Farsheed's got some fresh tunes. Click play at the top of the page. If I were mo' fly I'd figure out how to play tracks along with my blog posts.

So this is making me think about a different life, one in which I live in a smaller town, someplace with a college, and I have an old car that doesn't work very well, but which I use to get around and do the things I need to do. It's an American Dreamlife, where my concerns don't spread much beyond the hills that cradle the town. It's a dream where I have less money, but where my life costs less, and I have less work to do, so it makes sense to take time to shop and cook and spend time making the yard look nice.

I think about what it would be like to be in an institution I liked, to have a path. What it would be like to have fewer worries, fewer known unknowns. Perhaps I'm losing my will to power, but it all sounds pretty nice to me; living a human-sized life in a nice community.

Maybe it's just springtime making me whistful, remembering sunlight glinting off the copper decoration worked around a building on Broadway down by NYU, walking with a girl. Other things, times. Different people I have been, could have been, pretended to be.

My current position is impermanent, both on it's face and in light of my ramblin' ways. But just simply movin' on isn't near enough for me anymore. Tension. Need to kick out the jams.

Farsheed's got some fresh tunes. Click play at the top of the page. If I were mo' fly I'd figure out how to play tracks along with my blog posts.

So this is making me think about a different life, one in which I live in a smaller town, someplace with a college, and I have an old car that doesn't work very well, but which I use to get around and do the things I need to do. It's an American Dreamlife, where my concerns don't spread much beyond the hills that cradle the town. It's a dream where I have less money, but where my life costs less, and I have less work to do, so it makes sense to take time to shop and cook and spend time making the yard look nice.

I think about what it would be like to be in an institution I liked, to have a path. What it would be like to have fewer worries, fewer known unknowns. Perhaps I'm losing my will to power, but it all sounds pretty nice to me; living a human-sized life in a nice community.

Maybe it's just springtime making me whistful, remembering sunlight glinting off the copper decoration worked around a building on Broadway down by NYU, walking with a girl. Other things, times. Different people I have been, could have been, pretended to be.

My current position is impermanent, both on it's face and in light of my ramblin' ways. But just simply movin' on isn't near enough for me anymore. Tension. Need to kick out the jams.

It's 70 degrees. I slept in late. I'm missing the alleycat (unsanctioned bicycle street race) that Frank invited me to in DUMBO. I'm drinking some coffee and some OJ and thinking about how much work I should try to get done and when I should call the Belle du Mois.

I'm thinking about getting started painting my room, because even if I bail out of here at the end of May I still want to do it. It'll make it a nicer room, and it's something I've wanted to do, and I already bought the paint and everything. (Update: I did it!)

I'm wondering when my generation is going to start getting its shit together. Probably not for another four or five years, but there's lots and lots of groundwork to be laid in the mean time. Thinkin' about that old tyme corpulent populism. Thinkin' about how spreading the internet all over the planet in the next 50 years could be the key to lasting world peace: when people can connect directly, it makes it a lot harder to gin up the war fever.

I'm thinkin' about the summer of Jefferson.

Among other things, I've been thinking about that idea for having pr0n support "The Foundation."

It's vitally important that as many aspects of what we do are independently and sustainably funded. It's also true that from a political perspective, straight white males are the backbone of almost everything evil. I've been thinking there's synergy here.

So:

1) Prontrepreneurial site lets anyone run their own porno operation, keep the legal rights to their content and the lions share of the net profits. Has all the functionality of your standard 3rd-wave stuff (community/networking, memebers-only torrents, etc). Some small portion (10%?) goes to funding projects and other stuff. The goodstorm business model, but with smut.

2) One of the projects will be an attempt to push some of the best and most tasteful content onto politically impressionable young white males, but packaged within the context of a "lifestyle" website which espouses our own social values. Like playboy in its heyday. Kind of non-misogynist-consumer-zombie version of Maxim, but we show nipples.

3) The magazine (which I like to call "Corpulent Populism") also becomes a showcase for other Foundation Funded projects.

And now I want to go outside and tune up my bike. So I will.

Last Saturday afternoon Mark and I took a little drive over to Patrick's Point Park a few miles North of Westhaven, hiked out along the rim trail for a mile or so. Great vistas, even with a windy drizzle on. For those of you who haven't been to the Pacific Northwest, there's really nothing like it in terms of raw natural power in a coastline. I suggest you take it in before you die.

