I'm just about ready to get down into it, just about ready to get back in the game. I've been rambling for the better part of the year and it's just about time to get a drop on the next thing.
Here's a question for you. Drupal powers The Onion. Why doesn't someone make a Newspaper distribution?
And here, to close it out, is most of an email I sent to Frank the other day, explaining my situation.
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From: xxxxxx@outlandishjosh.com
Subject: Fraaaank
Date: September 24, 2005 4:21:45 PM PDT
To: xxxxxxx@gmail.com
What's up? I've been busy. It's a strange place, my old hometown. I've sort of piggybacked off my sister's social network, friends of hers that I have come to know and like and the company they keep now... Last night I went out to a party at some punk kid house. Teenagers with mowhawks, people "off their medication" and the whole deal; it was allright. This girl invited me, a friend of friends who I'd met before and gotten high with on a couple of occasions. No sexual angle (at least not from my end), just good times and comradre.
There's a rock'n'roll mom there, three of her kids at the party, and this makes me feel less out of place even through she's probably pushing 50 and I'm at most a decade ahead of the youngest people there. Also, there was an astounding preponderance of tall girls. What do you say to a 20-year old who's 6'2"? Well, not much really... So it was the armchair anthropology thing but it was really something to see, and in Eugene no less. There's so much potential everywhere, you know?
I'm doing the best that I can to back myself into writing a book. Basically I think if I tell enough people that I'm doing this, I'll be peer-pressured into actually making it happen. That's now Nitewerk got done... What I think I can do is make about a third of a book and outline the rest and get some contributors who are smarter than me to fill in the blanks. Wrap it in an editorial throughline and get it done with some cool pictures and graphs and typography. Then I can use the text as script to go out and perform the ideas. It would also all go online to live and evolve.
Looking for places to start, I've been thinking about trying to do some really simple things with audio. It worked out ok on the road trip and I think it could be kind of bad ass. Put together some essay-type content that's written to be read aloud, a little music, kind of like the stuff I used to try and do at the beginning of every Axiom... mixtapes for the revolution. Work from that to chapters and riffs for the book.
Taking that idea a little further into the theatrical realm, I've been thinking of trying to write (or get others to write) radio plays we can distribute over the internet. It could be fun.
I've been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do; this perennial question of what does one want to be when one grows up. The Peter Pan rhetoric is a glib way to talk about it, but I generally find a lack of direction to be crippling. One thought that keeps resurfacing is that I aught to spend more time pursuing my own happiness.
I've never been particularly good at this, partly because I'm wired not to get off on openly selfish things. What that means though is that I'll often engage in seemingly altruistic pursuits for selfish reasons. My first girlfriend/lover Amanda used to call me out on that all the time. "If you do nice things because it makes you feel good. It's not any less selfish." Her point was that I should find more direct ways of making myself happy, that this might lead to greater overall... happiness. Philosophically it sounded a little tautological, but on a personal level it always rang true.
I'm plotting and scheming as per usual. When I get back you'll have to turn me on to a good yoga class. I need to break out the blocked-up chi.
peace
-josh
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Finally, you can now find me on MySpace, because I will follow the lead of Dan Droller.
