The rain is on, steady and heavy for the past two days. Listening to it fall in my bedroom reminds me of childhood home. It's peaceful and soothing as long as you've got a roof over your head, especially if there's also a fireplace going.

Things have been going really well. I'm stuck working though the holidays on an overdue project, but we're making steady progress and I've come to accept that it just needs to get done, stopped being angry at myself for letting it get out of hand and frustrated with the other cogs in the system. This too shall pass.

I had a really scary moment on Satuday. Trying to wrap things up and get ready for the party, I accidentally deleted some critical files. Luckily there are multiple backup systems in play, and very dependable people out there too. Nothing was actually lost, but for the twenty minutes or so it took to sort out, I found myself staring down the barrel of a truly colossal fuckup. Feeling that kind of weight made me realize my stresses and troubles now aren't so bad, and (silver lining ahoy!) it makes them that much easier to deal with.

Getting that crisis resolved to neatly sent me into the evening with a lightness in my spirit and a new energy for life. Contrast reveals. That feeling is carrying on, and I'm learning the practical truth of my words about the contagious nature of Love and other emotions. Attitude is infectious, and in any organization or relationship, we all feed back into one another, both positively and negatively.

It's a lot of responsibility, really. I'm reminded of a cheezy country anthem by Hank Williams Jr, and the traditional barroom call and response:

Why do you drink? _(To get drunk!)_

Why do you roll smoke? _(To get stoned!)_

Why must you live out them songs that you wrote? _(To get laid!)_

So Saturday night I got back up on that art horse (which I've only been talking about for eight or nine months, so that's pretty good), and did a nice little talking piece at our christmas party talent show. [[T.S.L.|Text is here]]. It was very well received, and even though it was far from my best work, it was up to my own standards and I was pleased. I haven't shown off that side of myself too much since I moved out here, so it was nice to be able to let the artist out, to do something worthwhile with people's attention.

It turned out to be a more preachin' thing than I'd originally intended. That reading was latent in the verse and I'd just chosen not to rehearse it with that in mind, but the crowd responded on that wavelength, and our home in Westhaven was the original community church, so it seemed appropriate. It also made me realize the last time I did something performative I was officiating Frank and Laura's wedding.

Maybe I should just go with it, create myself a guru preacher character. I like being coy and vulnerable too much to go full out Reverend with it, but at the same time the form doesn't have to be so didactic, and it could really work for a lot of things.

To be honest, as an adult I've always equated art with religion. My training tended towards the ritual and having come up without a conventional religious framework, the process of creativity and the divinity of Really Good Performance/Product are what underpin any personal notions I have of mysticism and magic. It's a human and social thing for me, the moments the acts evoke. It's old-time; clap hands and all.

Anyway, it left me more exhausted than ever, but feeling high and mighty in my soul.

This is a good follow-on to the bit I quoted from _Air Guitar_ earlier. Someone at PBS had the brains to interview my former comrade Zephyr Teachout to talk about the internets and politics this cycle, comparing and contrasting Dean For America with The Ron Paul Revolution. It's an extremely good interview:

NOW: Could you talk about how that sense of connection to the candidate is determined by the way the campaign treats them?

ZT: I could answer to two real possibilities with politics on the Internet. One is that you use the Internet as a massive and really effective marketing tool. You build massive databases, you learn everything you can about the people in those databases, you figure out exactly how they can be useful to your campaign, and you ask them to donate money, door-knock, the virtual equivalent of being a sort of army of stamp lickers.

And you may be useful as a supporter in such a campaign. But you're not gonna have a pretty deep identification in the campaign. It's clear that you're taking your marching orders from Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney. That they have figured out how you can be useful.

The other latent possibility is that it enables groups of people to come together—offline and online, outside of the campaign, do their own scheming, do their own thinking, and take real responsibility for the strategy and the policy of the candidate or group that you're supporting.

Almost all the candidates, this cycle, have tended strongly towards the managerial use of the Internet.

...

More Huckabee stuff. It's a shame there aren't interesting movements in the Democratic race to write about. But anyway, check this out:

People in business (or other worlds where Popularity Matters) know what that kind of curve means (the green line). It means you've got true hot-shit exponential growth going on. The Dean campaign had that for a while; Huckabee has it now, at least in Iowa.

However, the institutional forces are arraying against him, and the GOP has a history of putting down outsider upstarts who win an early primary (c.f. McCain, John and Buchannan, Paddy). There's also plenty of time for the Huckster's fortunes to reverse in Iowa, and with it being a caucus, and Romney spending the big cash, I would expect the MormBot to outperform his polling. Professional organizers matter a lot when %0.01 of the population participates and the process is arcane.

