Had a strong Bachelor Weekend here in Resthaven. Kellimundo is in Colorado for her sister's graduation, and Mark and Zya went camping before she took off for a three week work stint in the Shasta wilderness. I've been walking around in my underwear, drinking beer and taking the dogs on walks, changing a flat tire, and generally just letting it all hang out.

I'm feeling a shift in gears. My birthday is probably part of that: while the arbitrary marker in time is indeed arbitrary -- one more trip around the sun doesn't really impact yr day-to-day, per se -- it holds up as a psychological milestone.

The good news is things are really coming together with work. I'm starting to have real confidence both in our craft, and in our fiscal solvency. It's a good feeling, and it starts me going ambitious in the career sense. For instance, we just got a gig with the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, for which I took some flight-suit photos, and that's pretty exciting. NASA, Bitches!

The career question is ticklish. Mean motherfucking monopoly player I may be, I don't have a real abiding passion for the world of business. You always read about how really successful people see it as a game, and I can grok that. I'm eternally turned-on by success, but just racking up points isn't challenging or complex enough to really hold my interest.

I can see being committed to the virtue of providing, building a business that gives people jobs and health care and helps them build their lives. It's appealing to me to be a Big Man in that way, tapping into some of the Fatherhood energy, but I wonder where it's heading. Do I want to do this for the rest of my life? I don't really think that's an option (evolving marketplace), but if it were I have to admit wouldn't be too excited about it.

I do have love for my industry, but I also feel the need to transcend as well. The internet ain't everything. Most of all I can't kid myself into thinking that I'm gonna have a job, make some money, and then do XYZ after-hours. That's not how I roll. It's got to be a 100% package.

Typically, I don't really have a place where I feel I fit in. I don't think the Silicon Valley scene is for me, and I'm not quite blossoming in Humboldt County. Politics doesn't feel like the revolution (vocationally), and I gave up on performing as a career a long time ago. What's a boy to do?

It's the 100% thing that sticks. I don't want a job, I want a life. I find myself worrying that the future is going to drive me and my friends further and further apart, that the sardonic Vagabender joke "Part of becoming a man is watching your dreams die" is actually turning out to be true; that we're all just drifting down into grooves, boxes, cubicles and career paths, off on our separate Adulthood trips, and the next time we see one another we'll be sagging and saddled, fighting back the heartburn to relive those Glory Days one more time in the parking lot. I preach a dark future!

Don't get me wrong here; I'm not moping. I still feel like life is beautiful and exciting, and that the future is bright, but I feel like I don't share that with enough people.

That's on me, no doubt, to share more assiduously, and the sentiment is mos def connected to the absence of a romantic partner in all of this. Feeling pushed like this makes me realize just how many walls I build around myself; demands, expectations, low-confidence cop-outs and an inability to relax and be that feels almost like paranoia. I also realize that in the last decade I've gone from living in New York City and living a life that was full of female contact, to living in the woods and working online in a field (Open Source Software Development) that has a 95/5 male-to-female ratio. Yowza.

It's is also connected to my lack of a big-picture vision. I'm a planner, and as long as I'm confused about where things are going and what the Big Idea is, my anxiety runs high and my vision goes furtive. "What's your five-year plan, Josh?" Fucked if I know, and as cheezeball a question as that is, having an answer (glib or notional) might be nice.

That in turn relates to what I've bitched about before in terms of not having a good quick explanation for who I am and what I'm doing, no elevator pitch. It's not that I'm suffering from role confusion or can't explain what I do with my time, it's that I don't have a frame for any of this. I don't quite know what the story is. I'm thinking about this kind of thing from five years ago where I decided to think of myself as an explorer and started having a lot of fun again.

Who am I and why am I here?

Dunno at the moment, but I'm going to go off to heady yoga at the center. Maybe the answer will come in a stretch.