neurotica_redux

When the Lights Go Down in the City

I’m leaving San Francisco in little over 36 hours, for yet another indeterminate chunk of time, and I don’t quite know what to make of it. I guess that means, as it always does, that it’s time to write into the fog and whittle my way toward whatever silhouettes are lurking. I’m starting to realize that my obsession with figuring out my feelings is little more than a gambit for control where there is usually none to be had. I constantly make decisions that require relinquishing the usual harnesses that keep people believing they’ve got it handled, that they’ve got that abyss yoked. On some level I’m denying myself that comfort, on another level, I’m freeing myself from it, but I guess why I do that is an entirely different conversation. The point is that when I’m anchors-up like this my brain’s knee-jerk reaction is to grab for something solid. Writing is what I do, it also happens to be a permanent foray into making meaning out of nothing, or something, or everything. It’s the way I try to understand the world, so I guess it’s not all that psychologically complex that when I’m emotionally jacked-up my monkey mind starts banging on the bars and throwing poo. The good news is that I’m getting better and better at not letting that process run amok. Because what at first begins as said gambit for control, can sometimes end by spiraling into some fatalistic extrapolation about my life and where I’m going and what I’m fated for etc. etc. ad infinitum. It can get very bad, very quickly. So what I’m attempting now is to allow myself to feel what I’m feeling without assigning some meaning to it that exists outside the moment, that is some dictate on the future or relic of the past, or whatever. It’s not as easy as it sounds. People like to look back and forward, not so much at the here and now. Yes, yes, it’s all very OPRAH, or Eckhart Toile or whatever, but c’est vrai - ask your local zen master.

So as for the feelings here and now, they are wild little beasts jumping back and forth between the twin beds of SAD and SURE and sometimes crashing mid-air. I was making a salad today with my special Maldon’s salt that I keep hidden away from my roommates because I’m greedy (and it’s expensive) and I went to put it back on my shelf, before I realized it wasn’t my shelf anymore. CUE THE VIOLINS. Because the new chick has already moved into my room, and I am staying in the limbo otherwise known as my absentee roommate’s bedroom. So, naturally, I had to cede my shelf to the new chick despite the fact I’m still here. ENTER the moment where I realize in two days I will no longer live here anymore, and in fact I have one foot out the door. And because it’s never just about one thing, the waves of sadness come from numerous places, about a variety of things and people and they kept sneaking up on me all night: when the 75 year old man with the wizard’s cape got on the train; walking through the deserted financial district after the movie; and strangely, watching the sushi chef meticulously clean his knife. Until tonight, out by myself, taking a breather from the sprinting pace of being out with friends and going to see this one last thing, or eat at this one last restaurant – I hadn’t really felt sad about leaving. But now, alone with my city, I’m full of love for it, and full of heartache because you can love a place or a person from their head to their toes, but sometimes love isn’t enough. That’s what it feels like right now with San Francisco – love just isn’t enough. And that’s where the SURE comes in. Not sure that it won’t ever be enough, not sure at all that I won’t just end up back here next winter, but for now, my life isn’t happening here. I’m sure I need to be somewhere else for a little while, or a long while, and that hurts because, San Francisco, I wanted it to be you. Maybe forever. This place is so special and it is such a part of me that I’ll never truly leave. We will be good exes and see each other often and always, but I’m not sure San Francisco is the next biggest, best, important part of my life. I think that belongs to somewhere else. It’s just a feeling I get. And I think because I feel so sad about it, it must be true. Or maybe I’m just dramatic. We’re always towing that line around these parts, aren’t we?

But, what I don’t want to do (just to further belabor the analogy) is be the girl who goes on dates and talks about her ex. Wherever I am I want to be there, and not compare it to where I was, or where I could be. That is a particular talent of mine, and it does nothing but blind me to opportunity and make me miserable (and annoying) in the meantime. So for the next 36 hours I will be sad, and joyful simultaneously in my city by the bay and I will try very hard not to figure out what exactly it all means.

Uh duh.

