I've been packing stuff up, going through all my buried boxes and bags of clothes I never wear, books don't read, etc. I'm gonna make a good shot at relieving myself of some of this burdin. Sal Army and the local library will get gifts; maybe someone's life will be brightened.

It's been filling me with a great feeling of sadness, actually. Even just walking around the corner past the bustle of Prospect Park, friends on the street, bought a lime fruit bar and two tickets to the last showing of X-men tonight... The humidity in the air I won't miss, but it feels sorry and low to be leaving all this energy behind.

This life I've been living for the past eight months hasn't been right for me. I don't try to pretend otherwise. Still, I can't escape the sensation of something valuable -- the last true fillaments of youth maybe -- slipping through my fingers. I imagine shortly I'll start going bald. Oy vey. That's kind of a maccab image, and overblown to say the least. I don't mind growing up, really, but I want it to be on my terms, not a matter of settling into one of these ruts that civilization hollows out there for ya.

The great problems in life are never solved, of course. It's the challenge and engagement that gives us meaning, yes, but I wish I didn't always feel so out of place. I wish I had bigger piece of the world called home.

I wish I didn't want to try and make all women love me all the time. I wish I were simpler, maybe a vegetarian; maybe a meditator; maybe married to my first girlfriend. I wish I didn't read the news. I wish we were smart enough to not be at war, brave enough to live honest and true and close to the soul.

It's a terrible dark thing sometimes, the future, especially in phases like these where I feel more or less weak and helpless in the face of everything, disconnected from my fellow man even though here we are packed in like sardines. G-D it. I know that I'll be allright, but I'm tortured by ambitions and wishes and that out-of-placeness that secretly (don't tell, I swear) drives much of my desire to change the world.

But tomorrow is another day. The thunder is rolling on in.

After Friday night's alcoholocaust, I didn't sip a drop of coffee all weekend. That may have contributed to the sensation that I was living underwater -- I don't even try to pretend that I don't have a caffeine addiction -- so this morning I'm having some Earl Grey tea.

I don't have any real desire to quit drinking coffee, but I think perhaps there's something to be said for de-escalating my chemical dependence, even as a little experiment.

This is actually classic addict behavior, by the way. It's a well worn trope for individuals conflicted with their chemical relationships to "take time off" or "dry out" for a week or a month or six, after which they generally return to their previous modus operandi.

I make no value judgements here. My experience studying the phenomena of addiction has left me deeply ambivalent about it's cost vs. value. Individual circumstances vary enormously, making this sort of calculus very difficult to generalize upon. Non-functioning, slavish addiction, the obvious kind, seems easy to judge, but in real terms this often has more to do with the addict's financial resources than with the depth and depravity of their habit. It's another well-worn trope for social elites to decry addiction among the massess, while simultaniously engaging in essentially the same behavior (with premium brands, of course) under the notion that they have their habits "under control."

Subjectively, I get a lot out of caffeine. It makes me feel like me. You might think that's immoral or unnatural, but I don't. It's also not a very large health risk, and it's hardly driving me broke or interfering with my ability to carry on a productive life, so I don't really worry about that fact that I get withdrawl symptoms. Your mileage may vary.

(Music to go with this)

In my dayjob land of open-source development, we talk about "scratching your itch" sometimes. It's the thing that tends to drive really innovative creations, and it comes from people who have the skills to speak the machine-language who want to get something done for their own purposes.

This is how bad-ass shit happens, because there's passion involved. It's not a job. You don't watch the clock while you scratch your itch. You scrach and scrach until either you get worn out and quit, or else the itch don't need no scratchin' no more. Or maybe you're a millionare or whatever and you move on to other things.

This is what people talk about when they compare open-source to poetry, to art, to those whacky "creative" pursuits that the B-schoolers secretly scorn and envy. It's apt. Not all poetry is socially useful, nor is most open-source code, but when you hit a real vein it shakes things up. It's how you get rapid advancement, frame breaking, watershed achevements. It's also how you can waste a lot of time.

