Seems something I wrote has gotten some high-profile linkage. I'm just tickled. Have to pump out some more premium motivational content for the old DeanSpace, which grows ever more popular as the word seeps out.

Feels good to be a part of something that might be significant.

It's been a quiet couple of days here on the old blog, but not in my life! As you can probably guess, less posts here mean I have something "more important" to do. More important than blogging? Who the hell does this guy think he is?

Well, apparently I'm an asset to the movement. I've been writing up some things over on my DeanSpace Blog which people seem to like. I also get random complements thrown my way from people who seem, for one reason or another, to be impressed by what I can do. I don't quite know how to react to it all, taking complements -- recieving in general -- has never been my strong suit.

I also have a lot of random friends from around the world. My old ETW friend Emily and her man Klaas were visiting with us the past two days in the Bay. I last saw Emily in the Netherlands, where she and Kalaas live, when I was there on a logreport junket. I took these cool photos of them dancing -- back then when I had a camera -- but I never posted them. So here:

I also spent saturday hanging out with long-lost highschool buddy Chris Pruett, who's now a professional video game developer. We had a good old time talking about tehcnology, and about videogames as a future mainstay of cuture. In spite of what many of my adult friends think, as a medium video games have the potential to be a truly great avenue for storytelling and positive interactive experience as well as mindless fun. Personally, I find the scene to be exciting.

Chris is especially interested in the Surival Horror sub-genre of games, and is working his way through playing all the titles in this category, the better to understand and make use of the form. This tied in to the whole 28 Days Later line of thinking, what we can learn from fear and how to harnass the darker aspects of our human nature for creative ends. A lot of intersting thought buzzing around my head the past few days.

Happy Birthdays today go out to Frank and the Sister dude. Old pa put up a great Brieanna photo retrospective, and Frank set off to run 26.2 miles -- apparently his ankle started acting up on mile 12, but that's still a hell of a lot further than I can run. Good on ya both, you Leo bastards.

That Danny Boyle sure knows how to make a fine film, and humanity's inhumanity continues to be a rich source of creative fuel. 28 Days Later takes the concept of Zombie films and actually makes art with it while keeping the scare/thrill action intact. The performances are excellent -- I can't imagine many American actors being able to pull this off -- and the cinematography is brilliant. The best part is walking out into the sunny streets of Berkeley, and feeling a rush of relief and hope; the result of a filmmaker's job well done.

So it's bohemain forgiveness tonight. After my recent spate of emoting in a senseless and spurting fashion -- a whole day lost until I figred out that hard bike riding up steep hills heals you -- I feel kindly and purged. It's probably going to take a spell before I'm set, but this is progress. I feel meta-ready to be a good guy again.

The time and space I live in conspire against me, isolating me from that which I desire. But every little thing is going to be allright. It's a sad song still playing in the background, credits rolling, but I'm learning to let that go. Life is holy and every moment precious; wollowing about in emotional pigshit has little virtue. There's a time to let one's self go, and there's a time to check in and see if you've had enough free range melancholy. Yes, it's time to bring it all back home.

So I'm on the rebound now. For really. If you want to get in on the action, let someone know. We'll set it up.

Here it is: Republicans for Dean. 14 months before the election too.

Yesterday was purgative. Huge bike ride up into the bourgeois and oligarcic hills of Piedmont, high above the city of Oakland. I found a vista between two incomplete mansion-sized houses which afforded almost 270 degrees of amazing bay views. Sweated my ass off too, worked through a lot of shit. I'm a better animal for it.

Wow, posting that one link to back when I first came to the bay got me started reading my own archives. It's like reading an old journal; sifting through all the dirt for unlikely gems. Some of it, recent romantic history, to be specific, is too hard to read just now. I skip around the parts that might remind me of things I'd rather not remember at the moment. But I did finally summarize and blurt out an update to my long-suffering love page, so maybe that's good.

