juicy

Somewhere on the edge of the bell curve is the girl for me.

Notwithstanding the fact that it’s the intellectual equivalent of cocaine cut with baby-laxative — which let me tell you really isn’t any kind of fun, appealing though it may seem — there’s lately been a new spasm of comment around the crypto-racist tome The Bell Curve, a book that tries very hard to create an intellectual edifice in support of timeworn prejudices about who’s smart and who’s not based on skin-tone and “cultural background.” Poo on that.

This isn’t a post about politics though, so I’ll leave the debunking behind the links above. Rather, it is a jumping off point to talk about the personal conundrums of intelligence, or more generally “capacity for life.” This is a post that’s filed under “authentic experience, hubris, love” and “juicy.” So then, lets get to it.

First principles. Statistical metrics of measuring human capacity and/or achievement are suspect. Highly. At the same time, it’s also undeniable that there are differences in people’s capabilities and accomplishments, especially borne out over time. Equality is an ideal, something to be pursued in principle but impossible, even counter-productive, to enforce in practice. Different people do different things, and this is Ok, and probably Good.

Disclaimers aside, I’ve got good stats. Standardized general testing consistently puts me in the 99th percentile. That’s one in a hundred, one of 10,000+ in China, nowhere unique or even really special, but certainly someone who’s “talented and gifted,” as they say.

But it ain’t easy being a smarty-pants, as a casual acquaintance with The Simpsons will tell you. Being a bright person in a lowbrow world is stressful, and a lot of people don’t really make it. I think of the girls I’ve met who pretend to be dumb until it’s no longer an act, the freaks and geeks walled off from social contact out of self-defense, the poor souls who apt to self-medicate away their standard deviations from the norm. I think about the way that my own perspective as a 1-percenter creates pitfalls and traps.

I started working up this blog topic after I wrote of my recent experience becoming a “class-traitor”. Contemporary culture uses money as a crude proxy for human value, capacity, achievement. It’s near the top of that list of suspect metrics (right up there with “how many people have you slept with?”) I wish we could all do away with.

Having been raised w/my hippie values, money-as-virtue isn’t something I can really get behind. But you can’t help growing up a little North American Scum; it gets into your head. The struggle around that was what animated my thinking/writing, and I found it to be interesting and good to ponder.

Lurking beneath my riffs on fiscal solvency and the social distance it creates is a much more hairy bundle of questions about real human capacity, intelligence, energy, chi, whatever. Why is it that some people are leaders and others are followers? Why is it that some people are more charismatic, smarter, able to get more done than others? And if you think you’re one of these people, what does this mean for you?

I find myself stuck between the egalitarian and elite. On the one hand I believe that “everyone can/should be able to live like me, do the things I do, understand the things I understand.” But people are different. Regardless of what might exist in the realm of possibility, the way I live and the things I do are not accessible to everyone, and I want to be with my own. There’s an in-built drive to seek this, and there’s an undeniable allure to the notion that you’re a part of something special, discriminating, un-common.

People start using terms like “level” and “league” when they talk about this sort of stuff. “Big fish, small pond” and all that jazz. I’m generally uncomfortable with that talk. There are enormous problems with elitism and hubris. Just from a practical standpoint, exclusive cliques don’t work out well, whether they’re out on the playground or running the country. Once you start reflexively screening out people or ideas based on the perception that they’re somehow “beneath” you, you’ve started concocting your own downfall.

Yet at the same time, the pattern-matching part of the right brain and the evaluative and analytic part of the left brain are constantly at work categorizing the other human beings around us. This is natural, inescapable, and hardly without merit.

Perhaps this isn’t the sort of thing that other people get hung up on, but I find myself stuck on it a lot lately. After a lifetime of moving to bigger and bigger “ponds,” I took a leap into a much smaller and more private pool. It’s a more sparse social world, less ambitious and boisterous compared to what I’m used to, and I don’t have many people around who really understand what I do or who can play my brand of intellectual tennis.

Most heavy on my mind is how this factors in on questions of Love. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I need a woman who I can go toe-to-toe with on multiple levels, and this hasn’t been easy to find. Partly this is because I almost immediately slip into competitive modes of thought (e.g. “toe-to-toe”), and competition isn’t a great frame for romantic relationships, and largely because what this means in practice is that I’m terribly fucking picky. Except when I’m not.

As you can see, this line of thought is fraught with self-contradiction and hypocrisy. I’m uncomfortable with language I turn around and use two paragraphs later. I’m suspect of statistical measures, even as SAT scores and career achievements have been known to turn me on in a decidedly superficial way. I’m publicly shoring up my egalitarian conscience while internally hoping to find my way into an elite club of peers. The serpent is eating his own tail, and ain’t even shy about it.

Ultimately it is this inability to let go and roll with things that’s the greatest drawback to living in the 99th percentile. You’re inescapably conscious of your position, of your privilege. This very easily becomes an inhibiting kind of self-consciousness, a second-guessing one-step-removed-from-real-living meta-consciousness. Every superlative compliment you’ve ever received just reinforces the notion that you’re different, better, blessed. And yet you’re still lonely. You still make mistakes and do bad things and hurt people. Nothing changes, it’s just that you get to be more keenly aware of how it all goes, and of your own power and weight in affecting the situation one way or another.

I remember when I was about 14, one of my young friends telling me about his first-time experience of being in a mosh pit, the feeling of being able to move a crowd, to lean into the people next to you and have that really do something. When I was still in the process of discovery, exploring the reaches of my capacity and power was exhilarating. Every day a new horizon. Now it feels like more of a known quantity, and the whole thing is paralyzing well beyond the simple moral of Uncle Ben’s Law. Perhaps I’ve become to focused on the harm, rather than the good to be done.

Bringing it all back home, it’s not like this is an impossible situation. I have confidence that I’ll be able to let go and roll with things again. It just takes a lot to engage me, and without that it’s not going to happen. Much like okcupid’s advice to the Playboy, finding adequate challenges is probably my best out. There are always more horizons out there, and the best way to stay limber and avoid creeping stuffy aristocratism is to stay on the move. Never draw a box around what can be known and what can be done. There is no 100%, just infinite and unfolding degrees of closeness.

Like most of my peers, I don’t much like valentines day. It tends to be an artificial creator of stress, unwanted and advantage-taking. I resent it conceptually, even though in practice it has worked out on occasion.