I haven't done this in a while, in any arena. No art. No tech. No real itch-scratching at all. You might say that instead of scratching my itch I've been using various creams, salves, herbal tinctures and prescription forumulas to keep those sort of symptoms at bay. Maybe I'm straining the metaphor a bit too far here, but there are lots of ways to numb yourself, and I think mainline society encourages this to some degree. Law and Order, 24/7. Go along to get along. Hump day! The weekend is your kingdom.

Well, fuck all that noise. Life is your kingdom, it's the adventure of your lifetime. Kick out the jams and all that. And I found out that my back-tax bill for this year isn't so bad -- me vs. the IRS, an epic struggle -- so I'm bully for the summer, yes.

This is the summer of scratching the itch, of brewing biodiesel and grinding my own mustard, of moonshine and long-form writing. It's a summer for home-media and bonfires, a time to dig down and push. It's time to try out those other ways of living, because this half-square compromise crap just isn't cutting it for me.

Anyway, stay tuned. I'll let you know how it goes.

One day soon I'll fix the brokenness so that you can once again wander around in the good old pages where I've collected my notes on sex, drugs and philosophy. Since those pages are broken at the moment, I'm just reposting this because it feels relevant this morning:

Josh's Axioms Of Living

1. Life is Holy and Every Moment Precious
   Lifted from Kerouac. I believe in the essential worth of life and the time we have to experience it. Unless you accept this as basic, nothing else is worth bothering about. You have to first sit down and say, "Hey, my life is a real thing, and I want to make it the best it can be." This is the bedrock of everything else I believe in: the core assumption I make that experience is good. Common synonym: "Thou shalt not kill."
   
2. The Truth Always Feels Better
   Just a simple little reminder that holding it in or trying to cover for things is not a good way to run the ship. This revelation should share credit with Andrew, who helped me realize this when we were but College Sophomores. Common synonym: "Thou shalt not bear false witness."
   
3. The Most Important Thing is to Stop Struggling
   This doesn't mean you don't resist evil, or that you don't battle for the light, but that you accept what is and work with the flow of life and not against it. It's built on the core assumption (life is holy) that there's always something positive to be had in the flow of life. This was revealed to me by Robin vis-a-vis Mark and a big night of struggling. Common synonym: "Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream."
   
4. Presence is Perfection
   This is how I get out of my nit-pickey, perfectionist, self-critical, hyper-aware, out of body hell. Being "in the moment", as they say in acting school, is harder then you might think. But if you can manage that, you've got it made. Common synonym: "let your mind go and your body will follow."

I intend to revisit and renew a lot of this (and the other non-blog content) on this site as part of my summer project. But thse things still ring true to me five years later.

On this day 27 years ago I was born. Huzzah for life.

It's a new era. I no longer reflexively think of myself as 24, but I don't yet have a new age-identity to roll with. I'm in a middle ground between the Eriksonian crises of Intimacy vs. Isolation and Generativity vs. Self-Absorbtion. I think I'm doing well on both counts -- a bit snobby on the Intimacy tip and only truly Generative in fits and starts -- but I'm very much starting to feel the lack of a well-defined career path. Where, exactly, am I going with all this?

For the past half-year, I've been working, living, and loving pretty steadily: Trellon, Park Slope, the Belle du Mois. These things have been good, but I'm about to let them go. In three weeks or so, I'll get on an airplane and fly West, there to live for the summer with my friend Mark -- and compadres Kelly, Zya, and associated nerdowells -- at the Country Soul Carnival in Westhaven, California, State of Jefferson. I'm stepping down as Lead Developer to focus on creative works and speculative projects, freeing up my schedule and scrambling a life that's been comfortable, but also somewhat confining. I'm trying for another run at the unknown and impossible.