Sometimes I am so utterly dense. I’m a writer because I love to write. It stands to reason that when you spend too much time NOT doing what you love to do, but doing a whole bunch of other unimportant shit, it might make you a little unhappy or discontented, right? Right. Well, I (idiotically) haven’t been making much time for writing lately. At first it was frustration with my writing and needing a break, then it was too much work on my plate, and then it was just laziness. I noticed recently I was having a harder and harder time focusing and concentrating on my work. I was really hating it, and not able to get anything done. For the last two days I have written in the morning for myself, and then spent the rest of the day doing the work I need to do to pay the bills. Like magic, I am less annoyed with work. Less annoyed with life. I’m in the sweet spot where I haven’t fallen into self-criticism yet with my writing and am just happy to be doing it. Sitting down to write is not easy, there are a million other things that I could do that would be a snap to just slide into, but you know what? They’re not fucking important. 75% of the time they’re fine experiences, but very rarely are they important enough, or contributing enough to my overall happiness to override writing. So why is it so goddamn hard to remember that?

If I had an iPhone I would wish for an app to take care of this.

Of Guides and Hiccups

Well, it’s officially a month and three days until I leave San Francisco (again), for lands unknown (but first, lands very well known). I am (predictably) freaking out from time to time, testing my newfound coping skills and weathering the storms as best I can. Ah, Saturn Returns. You bitch. Despite all the changes that are happening, and the emotional hiccups, I feel like I’m moving forward. That was my takeaway from my dinner with Spencer tonight. It’s funny how friends you don’t see that often, people who are not part of your daily life, can have such an impact on you. Spencer is older, and much wiser, and is of the same writerly ilk. We have a great connection that means more to me than he probably knows, he’s the Virgil to my Dante if we’re gonna get literary (and melodramatic). Literally everything I say to him that I’m going through, or feeling, or worried about, or excited about, he’s already gone through. And he’s able to talk to me about it in a way that’s not condescending or preachy or anything, it’s just simply solidarity and gentle nudges in the right directions. We had a similar dinner about a year ago and I think I wrote similarly about it then. The content of those conversations is for me, but what I can share with the internets is that sometimes all you need is someone to tell you it’s going to be okay, even if it’s not okay.

This Little Piggy Went to Market

We’re having a bit of a blog renaissance, non? Clearly 50% of my friends are in Hawaii (bitches), leaving me with altogether too much time on my hands to, heavens, write! Or maybe it’s because change is afoot and this blog and change seem to go hand in hand. Whenever something is shifting in my wee little brain/life, I feel the need for expression far more acutely.

On a less intense ‘change’ note, one thing different in 2011 is my diet. I have officially gone “highly selective omnivore”.  At the end of 2010 there were a couple dramatic months, let me tell you. I thought I was gonna go completely veg and the Hamlins just couldn’t give me enough shit about it, I had a complete crisis of faith considering my love of meat nears worship, and it was just all around mayhem. Philosophically, I’ve been on the only humanely raised, free-range, grass fed, lullaby-sung, meat train for a while. But, financially I found it difficult to practice and the thought of just giving it up even in small doses, well, I just didn’t think I could do it. Then I did. For a month (which yes, sister linny is small potatoes, I get it…) For me it was a big deal in the sense that I really didn’t miss it that much, didn’t crave it unless I smelled it, and even then, it wasn’t heartbreaking. In fact, by the end it kind of made my stomach curl to think about the no-name chicken that probably had 26 names in my burrito. So I just didn’t really want to eat it after all.  

So anyway, I talked myself into vegging it, talked myself out, and then decided that for me the middle ground is probably best. Fundamentally, I don’t have a problem with killing animals (sorry folks) if, as Michael Pollen says, they’re well cared for animals who have one bad day. I do think the fact that we were able to evolve to our current state because of our nasty little killing habit means that there’s nothing inherently unnatural about the act. However, what is unnatural is the way we are mechanizing the death and consumption of these animals. Not to mention the overconsumption. Blah blah blah. Soapbox. These are not new and earth-shattering views, but they are outside the popular consciousness. So yes, I was one of the pack. Call me a late-adapter. Whatever. It’s just one of the ways I’m trying to be more mindful of my body and my life and all that crap.

Now that all that’s been said, I’d like you to know I’m sitting here with part of a little piggy in my stomach! gaaaah! (Niman Ranch of course). I had a craving and I was at Trader Joe’s and I bought it, which is very uncharacteristic. I almost never have meat at home; if I have at all I have it out at one of those accommodatingly well-sourced San Francisco restaurants that make me so happy. And while piggalicious sure did taste good, I feel kind of yucky right now. Like for reals, I feel like I have a pig inside me. I’m having a moment where I’m like, if I had to think, really think about what a pig would feel, taste, BE like inside of me, this is it. And I have to say, kind of gross. Maybe I just overdid it, maybe I ate a little too much, but more likely than not my animal-eating enzymes have depreciated and my body is reacting in kind. What a bummer. Oink.

