It was a monkey weekend. I'm pretty exhausted. We dropped Mark off at the Greyhound at 1:00 and I walked away through the shell that is Downtown Oakland on a Sunday, following an insane old black man with a bushy white bear to the BART, thinking about why we do what we do and what we want out of this life.

It was good to take real time off of work. For the first time since my Christmas vacation I tuned out the news, kicked my feet up, left my email alone -- 50 non-spam messages, still unread -- and took a load off. It was good to drop into a different way of being for a while, to check in with my peers in the civilian world.

It was also somewhat uncomfortable. Lots of echoes of last summer, which wasn't a totally fun time in Monkey Land. Not the girl stuff -- that was actually a high point -- but with all the confusion and lack of effective communication.

It gives me a little bit of guilt, to sense how things aren't as together as they used to be, to know that my distance from everyone and everything doesn't help, to intuit that there's still something there in that group, between my closest and oldest friends, but that it's hazy and worn. I feel like if I made it a focus for me, great things might happen there. Great small things full of fun and laughter.

The essence is there. It may not be as terribly ambitious as my current bag, but it feels somewhat more attainable. I got to be where I am by wanting to get over my feelings of powerlessness at the course of world events, and because I want to have that bright future. I now wonder how to have my cake and eat it too: how to continue my grand ambitions to help bring about national and global change, while still having the free capital (financial, social, intellectual, temporal) to go about constructing a more ideal locality.

Kierkegard and Dewey on my mind; social networks and the new emergent utopia. That's the long-lense world view, and in my head I try to balance it against all the ugly wrong shit (and just plain depressing rot and blockage) that's really out there. Locally/personally? I really don't know. It's one experiment after another.