I sense a fork in the road. Do I buckle down and try to become a "sucessful professional" in some sense or another? I could, you know. I have a lucrative trade, a pretty keen analytical mind, and I can talk with the best of them. I'm teaching a workshop this weekend and speaking at a conference on Monday. I got skills, yo. Play the game. Play to win.

Or do I want to follow the other fork, the one marked "get a life, not a job?" The hard truth is that I don't have much of a stomach for ladder-climbing. I'm not excited by money. I long for a community-oriented lifestyle, rich in human connections and creativity and the like. I also crave adventure, the buzz of new things and new people and challenges.

Bob Frost is right that the road less traveled is the one worth taking, but I wonder whether I'm not falling into another well-worn rut by setting up this kind of dichotomy in the first place? Isn't it a cliche either way? The one-time artist who packs away his bohemian leanings to join the workaday world is just as much a architype as the dropout hippy who skates by on talent and luck in his own Pirate Utopia.

It seems to me that the real road less traveled is the fusion route, the uncompromising stand. That kind of scares me, which my internal Allen Ginsuburg quote-machine reminds me is how you know when you're getting into something good.

This summer, I plan to try to make some Biodiesel. First will be the quick/standard vegitable-oil extraction (which is super easy), but what I really want to get into is algae.

What I'll need to figure out is how to extract oil from algae. There have been methods for doing this since 1879, but I'm not sure if solvent-based extractions will really work. It's kinda expensive, dirty, and really aimed at small batches.

I have yet to find any information on larger-scale extraction, but I'll keep looking. Maybe I could build a centrifuge...

Protecting a competitive marketplace:

When, seventeen years ago, I designed the Web, I did not have to ask anyone’s permission. The new application rolled out over the existing Internet without modifying it. I tried then, and many people still work very hard still, to make the Web technology, in turn, a universal, neutral, platform... The Internet is increasingly becoming the dominant medium binding us. The neutral communications medium is essential to our society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy.

He did really, in fact, design the web. So listen up.

I'd go a step further and posit that in the 21st Century, the 1st Amendment would be (to use a phalocentric term) castrated without Network Neutrality.

What do I mean? Well, think about it: we don't need a right to speech because it makes us feel good to speak our minds. We need the right to speech becuase puts power in the hands of citizens. It's not just about preventing thought police, it's about letting people freely communicate, organize and assemble, all of which help balance power between human beings and institutions.

Currently, a narrow definition of the "right to speak" means you're free to be a crackpot on the street corner, or perhaps to protest in a "free speech cage zone," or to chat with your friends in person, or (if you've got the dough) spend your money to create a media outlet and/or contribute to a politician's re-election fund.

That's not a very empowering paradigm for citizens.

Lately that's been changing, and the effects are good overall, I think. The trends, at the very least, are encouraging. However, without Network Neutrality, we all fork over our right to communication online -- the most empowering type of speech -- to the whims of Verizon.

Not a good idea.

Protecting a competitive marketplace:

When, seventeen years ago, I designed the Web, I did not have to ask anyone’s permission. The new application rolled out over the existing Internet without modifying it. I tried then, and many people still work very hard still, to make the Web technology, in turn, a universal, neutral, platform... The Internet is increasingly becoming the dominant medium binding us. The neutral communications medium is essential to our society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy.

He did really, in fact, design the web. So listen up.

I'd go a step further and posit that in the 21st Century, the 1st Amendment would be (to use a phalocentric term) castrated without Network Neutrality.

What do I mean? Well, think about it: we don't need a right to speech because it makes us feel good to speak our minds. We need the right to speech becuase puts power in the hands of citizens. It's not just about preventing thought police, it's about letting people freely communicate, organize and assemble, all of which help balance power between human beings and institutions.

Currently, a narrow definition of the "right to speak" means you're free to be a crackpot on the street corner, or perhaps to protest in a "free speech cage zone," or to chat with your friends in person, or (if you've got the dough) spend your money to create a media outlet and/or contribute to a politician's re-election fund.

