Well, in spite of getting a mild cold, possibly from dancing until 1am in a sweaty tent full of candy ravers (everyone kept asking me for pills), I'm feeling pretty dang good. After a little bit of a rocky start getting back into the grove with work -- it's still a tenuous thing for me to take a vacation -- I'm riding higher than before, in large part thanks to getting the fuck out of my routine, shifting gears. I be riding my new Mission Bike fixie any day now, but I still think this is important: gearing lets us tackle bigger hills, and also go faster.

It's a wild world out there. I forget that a lot these days, and it's important to remember, to know in yr bones. Praxis is hard, but dancing helps. Driving fast helps. Getting a lusty little crush going helps. All these things that tap into feelings and challenge our notions of control, they're important to keep up. I realized this past weekend that I haven't been doing enough emotional exercise, and the result isn't pretty. I've been feeling bland most of the time, nervous-to-terrified the rest, and it's getting worse. This ain't no way to be, so I figure I better stop.

People have been telling me for years to get out of my comfort zone, and they're right. It's hard though. I'm pretty good at getting comfortable wherever (benefits of a big limber brain, y'see) and there's a certain innate conflict between pushing ones boundaries for the sake of rut-jumping, and pushing ones limits for the sake of getting worldly things accomplished, a pull of internal/external focus.

I was talking about this stuff w/Julia down in LA, before we went to Coachella, and her response was "yeah, these days I'm more about really good sex and working on myself." It's a refreshing perspective to consider, as I've been about neither for quite some time now.

And maybe, as always, it's not a zero-sum thing. Maybe I don't need to think of it as a question of personal sacrifice for external ends. Maybe there's a way to spin up, shift, and make the whole thing work faster, in a higher gear. Maybe I should put aside my fears and newfound risk-averse tendencies and see what happens if I let things go. Hang on tightly let go lightly. Maybe I can handle it. Maybe even if I crash I can handle it.

This is a somewhat frightening line of thought, in the good Allen Ginsburg poetry way: that animal fear that comes from vulnerability, from knowing your heart is opening up, that you could get hurt, is perhaps the most and only reliable indicator that whatever you're into is something good. I'll have to consider it.