That was incredibly long-winded and most likely obnoxious. On to something equally as lengthy but hopefully redeemed by mid-twenties earnestness. So, I exported my entire blog to a text file (697 fucking pages! I wrote a fucking novel on the fucking internet! Horrifying) because I’m thinking about taking it all down and starting over. But that’s beside the point. I read the very first entry, which I haven’t read for a really long time and it made me smile (and not just because of my cutely inaccurate use of the word ‘feint’ and my questionable use of the word ‘sewn’).

“Though great change is not for the feint of heart maybe it ought not be so exclusive a club; If we all took those changes for better or worse to be nothing more than simple notches of time punctuating our lives we would be better off, instead of the idea that once you make a move you're locked in. Last night Nick brought up the age old analogy, life as a game of chess. I don't doubt that is true, the path you take after all will irrevocably change you and determine all other moves. But maybe we shouldn't look at that as such a bad thing. After all, even if you could have a “do–over” in life those choices and decisions would be equally important and weighty as the original road sewn. A choice is a choice, a path is a path, each varied but equal in importance, as far as the long trajectory of our lives goes. That's why I like Vonnegut's concept - if every moment of our lives is equally accessible to us, and we can recall - no, we could be- immediately who we were five years ago with ultimate clarity, perhaps we wouldn't move forward with such hesitation.  But then again I could be missing his point entirely. Not that I care so much.”

How amazing is that! It is five (and a half) years later, and guess what, Vonnegut was right. I had a moment after reading this where time telescoped and I was 25 year old me. My next move is to worm-hole to 35 and remind myself to have faith in all my moves, not because they are the right ones, but because they are mine and because I am me and I will make something beautiful out of them, I will continue to build a life I want to live. Just like that 25 year old did. Goddamn it.

More.

“I'm sitting in my cube at work right now, getting paid to blog, which I have to admit I feel somewhat guilty about. It kills me to sit here and work and do something when all I can think about is how I'd rather be reading a book, having a conversation about it and writing some sort of analysis Mostly I don't mind my job, but every once and a while I get the feeling I shouldn't be sitting here with ideas skipping through my brain, aching to detach from the cube run to a coffee shop and let them out of my head. At the moment I'm in attendance but entirely absent. So it goes.”

I no longer sit in a cube, and finally I let the ideas out of their cranium-shaped cell, and sometimes in the middle of the day I read an entire New Yorker and I don’t feel the least bit guilty, because these days I’m my own boss. These days, for better or worse, I’m never absent.

So now I’m left to wonder and dream about the next five years, and what exactly 35 will look like. What do you think, is a sailboat and self-actualization too much to hope for?

 



Blog as Oracle

In a haze of writing last night I think I figured it all out. Why I’ve had this all-consuming fire to travel in the last three years, why I need to go back to Maine for a bit, why San Francisco thinks I’m ready to be kicked out of the nest, why it’s terrifying, and most important of all, why Glen Beck hasn’t yet been taken away by the men with the butterfly nets. But, of course, now I can only vaguely remember what all those revelations were, only that they made me feel marginally better about all these unknowns floating around my poor little universe.

Generally speaking, when people take a next step, they like to have some idea what they are stepping toward -- dog shit or paradise? A new professional chapter, or a new romantic one? Growing up, or embracing youth? I can’t lay claim to any such knowledge of what’s ahead of me. In a couple months I’m pulling an Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade, putting my hand over my heart, and stepping over what looks like a yawning black chasm, (but hopefully is something a little sturdier). Not to be dramatic, but hey. I know leaving is the right thing to do, it’s forward movement, and I just have to have faith in that first step, even if I can’t see the second. But, for a planner like me, this is not so easy. I can really only think of two other occasions like this when I felt no pull toward any one place, had no plan in place, or a goal, or a new job, or school. I feel ambivalent toward it all and so I’m standing still in San Francisco, and it doesn’t feel right. It’s not the good kind of standing still, the kind where you grow nice, homey, steady-like roots. No, it’s not like that. I’ve tried in the last year to dig in my scrawny shoots, but they haven’t taken hold. And so I’m standing here like one of those saplings wrapped in a burlap sap, waiting for a stiff wind to blow me one way or the next. And yet, not so much as a breeze.  (This is where I stop this terrible metaphor. Your welcome.)

