So I haven’t written an actual post in a really long time, and you’ve probably noticed that I’ve stopped really making videos too. The thing is that I made a Day 8 video and it was of me crying and I debated about posting it and then I tried to post it three times and the upload kept failing and I sort of took that as a sign that maybe the Internet isn’t ready for footage of Storey driving and crying simultaneously on the New Jersey Turnpike. (Incidentally, Jake and I once saw the band Drivin’ and Cryin’ perform live at Georgia Tech. Unrelated.) Anyway, the upload fail both made future uploads from present location unlikely and sort of interrupted the daily momentum I’d built up for a while. So now I’m entering Day 12 and there are no new videos. Don’t hold your breath. I know you won’t because not that many of you were watching them to begin with. I’m not sure the format really works or is my thing. I like experiments and I will keep doing them. Just maybe not too many more videos. Though I kind of enjoy them as a personal chronicle in some ways. I’d really like to see videos of my high school or college self and those basically don’t exist. Even Gris may have lost the fabled Love Video. I guess there are the old Stanford rounds, but those are a little poisoned at the moment.

Trying to capture every passing moment and twist and turn on the Tour so far is both infeasible and slightly dull, so I think a list is both fitting of my mood, energy/time expenditure interest on this particular evening, and entertaining. It will call to mind a bunch of very random experiences I’ve had that will hopefully, upon future reflection, spring forth a bevy of memories from what this last two weeks have been like without having to itemize each one. Some things are perhaps best recalled as a jumbled mass of joy rather than a sequential turn of linear builds. Of course, memory is pretty darn intractable in my experience, so why I take actions to enhance or alter memory is sort of beyond me. A lot of the rules of how this works don’t seem to apply to my experience or perspective.

Oh, speaking of experiments, I’ve spent a lot of time today deciding that I think I want to get a rabbit in August when I’m back in Jersey. I need to do some research into the availability of rabbits in the area, as well as do some thinking about whether I want to get a show-quality breed or just settle for a mutt or what. I mean, it’s not like I’m going to be taking the rabbit to fairs and ditching debate for 4H. At the same time, there are some really pretty breeds out there and I’ve studied them long enough to have a wishlist of rabbit breeds that is worth consulting when I’m considering purchasing a pet rabbit that may be part of my life for some time to come. But a lagamorph seems to strike the right balance between an attentive furry friend and an animal that does not require constant care over, say, weekends or even possibly week-long trips. The issue of a trip like my present one does come to mind, but next summer is more likely to be set aside for a book than a trip, and there’s always the possibility that people will want to rabbit-sit, especially if he/she is cageable for certain durations. Which itself is another issue – I’m not wild about animals in cages, but if I let him/her romp around the apartment when I’m home, it might be a decent compromise. Even Pando boarded in very small spaces for weeks at a time when we went on longer journeys.

Anyway. Without further dilly-dally, the 24 things I’ve learned on TH’HEAT so far:
1. When robbing a house, one should not attempt to become the Foursquare “Mayor” of that house.
2. Most of the Ryan Adams album “Gold”.
3. Most of the Regina Spektor album “Soviet Kitsch”.
4. I don’t read much when people are around.
5. My phone’s spontaneous-turning-off is 100% correlated to it being closed. If left open, it works permanently until something forces it closed.
6. Many of my friends continue to be better than I am at chess.
7. Dominion may be the most universally liked board game, at least among those who’ve been exposed to it.
8. People are aliens. (To be fair, I’ve known this for a long time – it’s only gotten reaffirmed/reinforced.)
9. Some of the Sufjan Stevens album “Seven Swans”.
10. Some of the Vanessa Carlton album “Harmonium”.
11. It’s a bad idea for me to drive alone for nine hours on the day after a wedding.
12. Waffle House is always a comfort. If I lived nearer a WH, I’d probably be happier. This is probably a good chunk of what got me through 1997-98, no foolin’.
13. I should be more grateful that I still have a lot of hair at age 31 than I am on a daily basis.
14. A laptop makes it possible to not really feel like one is on a trip in the same way that taking a trip before having a laptop (and a cell phone) felt.
15. I don’t regularly eat as often as most people. (Also previously known but re-emphasized.)
16. I apparently have built my entire life around communicating with other people who I like. This has probably been a great decision. It also explains why most of my lifetime travel has been in the US, where these people are, rather than outside it, where other adventures may be more interesting but communication is vastly harder.
17. Lots of people are or seem or claim to be completely fine being partnerless for long and even perhaps permanent stretches of their lives.
18. I have very little in common with the people described in 17. (Probably a known, though 17 itself was just not well known prior to this trip.)
19. While no one else’s obsession with Chipotle burns quite as brightly as mine, most people functionally act as though it does.
20. No one thinks the Bar Exam is fun. This may or may not be related to the fact that there is no “high pass” or commendation for being a top scorer thereon.
21. Everyone is optimistic going into law school. Everyone.
22. The 30’s are when the real medical problems seem to start.
23. The evidence that families are cults seems insurmountable. (Also previously known, but boldly underlined herein.)
24. I have no idea, still, what this trip is going to be like on the long lonely stretch between North Carolina and Texas, nor on the return run between New Mexico and Philadelphia.

I like lists. I can’t even pretend that that was even a little unknown prior. So twenty-four is what you get. Good night for now.

Happy to announce the continuation of Blue Pyramid Stories, with special focus on my upcoming roadtrip. This project could go in a million different directions, but will at least go north, south, west, and east…

I think my definition of productivity may be different than everyone else’s.

Granted that the word carries very capitalistic connotations, that the implications of the word convey an image of a factory worker plugging away at widgets or perhaps an office automaton churning through a comically piled Inbox drift of papers, converting them sheet by sheet into a neatly stacked ream of Outbox ex-trees. But still. So much of what capitalism conspires to produce is drivel, is from the Self-Eating Snake School of Consumption. It’s there for profit, and the larger conception of profit, for wasting resources and converting them into items we don’t need. And the biggest resource consumed, of course, is time.

Whereas the truly productive uses of time are those which are geared toward creativity, which innately seems to tense against notions of time-in-the-seat hourly work. Which is not to say that schedules and discipline are fundamentally opposed to getting things done – indeed, longer works and projects require some adherence to a daily grind. But there’s something to be said for the schedule one creates for oneself as opposed to the one that is dictated by others. That a self-regulated sense of commitment is vastly more likely to succeed than one imposed from the outside.

Where a lot of this becomes a struggle is in the realm of my own projects. I have projects so long overdue it’s laughable. The Song Quiz, for example, still claims to be ready to go in early 2010. I designed a new sidebar for this page before this year started and we’re almost halfway through it, without its appearance anywhere herein. In part because it was tied to a new project whose release I have regularly predicted but never achieved. I’m behind on submitting my books to agents and publishers in a new round of excitement that seems to have been unable to launch since July of last year. I have managed to put momentum behind debate, but little else.

Although, of course, this note about writing does remind me that projects spun out into the orbit of thing constantly contemplated and considered but left undone for years do sometimes get finished. American Dream On, for example, was begun in 2002. 2002! And sat as a few-chapter stillbirth, periodically touched up, for seven years before I finally sat down and cranked out the entire work. Not that this is an inspiring model per se, but it does at least offer hope, however possibly false at times, that the distractions of the capitalist-focused life can sometimes be set aside in favor of meaningful and creative production. It feels almost wrong to call that production, so ingrained are the stereotypes about what can be deemed valid output by individuals for society. But there it is. Maybe it’s time to reclaim this word for the good of everyone.

