I continue to struggle with finding what place, if any, this blog holds in my life anymore. Fleeting thoughts on current events make more sense to share on social media, as those will be seen more immediately and by way more people. Then as I mentioned recently, Facebook has taken the place of this blog in terms of me trying to record any semblance of a journal.

Side note… just thinking about that gives me anxiety, as you may have gathered I like to hold on to information. There are years of my thoughts and “social” interactions that only Facebook has a record of. My nature is to want my own copy of that in case anything ever happens to Facebook, but I can’t imagine what it would take to get a dump of all of one’s Facebook activity. But that’s a problem for another day.

I guess broader expositions about life in general still belong here at least? To that end, this is where I’d get into those big thoughts and major happenings. But here, too, Facebook complicates matters. In the last several years, we’ve all come to increasingly understand (and fear?) data privacy issues and the influence big data has on our politics, finances, and lives in general. Who among us has’t been unnerved by the prescience of an eerily-timed advertisement on our feed? I don’t imagine I’m alone then in being a little wary of what kind of personal information I share here (or anywhere). This may have changed since my early days of blogging, but I’m usually pretty careful about names and locations. I never talk about where I may or may not work.

Perhaps I’m being paranoid, but for those reasons, it also seems risky to talk openly about health stuff. So I guess for the time being, I’ll engage in what I believe the kids call “vaguebooking” in order to record something for posterity in lieu of a true journal. Suffice it to say it’s been a rough couple of months health-wise — physically, mentally, and emotionally. Possibly the worst of my life, and that’s not an exaggeration. The Universe, in its infinite wisdom, has really been piling it on lately. It’s led me to touch on rare (if not altogether new) depths of anxiety, depression, and even anger. But I have support, I’m fighting hard, and I’m surviving. For now, that’s gotta be enough. What choice is there? You endure… until you can’t.

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”

— Pema Ch

Continuing my spate of memory dumps, this month has me thinking about Halloween (duh). I do love it, though I won’t be that clich

It’s September (at least for another few hours), and if you’re young or have kids that are, that means back to school. I don’t have to worry about that anymore myself, and yet I still find a way to. Though who among us doesn’t still have those occasional nightmares… the classic “showing up to school naked” or perhaps my personal fave “it’s finals day for a class you forgot to attend all semester.” We all still have those, right? No? Just me? Awesome.

A while back, I started gathering a mishmash of random memories from my school days that I wanted to put out there. Maybe not super relatable, but I don’t keep a diary, so it all goes here. Hope you enjoy. This will all be all your midterm.

Aesthetics Versus Athletics

School always felt somehow like enemy territory. I’m sure that’s mostly the anxiety I had about meeting obligations, but there was also something foreign about it. Large facilities that I only ever saw part of. Classrooms I never personally had classes in. Buildings I didn’t know the purpose of.

And then there was sports. Not that I wasn’t active as a kid. I remember that time of the early evening when the streetlights are about to come on. Playing outside, running in the cold till your gums hurt, itchy from rolling around in the grass. But I also remember passing by campus after school, looking at a jungle of fences and poles, a grass field and a labyrinth of athletics buildings and hallways and locker rooms I knew I’d never see. Shared equipment and rules and practices and competitions I didn’t understand. A club, a camaraderie I just didn’t “get.” Especially mystifying when it was for older kids. In elementary, it was the middles school. In middle school, it was the high school. In high school even, it was college. There was something exclusive about athletics. Jonah was always clued in, but not me. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t my family. And yet school spirit and uniforms and events and rallies all centered around this stuff. These were the heroes, the inner circle of the school. This is what mattered to some people, and to me it was so foreign that I just stayed away. Intimidated by that jungle, I guess. An outsider. That probably makes me sound bitter about wanting to fit in, but I don’t think I experienced it that way. At least not consciously. I got along with everyone, had friends, and generally had a reasonably trauma-free experience. I’m not going to pretend I was somehow above the desire for popularity, but I don’t think I specifically craved the approval or acceptance of people whose interests were so different from mine. (Like who cares if someone who likes shitty music thinks your music is shitty, right? Same idea.)

Anyway, I did eventually have my version of that camaraderie with martial arts in high school and later with bands, and I really appreciated it then.

Hitting The Books

In elementary school, the only books I cared about were at the Scholastic Book Fair. Reviewing each year’s catalog and negotiating a budget with mom was serious business. (That and the little “Santa’s Workshop” event where a bunch of cheap tchotchke booths were set up in the school library where you could Christmas shop for your loved ones. I vaguely remember wire-and-stone beetle jewelry and some kind of metallic angel. My first semi-independent exposure to consumerism.)

In high school, it was getting your issued textbooks each year and wondering what each one might portend for that class’ workload. The cold feel of weighted clay-coated pages. Worn covers with corny 70s city scapes on them, seeming mysterious because they predated my birth. The mandatory hassle of covering each one with a cut up grocery bag. And perhaps unofficially writing a few book reports based on Cliff’s Notes.

Then in college, the books were better — hell, I even kept a few of them. And you didn’t have to cover them. But you had to buy and sell them yourself, which sucks in its own way. I wonder if that’s any easier in today’s world with Amazon and e-books and Wikipedia and piracy?

Your Problems Aren’t Problems

Those JC days are fond memories. Living at home, balancing work and school, and still plenty of time for an active social life. Had some income but still a full course load. An easy commute with easy classes. Listened to a lot of music on the road (my own CDs as well as Alice and Live 105, though remember these were the dark days of post-grunge). Even a modicum of friendship with other commuter classmates. It was like having a second job that was less stressful. I suppose that might have been in part because this is when you start getting treated like an adult. Show up if and when you want. No one on your back. Sink or swim on your own schedule risking only your own neck. It’s how I work best.

