On this day 27 years ago I was born. Huzzah for life.

It's a new era. I no longer reflexively think of myself as 24, but I don't yet have a new age-identity to roll with. I'm in a middle ground between the Eriksonian crises of Intimacy vs. Isolation and Generativity vs. Self-Absorbtion. I think I'm doing well on both counts -- a bit snobby on the Intimacy tip and only truly Generative in fits and starts -- but I'm very much starting to feel the lack of a well-defined career path. Where, exactly, am I going with all this?

For the past half-year, I've been working, living, and loving pretty steadily: Trellon, Park Slope, the Belle du Mois. These things have been good, but I'm about to let them go. In three weeks or so, I'll get on an airplane and fly West, there to live for the summer with my friend Mark -- and compadres Kelly, Zya, and associated nerdowells -- at the Country Soul Carnival in Westhaven, California, State of Jefferson. I'm stepping down as Lead Developer to focus on creative works and speculative projects, freeing up my schedule and scrambling a life that's been comfortable, but also somewhat confining. I'm trying for another run at the unknown and impossible.

I sense a fork in the road. Do I buckle down and try to become a "sucessful professional" in some sense or another? I could, you know. I have a lucrative trade, a pretty keen analytical mind, and I can talk with the best of them. I'm teaching a workshop this weekend and speaking at a conference on Monday. I got skills, yo. Play the game. Play to win.

Or do I want to follow the other fork, the one marked "get a life, not a job?" The hard truth is that I don't have much of a stomach for ladder-climbing. I'm not excited by money. I long for a community-oriented lifestyle, rich in human connections and creativity and the like. I also crave adventure, the buzz of new things and new people and challenges.

Bob Frost is right that the road less traveled is the one worth taking, but I wonder whether I'm not falling into another well-worn rut by setting up this kind of dichotomy in the first place? Isn't it a cliche either way? The one-time artist who packs away his bohemian leanings to join the workaday world is just as much a architype as the dropout hippy who skates by on talent and luck in his own Pirate Utopia.

It seems to me that the real road less traveled is the fusion route, the uncompromising stand. That kind of scares me, which my internal Allen Ginsuburg quote-machine reminds me is how you know when you're getting into something good.