All that said, I have a project I should be working on. That I’ve been meaning to be working on for months, have dabbled in, but haven’t sat down and cranked out. Summer is never the best time to launch projects, but my Facebook contacts are at a critical enough mass and enough of my friends are bored enough (see also Facebook thread of epic proportions, now at 3,276 comments) that it might just do well enough anyway. It’s worth exploring. I can’t promise anything, because failed promises for production tend to get me into a spiral of self-recrimination that leads to video games or reading in bed. But maybe by observing this, putting it here, thinking about it and letting it go, I can do just enough to convince me to be as disciplined about the things that matter to me as I often am about the things that don’t.

Man, am I glad we’re about to be done with May. May was not without highlights, but was mostly an unmitigated disaster. The first month of being out of touch with Emily has been rough. It appropriately began on May Day (made all the more appropriate by just finishing The Handmaid’s Tale, which I loved and tore through very quickly, though was annoyed by the “Historical Note” addendum) and could not be over soon enough.

In the spirit of all this and more, here’s something to look forward to, already less than a month away. If you don’t like the title, finding it to be outdated, melodramatic, or even self-indulgent, you should know that my first notion for the tour title was the “Not Dead Yet” Tour. Which in some ways I find more fitting, though I like this acronym better, even if the ring is overall more nostalgic and less triumphal than Not Dead Yet might be. There are not a lot of detailed plans for this Tour quite yet, other than possibly daily yoga, since I’m losing my yoga routine with the close of the weekly class this evening, hanging out a bunch with friends, and two weddings (one in Boston and one in Albuquerque). I am still ruminating on a video diary thing as well as a writing project, so stay tuned for lots of neat new possibilities to come.

Anyway, obligatory Tour dates list:

Additionally, it’s worth noting that if you’re along the implicit route of this trip and I haven’t included your city, there’s still some room for amendment. You should contact me about that. The cross-country treks on either side of Albuquerque are going to be a little rushed, but there’s still room for flexibility there and especially on the East Coast portion.

Also changed the theme of the blog to reflect the new summer plans. The image up top is pretty much the best characterization of how I feel about this trip.

More soon.

It’s been really hard to breathe lately. Maybe I need to do more yoga. Maybe I just need to swallow my pride already. Maybe there are no right answers, like Rabbit surmises in the comic below, only a vague attempt to avoid the skyward pianos that loom and always threaten to fall.

I’m going to DC this weekend. Hanging out at Brandzy’s place, though I won’t see him much. Talking to high school debaters at Nationals about our upcoming Camp, our debate program for any potential Rutgers prospects. Getting a bit more familiar with Public Forum debate.

I went to the Allison Weiss show in Princeton on Wednesday. It was quite awesome, a much better sampling of her in her element than the prior show in New York. She asked for requests and I called one out (July 25, 2007) and she played it when she said it wasn’t on the setlist and used this to encourage more requests. I bought a dinosaur T-shirt from her after the show. She played all the songs I wanted to hear, plus a new one, penultimately, that broke my heart. It’s called “I’ll Be OK”. I’m not so sure.

There’s something about short, direct, declarative sentences that feels like control. It’s probably very different than how I usually feel, the rambly arcs of poetic lyrical interpretability. How much of all this is about control? Pride or control? How much of self-preservation requires those elements? How much do I care?

Yesterday I got a brief vision of a possible summer plan with the laptop-based webcam capturing me telling stream-of-consciousness stories while I drove across the country. Little video postcards of life on the road, free, carefree, hopeful. It doesn’t feel real. It feels like a clown suit I’m trying to want to put on. I don’t know how to pretend to want things that are different than everything I always tried to want.

Everything is harder since I tried to take control.

Allison Weiss at Small World Coffee
Princeton, NJ
25 May 2011

I’m Ready
I Don’t Want to Be Here
I Was an Island
Nothing Left
July 25, 2007
Don’t Go
Try to Understand
Why Bother
Baby
Kids (partial)
You + Me + Alcohol
The End
One-Way Love
Wait for Me
Ghost Stories
Let Me Go
I’ll Be OK
Fingers Crossed

It’s easy to forget what this year was supposed to be about. I don’t even mean all that long ago, before my life caved in and I was left staring at the daily wreckage of my own dreams. I mean after that, but still before now, when I was going to be finishing a book, my fourth novel, in five days.

I last worked on it on 7 February 2011, an overcold day that I spent writing fiction outside of my place of residence for the first time in many years, then talked on the phone to Ariel, then came home and wrote this post and then wound up tabling the project until, apparently, now or even later than now. That was three months ago. The project’s sum total, aside from a pretty thorough and still salvageable outline, stands at 2,433 words. Less than ten pages, generously. The size of a half term paper I used to crank out in a handful of hours before the deadline to convince my professor I was from wherever I was writing about.

May 15th.

I mean, there were other things that happened on the way to today, many of them halfway good. There was that whole job thing that came along just about after, whisking me away from a future in Seattle or Denver or Flagstaff and pulling me in, not unlike a friendly but still somewhat menacing giant anemone, ensconcing me in New Jersey with the promise of a career that was neither writing nor in conflict with my principles and artistic desires. Slowly gnawing on my nutrients while I got numb and placid and malleable and basked in the warmth of something like community before awaking on the rocky shores this May, behind on creativity and with the tidewaters of that community pulling away and out to sea without me. This is water, as good old DFW would say. And you only know it when you’re out of it, for good or for ill.

The Pale King is searingly brilliant, by the way, a 500+-page suicide note that I’m already in love with a fifth of the way through. It’s brilliant like a made-for-TV knife, like a whole novel of nothing but Tim O’Brien water buffalo in unending agonizing parade to their slow demise. It’s improved my quality of life twenty points in two days, single-handedly, if only be reawakening the slumbering knowledge deep within me of the importance of Project X. Its similarities to same are also somewhat troubling, at least in spirit, and it occurs to me that X could be a suicide note if it had to be, probably best reads that way as fiction even if that’s not its purpose in the corporeal world per se.

I draft ten notes a day, mostly addressed to the person I have decided to no longer address, of course, though it’s probably inevitable that she reads this blog (unless she’s really that disconnected, but then again she gets bored very easily and quickly became addicted to things like Facebook and the Internet for their absorbing, time-wasting capabilities, so) and thus even the people I “cut off communication from” (one, to date), are never really out of touch. With me. If. Yeah. I’m going to stop now. And reset.

The point is, simply, that I think a lot about death, in sort of the way normal people (as far as I can tell) think about food. Savoring different textures and anticipating certain flavors. Imagining different layouts and menus. It is not unwelcome, though it is probably less welcome than the average perception of food, it carries some of the same craving without the visceral desire. It is important, sometimes, for me to flag for people that I will not be terribly sad if it happens, even very soon. Which is not to say that I’m willing it and it is important that I not will it for the sake of all you dearly beloved readers and friends who I am truly well aware want the best for me. It is also important that you not respond to the sentence prior to the last one with some snide quirky neo-atheistic response about me not being able to be sad because I’d be dead and the whole point would be to feel nothing. It’s not exactly how it works and even if it were, it would still matter differently. Either you follow or you don’t. The point is, and this is the bottom line, it is no great loss if I go in this condition. There is something to be said for going out on a low note, when one is not missing much.

I bring this up not because I’m on the precipice of something drastic – indeed, I probably spend less time worrying about it than I have in a while – but because I am starting to formulate plans around spending a lot of time on the road this summer. And the road is a dangerous place – far more dangerous than the head of the truly suicidal, let alone something nice and safe like a plane or a ghetto. And in spending a lot of time considering mortality, one can stave it off with the import of writing a note first, then a lengthy note, then perhaps a whole manifesto about life that is long and exhaustive and exhausting and before too long, it’s time for sleep instead of death and the whole discussion can be tabled for another night.

