Oh man. It's baaaaaaack.

Thanks to me remembering how to use sed and bash (handy dandies from the hardcore geek toolbelt) and updating a few PHP scripts from their clunky 2001-style coding, I've resurrected my "classic" content!!!

This is really good stuff, the first two years of outlandishjosh.com. That was a special time and place to be: North Brooklyn in 2001-2003, right in the sweet spot for the second-wave, before the war, and before the eurotrash and Single Guys In Finance started showing up.

Some of this is of course fantastically out of date, and my intention at this point is to bring it all into the new system... it's a TODO I may or may not ever get around do, but I'm happy to make the juicy stuff available again. Heck, if only for myself. It's as good as an old journal. Personal archeology.

Some highlights:

• Ren Fayre: Bugs, Drugs, Neitzche -- a gonzo account of my trip to Luke's graduation-year extravaganza at Reed College.
• For that matter, the whole Life section is pretty good. That's where the juicy stuff is.
• Bridgetrips -- I used to do a ritual of writing the thoughts that came from reflections on riding my old first city bike over the W-burg bridge.
• Performance Texts -- stuff that I wrote to perform in front of people in a theatrical setting.
• One Year Later -- a rant written on the first anneversary of 9/11

There's a lot of gold in the day to day archive of that old frontpage. Shames me every time I read it. I used to be so good!

Just a plug for my comrade Samuel Taylor's Blog. He's a kid I met from Minneapolis through MFA who I fucking love. His blog is rad; talking about his journey toward becoming a professional actor, as well as politics and his own brand of anarcho-christian philosophy (St. Francis style). You can't beat that. Makes me wish I was 22 again.

i took a tour of some of the women in my life from the past four years, recycling old quasi-relationships into new and interesting sculpture-shapes. that was a head trip. rekindled dead coals, found friendship, offended people, made bonds, dodged bullets and generally made mistakes: sort of a condensed version of the real thing. i haven’t been a particularly responsible or exemplary lover over the past four years, but i have tried, and i hope i’ve been as enjoyable and nourishing to my exes and quasi-exes as they have universally been to me - even the ones that didn’t work out so well. ladies, you drive me batshit insane in the best possible ways.

Plenty more where that came from.

I'll definitely be trying to recruit him into the Rebel Unicorn cabal as soon as I can.

And so another week begins. I've got to get back into the autobio practice (what this is trying to return to) so I'll recap my weekend. I want to be a little careful and intentional here, as I'm trying to walk a couple of lines:

• No a secret diary -- the original genesis of this whole thing was to open up my life a bit more and to lift up my conduct and being all around, not to have a place where I write things instead of saying them. It's a easy slip to have this be a substitute for more immediate expression, rather than the poetical mass-communication and aspiration I want it to be.
• Don't burn people -- I've gone over the general concept of what stories are mine to tell and what aren't, usually in the context of "kissing and blogging," but trying to get back into autobiographical writing means being careful about what I say about other people. I've already done things like remove old posts about friends who've become lawyers and have questionable google results because of something i wrote in 2002.
• Keep it interesting -- while I've got a certain confidence in the palatability of the reality-TV equivalent of blogging, I don't want to tumble down some hallway of self-obsession and inward-looking myopia. Intriguing introspection is the ideal; don't want to run off my little readership with a bunch of pathetic navel-gazing.

Anyway, enough disclaimer. This is an evolution. Let's get started. 1500+ words after the jump.

So the other night I was writing in my paper journal, and I noticed that I was talking about my own life the way I do about work when I have my Project Manager hat on. My first reaction was that this was pathetic, but then I checked that and I remembered that actually this is natural, and I do the same thing when I'm in an "actor" or "activist" mode as well.

So I decided to embrace it, started an open-ended todo list that started with "California drivers license" and "medical insurance" and ended up at the bottom with: wife, land, kids.

Heady, brah. No doubt influenced by my thinking a lot about Frank and Laura's wedding this weekend.

But I'm embracing this exercise and so I start to try and build a timeline around these things, because that's what you do when you're a project manager. If I'm doing it, I gotta do it.

So the upshot is that I figure I should have met and started a relationship with my wife by 2009, after which I've got five years or so to wrangle the land and kids bit. Prior to that there's getting a car and a dog to consider.

All this is assuming I stay on a track to remain in California. This is far from certain, but it seems to be the direction I'm headed for the moment, so I figure why not take it as far as it can go.

Now that I've got a five year plan, all I need is to meet some of those college girls that would ask you about that sort of thing. With 2009 as a milestone, why, my wife could still be in High School. Ho ho ho.

Kidding aside, meeting the women is perhaps the greatest challenge/unknown up here. I'm single again after almost a year of relationshipping. At the moment I'm not quite ready to really get back out there and mix it up, but it's going to have to happen sooner or later.