So, off I go, home again, home again jiggity jig. Which, being all, you know, home-like, brings with it its own panoply of emotional landmines, which I’ll have to be very patient with myself about dealing with. Even for someone who loves their family as much as I do, one thing doesn’t change when I go home, I’m still me, which means things are inevitably more complicated than they ever really need to be. I like to think that’s endearing.

Well, you know once you say it on a blog that means it’s really happening, right? So now, two months in Maine and if I’m lucky, plenty of strong wind.

 

 

 

 

Get Your Helmet

I get so worked up when I haven’t written a blog post in a while. I get performance anxiety to the point where I start several that I never finish. (Speaking of performance anxiety, that is not a problem with my roommate as I can hear him and his pseudo-girlfriend riiiiigggght now. Awesome. Cue me cranking Deadmau5.) Anyway, I am sitting here on the verge of buying a ticket to Spain even though Luisa and I haven’t totally nailed down the dates. I’m probably driving her nuts because I’m so anxious to just do it (don’t you love all this subtext? are you even seeing this?) and be on to the next savings & travel project. Nothing gets me more excited than travel (okay, okay, I’m done now.)

So Aaron’s getting married and I have skillfully shoehorned in side trips to Seville, Granada and Morocco as a bonus for making it across the pond for the blessed event. The only weddings I approve of are ones that involve me “having” to travel internationally. I know people who bitch about their friends’ destination weddings but no-sirree-bob, not this guy. I’ll bitch about your platinum wedding in the Hamptons instead. Zzzzzzzzzz.

Despite the lovefest there are sacrifices that will have to be made. I pointed out to Luisa tonight that I’m finally coming around to the realization that if I want to make this happen I have to trim back my extraneous expenses; one-off trips to LA, a new nano, a meditation retreat, shit that normally, I would throw down for without thinking. It seems an obvious point, but I’ve never been one to acquiesce to the idea that ‘you can’t have it all’. The Universe and I have been battling this one out for a couple of decades now. Me insisting that I can, if only I can think it through, and occasionally winning a prizefight. The Universe insisting that it’s a losing battle and that sometime very soon I will be on several prescription drugs that tell me so.

The truth is, there’s a lot going on. I just don’t think I have the mental/emotional wherewithal to blog about it. Lord knows I’m doing enough talking and thinking about it. I think the years of 29,30, 31 are pretty much a shit show for everyone and I’m no different. Tonight, I was talking with L about how everyone seems to be going through the ringer right now and why and all that. The best I (we) can come up with is that despite all the growth of the twenties people are still dealing with the notions and expectations of what their lives were supposed to be, or what they think they want, or what they hope they can get. Sometimes none of those things have very much to do with the place we happen to be standing in at the moment. So the options are to keep beating your head against the same wall that has been standing there forever (that one that just gets you every time), find a way around it, or open your eyes and realize that it’s no longer there. Different walls, different people. I think at this time in our lives, it still feels (for some of us) that there are a lot of things still hanging around to beat your head against, but at the same time we’re tiring of it, we know that it’s change now or suffer some serious brain damage. Maybe that’s macabre, but I think it’s true. No one wants to be the 45 year old with the same daddy/mommy/control/body/etc. issues that they’ve had since they were in high school. No, that’s sad. And if you’re a relatively emotionally in-touch person that can feel panicky, and anxiety provoking. There are major decisions to be made, and are we ready to make them? Have we been emotionally triaged enough to take that step? What can we do to fix ourselves once and for all? But maybe that’s the silly part. Maybe all that anxiety is a little overblown because you’re always changing, you’re always moving further away from the person you used to be and closer to them at the same time. Defining one age in our life when we have to rectify or fix our panoply of emotional ills is probably extreme. But, that’s what it feels like to me. It feels like okay, it’s time. It’s time to fix this, to figure it out, to be happy, to say yes, to say no, to jump over the wall or barge through it. It’s time. Even if it’s not, it feels like it. So what do you do with that feeling? Deep breathing? Maybe. Meth? Could be. Alcohol? Wow, that’s new. Who knows. (Maybe I should just ask my roommate). I think this urge I have to fix everything and to figure it out can be toxic. I clearly have an ego problem because I think that’s realistic. On the one hand it has gotten me far in a lot of life’s categories, but there are some that aren’t so easily handled. Those intangible things like acceptance and intimacy and contentment, there is no clear path to them. You can’t intellectualize it or self-help it, or therapize it. I am really starting to believe that. Accepting that they take a lifetime maybe be the only way to find yourself living in a wide open space, with nary a wall to be seen.

But, you know, easier said than done.

