Granted, I’m here in this situation now to write books, not really short stories. Though I have been newly inspired to write some stories, they aren’t exactly intended to be my focus. So this success offers a bit of a dilemma – how much do I divert my efforts if the stories keep coming? On the one hand, stories have a lower threshold for publication and indeed may almost be a prerequisite for getting a larger work printed by a significant press. On the other hand, my success in writing books is going to depend on setting a deadline and making it stick. And if my daily 3,500 words are being diverted from longer works to shorter works, it’s going to be hard to keep to the deadline.

All of this is coming at the same time as I contemplate a major overhaul of the Blue Pyramid, both the front page and subsequent pages. I’ve decided, for example, that it’s time for me to have a navigation bar. The BP is suffering its biggest drought of traffic since the quizzes came out, which is hardly surprising in the face of how much I’ve neglected it. And I don’t want this to distract me from any sort of writing, though one can’t be writing 24/7. And I can’t help but think that a traffic revival could only help the general momentum of all my projects – getting my name out there and having something serious and creative to refer people to when they’re asking who the heck I am anyway.

Regardless, I was contemplating all this and wondering what to do about having a possible writing section of the BP linked on the nav bar when I remembered that I once assembled my so-called collected works before. And I was shocked to rediscover that I wrote no fewer than 51 short stories in a 3-year period from September 2003 through August 2006. Fifty-one! Now that’s productivity.

Granted, of course, few were of really sustainable value (other than the process and its incredibly helpful practice in improving my writing – hard to imagine being able to write Loosely Based without that kind of narrative experience behind me) and many of them were outright absurd. Although, it does make me wonder how many plots are retrievable – rarely were the ideas the dealbreaker in the stories so much as the execution. But still, 51 stories while going to school and living a full teenage life. That was some dedication. I really used to be so much cooler than I am now.

So I’m newly inspired as I stare down my tentative deadline of December 15th for American Dream On and contemplate a full slate of stories to compete with its completion. Surely I should be able to outpace my fourteen-year-old self in volume of output. Surely, like anything, enough work input will lead to worthy output.

And speaking of output, if you’re interested in being on the list of potential readers for either stories or the novel when they’re ready, let me know. I sort of threw Loosely Based at most of my close friends at the time it was done, with mixed results. Some of the recipients still haven’t read it. I’d prefer to take a much more measured, opt-in approach to the next stage of my writing life. A few folks have already volunteered through Facebook, which is great. My only request would be that you are completely honest in your readings and that you look on the work as an attempt at art, not an opportunity to try to analyze me or find yourself in my writing. You won’t be there. And I don’t need cheerleading – I need earnest, critical feedback.

Standing in the shadow of my youth, here I go.

Speaking of the move, though, we finally have a rough outline of the six-week trip across the country:

So we’ll be coming soon to a town near you!

If you need me, I’ll be at Russ’ for the next nine days. If you’re David Kunkel, please respond to my e-mails because I’d really like to break the streak of years where we’ve just missed seeing each other.

Possible posting from the road, depending on how much time I can spare from sun, video games, and cards.

So far, she’s only heard from Yale and she’s in (congratulations to those who cracked the code a few days ago). We will be getting their financial package in the (physical) mail sometime this week, along with e-word from Columbia. Then Princeton probably next week, with Harvard and Oxford a weekish thereafter. While possible stipends and such will impact the final decision, Yale is looking like the clubhouse leader at the moment. It was tied with Oxford as Em’s “first choice” and she can’t stop looking at New Haven apartments on Craigslist. But a lot can happen in a month, so don’t count on Connecticut just yet.

Meanwhile, something of a West Coast Farewell Tour is emerging already, with trips to LA over the March-April border, Seattle in late May, and a return to LA in late June (though we may have started moving by then, so it may be a post-farewell return). It’s going to be hard leaving the region of Earth whose land and people make me feel most comfortable (though Russia was close), but it’s clearly time to move on. It’ll be approaching seven consecutive years by the time we leave and that is really longer than I was cut out to live anywhere.

