Wandering like the wild geese in the west

May 1, 2012

As you may have guessed from the sudden dearth of entries, I’ve discontinued writing in this journal.  I plan to move the archives to my personal domain where they will reside alongside those of its predecessors, and once that is done completely pull the plug on my Typepad account.  This should happen by the end of June of this year.

I’m still writing, a new journal on a domain purchased just for this purpose.  If you’re a Facebook friend you know the location already; if not and you wish to continue reading, you’ll need to leave a comment below so I can contact you with the new URL.  Offer void once the plug is pulled, of course.

As always, thanks for reading. I hope to see you in the next world.

April 10, 2012

The riot of blooms outside the window – snowdrops, the white-blossoming bush that looks like honeysuckle but probably isn’t, the violet-blooming one that someone once told me the name of and I promptly forgot – reminds me this is my second spring in this little cottage and my how time flies, doesn’t it.  At the end of next month it’ll be two years since I left Austin and I’m still having trouble assimilating that info.  It’s not that I still feel I have nothing to show for the intervening period – quite the contrary by this point, in fact – it’s just that… well, I was just there.  How can it be two years?

2010: already so ancient.  Amazing how this happens.

Assimilation issues aside, I feel like I’ve done a lot of growing up in these almost-two years.  Maybe I actually have; maybe I haven’t and the real growing up is about to come now I’m facing life for the first time with neither parent living, in which case I likely won’t know for another couple of years.  I strongly suspect the former though.  My last few years in Austin I saw how developmentally-stunted staying in a town like that can make a person, especially when that person spends much of his time on a large university campus, city-within-a-city that it is.  I couldn’t keep letting that happen to me; the years go by too fast already.

As to how exactly I’ve grown up, I’m not sure I can point to one conclusive instance and say, “There.  That’s it.”  I’ve become more responsible with my time and money than ever before, which is often an effect of realizing there’s too little of either.  I’ve paid my rent on time each month: no matter what else, I’ve done that.  I’ve learned how, in my fiction-writing, to not be unhealthily attached to every word I turn out; I write a lot more copy than I’m going to be able to use, and where once I would have resented that I no longer do.  Creativity is apparently the one thing I have to burn at this point in my life, and while that by itself causes me no end of wonder, at the same time I don’t feel intimidated by it. 

I guess that is in some way its own form of grown-up.  I hope.

I expect I will nonetheless remain stunted in a number of ways for the remainder of my life.  I don’t necessarily resent that either; it just seems like my fate.  I will always bear the psychological marks of someone who maintained a substance-abuse habit for over two decades, who never had (or wanted) children of his own, who found himself rather late in life (and I can only pray that what I’ve experienced these last two years is indeed finding myself), who possesses a personality too volatile to ever truly get along with 99.5% of the people in the world for a prolonged period.

And so on.  That’s my path, it would appear.  Like anyone else, I’m shaped by the circumstances I’ve gotten – or have chosen, depending who you talk to.  Most of my life I’ve felt so completely not in control that the idea of choosing my circumstances was at best laughable.  That out-of-control feeling started to loosen its grip once I kicked the substance abuse, a loosening that’s drastically accelerated the last two years.  I can’t tell you how grateful I am to be aware of that.  Taking control of, and responsibility for, one’s choices is perhaps the very essence of growing up.  Or so I hear.

A broad-overview entry like this is one way I have of bringing a story to a close.  Fittingly so, as I’ll be shutting this journal down soon; in fact, this may very well be its last true entry, though that depends on how quickly I get the next one up and functional.  I will continue blogging in another (non-Typepad) location, never fear.  But the phase with which I began this journal is pretty much over; I’m not, I see now, going to be doing any significant wandering for some time to come, which kind of negates the whole original premise and sure as hell does so the title.  Instead I plan to hunker down here in California, delve into the identity and practice I’m building, and look for satisfaction from that very construction - from within rather than on the road.  Because it’s true: wherever you go, there you are.

Such a realization, far as I’m concerned, deserves a new journal.  There are more facets to the decision than that, naturally; I’ve realized in this last week that I’m fast approaching, perhaps have already reached, one of the handful of major turning points life is going to hand me.  But I expect there’ll be plenty of opportunity to explore that in the much more appropriate setting of the new journal.

Which is to say I’m not thinking much this morning about what comes next in that regard.  What I am doing is alternating between writing passages of this entry and putting together my plan for the day and just looking out the window.  The weather has turned rainy again and the bushes outside, the very blooms mentioned earlier, are dripping and blurry through the glass.  I can make out the colors but not, during the squalls that come and go, much detail beyond that due in part to the fog of my breath on the window.  Somehow it seems fitting – I don’t need to see something clearly to know it’s there.  As I was when I left Texas, I’m content moving forward in this fashion.

April 5, 2012

This morning I’m no longer so absolutely drop-dead tired as when I got home Monday night, though that’s largely because I’ve now had three nights in my own bed to help me recover.  It’s certainly not because the intervening days have been slow and leisurely; busy as ever, in fact, and today is more of the same and tomorrow doubly so.  Things just pile on of their own accord and are no great respecter of death in the family.  Once again I realize this is how many people with even moderately busy lives live most of the time, and once again I’m glad I’m generally not one of them.