My room's a mess, but I don't care
I'm tired of sitting at my desk
You can't bother me
I'm far away from you
Got to get away
You can't ruin my day
You can't tell me what to do
You can't make me think I love you

Shoot it in the arm, you can't hurt me
I'm on my way to Catalina
And I'm not going to read your books
My tank's full of squid
And it's getting light
And you whores, you can't make me want
'Cause I got all the fish I need
On the deck of my boat
And you can't take my heart when I'm here
'Cause it's a long swim home
For your cute little arms

I'll steal some gas, fix my motor
Put on my Beatles tape
And get you out of my head
Get you out of my head

Ah yes, here I am, far away from everyone
And the only fish I smell
Is on the back of my boat
I want to go but my motor's broken
There's no scotch tape, I'm out of gas,
So it looks like I'm stuck here

I'll steal some gas, fix my motor
Put on my Doors tape
And get you out of my head
Get you out of my head

Sort of an anthem for my love life for the past year and a half. Not necessarily a great thing, but it's a fuckin' rockin' song.

This is pretty funny, but the really interesting thing is that this pretty much is Huckabee's message, and so far he is able to sell it:

I've been ramblin' now for two weeks, sleeping on couches, futons and borrowed beds. I've done a lot of this over the past three years. I remember when we first got set to roll out on Vagabender, little Wiley asked us, "can I go on the run with you?" I think he meant "on the road," but it was more endearing that way. It's a good phrase.

All this ramblin' has had its ups and downs. I find myself wishing fairly often that I had a more built-up life, the kind of think you get when you invest serious time and energy into some locale. On the other hand, it's also good to be confident living by your wits.

For instance, today I left the office at around 10pm, rolling back on a borrowed fixed-hear bike to my partner Zack's place, but nobody was home. Luckily I know a bar around the corner that serves good food and has a back patio with a separate door where I could stash the bike (didn't have a lock). So I headed over, did that, and enjoyed a Tecate and a damn-fine burrito, picking up some wifi and getting another todo knocked off while I waited for someone to return so I could get into their place.

It's not a great feat of survival or anything, but afterwards I was kind of pleased that all this came naturally to me, that I didn't stress out about being stuck with a bike and nowhere to go at 10pm in the Mission, just flowed with it. These instincts are useful, I think. Adaptive. Proactive. So much of life is about attitude. It's a blessing to enjoy challenges.

Here's a great and lengthy quote from Air Guitar, an essay entitled Romancing the Lookey-Loos which starts off with a moment of Waylon Jennings on tour, and goes on to explore the difference between spectators and participants in Art.

It's quite a brilliant essay, and which I think it cuts to the quick of what my shit is all about in both art and in politics:

[Spectators] were non-participants, people who did not live the life -- people with no real passion for what was going on on. They were just looking. They paid their dollar at the door, but they contributed nothing to the occasion -- afforded no confirmation or denial that you could work with or around or against.

With spectators, as Waylon put it, it's a one-way deal, and in the whole idea was not to be one of them... Even so, [growing up] it wasn't something we discussed of even though about, since the possibility of any of us spectating or being spectated was fairly remote. It is, however, something worth thinking about today, since, with the professionalization of the art world, and the dissolution of the underground cultures that once fed into it, the distinction between spectators and participants is dissolving as well.

I'm feeling it. Well, actually, I'm totally fucking exhausted to the point of being goofball jittery, but sitting here on a borrowed bed after spending a week dancing along the edge of what I can really do as a person, I'm all strung out, a little hung over, but sizzlingly alive. It's hard to articulate. Words fail, but General Tso's Tofu provides.

Earlier this week I visited with Bill, my Pa, my step-father, father of my sister, who was around the house from when I was about three until I left home and did me a world of good in-between. He and my mom had a really interesting relationship, one which reached a romantic coda when I was a teenager (and was ergo semi-oblivious to this, or perhaps just too self-absorbed to care) but they stayed together as a logical family unit until my sister left for college.

He's married now to a wonderful artist named Patti -- hence the domain name -- who's lives most of her life out in DC, and who he (and my mom) have been friends with since they were wild and young. Yeah. Life is strange that way. I remember meeting Patti when I was a kid in Iowa when we were out there one summer on the farm, her and her then-husband Skip -- who was part of the wild and young thing too -- come out to visit and break the news that Skip had cancer. Skip died. We all went to his funeral in DC. They played The Circle Game.

Patti is dying now too. Same cause. All things considered I was impressed by how well she's holding up, and Bill's doing a stellar job of taking care of her, but it's clear where things are going and it was bittersweet seeing her; made me feel sick to my stomach to say goodbye.

Site was down a bunch yesterday.

Here's why.

Nice to have transparency from a hosting provider.

Unrelatedly, here's this music that seemed to be following me in the distance at Burning Man, and which I tracked down because I'm working in a client's office this Saturday, and one of the clients themselves had it play on his radio stream.