travel

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.

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 is my “good” presentation. I’m looking a little haggard here — this is after two more days of being on a boat in Stockholm, and two more nights out with the king of Denmark, then flying back to spend Friday/Saturday nights in Austin, Texas — but this is the best Video I’ve got of my “inspired by Lessig” deal.

Someday I’m going to get my own projector, a foot-pedal clicker, and a few weeks of time, and make some king-hell presentation-art. Lots of potential.

One of the things I did while on my world-tour last fall was give a talk about Drupal and academia in the belly of a ship in Stockholm. And the cameras we’re rolling.

How Berkeley and Stanford University Use Drupal (Joshua Koenig) from NodeOne.se on Vimeo.

It’s not my best presentation due to jetlag/sickness and a funky mic (I also never really had my breath working right, a big no-no from Theater World), but I did a decent job of regulating my pace and I think it’s a more or less accurate talk.

Huge thanks to my hosts who cut together this video really well, and gave me some lovely liquor that I didn’t quite get to drink. Looking forward to showing them a really good time when they come out to San Francisco in April!

Back on the west coast, where I’ll be for at least the next two or three months. It’s been a long and winding road, and lots of fun, but I’m happy to be decreasing my rate of motion. Time to come to a more settled place and process.

There’s still a big load of things to get through before the end of the year, and I wish wish wish I had more time to digest and to write, especially to write good big emails to all the people I love. Maybe that’s a good holiday project. It’s a good way of figuring out where you are in life, writing your old friends.

Anyway, I’m safe and sound in rainy California, getting ready for a final couple weeks before I retire to the relative isolation of Oregon for a spell. More when I get the chance.

There’s so much to say. I couldn’t sleep last night even though I was totally exhausted. Buzzing buzzing buzzing thanks to the great city of New York, the Brooklyn winter market, and my utterly inspiring friends, family and comrades.

I am in a meaningful way a whole different person here, near the center of the clockwork. I’m looking forward to taking a few weeks off at the end of the year, figuring out next steps. It feels significant, the pull. More than just a jonez for city life.

Returning to the romance.

It’s been a dark fall so far, hard-pressed and shut in. I’m looking forward to getting healthy so I can go back to getting drunk like a sailor, heaving to and fro, freewheeling and going where I will. Getting out on the road was good, but work-travel is more draining.

High time now to ride another wave, to get up on it and roll. It’s unlikely that I’ll have any less work to do anytime soon, but like every self-help manual teaches (and my own philosophy preaches) the X factor you’ve got real control over is your mind, not your circumstances. Big changes begin as shifts in perception. Mad lib it. Fill in the blank with confidence and everything will be fine, or as fine as it can be.

So there’s an inflection. My situation can be seen as being overwhelmed by an unreasonable and untenable tumult of todos, or a raging whitewater sluice of opportunities to be rafted. We’re in the deep fast water now, the difference between going under and riding it for all its worth really comes down to attitude. If we head into this thing with joy, it should work out. If not, well, there’s a reason the skaters say fear is the mind-killer.

But what’s really missing from all this is the romance, and really it’s nobody’s fault but my own. I’m pretty much impossible to please, my desires in love taking on the same grandiose scale as the rest of my outsized ambitions, even as my ability to invest time, energy, effort ever dwindles. What exactly can you expect?

Of late I’m all wrung out and hung up, exhausted, scheduled, and sick. No room for special lady friends. No time to be genuinely interested even — so long since I’ve been smitten — just the dull sense that I’m missing out and a flickering hunger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m exiting Estados Unidos once again, waiting for my flight to Stockholm. I’ve stocked up on Sudafed and Airborne, so with any luck I’ll be able to give some coherent presentations Wednesday and Thursday. From there I fly back to the US, to Texas no less, to spend the weekend in Austin for another conference, and then a two hop trip back to California stopping in Tempe AZ for some work on-site at Arizona State University.

Generally speaking I like traveling to new places, or places I haven’t been in quite some time (like Austin). Being sickly puts a damper on things, but hopefully I won’t get any worse (it’s just been a malingering thing, which is what the Doctor said to expect) and even though I can’t party party party like I might like, the brain-shift from confronting new and different environs should provide some welcome stimulation.

And who knows, maybe I’ll meet some dreamy lady out there in the world, get jolted awake from my jaded romantic somnambulance. Either way, Kudos are due to Frank for that link, the latest in a long string of evidence that being environmentally aware is fully mainstream in all sorts of exciting and depressing ways.

I’m in Philly, waiting for my connecting flight to Raleigh, pondering information asymmetry. CNN is all abuzz about some flight to Minneapolis that overshot for some unknown reason. They just did another segment on it repeating the exact same shit they said 20 minutes ago. Meanwhile, the internet has known what happened for about 45 minutes:

But when the pilots of Northwest Airlines flight 188 became distracted it had more serious consequences as they overflew their Minneapolis destination by 150 miles. “They were in a heated discussion over airline policy and they lost situational awareness,” the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) explained.

That coverage is intermingled with two scare stories on swine flu (don’t trust water fountains!!!!!!@@@!) and important coverage of a Microsoft publicity stunt to sell a Whopper in Japan with seven beef patties.

I am inclined to think this is the sort of thing that helps the terrorists win.

But I’m not just being snarky. Being connected online can give you access to much higher quality data about the world. That’s pretty good. It can also put you in a strange sub-reality bubble. How do you know where you are? Well, really, you don’t. Take your best gut guess. Subjectivity! It could all be the matrix!

However, it seems blindingly obvious that the chattering coming from a 24-hour news network will probably leave you in a kind of info-stupor, if not agressively misinformed, or exposed to financial risk. Or maybe the matrix is just really really stupid. If I could, I’d embed a clip from Idiocracy, but that’s not allowed because NewsCorp doesn’t believe in fair use.