Things are smoothing out a little bit here. I'm starting to take slightly better care of myself. Beter diet, a touch more exercise. Hadn't been doing that very well as of late; tons of impulse control, ears back against head, a constant state of cat-like readyness. It was getting to be a pain. I've yet to hang loose in California, but I feel it coming. I miss New York like hell, and as my man the Girth forced me to admit the other day, I'm plainly not yet over Sasha (science for grownups... holy shit was I in love!), but in spite of this, I've got to jump in to where I am with both feet. Should I ever go back to those things from my past, it will be on new terms. Progress must be made. Take it seriously. Now have fun.

And you know what? It's working. A soft hand is a better means of steering the live-wire Koenig. Got to have a little room to maneuver.

Quick scan/A little Dada commentary: Iraq Said to Have Tried to Reach Last-Minute Deal to Avert War; In Anti-Abortion Campaign, One Leap for Incrementalism; British Police Brace for Bush Visit; In Deal for Life, Man Admits Killing 48 Women; Action Figures Proliferate; Soldier Accused as Coward.

Oooh, let's have a snarky soap opera of a blog for once, why don't we?

It's not like my relationships are any better than anyone elses. For the most part I have no relationships, but being surrounded by various kinds of unhealthy couple moments this weekend made me for a moment proud to be single. Or rather, it made me feel gross and uncomforable, which in turn evoked a kind of reactionary, atavistic bachelor pride.

This bravado was summarally deflated when a girl approached me at the bar on Friday night and I went to pieces like a 16-year old.

She was a stranger to me at the time, but I gather now a friend of a friend. She looked at me just as we were walking in and there was a spark. I thought I knew her from before, she looked roughly similar to that girl I'd talked to on the phone a couple times but who'd decided not to ever meet me for a drink; tall, dark hair, possibly a slavic hint to her features. I panicked and walked past.

She followed very close. I could feel blood rushing to my head, the heat of her body behind me, a flustered sensation to say the least. This just from walking into a bar. I was aroused and excited, but then paranoid and defensive at the same time. Where the hell did this come from? Showing desire is declaring vulnerability. What the hell was happening here?

In any event, I mishandled it. She passed me, tugging at my hand. For a blissful second I didn't even think and went with her through the crowd. An elated sense of coming unstuck overccame me, but the power of doubt quickly took control and I started lagging. She glanced back once, let the light grip on my hand go and continued on to the back. I started after her once; checked myself. Looked back to try and see where my friends were. Looked at her again, stutter started and then finally headed on back to see what was what.

I was scared. I don't know what of, but I was not relaxed. "Do I know you?" I said in a highly accusatory tone.

"No... I just thought you were cute," was her quiet response. She slipped past me quickly and out the front I presume. 90 seconds later when everything made sense again and I realized the score she was gone. I couldn't see her anywhere. It was all over, all in the span of four minutes. So many things I didn't want to be worrying about then... who wants to be uptight? That little axe-wound of tension between my shoulders is killing me.

So I sit here, stewing slowly in lust and regret and Charles Mingus. Happy Halloween. Maybe I'll dink around with Friendster for a little bit. Lots of girls down here put up their Burning Man photos; a lot more squares too; interesting.

Maybe I'll think about what I aught to be able to be doing, engage my identity crisis in a bout of grappling, map out a plan of action for taking over the world. Maybe I'll think about taking care of myself for a change.

It's a rough time, you know. We've got a lot of problems; a lot more than we used to, it seems. We're quickly learning that we're not invincible. Though some still try to resist the lesson, the question on eveyone's lips is, "what do we do now?"

It's ugly to contemplate, to fully let in the awfulness of this world. But believing you have the power to change anything means having the guts to look at how screwed up it really is. If you want to get the high highs, the low lows come prepackaged, friend.

It's time we shifted gears here; got to start increasing our power ratio or we'll burn out in first. You gotta believe. Feels like a throwaway line at times, but it's also the fucking truth. You do indeed gotta.

We've got to bring more people into this process. We've got to engage another section of the population. We're doing really well, but if we settle in where we are and start just running on what we've got, the results are in doubt. We need to make a couple quantum leaps if we want to insure the full revolution.

Tom Friedman, the mustached man in the NYT opinion section, has weighed in with another of his bold realpolitik visions: because Saudi Arabia will pony up $1B in aid for Iraq and both France and Germany left us hanging, we are seeing the beginnings of the disintegration of "the West."

Perhaps. He makes a salient point that contemporary European politcs stem from 1989, by the fall of the Berlin wall, the end of the Soviet Union and a desire for multilateralism and shared authority, whereas America is defined largely by 9-11 and is casting about wildly for "security" as opposed to peace,denying the fact that our reason d'superpower has vanished. We are in very real ways on very different pages, and the question is open as to who's vision, if either, for the world will be the first to budge.

A good point, and one to ponder, but to return to the matter at hand, it seems obvious that he most salient factor in disparity of Saudi and European aid for Iraq is much more immediate: how will the money be spent? If we had an international open bidding procees for reconstruction contracts administered by the UN, something tells me that our traditional allies would be more willing to pony up the dough.

The shorter Tom Friedman: We're not war profiteers.

It's been a breezy couple of days, more social contact than ususal. I got to put up my favorite Hobo Lawyer for a night, a quick seven hour visit, and last night saw my friend Kate -- who reminded me again that I need to put her in my people page -- and some of her friends. It was fun and different, investment bankers and planners for the Gap, salesmen of fiber optic transponders. Even though I have a full time job for the first time ever, I'm still the token boho; riding my bike and pushing my non-profit. I get to take home the leftovers from dinner, not that I'm complaining.