Except here’s the problem: we often never get around to writing that thing, whatever it is, and then we wind up in a three-car chaos outside of Tulsa some night or succumbing to a clot or an aneurysm that no one thought to look for and suddenly the thing that reassured us about staying alive is still left unfinished and makes the whole operation of dying, after all, sad and wasteful. Which is not to turn this into the typical trite “make haste to live” or the deadly “live each day as if it were your last” (not that there is not value to such positions, in part), but rather to observe that those things bear writing when one has the time and, indeed, even the circumspection to perhaps not be all so mopey about the end of living on this planet.

It’s like this: My debate team went to Columbia a week or two ago to renew the old King’s/Queen’s Debate tradition from centuries ago and they hit this case about letting prisoners go if the law they were imprisoned under was repealed. Makes sense, intuitive, fun for discourse, the whole nine. But the team mounted a mighty opp based on the idea that parole boards ought decide when people are ready to reintegrate into society – that blanket amnesty is bad, but the parsing and sorting of parole boards can maximize the chance that those returning to society are healthy and happy and ready to participate. But of course Columbia ultimately won that argument by observing quite simply that this is not our modern standard – parole boards are not invoked at the end of every term in prison, but only periodically and selectively for early release.

Which is to say that a great writing project, a suicide note if you will (regardless of self-infliction, mind), is like a parole board for life. We ought not be let out without taking the time to reflect. Not only does this dovetail quite obviously with my own theological presumptions about a time of review and reflection between worlds (some day that will be set down, but I have confidence enough of you know what I’m talking about that I don’t have to explicate further at risk of this being part of the whole missing piece I’m trying to avoid), but it’s just a good standard. So if you catch yourself feeling okay with death, maybe it’s time to start contributing the last great statement (and yours may not involve words – perhaps you prefer sculpture or interpretive dance) just in case. And if you like life more, well all the more reason to hedge just in case, to indent the sting of potential calamitous tragedy with pre-emptive safekeeping.

And so, with that, it may be time to set a new deadline for good old Project X. Realistically it can’t be before the summer travel, starting to take shape between the 24ths of June and July, but it can be soon enough that each year since I got serious about this aspect of my life again will contribute one book to the stack of those waiting to find traction in the greater mind at large. And writing books for the aspiring author is probably a lot like having children for the aspiring Major League dad. Sooner or later, one of them’s gotta be able to play ball.

I haven’t been posting much lately. There’s a few reasons for that. For one, there’s something stemming from my last post that’s still being resolved and I’m not commenting on that matter till it gets sorted out. So that tends to put a damper on my communication when there’s an elephant in the room that doesn’t bear description. But I’ve also been struggling a bit lately to find an equilibrium of time and expression that works for me. The complicating factors of being just shy of turning 31, dealing with multi-continental communication with a certain person, and trying to decide what I’m going to do with the coming year after this May have all weighed heavily. And, lacking conclusions, there is little to say.

So I’m not really going to talk about any of that today. What I do want to focus on is something arguably more important that has crept in through the margins, that has manifest on the sidelines of all these other things I’m trying to decide. A fitting frontispiece for this post might be John Lennon’s old standard “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.” But it might also be my old standard “Why do you think we were born on a planet with six or seven billion people on it instead of just one person?” And herein lies the crux of the issue. People. Lots of ‘em.

Look, I’m an only child. People often frustrate me. I’ve been known to get into a state after weeks or months on end surrounded by others where I start to crave alone time, start to find ways to force it upon myself whether it’s really feasible or not. Staying up late has a lot to do with that – in times when I’ve been most surrounded, I’ve pushed the limits of late-awakeness mostly out of a need to carve out time that’s only mine, where I can be alone with my thoughts and stack them up, rearrange them, figure out what’s really going on. Losing that ability tends to correspond to what other people claim to experience when they lose sleep – fragmentation of thought, randomness of action. Not good things.

HOWever, the last thing I’ve really been needing of late is time alone. I’ve never had so much of it in all my born days. And this has put special focus on the rare exceptions, the time when I get to interact with others, especially outside of a merely utile context like debate. When I get to just talk and be and exchange ideas and thoughts and feelings with other folks.

People, these times are what life is all about. I have gotten to hang out, on the phone or in person, with a handful of close friends in the last couple of weeks, and I simply don’t understand how any human being could prioritize anything else in their lives above human interaction of this kind. Yes, I know we’re all technically sustained by food and it probably helps to have access to clothing and shelter, but the fundamental roots of our human dignity have to be about access to meaningful conversation steeped in mutual respect and interest. And admittedly debate is a lot like that, in several ways, or gives rise to similar interpersonal conversation once one pushes beyond “how was your round?” But conversations that are the fundamental centerpiece of most all of my friendships, the balanced buffet of bantery jokes and references, shared memories, enlightened understanding, and honest exploration, this is the atomic block of life as a rational agent. This is what keeps us, any of us (I would posit) going. And without it, life quickly becomes gray, drab, brutish, and potentially short.

This is somewhere between +1 and -1 on a 100-point revelatory scale, but the way it’s hit me this week has reframed internal debates about what is important and meaningful in my life. Namely because I’m so surprised that we don’t structure society more around the facilitation of these kinds of deep and profound interactions. There are a lot of market-based commercial reasons to minimize the role of these conversations and exchanges of ideas, of course, though I hardly think capitalism can singlehandedly shut them out. But obviously if we advertise based on the exploitation of insecurities, we hardly want to enable people to derive such satisfaction from individualized free experiences that at most require a meal or beverage over which to stage such an encounter. But that can’t be all that’s thwarting daily recognition and prioritization of these kinds of groupings. Part of it has to be about the difficulty and perhaps non-universality of finding close friends, especially those who persist across years and decades to enable meaningful reunions and catchings-up. Still, most everyone has such friends, even if only in ones and twos.

I do have to blame money, I guess. And as the upcoming quiz (half the images are done and then I have to write all the answers – it could be anywhere from three days to three months away at this point) illustrates, money is a big impediment to most meaningful things. But surely even people dedicated to work or to setting time aside for a passionately pursued pursuit must be able to take a step back and realize that only when exchanging important ideas with those they most care for are they maximizing their potential as a human being. That what they can most remember about one, three, seven, twelve, twenty years past are moments spent in mutual revelation or wonder or admiration with another soul and that everything else in the meantime, save perhaps for a few treasured accomplishments or accolades, is fine print. Seriously, seek out your lasting memories. How many of them are alone? How many of them are all about you only?

Stop reading this blog entry. Call up an old friend. Or go visit them. And you’ll see what I mean.

Kids, it’s been a manic day in Highland Park. Say what you will about the downside of being a manic depressive or bipolar or whatever the trendy new pharmaceutical term for my outlook on the world is, but the upside is GREAT. Always has been, always will be. I don’t have reason to be happy, per se, and I’m not exactly, but I am being productive. Which may be the next-best thing.

Without manic moods, I’m not sure I’d ever get through the mundane drudgery aspects of life – the bare levels of life maintenance whose very existence in a thoughtful, creative life seems to stymie every possible inspiration and outlet for hope. How can we feel good about the potentiality of life’s higher echelons when so much of it is spent running errands or eating or sleeping or cleaning oneself or one’s living quarters? It becomes debilitating quite quickly. But manic moods seem to pave it all over, to flush away the feeling of incumbent drudgery with a hyper-enthusiasm for life and doing and going and being that one would want to infuse in all of life and its aspects. Suddenly, there’s a relentless energy for everything, whatever it may entail, and the to-do list dries up and crinkles and disintegrates in the wind of such adrenaline.