Tuesday was preparing for the job interview and then doing the interview itself, which I’d say went pretty well in spite of the fact that practically up until the minute I walked in the door I was in nowhere near what could be called a job-seekering headspace.  (Meaning that the preparation was inadequate and I wasn’t totally sure why I was there.  But I covered for the first and pulled out of the second in time pretty adequately, and it was gratifying to see how easily I accomplished both.)  Yesterday was a meeting on the other side of the Caldecott of a small team I’ve gotten involved with that’s starting a consulting business; I’m the design/marketing materials resource.  Very interesting, but also very time-consuming and not liable to be putting BART-fare in my pocket in the immediate future.

Today is an EU committee meeting I can’t get out of.  Tomorrow is an all-day event in SF with a potential contract employer, talking about open-source CMS and networking and generally acting (I hope) like an expert at WordPress and site design and whatnot.  Talk about exhausting.

And always, always, there’s the follow-up.  Not that each of the aforementioned activities doesn’t generate its own, and in plenty, but that’s fine – that’s my career-path we’re talking about here.  I just want to be sure I’m not neglecting any follow-ups from my time in PA, of which there are more than plenty as well.  It’s intimidating to some degree, weighing family obligations against what I do in the rest of my life – not something that to date I’ve had a lot of experience with.

Last weekend I discovered I two first cousins I’d never met: members of the Baltimore branch of the family, daughters of the uncle who’d become so estranged from my mother by the time I started to grow up.  They’re both pretty cool gals – one is a professional book-writing coach, of all things – and I want to build on the start we just made, that thrill of the moment of mutual discovery that you have someone who’s kind of like you but enough not so there’s not still plenty to explore and there has been all your respective lives and you never suspected.  You don’t get many such moments in your life, I think.  I want to make sure that this one still means something years from now.

There are other family members I now want to stay connected to as well.  The aunt who I sorted photos with the day after the service, for instance – she’s only 80 or so and from what I can tell she’s as sharp-minded as ever.  She’s got some good years left in her yet and I want to be part of them.  Her daughter also: she’s more or less my age, self-employed, an artist and designer and Mac-lover and I feel like we have a lot to talk about.  The last time I remember seeing her was in 1986 at my grandmother’s funeral.  Another cousin, one of only two on my father’s side, I haven’t seen in longer; in fact I have no idea how many years elapsed since the last time.  But last Saturday she was just as tart-tongued and irreverent as I remember her from childhood and now I want to make sure she’s part of the rest of my life too.  The more family I lose the more precious the remaining ones become to me, newly-found and rediscovered alike.

“Rediscovered” also describes some aspects of how I feel about myself in the wake of this experience.  My sister found a large sealed shoebox with my name on it in my mother’s study and gave it to me without opening.  I explored its contents the morning after the service and it turns out that holy fucking shit, my mother saved everything from my pre-college life: medical records, report cards, early drawings, creative-writing endeavors - everything.  Large chunks of my young life that I wouldn’t have remembered unaided, and that’s even before we get into her photo library. 

I packed all those papers home with me on the plane, in my carry-on luggage because I don’t intend to let them out of my sight until I get them digitized and backed up.  It’s a huge gift, and a very unexpected one.  I wouldn’t have been ready for it ten years ago and while I’m not totally sure I am even now, I intend to do my utmost to be worthy of it.

Other follow-ups are more mundane in comparison, or at least more easily accomplished.  The 500-plus photos taken of our family house and property and the high school we went to and the Brandywine countryside: these need to be reviewed and sorted, the best ones posted to Facebook and the purely utilitarian ones (mostly of the house’s contents) set aside to aid where needed, in the pre-auction inventory for instance.  I need to bring my finances up-to-date and organize the trip’s receipts in case there’s money in the estate to pay for that ruinously expensive last-minute plane ticket and hotel.  And I need to start preparing as best I can for the deluge of photos and slides from the aforementioned library that I will first receive, then organize and convert to digital.  It’s going to be a very interesting next couple of years, to say the least.

I’m glad I’m well-rested for it.  For the moment, anyway.

April 2, 2012

I would say that if I’d known the day would be so sunny I’d have been up much earlier if the statement wouldn't be untrue on two counts.  The first is I did know the weather would turn nice – I’ve been following the Chester County forecast for a week now and this was projected to be the only reasonable day of my stay. 

The second is that I would have slept in anyway.  With less than 72 hours on the East Coast my body is still on CA time and I want to keep it that way.  Plus, I’m exhausted.  Clear, close-to-the-bone exhausted.  What a surprise given the circumstances, right?

Friday was the easy part.  On-time flights to Denver and then to PA on Southwest – this time I flew Business Select and got excellent seats both times that allowed adequate legroom, meaning minimum discomfort from my bum knee (did I never mention that before?  I’ve developed a bad right knee in the last two years and have been dreading my first flight with it all this time).  No checked baggage, easy rental pickup, minimum hassle driving to Chadds Ford and then checking into the hotel.  (Nice little hotel.  I barely saw my room the whole time.) Saturday was people, people, people all day.  My mother’s service went until noon, was well-attended (though not as overcrowded as feared) and very vocal.  People loved her and were grateful to have known her and had plenty of good stories about her, though tellingly enough most of them came from the latter part of her life: the part after my father died 35 years ago, during which she devoted herself full-time to teaching, activism and travel. 