Back, Momentarily.

Ah, ye olde blog. I barely know thee. Struggling with whether or not to abandon this bad boy once and for all. There is only so much writing one can do. I write for work, I write for myself, I write (whine) in my journal. Really, does the world need that much of me on paper? Probably not. However, I think I’ll keep it around for times like these when I have a few minutes on my hands and I want to off-load some thoughts. The beauty of the blog is the ability to be unpredictable. And by unpredictable I mean bust out some non-sequitur shit just because you can.

To all the people on the bus who think it is an appropriate time to clip their nails. Stop. Please, for the love of all that is sanitary. There was an Asian woman behind me tonight on the bus clipping her nails and all I could think of were the little bits of keratinous shrapnel that were probably lodging themselves in my freshly washed hair. It’s times like these I want to turn around and pull an Elaine, intone through clenched jaw something cutting and justified, if not a little less than kind. I have a solid Seinfeld character in me dying to come out. I am feeling less and less inclined to restrain her these days. Not sure what’s up with that and how dangerous it could be.

 

So, I started reading Swann’s Way last night and so far if feels like taking a warm, aromatic bath in word-love. Within the first twenty pages he put to words something that I have been trying to describe adequately for the last two years. When reading fiction you live for the sentences, sometimes few and far between, that are just true on an almost elemental level. Reading them brings you this beautiful, quiet, existential relief. They don’t have to be deep, complex truths, they can be about something as simple as waking up and not knowing where you are, and what that feels like and what it means in those moments. Put the right way, these sentences offer us an ephemeral connection to each other; to something primary that is so god damn hard to feel sometimes. So far, Proust piles these sentences up like fruit in a basket, they’re on every single page, sometimes one right after another. It’s probably going to take me forever to read In Search of Lost Time in its entirety, and not because it’s thousands of pages long, but because I want to take my time with it. Read every word. Feel every truth and get as much relief as I can from it.

Today I had a weird image of a tattoo on the side of my left calf. I looked down at my leg and must have seen a shadow or something, but all of a sudden I felt like a different person. It only lasted for a moment but I felt like another iteration of myself, someone who could have been or still could be. Someone who would have a tattoo on her leg.

I’ve been off facebook for a couple months, and it’s been interesting. I feel like the last person to get a cell phone or something. Strike that, I am the last person to get a cell phone. A smartphone to be specific. It’s amazing how rapidly total saturation happens. Everyone I know, with the exception of one or two people, has a smartphone. The busboy at the restaurant I occasionally work at has a smartphone. At some point it’s like satellite dishes on the sides of trailers. Like, really? What’s necessary gets irrevocably warped to the point that soon it’s just reality. I wonder if I’m being a little petulant and anti-social by not being on facebook or having an iPhone. A willful, nasty little luddite. The crazy part is that I love technology, I find it just as fun and intriguing and engaging as the next person. I miss facebook, I do. I feel like I went down the rabbit hole, saw how seductive it was, and now I’m trying to come back out. But what happens when the world becomes the rabbit hole. That’s what San Francisco feels like right now. And I don’t like it. I wonder how long it will be before it becomes too much to fight against it, or I fold back into it.

I love the city. I love being alone, surrounded by people. On Sunday I was having an “I hate everyone and everything” day, and I went to Ocean Beach, sat at a café for three hours, and wrote and felt better. I like watching people and being around them, but a lot of the time I don’t want to talk to them. If you live in a small town, this is impossible. In Missoula I felt like I couldn’t get away by blending into the masses and it drove me nuts.

Susan Miller says the end of my current money woes is in sight. November 18^th to be exact. Hallelujah! After two months of multiple irons in the fire, I will look forward to having a few things settled, and indeed Susan’s right, there is (fingers crossed) an end in sight to the Fall 2010 Savings Depletion Extravaganza.

I have a thing for ersatz French cafes. I’m in one right now. They play the right music, dim the lights appropriately, and have nice wine. They’re not quite France. But they’re close(ish). God bless Francophiles everywhere.

I’ve only been gone from Europe for three months and I’m already dreaming of when I can go back, maybe semi-permanently. But that is awhile off for now, so I must instead focus on inter-continental travel at hand, i.e. my trip home for xmas. I haven’t seen my linny lou for almost seven months since our ill-timed vacations did not overlap. It’s far too long. So, come December it will be sisterpalooza in Portland and the three of us will be unleashed on the coast and it will be a beautiful thing indeed. 

Viva La Blog.