Here’s another thing that’s helped keep me organized, perhaps the best life development of 2009, now a three-year tradition for my office area wall:

You wouldn’t think that looking at twelve months at a time instead of one would do that much for one’s perception of time in its passage, but boy does it do wonders for me. I could probably write a two-thousand word treatise on why this particular vantage on time is so powerful and important for me (especially today!), but I’ll try to summarize briefly instead. Being able to see 365 days at a time really emphasizes the importance and the rarity of each one. One can wave away a month all the time, and one often does, thinking I only have to get through this or that or over that hurdle and a month can be explained away as nothing. But no one is so jaded, cynical, and resigned to do the same for a year. A year is the benchmark of an amount of time that, by its nature, is a Very Big Deal. And looking at the whole year in a snap is a little like looking at the Grand Canyon. One can’t help but be overwhelmed by its stature, its enormity, the vast complexity of its details.

And yet one adjusts – one sees the Grand Canyon as a whole, sees its details as composite parts of something larger, greater, and more important than oneself. Similarly, one’s eyes gradually adjust to the year at a time, to each block of it being something vital to carve importance and meaning out of. One can put the feeling of a day and its length and rhythm in the context of hundreds like it. One can feel a month not as an isolated frame whose edgy abyss can be peered over but never really seen, but as a passage of days surrounded by other days, making planning across months more seamless and fluid. One can also grapple with the finitude of life itself, that one (in this case, I) has (have) only yet been offered thirty of these little wall hangings in which to decorate the whole of a life to date. That eighty (fifty more) would be generous – that but one or only half of this is possible. And thus there is urgency to coloring the days with matters of importance, with good expenditures of time, with investments whose memory will bear reflection and not merely yield to sighs and excuses and shrugs. This is the call to arms of most of my days and perspectives these days (and for some time in the past, if you look through this record), but especially is enhanced by the hanging of all 365 24-hour sets in a row on the wall.

I highly recommend it for your own wall. I also recommend being able to go through an entire grocery shopping visit without crying once, an accomplishment I notched for the first time in six months today. I think I was too distracted by manic focus to think about the larger implications of anything. I have that grandiose sense that I could knock down a menacing statue with a single cross-eyed glare, the feeling that I could actually lift a car over my head and chuck it across the street. Keep your drugs and substances – I experience all the highs and lows I need quite naturally. And no, folks, I’m not actually going to attempt any vehicle-flinging. Not today.

In any case, the high-energy Wednesday has also finally established the deadline of my fourth novel, dubbed Project X as discussed earlier, which will be Sunday, the fifteenth day of May. Given that it’s likely I’ll vacate Jersey on June 1 (or possibly July 1), this will give me a reasonable timeframe to focus on the novel, blending my other duties here and a vague urgency with a slightly more lenient pace (nearly four full months instead of three!) to account for my current emotional bearings. It’ll be a challenging project, to say the least, and is almost certain to be either my most or least commercially viable venture. Which it is will have to be determined by many things impossible to predict at this juncture. But it’s exciting to have a deadline in life – it’s safe to say that pretty much all my best days have come when I have a deadline ahead of me.

Anyone who isn’t manic depressive should really try it. Seriously. I don’t know how you all get by without feeling this way sometimes.

The air is pregnant with impending snow today, the entire high sky taking on a gray-white hue as though snow were the literal product of such a sky being chipped and chiseled into flaky falling flecks. The radar maps say it’s far away still, but the feel of a person as they walk through our three-dimensional metaphor ought outweigh any technological override. Any moment now, the clear paths and piled yards of my frigid neighborhood will find new comrades, paratrooping in to reinforce their ranks.

I’m back in Highland Park, in Jersey for the foreseeable as I try to make my resolve to improve this year a reality, struggling against the siren call of visits to grocery stores and other overlit places I only ventured to in pairs, or not at all. Each week is to be punctuated with the refuge of a debate tournament, the travel and camaraderie and distraction found therein, the opportunity (as especially this last weekend at Dartmouth) for truly elevated discourse and exploration of ideas. The community of college debaters is such a distillation of intellectual vigor and passion that I am frankly surprised more people do not find themselves gravitationally tied to it as I do. No doubt its periodic overcompetitive acrimony is a deterrent, as might be the distractions of normal life and its beckoning stress and responsibility. But given its unmatched ability to perpetuate thought in an exciting way, there’s no place I’d rather spend time and energy, at least for now.

I’m at a crossroads these next few days, determining how to approach what are likely to be my last few months in New Jersey. There’s a need to reintegrate a three-month novel project into my daily routine without it swallowing everything else whole. There’s a need to determine exactly how much unpacking I want to do for a temporary stint in this apartment, what the ratio of energy is between making things more livable here and making the move unbearable at its conclusion. There’s a need to place other orbital parts of my life in their respective aspects, to figure out where things are going and what good uses of time really are. Priorities, trade-offs, balance, perspective. Really, life is never any different than this – these are always the things one must weigh when looking at existence. It’s merely that most people are too busy to look at existence too often, while I have nothing but time.

I guess I look forward to a time when I feel too constrained by other priorities to examine my own priorities. Although I can see the drawbacks of that too, and I must be careful what I hope to see.

In the spirit of trying to get my engines revved, of trying to buck up and plow through the life-maintenance shlock that must be cleared away to get to the good (creative) stuff, in the theme of embracing a life that is controlled almost entirely by other people but can still be viewed from my own perspective, I will close with a video. It’s one I was sent about a week ago by my friend Michael, one that he said reminded him of me and I say reminds me of who I used to be, long before I ever met him. Who I must be again, or could be, or could take a couple pointers from. While we collect more information about life as it progresses, if we’re paying attention, we don’t always improve. Sometimes we go backwards, we lose vision, we lose touch with what is essential. Here’s hoping this can help you restore, as it does me, at least on the margins:

Is there anything so great in this world as a shower? I doubt it. There is something ineffable about the way it focuses one’s mind and thinking, at least sometimes, that makes it the single most consistent source of inspiration, resolution, and clarity that I have access to. You want to go do a cool groundbreaking psychological study? Attach electrodes to the brain and see what channels and conduits open and close as said head is doused by hot water, shampoo, and soap. But for all the collateral electrocution, you’d come up with some pretty amazing results.

In any event, I came to Albuquerque for nigh on a month largely to get a reset on my life. To try to figure out what the swath of damage was from 2010 and to determine what, if any, resolution I could make for 2011. Not resolutions, mind you, necessarily, because although I appreciate the tradition, the whole thing is a little contrived and probably more directional than I could count on myself to be on this trip. But some kind of decision, or decisions, some kind of purpose or at least a path to try to find it.

It’s frequently been a tough trip, as I’ve found Albuquerque to be haunted by memories old and older. Much time was logged before friends arrived and their arrival has not heralded the automatic good times that such encounters used to. Which is not to say that I’ve been miserable or even largely unhappy, nor that others have made me feel that way. Much of my time here has been wonderful and I’ve found my friends and family to mostly be powerful aids in my effort to establish an interest in the future. Or at least to share a meal or a game with, even if it isn’t quite up to pre-2010 standards in my own beleaguered soul. But up until the shower this early afternoon, nothing had really resolved itself. Nothing was funneling or folding toward some purposeful outcome, let alone a set of them. I’ve read a lot, thought a lot, talked a lot, cried a lot, seen more than a few movies. All minor little influences to be sure, but it took falling water to put it all together.

How long any of this will last remains to be seen. It seems literarily contrived in the extreme that the path for the next few months snapped together like the proverbial mosaic gone groutless in the waning hours of the year, with less than twelve to go before a deliriously celebrated transition to the next. The next that, please God, has to be better than this one, though admittedly 2010 was not without accomplishments. Certainly in spite of the disastrous middle times between the accomplishments, finishing my third novel and leading Rutgers debate to a fourth ranking in the nation are not to be trifled with. Indeed, had my marriage persisted, this year could be counted perhaps among my five best, especially since that means it also would have involved our scheduled trip to Egypt. In any case, contrived-seeming or not, temporary wishful thinking or otherwise, a list of directions for the coming annum has sprung up in my head amidst the steamy confines of tile and glass block.

