days in 721 Broadway. Studio. It was a shining time; young and firey and flexible I was, making art pretty much all the time. Granted, ETW could itself be something of “a scene” — though in keeping w/the above I shied away from that for the most part — but it was also a real community, and the friendships that remained after college formed a foundation for, I think, the most positively connected phase of my life to-date.

Certainly there were all sorts of other folks from other places in the mix there, but studio was at the heart of things, much in the same way that a successful fraternity or sorority will set the tone and establish a natural center of gravity. The two to three years immediately following college are among my favorites in life so far, eking out a post-postmodern bohemian life in the midst of recession and terror, the whole world up for grabs. It was pretty fantastic.

But this isn’t about nostalgia; it’s about the future. If there’s one thing I can predict for 2009, it’s changes in my social habits, some welcome upheaval in existing routines. Internally I’ve been doing well over the past several months, growing up in my own way, but I still lack a peer group. Seems like the thing to do here is tackle that issue head-on.

It’s a tough nut to crack. As an inveterate gap-straddler, I spend time in many different dimensions, none of which I can really go for completely. Genetically I’m predisposed to rootlessness: “at home” isn’t a feeling with which I’ve much experience. I’ve got plenty of friends who I treasure, but no community of interest, of purpose. It rankles that there’s nobody I really care to impress.

Perhaps part of the reason is that I don’t have enough of said purpose in my heart to engender the camaraderie I crave. That would fit with the vaguely unfulfilled taste my ambition leaves in my mouth.

My biggest project over the past couple years has been my business, and I’m proud that it’s successful, but I don’t feel drawn to the world of other engineers or the community of other businesspeople, even on the hip Silicon Valley/Open Source tips. I enjoy being an entrepreneur, and I enjoy making things happen with code, and I have good friends who do these things very well, people whom I deeply admire, but I just don’t see myself in those particular movies. My breakthrough role remains in the wind.

In the mean time I’ve got plenty of things to do, but there are a lot of empty spiritual calories in there, or at least an over-abundance of carbs. Am I ruining myself with doughnuts and cheap beer, or loading up for some new marathon? Time will tell. Until then I’ll have to keep pushing forward sans-scene, muddling along my internet businessman political gadfly late-nite writer performance bachelor little scene, trying not to take myself so fucking seriously.

Kudos to Dr. Robbins for achieving entry into a Masters program in construction mgmt. He’s poised to join the ever-expanding ranks of peers who out-certify me.

It seems like a trend these days, how people are shifting towards Green Construction and related fields. A good trend, mind, but I can’t help but think of the career advice from The Graduate, “I’ll give you one word: plastics.” It is, we hope, we fear, the boom to come.

Anyway, good to have friends in high places.

It’s a heady collection of tags: authentic experience, nyc, love, sex, friends; should be a real barn-burner of a blog.

Back in Humboldt for a week now, feeling the raw world-conquering momentum bleed away into wood smoke and the smell of fallen leaves. It’s not unpleasant at all, this country home of mine — next week will be alive with family and friends; the way I fell in love in the first place — but today it gives me a feeling of wistful sadness.

It seems I make myself a smaller person here, or maybe it’s vice-versa with the Mother City making me bigger. Much as I believe the hype about the internet flattening the world, it will always be true that different things happen in different places. It was an immense recharge, to walk again the streets of Brooklyn, to feel the quick hard snap of real subway doors, the great heaping crush of humanity, densely packed ambition and excellence. I draw power from the capital of the world.

And it’s not just the women, but I won’t lie: they’re a big part of it. I have a no kiss-and-blog policy, but this little slice from William Gibson has stuck with me since adolescence, and pretty much nails me to a T:

But Bobby had this thing for girls, like they were his private tarot or something, the way he’d get himself moving. We never talked about it, but when it started to look like he was losing his touch that summer, he started to spend more time in the Gentleman Loser. He’d sit at a table by the open doors and watch the crowd slide by, nights when the bugs were at the neon and the air smelled of perfume and fast food. You could see his sunglasses scanning those faces as they passed, and he must have decided that Rikki’s was the one he was waiting for, the wild card and the luck changer. The new one.

I’m glad to be mature enough to appreciate how things work above and beyond (as well as in and around) sex. Brilliant conversation beats mediocre fucking any day of the week, and anyway good conversation is how you scale those shining peaks of physicality. Takes time, but anticipation works. So I’m happy having a drink and catching up with an old flame, or striking up an honest new connection; not so much of an agenda, just moving on the moment. That’s how all my good times have happened.

It comes in a flood though, my confidence. Once I start feeling good about myself, quit apologizing, ducking out of eye contact, it’s hard not to go over the high side. Josh the Lothario is a natural groove for me; crackling with energy. “Because I can” becomes a powerful rationale: I’m a lucky guy; I can do a lot of things.

Indeed, I get a thrill having more than one love interest, and it’s time I owned that, quit trying to dodge/judge myself. As the man said, the only way to foster Love in your life is by being yourself at 100%, and so I choose (now) to embrace my polyamorous free-lovin’ playboy status.

But then it comes to babies, to the existential question of Settling Down. That posterized photo up there is me and Frank Edward Robbins VI, aka Freddy — or me being a god-fatherly figure here, “Fredo” — who I got to meet and hold in Greenpoint. A pure delight, and a clear indication of things to come.

Indeed, the first wave is on. LGD, author and progenitor of the “35 To 55” strategy will be moving to PDX in the new year to start his family. Jumped the timetable a bit — switched to a Patraeus-like surge, he did — but it’s a happy thing. He was ready, as others are rapidly becoming.

And yeah, I’m a family man in my heart, though not yet in that state of readiness. When I moved to Humboldt I took on a sort of homesteader’s outlook, putting myself through a nesting phase, but without another bird or any eggs. It was lonely, and in some ways a bit of a force, but overall a good thing for my maturation I think. I can feel the potential, the theory, a slick hot run of fortune and luck leading up to the Big Jackpot. It’s a fantasy, sure, but that’s what I need these days.

The question here and now is what comes next. Back in the country, my confidence wavers. The sheer logistics of my life here exert a powerful force: lots and lots of work (I am procrastinating right now, in fact) and a home 10 miles from town. The cute bartender down the hill might pour me an extra/full glass of wine and let me hang around while the waiters fold napkins and talk shop, but I can’t make anything of that. I turn to a shrinking violet. Strange. Hopefully that opportunity knocks twice.

Part of me wants live in New York again, and while my next move is into the garage here in Westhaven, I know for a fact I’ll be visiting NYC more often in the near future. It’s a big life, and I’m a big guy; need my big city fix from time to time.

For now I want to try carrying some more of that energy along, keep some of that swagger on me out in the woods. Unshrinking. Walking tall and getting “out there” out here too.