And then the later days at Cal were great, too. I had no income since I couldn’t balance it with a real job. That sounds to me now like something that would have terrified me, so maybe I’m remembering it through rose-colored lenses, but I really think that other than the given stress of classes, I felt pretty free. Spending all day on campus, hanging out in libraries, watching movies in the film department to kill time, lunch on the quad and around town. The end was in sight, and I’d put all the pieces in place. There was nothing left to do but stay the course and wait for it to all come together at graduation. Which it mostly did, and I moved on to adult life.

As nice as I seem to remember it being, I can’t even imagine having to go through school in today’s world. More expensive and less valuable. More complex and stressful. I don’t miss that shit. You’d have to literally double my salary for me to even consider going back. I obviously don’t recall it being all that awful at the time, but trying to make room for it here and now, contending with real adult responsibilities? No thanks. Those carefree days are gone. Unless I win the lottery, I don’t see myself loafing around on a campus again. I’m much happier with a steady income and a nightlife. At least I think I am.

“Every beginning is a consequence — every beginning ends some thing.”

— Paul Val

Television in San Francisco was just background noise. Comedy Central in the evenings while I was doing something in the other room. Not consciously, but I assume to make the place feel less lonely. Didn’t Palahniuk have something clever about that in Lullaby, about how we’re all scared of silence?

I thought that my lack of attention to television in those years while everyone else was fawning over “Lost” and “Orange Is The New Black” made me a better person. I was a musician. A creative. I didn’t have time for such pedestrian pursuits. But without a drive to keep going, I succumbed, and these days, television is the new band practice.

Oddly, it started in Hawaii. You can only spend so much time at the beach. And without much else to do there, I got turned onto Netflix, Amazon Prime, and later Hulu. And like all of you, I’ve now got lengthy queues in each that I’ll never get through. Shows have gotten better, but not enough that the ol’ boob tube doesn’t still feel like a pathetic recreation. I can’t shake the feeling I should be reading more and creating more. People used to say they had too many books to read or things to do or friends to catch up with. Now it’s they have too much in their queue and aren’t currently accepting any more recommendations.

And now Disney, NBC, CBS, and others are fleeing the big three and trying to start their own thing? Who wants the cost of more separate services and the hassle of maintaining more logins? I predict the upstart services will ultimately still get aggregated under a larger umbrella service for exactly that reason, which essentially amounts to the

I’m not sure what happened, but I think I suddenly like 70s-era Rolling Stones. Early 80s, too.

I never really responded to them in the past, other than the hits. They were just too “loose” sounding. Lots of good hooks, and every song was rooted in a good idea, but the execution was rough. It left me feeling like the songs were half-baked, whereas I gravitated more towards recordings that sounded pristine and ultra-polished. And I guess that summary of them hasn’t changed for me. But for some reason, these last couple months, that same loose sound is speaking to me. Friends have joked this is because I’m getting old, but I don’t think that’s far off the mark. Something about those recordings sound exhausted and almost desperate. That’s not exactly how I feel, but there is something relatable there vis-

Ripping off my 2008 self ripping off David Byrne? An inauspicious beginning, to be sure.

Well, friends… you’d be forgiven for thinking I’d died, being that my last post was in 2013. But mostly dead is slightly alive! In fact, I was so alive that I could no longer find the time and interest to write about it. The occasional Facebook post has served as a sparse diary in the interim. Apologies for not leaving you a more formal goodbye here at the time.

It seems I’m back, at least for the moment. For a variety of reasons, I guess. A few things left unsaid. Maybe some new things to get off my chest. Lots has happened in the last six years, sure. Left San Francisco during its descent into tech bro madness. Moved to Hawaii. Moved to SoCal. Have lived with a significant other. It’s been a wild ride, and so much different than I could have foreseen back in 2013.

I truly don’t know how this will go. Do I even still have the same writing voice? Will I stick with it for a while or will this single entry simply supplant the last as the last? Do I have anything interesting to say? (Did I ever?) Tune in to find out! Or don’t. I realize commanding an audience on some random independent blog is a tall order these days. As before, I guess I’m doing this more for myself. More a journal than anything else. Record keeping. Chronicling.

I shudder to think what might be going through the mind of those few of you who’d “subscribed” to this blog as you read this latest entry nearly 10 years after you first joined up. I suspect the ol’ unsubscribe is soon to follow, but for what it’s worth: hello, and I hope you’re doing well this decade! No hard feelings. ❤

If I’m being honest, I’m already second-guessing this whole revival. In some ways, I’m a different person than I was years back. For instance, there was a time when I was super motivated to play music. I felt like I had a lot to say, and I wanted the world to hear it. But it’s not like that anymore. I feel like I don’t have much to say, and I don’t really give a shit who hears it. Nothing to prove, no one to impress. Less interested in changing the world. All standard aging stuff, I suppose. Older and wearier now, coming to grips with the fact that the body is beginning its decline. Over the hill, as it were. I’ve long taken for granted that all doors are open to me and that anything is possible. To whatever extent that may have been true in the past, there’s no denying that a turning point has been reached. Not that my cart is careening toward oblivion exactly, but I think it’s fair to say the best one can hope for is to slow it down. Gravity is not in our favor. Keep healthy, take care of yourself, and do your best to hold back the inevitable tide for as long as you can. Is that the full half or the empty half of the glass talking there? I’m not sure yet.

“Things fall apart… it’s scientific.”

Wow!

You remember in 1994 when John Travolta appeared as hip gangster hitman “Vincent Vega” in Pulp Fiction?

With the focus on my recent retreat last time, I neglected to get into general updates and current events.

Well, I’m fresh back from my week-long meditation retreat as a Buddhist “yogi.”