I present them here for the same reason that people have listed such things for time immemorial. Indeed, this blog itself could be considered one gigantic New Year’s Resolution machine, applied evenly to every day or thought or perspective to usher in the accountability and consistency required of making public declarations to any sort of audience. I can resolve to do all kinds of things every minute and the last six months have been aswirl with just that: emotional and mental lines in the sand that were constantly erased and redrawn, moved and altered, bent and broken, till all that was left was a pile of overwrought pre-glass. Now it’s time to apply some heat and pressure, to try to cobble the tiny grains of windblown wreckage into something useful, solid, even stable. Fragile and vulnerable, of course, as all glass is, but at least tangible and visible to the naked eye as something other than infinitesimal fragments.

Here goes:

1. I will not be seeking a part-time job upon my return to New Jersey in January.

2. Instead, I will spend that time ramping up creative pursuits of many stripes as though this time were deliberately spent away from day jobs like 2009-2010. Among these will be escalating the visibility and promotional potential of The Blue Pyramid, with new quizzes and especially the long discussed but still unfulfilled Facebook integration.

3. I will also aggressively ramp up the pursuit of representation/publication for American Dream On and The Best of All Possible Worlds.

4. Finally on this creative front, I will commence work on my fourth novel. Soon after returning to Jersey, I will set a deadline for it as with the past three novels and I will finish the book by the deadline, taking this process just as seriously as the prior ones. The novel has a working title already, but it will be known publicly as Project X for the time being.

5. I will obviously fulfill the remainder of my commitment to the Rutgers debate team, attending every tournament this year as previously planned.

6. Unless significant reasons to stay emerge, I will plan on moving West in the summer of 2011. I will spend time scouting out cities and possibilities, with few to no places in the western thirteen states ruled out. I will plan to return to conventional full-time employment for the year starting in fall 2011, possibly even multiple jobs.

7. Aside from the above, I will not put pressure on myself to do or be or pursue anything else. Which is not to say that I might not also find other uses of my time or energy, but I will keep myself from beating up on myself about any shortcomings outside of fulfillment of the above six pursuits. While I will try to stick to a budget, I will not worry about money, because this plan is financially sustainable. While I will try to volunteer some, I will not berate myself for prioritizing creative pursuits over volunteer time. While I will try to read a great deal, I will not get on my own case if I spend more time playing video games. As long as nothing else interferes with the above goals, it’s fair game.

It doesn’t look like much, now that I have it up there, and a good bit of it was probably already the gameplan in one form or another. But it feels like an incredible relief to have it up and out there, especially #7. I’ve spent enough time in the last half-year contemplating the brink of my own self-destruction that there’s simply no point in not making sweeping decisions to improve the quality and purpose of my own life. I believe that the only really fulfilling aspect of the human mind is the pursuit of creativity. The soul may be fed by love, however painful that seems to be, and even efforts to help others, which all good creative pursuits also are. But the mind requires creativity and the only thing I really value or trust about myself at this point is my mind. If I don’t focus on that, in finding my way back to feeling okay through maximizing those efforts and those pursuits at the detriment of financial concerns or emotional self-flagellation, then not only will I not make it, but there will be no point to making it. I’m in a long, ongoing argument with myself about the value of getting through this. I must arm myself with all the best reasons to go forward.

2010, no one will miss you. Please see yourself out.

I’ve made it pretty clear this year that I will neither be sending nor receiving gifts for Christmas or associated holiday seasons, though I’m still deliberating about sending out a New Year’s Letter. On the one hand, it’s a tradition that I started with Emily in 2003; on the other, it’s one that I was well more enthusiastic about and she basically pressured me into giving up. So there’s some opportunity to reclaim it. At the same time, what do I really have to send in a friendly greeting to everyone about the advent of 2011? “Thank God it won’t be 2010 anymore!”? An inspiring message, to be sure, but do people really need an 8.5×11 in their mailbox with such declaration? Not at all sure. Besides, it’s not a mystery to anyone who’d be on the list that this year was a setback. I could just send out an e-card or even post a holiday letter right here, where everyone’d inevitably see it anyway. But then isn’t most of the point that someone cares enough to go to the trouble of printing something out on actual paper, of signing their name, of finding the address of their friends? So, yeah. Nothing is simple these days.

So despite my moratorium on gifts, largely borne of exhaustion at the idea of giving and horror at the accumulation incumbent in receiving, I went and bought myself a big ol’ new toy this week, which arrived today on a Budget Rent-a-Truck masquerading as a FedEx delivery vehicle. It’s what I’m using to write this very post, a Dell Inspiron laptop that is my first ever computer of the portable variety. I don’t really need it, which begs the question of why I went out and spent ~1% of my net worth on it. There were a lot of micro-factors, including a desire to become familiar with post-XP Windows operating systems (while not having to rely on them, thank you trusty desktop!), a desire to utilize streaming Netflix movies while not trying to use my office chair like a couch, and a desire to be able to write in places that are not my apartment. None of them singularly compelling, but in combination enough to make an interesting case, especially when my misperception that any decent laptop cost at least $850 had been so roundly dispelled. This one was less than $500, including taxes and shipping.

I’m not intending to make it my primary computer, which really gets me on my case about spending money like this for a backup computer at a time when I intend to be saving for some indeterminate future. At the same time, I haven’t bought a new computer in about 7 years, and that one cost about the same as this one. $750 a decade is probably a reasonable computer budget, especially for someone who uses theirs as much as I use mine. Plus it’s a little lift, sadly, to get a new toy. I say sadly because I truly wish I were immune to the American-instilled pleasures of having a new material item to play with. But I am honest enough to admit that it gives me a little thrill, that it’s fun to explore and learn, that I enjoy the tactile pleasures of the shiny o-bespeckled base and cover. Am I nervous as all get-out that I will tire of using the keyboard which, although not bad for a laptop, is still annoying? Sure. Or that if I spill something in this keyboard, the whole computer is wrecked, something I’ve long criticized about laptops? Of course. But hey. Life is unpredictable. Might as well take some chances when the impulse strikes. And, y’know, it doesn’t do grievous harm or something.

Meanwhile, New Mexico continues to be a really mixed bag. I’m loving the food, splurging additionally to stuff myself with rellenos, enchiladas, and burritos. I continue to read a lot, now about a third of the way through John Irving’s behemoth Until I Find You. I can’t tell if he’s writing it absurdly simply to prove a point of some kind or if he really was always a very simple writer and I didn’t notice amidst his really engaging plots like Owen Meany or Widow. Maybe I’ve been reading too much Pynchon and DeLillo and Russian lit lately, but this work is coming off like a third grade composition. Maybe he’s just lost it as a writer. Nevertheless, it’s entertaining in the lurid way that most Irving pieces are. And I’m sure it will be ultimately convoluted and heartbreaking, so there’s that to look forward to.

Now that I have my laptop, I might move forward with the ambiguously talked-around quiz project that was laughably short of launching before I left NJ, despite my ambitious claims to the contrary. Of course, we’re also in the full throes of luminaria season, which gets going in earnest tomorrow as I take the 600 folded bags and start filling them with sand to be stored in the garage. My ambition was to place them a day early (the 23rd) – something I’ve often talked about but never actually followed through with for one reason or other. But they’re now predicting rain that entire day, meaning it’ll have to be another dawn-to-dusk marathon layout on the 24th, as per usual. And that’s assuming the rain doesn’t start to impinge on the actual display day. Now that I’ve got a camera built into the laptop, I even toyed with the idea of making a “How to Make Luminarias” video, but I probably won’t have the energy. At least the rate at which projects occur to me is steady, even if my inertia is larger than normal.