After the service was the “tell the family how sorry you are” part.  I wore out after about ten minutes of that and spent most of the afternoon in a corner with a friend I hadn’t seen in person in decades and enjoyed that a lot more than I probably had a right to. The rest of the afternoon was huddling back at the house with my sister and two brothers who made it – the oldest, W., can’t travel due to his advanced MS – and having preliminary discussions about division of property.  Evening was dinner at my aunt’s retirement community nearby with the cousins and other extended family. Three full tables of family, and I had to choose the one where anyone got sloppy drunk.  Charming.  I’d say my mother, who claimed to maybe have been tipsy in her life once at most, would have been scandalized but then again she spent a lot more time with these people than I ever have (and know I know one of the reasons why) and probably wouldn’t have been too surprised.

Sunday/yesterday the cousins left and I spent most of the day at my mother’s house with one of her two surviving sisters and my own sister, beginning what promises to be a long and tedious but ultimately rewarding slog through my mother’s voluminous but poorly-organized collection of photos and slides.  My mother was, like me, what one cousin calls a “social historian,” which means she collected all kinds of memorabilia and souvenirs that someone one day might find useful when investigating family history or otherwise reconstructing the past.  I found going through her storage closet physically and emotionally taxing but still a thrill – who would have ever thought I’d want to read my mother’s diary from high school?  I didn’t.  I look forward to it now, though. Said photos and slides are going to be packed up and shipped to me in CA, as I’m the one who volunteered to first organize and then digitize the whole mess.  I suspect I’m going to be in contact with my aunt a lot in the next year or so, as she’s the one in my mother’s generation who’s most interested in this project and has a pretty good memory for who people in pictures going back to 1925 are or might be.  I‘ve wanted for years to know more about my mother’s family without having to get the story directly from my mother herself, as the older I got the more I discovered that she was what you might call an unreliable narrator.  Be careful what you wish for, right?

Also I spent a lot of yesterday taking pictures and movies of the house.  I expect it to be the last time I see the place before it gets sold and while memories of there are strong and I suspect will be for a long damn time, I still trust pixels better.  As much as you’re ever going to trust a configuration of electrons anyway, that is.

And this morning was getting up reluctantly – I’m exhausted not only because of events and packed days but because I miss my own bed and my cat and, of course, my nice little low-stim life and I haven’t slept for shit for the last two if not all three nights – and poking around the countryside, taking more pictures of near and dear places including the Brandywine and my old school and the like.  And getting a big gooey cheesesteak from Benny’s in West Chester to eat on the plane, and then rushing for the plane and taking off and landing and now waiting to board the final flight.  And whew, that will be that.  Why oh why did I try to fit everything into only four days, two of them mostly travel-centric?

Because I have a job interview in SF tomorrow afternoon, that’s why.  Or that’s the public version, anyway.  The private/family version … well, I previously referred to my crazy brother as such because it was easy and even perhaps slightly amusing in a grim way.  But there’s nothing funny about metal poisoning (five different ones in his case) and its long-term effect on a person’s mind and now that I’ve seen him for the first time in over seven years I realize that fully.   That’s all I care to say on the subject for the time being except that his presence was a major reason I planned my stay so short and a wise move that now shows to have been indeed.

As for my own mental and emotional state, I’m OK (apart of course from the effects of sleep deprivation).  Still no freight train, and by this point I’m kinda doubting there will be in the foreseeable future.  It’s just… over.  There’s really no better way to say it.

I’m writing this from the Denver airport on a three-hour layover, the first real downtime I’ve had since boarding at Oakland.  A few more hours and I’ll be home and it really will be over.  Life goes on – for some of us, anyway.

March 29, 2012

Something in the cottage smells like woodsmoke and I want to find it, if for no other reason than just to know what it is.  Last night I went to a goodbye party for a friend who’s quitting her job and going nomad abroad for a few months and, it being a relatively balmy spring NoCal night, they had a fire going outside and I came home saturated in its smell.  Everything I wore is now in the washer – I would have done the laundry today anyway just to have a completely clean wardrobe when I board the plane tomorrow – but I still smell last night somewhere nearby.  Maybe it’s my daypack, in which case good luck getting that out.

And if that is indeed the case I can only hope my seatmates won’t mind.  Carry-on luggage that smells of smoke is no doubt slightly preferable to that smelling of various bodily odors and general funk accumulated during long and hard use, and if memory serves I’ve had that daypack for four years now and worn it pretty much every day.

The plane is of course to PA, where tomorrow evening I’ll be landing right around rush hour after seven-plus hours in the air and a flight change in Denver.  In order to do this I’m getting picked up by SuperShuttle at 4AM, meaning that once I get my rental car at PHL I’ll be fighting my way through thick suburban traffic while in the throes of some major exhaustion, and just generally argh to that.  The timing’s good, at least: if all goes reasonably according to schedule I’ll be reaching my hotel room just about what my body clock will think is 4PM, the point in the daily cycle when energy is lowest.  Small blessings, indeed.

