I've never been much of a scenester. As a younger man I hung around with a pretty punk rock crowd, and later I lived within spitting distance during the great metastasis of hipsterdom in Brooklyn, but as often as I've stylistically appropriated elements of those (and other) cultures, I've never really felt like calling any of them home.

I wonder about this for a few reasons. I've been considering my relative lack of a peer group anywhere in California. LGD and the Redman are moving on up/out, to Portland and South America and various new forms of domesticity beyond. I say more power to them, and in a lot of ways it's possible that having them on hand as my crew was a contributing factor to my late psychosocial cocooning. Nothing like your old friends to make you feel comfortable. But the takeaway is that with them on the go, I'm going to have to find some new ways to spend my time.

Another prompt for this thinking is that the bounty of Facebook has been visited upon me in spades this season. In the past month it seems like there's a been a surge there outside the nerdy/poitico factions who heretofore were in the majority of my connects. I've discovered/been-discovered by old lovers, highschool and college crushes, and most interestingly a whole slew of my old fellow-artisans from the Experimental Theater Wing.

For, you see, this brings me to reminisce about those heady old days in 721 Broadway. Studio. It was a shining time; young and firey and flexible I was, making art pretty much all the time. Granted, ETW could itself be something of "a scene" -- though in keeping w/the above I shied away from that for the most part -- but it was also a real community, and the friendships that remained after college formed a foundation for, I think, the most positively connected phase of my life to-date.

It's getting to the point where one begins naturally, maybe inevitably, considering the year in review. Comparing, contrasting, looking ahead to what new things may come.

The new year is going to be different. For the past two and a half years I've been existing in a kind of insulated social world, living with old friends from High School and investing most of my energy in this business that I started.

The habits that I've developed as a result are going to have to change. Staying home on a saturday night to do the dishes, make a fire, drink some wine and watch TV... probably less likely to be in heavy rotation.

And that's probably a good thing. My life can be overly comfortable, and it's real easy to slip into a rut -- having external events force a bit of improvisation and self-definition may be just what's needed.

Like most people, I'm still figuring out what I want to be when I grow up. Sometimes I feel like I've got a good idea. Other times a little exigent circumstance is welcome.

Ultimately, my ambitions will drive me out into the universe one way or another. Too much wound up inside to ever really be satisfied in any one place or with any one thing. Feeling my way through to the new thing should be fun. There's a big beautiful world out there.

2008 is winding down. Quite a busy year. I've fallen a bit under the weather -- plague running rampant at the office -- and am generally feeling the decompression beginning. It's been cold at night up here, good for making fires and nice and contrast-y with the hot tub. Moon is almost full, and tonight we took a quick little night mission down to one of the overlooks by Luffenholtz beach where you can walk all the way out to the jutting end of a rock outcrop and watch the waves crash in on all sides.

It reminded me of when I first came out here, going camping with a girl up in the Redwoods north of Orick and walking/sliding down what turned out not to be a real trail, or at least not one made or typically used by humans, ending up on a coarse-grained sandy beach miles from the usual access road. We came for an adventure, and to carry salt-water back for cooking, and to make out a little bit. Something about the way the froth of the waves catches light in the night... connected those two moments for me. Made me feel like a page is turning.

Word to the wise: should you have any mid-to-large gauge body piercings, for instance a nipple, and you happen to own one of these lovely Apple laptops with the magnetic power adapters, be cautious when unplugging the end that goes into your lappy.

If your the type who likes to grab the plug and start coiling it in one smooth motion, and the magnetic end happens to hone in on the metal stuck in yr body, you're in for a shock. Literally.

So I've been rolling this one over in my mind a fair bit in the past week, thinking about what I want out of life, what/how I want to be.

One thing I want is to hold on to my far-flung cadre of friends, the bigger Family I have that's grown by choices. I don't have any illusions about everyone all living together in one big happy hippy compound, or cutting a swath of stylish destruction as a king-hell gang of city-dwelling bohemians. No, people want to do their own things, and that's cool. I'm good with it. There are 31 flavors and more. Please sample them all and stick with whatever fits you the best for as long as it feels right.

What I'm more thinking about is keeping up the knitting, maintaining fresh contact information and some sense of What's Up with all these people I fucking love so much. Keeping up the process of running them into one another whenever possible, expanding the network when appropriate, etc. I don't want to sound like an ass, but I like being a part of an elite crew. I'm ambitious. It drags me down being around sad or needy or low-caliber individuals. You know the tune; Rise above, we're gonna rise above.

I was talking the other day with my Gypsy Princess roommate, about how she's always felt the lure of travel, the open road, adventure. And the more she thinks about it the more she wonders if the life of a rambling gypsy isn't but one of many possible outlets for her inner desires, maybe the easiest and best-practiced and ergo most alluring in a default fallback kind of way. Life tough? Go travlin'. That always gets the juices flowing. But maybe there's something more out there, something more substantial, another expression, a way of being that answers the same calling, but more creatively, substantively, sustainably.

It's a heady collection of tags: authentic experience, nyc, love, sex, friends; should be a real barn-burner of a blog.

Back in Humboldt for a week now, feeling the raw world-conquering momentum bleed away into wood smoke and the smell of fallen leaves. It's not unpleasant at all, this country home of mine -- next week will be alive with family and friends; the way I fell in love in the first place -- but today it gives me a feeling of wistful sadness.

It seems I make myself a smaller person here, or maybe it's vice-versa with the Mother City making me bigger. Much as I believe the hype about the internet flattening the world, it will always be true that different things happen in different places. It was an immense recharge, to walk again the streets of Brooklyn, to feel the quick hard snap of real subway doors, the great heaping crush of humanity, densely packed ambition and excellence. I draw power from the capital of the world.

And it's not just the women, but I won't lie: they're a big part of it. I have a no kiss-and-blog policy, but this little slice from William Gibson has stuck with me since adolescence, and pretty much nails me to a T:

But Bobby had this thing for girls, like they were his private tarot or something, the way he'd get himself moving. We never talked about it, but when it started to look like he was losing his touch that summer, he started to spend more time in the Gentleman Loser. He'd sit at a table by the open doors and watch the crowd slide by, nights when the bugs were at the neon and the air smelled of perfume and fast food. You could see his sunglasses scanning those faces as they passed, and he must have decided that Rikki's was the one he was waiting for, the wild card and the luck changer. The new one.

I need to get creative again. I love blogging, but the truth is my sister CrowDawg is a lock to be the great American novelist in the family. And anyway my real bookish ambitions were always more non-fiction-esque (blueprints for the revolution), which lends itself to other formats perhaps more. So I think I know what I want to do.

I want to compete with Joe Felice.

I don't mean to literally try to beat him at anything -- much better to have a little co-opetition -- but rather to play in that space of DIY talking-head media. He's done a fucking inspiring job with his video productions, and I want to get on the bandwagon.

Granted, this is something I've made noise about a number of times before, so believe it when you see it, but I've been feeling for a while that I need some kind of change of pace, a more structured creative outlet as I said, and for some reason w/Obama getting in, feeling like I want that to mean something, reading this Krugman blog post and seeing the awesome graphic in the post below that Nica made, it all started clicking.

Here's what I would do: