Ear-worm

Hey you, don't watch that, watch this!

3 weeks on the road and I'm having trouble keeping up too many blogs (as well as Facebook!).  So go to my new one, Wandering Like the Wild Geese in the West , cuz I'll be doing most of my writing there from now on.  Ta!

To travel and unravel all the fabric we'd sewn

Yesterday being my 50^th birthday, the approach of which has been causing such angst since the 49^th and almost assuredly quite a bit longer, you’d think I’d have had something to say about it on the actual occasion.  But, well, fuck that.  The day itself doesn’t actually matter when you get this old, I figure, as long as you do something suitably celebratory sooner or later.

Back in January I thought a good time would be going out to some private land somewhere with a bunch of good friends, a stack of partially- or totally-dead TVs, and a few firearms of assorted caliber and spend some hours blasting holes in the second with the third.  I’ve never shot a TV before and I gotta say I feel my life’s lacking some for it.  I wanted to make a recording of Bush saying You’re either with us or against us in a loop and blow a big hole in the screen right in the middle of it.  That’s what I consider Texas-style justice.

But I don’t own a gun anymore, and none of my friends do or even know how to shoot, and the sheer logistics of such an event made me put the idea on the back burner.  Then I got a bug up my ass about leaving Austin and the fire on the burner went out completely.  But no mind – taking the kind of road trip I’m about to is the perfect turning-50 gift to myself, and even fun with firearms pales next to it.

It’ll be a pretty solitary celebration, true, but that’s how I roll these days.  Ten years ago I brought together friends from all different sectors of my life for dinner and that was OK, that seemed like the right thing to do then.  I couldn’t imagine doing the same today – I haven’t made many friends in Austin and have kept even fewer and I have the horrible suspicion that I would look around the table and see only strangers.  If you’re one of those people reading this, please don’t be hurt – it’s not you, it’s me.

Anyway, the day in question is now passed and I’m into my 51^st year and, with any luck, will spend a lot less time during it looking into the rearview than I’ve become accustomed to in this last phase of my life.

Uh… that’s a metaphor.  I’ll be driving too much, and am too conscientious a driver, to do anything but use the mirror frequently.  But you get the idea.  It’s a new part of life beginning, and I’m happier than I can convey about that.

I played the record backwards but all I got back was a cat

And why the long silence this time, you ask?  Well, here’s the deal: you know that truck I got?  Of course you do, that’s its picture right there in the entry before last.  Well, in spite of what I may or may not have told the loan company, I didn’t get it to do no once-a-month recreational trip.  Nope, I’m leaving Austin at the end of May and heading – actually, I’m not sure where ultimately at this point.  I do plan on touring the country for the summer, or until the money runs out, whichever comes first.

Becoming a road-bum, in other words.  You always knew I had it in me.

This of course entails quitting my job at UT, which is just fine because since at least 2008 it’s been the only thing holding me to Austin and around the turn of this year I realized it’s a dead-end professionally and generally just not worth staying for in a town I don’t really like all that much.  So adios, Bat City.  It’s been real, though rarely as weird as all the Austin-boosters would have you believe.  (Whatever “weird” could possibly mean in the center of a middle-America state like Texas to begin with.)

I’m more than ready to go.  Since buying the truck I’ve outfitted it with a camper shell and a bed/storage platform inside and now it looks like this:

Taken the rig on a test-run too, a week in Big Bend and the Guadalupe Mountains during which I slept in it every night.  (Though I got some practice putting up my tent anyway just to see if I remember how.)  Took my cat Sadie with me to see how she likes the road and she seems to fine, especially when she’s watching it roll away from the center armrest:

No, you're right, we're not actually in motion at the moment

So now all I have to do is finish selling my stuff, collect whatever other money is owed me, and drive away.  I decided to leave Austin back in mid-February and a week later my landlords, completely unaware of the decision, informed me I’d need to give up my apartment soon to make room for baby they’re expecting.  So everything works out for everybody, including the people I work with.  I haven’t been exactly cheery since realizing I’m in a dead-end job and haven’t done much to conceal it.

Anyway, it’s the end of an era.  Or at least nine and a half years in Austin.  Take your pick.  I’ve got a birthday coming up, one of the 10-year ones, and starting a new phase of life is my present to myself.  A damn good one, I’m pretty sure.

Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend

Sadie wants to go exploring in the evening, Marathon TX

Please don't pick the daisies

Having a vehicle is no good if you never go anywhere so yesterday I took a nice long drive out beyond Smithville.  To, uh, road-test the truck.  Yeah, that's it.

Wildflower season is officially in full swing and the awesomeness of central Texas at this time of year amply demonstrated itself.  Mobility is a wondrous thing, yes?  And now I know what I hoped wasn't true, namely the Ranger gets shitty mileage. Worth it for the pictures, though.

Someone outside Rosanky has a damn nice front yard for a few weeks a year

Yellow among the blue near Cistern

Admire this shot - collected a kneeful of nettles getting it

Just your average meadow somewhere near Cistern

My favorite random tree, Rt. 95 near Vyvjala Rd.

52 pickup

Not that plenty of things didn't happen on their own this past week.  Alex Chilton died, mere days before what was to have been a triumphant Big Star showcase at SXSW.  The seven-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion.  (Seven years.  Fuck!  And we're still there.  That night when we were being pepper-sprayed off the Congress St. bridge did we suspect it was going to be this bad?  Of course we did.  That's why we were on the bridge in the first place...)  And of course the health care vote, which is still undecided as I write this.  That alone would suffice to make this one of the more memorable weeks of 2010.

But the only thing that really matters is that this was the week I became motorized again.  That's right - after almost 8 years car-free I went out and bought a vehicle.  Specifically, a 2005 Ford Ranger pickup:

Isn't it pretty?  No, I don't have a name for it yet.  These things take time.

A friend on Facebook writes, "Who are you? My Sean was anti-auto."  Which I was, and still am as much as you can be while actually owning one.  Thing is, after all this time virtually immobilized in Austin and bound to Capitol Metro (whose service, let's not mince words, sucks and is only going to get worse before it gets better if it ever does) and getting rides from friends and paying through the nose for the Carshare and rentals for trips out of town, I'm ready for a change.  A big one. 

Most of all I miss camping.  I'm really looking forward to plugging my faithful CPAP into the cigarette lighter and heading out for a night in the woods whenever I feel like I can't stand the city a minute longer.  Which has been a pretty frequent occurrence these last few years.

So now I've got the truck the next step is to get a camper shell and build a bunk inside it.  It'll all be ready just in time for summer, which means I'm going to need to get up into the mountains to avoid the heat.  Well - no problem.  That's what mountains are there for.

OLJ dry run 1999: entry 44

11/1/99

Angela wrote to tell me that today, Samhain, is considered by some to be an equivalent to the new year.  It feels like it.  Or it feels like something new, beginning today.  New and invigorating and just plain sweet.  I feel glad to be alive, better than I’ve felt in days, weeks maybe.  The weight of the unreleased stuff inside me feels like it’s lifted and I walked out of my house this morning into the bright sun – it was beautifully warm all day – and felt like crying with joy.  Because I felt like I had myself back again, like I was no longer cut off from my feelings, or at least the feelings that I crave – peace, gratitude, empathy.  Love.  I felt perfectly, wonderfully open again.

And Halloween’s over, for another year.  You want to know the truth?  I hate Halloween.  I don’t know why for certain.  Perhaps because I feel creatively challenged in making costumes – my perfectionism comes into play, strangling the impulsive, winging-it spirit that it seems makes putting together a costume fun for most people.  Remember how when you were a kid you’d be afraid someone would look at your costume and say, What are you supposed to be?  At least as far as I’m concerned, those words are even more devastating now that I’m grown up.  (I guess I should put quotation marks around grown up.  My body is about to turn 40, but most of the time I keep forgetting that I’m not 12, or 18, or 8.)  And because I fear those words – emblematic of not being understood – I want to make my costume perfectly obvious, perfectly representative of exactly what it’s supposed to be. If I was going to be, say, Richard Nixon, just a mask alone wouldn’t do – I’d have to get the posture right, the speech mannerisms right, wear brown shoes with a blue suit.  So being in a costume would become an act too.  Some people may find that fun.  I find it wearing to have to do, even for one night.  Why be someone you’re not?  Which I guess also applies to any elaborate costumes, or wearing masks at all.

There’s a metaphor here, I’m sure – false faces, something like that.  I am never comfortable in a mask – it’s difficult to breathe.  And my glasses, when I can wear them inside the mask, get steamed up and I can’t see.

Or perhaps it’s because, petty spiteful person that I am sometimes, I can’t stand to see other people getting so much pleasure out of dressing up, parading around, being seen – when it’s such a stressful act for me to even contemplate, let alone do.  Bleah.  If I were a kinder person, I’d take pleasure in what gives others pleasure instead of feeling threatened by it.  Something to work on, I guess.

One of the reasons I like hanging out with the crowd I do, people I’ve fallen in with from Burning Man, is that dressing up is fun for them – because every day can be Halloween.  Matt goes to the thrift store and buys a wonderfully tacky dress for a party that night.  M packs a whole trunk of exotic showy outfits just for a weekend campout.  I noticed at the party I went to Saturday night, largely populated by the diox/Blue Light crowd, that there were very few exactly-themed costumes – “oh, a pirate, how cool” – and were instead a profusion of bright, shiny clothes, ornaments, accessories.  Emily wore angel wings and fur trim on her breasts.  Paul wore a painted-on red devil death mask and carried his favorite revolver.  Jenna wore a miniskirt, mirror top and her knee-length white fuck-me boots.  Very few people came as anything special – they just dressed up like they would for any party that called for dressing up.  It was cool that way.

Me?  I wore my velour catsuit that I had Marilyn make me for Burning Man this year.  It’s the only costume-like thing I own.  And it’s comfortable enough to wear all night.  (Another complaint I have about costumes is that, like the formal clothes I had to wear as a child, a costume of sorts in themselves, they’re just not comfortable, most of them.  Costumes don’t get worn enough to get comfy in and I’m always reminded I’m wearing a costume every time I move around in one.)

So I can rant on about Halloween now, it’s easier now that it’s over.  I was getting into some major angst about it before.  Next up – Thanksgiving.

And I’m not even going to go into the weirdness of being at the same party with Wendy and her new guy.  I’m slowly letting her go but letting go, at least for now, means out of sight, out of mind.  So it was awkward and uncomfortable with her there.  God knows how she felt.  Presuming she even noticed… didn’t I say I wasn’t going into it?  I can make myself sick with this stuff.

I have, in fact.  For months now.  It’s getting pretty old.  I figured out yesterday that what I’m thinking about is not Wendy and the breakup but something else entirely, something deeper.  I’ll have to write about that later.

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Whatever elation I felt the day I wrote this vanished quickly and that November was one of the hardest times in my life.  By December though I'd come out of it enough to begin fooling with Diaryland, and I've barely missed a week scribbling online since.  I can't quite believe it's been over ten years myself.

OLJ dry run 1999: entry 39

10/20/99

In less than two weeks it’ll be Daylight Savings Time again and dark really early out.  On one hand, I won’t have to deal with the afternoon glare on my monitor screen, which is especially annoying cause some of my best surfing is in the last few hours of the day.  On the other hand, it’ll be dark outside even before I leave work.

I hate this time of year.  Actually, not this time yet, but the time coming up, the first month after the clocks change and the days just keep getting shorter and shorter and darker and darker. 

So I’ve been enjoying the evening daylight while I still have it this week.  Yesterday I walked all the way home from work, about 2 miles down Broadway in the late-afternoon light.  Every morning I see a woman who does this same walk, all the way to downtown; by now we recognize each other and smile and wave, her trucking along in her dark-yellow jacket, me on my bike.  It’s a nice little reassurance, a connection with someone that I’ll probably never see beyond this daily path-crossing but for that it’s still a pleasure.

And it’s a good walk too, now that I’ve made it, although I’d prefer to do it like I did yesterday, in the golden light of the afternoon setting sun than in the mist and cold of the morning when the yellow-jacketed woman does it.  So much to see along the way: the car dealerships, the burned-out building that once was a music club with an apartment on top, the big greenstone church on the corner that vaguely reminds me of what I expected the real-life Hill House (as in The Haunting Of) to look like.  And the people, all along the way, so many people – all the ages and races and classes, they all go up and down Broadway.  I love Oakland, and walking through it yesterday afternoon I really felt like it was my city, like it was home. 

Which is a really good thing to feel, to have put down roots in this place, to have pride and a sense of belonging here in this varied and multi-everything town.  I’m always amazed at the wide range of people from all over the world that have come to settle here, and how each different group – Vietnamese, Indian, Russian, East African, you name it – has laid a claim on the city in such a visible way.  New York may think it has the title locked up, but Oakland is truly a city of the world.

And yet for all my feelings of rootedness and sense of belonging here, I also look at the city greedily as I’m walking through it, wanting to take it all in against the time when I may no longer live here.  Which may come sooner than I’d thought.  Going to Austin a few weeks ago started me thinking seriously about relocating there: partially to be with Angela, who I fell in love with on that trip, head over heels, bit by the bug and caught totally by surprise, but partially just for the sake of moving again, throwing my life up into the air and believing that I will catch the important pieces as they come down.  I moved to the Bay Area almost 15 years ago and have called it home, as much as I’m likely to call anyplace home – mostly, home is just a word to me, a word with no real emotional resonance yet – and it’s been a good place, a fabulous place actually, to be.  I’ve gotten married and divorced.  I’ve completed grad school, I’ve witnessed natural disasters of earthquake and fire, I’ve made and kept and lost damn good friends while I’ve been here.  I’ve lived a life that has been both cloistered and fascinating, exposing myself to some pretty outré ways of thought while never getting fully immersed in them.  (Even in the year I spent studying intensely at the Berkeley Psychic Institute, I still kept my ideological distance, and that’s the closest I ever came to being roped in before embracing the radical independence of the Burning Man movement – didn’t know it was a movement, did you? – two years ago.)  I’ve lived an increasingly full life here and it just gets more interesting week by week.

And it’ll probably be just as interesting in Austin, if I go there.  Wherever I go, there I am.

In spite of all of my feeling of belonging here, I don’t feel that I have a hell of a lot compelling me to stay.  Of course, it’s easy to say that now when the idea of leaving is purely an academic one… and distant.. .and just an idea at that.  I will want more evidence of how things are going to develop with Angela.  I will want more time in with my new friends, the wonderful people I’ve been loving steadily, increasingly over the last year.  And I will want a sense that I’m doing it to move to something good and positive, not running away like I was when I came to CA in 1985.  The winter days will be dark, but I've got a light shining of my own inside lately.

OLJ dry run 1999: entry 33

10/7/99

It’s really bright out today.  Walking down Piedmont Avenue at noon, outdoors for the first time since getting to work, I was struck by the just how bright the sun is and wondered if it’s always been like this and I just didn’t notice, or if the atmosphere has undergone some freaky change after all.  I sometimes wonder how ozone depletion will really show up and guess that one of the of the first things I’ll notice is how hot the sun is.  And how easily I’ve burned, usually much too late to do anything but sting.

I’m not really all that concerned about the future of the planet, even though we’re doing our best to destroy it, or at least its inhabitability, through greed and ignorance, not that there’s a whole lot of difference between them ultimately.  The planet will survive long after our little ant-colonies have disappeared from its surface and our legacy will be in the ruins and the new species we’ve inadvertently created by our toxic- and nuclear-wasted dumping these last fifty years and probably the next fifty too.  Humans aren’t going to get a lot smarter about how to manage our  waste when it just appears that putting it somewhere else, out of sight, robs it of its power to hurt or offend.  In my limited travels I’ve realized this isn’t just a first-world attitude, this out-of-sight, out-of-mind practice; the Nepali were just as grievous litterers and dumpers as anyone in this country, just piling the empty Pepsi bottles at the bottom of the hill behind the trekkers inn because there was no profit in hauling the empty bottles down the mountain  Ditto other waste, human and food and everything that couldn’t be used as fertilizer or cow-slop.  Granted, almost all areas I visited in Nepal were heavily impacted by the tourist trade, and I guess that extended to the local’s attitudes – "Why, we learned how to just throw stuff away from all the trekkers that were doing it all the time themselves!" – as well as their economies.  The one area I saw off the beaten path – Nalma Phedi and Karaputar – was a lot less trashed than the Annapurna Circuit.  Makes me think that when people have more reason to remember how to live in balance with the land, good earth-respectful behavior follows.  But I guess I didn’t have to go to Nepal to learn that.

A year ago at this time I was poking uphill towards Manang, traveling solo or perhaps had hooked up with Ellen and Asif already.  I’d have to consult my travel journal which I’ve hardly looked at since I got back.  The Nepal trip changed my life but I’m still not aware of all of how it did that, I know I learned that it’s important to take things like work and technology a let less seriously, though I’d already been thinking about that since my Alaska trip in 96.  I know that since I came back almost a year ago I have a much lower tolerance to the stimulus I considered an essential part of life before: the media, music, even movies.  I know that I crave silence whenever I can find it.  I know that I talk to people more easily than I used to, although again that was already starting to happen.

I don’t really know how deeply that trip affected me.  I went and came back and don’t think about it much on a daily, conscious basis.  And I didn’t take any pictures, electing to depend on my mental camera to keep the pictures in my mind.Well, my mental camera works fine.  Many images of parts of the trip – the bus ride into Besisahar, for instance – are still vivid and clear for me.  I can remember even in my back and my legs how I sat at a stiff angle to keep from sliding to the downhill side when the bus almost tipped over because of the ruts in the road.

But mental pictures are like real photos – they only exist, for all practical purposes, when you remember to take them out and show them.  And I’m not so facile or glib with words that I can pluck them out of thin air to paint a verbal picture equally vivid to the one in my mind when the subject of my Nepal trip comes up, which it does rarely.  I think most of the people I call my friends now, who I hardly knew just a year ago, barely missed me for the five weeks I was gone.

Plus people are accustomed to seeing pictures and letting them tell the story in this age.

Plus I’m accustomed to holding things in.  I don’t think I’ve gone to anyone and said, Hey, you want to hear my Nepal stories?  Neither if I had taken pictures would I attempt to show them off unless I was asked.  That’s just the way I am.  It’s all in there, like data in a mainframe, and like that mainframe you have to know how to ask me the right questions to get it out.

OLJ dry run 1999: entry 11

8/11/99

Went to the Berkeley Zendo tonight to sit Zazen with Steve "Faddah" Wolf and stayed for the discussion group. My first time sitting Zazen, which was quite enough stimulation and new experience by itself, and then on top of that the discussion centered on the dance of communication and understanding that people engage in to move further along their respective paths. The basic thrust was: you can either dance, leading or being led or taking turns, or you can block. Block with defensiveness, block with gracelessness, block with ego. You are either dancing or blocking, and dancing is the much more outward focused of the two, while blocking becomes entirely about oneself.