It's been the season of the bitch all over, though. Not just here. Look at my anonymous british blogroll buddy who's been carrying on in trans-atlantic style with a woman about half his age. He's just about where I am, so maybe this shit never gets any easier. He's backing him self with some Dali Lama wisdom. Well, I suppose heartbreak is a part of every life, so there you have it. But holy fuck it hurts sometimes.

On a lighter note, my own amateur punditry is inspiring to some people out there.

The slow rebuilding process is continuing apace. I'm starting to feel as though I have a skeleton life-plan again, something akin to purpose in this beautiful world. Hit up a San Francisco Dean Meetup, a grand old time. I wrote a couple letters to New Hampshire and then participated in a Dean Media Team video taping session with about 6 other people. It was a little bit forced to start, like any media event, but it was really interesting to see what other people had to say, and good to feel like what I said had some resonance with other people.

I really like the Bay area. NYC comparisons abound, both positive and negative. There's a certain blue-collar bohemianism here, something to do with community and open faces and good cheap friendly food, somthing that is conspicuously lacking in New York City. There's a kind of atmosphere of class consensus betweeen union workers and bike messengers, artists and computer hackers. The cost of rent may be comparable, but you can still get tap beer just about anywhere for two bucks, and that $20 you stick in your wallet can last a couple days. On the other end, San Francisco new money is classier than the NYC nouveau; it's frontier money, pioneers and explorers. You have your white trash, but there's something comforting about that, or at least preferable to meatheads. It seems to be a much more generally progressive place, or maybe that's just my western heritage bias coming through.

There are also a lot more people sleeping on the street here. In absence of a "quality of life" campaign such as Guiliani enacted in his time as Mayor, the fallout of a bad economy and jobless recovery are sharply obvious. The city also seems to largely shut down at midnight. There's still traffic, but Market Street and red-brick sidewalks take on the air of a late-night greyhound station as you make your way to the last BART for the East Bay. If they ran that shit all night long and halved the ticket price, the secondary economic benefits would be enormous, or so I imagine in my internal East Bay - Brooklyn analogy. As it is, the Bay Area mass transit works more like the metro north than the subway. They do have these nice rounded seating areas on the platform though. Much better than benches, more conducive to a friendly underground atmosphere.

So I'm starting to feel good here, at home almost. I remember this vibe from my first visit to the bay, and I do hope this turnaround continues apace. There's naggling doubt hanging around the edges, monsters under my borrowed bed waiting for me to turn out the light, demons of love's labor lost and a lonesome wind in the trees. It's all fuel eventually, but sometimes you can't bite right in. Sometimes all this emotional biomass needs deep-core heat and pressure before it becomes a source of energy. In the lesser days I just remember that this too shall pass, and in the good times I strive for my unconscious connection to the sublime, closing my eyes and feeling the sun on my face.

How did we get such a pack of poor talkers? I'm watching the Democratic candidates' forum right now, and it's really annoying how poor the oratory skills of our potential leaders are. I also find it wrankling when the moderator asks a question and the candidate, rather than answering the question -- or even attempting to -- launches into a tangent of semi-related political mumbojumbo. It would be so much easier to watch if they would devote at least 15 seconds to answering the question, and then launching into whatever sound-bytes they think will hit. I don't like it when people don't follow basic communications protocols.

Watching the people speak, Dean looks strong. He's the voice of reason, and the one who's proposing real solutions. For instance, on the worker question, he talks about how unions and the people who want to be unionized, need to organize and grow stronger, and that this is the way to protect workers, by allowing them to protect themselves. He also suggests bolseting social security by extending payroll taxes to cover income above $80,000, which it currently does now. Kucinich rants, lashing out at the others, looking mean, hunted. Kerry launches into a class-war tirade -- and a good one; good applause -- but none of them propose anything real.

Sharpton is a rare gem. He's unlikely to contend, but the man can speak. He makes everyone else look bad, and we need more people with his skills on our side.

Lieberman is such a weenie, it's ridiculous. He won't re-appoint Ashcroft; shocking. His quote on vouchers, "This is an experiment. Try it for a few years. Keep it to the poor children. Don't take any money out of the public school budget. See what we learn." Right Joe, experiment on a class of poor students. That's a talking point you want to promote.

