Well, ticket in hand I'm still not sure how I'm going to transport my sorry ass to Burning Man. I'm not really worried since if it can't happen it can't happen. However, it's starting to be a source of stress. Mostly this is my fault for collapsing earlier this summer into a shambling puddle of discontent and not pouring any energy into planning anything. It's also perhaps somewhat daft to try and swing this thing on a solo basis.

Nevertheless, I'll proj on. It occurs to me that I'm going to be in Eugene at least the friday before I want to leave, so trying to get a ride from there might be an option. That means I need to carry all my gear with me, but since I'm going camping on the way up there... it's so crazy it just might work.

There's an old joke: what do you get if you put two nerds in a room? An argument.

My friend Nick's father passed away unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago; a shock to us all. While I didn't know him personally, it and a few other things put a lot of stuff in perspective for me. Nick just came down to the Bay. He was all set up to be a law student here come the fall semester, but there was some doubt about whether that would come off, what with the tragedy and all. It's a touchy situation. I don't know what to say to the guy. I wish I had some wisdom, but I've never had to deal with death in that way, and moreover I have never had a strong father figure in my life the way he has; don't know what he's lost. I had a couple dudes who were both better than decent at giving me the dad-juice, but neither is really a driving force behind who I am and what I do in the way that Nick's father was for him. So I'm more than a little lost in the face of his pain.

He's here now though, and we had good pizza on his mom's dime and we ended up talking politics, which inevitably rolls around to the sorry state of the electorate and body politic vis-a-vis the 2000 election and my voting for Nader. Nick believes that there's something wrong with people, with third-party voters, with anyone who'll follow their impulse to express themselves over and above their responsability to be pragmatic. I tend to take the stance that there's something wrong with the party, with the Democratic party, with an ossified instistution that has ceased to mean much of anything to anyone. We're both right, and both wrong. But it's a tough thing, having a heated discussion. I'm argumentative by nature, competative. I don't refrain from laying into someone because they've suffered personal tragedy. Maybe I aught to. Maybe I aught to listen more. The argument reveals as many flaws in my character and ethos as it does anything else. Me and my ego and my anti-establishment neruosis. Plenty of food for thought.

Earlier today I did another big ride, taking an enduro-trip to the tip-top of the biggest hill overlooking Berkeley. I got smoked on the way up by a couple of pros; passed like I was standing still on the uphill by guys with ultra-light bikes and spandex body suits. I roll in cut-off jeans on a 40-pound Shwinn, so it's not a real hit to my manhood, but I wish I could outperform them still. It was a nice ride though, the best views yet. Me longing for a camera way up above it all. There's definitely something to going through the physical exertion of climbing a hill and then being rewarded with the wind and the vista, something like being a god.

It's been a quiet couple of days here on the old blog, but not in my life! As you can probably guess, less posts here mean I have something "more important" to do. More important than blogging? Who the hell does this guy think he is?

Well, apparently I'm an asset to the movement. I've been writing up some things over on my DeanSpace Blog which people seem to like. I also get random complements thrown my way from people who seem, for one reason or another, to be impressed by what I can do. I don't quite know how to react to it all, taking complements -- recieving in general -- has never been my strong suit.

I also have a lot of random friends from around the world. My old ETW friend Emily and her man Klaas were visiting with us the past two days in the Bay. I last saw Emily in the Netherlands, where she and Kalaas live, when I was there on a logreport junket. I took these cool photos of them dancing -- back then when I had a camera -- but I never posted them. So here:

I also spent saturday hanging out with long-lost highschool buddy Chris Pruett, who's now a professional video game developer. We had a good old time talking about tehcnology, and about videogames as a future mainstay of cuture. In spite of what many of my adult friends think, as a medium video games have the potential to be a truly great avenue for storytelling and positive interactive experience as well as mindless fun. Personally, I find the scene to be exciting.

Chris is especially interested in the Surival Horror sub-genre of games, and is working his way through playing all the titles in this category, the better to understand and make use of the form. This tied in to the whole 28 Days Later line of thinking, what we can learn from fear and how to harnass the darker aspects of our human nature for creative ends. A lot of intersting thought buzzing around my head the past few days.

Happy Birthdays today go out to Frank and the Sister dude. Old pa put up a great Brieanna photo retrospective, and Frank set off to run 26.2 miles -- apparently his ankle started acting up on mile 12, but that's still a hell of a lot further than I can run. Good on ya both, you Leo bastards.

That Danny Boyle sure knows how to make a fine film, and humanity's inhumanity continues to be a rich source of creative fuel. 28 Days Later takes the concept of Zombie films and actually makes art with it while keeping the scare/thrill action intact. The performances are excellent -- I can't imagine many American actors being able to pull this off -- and the cinematography is brilliant. The best part is walking out into the sunny streets of Berkeley, and feeling a rush of relief and hope; the result of a filmmaker's job well done.