A decade ago a friend of mine drove me from NYC to New England where my then-girlfriend was going to an all-girls college. The first love of my life. That turned out to be a very good weekend, the cold brisk Massachusetts air and light through leaveless trees, frozen ground and beautiful old architecture and heavy quilted blankets. Probably the best valentines to-date.

Five years ago I went on a first date, out with an artsy clever brash girl, a self-described bad girl, a girl who brought me gifts from the dollar store: this garish yellow notepad I still have (and use) today, and a bar of soap called stud which set the tone but was promptly lost. We had drinks at Beauty Bar, and it was the night before the big protests against the Iraq war. That one worked out alright too, even if we didn’t stop the war from happening.

This year I stayed home, begging off from seeing the cute soccer-playing girl I’ve gone out with a few times in the past couple months, probably signaling finis to that going-out. I didn’t intend for that to be the case, but the tone of her voice strongly suggested displeasure at our scheduling difficulties, or more specifically my lack of attention and follow-through in that regard.

It’s something I have some experience with, the way that women get gradually fed up with me and my half-heartedness. It’s not something to be proud of, but I’ve learned to recognize the scorn this inevitably brings, even in trace amounts.

I would like to be a better person, and sometimes I am. But I’m also fickle and picky, especially when it comes to women. At the same time I want them all to love me always. It’s literally childish, I know. This is one of the main reasons I’ve tended to avoid dating people who I know socially. It makes things simpler, operating without the additional pressures that a second-degree friendship brings. It makes it easier to play it straight when there are fewer people to please.

“People to please.” Jeebus, Koenig! This is how you know your life has gone off it’s philosophical rails, when you start thinking of your day-to-day like a public relations campaign. The truth always feels better, right? Even when it seems unpleasant and hard, especially when it seems unpleasant and hard.

Yeah, shit. So what is the truth? The truth is that my purposes and objectives have changed over the past several years, and my romantic sense of self has yet to really recalibrate. I was having a little heart-to-heart with my man Luke down in the Cornell Club, and I vocalized for the first time — which I’ve been saying and feeling in so many words some time now — that what I’m really interested in is finding someone to settle down with. Speaking the words made me realize how true they were.

That’s all well and good, laudable, obvious even, except that in tandem with this I seem to have lost my lust for visceral experience, the flame of Dionysus gone flickering, low and cold. Couple that with my vanity, my hubris and ambition, the height of my high-side soulmate standards and a recent spate of confusion about my life’s purpose and future, and you’ve got a potent recipe for long and lonely times, which is what the past 18 months have been, for the most part.

The truth is I really don’t care about sex for its own sake anymore. It’s not motivating. Well, that’s not really true. The more accurate truth is that I don’t care about sex as much, and I care about its consequences a great deal more than I used to. The cost/benefit analysis has changed.

This feels grown-up, but also sad. There’s a loss of faith in there, a cynicism, a dimness, a pessimism, even some fear. I don’t know whether this is just an aditudinal phase or the irrevocable effect of experience. I hope for the former, if for no other reason than life’s more interesting when one believes in mystical and potent powers which supercede the narrow realms of consciousness and logic. And because I don’t want to be ruled by fear. And because I have a lot of fun memories, and would very much like to make some more.

Something’s amiss. Pure fun is still nowhere to be found, and more of my philosophies are offended. “Presence is perfection.” “The most important thing is to stop struggling.” These are catchphrases for the self, yeah, but they’re also things that I have believed in, ideas I still intellectually embrace. Presence is more illusive than ever, and this paradigm of public relations — expectation/perception-management — produces crippling bouts of precisely the sort of “struggle” it’s most important to stop.

As the philosopher says, “beliefs are habits of action,” and in that light many of my so-called Axioms of Living are no longer things I can truly claim to believe, at least not in the utilitarian sense. They are not the principles that I live. Which is probably why I feel so estranged from myself.

The crisis of meaning has always been with us though, and the fire and the blackness wait around every corner. It feels good at least to be able to put my finger closer to the likely source of my discomfort, even if I remain clueless as to a resolution. This is not exactly new territory (as a survey of recent posts tagged “sex” confirms) but it feels more precise.

The best that can be said for artificial constructs like valentines day is that they provide a focus, an inflection point for things that are already happening. Learning is always a plus.

It’s been a good weekend, with lots of sleeping in and no drudgework at all. Absent the pressure-cooker mentality I tend to find myself a little listless and bored, especially in the recent aftermath.

When you’re a small child, the most boring day in your life is the day after you go to Disneyland. It’s a very high high, tons of stimulation, really kind of incredible if you think about all the psychic energy that gets built up by the whole Disney cultural complex. Anyway, the next day you’re one strung-out six year old, and you don’t even really understand what’s happening.

The trajectory of my adult life has grown up around projects. Productions, plays, parties, road trips, websites, campaigns… all variations on the general theme of engaging in an ostensibly focused effort to Get Something Done. At their best, they’re like little births; creative miracles born in the spastic passion of inspiration and carried to term with love, craft and care.

At their best or worst though, projects tend to leave me with that same Disneyland hangover. The stress and attention called for to see things through the last mile are (ideally) some of the highest functioning times we experience as human beings. Afterwards, our metaphysitcal children born, grown, gone, and possibly even dead, we wonder what to do with our lives.

War Crisis Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning
The boom-bust psychology of project-based living presents a very real series of pitfalls. The post-peak decompression is very often an unpleasant and inarticulate state of consciousness. Unlike intentional rituals of spiritual purification — which also tend to revolve around some peak experience, but have well-tested frameworks for what comes before and after — finishing a project (again, like going to Disneyland) is more often than not mentally framed as nothing more than a normatively good achievement. A notch in the belt, a feather in the cap, a ladder-rung clumb, at minimum some business out the door, something your parents would smile upon you for having achieved.

This narrative is deceptive. Nothing in it hints at the un-reality of “being done” or at the thousand challenges embedded in completion. It leaves us woefully unprepared for the sudden void that follows. At a time when we’re supposed to be Better Than Ever, we find ourselves empty, confused. We want to get back the good feeling, or at the very least we want to get away from this bad one. It’s a hangover, and like weekenders going for a bloody mary with brunch, the usual answer for us binge-oriented workaholics is to light into another project.

For many high-functioning people who live at the top end of statistical measures of human capacity, especially those who find themselves embedded in organizations or ongoing efforts of some real or imagined importance, this gradually evolves into a semi-permanent state of crisis. You start by working through your weekends to meet some critical deadline, and the next thing you know you’re (possibly subconsciously) planning on it all the time. You go from “performing well under pressure” to someone who requires and expects pressure to perform at all.