Edwards is Clintonesque, mustering comforting personal tones, family connections, a smooth demeanor and delightful drawl. You can see why people still go gaga for him, in spite of being nowhere in the polls. Doesn't seem like the year to seduce the voters, but any idiot can see he's got a bright future.

First of all, this massive flash animation is cool. A bit heavy handed -- man does Dennis sound nutty from time to time; not what he says so much as how he says it -- but very cool nonetheless. And now on to matters of more substance.

There's been a lot of punditry in the past week that my man Howard Dean is peaking as a candidate. With three magazine covers and an efficient high-throughput/small packet fundraising engine, I look at it as "Dean cracking into the mainstream" rather than "Dean peaking." Let's think about it for a second.

It's still real early in the primary cycle. At this point in the 1992 process, Bill Clinton was still a hilbilly lawyer that no one thought stood a chance at anything. This time around the stakes are considerably higher, so it's natural to see things being stepped up. Still, Dean has a lot of room to grow in terms of national name recognition, and in any place where his brand equity is comperable to the other candidates he's in the top tier. He's officially arrived in the lead pack, true, but that's no reason to believe his forward momentum is slowing.

A significant portion of politically-inclined Americans remain interested but steadfastly undecided on their primary candidate of choice. For many Democrats -- those who's involvment generally comes to pulling a lever, if that -- Summer 2003 is far too soon to even begin seriously thinking about making a choice. While you can make a case that most party activists have picked a side, that doesn't mean anyone has peaked.

The exciting thing about Dean is that he's getting a lot of people more involved than they've ever been before. A quarter million signed up to get campaign email, 75,000 attending meetups nation world-wide. Dean talks about getting three or four million new participants in this process, and his campaign is serious about it. That doesn't just mean more voters -- though that's obviously the proof in the pudding. It means more people campaigning, more people having a stake in the process, more people awake and breathing. The internet provides a platform to organize this kind of distributed/decentralized campaigning, and while people would have scoffed at the notion six months ago, the theory is being put into practice with brilliant results.

And here's the kicker: the Dean campaign is just warming up. I know this because I have my hand in a number of pies which aren't quite ready to come out of the oven. Everything you've seen up until now is the work of a simple strategy, a good candidate, a powerful message, and a campaign that knows how to get out of the way. The real magic has yet to begin. There's a massive reservor of grassroots energy steadily growing larger, waiting to be unleashed. The humble beginnings you're starting to see now -- hand-written letters to Iowa and New Hampshire for instance -- are just a taste of what's to come. As meetup gatherings transition in pupose from solidarity to recruiting to action, prepare for a wave of people-powered Dean projects, open to anyone's participation. They'll range from from good-old door knocking to concerts to presence in parades, and they'll be organized without any direct coordination from campaign HQ. They will launch careers and change lives. They will reclaim the dignity of America.

We've got a beautiful scale-free organic network cooking here, and there's no sign that it's slowing down. Every new person who signs on adds exponential power to the system. The only reason people say it's peaking is that they've never seen anything like it. People have been declaring Dean as "peaking" for about two months now. They can't concieve that this new kind of organization, this new kind of spirit, has a chance of supplanting the old hypnosis of the boob tube which has been the hallmark of US Politics for the past 40 years. But it will.

Dean's campaign is offering something truly new: a place at the table for anyone who wants it. Rather than populist rabble-rousing or handing out didactic talking points or attempting to take on the role of strong father/protector, Dean appeals to the angels of our better nature to take a stand in our own lives, a stand for our country, for our future, to get involved as leaders on our own level. Dean's campaign represents an restoration of the American civic spirit; the sort of thing Nader talked about but could never deliver. It is about participation, bi-directional communication and in-person politics, about being a part of what's happening as it happens, because this is the only way it has a chance of happening. It's up to us.

Tune in, turn on, but don't drop out. We're turning this mofo around.