Naturally, it’s easier to concentrate on the minor details of the trip – the flight, the drive, the room – than on why I’m making the trip at all.  Twas ever thus, because who wants to think about burying a parent until you have to actually do it, anyway?  Since that will be the day after tomorrow, I plan to spend today solely thinking about tomorrow.  I’ll probably spend most of tomorrow thinking about tomorrow also, with the possible exception of those long dead (and deadly) hours on the plane when thoughts of the day after start to creep in.  While a transcontinental flight provides plenty of distance from one’s land of origin – it’s why many of us East Coasters, when we leave home, don’t stop running until we reach California – it also provides plenty of time for rumination when one is returning, however briefly, to said land of origin.  Nothing ever comes without a price.

And it will be a brief return.  One day mostly in the air, two days on the ground, and then a fourth mostly in the air again and voila: back in Oakland.  Just enough time for my body to be confused by the changes in time zones.  I had to schedule a job interview for the afternoon of my first full day back so I hope I can physically adjust fast enough.  If not, well: there’s always the trump card to be played, the “sudden trip home for a death in the family” one.  I’d just as soon not have to, though; it’s my business, and my family’s, and for the most part no one else’s and I plan to keep it that way as much and as long as I can.

We won’t actually be burying my mother, not in the literal sense; she gave her body to science.  (Just as my father did 35 years before.)  Not even any ashes to scatter; just a memorial service in what I expect to be the very-tightly packed meetinghouse right down the road from her home.   The meetinghouse was built in the 1700s when there were a lot fewer people in the world and they were a lot smaller, and it’s tiny.  If it fits even the 200-person limit we’ve been given I’ll be very surprised. The one thing I’m not in doubt of is that the service will be standing room only; my mother made friends wherever she went and kept them and there are many, many people within easy traveling range of the meetinghouse who will wish to be there.

And since the memorial service is, true to Quaker practice, going to be held as a Meeting For Worship, many of them will want to speak in testament to her memory: the impact she had on their lives and the good she did with her own.  That’s how they knew her.

I don’t expect to speak myself.  I knew her differently.  Considering how beloved she was to almost all and how troubled our relationship was in contrast, how conflicted I feel about her myself, I expect that some of what will be said is going to be hard for me to hear.  Guilt, shame, regret: it’s all going to be part of the mix.  Probably some anger and resentment, too. 

But I’ve got to be there, and more to the point I want to be.  I wouldn’t be my mother’s son if I couldn’t muster the courage to hear it, and the resolve to deal with whatever comes in its wake.

And after the service comes a reception at her house, or “visitation” as Quakers call it, and still later in the day a special dinner just for family members that I suspect I’m going to skip because by that point in the day all I will want to do is crawl into a hole and rest away from others’ eyes.  I’ve got a room in what looks like a pretty nice hotel nearby just for that purpose; it’s close to the Brandywine, walking distance I believe, so it’s hard to go wrong with that.  And I’ve got a rental car to take a drive if that’s what I need, maybe for a tasty Saturday night cheesesteak at my favorite pizzeria in West Chester if that turns out to be what I need too. 

But that, again, is the day after tomorrow.  Didn’t I promise to think only about tomorrow today?  Except for that damn wood-smoke.  That’s definitely a today thing.

March 25, 2011

I had a good writing day yesterday.  Not just the 3200 words I turned out, which while maybe impressive isn’t that unusual a total for a long Saturday morning’s session, but more that those 3200 along with the preceding day’s 2400 brought me to the end of The Novel’s last chapter and plop plop fizz fizz oh what a relief that is.  I see now that, in addition to the various fill-in sections needing written, I have to write an epilogue as well and who knows how long all that will take.  Still and all a good day’s accomplishment, especially since that last chapter centers around one of the most gruesome scenes in the book and no matter how well I might have thought myself prepared to get it out of my head and actually down on the screen, it was still plenty emotionally taxing to do so.

All told it took about four hours, fueled by an extra-strong cup of black tea the barrista provided without me even asking.  Then I went home and relaxed for the afternoon, re-reading a book a friend wrote a few years back and listening to the rain on the roof and enjoying the cat warming my lap.  At no point during the day did I hear the phone ring, or even think about checking it for messages.

So it wasn’t until near dinnertime that I looked at the phone to see my sister had called.  Twice.  From a number I recognize all too well: my mother’s in Pennsylvania.  The area code changed decades ago but otherwise it’s the same number I grew up with, gave out hundreds if not thousands of times during my childhood and adolescence.  I knew it was my sister calling because a) my crazy brother finally left the house earlier this month after overstaying his welcome by several years and b) my 89-year-old mother has barely been able to speak on the phone let alone place a call for the last few weeks.

Staring at the digital readout I knew something else too: that if my sister was calling from that number, rather than her own cell that she took with her – she’s been in PA with my mother over a month now – she had a specific piece of news to deliver.  I confirmed this a minute or two later when I returned the call and heard her say that yes, our mother had died.  The night before, peacefully and in almost no pain, in her bed in the house where she’d lived for something like 63 years.  It was over.

We talked for awhile but in the end didn’t really say that much.  What can you?  We’d known this was coming – that’s why she’s been there the last month.  She asked about the mechanics of the call I was placing from my computer browser, which seemed totally absurd until I realized that not only with her recent immersion in the situation she’s likely already a lot better-adjusted than most to the news, but also because she’d been making calls all day to relatives and close friends – and my mother never had any shortage of those – she was either a little punchy or just all too happy to talk about anything but the news.  Or both.  Now it’s just one of those funny little things you remember when you talk about That Day years later, I figure.