The next ten weeks are going to be emotional. I wasn’t really prepared for the outpouring of shock and grief that people have shown me at work upon my announcement. I told several people in person, sad that I couldn’t tell a couple more face-to-face because of conflicting schedules or untimely illness. I was prepared to surprise some folks, but the rate at which people thought I would be staying for 5+ more years blew my mind. I sent the All-Staff e-mail just after hours yesterday and have already gotten several responses, including a very moving visit and hug from someone I work with weekly at most. Besides a nice big helping of guilt (perhaps my resident emotion), I just feel overwhelmed by this reaction and can’t even imagine how much more I’m going to feel today when most people actually find out. It’s one thing to be able to intellectually articulate that a lot of key people might not see this coming ahead of time; quite another to witness the series of stunned faces and e-mails.

And yet, even most Gliders can recognize it’s exciting and for the best. Almost equal to the shock has been an incredible offering of support and energy for new adventures and opportunities in a new town. Emily now has hundreds of people pulling for her, between her work, mine, and all our friends and family. It’s good groundwork for the very foreseeable announcement of a move to Africa in 2011. Though if you can accurately predict one thing about the year 2011, you are well ahead of pretty much everybody.

And as that sentiment may indicate, this is only the beginning of the uncertainty. The move and transition will be highly time-consuming. We have to move the world’s least mobility-inclined cat across the country or even the Atlantic. We have to potentially prepare for switching countries. We have to find a new place to live, make decisions about how much stuff we really need, determine a whole new pattern for our lives that have really only been settled in one metro area. And the exciting boundlessness of possibility still lingers, more tantalizing than scary, beckoning toward a multifarious future whose options will narrow, but slowly.

People, this is an exciting time to be alive.

1. Go to AdamsBlock.com.
2. Watch.

I don’t sponsor or endorse the site fully, though I did just hear that the site’s owner learned about my workplace yesterday and was “inspired”. Apparently he’s donating some ad revenue and donations to Glide. He may even change the reference on his FAQ to something other than calling us “apparently some sort of Methodist church”.

Tune in today. Trust me.

That is all.

“He lost his money in a geyser bank,
Ho ho ho ho ho,
First it floated and then it sank,
Ho ho ho ho ho.”
-Traditional Clayton Family Song, c. 1987 trip to Yellowstone

My family used to write songs in the old folk tradition, through oral telling that was created impromptu and then sung and resung. Sometimes the lyrics would change every time and sometimes they would be solidified and codified into one set of lyrics to be passed on through the ages. Occasionally, as with the epic spoof “Santa Shark”, the lyrics were written down entirely for future generations.

Of course, there were only ever two generations (three people total) and they stand today. I did have grandparents then, but they have moved on and probably never would have appreciated songs like “Hooray for U-Haul Trucks”. That may have been my favorite song of the old travels, a telling anthem for an unstable period in our lives that was all the more exciting to me because I didn’t fully understand the financial implications of our nomadic and volatile lifestyle. And yet I was the one who came up with the only lines of the song:

“Hooray for U-Haul trucks,
They take you away from bad places,
Hooray for U-Haul trucks,
They take you into bad places.”

There were many ironies to this song, not the least of which was that we were using our blue Saab that already had close to 100,000 miles on its record as our own “U-Haul truck” to take us from one bad place (Visalia, CA) to another (Washington, DC). The protocol, of course, was that this song was to be sung whenever passing any sort of brand-name moving truck, and adapt to the one being seen on the roadway. “Ryder trucks”, “Hertz-Penske trucks”, and “Mayflower trucks” were most often referred, though U-Hauls were dominant. If we were lucky, they would be the U-Hauls with exciting illustrations of another state that we would visit, had just passed through, or would some day live in.

It’s the geyser bank song (actually one of two – the other was relatively lyric-less and peppy) that sticks in my head of late, for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is that a Winnebago has decided to spend the last week parked in front of our house, and occasionally in a non-parking-spot down the block on the corner. It perfunctorily moves every 48 hours or so, but it’s clear that life in Berkeley got too expensive for someone, so they decided to “go RVing” in front of the Nation’s by the campus. Parking tickets sure make great rent when compared to an adjustable rate mortgage.

This is particularly poignant for two reasons. One, in a conversation foreshadowing just this kind of reality two months ago, my father and I argued profusely about the legality of just such an RV-type vehicle parking on the streets of Berkeley over even one night without being towed. I predicted that it wouldn’t get towed for ages. Well, Dad (yes he’s blogging again), we’re on day six in the neighborhood and the Winnebago hasn’t gone anywhere (and I’ve only seen one actual ticket). The other poignancy is the titular line of this post, which was another lyric in the somewhat melancholy ode, “He Lost His Money in a Geyser Bank”.