So it's bohemain forgiveness tonight. After my recent spate of emoting in a senseless and spurting fashion -- a whole day lost until I figred out that hard bike riding up steep hills heals you -- I feel kindly and purged. It's probably going to take a spell before I'm set, but this is progress. I feel meta-ready to be a good guy again.

The time and space I live in conspire against me, isolating me from that which I desire. But every little thing is going to be allright. It's a sad song still playing in the background, credits rolling, but I'm learning to let that go. Life is holy and every moment precious; wollowing about in emotional pigshit has little virtue. There's a time to let one's self go, and there's a time to check in and see if you've had enough free range melancholy. Yes, it's time to bring it all back home.

So I'm on the rebound now. For really. If you want to get in on the action, let someone know. We'll set it up.

Wow, posting that one link to back when I first came to the bay got me started reading my own archives. It's like reading an old journal; sifting through all the dirt for unlikely gems. Some of it, recent romantic history, to be specific, is too hard to read just now. I skip around the parts that might remind me of things I'd rather not remember at the moment. But I did finally summarize and blurt out an update to my long-suffering love page, so maybe that's good.

It's been the season of the bitch all over, though. Not just here. Look at my anonymous british blogroll buddy who's been carrying on in trans-atlantic style with a woman about half his age. He's just about where I am, so maybe this shit never gets any easier. He's backing him self with some Dali Lama wisdom. Well, I suppose heartbreak is a part of every life, so there you have it. But holy fuck it hurts sometimes.

On a lighter note, my own amateur punditry is inspiring to some people out there.

The slow rebuilding process is continuing apace. I'm starting to feel as though I have a skeleton life-plan again, something akin to purpose in this beautiful world. Hit up a San Francisco Dean Meetup, a grand old time. I wrote a couple letters to New Hampshire and then participated in a Dean Media Team video taping session with about 6 other people. It was a little bit forced to start, like any media event, but it was really interesting to see what other people had to say, and good to feel like what I said had some resonance with other people.

I really like the Bay area. NYC comparisons abound, both positive and negative. There's a certain blue-collar bohemianism here, something to do with community and open faces and good cheap friendly food, somthing that is conspicuously lacking in New York City. There's a kind of atmosphere of class consensus betweeen union workers and bike messengers, artists and computer hackers. The cost of rent may be comparable, but you can still get tap beer just about anywhere for two bucks, and that $20 you stick in your wallet can last a couple days. On the other end, San Francisco new money is classier than the NYC nouveau; it's frontier money, pioneers and explorers. You have your white trash, but there's something comforting about that, or at least preferable to meatheads. It seems to be a much more generally progressive place, or maybe that's just my western heritage bias coming through.

There are also a lot more people sleeping on the street here. In absence of a "quality of life" campaign such as Guiliani enacted in his time as Mayor, the fallout of a bad economy and jobless recovery are sharply obvious. The city also seems to largely shut down at midnight. There's still traffic, but Market Street and red-brick sidewalks take on the air of a late-night greyhound station as you make your way to the last BART for the East Bay. If they ran that shit all night long and halved the ticket price, the secondary economic benefits would be enormous, or so I imagine in my internal East Bay - Brooklyn analogy. As it is, the Bay Area mass transit works more like the metro north than the subway. They do have these nice rounded seating areas on the platform though. Much better than benches, more conducive to a friendly underground atmosphere.

So I'm starting to feel good here, at home almost. I remember this vibe from my first visit to the bay, and I do hope this turnaround continues apace. There's naggling doubt hanging around the edges, monsters under my borrowed bed waiting for me to turn out the light, demons of love's labor lost and a lonesome wind in the trees. It's all fuel eventually, but sometimes you can't bite right in. Sometimes all this emotional biomass needs deep-core heat and pressure before it becomes a source of energy. In the lesser days I just remember that this too shall pass, and in the good times I strive for my unconscious connection to the sublime, closing my eyes and feeling the sun on my face.

Some random response to my "art is church" bit o'er there on yr left with their own. I don't know if I understand this, but it sure seems like art: Mutant Eggplant. Heavy on the cactus. See if it makes meaning to you.

On the other end of things, my man Briit Blaser's got some fscking right-on things to say about terrorism, opportunism and the clowns currently in charge of the works.

Things are coming back together. Life is re-taking shape. As someone noted recently, I'm brused just about now, but I'm coming round. In dark times a ray of hope is a welcome thing. Still existing through that rough compression phase of the rebound, the part they show in slow motion on 3-2-1 contact, where you see the rubber ball actually squeeze into itself before bouncing back.

Yesterday I rode up Cyclotron road to the Berkeley National Research Lab, affording an even better view than yesterday's excursion, where I stopped at the Pacific College of religion campus and was astonished by the beauty of the bay. Nothing like riding up a big hill to make you conscious of entropy. Clikity-clackity clickity-clack energy drain; it's another one of those metaphors.

I'm learning again how to take care of myself. Listening to morphine and getting into better physical shape. It's quite something what an hour of bike riding a day and a few push ups will do for you. I'm eating good food and feeling pretty stress free in spite of it all. Hope and prospects are just around the corner, or so the self-pep-talk goes.