As someone who falls into this pattern via the putative pursuit of effectiveness — the first several steps at least are all about being proactive and getting things done — I’m forced to recognize the utter inefficiency of where this mentality leads. I’ve slept under my desk before, and in the big picture it’s never really been any more productive than disciplined and focused effort would have been. More damningly, at least to the supposed pragmatic goal, it has limited my ability to cooperate effectively with others.

Indeed, total devotion to a project is quite often a cover for sloppy planning, procrastination, distraction, a lack of focus and coordination. You may work 100-hour superman weeks, but what are each of those hours really worth, and how long can you keep this up, and can you really do it all on your own? If you’re truly concerned with effectiveness in life and grasp the span of time’s arc, you have to seriously consider these questions in light of the years. Without presuming to speak for all of humanity, for most people and pursuits I suspect the honest answers are “not a lot,” “no” and “no.”

No Control
This leads to a second great truth of Workaholism, which is that when you’re sleeping under your desk you’re not sleeping in your bed; when you’re working through your weekend you’re not being a social animal; when you stay late at the office or bring work home you’re not spending energy and attention on your personal life.

If you’re like me and you acknowledge that all of the above have happened, you must at least consider that there’s something more going on than a screwed up working process. Life may be out of balance.

When I was recently in Portland for a day of semi-forced vacation, coming in after spending the night at O’Hare airport thanks to the brilliant bureaucracy of United Airlines, I got a good chance to hang out with my friend Tommy. A few years ago he came into a little cash and quit his proto-bourgeoise office job — Quiznos for lunch whenever he wanted — spent some time unemployed, and is now pursuing a much more self-conscious path in life, and is vastly happier for it.

One of the realizations he related when we were talking on this subject was that part of what drove the workaholic cycle for him was the fact that his non-work life contained countless things that were both unpleasant and entirely out of his control. By contrast, his work was something he could excel at and complete and feel in charge of, that he could win.

I immediately understood this. Life’s events are a much more dicey and uncertain series of contests, often resisting any notion of resolution. For instance, in my own mind that monday: Will this girl call me back? No? Can I call her? Yes, but since she’s not calling you back it probably won’t help. You’re just going to have to feel this way and wonder. Welcome to no control, brohan.

This question of control jives very well with what I know from my research into addiction. One of the more powerful metaphors I came across was that of the doorway/shelter: in essence, addictive behavior functions as a portal into some alternative state of consciousness, and also an escape or respite from whatever is difficult about “normal” life. Or maybe the opposite order of events. In either case, it’s a cyclical interrelated thing, and one of the critical factors in what makes something addictive is that the results of the behavior become predictable.

In other words, although it seems counterintuitive — largely because of the warped way in which mainstream culture interprets drugs — addicts very often assert control over their life though their behavior of choice.

Regardless of whether one inhabits the speed-freak yo-yo pattern of a project-based life or the steady maintenance rhythm of a low-hassle cubicle job, it’s easy to let this creep in and take over more and more of your energy and attention, to become the primary feature of your existence. This usually happens because other things aren’t, or aren’t going well. That’s something to consider.

Bringing It All Back Home
For my own part, I know I’m quite lucky to have a job which rewards me quite handsomely for my exertions. Owning a business is like that. There’s a nice payoff in it for me, though perhaps this only enhances the seductive qualities of work. In any event, work-junk can deliver real benefits to my life, and if I manage my habit well it could really “work out,” as they say.

Yet that said, it’s a hard thing to wake up and realize the truth of an addiction. The first step is admitting you have a problem, etc. I often tell people that my one true vice is caffeine. In the realm of drugs I’m used to enjoying a couple beers or scotch in the evening, and when it’s readily at hand I will supplement that with bit of hashish, but these are things that come in and out of my life without creating any real disruption by their presence or absence. Kicking coffee puts me through real physical withdrawal, but more importantly I don’t feel like me without it.

I’ve never even tried to kick work. The closest I think I’ve come is Vagabender, but that was an enormous project in its own right. It was recreational, but it was also work in the sense that it required sustained and not entirely pleasant efforts to keep rolling. I have no idea the kind of withdrawal I’d go though, or what I’d feel like. It probably wouldn’t be pretty.

However, one of the other great takeaways from my addiction studies is that I don’t take part in the reflexive disdain that our culture promotes by default. Beliefs are habits of action, and so are addictions. That gets right to the crux. Some habits are better and some are worse, but very few can be judged one way or another without a real look at their context, the multiple overlapping factors that drive us.

So, I don’t necessarily even want to quit drinking coffee — though I would like whiter teeth — and I don’t think I’ll ever stop living my life around projects. I recognize the whithering of the rest of my life when work takes over, but the question is not how to “get clean.” Clean is an illusion. “Healthy,” however, is something to consider. Physically I don’t have too many worries there, but psycho-socially I have to admit real concerns for myself and my future.

There are simple common-sense things you can do to be healthier. You can go to the gym. You can eat better foods. You can floss. Socially you can spend time with your friends and family. You can tell other people truths about your life, share in the great fraternity of human experience. You can take in great and small works of culture. You can explore the natural world. You can have relationships.

For all those things, you must make space and time. You must set aside energy and the will to focus, at least enough to get you through the door, maybe more to keep you out there.

This is harder than it sounds. If you’re coming off some kind of junk you’re likely to find yourself at least a little numb. You may find yourself changed, marked, disinterested in the things from which other people derive meaning. It may be hard to relate, and the temptation to go back to what you know will be ever-present.

In time, with luck, the mind and heart will open and other habits of action will emerge. New and healthier beliefs will take root, the out-of-control nature of Life now an adventure rather than dark and stormy shitpile. In time, with luck, and hope.

Spending a week inside the Robbins Family Nest got me thinking quite a lot about my own rather barren romantic landscape. I’m being screwed by O’Hare Airport (as usual) and have several hours to sit here, so I figured I might try and organize my head a bit about this.

I’ve come to see my decision to relocate to remote Humboldt County in part as a semi-conscious decision to get away from women. In one way it could be seen as a sort of self-purification or monastic thing. Alternatively, it could be seen as a decision to flee. It’s unclear, but all in all the decision was right for me, and I am where I am, so I sort of try to look forward.

It occurs to me lately that sex and love are in some ways skills, requiring energy, attention, and more than anything practice if you want to do well. It’s like a bicycle in that you never forget how, sure, but it also really seems like the kind of thing where you can lose your edge; or, to be more specific, where I currently feel dull and edgeless.