Halloween is upon me. Not my favorite holiday because I'm poor at costuming myself. Nothing fits. One of the joys of being an actor has always been that someone else gives me outfits to wear. But I'll make a go of it for stress relief if nothing else.

Finally, pursuant to my last post about sexual harassment, I got a major boost from this bit of news:

A man described by authorities as a known sexual predator was chased through the streets of South Philadelphia by an angry crowd of Catholic high school girls, who kicked and punched him after he was tackled by neighbors, police said Friday.

Flash your willey, get beaten silly. Damn straight.

Ever feel the need to apologize for other people? Maybe it's a neurosis of some sort, but I often feel that the actions of other people reflect upon me as a fellow human being. It pisses me off, not out of some bleeding heart empathy with victims -- though there's a touch of that -- but because I feel like that's just one more roadblock that's been placed in front of me having better interactions in my own life.

I take man's inhumanity to man personally. War, bigotry, harassment; these are all things that tend to happen to other people, but we privileged straight middle-class white male Americans ignore the effects on our own lives to our peril.

I'm so sick of hearing about, witnessing, and being impotently enraged by sexual harassment. One girl at our housewarming party last weekend had a bad story about being the only person on a bus with some pervert dipshit as the driver. I've heard many more like it, and worse too. There's nothing I can do about it but get mad and feel like that just one more fucked up man out there attacking the foundations of trust between the sexes, one more man who's crapping all over women and making my life harder. One more man's shadow for me to escape.

And just today I read about this:

Yesterday, an openly gay Dean for America staffer who attended an event for Congressman Dick Gephardt in Iowa (as is common practice among campaigns) was pushed and grabbed by Gephardt staffers, one of whom derided him as a "faggot."

Here's what the AP wire has, and here's a much more detailed article with multiple quotes from both sides.

I know Hunter, the staffer in question. I met him when I was up in Burlington; he sat around and listened to me prattle on and on to a reporter for the NYT Magazine and then recommended the poem "Kuba Kahn" for me to read. He's a class act, and the fact that he got treated this way brings up similar feelings as the harassment story above. Two yahoos in Iowa attacking the foundations of trust between gay and straight men -- to say nothing of the foundations of trust between Democratic political campaigns. Two asshole men crapping up the world and making my life harder.

So I'm bouncing around the internet before going to bed -- my version of channel surfing I guess -- and I come across this site, the Anarchist Library and I click on the 9-11 link because I'm from New York and there's a post asking "why is conspiracy a dirty word?" or something to that effect.

So I think I'll leave a comment and lay my "conspiracies are disempowering" jive on these black and red beboppers, but then it tells me I have to register to post a comment. Yeah! Anarchy!

It occurs to me that my sub-par mood of late is probably in part due to the fact that I'm sitting on my ass eating crappy food getting under considerable stress for a good portion of my waking hours without regular source of physical activity. Know a good gym in San Francisco?

We had a housewarming party last night; a grand success given that Dan and I have put done no roots in this town as of yet. We half-filled our gorgeous apartment with decent people, liberally saturated with booze and food and loud music, and everything was cool. There was conversation and jest and sociopolicial debating, all the ingredients for a swirling cocktail salon scene sometime when we have a couple more connections. I got to talk art-school with some of Molly's student friends, which was refreshing but also made me feel a little old; a few years further out at least. In spite of the fact that there was no one there for me to romance, it was a damn good time. A sizling proof of concept at the very least.

That stuff makes me feel, makes me feel, feel, feel, feel, happy.

Day by day it gets a little easier, the new life. I miss rain and riding on misty mornings past McCarren park on my way to the bridge. I've hit that little stretch of Driggs maybe a couple hundred times over the past two years, and there's no pleasure like spreading your arms like wings and coasting under trees past green grass on either side in the middle of Brooklyn; that beautiful old orthodox church dome ahead on your left, the Empire State Building rising across the river on your right.

In weak moments, whistful or lovesick or something, I replay scenareos, how this or that might have been different. I remember being a teenager and in New England and the rightness of that, and how I kind of crapped all over it; made proud juvinile moves like I thought an adult would. Takes a while to learn these things. I playback the summer's timeline, wondering where I would be if I hadn't had a ticket to California. Pretty much where I am now, I suppose, but the possibilities tickle.

But hindsight is just a story, and usually a convienent one at that. You don't like being alone now. It's highly unlikely that a real solution to that problem lies anywhere in your past, as comforting as that might be to imagine. Better off roaming the streets looking for some bike-riding apparition to pounce upon than mining your past for nuggets of now-bittersweet memory. Chase too many veins of illusion and you might just get in too deep, suffer from a cave in or loose sight of the canary in the shaft, suffocate for lack of emotional oxygen.

The future is out there, and it probably involves a lot of people and places I've never seen before. That's a kind of comfort too, but rather of a cold variety on an unspoken Sunday night in California.

So in the face of dwindling time resources, my potential avenues of expression are expanding. I like to read and post over on the Daily Kos, and he's made the big leap to scoop, which means I now have my own diary there. While I'm currently using that for stuff that is more or less focused at that community, I may start doing more of my harder-core political noodling in that space.

I mean, it's not like many of you really need my two-bit advice on how to harnass the winds of change. Lots of places to go for that.

In addition to the Kos thing I'm going to also start pouring a lot of my pep-talk energy into my blog on Music for America. I might cross-post on occasion; I'll at least put up a link whenever anything good goes on. The point is that this spot is going to be more personal than anything else, back to the old ways.