This has wound up being a rather prosaic post. Blame the latent materialism, blame John Irving’s low-vocab influence. I had more poetic efforts in mind last night amidst the lunar eclipse and the solstice. But after lying down on the rooftop for the better part of half an hour it was too cold to persist. By the time I went back out in search of a reddened orb, it was blockaded entirely by clouds, the world hemmed in from the astronomical convergence. It almost brought me to tears, and not mostly because I was sad to miss out on a direct visual of one of the most photographed events of 2010. The moon does funny things to people. It tilts the tides unseen within us all.

I’m about halfway through my month in Albuquerque. Up till now, almost all of the time has been with family. Much more of the time to come will be with friends. These twin pillars continue to radiate the import of this place for me, whatever toys I bring or hold, whatever meaning I ascribe to its tasty food and haunted corridors. In the end, as always, it’s about the people. The luminarias, laptops, and lunches don’t hurt. But it’s about folks. That’s all we are in the end.

It’s hard to believe that I’m already in the process of counting down to my longest trip to New Mexico in nearly a decade. In just a shade over a week, I’ll be winging my way westward to spend almost a month in Albuquerque and the surrounding environs, making undoubtedly endless appearances at the Frontier and Waffle House as I try to more thoroughly get my bearings on what my future looks like. Certainly I’ll be looking at Albuquerque with the new eyes of one searching for a new destination within the year to come. No doubt the place I loosely call my hometown will be on the shortlist for the future, alongside Seattle, Flagstaff, Denver, and probably a couple other cities.

Been working on a project that’s almost certainly going to come out shortly, maybe even in the next 24 hours. It’s another quiz that isn’t the Song Quiz, as I believe I alluded to a few days back. If optimally timed, the quiz would have been released in the early morning hours today, sandwiched neatly between the advent of the WikiLeaks story and what people colloquially call CyberMonday. Most of this year’s CyberMonday articles seem to be decrying the phenomenon as hype, something that never seems to be written about terrorism or national security threats. I don’t know if there’s a lot more Internet traffic today, but I do know that Romania seems to be really into the BP in the last few days. Hi, Romanians! Hope you keep enjoying the Book Quiz.

I’ve also enjoyed a lingering Facebook debate about the WikiLeaks article I wrote and about the phenomenon in general. I was sensing a sea-change in perception when I wrote the piece, but it seems I underestimated the emotional attachment of so many Americans to the sanctity of their government, no matter how far said government strays from its ideals or stated purpose. I think the debate has been robust and fair, but I am still a bit personally dismayed by the idea that almost anything pernicious could be revealed about this country and a large swath of its people would condemn the revelation rather than the initial act itself. All I can try to point people back to is that the principle behind democracy conceptually requires the informed consent of the governed. If the only way our government functions is by concealing reality, we no longer have informed consent, and thus we aren’t a democracy. It’s hard to be a beacon of democracy when one isn’t one.

Maybe I should just skip the west altogether and strike out for Ireland or the UK or something. Not that I’d ultimately wind up vastly more satisfied with those governments, but there’s at least some humility and sobriety to the general conduct of those countries. It’s probably hard to exist in modern Europe without a little more awareness of the balance of things as they really are. Then again, the last thing I need right now is further isolation. Would a small town in Ireland accept me as a novelty, a distant great-grandson come home to write and work? Probably not work – and here’s the real rub: an inability to economically sustain oneself in a place even more economically troubled than the good old USA. Probably better off building up a cache of cash first in the west.

If you like the Facebook debates, it’s a good week for debating. Monday and Wednesday feature two of our three public campus debates this semester, on green energy and vegetarianism, respectively. Basically none of you are in New Brunswick and most of you are horrendously busy, but it’s worth offering the invitation anyway. Debate tournaments aren’t especially well designed for outside observation, but both of these events will be, and there’s even cash on the line in the former one! The latter is for the hearts and minds of college students and my team is thus arguing against one of the fundamental principles of my own life. Of course, debate itself and its ability to endorse the core ideals of the enemy in a convincing way is, itself, a core value. So it’s all worth it.

Would that said core value were more broadly accepted by the American public, no? If the idea of making the case unthinkable for the sake of argument were standard practice rather than unpatriotic treason? It would be a lot harder to dismiss other rational agents as crazy, a lot harder to accept ourselves as infallible.

The sidebar on this blog looks a little different now – I’ve manually added a bunch of links to the only active blogs I know of that my friends are keeping. If I overlooked yours, let me know and I’ll add it. And if for some reason you want your link taken down, we can do that too.

I’ve tried to just use titles and not identify anyone this time around, since it seems that a lot of people are into the relative anonymity thing. Looking over the previous rendition of my links to others’ blogs, it’s kind of remarkable how many people seem to have gone through blogging as a “phase”. But at least a handful are still into it at some level or another, so bully for that. One of these is also seeming to hope for anonymity, so I won’t identify who summed up my political thoughts better than I could just yesterday. Good reading, though.

I’m also not convinced that the whole Blue Pyramid Stories thing is working out. Frankly, no one seems that into it, given the view numbers. A lot of people have said they think it’s a little weird, especially with the candles and my somewhat toned-down demeanor. It’s an experiment, and one that I will probably continue to dabble in a little (I still have to finish the Scotland story, after all), but I’m not sure it’s going to be the multi-day-a-week thing I initially envisioned it as. Then again, once I actually revamp the sidebar to the BP page and have a featured landing page for the Stories, maybe people who haven’t heard them from knowing me will take an interest. Or maybe it’s all just too strange.

It’s been raining all day in Highland Park and it’s been a particularly daunting storm. The mood seems to be affecting everyone, especially those at the Cafe today, who were subdued amongst the quiet reclusion indicated by the absence of patrons. This storm seems to be winter’s declaration of arrival, the calling card of a season that may menace us with the portend of bundled coats and zipped up faces. I may have to drive to debate, not even to keep dry so much as to stay focused on not getting swept, like so many drenched leaves, down the road and into the river.

Might be working on a quiz at some point too. I know I’ve long promised the Song Quiz, but I’ve also been thinking about going with something really zany to mix things up. I need a focus, something lighter and more fun than I’ve been investing in. I feel heavy with the weight of reality. Maybe I should just join a bowling league or something, though that also puts a weight on one’s shoulders. Or at least one’s wrists.

I was alone all yesterday, a Saturday. I’m not making that mistake again.

Barring a major change, I’m going to be booked the next 26* Saturdays:
30 October: UPenn tournament (Philadelphia, PA)
6 November: American tournament (Washington, DC)
13 November: GW tournament (Washington, DC)
20 November: Fordham tournament –> Greg’s band’s show (New York City, NY)
27 November: Thanksgiving with Friends in Philadelphia, PA*
4 December: UMBC tournament (Baltimore, MD)
11 December: Albuquerque, NM
18 December: Albuquerque, NM
25 December: Albuquerque, NM
1 January: Albuquerque, NM
8 January: Middlebury tournament (Middlebury, VT)
15 January: Dartmouth tournament (Hanover, NH)
22 January: Bates tournament (Lewiston, ME)
29 January: NorthAms tournament (New York City, NY)
5 February: NYU tournament (New York City, NY)
12 February: GW tournament (Washington, DC)
19 February: Princeton tournament (Princeton, NJ)
26 February: Rutgers tournament!
5 March: West Point tournament (West Point, NY)
12 March: Brandeis tournament! (Waltham, MA)
19 March: William & Mary tournament (Williamsburg, VA)
26 March: BU tournament (Boston, MA)
2 April: UVa tournament (Charlottesville, VA)
9 April: Swat tournament (Swarthmore, PA)
16 April: Bryn Mawr tournament (Bryn Mawr, PA)
23 April: Nationals tournament (West Point, NY)

Twenty-six Saturdays*. That’s half a year.

