Got a new lappy. Built in camera. Fun:

Glamor shots whenever I want!

It's coming on the turn of the year, a time to draw up to my full height and survey the scene. I've been going around and seeing people I've not seen in a while, which has revealed that I really don't have a good 30-second explanation for myself these days -- you know, the kind of quick encapsulated "elevator pitch" of what's new and exciting in your life. It's not a particularly great or important thing to have in the can or spring on lots of people, but it's usually something I've got down pat, and the absence of this trusty bit of performance is indicative, I think, of the larger ennui with which I grapple.

Intention is a tricky bitch. It's hard line to walk between trying to force yourself upon the world and taking a back-seat role in your own life. One wants to be an active participant, to listen and respond in conversation with the universe, but at some point you've got to pull the trigger; and it sucks being wrong, to gamble and lose. It burns rare and precious soulful fuel taking these shots, runs down some energy reserve that seems to take an aeon to recharge.

I haven't done too well with decisions over the past four years. Most of the big things I've set myself towards doing intentionally -- personally, professionally, creatively -- have ended up going bust. In spite of this, or probably because i've had the good fortune to have so many fine at-bats, I've landed amazingly well: poised on the brink of a the best jobby-job ever; living the neobohemian dream; penetrating the global power-elite seemingly without even trying.

It's an old story. "...And I stumbled to safety" was designated the title of my autobiography years ago.

So I don't lament my lot in life. I am lucky and blessed beyond knowing, and everyone seems convinced that I'm bound for some sort of glory or another, an opinion I don't necessarily dispute even if it can get to be a bit of a weight to carry at times.

This is the first time I've been down to LA under my own power. Previous trips were at the outset of Vagabender and way back in 1994 when my dad took me and the step-fam down for the Rose Bowl.

It's an interesting place. Lots of bright colors, flash, sizzle, spectacle. It's structurally totally distinct, but reminds me of NYC more than any other city I've been in lately. Something about the international diversity, the smell of a liquor store/deli, the type and tone of affluence...

Tonight I hung out with Julia and my sister. We chatted it up, watched a little Wheel of Fortune, had two beers (one at a depressing bar, the other judgemental) and told some old stories. It was nice. I'm totally beat from the 4am wakeup for the 6am plane ride down here.

Tomorrow 6am flight to Los Angeles, there to stay with my sis, do a little biz, hang out with some friends, and attend my niece's Bat Mitzvah.

It's been freezing cold (literally) up here in the State of Jefferson, so 70 degree weather sounds like fun to me.

Goddamnit I want to go deep. I'm feeling all charged up, filled with turkey, yes, but hardly down for the count. I am full.

I want to talk about it and work on it. I want to find a stronger peer group for my pursuits; currently worry about boring my friends with my latest revelation, realizing the distance the exists with "normal people" when I stray into my specific interests.

Also worry that being kind of pent-up leads me to have weaker human ties... my heart's not not always in it to try and overcome that social distance. I'm impatient. The pent-up ball of energy and thought becomes an impediment to normal being. It burns away much of my ease, consumes my capacity to listen. Needs expression.

In my head it's all connected to girls. The romantic barometer weighs heavy on my overall mood, and my luck and fortune with the ladies figures deep into my own personal Tarot, my sense of momentum. Clearly I'm back into looking. It's a more purposeful kind, but it's still looking.

Oh how I long for some pillow-talk. Is that too much to ask? Hot oral sex and pillow-talk? Seems like a decent place to start.

I remain a romantic at heart. I believe in that internal gyroscope, that sensor of momentum. I want it to go crazy, wild so's I can feel it; one of the reasons I've always been so in love with velocity. Speed itself conjures forces, but that's not enough anymore. I'm looking for the long run here. It's a marathon, not a sprint.

But it's getting better all the time. It helps to write about life, and in addition to getting back into autobio-blogging, I'm working on reviving my correspondence -- the better to fan old flames from afar, you letch... what, like there's anything wrong with that? -- and trying to dig into my professional tangle of ideas through other outlets. Writing works.

I've got an opportunity (Allah Akbar!) to do a little retrospective writing about my days on the Dean campaign, the whole DeanSpace thing in particular, and perhaps maybe get it published as part of an anthology style book. So I'm going to be writing about this.

My style is to write what I feel, and some of what I'm doing is good, I think, but off-topic. Hence, this post.