 

Keep It Strange

I’ve been back in San Francisco for a little over twenty-four hours and already the strangeness of it is wearing off. When I first got home last night I walked into a dark apartment. My roommates were either gone or working and everything felt familiar yet not. I felt a little like I was trespassing. The white tiles in the kitchen popped out and it seemed suddenly that the brown grout was even more seventies than it was when I left. My bed looked lower to the ground, my desk emptier. It was as if I was in my room in a dream, not in my room in reality. Everything was as it should be but not.

 

But, this morning I woke up and that bizarre quality began to wear off.  Iwalked around the foggy sunset and went to the bank, the coffee shop, the Chinese produce store down the street. It’s all the same. I unpacked and ran errands and made phone calls and appointments and was handed a new work project. Just like that. And it’s like I never left. But I did. And now I’m struggling to hang on to everything that happened in the last two and a half months both internal and external. Suddenly Europe feels like a beautiful fugue and I’m just now stumbling out of my padded room.

 

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m not happy to be back. But then again I wouldn’t say I’m happy to be back either. I would say my emotional state concerning my recent return is akin to that of an Alzheimer’s ridden grandma. I’m not terribly concerned that I can’t remember anything (after all I can’t remember that I can’t remember anything) but at the same time somewhere unreachable there lurks a certain amount of dull alarm quietly lapping the shore of my subconscious telling me something is a little off.

 

That sounds very dramatic but the truth is I feel a little uneasy and I can only marginally put my finger on it. Most likely a pretty normal transitional mood swing. But still, dubious.

 

The other thing is my clothes. I hate them. I just unpacked half my closet that I had stored to make way for a subletter and all I want to do is make proper use of a zippo and some lighter fluid. It was physically painful for me to put them all in my closet. I’m sure it’s not because they’re all terrible clothes. They’re probably very lovely clothes but the fact remains that I hate them. I am seriously considering ripping them all out of the closet and going shopping tomorrow. I have lived for the last three months very happily with minimal clothing and I don’t see why I can’t do the same here. Except with all new frocks of course. The idea of that makes me very happy so I might just do it. It’s interesting what a visceral response I’m having to doing things the same today. I went to Trader Joe’s and got all the normal shit and spent a bunch of money and felt so completely empty after I put it all away. It’s like with every old routine and act that I engage in I’m effectively erasing the time I was away. Which is ridiculous. But that’s how it feels. The weird thing is that I don’t feel like I went through some Eat, Pray, Love-esque like adventure having multiple life-changing epiphanies etc. etc.  But I went through something. Lots of somethings. And along the way had little realizations and insights and moments of joy and contentment that I didn’t share with anyone here. There is of course the problem of reality. If there is no one around to confirm you did what you did and felt what you felt how do you know it wasn’t just one extended waking dream? Maybe this awkwardness is my mind grappling with the dissonance of time. Time as it seems to have passed here and time as it passed in my mind.  Interesting to think about the little emotional storms the psyche kicks up when you rattle its cage a little.

 

What I do know is that I want to make changes now that I’m back. I realize that you have to live somewhere. You can’t travel forever. At some point you have to get a job and a place to live. Would I be happier in Berlin? Barcelona? Paris? I don’t know, but I suspect not. Wherever you go there you are and all that nonsense. This is as nice a place as any and I have a good work situation and lots of wonderful friends. Nothing to complain about here.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t start a new life in the same place and I intend on doing so. Yet another iteration of my San Francisco self. But it’s easier said than done. Making changes that is. It’s much easier to just keep doing more of the same. The inertia is intoxicating and I can already feel myself swayed by it. Perhaps that’s the reason for today’s distaste with everything familiar. I don’t want a life that’s familiar. I want a life that is always strange and growing. It’s easy to make long, shadow-casting strides when you are traveling. The strange and wonderful growth you experience is exponential because of the very nature of being in a foreign land. Maybe keeping my life strange and uncomfortable in a place that is familiar and comfortable is the real test of a wanderlusty spirit. At present, with bank accounts depleted and a physical revulsion toward airplanes reaching an all time high, that challenge is what’s on deck.

This is Where We Started

Well, due to the inflexibilities of something aptly called a “closed jaw” ticket, I’m in Barcelona, leaving from where I started, though only in the corporeal sense of course. I have a flight back to the Bean at the crack of dawn and I’m trying to quiet the sadness of leaving by repeating over and over again in my head how lucky-wonderful the last two months have been. As with any travel experience (read: life experience) I had my ups and downs but overall I came out with some amazing new friends, meaningful realizations, a new writing direction, and of course lots of pictures. All stellar reasons to travel if you ask me.