So we talked and hung up and I went about my business and I presume she went about hers.  And I went to bed and slept a lot better than I expected and this morning I got up and went for a walk and bought some groceries.  When I got home I called another family member who agreed to loan me enough money to buy a plane ticket back to PA for the memorial service, which although it hasn’t been scheduled yet is probably going to be next weekend.  And at this point that’s there is to tell.

If there’s a freight-train of sorrow going to hit me it hasn’t yet.  Right now all I’m feeling is glad for a number of things.  One is that my mother got to die at home, in the house she loved so much and always said she wanted to be in to the end of her days.  She had been moved to a hospice in February when in-house nursing personnel suddenly became impractical, but after my sister flew in it became practical again and the first thing she did was have my mother moved back for what all concerned knew by then would be the last weeks of her life. 

I’m glad my sister has been able to be there all this time.  Of my mother’s five children she was far and away the best choice to take charge and see it through.

I’m glad that my mother experienced a relatively quick end, and so little pain throughout.  She was never officially diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer the doctors suspected; a scan after she was hospitalized in December revealed something that might be p.c., but she refused further analysis as it would have almost certainly been untreatable anyway.  Instead, she elected to decide her time had come, and slowly shut her body down over the next three months.  She was in control until the end.

More than anything, I’m glad she had the life she did , that she was able to live it so long and squeeze so much out of it until close to the end.  This is the woman who went on annual cycling trips in Europe until well into her 70s; the woman who continued her community work fighting racism until her mid-80s; the woman who went with me to Washington in 2004 to march for reproductive rights.  Her passion for social justice took her around the world over the years: Russia, India, China, Cuba.  Up until the last few years she had the energy of three people, and lived accordingly.

I don’t feel cheated by her passing, mostly because I know she didn’t herself.  She had the life she wanted, more than most people get to.  She was blessed many times over: lucky, and mostly she knew it.

This is not intended to gloss over the fact that the relationship between us was a difficult one, particularly in the last seven years.  I’ve devoted many thousands of words to it during my blogging history and at this point don’t care to write more.  Maybe I’ll feel different once I’ve attended the service.  It’s always useful to have others’ perspective, after all.

In the meantime of course, life goes on.  I still need to find work.  I need to get someone to feed the cat while I’m gone.  I need to do what I can for my sister, who so far sounds like she’s holding up well considering.  And so on.  I don’t expect to be doing any more work on The Novel for a little while though, so one final thing I’m glad of (selfish and callous though it sounds) is that I had a good writing day before it became That Day.

March 22, 2012

More fun with WordPress this week.  No sarcasm there, it actually has been fun – mostly – to get familiar with the product through building out my own mini-network of sites to house my old OLJs.  Right now I’m getting into theming, which is fitting for someone calling himself a designer.  I foresee a lot of time staring at the screen in my immediate future – or a lot more time, more accurately. 

Today’s goal is to learn to use @fontface effectively.  Good times in the ol’ cottage – or they will be once I return from Concord, where I’m spending the morning at an EU-related meeting.  You’ll recall from a few weeks back that I joined this all-volunteer job-search-networking organization, and now I’m a full member so I’m required to be part of a committee.  I chose the IT committee mainly because, dare I say it, the organization’s site looks pukey and they need a designer.  Whether or not I’m the designer they need remains to be seen, but so far I don’t see a hell of a lot of competition.

The committee meetings I’ve attended so far have been on the clusterfuck-y side and I’m looking forward to having this one over so I can get home and back to the fun stuff.  Not that it’s not good to have a reason to be out of the house and around other people or anything, especially when they’re professionals and we’re speaking of professional matters.  (Or trying to – these are computer geeks after all, so a certain lack of articulation is to be expected.)  It’s just that Concord is a long way to go for anything, let alone a weekly volunteer meeting.

I’d write more about this group and the people involved and EU in general if I weren’t suddenly aware I’ll be re-publishing this journal eventually under my own name.  While I’ve always blogged using an alias because I feel it gives me relative freedom to write what I want, it’s kind of hard to duck responsibility for those same writings when they’re relocated to a domain where my real name is part of the URL. 

Earlier this week I spent a few hours vetting the last half-year of the journal preceding this one – the period covering my decision to leave Austin and the subsequent preparations to do it – and I was disturbed by how relatively few of those entries I’d want, say, a potential employer to read.   Or a potential lover, or even just someone considering a close friendship.  I really wasn’t all that concerned with making myself look good either at or outside of work, and if memory serves I never much have been – that’s why you write a personal blog, isn’t it?  To let off some of the steam resulting from keeping on your game face to the world in real time, at least in part.  To have a forum for saying the worst things you think and feel, or at least the worst ones for which you can find words.  There’s certainly enough evidence of my doing that in this journal too, and there’s particularly damning future-employer evidence if you go back over a year to when I was still working.