That's not a very empowering paradigm for citizens.

Lately that's been changing, and the effects are good overall, I think. The trends, at the very least, are encouraging. However, without Network Neutrality, we all fork over our right to communication online -- the most empowering type of speech -- to the whims of Verizon.

Not a good idea.

Fact: there are 250,000 friends of Laphroaig, which is my favorite scotch (and pronounced "la-frayg"). That's a good benchmark for building a list, eh?

I'm thinkin' more and more about the kind of life I want to build. It's clear that I have marketable skills, but how best to configure them? How best to allocate my energy? I have the enormous privilege at this point not to worry particularly about I will survive, the luxury of first-world problems. I also have a pretty good social network for professional/career purposes. People tend to like me (because, hey, I'm likable), and I have enough of a sense for folks that I think I do a good job of hanging on to the good connections. I'm also enencumbered by any serious legal, financial, or personal constraints. I could literally go anywhere to do anything, as long as I really thought it was worth it.

I'm blessed in many ways, yes, we all know. But what's the boy making of the whole thing? What's he got going?

Well, that's a bit more unclear. I'm involved in the Drupal snowball, which is growing pretty rapidly and career-wise seems to be a good place to be for the forseeable future. It's in a good position to get more popular and even more in demand as the number of people online continues to grow, so long-run that's cool.

However, my position there is ticklish. I've yet to attempt my own initiative, and this begs the question.

It occurs to me that this Drupal Camp thing might be an interesting evolution of what I've been doing. I certainly enjoyed the camp in SF. I think Jeff (who points us to google earth for mac) did a fantastic job running the show there, and I'm excited to collaborate with Aaron and try our own version come May. It makes me wonder if I couldn't parlay the whole training bit into the baseline for a new kind of life/work configuration.

I spend a good portion of my energy now working with people in various capacities which could be construed as "training." With Trellon, I work with the other developers as well as clients in a number of ways that span direct training/education to collaborative investigation/prolem-solving. This is the part of the job I enjoy the most.

I also to do a fair amount of management, sales-support, client-relations and interpersonal maneuvering. This is work I'm somewhat less enthused about pursuing professionally, largely because a lot of it is bullshit.

That's not to say that the art of interpersonal communication isn't an important part of any pursuit (it is), or that all the conference-calls I take part in are pointless (they aren't). Just to say that I feel like in a lot of cases it could be better, and specifically some of the time I feel that I could do better, and that I don't want to professionally specialize in this kind of thing, in being good in a meeting. I think the important stuff happens outside of meetings.

Indeed, I'm enthusiastic about the business end of things. I think making the market work for you is fucking important, and a worthy pursuit. That side plays in as well as my techical skills and desires when thinking about how I want to handle the qustion of work.

Finally, I have my creative nature to satisfy. If I'm passionate about a project this can really kick in and get going, but that kind of connection tends to happen less often when projects are encountered via a full-time-job. And when one has a full-time-job, it's difficult to reserve significant extracarricular energies to take on meaningful (e.g. passion-worthy) projects. It isn't exactly an original complaint, but it's true.

On the creative side, there are prospects for another serious run at a writing project, maybe starting this summer. At the very least, there's the self-imposed goal of new web-publishing and media experiments, part of the notion of a reconfigured daily schedule for the season. These are things I look forward to, things I intend to honor.

I also look forward to scrambling my social life a little bit. While I have no real complaints here, I do feel a little stagnant. It's my own damn fault, but I've become a little bit of a homebody since returning to Brooklyn. Partly this was by design, but partly it's my own lack of initiative and drive. I don't really expect this Summer to be a social rollercoaster (I'll be living out in the hills for pete's sake), but I am welcoming the shakeup in routines and in immediate company.

One of the big unanswered questions for me when contemplating life/career/etc is that of community. One of the things that's become clear to me is that I thive within and long for a strong community. I like living with my social network. I like feeling connected.

