"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

San Fanciscan' It

I've made it down to my workaday summer outpost in the Dogpatch and my first home-away-from-home off in the Panhandle. Greeted by blue skies and sunshine. Initial city impressions:

  • Wow there are a lot of pretty girls. On the streets, in cars (presumably bars) and freight elevators even.
  • I've lost some of my nerve for fighting traffic on the bike. Those country roads and stationary machines have made me soft.
  • Or maybe it's that I haven't really been riding all that much, because these hills are harder than I remember too.
  • The living situation seems like it will work out great: nice unassuming roommate, wifi, extra-long twin bed (so my ankles don't even hang off).
  • The office hasn't been progressing too much in terms of getting fixed up. It's basically the same as it was last time I was here two months ago. That's gonna change.

After last weekend's outlaw mountain trip, I started re-re-reading Sometimes a Great Notion, which is probably one of my top 5 books, and have been slowly digesting the potential of having one foot in the city and one foot in the woods.

It intuitively feels connected to my existential crisis-of-meaning du jour, reconciling these seemingly contradictory aspects of my life. What I want is some kind of grand Hegelian synthesis: a future where my biodiesel hybrid 4x4 pickup carries me from Silicon Valley to the peaks of Trinity County in carbon-neutral style, and there's someplace in-between called "home" where the dog stays while I'm down in the city.

Is that kind of thing really even possible? It feels like maybe... it also seems logically like a bacheloresque way to roll, all that movement, or at best (see point #1 above) a "girl in every port" type of situation; but the dream includes a family of course, which begs a huge and unanswerable sea of questions, variables out of my control, etc etc etc. Hrmmm.

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Briefly Noted

First: more of Big Media Mark on the news. It explains a bit about his program, and has a nice clean-cut guy giving an even better soundbyte:

Other notes:

  • Had a great weekend visit from the Girth, JD and Shamus. We all (them, me and Mark) headed up into the mountains, Trinity County Outlaw style: guns, dogs, bushwacking trails, mad-dogging up mountains in Moammar the 2WD Scorpion. It was epic. JD has photos.
  • Things are all lined up for me to establish a base in the Bay this week. I have a little more work to do getting the pickup in order (adding a bed and a lock to the camper shell) but shelter has been secured and the wheel is in spin.
  • Work is going so well that we got to give our awesome Sr. Web Ninja a raise. Considering how integral he's been to everything over the last six months, it's very well-deserved, and for me personally it's a big warm fuzzy.
  • Got my Burning Man ticket in the mail, and Mark says he's all-in too, so it's on like Donkey Kong. Working camp theme is Rastafarian Navy. More plans soon, but if you want to get in on the action the first thing you do is procure one of those spendy pieces of paper they want to see at the gate. They only get spendier.

I've got a lot of wild loose ends to tie up but I feel great momentum, like I might just up and blossom one of these days.

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The Junk

After a pretty intense weekend, I feel a low drop. The physical exhaustion is expected (and I have some minor injuries to heal), but the emotional rebound is harder. It's like the day after Disneyland. I'm so bored!

One of the things I've been mulling over lately is just what it takes to get me excited these days. There are several threads to this introspection, so I'll try to tease them out with some kind of order.

Inhibition
I'm coming to realize that in certain important and meaningful ways, I've developed a range of inhibitions, in the form of insular routines, reflexive skepticism, and internal checks. This is kind of a contrast to my life age 18 to present, which was largely about the shedding of inhibition, tapping into self, going a Dragonball-Z with my chi and that kind of shit.

Maybe it's a weird thing to say as the proprietor of a website that's blocked by many major parental-control (or workplace-control) filters, but there it is. This has been a theme in my writing for the past several months, but I didn't hit on the specific word "inhibited" until someone used it -- or rather, the inverse, "uninhibited" -- the other day to describe an ideal way to be.

That's something I agree with, deeply, being uninhibited. It's in some of my favorite hip-hop lyrics and it stands at the center of what I construe to be personal liberation. Emancipate yrself from mental slavery and all that jazz. The point is, it's a bummer and a wake-up call to realize that's part of what's been going on.

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Mark Makes The News

Shazam! That's a bad-ass helmet and a pretty good soundbyte from the man.

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