So there are flashes of paranoia that, having taken myself out of things, I may not easily find my way back — that I could end up drifting along nonplussed by the world, libido curled up asleep inside me where I put it to bed. That’s an unpleasant thought.

And then, thinking of that mis-attributed quote about how our greatest fear is our own power, I’m immediately struck by the opposite idea, that maybe what troubles me isn’t ennui or boredom, but rather a fear of living, of what I might do or be or become.

That would explain this semi-conscious self-divorce. If I made a move to cut myself off from sex, I must have done it for a reason, and that reason probably has something to do with me not being very happy with myself.

And, thinking this, I know immediately that it is true.

When I visited with my Father and family, I spent a good long late night talking with my step-sister, who is honestly closer with my dad than I am these days, having lived with him as a teenager and stayed closely connected since moving out and starting her own family in Phoenix. Talking with her got me to consciously see my old man in a different light, one which I realize had always been there, but I hadn’t really thought of directly.

He’s this really classically moral guy, you know? And even though I have a great deal of confidence in my own moral fiber, I know I’m not like that (e.g. I’ve used drugs and have no compunctions about premarital sex). And even though I don’t want to be like that, apparently I’m not quite happy with how I am.

That’s what made me want to make “more sex” the counterpart to the “less work” lead-in for my new years slogan. In the past, I’ve found my best and strongest love interests in times where I was sort of free and sleazy. That sounds bad, but there’s a cycle that works between confidence and openness. Getting to the point of finding capital-L Love requires (for me) heroic feats of surrender and vulnerability. It’s a leap of faith; takes a lot of chutzpah. Feeling free to get laid has helped with that in the past.

For the last year or so, I’ve been fighting against that pattern: pining away over the lack of love, but keeping a pretty tight lid on my sexuality because for whatever reason I got it into my head that doing it that way was “wrong.”

Wrong? Immature, maybe, but where did that normative self-judgment come from? I don’t quite know, but there’s a lack of self-love there, that’s for sure. There’s something about the Shadow-self too, and something about permission to make mistakes. It’s a lot to figure out, but clearly it seems necessary to get past that kind of self-judgmental thinking.

And the real downside, beyond the simple lack of practical success, is the slow bleed of self-belief. That dullness I started out talking about is looking a lot less like a lack of desire or edge, and a lot more like a crisis of confidence. Intellectually I understand I have a lot to offer — not fishing for compliments here — but there’s a big gap between (for instance) knowing you’re good-looking and feeling hot. Until I really feel it, it’s going to be an uphill battle.

Similarly, the fact that my emotions and desires are beyond my control and could be compromising in a number of ways leads me to stuff the whole business down, even as I long for some jolt of something to break the monotony. I know this is no way to live, dreamless, repressed and un-romantic, but knowing that and living differently are (once again) two very different things.

In many ways this is familiar territory. Back in early May of ’07 I wrote a piece called Fumbling the Flutter (Or How I Realized My Sex-Drive Needs An Overhaul) which still feels very accurate. I have a certain low-level confidence that things will work out, but it’s sort of annoying to still be in the same place.

Hence the resolution/slogan: less work; more sex; flossing. I’ve flossed several times now, and should be able to take most of next week off of work. Hopefully the rest will come too.

I’m feeling it. Well, actually, I’m totally fucking exhausted to the point of being goofball jittery, but sitting here on a borrowed bed after spending a week dancing along the edge of what I can really do as a person, I’m all strung out, a little hung over, but sizzlingly alive. It’s hard to articulate. Words fail, but General Tso’s Tofu provides.

Earlier this week I visited with Bill, my Pa, my step-father, father of my sister, who was around the house from when I was about three until I left home and did me a world of good in-between. He and my mom had a really interesting relationship, one which reached a romantic coda when I was a teenager (and was ergo semi-oblivious to this, or perhaps just too self-absorbed to care) but they stayed together as a logical family unit until my sister left for college.

He’s married now to a wonderful artist named Patti — hence the domain name — who’s lives most of her life out in DC, and who he (and my mom) have been friends with since they were wild and young. Yeah. Life is strange that way. I remember meeting Patti when I was a kid in Iowa when we were out there one summer on the farm, her and her then-husband Skip — who was part of the wild and young thing too — come out to visit and break the news that Skip had cancer. Skip died. We all went to his funeral in DC. They played The Circle Game.

Patti is dying now too. Same cause. All things considered I was impressed by how well she’s holding up, and Bill’s doing a stellar job of taking care of her, but it’s clear where things are going and it was bittersweet seeing her; made me feel sick to my stomach to say goodbye.

And it feels weird and advantage-taking to say it, but that very real, heavy, pressing reminder of just how finite our time on earth really is is why I’m feeling the way I do now, which frankly I’m enjoying. Contrast reveals, and the old words sing: Life Is Holy And Every Moment Precious. Thanks, Patti.

Also fueling the fire is that I’m reading Dave Hickey‘s Air Guitar, and I feel he’s a kindred spirit in the over-use of five-dollar words and full-hearted embrace of the Public. He made it ok, seems to be happy and shit. That’s always nice to see.

To sum up, post-postmodernism recognizes and embraces the relativity of all things, understands that meaning is born from a web of associations, and takes away from this not just the apple-pie wisdom that “life’s what you make it,” but also a critically empowering lesson in terms of how things get made. We are procedurally literate. We see and feel the romantic keen of Meaning, and fill ourselves with the knowledge of it’s construction like so much Holy Ghost Power.

Everything is a choice, so, in the words of Jimmy Carter, “Why Not The Best?“ There’s just no time for anything but Love, but Action, but Brotherhood, but Glory. Anything less is marking the days, waiting on revelation. Nothing ventured isn’t just nothing gained; it’s really a gigantic cosmic loss.

I go back and forth on the Zen question, about what can and can’t be actively done or achieved through intention and attachment, what you might call “direct action” in life. It’s tricky. As they say, when the student is ready the master will appear, and all the great things in life will come to you in unforced moments. In the words of my mother, the universe is not a tease — but you have to let yourself go to it as well.

You have to be ready, to be hungry, to be willing to take a chance, to give yourself permission to speak freely. You have to have faith. You have to embrace your shadow self. You have to keep on plugging away.

