I'm back in the Bay for a week. BadCAMP coming up, and business to conduct for our budding Cycling Empire. Also happy birthday Zacker. Good fun and a nice drive, so I'm content with all that.

Oft's the time I wonder about graphing my changes in mood and fortune, a little personalized stock ticker of the soul. Regular journal-writing is beyond me, and actually recounting the details of my daily life would be debilitatingly dreary. No one must know just how ho-hum my routine really is. Gotta preserve the mystery.

A numerical composite would be interesting, while (probably) allowing me to retain whatever shards of sex-appeal I can still muster. And what might such a life-market show? Finances flat but stable. Politics looking up and responsibility on the rise. Stress back down after peaking in August.

It's all well and dandy, and I'm especially happy that visible signs of over-stress -- e.g involuntary muscle-twitching -- are declining, but as things level out I worry muchly about the void, that it may just sit there gaping at me. Nature abhors a vacuum, and although I could really use a vaction, the kind of soul-emptying boredom that may be in the offing here seems dangerous.

The best answer seems like a long shot. Short-sellers are killing the Love index. The gut feeling: flat-lined.

This is starting to become a problem. Aphoristic wisdoms along the lines of "age is a state of mind" are cold comfort when contemplating a creeping case of cynicism. I really don't want to end up a jaded or pessimistic person. It's a shit way to live, but objectively that's the trend. Me no likey.

If our vaunted illusions of free will are worth anything, it would have to be here, right? I can remember more turgid times, dreams of heavy northwest rainfall makeout, sparkling deep beneath the sodium-yellow glow of a lone streetlight. Wet shoes and hot breath; high octane nostalgia. I've been complaining about the lack of this sort of fantastic for long enough now that I wonder if it isn't time to consider some kind of dramatic action.

Let's contemplate that.

• The best and possibly only thing one can do to invite Love is to be at 100% of whoever you are. Beyond that, it's a matter of exposure.
• In that light, my lingering role-confsion and personal isolation are pretty much textbook (Eriksonian) faults.
• The practical answers are obvious: redeveloping a sense of self and instituting better habits of action for being exposed to other people.
• Just as my complaints are the result of a holistic complex, solutions would very likely be similarly synergistic.

My life in the country is problematic in this respect. I've grown quite comfortable there, but haven't truly embraced it as a part of who I am beyond reinforcing the superficial lumberjack aspects of my persona. In a very real way, it's a hideout. I'm not sure at this point whether that will change, or even if it needs to for my conditions to improve.

Perhaps recognition is enough. The notion of a clandestine utopian tree-fort is pretty romantic, no? Embracing this could be the beginnings of a great leap forward.

Similarly, my life in the City is equally vexing. I've never felt at home in San Francisco or the Bay Area, never saw it as my place to put down roots and grow. It's been a palace of opportunities, a picturesque playground and super-swell port in some-odd storms, but I don't really see myself settling here.

And so again, maybe the answer here isn't to beat myself up over this fact, but rather to look at the glass as half-full and embrace it for what it is: a wheeling-and-dealing roller coaster of opportunity. There's romance in there too.

And anyway, who needs to nest? There are too many un-met pre-requisites to even worry about that.

Yeah. This starts to feel right. It's not dramatic action, but it's a change, the beginnings of a new theory of everything. Theory is easier than practice they say, but it's necessary. You can't knock it, nor can you deny it when it's true.