So now I’m estimating that well over half, maybe even up to three-quarters, of all the OLJ/blog entries I’ve ever written will need to be protected against casual public viewing on the net.  Limiting viewer access is not so much of a problem with WordPress – many has been and still is the time I wished Typepad allowed for protection by entry instead of by the whole damn journal – but still.  That’s going to be a hell of a lot of work to determine what I’m comfortable with the whole damn internet knowing I’ve written, going back 12 years entry by entry. Me, as in the person whose name is on a CA driver’s license.  It’s just a bit scary.

The plan is to get a new domain and start the next journal there so I can keep writing under an alias - preferably this one, as it’s part of my personal brand and that’s something becomes even more important when you’re penning a book you hope to publish under it someday.  Once I do that (which will probably be in the next few months), I expect to fully abandon Typepad: no more monthly fee, among other things.   Contemplating that particular switch – leaving a provider I’ve considered a safe home for over eight years, a brand I’ve been proud to use and identify with and a platform that, earlier quibble notwithstanding, I’ve found solid and highly stable - is something else that’s just a bit scary.  But it’s time.  A new phase, and all that.

Knowing all this, knowing that I’ll eventually be republishing these entries under my real name makes me wonder what to write how much self-censoring to do for the remainder of this journal’s life.  And beyond that too, if I’m smart; while at the moment I see no reason why once I start the new one I’ll ever need to associate it with my meatspace persona, I recall that I once thought the same about everything I wrote on Typepad.  And before that Diary-X, and before that Diaryland.  If the only lesson here is “never say never,” then that’s still probably an adequate one to take away.

Not that I don’t do a lot of self-censoring already.  I’ve been doing it for the last month or so regarding some family business, just for starters.  And as with any blogger, just in the natural course of events there’s a lot more I don’t tell you than I do mainly because my life is unexceptional in a lot more ways than it’s not.  Hell, I’m bored with it much of the time and I’m the one writing this.

All that aside though, it pays to be wise about these things.  The deeper I delve into the current project – meaning, the more I evaluate old entries from this new perspective – the more I see how unwise I often was in the past.  It’s so much easier, really, when you think virtually no one but you is reading, or knows who you are.

March 18, 2012

It’s a month now since I went to Meeting For Worship.  Such gaps – longer ones, in fact – were common during my last few years in Austin though that was partially due to me regularly taking a friend grocery-shopping Sunday mornings (he had a car but couldn’t drive it, long story) instead.  Now I have no substitute except for rising late and doing whatever is enabled by the lack of pressure to be any place at a certain time, and I’m finding this is just fine in its own way.  I could get used to it, even.

I could certainly get used to it if mornings are going to be like today's, sunny and windy and clear-aired.  The rain is mostly gone after a week of gray drippy mornings and even if all that means to me today is sitting on the window-seat in the sunshine, watching the palm-fronds and eucalyptus-leaves tossing about above me and hearing the birds going tweet-tweet-tweet, that’s just fine in its own way too.  I slept in until almost 8:30 today and for the moment am in no hurry to be doing anything else at all.

Which wouldn’t seem to give me that much to write about here.  The last couple of days certainly haven’t: go to the coffeehouse and turn out new copy on The Novel and that’s about it.  The preceding week, though busy, is just as easily dismissed; in fact its only salient happening I didn’t cover in the last entry was the near-disastrous job interview on Tuesday afternoon that I’m pretty damn sure will not lead to anything resembling an employment offer, and back to the drawing board and all that.  But other than that, yeah: nothing to see here, move right along folks.

Times like these are when I start to question my blogging practice.  I can’t help it, I just do; wonder, among other things, if the amount of time I put into writing these two entries a week – regularity more for form than passion is what it’s about by now – will prove worth it in the future.  The periodic “does anyone care, even me?” business, minor existential crisis and all that.  The answer that usually comes back is Yeah, probably, and in any case it’s valuable that you re-evaluate periodically and that’s all well and fine – no surprises there.  But those moments of doubt and frustration suck nonetheless, even if I do suspect there’s ultimately value in that suckage too. 

One of my projects the last few days has been setting up WordPress’s multisite function so I can host my OLJ archives on my own domain, all 12+ years of them.  It’s been interesting work (and, I suspect, nowhere near as frustrating as it would be with Drupal) though so far I haven’t gotten farther than importing most of the content stored on Typepad and putting up a gateway page.  That gateway has proved to be unexpectedly high-effort, less because of the design than what I actually want to say on it: to explain to the world at large why I’m compelled to publicly chronicle my life, in effect.  Saying that I just am isn’t going to cut it here, I suspect.

As always, a good fallback when in doubt of one’s own words is to use someone else’s.  So I spent some time looking for a good quote that would effectively serve as an epigram to the two million-plus words those journals will eventually hold.  Digging through my Evernote records I found one I really liked - “Nobody changes.  They just reveal themselves,” taken from Ethan Canin’s For Kings and Planets – and decided that would do.  Then I found another, something from a New York Times column by David Pogue the year before last to the effect that you can’t examine your life if you can’t remember it, and I really liked that one too and that made me all confused. 

These quotes represent two very different rationales for blogging which at the same time are equally descriptive of my motivations.  So I used them both – who says you need to stop at one epigram? – and feel very satisfied with the result.