Epilogue
For a minute it seemed like we might be branching out of the mean zero-sum game of traditional politics, like we could break the old muscle game, the turf wars, the whole 51% shuffle, everyone fighting over the same endorsements, the same TV show slots, the same pool of "likely voters." It felt like we really might grow our way to victory, take the prize simply by doing the right thing and widening the circle of participation.

Implicit in this vision was that if we went all the way, this is how the Dean Administration would be run as well. It represented the idea of a complete recapitulation of the Bush/Cheney gestalt -- not just a reversal on policy, but on the means and modes of governance as well. We dreamed of building an inclusive and transparent movement that could not only win elections, but also support a true national consensus; of the re-emergence of that classic standard of democracy, the Public Interest.

It was happening, and I believed -- still believe -- it would have kept happening if we'd made it past Iowa.

My mood has been vacillating back and forth a lot over the past week. Things are in flux, but the momentum is good. I think what's happening is that there are a lot of possibilities, a lot of change, and it's putting me in unfamiliar emotional territory. I go up and down and up and down, and after being static for a while I freak out from time to time. Must. Learn. To. Retain. Perspective.

It's good to be back home. The more I do it, the less I love sleeping on couches. It was a hard weekend in San Francisco. After the extensive (and expensive) partying for The Girth, Esq. I didn't really get back on the ball until Tuesday, and the schedule was full and heavy. Not a good time to be off your game.

I also had a purely platonic dinner with an old girlfriend that left me wobbly -- prompting the previous post about a lonesome crisis of meaning... "see how he selectively supplies context, the bastard?" -- and searching for purchase. It was one of those moments where you really really want to do or say something, but you're observing the world through thick bulletproof glass, listening to the muffled sound of yourself prattling on about something else, peripheral, dancing around it, wondering why you can't look this person in the eye.

So I posted that blog entry and emailed my #1 romantic adviser, Julia "Solid Gold Pussy" Henning. Writing helps me process, and Julia came back with some quality perspective. I feel better about the whole thing now, grateful even to have my dumplin' jumpin' for a change, but in that moment I felt positively 17 again. Whooof.

Thankfully the coming dawn and advice and a couple good working days reminded me that, yeah, everything will be ok. My direction is positive. Life is good, tomorrow another day, happy happy joy joy. You know the drill.

The crisis of meaning is upon us again, and it's back with a vengeance. A lonesome vengeance, to be specific, the kind that hasn't been around in a long while.

Taking a look back at the old Love page, we can see where my life left off three years ago, misspellings and all. Sigh.

The present moment feels most like 2002:

I'm after the other thing: the harder thing: the thing where you find someone you like and you make something between the two of you over time. And I don't know how to get that happening other than wait and see.

The trouble is "wait and see" is a very boring and unsatisfying strategy. It leaves one feeling rather powerless and at the mercy of the cosmos.

I'm not the same person I was at the age of 23, and I'm not in the same environment either -- not by a long shot -- but I remember what that felt like and it's close to what I feel now.

One response has been that I'm going back through my history, wondering about the ones that got away, or more often that I got away from and later regretted. This is a debatable thing to get into, rummaging through the old files. It can feel weak and crutch-like, but you might look up long-lost connections on myspace and find something that strikes a spark. I think it all comes down to the spirit of the thing. Also, there's that bit about learning from history -- and purely as a matter of science one can't rule out a blast from the past being the ticket to ride.

The point, though, is that there's a kind of emotional turbulence that's not been around in some time. Strange feelings are brewing inside the Konezone. Gut feelings; questions without answers that lead to whistful stares into the rain. Vulnerability and instability too. I don't know where (or when) The One will come from, but I'm pretty sure that as long as I'm pushing for it or stressing it, it's not gonna happen.

Fucking annoying, that.

The Girth at Hastings 2006 Graduation

He passed the bar.

This week I've been having a hard time getting up and at 'em. This is in contrast to the past several months where I've been up by 8am at the latest on most weekdays.

I dunno... it feels like some kind of weird senioritis-like plague. The holidays are coming up; the business seems to be working; pressure's off. I'm kind of in a lonely little limbo personally, pent up, a little horny, feeling like I should be getting creative instead of squareball workin' my life away. Raaar!

Well, I get out of town this weekend, down to SF. I've been here nonstop for six weeks, so maybe I just need a break, a little city energy to charge the old dynamo.

It should be fun. I have a cool summit on transparency, and the Girth is getting his Bar Results back (party!) and the Airman of the Year will be in town on leave. We'll no doubt get into some fine trouble.