So I'm bouncing around the internet before going to bed -- my version of channel surfing I guess -- and I come across this site, the Anarchist Library and I click on the 9-11 link because I'm from New York and there's a post asking "why is conspiracy a dirty word?" or something to that effect.

So I think I'll leave a comment and lay my "conspiracies are disempowering" jive on these black and red beboppers, but then it tells me I have to register to post a comment. Yeah! Anarchy!

We had a housewarming party last night; a grand success given that Dan and I have put done no roots in this town as of yet. We half-filled our gorgeous apartment with decent people, liberally saturated with booze and food and loud music, and everything was cool. There was conversation and jest and sociopolicial debating, all the ingredients for a swirling cocktail salon scene sometime when we have a couple more connections. I got to talk art-school with some of Molly's student friends, which was refreshing but also made me feel a little old; a few years further out at least. In spite of the fact that there was no one there for me to romance, it was a damn good time. A sizling proof of concept at the very least.

That stuff makes me feel, makes me feel, feel, feel, feel, happy.

Day by day it gets a little easier, the new life. I miss rain and riding on misty mornings past McCarren park on my way to the bridge. I've hit that little stretch of Driggs maybe a couple hundred times over the past two years, and there's no pleasure like spreading your arms like wings and coasting under trees past green grass on either side in the middle of Brooklyn; that beautiful old orthodox church dome ahead on your left, the Empire State Building rising across the river on your right.

In weak moments, whistful or lovesick or something, I replay scenareos, how this or that might have been different. I remember being a teenager and in New England and the rightness of that, and how I kind of crapped all over it; made proud juvinile moves like I thought an adult would. Takes a while to learn these things. I playback the summer's timeline, wondering where I would be if I hadn't had a ticket to California. Pretty much where I am now, I suppose, but the possibilities tickle.

But hindsight is just a story, and usually a convienent one at that. You don't like being alone now. It's highly unlikely that a real solution to that problem lies anywhere in your past, as comforting as that might be to imagine. Better off roaming the streets looking for some bike-riding apparition to pounce upon than mining your past for nuggets of now-bittersweet memory. Chase too many veins of illusion and you might just get in too deep, suffer from a cave in or loose sight of the canary in the shaft, suffocate for lack of emotional oxygen.

The future is out there, and it probably involves a lot of people and places I've never seen before. That's a kind of comfort too, but rather of a cold variety on an unspoken Sunday night in California.

It's been my labor for nearly a month now, and will continue to be for the next year at least. Give it a look:

Music For America

Better Than Sex is the title of Hunter S. Thompson's book about the 1992 presidential campaign. As I find myself more steeped in the world of politics -- with fair to good results on my sum personal happiness -- I can't help but reflect where all this is leading.

Might I someday run for office? Michael Moore suggested it to the audience at Berkeley last weekend and that gives me the chutzpah to bring it up in public. I might be able to hack it at a low level, but that's rarely a paying gig and I don't come from money. Money is an obstacle to bigger things, but might be raised. But I tend to think that the seamy underbelly of my website might also be an issue.

It shocks me that people are still shocked that I put all this out there. I mean, why not? I did all these things, didn't I? No point in pretending otherwise. But it's a political liability, maybe. I sometimes do think I'm too radical a revelator to make people feel at ease. Perhaps that's just a lack of self-confidence. Sometimes I flip it and think, "fuck you and your obscurity; truth is a live wire dynamo that doesn't end." And then I think "Hubris, Koenig."

Maybe my role is more cultural. I wrote once in a fit of pique in my personal pen and paper journal, wrote as part of a lenghthy jag against Everything, the question, "where is the Hunter S. Thompson of my generation? Probably off somewhere blogging." I was thinking of Justin Hall, but maybe it's me. Somehow that doesn't seem right either.

I know that Frank and I (and others) have talked often enough about how public speakers at political events tend to really suck. I know that I care about a lot of things. I know that I'm halfway decent at articulating a vision if I take some time to figure out what it is before hand. I know that I can turn a pretty phrase, and have an abiding interest in humanity in all it's various kinky permutations.

The question is where does this leave me? I'm wary of the responsibilities of leadership, tending to hide behind my de-centralization mantra, the idea of being an inspiration to other people to be inspiring, to empower people to empower people. This kind of mantra isn't new; it's common to most hucksters. Not that I'm in it for the snakeoil by any stretch, but I look at the words that come out of my mouth and even I can't take them all that seriously. Too etherial. What about the last minute, the time when everything gets done?

No answers tonight of course, and none really needed. Just the stuff that's on my mind having no book to read. I finished Haruki Murakami's South of the Border, West of the Sun today... man does that guy spin out the romance. That triggers a whole other set of things to go on about, but most of it's predictable; think I'll leave it at this for now.