I’d like to wax poetic here but I’m too damn tired. I am being hella lame and going to bed at 11pm on my last night in Barcelona. But, whatever, I’m wiped. I had a fantastic last day in Berlin courtesy of my new freund Maximilian. We biked all over Berlin, ate delicious middle eastern chicken sandwiches, prayed for a deluge over ‘Sandsation’, beered in a back-alley punk café, heckled a Stieg Larsson fan in the bookstore, traded music (and by traded I mean he gave me over 400 songs and I gave him one), ate delish Laotian, compared murder rates, and finished the night off in a bar with Jazzercise décor. Exploring by yourself is fine and sometimes very nice, but it’s so much more fun with someone else - especially someone with a wicked sense of humor like Max.  This is a public shout out to Nick for connecting us and Max and Alice for being Max and Alice.

While I can’t say I’m happy to leave, I realize that at some point, one has to go home. Or get a job. I was yakking yesterday about getting my “business” whipped into the kind of shape where I can essentially work from abroad for extended periods of time. That’s of course the most attractive part about working via the interwebs although it’s not quite as easy as it sounds. I’d like to see if I can make it happen so that I’m free to live in this city or that for months at a time. That would be nice. Oh yeah, and I want a sailboat too. These are the things I want as I round the bend to my thirties.

Ready. Go.

See y'all stateside.

Fist on the Table, Food on the Shirt

I’m writing this blog post from the road. The old fashioned way. After writing all day and going for a much needed run, I find myself wandering around Auguststrasse, a street full of galleries in Mitte. Not much of a gallery-hopper in my real life, upon finding them closed at 5pm on a Monday, I am forced to acknowledge that I don’t really know when one goes to a gallery. A total cretin am I. I have a sneaking suspicion they’re only cool to go to on the weekdays if you actually have the money to buy something, otherwise stick to the openings when at least there is some social element added to the often sparse collections, you know, just for funsies.

            Anyway, after an hour of walking around I’m drained. I think Rome took it out of me and my feet are on sight-seeing strike. Lucky enough I spied an almost painfully charming outdoor café/restaurant. I’m here to say that Berliners are THE authorities on how to maximize outdoor space. The sidewalks of Paris? Spare. The Placas of Barcelona? Barely populated. It’s not that it’s crowded per se (okay fine, some parts are) but they’re very clever about the balance of space-people-landscape.

When I went out on Saturday night in Kreuzberg I was totally blown away. EVERYBODY was outside. I kept thinking that it would be a good night for burgling. There were far more people outside any given bar than inside it. (I suppose it helps that you can walk around with open containers.) Every inch of sidewalk was taken up by chairs and tables and in some cases there were set-ups that looked like living rooms; carpet, end tables, lamps, the works. Bar after restaurant after bar after slapdash art studio with the doors open after neon-lit club after bar after kebab stand after hair salon cum gallery after bar. End on end, nothing but venues for young bodies drinking cheap summer beer on a cheap summer night. For all the broken beer bottles and men watering the flowers, you’d think it would be pure debauchery, but as far as I could see nothing was out of hand. No fights, no girls vomiting in the gutters, no one beyond the pale wasted. It’s hard to explain how a place, a crowd, can be so vibrant and appear so pedestrian at the same time. Corrections: it wasn’t at all pedestrian to me, but it seemed that way to them. As if roving hordes of the insistently cool were a normal affair. To me it seemed like a holiday. Nope, just Saturday. Their relatively blasé attitude signaled to me this wasn’t a scene. Who knows, maybe by German standards (and I’m sure my new friend Max would have something to say about it) it was/is, but my poser radar wasn’t blinging off the charts the way it does when I cruise by some of the hipster hangouts in the Mission. Maybe I’m being starry-eyed about Kreuzberg, who knows. There’s always someone around to say this neighborhood or that has jumped the shark, but I don’t really give a shit about anyone else’s perceived cool timeline. To me it is alive and new and I’m glad I’m here.

So that’s a slice of Kreuzberg, but really I haven’t even started. I could write a dissertation on the graffiti her, it’s so engaging. Not the individual pieces per se, but the strange effect of it en masse. It makes me wish Mara was here so we could talk architecture and zeitgeist. More on that later maybe.

 Okay, you ready?