It was a good chat. The crisis of meaning is an everpresent first-world problem. Those of us who ascend Maslow's Pyramid of Human Needs, we get past the basiscs of survival and safety and living within a society, and then we're buggered by things like having a social circle that esteems us, and finding that inner source of purpose and reason.

And we're not getting any younger. Mark's 27. I'll be there in another month. We can joke all we want about the 35-to-55 sweet spot for having a family, but the truth is if you want to get there in style there's groundwork to be laid.

(On a related note, I came home to find the only mail that had piled up was wedding-related, from friends. Everyone goes through this, I'm sure, but it sure is new and interesting to me.)

But groundwork. Where and how to begin? I await revelation, listening to the wind and to my guts, searching for way to call down lightning, sniffing around for signs and wonders.

My ability to plan my life has always been somewhat light. What is a plan? A list of things that probably won't happen. Surely I can make decisions, pursue goals, change courses through the exercise of will -- I believe in all that -- but all the Great Things that have ever happened to me came through synchronicity and luck.

I'm an accidental person, embracing the unexpected. It is written in my soul, my genesis. I maneuver into the moment and channel my talents and instincts based on the situation. It all sounds more hippy-dippy on paper than it feels to me inside. I still have great expectations and outlandish ambitions, and I really believe this kung-fu is the best way for me to get shit done. So it's not as though I'm a lost soul or one of those Tolkienesque wanderers. The internal compass and gyro units still run strong, but how this squares with putting together a whole stable life remains unknown.

Awaiting revelation the question rattles: do I settle down and start playing by the rules, or do I persist in my alternative/outlaw style. Instinctually the choice is clear -- I'm an outlaw baby; a ramblin' man -- but the suit grows around me through fear of the unexpected: something demanding medical insurance, a death in the family, who knows what might happen. "Be prepaired," a certain voice says. Ironic: what's the difference between these unexpected events that I should settle down in preparation of and my long-awaited sign from heaven? It's in the eye of the beholder I suppose.

I need to get out from under the weight. This is why I want to get to California for the summer. This is why I want to stop working for political groups and start working in politics. This is why I want to tear down this old website and get back to my roots.

The square world isn't going anywhere. That's one of the nice things about it. It's high time to hew to the ethos.

This is what happens when I try to go on vacation: inevitably a server goes down or a deal falls through, or both, and then I have to get on Mark's dialup and deal with stuff, and I get the crazy eyes:

After the unpleasantness, it was quite a great weekend. We got out to see the ocean and stuff, had some excellent breakfasts. Satuday night we caught The Devil Makes Three down at the 3030 club, which was a rockin' good time. Your $7 admission also gets you the right to tailgate in the parking lot, where the action moves from beer to whisky to hash to psychadellic mushrooms to BBQ sausages, and then piling into the warehouse to jump and dance and sing along. What more could a man ask for?

I think I'm going to head out there to live for the summer. The Summer of Jefferson, we'll call it. Oh hells yeah.

Is it pathetic that I get an enormous jolt out of reading my own archives?

Now, I know I can communicate, and I know I have a few ideas. I spend a lot of time straddling strange gaps, trying to deploy my mind in two areas at once. Sometimes I'm successful. It took me about two weeks to rack up 50 karma points on /. just speaking my mind, mostly about the politics of business and the business of creativity and the creativity of politics. I know I'm a smart kid, but I intensely fear ending up one of those arrogant hipster dudes who's so into the coolness of the things that he does that there's not much he's actually doing. I'm too reserved as it is: people see me as cold when I would say I'm shy. I don't want to retreat into a shallow lonlely shell of ego: I want to truly become and remain humble. I want to retain the ability to regularly be overcome by all the truth and beauty in the world, as I have many times this week. I want stike a deal with the universe that grandfathers in that that delightful sense of childlike surprise I get at strange weather or the syncopated rhythm of my music and the pedals of my bike.

I was reading Justin's Links just now, and today's entry really brought around the emptyness of what I've been working on this week. I think I've found something I can do for a while in consulting, but it's a world so frightfully awash in bullshit I don't know if I can handle it for the long haul. Every day the urge to let fly and speak real language with real meanings, even at the risk of offending someone's ego, grows stronger. What I need to do is amass a little nut and then stake out an enterprise of my own. Actually, this has been mine and Peter's plan all along. It's just that the nut-getting part is so insipid and banal. I hope I have the chutzpa to see it through.

