I'm doing my level best to keep it in the power curve. Things are popping and there are too many worthwhile ways to spend time and not enough time to be spent. It's a carnival atmosphere already; mass distraction. The old desire/truth two-stroke is starting to kick in, but I'm rusty. The summer has been one marked by loss and despondency, a lot of downtime and curling up into a fetal position. Kicking the habit of melancholy is rough, but the world doesn't wait for your sorrow. Get on the bus. Rumble, young man, rumble.

Things are looking up. The rent will be paid. Women, though about them I fumble, are looking beautiful and attractive again; dazzle all around, and sometimes in inappropriate places. Sometimes it's catching the talented designer girl who works for my mom in the corner of my eye -- now there's a well-worn trope of sleeze: the lecherous boss's son -- sometimes it's bright-eyed newbies from Florida who really just want to dance, sometimes it's the nameless stranger across the street. They all move too fast for me. I'm almost there, but at the moment I lack the ease and guile one needs when approaching the unknown. I don't have a lot of confidence in my self yet, so there's little reason for anyone else to believe in me. I know this, and while it's something to overcome it's also a step up from where I was not too long ago.

In a moment of caffinated reflection, my circumstances feel like Voltron forming up; the pieces starting to come together, but not quite ready for action. I imagine the various elements scattered by the Summer of the Hassle honing in on their magnetic contact points, rotating on their bearings and sliding into their purpose-built rail guides. The rush of wind and the whine of powerful servos; ca-chunk; ca-chunk ca-chunk; the robot comes alive. Be in love with yr life.

We've all heard that George W. Bush is a compassionate conservative. I remember hearing that phrase a lot on AM radio back in 2000 when my summer job had me driving Bill's old Oldsmobile Cutlass around a lot. AM was all I got and inevitably I grew tired of golden oldies and tried out talk radio for a lark. But I never really understood what "compassionate conservative" means.

Well, thanks to Boy George's own website, and a tip from the impeccable Daily Kos I now know. To Bush, compassion means talking to black people.

I'm not kidding. Check the link out. Better than 90% of them are Bush making nice to brown people. Nothing else. That's what's listed under "compassion." It just fits in so well with the neo-colonial worldview wrt. Iraq. George W. Bush: Taking Up The White Man's Burden. Fitting that Kipling's poem was in response to the US occupation of the Phillippines, which has been suggested as perhaps an informative historical example of what our desire to improve other nations hath wrought in the past.

Well, I have a ride to Black Rock City; they'll even let me take a bike. I roll from Eugene early Sunday morning with a couple 40-something theater women and a man from Venezuela. Now comes the arduous task of preparing my gear to go. My thoughts for barter items are still settling. Leading the pack:

• Preparing some "index cards of wisdom" which I can give people or do dramatic readings of (Robin's suggestion)
• Printing up some little zines of my and others quality writing to hand out, something for people to read in their downtime when the sun is too much
• Making a run at brewing up a batch of the old opium tea, which is sinfully easy to concoct, and might just be a hit. Instructions for same might be good too
• Sugar baco

If you've got other ideas, refinments to suggest, or perhaps even writing you'd like me to include in my little zine project, please contact me. I'm all ears.

And real quickly, here's some hot and salty Howard Dean grits: he's up in New Hampshire and his campaign-man Trippi has a great interview over on Larry Lessig's blog. If you're one of my friends who scratches his/her head and squints when I try to explain why this is a revolution, read it. If not, read it anyway. It nicely summarizes a lot of the reasons why I think the 2004 election could be a very real tipping point for the US and for the world.

The Summer of the Hassle -- now the official name -- rolls on.

I'm back up in Eugene now, the old home country, after spending a weekend off the grid in the Redwoods with Luke and Mark. It hasn't been an easy season for anyone, and while my personal fortunes seem to be making a glacial but much needed turnaround, others are feeling the heat. There are stories to tell; an all-night ride on a jam-packed greyhound on windy Hwy 101; a park ranger intent on making his authority known; a punishing hike with foolishly overpacked bags; good times around a driftwood campfire; all the personal moments you can really expect from such an excursion. It was good we made it happen.

Small triumphs abound, even as the big clouds continue rolling in off the coast. I've got a lot of work to do.

I'm camping in Northern California for the weekend, then bumping around the Euge for most of next week. Somewhere in there I'll make a trip east to see my dad and then I'll either shuffle off the Black Rock City, or back down to the Bay, depending on whether and when the logistics come together.