I have spent the entire day writing what will probably be the fastest-written and most completely ad hoc quiz in the history of the Blue Pyramid efforts, tentatively dubbed the Bailout Betrayal Quiz. In it, you’ll get a slightly in-depth look at the 59 Congresspeople who changed their mind between Monday and Friday of last week, plus 5 of our favorite folks who lobbied so hard for the bailout in the first place. I have vacillated greatly on what I want to get out of such a quiz, and how vengeful to make it (especially since I agree with many other stands these people took besides turning their coats on the bailout), and whether I should offer alternatives and promote opponents, many of whom would’ve voted for the bailout even earlier. I am still working out these compromises and the quiz won’t be up till this time tomorrow at the earliest, since I still have 40-some answers to write. But I’ve done nearly everything else that makes up a quiz since about this time yesterday, if you can believe it.

I am sitting here, wired and tired, unshaven and unbathed, overwhelmed and just beginning. I have expended tremendous energy on a project that leaves me ambivalent. Sometimes I think I’m just like the people I’m railing against – taking action because I can, when perhaps inaction would be more sober. Yet at the same time, I can’t just let this moment in history go unmarked. The US is careening, faster than even I imagined, for the Greatest Depression. Everything I ever was concerned about, speculated wildly about, thought may be happening, is beyond true. It’s here, already, and to stay. Everything up till now has just been prelude to what’s upon us.

The decisions we make, going forward, count double. It feels like one of those signs on the highway: “Traffic fines doubled in construction zone.” That’s what we’re in, except it’s a deconstruction zone. Everything’s coming apart and people are grabbing what they can on the way down. Friday’s vote was a public looting of stores that no one was bothering to guard. There will be more and faster and there will never be any bounce or payoff, just more looting.

I am reading Camus’ The Plague this week. I watched “Blindness” on Friday. I can’t imagine two more fitting pieces of media experience for what is coming.

No one can say they weren’t warned. And coming from America, no one can say they don’t deserve it. The world makes remarkably more sense than we give it credit for.

There’s that word, credit. Heh.

“He Lost His Money in a Geyser Bank” was initially the product of a pun, as were so many Clayton family tunes. But on a day that is about to dawn with “real” banks seeming comparably safe to geyser banks, it begs all kinds of questions. Questions whose answers may be in another 64-answer quiz. Or in nothing at all.

What’s your interest?

I woke up late this morning, but inspired. Not in recognition of the ancient new year so much as yet another new project, another “chapter one” for me. I plunked down my ten ethernet dollars and picked up a domain name that seemed resonant. This may yield, in short order, an incredibly prolific and time-consuming “next big thing”. Or it may pan into nothing, a product of me being realistic, for once, about my time constraints and expenditures. At this point, I’m squarely 50-50.

If I decide not to do it, I’ll at least post some of the prototype stuff somewhere on the BP. And if I decide to do it, you won’t be able to stop hearing about it for a while.

These times have been labeled interesting, trying, unprecedented. Somehow, in the shuffle, we’ve lost sight of the fact that it’s becoming more and more obvious that there’s some sort of life on Mars. I know I’ve already been over this, but snow? Snow?! I feel like the next article will talk about the Martian radio broadcast that some linguist in a lab is working on translating, only to be met with similar lack of fanfare in a world so self-absorbed as to believe it is alone in living at all.

Maybe they’ll have to cart the Mars Rover into their underground lair before we really start to see it.

Maintaining a lasting feeling of relevance is difficult in a period like this. I feel as fickle as the market is volatile, as uncertain as everyone else. What inspires me in the morning seems blasé by the afternoon. What depresses me one day seems almost okay the next. I know I have unstable moods, but this is just getting silly. Is everyone feeling this way? Is everyone’s world this inconsistent, unstable, murky?

This isn’t exactly something people are prone to sharing. Like so many widely held perceptions, people assume that it’s “just me” or “something only I’m going through”. We are trained to be independent, to be scientific, to be immune to larger growing understandings that border on the universal. We are given inoculations of isolation and uncommunicativeness from birth, in the hopes of eradicating the virus of our humanity.