This also indicates that, as you may have noticed, I’ll be spending a month in Albuquerque. 7 December – 5 January. Very excited about that – a long-term homecoming is long overdue. This also means that, unless something surprising comes up in the next couple weeks, I will likely be suspending any sort of job search until 2011. I’m just not convinced I’m up to it and I’m more convinced that I need a month at home than I need income right now. It’s only six weeks till I go home anyway. Once I come back, hopefully I will be restored to the point where I can consider employment.

Anyone got ideas for 30 April 2011? Who says I don’t plan ahead?

*Edited 26 October 2010 to add Thanksgiving weekend in Philadelphia. It’s actually 26 Saturdays booked, not 25 as originally reported.

There’s no debate this weekend. Not because there’s no scheduled tournament, but because that tournament doesn’t serve the purposes of the Rutgers team. It’s in British Parliamentary style, designed to prepare American teams for competition on the Worlds stage, with all its crazy four-on-four structure and rhetoric trumping analysis and lack of flowing. Rutgers would love to compete at Worlds (this year in Botswana!), just as much as we’d love to go to Stanford this year, but it’s not in the budget. We barely have a budget to get to basic regular tournaments when they give us deep discounts, let alone scurrying about like a team funded like the 7th-ranked team in the nation. Which, uh, we are.

The last few days have been about as eventful as any days are for me these days. Days, days, days. They cascade not like a waterfall or something glorious to be beheld so much as the drip in my bathroom sink. Day, pause, day, pause, day. The passage of time has become an annoyance, something to be swatted away like a lingering mosquito. There are moments each day that are almost okay… a good debate round or a fun practice, a moment of volunteering or walking that sparks imagination or hope, the second the heat started coming on in the apartment yesterday unbidden. But they’re rare and their ceiling is low. For the most part it’s a long trudge to school, uphill both ways in the snow. Sludgy, dirty snow, not the good kind.

Things are happening this Friday too, things I’m loath to preview here lest they raise concern from the worriers among you. It’s a long overdue meeting with my past, I can say that, and it comes at a time when the risks are low because I have nothing (almost nothing?) to lose. It’s something much better discussed upon reflection than anticipation. So I guess I’ll flag this post with a “Keepin’ It Cryptic” and move on. All will be revealed at some point.

Similarly, I have an upcoming project about which I’ll also be vague until you can see what it looks like. It’s adding a new dimension to the collection of things here at the BP, and it’s a major experiment. With any luck, it’ll be something that at minimum creates an archive of moments in time in a new and exciting way that can at least serve some posterity. At maximum, it could, like anything done serially on the Internet, become a phenomenon. So I’ll let that whet your appetite and, again, soon there will be much more to actually evaluate.

I have this last bit merely because of the Zen state of mind that came from tearing leafy greens from their stems for literally 150 consecutive minutes. This was my assigned task at the Cafe yesterday – I actually showed up an hour early because I’d misread the e-mail confirming my time, and thus was drawn up to the sink with a gargantuan box of greens whose name I never ultimately caught. Spinach? Arugula? An obscure lettuce? It was something like that. The repetition and the small satisfactions of working one’s hands against the bounty of the earth plunged me through the worst aspects of the mental void and into a deeper place where I could contemplate connections and possibilities rather than the mere horrors of the past. And it was in that state, not unlike a shower or even some of the better walks, that I was able to stumble over the obvious project I’m on the verge of launching. This was more of what I hoped for when I pictured volunteering as a key component of this year.

Of course I never really pictured this year and my subconscious is really having trouble catching up. This morning I awoke from a terrifying and disheartening dream that, while I was working at Glide and Emily was at the Labor Fed, she’d decided overnight to go to LA for six weeks straight. She was endlessly unconcerned about the toll this might take on our marriage, couldn’t seem to care less about my loneliness or missing her or anything of that ilk. I could detect, vaguely, in the dream that there might be someone in LA she was trying to see or some deeper thing to fear from this sudden trip arrangement which she was announcing to me the morning before she left. I panicked more and more as the dream hurtled toward her departure, clinging to her presence that I would soon lose for so long.

I awoke to a reality that made the dream look more ideal than nightmare.

Miles walked Wednesday: 1.2
Miles walked yesterday: 2.8

Been doing a lot of thinking lately. Obviously. If you want to play along at home, imagine the best thing that has ever happened to you in your life. Imagine that this had lasted for nine years. Now, imagine that instead of being a source of solace and comfort for you, a font of inspiration and confidence, it is transformed almost overnight, without warning or even coherent reason, into a source of betrayal and pain.

Anyway, this prompts a lot of thought. And key among the thoughts is the one of where the future will be, if there is a future to be had at all. I have really made extremely little progress in figuring this out for myself. I know I will not be living in Princeton anymore, and I’m pretty sure there are wide swaths of the country I can rule out for either lack of friendship/support or lack of interest in ever being there. Georgia comes to mind. Iowa, maybe. Seattle, a town I’d desperately like to live in someday, is just too far from any close friends. Same goes for anywhere abroad, except maybe parts of Mexico. Though I hear it’s tough to do regular border crossings.

There was a list at some point, though the list sometimes feels too narrow and other times too broad. Two cities have risen near the top, though they both are towns where I have no super-close friends. In one of them, I do have a whole debate team that would be the main source of my sustainability and interest for the year I could spend there, there being New Brunswick, New Jersey. In the other, I know no one, but would be a short jaunt from the Grand Canyon, long established as my spiritual home and epicenter. This one being Flagstaff, Arizona, the town I just told my friends in LA after Kunkel’s wedding would probably be my first choice of places to live if practicality were no object.

It’s by no means exhaustive – there are plenty of other places both west and east that are in contention. And even if they contend for 2010-2011, there’s no telling how much longer I’d stay in the same place. Both New Brunswick and Flagstaff would kind of be project towns. The former being a place to throw myself into debate, hoping to find satisfaction from fulfilling the coaching commitment I already made to a group of exciting and improving youths on the verge of their potential. Probably for just one year at the absolute most, to fulfill the commitment and see this year’s batch of seniors through while still laying the groundwork for a program that will (hopefully) have arrived by that year’s end. Flagstaff would be about me becoming a bit of a Desert Rat, spending maybe up to half the nights outside or in tents as I tried to hike every trail in the Canyon or maybe even embarked on an endless jaunt through the wilderness. To get in shape, to heal myself and restore my faith in the soothing light of the high desert. The same could be done, with more familial support and less natural perfection, in Albuquerque. Maybe – maybe – even somewhere in southeastern California that’s in range of all the friends I have in LA.

In thinking about these choices, it’s become increasingly clear that I will have regrets no matter where I go. And not just in the sense of the decade of regrets I’m only starting to come to grips with in my own head that pertains to the crisis writ large. If I go west, I will forever regret reneging on my commitment to Rutgers, feel bad about leaving the program I was helping to build in the lurch at the outset of arguably their most critical year. I will writhe that the opportunity to work with those kids is another casualty of what Emily has done to me, that the kids I’d be turning my back on would be unwitting victims of her recent rash actions. Conversely, of course, staying east offers numerous challenges to forming new bonds with people. For reasons I have been routinely unable to fully explain to others’ satisfactions, I feel enormously uncomfortable in the east. I find it to be cold (not physically – I like that kind of cold), uninviting, harsh, unwelcoming, and populated with people generally even more emblematically so. The idea of embarking on my most fragile and vulnerable year of existence on Earth in such an unforgiving environment seems almost pathologically stupid. And so I would regret, every time I was sad or lonely or desperate, surrounding myself with the forbidding world of the east instead of the relaxed, warm, and welcoming confines of the American west.