This is a struggle for me just like it is for every other poor confused soul who braves the world free of easy fictions and light on the self-delusion. We all long for the comfort of certain knowledge, are envious of those who appear confident and calm. I know well enough that other people see that in me, and in this I take some solace, because it lets me assume that everyone else is really just as uncertain under the hood too. But that doesn’t make any of this feel less urgent. Gotta make something happen. Gotta believe. Got to be Free.

It’s scary to be here — to feel my spirit opening, like I could fall in love again, like I could get my heart broken — but scary in a good way, the Allen Ginsburg way, the way that lets you know you’re really on to something.

To be honest I have no idea what that something is, or where all this is headed. It’s just getting started, I think, and I want to try and Go With It even if I’m not sure what the goal is. I feel like my thirst for long-term/big-picture clarity holds me back and away from the thrum of the present. It’s a cop out.

So I’ll go with the flow, with the excitement. It’s keeping me up at night. Ideas. Philosophies. Business plans and political schemes. Thoughts of women and dreams of paradise. This is why they pay me the big bucks.

Speaking of which, in the meantime there’s still a shit-ton of work to do, a lot of boxes to check and a lot of miles to travel. It’s the hard yards from here until the end of the year, and maybe even a little into January, but after that… I have a feeling that 2008 will be a Whole New Thing.

On the topic of “the Good Old Days,” I have some semi-strong feelings. I’m as dubious of nostalgia as the next guy, and while I love the process of maturation, I fear and loathe the narrative of “getting old.” I have all sorts of fun memories of more free, innocent, wild and irresponsible times. Good times. Fun. Naturally given a more regularized, orderly, and subdued existence memories of pure fun are attractive, but those aren’t really what I’d call “the Good Old Days.”

What I look back on with envy are the times in my life when I really knew what I wanted, and felt like I was getting it, in both the big and little pictures — times when it could be reasonably argued that I was, indeed, “living the dream.” That’s what I’m talking about.

My early 21st-Century dreams may have been unrealistic, hazy, naive and fraught with delusions of grandeur, they were still pretty awesome, and to be perfectly honest I don’t feel like my dreams were wrong; I feel as though I failed in bringing them to reality. In spite of my (best?) efforts things didn’t work out, and in a series of dark skirmishes over 2003-04 the purest hopes I can go on record as ever possessing were all put to rest.

It can and has been said that I just need to get over it, and in some ways I have, but this is my history. It colors everything I do. It is why I am the man I am. I’m not trying to throw a pity party — objectively I know I’m lucky, and doing quite well — but I do wonder why, when talking with my two best friends and finally getting down to a level, I don’t have much positive to say for myself.

Previously I’ve lamented the creeping ennui that comes as a side effect of no longer living in a high-pressure environment, but really I see that as just a symptom of the larger cause. I felt mostly the same when I last lived in New York; it was just easier to ignore vis-a-vis distraction. That’s part of why I wanted to get out of there: to see what would bubble up if the artificial pressure were off.

Turns out what bubbles up is a tangle, a complex web of ideas and opportunities and people and places, desires and regrets. It’s life, and it’s neither fair nor easy.

In the face of this I’ve been somewhat indecisive. I have a hard time with compartmentalization. It’s both difficult and non-enjoyable for me to try and make strong decisions based on the single-track pursuit of work or relationships or anything abstracted from the holistic system that is my life. But the whole is inscrutable, almost unknowable, leading to some personal variation on the theme of analysis paralysis.

However, as Rush reminds us, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

Returning to some of the deeper psychic wells I have to draw on — fantasy + reality = experience — I seem to be suffering from a shortage of fantasy. Reality abounds, and objectively the real circumstances of my life are easy and enviable, and yet my experience remains marked by shame and confusion.

What up with that? Well, my cheap bohemian math suggests that it’s a lack of ideas, of myth, beliefs. Raw reality is bewildering and confusing. Even if one has a keen analytical mind and can “make sense” of the world, without some concept of where things are headed and why (such concepts as can only be given true life outside the iron cage of rationality) the spirit suffers.

I feel scattered. Since I was a little kid going to spend weekends at my Dad’s, I’ve been nurturing the ability to maintain disparate relationships, and as my life has blossomed over the past 10 years I’ve collected more and more of these. I’ve done a weird variety of things, met a motley collection of comrades, and built what could pass for a career out of bridging gaps. In positive manifestation, I feel connected (if not always strongly) to an absolutely inspiring array of people, places, processes and scenes, loving nearly every aspect of humanity. On the downside, integrating this into that holistic picture of life, the kind that will really let me make choices, seems to border on impossible.

The worst of this is that the indecision seems to be choking out my passion and enthusiasm. Without some vision (fantasy) to integrate a critical mass off all my interests, I’m left floppin’ around, fumbling the flutter. I fear and loathe the narrative of “getting old,” and I don’t really feel that way. But I do feel like time’s a wastin’.

Well, slow blogging of late because I’ve been pouring most of my psychic fuel into work. This month looks to be a record-breaker for those precious billable hours (oh, if only they were denominated in euros, or better yet barrels of crude oil), and it’s a good thing to be operating at Full Capacity, but it’s also a bit stressful. Not that I’ve been doing anything all that important with my spare time over the past few months that I regret curtailing, but shifting to 10-to-12-hour days is darkening the circles under my eyes, and drawing forth a great buried longing for true wild big-city-style partytime.

Honestly, I haven’t worked this hard since I moved out here, and the old mantra of “working hard, playing harder” is untested here in the HC. It’s been more like “work an honest day, then relax and maybe take a hot tub.” Different frequencies and extremities of oscillation, you know? How to cut loose and balance all the grindstone-nosing? Getting drunk, eating a huge meal and watching tv isn’t quite it. This is a good question for me to get into. It’s part of who I am — the lighter side of workaholism is that I often have a lot of fun under pressure — and it’s a welcome challenge to try and figure out. No gray hair yet, so I’m happy to keep experimenting.

In general it feels like things are starting to move well. Last week I got an unexpected email from my Father, saying he was in town on his way to San Diego, asking me if I could meet for breakfast. I haven’t seen or spoken too him since early 2004, which has been a sort of background-noise stress for me. It wasn’t like we had some kind of fight or falling out. He just pulled away, and I still don’t completely understand why except that it has to do with him being upset that he wasn’t a bigger factor in my life, something about the gap between expectations and reality. Regardless of the past few years of estrangement, I’m glad he finally reached out and we’ve re-established relations.