Today though what I’m thinking is it’s the second one that counts for more.  This is because for me blogging is in the end not just a memory-aid but a public record – a way, actually, of publishing your autobiography while you live it.  It’s not so much that I think I have that remarkable a life (and certainly not by first-world standards), one that everyone needs to know about.  But who else's autobiography am I going to write?

My mother has said more than once in the last decade that she ought to write a book about her life, which is one that has been remarkable in several ways.  Yet here she is very near the end of that life with no book, and when she’s gone her story will live only in the minds and memories of the people who knew her – meaning when they (we) die too, it’ll be lost forever.  This came about because she’s a talker: she always preferred to engage with other people in the moment, an endless series of moments day after day and year after year, than devote time to setting any of those moments down while they were still fresh in her mind.  Or at any point, for that matter – if she kept anything resembling a journal or even just a logbook I sure as hell don’t know about it.

Talking was her primary gift.  Writing is mine.  A secondary, and in this context very useful, gift is knowing how to manipulate the medium of electronic print to put my story in front of others.  It’s up to them whether they care enough to read it, but I can’t do anything about that.  I just want to tell it – to reveal myself to the degree I feel I comfortably can.

In Meeting For Worship I go to sit in silence and wait for others to reveal themselves, and through them for The Divine to reveal Itself.  There are times when that just doesn’t seem all that appealing, especially if there’s no palm or eucalyptus involved.  Today would be one of them, it appears.

March 15, 2012

I still can’t figure what that traditional USPS drop-box is doing two blocks from my house; my neighborhood is more than half comprised of single-unit dwellings and as such has never struck me as one where people would prefer to walk to the corner to deposit their outgoing mail when they can just stick it in their porch-box and leave the flag up - the way I usually do, as I rarely send anything more important than a Netflix envelope.

Yet there that old-school blue box is at the corner of Vernon, and there it remains (sitting crooked as its hind off-concrete feet have partially sunk into the ground) and the sticker on it says it’s emptied every day.  And there is where I traipsed this morning in the light rain to feed it for the first time, wanting to ensure today’s outgoing remained dry the way stuff left in my own box rarely does.  This was a follow-up to yesterday’s lunch, a “good to see you, old friend” card, and as such deserved special handling.  Besides, I need the exercise.

I expect that’s the last time I’ll leave the house today.  Partly because it’s raining, and partly because I just don’t want to go anywhere.  Recently it seems I’ve been out as much as in, yesterday and the day before especially, and that’s something you notice a lot more and even begrudge a little when it rains as much as it has all week.  The cat notices it too and squalls at me when I come home just long enough to change clothes before rushing out again.  “Sit down,” she cries.  “Sit down, dammit.  I want to crawl into your lap.  I’m cold.” 

So that’s what today’s for.  A kitty day.  A sanity day too, if you will.  Either way it looks to be the only one this week and I plan to enjoy it.

Even if most of it will probably be spent in front of the computer screen rather than in any posture where the little beast can occupy my lap; WordPress mostly, and some work on a client site too.  Online job postings.  Finish the design of the brochure for my own business, if I can get to it.  It’s going to be a long shut-in day but all this work is overdue; I’ve either been running around too madly or too exhausted by it to do anything else for days now.

At the moment though I just sit in the reading chair, MacBook on a board across my lap (a trick intended to extend the hardware’s life by preventing overheating such as happens by placing it directly on a soft surface like cloth-clad skin) and feet up on the ottoman with cat snugged comfortably between them, waiting for the mid-morning bagel to toast.  Warm and dry, in other words, exactly like I want to be today. 

Warm and dry and best of all, sedate.  The cat’s happy with that which means I am too.  The biggest effort required today will likely be getting myself out of this nice comfortable armchair (thank you once again, Amanda) and across the room into the desk-chair to begin on the important stuff.  I’m a slow study in some ways and getting myself started is often one of them.

For instance: it was five years ago this week that my burner friends Evan and Michele were in Austin for SXSWi and we had lunch at the Clay Pit.  I asked what I should be doing to ensure my future in web-work and Michele told me to start studying content management systems.  I’d never heard the CMS acronym before that day, let alone the funny-sounding names she dropped - Drupal?  Joomla?  What the hell is that? – and I did what most people regrettably do when they don’t see the immediate relevance of advice to their situation: I put it aside.  Today the wisdom of Michele’s suggestion, its dead-on relevance to my career path, is so completely obvious it’s flat-out embarrassing to mention how long ago I got it.  It’s only of value at this point to demonstrate what a slow study I can be.

Another way: my therapist in Austin tried sporadically to nudge me further into the Buddhist mindset, a facet of his practice that led to me picking him in the first place.  Tried to show me the worth of working with what some call the love meditation: “may so-and-so be peaceful and happy and light in body and spirit, may that same so-and-so be safe and free from injury,” and so on.  To think about others more than I do customarily, which seems to be little if at all.  I invariably put that advice aside too when he gave it, less because of its apparent relevance than what I judged to be its utter lack of practicality: why wish for something for someone else when a) you don’t really mean it (unless of course it was some woman I had a crush on) and b) you spend so little time wishing for those same things for yourself? 

My therapist eventually gave up on it and I didn’t think about that meditation again until last night, when it came up in the weekly group I’ve started attending again.  This time I actually tried it.  Ended up practicing it for the half-hour that we all did, in fact.  Today I’m not sure I’m any more convinced of its practicality than before, but it was a good experiment nonetheless - especially since before I moved on to so-and-so I tried it on myself a few times. 