Last night we hit up the good old Acme again. Tall blonde bartender guessed my height, which felt a little like flirting, but not really. Nick was there and he laid out the whole story of his father's death. I had been kind of afraid of this moment, but it was actually good to get it out in the open. Luke and I are going to help him move in to his Hastings law school apartment and then catch an overnight greyhound to meet Mark up near Arcata for a little time in nature. I'll catch y'all on the flip side.

Well, ticket in hand I'm still not sure how I'm going to transport my sorry ass to Burning Man. I'm not really worried since if it can't happen it can't happen. However, it's starting to be a source of stress. Mostly this is my fault for collapsing earlier this summer into a shambling puddle of discontent and not pouring any energy into planning anything. It's also perhaps somewhat daft to try and swing this thing on a solo basis.

Nevertheless, I'll proj on. It occurs to me that I'm going to be in Eugene at least the friday before I want to leave, so trying to get a ride from there might be an option. That means I need to carry all my gear with me, but since I'm going camping on the way up there... it's so crazy it just might work.

So I do read the Dean campaign blog at least once a day. I'm a fan, we all know that. But I really got a kick out of the photo for this post. If'n you click the link you'll get to see Dean's Iowa campaign vehicle -- a donated RV from an Iowan supporter with the license place "McFun" -- right behing the John Edwards tour bus. Now, Dean did real good with fundraising last quarter, beating all other candidates for that quarter, but clearly Edwards -- scion of the working class -- is clearly sitting on a big pile of cash.

Or you can see the man play the guitar. Still waiting for an mp3 though.

This goes along with my Howard Dean is the Humility candidate. He's not really a joe sixpack, nor does he attempt to portrey himself as such, but his candidacy does exhibit a lack of pretention I find appealing. Why just look at these photos from the Iowa state fair. Hard to imagine John Kerry in that photo spread.

There's an old joke: what do you get if you put two nerds in a room? An argument.

My friend Nick's father passed away unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago; a shock to us all. While I didn't know him personally, it and a few other things put a lot of stuff in perspective for me. Nick just came down to the Bay. He was all set up to be a law student here come the fall semester, but there was some doubt about whether that would come off, what with the tragedy and all. It's a touchy situation. I don't know what to say to the guy. I wish I had some wisdom, but I've never had to deal with death in that way, and moreover I have never had a strong father figure in my life the way he has; don't know what he's lost. I had a couple dudes who were both better than decent at giving me the dad-juice, but neither is really a driving force behind who I am and what I do in the way that Nick's father was for him. So I'm more than a little lost in the face of his pain.

He's here now though, and we had good pizza on his mom's dime and we ended up talking politics, which inevitably rolls around to the sorry state of the electorate and body politic vis-a-vis the 2000 election and my voting for Nader. Nick believes that there's something wrong with people, with third-party voters, with anyone who'll follow their impulse to express themselves over and above their responsability to be pragmatic. I tend to take the stance that there's something wrong with the party, with the Democratic party, with an ossified instistution that has ceased to mean much of anything to anyone. We're both right, and both wrong. But it's a tough thing, having a heated discussion. I'm argumentative by nature, competative. I don't refrain from laying into someone because they've suffered personal tragedy. Maybe I aught to. Maybe I aught to listen more. The argument reveals as many flaws in my character and ethos as it does anything else. Me and my ego and my anti-establishment neruosis. Plenty of food for thought.

Earlier today I did another big ride, taking an enduro-trip to the tip-top of the biggest hill overlooking Berkeley. I got smoked on the way up by a couple of pros; passed like I was standing still on the uphill by guys with ultra-light bikes and spandex body suits. I roll in cut-off jeans on a 40-pound Shwinn, so it's not a real hit to my manhood, but I wish I could outperform them still. It was a nice ride though, the best views yet. Me longing for a camera way up above it all. There's definitely something to going through the physical exertion of climbing a hill and then being rewarded with the wind and the vista, something like being a god.

Important things are happening in the world. How do we learn about them? Most people I know watch television, which I pick up by proxy but don't really pursue myself. I prefer the subjective but un-spinnable feed of human experience. Here's the latest in that vis-a-vis our current misadventures in occupied Iraq:

TurningTables is a blog kept by some G.I. overseas. Maybe it's a pentagon plant. Maybe it's not and this guy is cruising for a court-marshal. In any case, it's fascinating reading, regardless of its veracity.

On the other end, Salam Pax continues to bring the real stuff. His friend G. recently caught a beating from some US forces; not a good sign. He also publishes more polished prose in the Guardian.

All of which reminds me to get back to work on my interview with my Air Force friend.