Things are coming unstuck all over though. I’ve been fighting work for a while, but have recently started embracing the whole thing again. The most important thing is to stop struggling. As much as I lament the hassle and the responsibility, it really is pretty cool to be rolling as a respected community-member in Drupal — which is basically a model for the revolution — and also making money and having a sweet office and starting a fixie bike sideline, generally being the master of my own domain at the tender age of 28. Maybe we’ll do a mil before I hit the big three-oh. That would be another box to check I guess.

But really the point is I’m starting to enjoy it more, starting to believe that it’s a real thing that will actually work rather than a house of cards waiting to collapse at any moment. We’re going to build out this office and we should have a real high-class operation in another year. That’ll be nice. For now it’s more time-and-a-half, but in the long run it’s worth it.

Also tingling my spider-sense is an increased rate of activity with The Ladies™. Nothing in particular has happened — the spell of celibacy remains unbroken — but I’m feeling more and more the eligible bachelor, and even maybe beginning to believe that I’ve got some prospects on this side of the continent. I’m still flighty and skittish for the most part — ducking and dodging what in latter days I might have pursued with relish — but even within that evasive mode of operation I feel I’m a sharp enough observer of the world to know I’m starting to get my mojo workin’ again.

This is important to me, as honestly my biggest complaint about life is the overall loneliness. So I like having pen-pals in Portland and chatting up union-organizing ladies on the last BART back to El Cerrito (even if I do demure and let them walk home alone). I like meeting techy girls and women with masters degrees (mmmm… brains…).

It’s interesting moving back “on the scene” because it tells me a lot about myself and what I want and what I’m confident about and what I’m not. Clearly, I’ve been spoiled by my years in NYC, and I can’t just troll for hits and expect that to work out. Also clearly, I don’t have much interest in girls (as opposed to women, cue the Prince riff) and strength/toughness is a must. These depths you only plumb in the cold and lonely days when you’re trying to find that queen of all your dreams. It’s not necessarily a lot of fun in the moment — lovesick, driftin’ — but the journey is most likely worth it, or at least so far I believe. And anyway, it’s not like I have a whole lot of choice in this.

These things wear on me from time to time. I still have no vision for the purpose, the crisis of meaning running stronger than ever, but I’m feeling more and more optimistic about the Konezone day-to-day. There’s a lot to do between now and the end of the year, maybe a lighter sleep schedule than normal, darker circles under the eyes. But whatever. You only get one life. Best get the most from it.

So, the old blog has been pretty much steady-set since March, and two seasons is more than enough for a single design. The uber-minimal dirtstyle plus the background I ripped from koshi had a nice feeling, but I’m not satisfied with it anymore. More directly, I’m also not satisfied with my writing lately. Feels like I’m lacking punch and flow and voice, the gonzo spirit at low tide.

Part of this is no doubt my own physical and spiritual fatigue. It’s been a long week, full of things I can’t quite publicly discuss, that other people might not understand; meetings with my attorney, an Iraq war trophy knife choping up 17-year old pain pills, dark glances into the abyss of post-modern capitalism.

Secrecy wearies me, and if it were all the same I’d turn my whole life into some weird performance piece, tell everyone all the shit I did. But it’s not all the same. The presumption that you might write something about an experience colors it for you, and people react differently under those circumstances. At a minimum, one must consider that an autobiography has other characters in it, many of whom may have bosses, some of whom may have discovered Teh Google, and so I feel restrained.

In the best of all possible worlds we’d all live somewhat more open lives, and whether or not there are myspace pictures of you doing keg-stands wouldn’t be an issue, but a shame-based morality is the spiritual companion to our debt-based economy, and so many of the best and truest stories of the human condition circulate as a sort of samizdat; secret underground utterances of the sort you get into trading once you’ve determined that some Other is perhaps trustworthy. “One time I got so drunk and then…”

I can see why those kinds of stories are fun to swap, and part of it is certainly the aspect of the forbidden or transgressive, but the hiding still rankles. At their core, these stories have value not as mutual blackmail, but because they reveal us in our most unguarded and vulnerable moments. This is also another reason why they’re sensitive, but it’s an indictment of our lives that we feel the need to be so protective, so hard.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to think of creative ways around it, considering a formal departure into more traditional gonzo journalism, the use of pseudonyms, etc.

This is an inevitable consequences of a pubic audience as the stakes move up. An alternative would be to Privatize this blog, as a number of upstart web enterprises would offer me tools to do. Basically there are plenty of ways to write and only have your friends read it, and maybe that should be enough for me, but I’m too invested in my own persona and too far gone into the ticklish gratification that comes from autobiographical exhibitionism. I have even developed the classic artists delusion that this matters somehow.

In addition to figuring out how to post more juicy bits, behind the scenes there are a ton of technical issues to deal with. The server that this and Vagabender are hosted on needs to be retired, and beyond visually refreshing things here, I’d like to take a stab at leveraging my alleged professional expertise towards achieving the mission of this website.

Which begs the question: what exactly would you say you do here? Well…

• I’ve enjoyed the turn back towards personal life-story over the past year, and I think the family and friends who compose around 80% of my audience have enjoyed it as well. I want to stick with that, perhaps augmented with a little obfuscation around the details to free me up a bit.
• I also want to do more writing that could have some enduring value, getting back to the old “this is your brain; this is your brain on the internet” concept that I’ve pursued over the years in fits and starts.
• Finally I would like to make myself a more powerful public aggregator. I find that I actually use my little “aggregamatron” tab above a lot, and I could do something even better that would at least be useful for me, if not necessarily interesting to everyone else.

The ultimate goal is to create a site that continues to serve my goal of keeping people I love up to date with my life story on whatever schedule works for them, but also has an increasingly “sticky” public footprint which can serve to help me promote the ego-goals I have in the wider world.

Oh, and I want to start making videos. Noel is a goddamn inspiration.

In the end, I write here and not on paper because you read it. Tell me what you want. Email is fine. I’m a hopeless pleaser.

It’s the last day of summer, a summer of many scenes, travel, exploration, some hard yards. You learn things about yourself, things you didn’t even know you didn’t know, those fabled unknown unknowns.

You might come back from Mexico and discover from your roommates that you displayed a rather more zesty case of wedding-fever the other weekend than was previously known. It’s all second-hand knowledge because you honesty don’t remember yourself, and it sounds kind of tawdry, but making out with your friends’ ex-girlfriends is a staple of Portland culture, so it’s all good, right? Right.

One just like the other, Sin’s a Good Man’s Brother.