But there is power in the viral, a term the web has started to turn on its head. There is seemingly impossible potential in people, both alone and in groups, working toward common purpose. I would never have believed that the bailout, even if it’s just a first round, could be defeated by a populous united in opposition to their politicians. Couldn’t even conceive of the possibility. And now, in the face of it, it seems like anything is similarly probable. We could be on the verge of something very real.

And yet I have despair, debilitation, almost no energy to get anything done. I want my recreation, rest, distraction. Once more unto a breach of working overtime on top of a day job just seems… sigh.

But what if this is the one? What if the next mountain is the one we have to get over to find the valley below? What if this door is the exit?

Someone show me a sign.

No matter how weird this may be for a characterization of a collective group of gambling agencies called a “stock market”, I think I know how this anthropomorphized market feels. I am searching for direction.

Much of this is the direct result of the post-completion hangover that usually accompanies any major project, especially one that has dominated the horizon for a good bit of time. The project in question at this stage is, of course, the just-released Women World Leaders Quiz. There is always a mad rush of euphoria upon completing a major web project and especially a quiz. Such euphoria usually quickly is dashed upon the rocks of reality as I realize that the first few weeks rarely bring the bulk of the visitors, and that it will take months and sometimes years to build up the kind of visitor base and feedback loop that I’ve been dreaming of for any given quiz. This isn’t always the case, but I’m able to block it out in the mad rush of motivation that rolls toward quiz-completion as I grind out the last few answers. And then the rocky reality crash is replaced by a calm that slowly fades into malaise. As though to inquire so now whatchya gonna do?

Indeed. Now what?

Lord knows there are plenty of projects pending at the BP. A Facebook app that really got me going in late June, if you can believe it. A just pre-announced eleventh quiz that I’m already promising sooner than is probably reasonable. And no shortage of projects in various states of neglect and disrepair, summarily abandoned along the trail like only the web (or a very large closet) allows one to do. Unlike the closet, though, one leaves all the laundry piled about unless one actively tries to go back and retrieve, hide, and clean everything up. And that’s never really been my style. In part because I like history, the layers of sediment, and the snapshots of abandoned pages at their last moment of maintenance. Unlike the closet, or ruins of a civilization, there’s no innate decay in bytes. No real cobwebs on the interwebs. The ‘net preserves better than mummification.

So I have almost too many things I could be working on, but so much leftover void of having the one big bogeyman (shouldn’t there be two o’s in “bo(o)geyman”?… it’s not fear of being one over par, after all) project finally completed. Projects for others (the quiz is for my friends at Camp Kupugani) always carry more weight and onus than projects for oneself. Even if the projects for oneself involve countless others (e.g. the currently suspended-animation OMBFP). This is why having a day job manages to debilitate and undermine all the countless projects (including 3 books, a novella, and unending short stories) that I really should be working on. My Dad always said that half the trick in life was to be able to work as hard for oneself as one did for others. My Dad is smart.

And yet today is a lousy day to start a project, really. I mean, sure, they all feel like that sometimes, but really today. September is going to mark a highly volatile month. And not just for the world – I’ve got trips to Colorado (Will’s wedding) and Nuevo (10-year HS reunion) in the next two weekends after this. There’s a Counting Crows show in there somewhere, to match the Jakob Dylan show we just saw on Wednesday. (First concerts since last October, and it was probably 6 months before that to the last one.) I’m taking serious time off work for the above trips for the first time since coming back from India (oh, there’s a dormant project for you – remember when I was going to put all my India/Nepal trip pics online? Yeah. You’ll note I haven’t even managed to change the theme of this blog from last winter.). And then it’s Em’s birthday and baseball season ends and holy goodness it’s October. And we all know about October. (Hey, at least I’ll have to change the theme then.)

This is the point in our program where I try to draw my own personal failings, struggles, and queries into a larger point about where we all are heading at this moment in history. The obvious segue available is the election – what better way to capture a gigantic search for direction than a bi-polar election season with two divisive candidates vying for the allegedly most influential job in the world for the next four years?