Fuckin' A. I used to really have some mojo.

Outlandish, four years ago, feels a lot cooler than this semi-pro crap I've got going on now.

Fuckin' a, man. My blog used to be awesome! What the fuck happened? Must resist the creeping growing up...

It's time baby. I'm gonna really rip this shit down and put some new shit up. For reals. Gonna happen. Semi-pro nonsense gets its own zone and this url goes back to being all outlandish all the time. I'm gonna start doing video too. Hells yeah.

On an unrelated note... According to the most recent studies, more than 25 Million Americans willingly admit to using marijuana in the past year. About half of those are over the age of 25. Time to end that prohibition ya think?

The FCC has been a problem for a while:

FCC Chief Kevin Martin yesterday gave his support to AT&T and other telcos who want to be able to limit bandwidth to sites like Google, unless those sites pay extortion fees. Martin made it clear in a speech yesterday that he supports such a a "tiered" Internet.
...
By siding with telcos who want to be able to offer adequate bandwidth to sites that pay up, and to limit bandwidth to sites that don't, he'll help kill off new sites that can't afford to fork over the money.

That could help end Internet and network innovation, and we simply can't afford that.

This is really what it comes down to. Established players want to consolidate the internet. Sometimes -- as in the case of Billionaire Basketball Team Owner Marc Cuban -- by pedalling fantasy applications such as "home diagnostic tools for senior citizens." The reality is, we're highly unlikely to see those types of applications anytime soon in a consolodated marketplace.

The rapid pace of innovation online really comes from it being an open end-to-end system. Lock in a tiered structure that favors those who can pay, and watch the net turn into a mechanism for corporat content providers to pipe crap to your Xbox. The internet becomes TV with chat rooms.

That's one possible future. It's not as dark as the 1984 internet-as-panopticon possibility that's still out there, but it's not what I want to happen. The new kids on the block (google, yahoo, microsoft, et al) will fight this, but it's going to be a close call.

I tend to think the "inter" part of the internet might be another way out -- other nations or regions (or even municipalities) could get it right and outperform the fatbacks. Hopefully it won't come to that.

The FCC has been a problem for a while:

FCC Chief Kevin Martin yesterday gave his support to AT&T and other telcos who want to be able to limit bandwidth to sites like Google, unless those sites pay extortion fees. Martin made it clear in a speech yesterday that he supports such a a "tiered" Internet.
...
By siding with telcos who want to be able to offer adequate bandwidth to sites that pay up, and to limit bandwidth to sites that don't, he'll help kill off new sites that can't afford to fork over the money.

That could help end Internet and network innovation, and we simply can't afford that.

This is really what it comes down to. Established players want to consolidate the internet. Sometimes -- as in the case of Billionaire Basketball Team Owner Marc Cuban -- by pedalling fantasy applications such as "home diagnostic tools for senior citizens." The reality is, we're highly unlikely to see those types of applications anytime soon in a consolodated marketplace.

The rapid pace of innovation online really comes from it being an open end-to-end system. Lock in a tiered structure that favors those who can pay, and watch the net turn into a mechanism for corporat content providers to pipe crap to your Xbox. The internet becomes TV with chat rooms.

That's one possible future. It's not as dark as the 1984 internet-as-panopticon possibility that's still out there, but it's not what I want to happen. The new kids on the block (google, yahoo, microsoft, et al) will fight this, but it's going to be a close call.

I tend to think the "inter" part of the internet might be another way out -- other nations or regions (or even municipalities) could get it right and outperform the fatbacks. Hopefully it won't come to that.

Something got me inspired to do a little clean up over at Vagabender, and I re-read a bunch of it. It's a great record to have, that website.

"Yeah, man. Instead of buying that dime-bag, I decided to just send the money directly to Osama. I just write out a check to Al-Qaeda, drop it in the mail, and because I hate America it gets me just as high."

Oh man. Those were some good times.

I realize big chunks of the story at the end are missing: Iowa, Burning Man, etc. I have photos and memories. Maybe something will happen there.