You might have your friends from Burning Man roll through, and go on and on about your square-ass work history over pre-dinner cocktails, and find out that the one you had an eye for already has a man back home. It’s all in the game, but would you have found this out if you handn’t had a burned-up hand and talked a bit more pretty? Might it have played differently, more like you’d hoped? The world may never know, but you try not to stress it. You resonated. That’s rare and true and more than enough.

It’s been two good years since I’ve felt clear like I’m starting to, back around the last time I returned to Brooklyn, post-Vagabender, starting up as a legitimate young man. I found myself a pretty nice girlfriend then, or maybe she found me (as has tended to be my m.o.), but regardless we had a pretty good thing for six months or so in Park Slope. The Belle do Mois. As has also tended to be my m.o., I got lured away by another bright sweet one, a real peach, and then I moved to the hills of California and didn’t come back, lost her too. I wonder in hindsight what was really behind that decision to run.

Back then, just after I’d settled in Brooklyn, I came home to Oregon for my man Dave’s wedding to the lovely Jessica, and in the drunken evening after my mom and I had a kind of heart to heart. She wanted to know whether I was afraid of commitment, how often I was drunk when I met these girls. You know, good honest questions from the most authoritative Woman in your life. I was already in the process of re-evaluating my attitudes towards relationships, fucking, love, etc, but I think that kind of got me to face up to some real truths about what I wanted, where I was going.

My boys and I like to kick around “the 35 to 55” as an abstract concept, and it feels like roughly the right target for starting a family, but life and love don’t really run on a logistical schedule. A plan is just a list of things that don’t happen. I’ve done enough spins around the block not to care about being celibate for six months or more, but there’s no denying I’m lonely, and also no denying I’m playing an active role in keeping myself this way.

It’s hard to say. I’ve never been particularly talented at fidelity, and I’ve not always been so good at being up front and honest about this. It’s a shortcoming. It’s something I think about in guilty and regretful ways. I came out here and stuck myself in the woods, away from distractions I said. Took myself right out of the game. You can’t fuck up if you don’t play, but you also can’t win, not to mention the fact that it’s boring as hell.

With the 20/20 vision time brings, it looks more and more like a retreat of sorts. In many human ways it was a big move forward — living with good friends is something that brings me huge growth and joy, and starting a company wouldn’t have been feasible if I weren’t here — but in terms of Love, the big question, it was a kind of Final Ramble off the scene. I’ve been out a few times since I moved out here — a picnic lunch, making out with young mothers — but nothing past second base or three dates. As has been pointed out, apparently I need to fly across the country to get laid.

It’s a different world from Brooklyn, for sure, but the truth is I don’t apply myself. I’m not really “out there.” I have to give myself the freedom to make mistakes again, and I have to work on being more forward. It’s not really my nature to be aggressive or competitive when it comes to the ladies. Like I said, my m.o. is often to let them come to me, which doesn’t really work so well in these parts, and probably isn’t all that mature either.

I wonder about the times when I’m very drunk, superego peeled more or less all the way back, and this reverses itself. The other week’s wedding fever is probably a good example, and thinking back a couple years again I remember the first or second weekend I was back in Bklyn, going out on the town, really hitting the scene. That’s the last time I have blank spots in my memory. I left my jacket somewhere, made some questionable 2am phone calls that were only known because of outgoing call-tracking, etc.

Frank told me at the time I was like a Great Dane in heat, which is probably accurate and kind of funny, if not the most flattering image. I feel some unspecified shame around this area, but the truth is that this is how I’ve found Love in the past: going for it with gusto. So what do I have to do to get the cop out of my head without drinking myself blind? That appears to be the $64,000 question.

Life comes in waves, and patterns have a way of recurring. Not quite history repeating, but there are echos, resonance, familiar contours to the road. No moment is the same. There is no stillness. And yet, I feel like I’ve been here before.

Out at Burning Man, one afternoon I had a bunch of our neighbors over, interesting wild people a few years my senior, and was kind of bird-dogging this 30-something conversation about love and sex and relationships. When it came to my piece I was short and sweet, talking about being a romantic, a three-week wonder, looking for something true and being frustrated because “there’s nothing you can really do to go find love, no action you can take.”

“That’s not true,” my neighbor said. “The most important thing you can do is make sure you are at 100%, with yourself, with what you’re doing. That’s how you find love.”

It seems like good advice. I took it to heart. Out there on my journey of spiritual cleansing, riding the dusty back-roads of Saturday night, head full of acid under a heavy moon and Johnny Cash and Bobby Dylan on the boombox singing about the Girl From the North Country, I realized just how much I wanted love in my life again.

It’s obvious, yeah, but in my experience revelations are always obvious when you say them out loud. What makes them revelations is that they stick. They arc from idea to belief. They spawn new habits of action, as the Philosopher might say.

Anyway, that’s about all the navel-gazing I’ve got for the day. It’s a beautiful Saturday. I’m going to wrap up my hand, go out and enjoy the Equinox.

Well I have returned to American soil, LAX to be specific. I’ve got a nice four-hour layover before I can catch a wing up to Portland, hop in my truck, drive down to the Euge to crash out at my mom’s house, then get up at 7 and hit the road for the HC on Monday.

My hand and arm are healing steadily. It’s looking more gnarly than ever as you can see, thanks to the fact that we’ve reached the “crack n’ peel” part of the process. I’m trying to keep the outer layer on as long as I can but all it takes is a bump or jostle to create a new grisly-looking sting spot. I’m covering these with ointment as they appear, which is helping, and the areas that came exposed yesterday are showing promise. It just needs some more time, but I feel increasingly like a freak walking around with my hamburger-hand here in the first world.

Speaking of the first world… some thoughts from Baja

My experience with medical care, where I was able to roll into a clinic at 8pm, get treated right away, get antibiotics and a prescription anti-inflammatory, and walk out paying $14.50 total stands in sharp contrast to your typical US ER experience. I wouldn’t want Benito to perform surgery on me — until he’s finished his studies, that is — but the truth is that the majority of urgent healthcare concerns aren’t on that scale. In spite of what Michael Crichton’s brilliant TV series would suggest, not everything you’d go to the ER for really requires a hospital. Throughout Baja I saw lots and lots of small “24 medical emergency” clinics; storefront type operations, really. This decentralization of urgent care seems like a good idea. Jamming everyone who needs quick attention into one place creates all sorts of problems. Maybe there’s something to be learned here.