This is one of the reasons I default to New York as a home. My social network is still stronger here than anywhere else, but even beyond that there's the sense of connection here. It's not as strong as it used to be, but there's still that general urban sense of shared humanity. There's also a vibe to a lot of this city, and to a lot of the people who migrate here (it's a country within a country, you know), that I dig.

Hell, New York City is the only place where I seem to understand women. That's got to count for something. But still, I'm thinking more and more about alternatives.

We all know I'm not going to be a rambler forever. Figuring out where and how I want to settle down is a natural thing to do. It seems to me that trying to guide the crazy metior that is my life isn't all that bad a thing to think about. It's important (at least to me) to be conscious on this level.

Went and saw my acting teacher/mentor Steve Wang's production of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew at the old ETW on Thursday, along with Frank and J-Mo. Ran into Ben Newman there, as well as Croft and Karisa (who's name I was embarassed to not remember: she ran sound for my play Nitewerk) and some familiar faculty faces. It was quite a little blast from the past.

The show itself was enjoyable. Steve set the floor of the theater up like an Italian restaurant and seated the audience there, using the risers where chairs are usually placed as playing space. He also cross-cast the principle characters, which served to undercut the somewhat questionable gender messages of the play. This let it just be the screwball comedy it was meant to be, backed with schmaltzy piano even.

The music was provided by Rachelle Garniez, who I know from back when she did some grand accordian playing for Steve's Merchant of Venice, which Frank and I were in together as Antonio and Bassanio. She did a wonderful job here, composing and performing a score which added a lot to the play, and got stuck in your head.

The performance was fun, but it also could have been tighter. There were moments where the vocal execution was right on and the timing crisp and sharp, and these were some of the most hillarious bits. It made me wish the whole show was like that, a little more tightly wound, quickly performed. Shakespeare is meant to be fast. The thing is, it's really hard to do that, especially when a lot of your players are working outside their normal vocal range.

Even with that challange, the cast performed well. The young woman who played Portrucio -- the Tamer of the Shrew, who was herself well-played by a tall black man -- carried things admirably. There was also some delightful bits of character work done by a few cast members who filled multiple roles. I should have saved a program so I could name names, but Bravo everyone.

The direction was also a pleasure. Steve likes to break the barrier between audience and performer, and there was plenty of that to see.

The setting itself broke any notion of the fourth wall right off the bat: as the audience entered they were greeted by cast members in the characters of waiters and waitresses, and shown to a "table" on the floor of the theater. They served bruschetta and then changed into their alternate-sex/character outfits, intracting all along. Pretty good way to set a mood.

This layout also let action happen "on the floor," with chases literally circling the house and the risers serving for more language-heavy scenes. There was one particularly inspired setting, where a trip back to Kate's father's is inexplicably cast as a mountain-climb, complete with a clipline and carabiners. It's just a short little wordplay scene with the Portrucio running his tame-game on the new bride, but the physical comedy created by the setting really let it pop.

The whole experience left me feeling at once energized, and also old. It was good to see art, and nice and nostalgic to remember my college days; but it also makes you think, to see how young everyone looked. I felt vaguely lecherous just being there, though that could just me being a little overly sensitive.

Yeah. There's a lot of energy. It's a good scene, and for the most part everyone is cool. They got new lockers, and the Men's bathroom shower is really a shower rather than a hole in the ground, so things must be going pretty good.

I spent a little time talking to Ben Newman (a hard-luck guy) and also good old Angela Hurley while sort of eyeing her little sister (who's got to be in her 20s now and was wearing cowgirl boots). After the show I got to give Steve a hug, and then we were out.

Saying our goodbyes to J-Mo, Frank and I bombed it into W-burg to catch up with our cohorts at TKs, riding a kind of competative semi-race most of the way. We passed some folks on our way over the bridge, one of whom came back to smoke us on the second leg of the uphill with his well-tuned fixed gear. Frank's comment later was, "we awakened the dragon."

After that just another night with friends.