My comment afterward when we were sharing experiences was that I’m not used to probing so deeply.  It’s hard work.  Then again, so much that I have to do is - that anyone has to do if they want to be on good terms with their life.  Something to think about on this rainy kitty sanity day, now I’ve already been to the mailbox and back.

March 11, 2012

One of the advantages of modern life is that come the turn of Daylight Savings Time all one’s crucial gadgets – laptop, iPod touch, cell phone – reset themselves.  In my living space the only items needing manual adjustment are the bedside alarm clock (souvenir of a long-ago cubicle where the previous occupant transferred out in a hurry and never came back for it) and the hopelessly analog wall clock ($1 at Ikea), which is a victory of sorts.  Though to be honest I can’t tell if it represents a triumph of tiny-but-functional quarters or saturation of technology in my life.  Or if that matters, even.

Regardless, it’s a spring morning and both clocks are now set until next October or until the power goes out/battery needs recharging and that’s out of the way.  Waiting for the body to adjust to the one-hour shift?  That takes longer, and the older you get the truer that is.  Fortunately I’ve got an empty-calendar day ahead to help my creaky, overtaxed ol’ bod get a running start at it.  How splendid!  You might even think I’d planned it this way.

Ordinarily of course at this time on a Sunday – oh yes, First Day, how could I forget – I’m at Meeting For Worship, waiting in silence for whatever revelation I hope will show up this time.  But I haven’t been to MFW for a few weeks and don’t expect to for a few more at least.  I’d call it a sabbatical but it’s more of a self-imposed exile; there was an incident in the courtyard last month following rise of Meeting and, well, there’s no way to recount it that doesn’t make me look like a dick.  So let’s just say that I was a dick, because I was, and leave it at that. 

A most un-Quakerly dick in fact, in a way that I immediately knew had profaned that most sacred of spaces to me.  So I’m staying away for awhile in penance, and won’t return until I feel there’s a reasonable chance I will respect the space again in the way that I expect others to respect it.  By my part in the incident I violated my own code of conduct, badly, which I usually take as a sign that I need a break from the given situation.  Or that I’m under more stress than I realized.  Or both.  In any case I’ve got Sunday mornings free for the near future and maybe longer.

So today I rise late, and instead of toasting a bagel that I chomp down walking to the bus stop I make a real breakfast for once, hash browns and scrambled eggs with cheese, ham and onions.  The day is overcast, prelude to a projected week of semi-rain, and that combined with last night’s crappy sleep (because it doesn’t matter whether you remember to change the clocks or not, DST invariably means for whatever reason that you have better than equal chances of it being a crappy night) means I might not leave the house all day.  No sweat: I’ve got food, and I’ve got books, and I’ve got lots of work to catch up on.  Been busy lately.

Like yesterday.  Spent the morning with a high school friend visiting from out of town, breakfast at my favorite place followed by sightseeing and hanging out at my place, and when that was done I burrowed at my almost-neighborhood coffeehouse and turned out almost 3500 words.  2500 words the day before, too.  I’m now partway through the next-to-last chapter, though that doesn’t mean what it may sound like in the sense of overall completion because I haven’t exactly approached this first draft in a thoroughly linear fashion and I count at least ten places I have to go back and finish a section, or write a bridge between two finished sections, or something similar.  I still don’t expect to make my end-of-March deadline – late April seems more realistic at this point - but no sweat on that either.  If I don’t it certainly won’t be because I’ve been sitting on my hands.

(For the record: as of today the draft stands at just over 211K words.  Just in case, you know, anyone ever wants to accuse me of under-writing.  Before I’m done it’s going to easily hit 250. Obviously I’m going to have a lot more than I can use for the second draft – which according to my visiting friend yesterday should top out at 140K or likely less, and he should know - but you may recall I’ve been saying that for some time.  You may also recall I plan this to be a trilogy, so with any luck some of the trimmings from this first book can feed the second or maybe even the third when it comes time to draft them.)

No such progress expected today, though.  I’m feeling too dull and sluggish to write, and once breakfast – fast turning into brunch, now – is cooked and eaten I may just go back to bed for part of the afternoon.  Or I may finish the last of Justified season 2, which I’ve been enjoying kind of but not greatly.  Or I may get back to work on my own WordPress site that I’ve been procrastinating on for days.  The day is long; maybe I’ll even get to do all three.

And if not, I plan to emphasize the WordPress.  Professional development and all that, even on the weekend.  Maybe especially on the weekend; Sunday is the new Monday, or that’s how it’s been shaping up the last few weeks.  My weeks are so busy I feel the need of an extra day to get a running start these days.

This new week certainly is.  Busy, I mean.  Job interview in SF on Tuesday (the good-vibe place mentioned last entry), lunch with an old friend on the Burning Man LLC Wednesday, job-seeker team meeting tomorrow afternoon – well, actually that’s about it according to the calendar.  But said calendar fills up fast, and that’s not even including to-do items of which there are a buttload and only a few of them have to do with WordPress.

That kind of makes today the calm before the storm.  I’m glad at least the business with the clocks is over.