The Redman Wants Out!

Sunlight breaks through the fog, the clouds lift, and the earth practically reeks of fertility. I roll down my pickup window on the safety corridor, letting the air waft up off the newly re-greened median divider and ease my troubled mind.

Things have been better lately; getting a little more balance in life, and starting to trust in The Others to do their thing at the office. That's an important thing for improving the overall outlook. Letting some of the weight fall. On the downside, the little muscle spasm that's been intermittently but persistently troubling my right eye has expanded its territory down to my right tricep, a much more noticeable flutter when it crops up. Seems like a bad sign.

Sometimes I wonder if this context really argues for taking my first real Time Off and going to a balls-out bacchanal in the Black Rock Desert. But wow, I'm sick of doubt. No more second-guessing, just forward progress.

As someone close said to me a few nights ago, it's hard being talented and gifted. I laugh that kind of thing off -- forbearance against deadly Hubris, doncha know? -- but it's undeniably true that those of us with pronounced personal expectations and ostensible potential have a tougher time finding our grove. There's always more, and it's never enough.

It's been a hell of a week. I made a promise to myself to take a true "day of rest" this Sunday.

Did a middling job catching up on correspondence, but am feeling better about the universe overall.

I really need some vacation; may try to take a three day weekend for Rest purposes before Burning Man at the end of the month.

Things are churning here. The Netroots Nation scene continues to evolve. It's a younger crowd every year it seems, though still wonky and sometimes a bit paranoid (the cute blond girl I chatted with complained of accusations of being a Republican plant), but overall everyone looks good. People have lost weight and look healthy; they know they're winning, even if the win is questionable and the progress seems too slow.

A great find has been hanging w/the coolkids behind Music For Democracy, which is shockingly familiar, and fun. I also got to play Phil Donahue -- microphone man -- in a nice little "Dean to Obama" session. You might have seen my somewhat poofy hair on C-Span there.

It all makes me consider my own future. This world is one I've grown ever more distant from over the past four years, and a world in which I feel like I've let a lot of people down, or at least not realized the great expectations that I and others helped to engender. For instance, we evangelized Drupal as a platform technology which helped break up the DC tech oligarchy and drive "the .org boom," but ultimately that promise remains unfulfilled, and our personal interests become diffused, focused on other things. The technology is better than ever, but our crucial human energy is missing, and so the value remains undelivered.

As I said before, it feels like my immediate first-degree network is coming up in the world, starting families, careers, etc. As I said before, it's a wonderful thing, but I feel the spread, the phenomena of "continental drift" as my Pa used to say.

I realize the impossibility of holding on to the past. In truth there are more people I love and cherish that could ever be knit together directly. I just worry that in the midst of everything everyone will just slip slide away, that I'll say stuck where I am and the distances will continue to grow.

Tom Jefferson ten days before the 50th 4th, and his own death, too sick to join the party:

I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made.

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.

The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

I added paragraphs and capitalized sentences for readability. Nice sentiment.

I'm my own quest for self-governance, I've gotten spread too thin again. The muscles on the lower half of my right eye socket are now twitching off and on -- a few weeks ago it was the other side -- which I take to be a bad sign. But there's light at the end of this tunnel, and a baseball game this evening.