So, I think now is a legitimate time to bring this up considering I’m in my third country of the trip and have a fair amount of quantitative (in my humble scientific opinion) data under my belt. So I’m going to make the kind of broad sweeping generalization that I abhor in others.

Americans are the WORST about their cell phones. The fucking WORST.

There, I feel better already.

I am sitting right now in a huge outdoor restaurant with approximately forty tables I can see clearly. Luckily they’re all spaced out nicely across the garden, not stacked on top of each other, so I have a great 360 view. I can see exactly ONE person with their cellphone in their hand, he’s alone at the table and he’s texting. Everyone else? _________. I see a couple phones on tables but no one seems all that concerned with checking them. It’s about six or seven pm, still conceivably within working hours and no one I think can accuse zee Germans of being lazy or dodgy about work. I’ve seen this scene repeated a hundred times on subways, on platforms, in terminals, on the street. You just don’t see someone swerving like a drunk, walking into some old lady because he’s pecking away at his iPhone or blackberry. It’s all terribly civilized. Of course people are on their phones, I’m not saying you don’t see cell phones in Europe, that would be a ridiculous statement. What I’m saying is that you don’t see them glued to 9 out of 10 heads that you pass on the streets, or on your way to the next train. Proportionally it’s much, much, less. Same goes for iPods but that’s a whole different kettle of fish.

Now, before I go too deep into my rant (there’s MORE you say), let me say that I’m not claiming to be a total innocent. I’ve been known to uncomfortably text while waiting at a bar, or even during dinner on occasion. I’ve fallen prey to half-attention-giving and other transgressions (though I’m not nearly as bad as some). As such I am condemning myself here as well when I say that it’s the epitome of rudeness and in my eyes modern society’s most distressing adaptation. Why? Simple. When you are with someone in the flesh (or a lot of someone’s) and you are constantly and pseudo-surreptitiously texting/emailing, you’re telling the person in front of you that they are of secondary importance. Plain and simple, it’s rude. (Cue all my friends reading this and hating me.)  I notice in the absence of a cell phone for the last two months, just how much more present I am, and how present and engaged those I’m with are too. It’s so refreshing and I feel even more how unacceptable the alternative is.

Obviously exceptions will persist since we’ve changed the way we socialize and make plans so dramatically in the last even five years. A quick text to tell a friend where you are and when to meet you? Fine, say excuse me and get’er done. What is not cool is getting embroiled in a multi-text conversation about who’s there, who might be there, if it’s cool, why they can’t meet you and how it might be possible to sway them, sexting, etc. If the pursuant conversations are vital, fine, step out for five minutes and take a call. Think about it…what would you do if in the middle of a conversation over coffee a friend whipped out a notebook and started writing a letter. Lending of course half an ear and punctuating her sentences with “uh huh” and “oh yeah?” and other faux-attentive hallmarks of actually paying attention. You’d be pissed! You’d demand to know who they were writing to and why they were doing it now. My question is how is it any different cumulatively? It’s NOT, yet somehow the former is almost completely acceptable in the U.S.  Not the largest of national shames of course (hello BP) but definitely endemic of a growing acceptance of human disconnection and social isolation. Not helpful cultural shifts in terms of quality of life. Disconnecting locally to plug in globally. How is that a step in the right direction.

Far from a luddite, I’ve thought a lot about this shit and it’s even more alarming the further you extrapolate out from the dinner table.  I’m not saying we should all throw our phones in the trash but I do think it would behoove us to consider that as with everything, you get the bad with the good. Especially in San Francisco we seem to bumrush the latest technology, embrace it, nay smother it, (yep said nay) without stepping back to consider the implications. Radiations levels (shout out to Gavin Newsom), precious metals whose sale directly supports war and genocide, neural rewiring, and last but not least simply spreading our attention to thin and taking what’s in front of us for second best. All things to consider, but most of us don’t. For once I’d like to see us take a step back from the latest Silicon Valley coup, and think about how we can incorporate it responsibly into our lives, trying to capitalize on the advances while admitting (god forbid) that there could be drawbacks.

And don’t even get me started on this guy.

            So that ladies and gentlemen is your evening rant, live from Kreuzberg.Tonight I’m going to sit by the river at a bar with some new friends and have many conversations where the only distractions are the party boats whizzing by blaring techno and revelers calling to the shore in a language I can not understand. 

(There’s got to be irony in there somewhere, right?)

Author’s sad little qualifier* It’s late and I’m re-typing this quickly so I’m not employing the usual fine-tooth (ish) comb as usual. Deal with it.