These are not the only factors involved, of course. Proximity to friends and family are huge, and made more complicated by the idea of sort of choosing between friends, or rewarding friends in some de facto sense for being near other friends and thus creating more of a safety-net community. It’s arguable that I shouldn’t try to do anything this year, instead drifting for weeks at a time from one friend to another. This seems bad because of the aimless stasis and limbo it might engender, but also seems safer in some ways and more likely to remind me of how much I have to live for. Not one of these choices is easy.

There’s also the factor of being too much of a dead weight on friends. I’m not saying this so that forty people e-mail me in the next 24 hours and reassure me that they are happy to do whatever they can for me – I already know you all feel that way. And thank you. But at the same time, I can feel the palpable toll that I and this situation are taking on the people that I care about. Anyone I stay with for a while ends up seeming exhausted, drained, and almost annoyed. I get it. It’s human. I am too great a burden to be shoved on any one person right now, or even a collection of people. Folks have to live their own lives, get married, have good times, embrace experiences that are not convincing their friend why there’s a reason to go on. And here again is perhaps the case for New Brunswick or Flagstaff, somewhere that the relationships I rely on day-to-day are tinged with less overall overwhelm at the depths of what I’ve lost. Granted, that may be infeasible – it’s possible that no one will meet me for 3-5 years without immediately being confronted by me as a broken semi-person. I don’t know. But there’s something to be said for forcing me into a situation where I have to form new bonds. There’s also a lot to be said for the idea that I wouldn’t do that even in a town where I knew no one, that I would just draw inward until my very sense of an outside world collapsed entirely.

There are no right answers. Such is the nature of calamity. There may be hope – maybe, I’m not sure – but there are no right answers. And so I continue to spin my wheels in futility, to face my impossible choices and decisions, to try to talk over the repetitive intractability with those who’ll listen. I know how I feel about regions of the world, though, but this isn’t the only factor. And I’m still not sure how I feel about the world at all, and whether it can still be the place for me.

I am trying, as calmly and slowly and rationally and logically as possible (under the circumstances) to figure this shit out.

About an hour from getting on my way toward the plane to take me away from Monrovia, which means I’m still a good five hours from the plane actually getting airborne. Things run at a slightly slower pace around here. The good news is that my flight is 16 hours from take-off to last landing (JFK in NYC), as compared to 30 hours on the way out here. Also two take-offs and landings this time as vs. four.

It’s been emotional. It is utterly clear to me that it was the right decision, though even clearer that the best possible decision would’ve been to come out here on Monday the 19th. I will never get to undo that one, though at least I didn’t make it worse by not flying out here at all.

Still an incredible number of decisions to sift through on my return, including how to try to craft a life for one after living for two for so long. Every assumption, location, and activity is on the table. Options start to narrow in my mind, only to explode again with further thought. It’ll probably take at least a month before I’m anywhere close to a single decision.

Tag, August, you’re it.

When Emily was here as an undergrad, she had unlimited printing of whatever she wanted at local computer clusters. This year, for the first time, they implemented limits on printing, which is a big part of why my distribution of American Dream On to friends was electronic, not paper.

Nevertheless, the limit is still sky-high and so she had a few hundred sheets left that expire on 1 July of this year. Today, I decided to use up as many of those as possible, printing a clean single-spaced copy of the most up-to-date versions of ADO and The Best of All Possible Worlds for posterity in case something happens, plus fifty sheets of Duck and Cover blanks in case something doesn’t. It’s always good to be prepared for all foreseeable possibilities.

I am heading to Philadelphia any minute now, then on to the greater LA area to see a bevy of friends and the wedding celebration of David Kunkel. Then finally a week in Albuquerque before returning here briefly only to set out again across the East Coast and then on to Africa. Quite a bit going on in the next few weeks and months, hopefully.

For reference, here’s the Tour image again, still accurate to date:

Feeling generally pretty good. Looking forward to editing TBoAPW, to spending some serious quality time with a lot of friends and family who I don’t see that often. Looking forward to the relaxing, renewing feelings of summer. Looking forward to lots of things.

But as I held the near-ream of paper in my hand, the more than 230,000 words worth of novels I’ve written in the last nine months, I was also looking at now. And for the first time in a long time, feeling good about right now. About the recent past. This feels as much like an arrival as it does a departure.

See you soon.

Not much time to post at the moment, but hopefully yesterday’s gave you something to chew on. If not, and you can’t get enough of playing Pac-Man on Google, my Dad is apparently considering selling his Pac-Man table if the price is right.

In any case, the main point of this post is to get you to go off-site, but specifically to two key sites from the women in my life.

The first is my wife’s new blog. Those familiar with past efforts may be the slightest bit cynical, but this is likely to stick since she’s blogging specifically about her upcoming internship in Liberia. Given the massive lack of distractions in Liberia and the overwhelming fascination the trip itself will likely inspire, I’d say it’s going to be a mighty interesting series of posts, assuming the internet stays up. So stay tuned there.

The other site is my mom’s sock doll auction to benefit KUNM, the Albuquerque NPR station. For those of you who’ve seen her adorable sock dolls, this is a chance to get two for the price of whatever the ABQ public deems appropriate while benefiting a good cause! Pretty neat all around.

The blog runs through the end of the summer (at least) and the auction runs through June 6th.

And I’ve gotta run because we’re going to Philly and DC for a whirlwind weekend before Em ships out Wednesday.

And if you want to leave not only this web site, but web sites altogether, may I recommend you head to the Barrow Street Theatre and watch Our Town? Em and I did last night and it was a religious experience. Seriously.

I am a pretty lucky guy.

It’s nice to get reminders of this, lest I begin to give in to consternation with any given personal quest or quandary at any given time. Though the below-announced “tour” is not a book-signing tour, yet, or anything of that ilk, it is a hearty reflection of how great my friends are, how many of them I am blessed to be able to see, and how fortunate I am to be in a position to contemplate some serious world travel as well.

Coming off a non-weekend weekend spent with the Philly crew, playing endless Wii Mario Kart and real-life tennis (6-4, 4-6, 6-5* over Fish in a reaffirmation that we are just as evenly matched as we were in the ill-fated Spring 1995 intramurals), I cannot express sufficient excitement about the summer ahead. More than anything, my visit just now was marked with exceptional depth and breadth of conversation, the greatest gift we humans can give those we are personally tied to. To have so many old friends with whom I can converse about such an array of topics at a high level makes me even luckier than I know I am.

*We didn’t do the proper tiebreaker thing because both of us forgot how to score it and we were exhausted already.

It is with this incredible fullness of heart that I announce my complete summer plans – possibly the most ambitious and wide-ranging itinerary I’ve ever undertaken. The “theme” is of course related to the thread that runs through these summer plans, work on my third novel (second this year), The Best of All Possible Worlds. The summer kicks off on the actual first day of summer, which happens to be my deadline, and will take me straight through the week of the first debate tournament of next season. I am preparing to be overwhelmed.

Here we go:

If we haven’t made specific contact about spending time on the tour in the above places and times, please send me an e-mail and we can sort things out. Some of this may be subject to a little tweaking, especially the dates that revolve around driving on the Eastern Seaboard rather than booked plane tickets. I may release an edited draft of this with some of those Eastern cities more specified before it’s all upon me.

Now the focus is making sure I can hit that deadline so everything else is viable.