Notes from the KoneZone:

Lately it occurs to me that this has been a long strange trip and there are about 10 million girls around my age in this here country and a lot of 'em are cute and I haven't had any real good fun for a while. Real Good Fun, maybe. It aughtta be capitalized.

It's funny, you know. Because last night I found myself at this party at Kim's house in the East Bay, and it was pleasently and un-pleasently like high school. I didn't really know anyone there other than a few good friends, but everyone was vaguely attractive and I was feeling out of it and slightly emotional, and I had to keep going back outside to sit down and collect myself and repeatedly come to the realization that I was not "living in the moment."

And that's the thing. When you're not really "in the moment," it's hard to have Real Good Fun. It speaks to a couple of my basic axioms: Life is holy and every moment precious -- which is both the reason for and primary entry point to the closest thing I know to enlightenment. And Presence is perfection, which is similar, but serves a practical method as well as being a useful diagnostic tool.

Lemme break that verbage down:

You can always ask yourself, "am I present?" And yourself is going to know if you're where you need to be. That's basic. You gotta trust it.

So anyway, this gets kinda mad personal and shit, because there are certain things that would take a lot of telling to unpack cleanly, and a lot of the stories aren't mine alone. I can't rightly write about some of the more saucy (and [in]formative) escapades I've had this year because the stories aren't entirely mine to tell. Some might take offense. I'll need to get clearance from people to mention things, or find a way to literarily obscure them. Or both. Probably both.

But confession is good, so here's a little bit of the truth. The last time I had sex with a girl was before I went back east for the RNC. It was wild, but not in the end something that made me feel better than I felt before. It was kind of draining, and at the same time even though it was pretty hard, it wasn't quite enough. In any event, since then I've kind of been flippantly casting my gaze about wherever I am; hungry eyes, but also wavering, unsure, heasitant.

You know, on some level I serioosuly beleive that this will get better if Kerry wins. Somehow that will give me some of my mojo back. I've been pretty deflated since Dean flamed out; maybe a change in political fortunes will have an echo elsewhere. No matter what happens, the presence of more personal freedom -- the election being over -- will bring welcome room for self-examination and change.

And I also really do think Kerry is going to win at this point. Honestly. I'm going to send a big message about it tomrrow. I'm willing to stake something on it, some hope. I've come to accept that it's not something I really have much conscious control over at this point; all I can do is the same as any of you: do all you can to get your people out there to do it... still, I'm feeling good.

At the same time, I do feel nervous about trusting that guy... but I really like what my mom said. She said, "remember when Clinton was elected, and everthing was about how he was 'my generation's' president? That wasn't true. He set himself up like that, but I never felt that he represented my generation. Kerry does. He's still got that in him somewhere."

Yeah... maybe. That would be nice, and I even kind of believe it -- check the clips from "going upriver" here; let me know if I should annotate them. But actually, I'm more excited about the fact that we might get to completely discredit the Bush administration by launching a series of investigations into their misdeeds so that we don't repeat history again. And maybe we'll get some shit-hot sunshine laws enacted to make sure the people can watchdog the whole process; take it back to the old-school. Transparency, bitches! That and cooler voting laws so we can do same day registration. And a popular revolt against the media establishment.

You know I once blogged to Sumner Redstone -- CEO of Viacom -- "Fuck you, Sumner. I will burn you down?" I meant that. Some days I really do want to be a HST-like figure on the internet. Justin Hall is my blogfather, don't forget, and he had more fun than me on halloween. I've got plenty more room to grow. But to really chase that dream, I'll have to wait until I'm in a position to really cut loose. That was late 20s for Hunter.

Interlude: here's what The Doctor actually said about his process...

I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant starbursts of writing from the book of Revelation than anything else in the English language." He elaborates that "you cannot call the desk at the Mark Hopkins or the Las Vegas Hilton or the Arizona Biltmore and have the bell captain bring up the collected works of Sam Coleridge or Stephen Crane at three o'clock in the morning[… ]It simply takes too much time, and if they've been sending bottles of Chivas up to your room for the past three days, they get nervous when you start demanding things they've never heard of[…]If there is a God, I want to thank Him for the Gideons, whoever they are. I have dealt with some of His other messengers and found them utterly useless. But not the Gideons. They have saved me many times, when nobody else could do anything but mutter about calling Security on me unless I turned out my lights and went to sleep like all the others…"

He would have loved google, so say nothing of technorati...

As I like to recall it, he got married and that only made him more weird, more free I suppose. If that kind of thing really worked out, man, there's no telling where I could go. Totally free of the need to chase women, all that nervous entropy gone; no more soul-drag to hold me down. Oh, man I could soar if it really worked out for me. I know I could. Of course, Hunter also got divorced, and recently married his assistant who's less than half his age, and I think that's rather something not to emulate. So it's not all a bowl of cherries.

The sentiment lives in me though; I could soar. Outide of being the most romantic damn thing I've written in the past eight months, this raises a really interesting question: why don't I let myself be fooled? Why don't I let myself be won over by someone else? It's not a really arbitrary question. I'm a good actor. I know how to nuzzle up into a fantasy world. I do it as art from time to time. I could do it in the name of fun at least once, right?

Well, for now no. It's just not happening. It hasn't felt like fun the last few times I'd tried getting lured into someone else's field, and Saturday night I actually ran away from that kind of situation. I met someone who was about as hungry as I was, but it just didn't feel right so I actually literally ran and hid.

I've got some work to do before I'm there. Hopefully part of that work is taking baby steps back to being ready for bliss by learning how to have fun again. I really would like that. We'll see how it feels in a week

Click Here and see if you don't get just a little bit excited. Just a little weensy bit.

Love you all!
-OJ