And yet it seems off. It doesn’t quite draw the right note, does it? Oh, trust me, I see enough of your Facebook updates to know that a whole lot of you really believe in this stuff, have been swept away by another series of fanfare and speeches. (Who says the conventions don’t matter anymore?) It’s a culture war, a clash of civilizations, a knock-down drag-out for the hearts and minds. What could be more relevant? Right? But it doesn’t feel relevant, does it? It doesn’t really feel like it’s going to make a difference, does it? I dunno. Maybe it does to you. But I’m not seeing it.

Of course part of this must be because I see it as a foregone conclusion. Don’t listen to me too closely – I put money on Hillary being in the White House, too (though I still wouldn’t rule that out quite yet). But unless they cancel all the debates and/or there’s a major “terrorist attack” on US soil between now and 4 November, it’s Obama big-time. He may just win half the South while he’s at it. If you really think that the Southern Baptist Republican base is going to turn out to vote for two self-described independents from the far West, I think you’re in for quite a surprise. And if Obama keeps compromising, talking about how badly Afghanistan is going to get bombed under his watch, and keeps picking old Washington insiders to help him “change”, the base isn’t exactly going to go gangbusters for him either. 2 votes to 1 is a landslide by percentage, but it says something larger about what’s going on in the country generally.

This wasn’t intended to be a political post and now I’ve got myself all fired up. The point is simpler, perhaps larger. There is an undercurrent, some other sort of direction being sought, decided, flipped on a coin at present. It’s irksome and irritating, it makes me feel all discombobulated. Mood swings that are a way of life go from bobbing waves to richter-scale disruptions. (Though I can’t feel the actual richter-scale disruptions alleged in the region.) They say that April flowers bring May showers, but I might posit that September decisions bring October consequences. And while we won’t watch the ripples run away just yet, the pebble is going in the brook as we speak. You can just feel it.

It feels, well, much like getting pegged with a rock.

But it’s Monday and that can mean fresh starts and new beginnings.

To wit:
-Silver skyrockets.
-I actually have work to do.
-A project that seemed like it was going to be harder turned out pretty easy after all (more on this tonight).

But the granddaddy of them all, the mighty news that brought an actual lift to my life today, is this:
The Mariners fired Bill Bavasi today.

The Mariners are 24-45, worst team in the majors, and just got swept by the worst team in the NL. At home. This season would be hard-pressed to become more abysmal. And suddenly, like a sunburst through the clouds, the man responsible for assembling this on-field travesty is kicked out of his comfy chair. As though somehow, somewhere, concepts like accountability and consequences may still have meaning on American soil.

Our Manager, who got lucked into the job by his old boss retiring last year, needs to go too. And Mel Stottlemyre needs to remember how to coach pitchers. And we have about half our payroll going to people who will probably never be good again. This is no panacea, and it’s not going to save 2008.

But oh, what a start. I haven’t been happy like this since Ryan Franklin finally departed the Mariner ship.

So today, somehow, I’m almost feeling like Barack Obama. There’s hope in the water. Which is a lot better than the bacterial microbes in the water of my dream last night. (We were back in India, forgetting to ask for bottled.) A lot better than the (literal) stench of death that hangs around my office today. (At least two dead mice and a third who must remain unfound, given the ongoing odor.)

Cautionary, filtered, fettered, unsteady. But today, I’ll take it all. It’s not even Tuesday yet. Hallelujah.

The problem is that I’ve never really learned PHP or MySQL. And rapidly, these are leaving HTML in the dust. You say increased functionality, I say decreased usability to require people to pay $100/hour for tech support. Whatever the real motivation (a combo no doubt), wrestling with the edges of what one knows about these things as a self-taught intermittent web designer is roughly as much fun as being the feature entree at a banquet for piranhas, big cats, and twenty-six-foot-high spiders. But perhaps slightly more painful.

This is not necessarily a cry for help. But if any of you have, say, designed a Facebook application in the past or really love explaining PHP to novices, I wouldn’t exactly say no.

With or without assistance, I optimistically (naively?) believe that I can get this thing chunked out before June. Depending on the timelines of other projects (it was, after all, a setback in the new quiz I’m working on that enabled me to thus spend my weekend in the first place). And then I will be begging you all to download and use (read: beta test) my lovely new application.

I’m pretty much set with the whole thing, except getting (A) results into profile boxes and news feeds, (B) view friends’ country functionality, and (C) invitations to friends to add the app.

Which is pretty much everything.