Some random response to my "art is church" bit o'er there on yr left with their own. I don't know if I understand this, but it sure seems like art: Mutant Eggplant. Heavy on the cactus. See if it makes meaning to you.

On the other end of things, my man Briit Blaser's got some fscking right-on things to say about terrorism, opportunism and the clowns currently in charge of the works.

Things are coming back together. Life is re-taking shape. As someone noted recently, I'm brused just about now, but I'm coming round. In dark times a ray of hope is a welcome thing. Still existing through that rough compression phase of the rebound, the part they show in slow motion on 3-2-1 contact, where you see the rubber ball actually squeeze into itself before bouncing back.

Yesterday I rode up Cyclotron road to the Berkeley National Research Lab, affording an even better view than yesterday's excursion, where I stopped at the Pacific College of religion campus and was astonished by the beauty of the bay. Nothing like riding up a big hill to make you conscious of entropy. Clikity-clackity clickity-clack energy drain; it's another one of those metaphors.

I'm learning again how to take care of myself. Listening to morphine and getting into better physical shape. It's quite something what an hour of bike riding a day and a few push ups will do for you. I'm eating good food and feeling pretty stress free in spite of it all. Hope and prospects are just around the corner, or so the self-pep-talk goes.

Ever since people started forwarding me Bob Harris's deft Kucinich vs. Dean tale of the tape, I've wanted to make my own to serve my candidate. Done and done as of this morning. It just hit me and I banged it out. You can catch it here: Why I Support Howard Dean Over Dennis Kucinich.

I also did some flame-warring over on this dkos thread. A little Sunday indulgance.

I got a bike! $35 flea market special: a hugely tall schwinn. I feel that this will impact the rest of my summer, possibly in a big way. Mobility == freedom.

I've been trying to listen to good music lately, keep the old spirits up. Sometimes that means Def Leppard for kicks. Sometimes that means a little U2 for nostalgia. Sometimes that means the Black Sheep or the Chemical Brothers or Jane's Addiction for drive. I still love good old Bob Dylan though; for the wisdom.

The evenin' dusk was rolling
I was walking down the track,
there was a one-way with a blowin'
it was blowin' at my back.
Trails of trouble
Road of battle
Paths of victory we will walk

That's a good one for the dark times. Almost as good as my all-time favorite, the "story of a ghost that come back from out in the sea, come to take his bride away from the house carpenter." But that one's a little meloncholy for now. Bob, you whistful motherfucker. Wish I was ocean size.

$1 beers always sound like a good idea. In praxis, the outcome can be debated. The morning after tells its own tales. A drizzle of a hangover blog today.

We spent the evening at the Acme, a faux-biker bar in Berkeley. There are bikers there, leather and all, but they wear full-face helmets and all appear to be well-off and in their mid 20s/30s, so I call them faux. But it's an allright scene -- friendly, good juke box. Luke and I had one of our famous booze-fueled arguments; debating the relative value of selling out vis-a-vis Ozzy Ozbourne and college and pro atheletes. He gave me a little better understanding of the sociological term "fields" as a middle ground between structure and agency. We had a good bumbling time riding home, me on Kim's girly bike, basket and all.

Praxis... this was supposed to be the summer of it. I haven't touched that document in months. Sad. Perhaps a resurrection is in order.

I'm trying to get on the rebound, the upswing, the return flight from shitsville. I remember after my bike crash this winter how afraid I was, the intense fear of running into things, a new fear, heretofore unknown. My tooth was loose and sore, and it would physically throb when I got a scare, a truck cutting me off or whatever. It took a while to get past that, to get back into the locomotive biker groove.

Continuing with my bike crash/relationship running analogy, I observe similar processes underway emotionally. Even when the immediate helaing process is complete, damage control, scabs formed and all, the psychology of beaten-dog persists. I'm hamfisted lonesome, clumsy and afraid of being touched. No one likes to cuddle the broken-hearted. Or at least this is my perspective on the world, flawed as it is known to be.

So I muddle. It's one of those times in life where you start to hear music differently, you start really listening to sappy love songs. I remember this happening about four or five months after I broke up with Amanda, my first love. I was a lot younger then, more reckless and obscure to myself. I didn't really know what I was doing, visions of sugar-plum faries dancing in my head. What happened was that she moved on quicker than I did, and in a much more real and mature fashion -- she's got a steady girlfriend now, fabulous woman, and they're moving to China together, no fucking joke -- and it knocked my 20-year-old ass for a loop. I recall sitting down for a friendly coffee and talking about our respective lives, the realization coming like a blow to the head, dizzy, seeing stars. Helter skelter. Not that I let on, but that kicked off a period of confusion and vulnerability that lasted about a year. I really didn't move out of it until after college.

However, as long as we're looking at history to be a teacher, it's worth remembering that I did some great creative things in the mean time. Even if I can't be girl-crazy I can be another kind of dynamo. It might even be fun, or at the very least productive. Yes, I know there's light at the end of this tunnel. It's probably a lonely light, cold and cyan-tinted, but it's bright and true and it will bathe me in what I need.

But you know me. I'm nothing if not impatient. I want the world and I want it now. I want to keep drinking coffee all day and night, never sleep, bleeding from my eyes and full of spirit. I want to run, duck, ride and fly. I want to slip free the bonds and space and time and financial circumstances, exist as a being of pure energy, moving at the speed of light, singing hearty songs of anger and redemption, an electric viking sailing off to sea. I want to be there.