I was also struck by the much greater feeling of fraternity in Baja than I’m used to in the US. It may have something to do with being out in a rural area — La Ventana/El Sargento is pretty remote — but even though we were a bunch of gringo kids I felt like all the people we met and dealt with looked at us as equals, from the taco stand lady to the guy who helped us get our pickup unstuck from the riverbed.

It’s true that when I visited Cabo, down on the Mexican Rivera, the more traditional tourist/service-industry paradigm took over, and it was really kind of a bummer. Many of the gringos there seemed to fit more into the ugly American stereotype, and I felt guilty by association. Also, in Cabo the disparity of wealth is writ large in a way that the simplicity of our little desert hamlet masked. Sure we were in one of string of million-dollar properties lining the beach-front of what was (before the properties) just another fishing village, but there’s something different about palatial resorts and the franchises and tourist traps they spawn. It increases the distance between peoples.

A favorite local custom of mine while driving was hitting the hazard lights when there are cows near the road. The whole area is pretty much open ranch territory, and those cows (and the odd burro) are pretty adventurous and/or stupid. The not-so-infrequent road-side carcasses are a testament to this, and to the necessity of giving your fellow drivers a heads-up as to the potential for a spontaneous bovine crosswalking.

One thing Baja doesn’t have going for it is the lack of water, and water-treatment technology. It’s cliché that you “don’t drink the water,” but living that out (and thinking about it) gives some perspective on just how much real Freedom there is in having potable water piped to wherever you are. There aren’t as many sayings about it, but you also don’t throw your toilet paper into the toilet because of septic issues, which is a tricky habit to break, let me tell you.

All in all I have some mixed feelings about the trip. It was pretty awesome that we pulled it off, and the hurricane crew who were here the week before have some great stories to tell, but I’m not convinced it was really the best use of resources for the business. I’m all for teambuilding, but being in constant contact with your coworkers for 168 hours (or twice that) can be a bit much, even producing tension. I like that we’re all friends, all passionate, and share a number of interests, but given that I already have concerns over workaholism/work-taking-over-life, it made me wish there were somewhere else to get away to in the evenings sometimes. I also don’t think we were really 100% productive, which is understandable, expected even given the setting and everyhing, but considering the energy and expense outlaid to put ourselves there, why would we accept anything less than 100%?

That said, it was a great experience personally. I certainly got out of my comfort zone a couple of times, and even burning up my hand had some positive aspects. It forced me to reflect more than I would have otherwise, and the environment was pretty good for that. Coming on the heels of a the otherworldly experience of Burning Man (which is still getting its own write-up, though sadly now not really in true gonzo fashion), it produced some good-feeling insights.

Things I Have Realized

I realized, for instance, just how blatantly I’ve been keeping myself out of range of romance out of fear more than anything else. Sex and love have always been intertwined in my experience, and avoiding one is a pretty good way to skirt the other. Much as I bemoan my lonely state, it’s my own choices and habits of action that render it so. I’ve been rationalizing this to myself as a kind of jaded maturity, but now I think that’s just bluster.

The truth is I’m afraid of what might happen: of getting hurt, of hurting someone else, of getting into unknown territory where the possibility of both those things just gets greater. It’s weak sauce, really, because this is what life is all about; but as they say the first step towards finding a solution is admitting you have a problem. So there’s that.

I also realized in conjunction with the above that I’ve been looking backwards a lot, for similar reasons, when really I should be looking forward. The possibilities of the future are almost literally endless, and when I begin to entertain them I feel a real true gut-level sense of trepidation — “don’t make plans; don’t invest; shit doesn’t pan out, remember?” — and it feels like it might be that good kind of Allen Ginsburg brand of fear. The kind I know I should pursue.

Back when I was a kid, I remember one time I was being a real prick as only a kid can be. I remember Bilbo sat me down and made me write out the mantra I will face my fear and slay the dragon and darkness shall be turned into light 20 times or something. I think I was about eleven, and even then I thought it was hokey, but it stuck, and more than just being a perfectly awesome example of his idiosyncratic-yet-effective style of parenting, it’s also good advice. I’m not ashamed to go back to the well.

I’ve also been feeling pretty down on the whole politics tip (as my 9/11 anniversary post below will attest), which is a real drag on my spirits. For better or for worse I am a revolutionary at heart. I really do attach my own happiness and success to the fate of humanity as a whole, and I’ll never be truly content just making my own corner of things as nice as can possibly be.

Re-realizing that, I am forced to accept responsibility for my own feelings. The idea that some knight in shining armor is going to ride in on a white horse and lift up my banner (and ergo my heart) just isn’t rational or pragmatic. The core ethos of the New Freedom Movement obtains: move lateral. If something’s not working, switch up. Don’t beat your head against the wall. The most important thing is to stop struggling.

To that end I think I’m going to have to go back to the old book idea. I probably won’t write a book for publication, but I might write a similar number of words for free. The idea is to lay out the bigger ideas in a punchy and persuasive format. I envision these becoming a force similar to what “communism” was before the cold-war solidified: a set of social and political ideas which are subterranean to existing institutions, infiltrating the halls of power, fellow-travelers, all that jazz. Hopefully there wouldn’t be the kind of persecution we saw back in the day, but I think that’s a risk one has to be willing to take.

And in the mean time I’ll remain active in conventional politics of course, though for the most part I’m happy to have Matt and Chris as my proxies in that world, and with aiding extremely awesome causes through my profession.

Welcoming the Harvest

Autumn is upon us, a season of production, of reaping, of renewal. School is back in session, and I’m looking forward to getting back to class, so to speak. Work is going to be packed tight over the next two months, and I’m hoping I can turn that into a high and heady flywheel of energy rather than a just another beast of burden. Get up on it like in the old days and let the flow drive me. A frenetic dance of genius, not a workaday slog. We shall see.

I’m hoping this because, as per the above, I want to get moving again. I’ve been bounding all over the fucking place all summer, but it feels like I’ve been stuck in first gear the whole time. Revving the engine and burning tons of fuel, but barely creeping along. Lots of wasted energy, unfocused and frail.

It’s my favorite time of year really. It’s romantic. I think of New York and the crispness of the nights and turning of leaves and the newfound appreciation for everything that the relent of summer’s smother brings; makes me envy my sister a bit. She’s loving it though, so I can’t help but be happy for her.

And so I’m looking forward to misty-morning coffee, to steamy hot tubs, to sunsets at the beach and rainy runs down highway 101. It’s going to be a good year. It’s got to be. I can feel it.