I was already thinking along these lines, thinking over the last couple of days about what I'd learned in improv class, which is the same basic lesson: you can lead, give a lead-in to someone else and enable them to step forward, embodied in the simple phrase “yes, and...” or you can block, derail the whole momentum of where your improv piece is going and in effect say, that idea won't work, embodied in the simple phrase, “yes, but...” You can cooperate and spur cooperation or you can simply block.

I've observed this serving with the Black Rock Rangers too; in theory the Rangers exist solely to give a big “yes, and” to Burning Man-goers. "Yes, that's a great costume, and there are a couple of places it doesn't cover that you might want to put sun block on." "Yes, you want to have a good time, and we're here to give you less to worry about." But it's become easy for Rangers to take the default action of blocking: "Yes, you're here to have a good time, but you can have it without that tiki torch, now please put the damn thing out." "Yes, but you can't do that." As a Ranger I found it easy to block, easy to simply say no, to go into reasons why not rather than to creatively seek an alternative to let people do what they want. This had more to do with my mindset that I already brought to the Rangers than the Ranger hat itself; I know this because I observe myself doing it in other parts of life too, blocking instead of dancing. Dancing is a good metaphor for me, one that I want to explore further, something that I'd like to do more of than I do now, which is virtually none. Otherwise, all I have left to do is block.

OLJ dry run 1999: entry 1

I wanted to be an online journaler from the moment I read my first OLJ in 1997 (Sara Astruc's infamous "The List," for the record, and try finding that on today's internet) but didn't actually get around to starting my own until two years later.  Before I posted the first Diaryland entry though I did a practice run in private, a series of entries just to get the hang of writing letters to an unknown readership.  Those practice entries written in the summer and fall of 1999 eventually numbered 44, and since almost all of them never made it out of the notebook I'm publishing a not-quite-random sampling here.

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July 26, 1999

I was copying some medical journal articles today for my current boss and had plenty of time to think the way you do when you’re running the copy machine for more than a couple of minutes.  The random memory popped into my head of standing outside the gym at my old high school last May, talking with some former classmates and some former teachers, most notably Tom W. who was the archetypal figure for me in high school, a sarcastic guy who didn’t take it all too seriously and was the first faculty there I think to come out gay, quite a shock apparently when he did, this was after my time.  I count myself lucky to have had him for English in 8th, 10th, and 12th grades; he taught me a lot, not just about the story and how to write it but how to read it too, how to look for what’s not written.  I didn’t love the essay form that we concentrated on senior year, but while I was standing outside the gym I listened as someone from the year after me told Tom W., "I loved your essay boot camp, one three-paragraph essay every day for a month, it was a marking point in my life, in my critical thinking."  I vaguely remember that same boot camp and wish that I remembered more of what I learned there, wish that I could sit down with confidence and write an essay off the top of my head.  I knew more then about what I thought, it was simpler and easy to put it on the page.  Now I feel at a loss to actually write down what I believe, to tell it to myself in a conscious voice.  To know it and be able to relate what I believe, in essence.  Maybe I’m blowing smoke in thinking that it was easier in my adolescence; I don’t remember much about what I thought then.  I had vague but strongly-held notions of what was right - not just right to me, but Right - non-violence, environmentalism, racial equality - and had trouble articulating those beliefs because, well, they were just Right, and if you didn’t already get them then there was no point in trying to explain.  I carried that approach with me for a long time, not debating those with opposing viewpoints because they weren’t going to sway me, I knew, and I wouldn’t be able to sway them, or at least believe that I might have.  I canvassed for Greenpeace for four years and never once that I recall got in a debate or argument with anyone at the door about the issues I represented, something others didn’t shy away from.  It’s not my nature, I thought.  Part of it was an underlying fear that I would not be able to articulate my beliefs, my convictions, that I would undercut them with my raw but largely wordless passion, an emotionalist in a society that values logic and reason.  I didn't add anything to that conversation my old schoolmate was having with our former English teacher, but I wanted to.  Wanted to say: I wish I had listened better, to realize the importance of making your point, of knowing it and then making it effectively.  I know that he would have understood.