I feel better. The fog is lifting, the blockages coming undone. This is good. I'm headed out today to see my man Howard Dean speak in San Francisco. First time live for me, and I'm excited. I've also been trolling through friendster quite a bit in the past week or so, and I'm amazed at how many ostensably interesting people there seem to be. I almost don't believe it.

Heard this morning here in The Jungle (a.k.a. Luke'n'Kim'n'Brian's house in the East Bay):

LUKE: What day is it today?

JOSH: The 30th

LUKE: No, what day of the week is it?

JOSH: Wednesday, man. It's Wednesday.

Luke has been crunching numbers for his research this fall, doing a slightly elevated level of data entry, tracking the path of several large corporations over the past eight years, 1994 to 2001 inclusive. This data will be used for a lot of thing, like looking at how mergers and acquisitions have impacted the global economy. Important stuff, but also mind-numbing I gather.

As for me, I'm working on a few things -- a site for people to meet new friends and a site for some good-guy lawyer back in NYC -- and trying to sketch out my life for the next six weeks. I'm an incorrigible planner; the desire to map the future springs from some deep well in my spirit. So I'm sweating a return trip to Oregon (gotta drop in on the daditude) and finding a ride to Black Rock City. It'll work out, but I'll feel better when the details are under control.

Wow! Cartoons are artsy again! I discovered Samurai Jack tonight. It's groovy; lots of amazing sound work and finely crafted images. It jumps from full-screen to letterbox and is light on the dialogue. It's mature content in the good sense.

Contrast that to the toons that pervade the "Adult Swim" programming block, which while clearly less suitable for children acually feels juvenile after watching Samari Jack. It's like watching some good modern dance piece and then watching a booty-bass video. Maybe that's a somewhat strained analogy, but you get the point.

Back in NYC we have some strange channel selections by the grace of the cable company; the majors plus the "new" TNN and Faux News. We used to get IFC, but lately that's been scrambled. Anyhow, there's a lot of media out there to which I'm simply oblivious. Broadcast isn't really my format, and I have a hard time stomaching advertising. But Luke has cable and has the tube on quite a lot; sometimes it's a bit of a distraction, and my general opinion remains that popular culture is going to the dogs, but every now and then I see something interesting and new and it gives me a little whiff of hope.

The old blog hasn't been very cheery, and I apologize for that. Maybe this one will clarify and explain. There's been some bad stuff backed up in me, and it kind of got suppressed and malignant. This website is supposed to be about the truth, but it's a lot easier when the truth is something you can swagger about, something that powers you. When bad things happen, I'm hesitant to talk about them; partly it's just shame -- no one likes telling people they've been cuckolded, for instance -- and part of it is my neurosis of not burdening other people with my own negative baggage. I greatly fear becoming a whiner.

But supression leads to internal purification. Last night it kind of reached a breaking point. After I wrote, Luke and I had a good talk about things. Lance that boil. Here's the shot.

I had a lot of Great Expectations going into this summer. The spring was kind of a magic time for me, what with the love and all. I was looking forward to coming out west in a blaze of triumph and glory. I envisioned a summer full of plans and platforms, a time when I would connect with all the people who mean something to me and we would form some collective understanding. We would create a bold vision that would lend our lives purpose and meaning.

I imagined the disparate pieces of my self -- the art, the politics, the technology -- and of my social network -- the monkeys, the meek, the object of my affection -- all beginning to settle into a grand and holy waltz of progress. It gave me the sense that everything was about to start happening, that exciting and positive times were coming, and I really liked the way this air of possibility made me feel.

Then one by one the wheels began coming off the wagon. I don't mean to attack any of these people I love, but the summer has been an almost parody-worthy cavalcade of disappointment. Sasha quit me about three weeks before I left NYC. I arrived in Berkeley to a house full of tension and growing pains. I found my cohort in Eugene to be up to the same juvenile stuff. The Oregon Country Fair was an exercise in confusion and bad planning. No one seemed to know how to communicate. And now I'm back in Berkeley with Lucas, wondering what the hell I'm doing out here.

Not that there haven't been great moments, but a record of only the high points would be mighty short. Everything seems rigged against us. In the past week even death has been on the scene; friends of friends and a close friend's father, their lives now just a memory. That kind of puts my personal heartache in perspective.

But what about that heartache? To be honest, there's a direct connection between Sasha breaking up with me and my weak tolerance for Monkey bullshit. When we were having the talk, the breakup talk, her central theme was "I'm through fucking around." Even though this was a pretty hypocritical line to pull at the time -- she cheated on me after all -- it stuck. It stuck with me because I realized I've been feeling the same thing for a long time: I don't particularly want to fuck around any more. It's not interesting to me. It's not fun. It's not cool. I don't see any point in it. Maybe it's growing up and maybe it's my ambition and maybe it's 9-11 and maybe it's just being fed up with the status-quo, but if we aren't getting fucking serious here and starting to try to build something, what the fuck is the motherfucking point?

So I've been thinking about all of these things.

She wrote me the other day to inform me that she's gone ahead and gotten together with the "other woman." This stings. I knew that band-aid was going to have to come off, and I was about half-way there myself, but having my paranoia validated like that... Josh Koenig was a nice guy, he didn't need this shit.

The upshot is that it's moved me right into the anger, a necessary stage of the grief process. I'll have to get mad before I can let anything go. She admits being selfish, and good for her, but having the courage to admit you're selfish doesn't make it any less hurtful to other people. I know this. I've been on the opposite end of this equation before, so this is clearly something in my karma.

But things are looking up. Now that this particular bubble has burst I'm starting to sense that movement is going to happen. I'm not getting back into the expectations game any time soon, but the wind is picking up and it feels good. Trust in the divinity of your forward momentum.