not a bad place to work.

New York City public library.  I've been thinking Ghostbusters ever since.

and back, again.

I’ve contained a bubbling tirade for weeks, one where I justify removing a huge chunk of my Facebook friends list, rant endlessly about privacy and the illusion of our enclosed, social dam(n)s which have actually sprung dozens and dozens of information leaks to a wide sea of hungry life-as-comparison fish.  Not to mention the NSA-as-fisherman.  Did you see the latest privacy revision?  The one where anyone can find you by your name?  Stalkers, rejoyce!

TLDR: if we’re friendly and previously co-workers you should add me on LinkedIn.  I’ll write the best god damn recommendation you’ve ever seen.  If we were tight friends we’d probably be talking outside of Facebook on a regular basis, no?

AND BACK, AGAIN is what I titled this entry.  I'm back in New York.  Back in one of my best of friend's place... this time, without him.  It's odd because he's still here, and just beyond his musk is his entire point of reference - him living here for years numbering at LEAST I-can't-remember.  And me watering his plants.  (Probably too much.)

The device on her hip tells us we've walked 18,440 steps today, and I believe.  Leaning into the loud roar of this city has given me some needed short-term purpose, something to keep up with.  New York has no patience for patients.

This is my home, my new place to work for the next month.  This trip marks a certain responsible return to the workplace of the free - said without irony, even.  I've realized that my dream gig allows me to spend quality time with the latest of my sick newborns, and that any amount of brick-meets-headwound is absolutely worth being light on my feet.  It's harder to see when you're trapped in the undertow of "being the new guy".

TLDT: Marketing is everything, kids.  I've had dreams of YouTube, of angles and hooks and minimizing blood loss.  The cold reality of capitalism is that the sale has far more meaning than the meaning itself.  If I am to become successful I've got to make the people see what I see.

freefall.

Objective reality might as well be objectivism itself when it comes to measuring irony.  (Kant touch this.)  It was mere months after coming to real, tangible peace with the impossibility of love.   It was mere months before familiar conversation with a favorite familiar grew and narrowed and pierced and left me wanting more.  Wanting more, over 1000 miles away.

Falling for someone you already have a sense about seems like a common occurrence among the young – free of the mistakes-come-experience, surrounded by friends before understanding friendship, all of it accelerated by wide-open naiveté.  With age such a thing becomes novelty, nay improbability, as you take your chances and write your story using pens pressed from salt and chaff.  You find yourself in a strange place where those closest to you have been fully stripped of mystery and flippant possibility.  Perhaps that’s why we’re so afraid of being old and single and alone.  Not because we ultimately want to die beside someone.  But because we’ve run through our course of chances with those that actually know us.

She moved up to Seattle and we celebrated our one-year anniversary mere weeks ago.  I could write novels about how I feel about this woman, but I’d rather read them to her.  And I need to treat what we have as the fragile, breathing entity it is - rather than writing about it as something I’ve conquered and shelved.

The most mind-blowing of the realizations remaining is thus: I’ve spent my most recent life crashing my ego against the rocks of “trying to do it yourself”.  I’ve inspired and hired and fired and begged and lost it all, multiple times now.  If it wasn’t for the path I’ve taken, if it wasn’t for the madman-esque return to the sea, I would have never had the talk that slowly turned torrid.  Nine years of my life and nine years of effort, all of it for a simple chance at a re-introduction?

Worth it.  All of it.

I’m a lucky man.

repurpose.

This was never intended to be solely a place to write about travel. The double meaning of work was as much about "belonging" as it was "earning money". I've always loved drastically different meanings to the same word. For years I've been wanting to change my name - more as a symbolic snip from my church-or-war family name, but many hours have been spent combing over my mental micro-dictionary to find the perfect new me. (Same as the old me?)

I ended that search with one of the most displeasing names you would find in a Baby Name book. The word "wage" remains one of my favorites - both an incredibly intentional, committed action as well as a passive, limp swear word used in arms-up surrender to our freedom machine. But there's no romance to that word, and what good is a new name if it's ultimately an in-joke with yourself? Who am I kidding about flow of the tongue - I'd so name myself wage if I could come up with a banging last name to sit beside it.

I closed this book abruptly, a year ago. I skipped over all of the details, as if those years beyond 2010 were somehow devoid of life. But the reality of coming back home was incredibly tough. I'd felt quite distant from everyone but my closest friends - a 9-month play-by-dropbox game of Fall From Heaven 2 was the most constant of connections outside of my tumultuous affair with Facebook. I pulled all of those belongings from that small crate on my doorstep and asked myself what the fuck I was doing.

My impatient attempts at dating went sideways, I found myself in a short-lived relationship with the wrong woman, and one day hit a very specific calm in my romantic life. This hasn't been the first suddenly-permanent revelation that I've experienced - in my youth I was struck down on a very specific Sunday that I was no longer innocent. While the 20 year-old me went in search of an open tattoo shop, this one resigned himself to the tragedy of his comfort - I would truly be okay if I never fell in love again. That medicine sat thick in my throat and took me a month to swallow. But it was true, and I was grateful to realize I didn't have to keep throwing myself against the rocks of bad odds. The realization that I could live a completely satisfying life, alone.

That, and putting everything I had towards the finish line, was my spring of 2012.

restart. rearranging.

2010 was about eating my weight in experience, and the long list of bands I took in wasn't meant to serve as bragging rights. More the reminder of what I did and what I saw and what I felt and what I remember. This is three years from then, and the list no longer belongs as a constant sidebar and a constant reminder and some sort of ruler against which I should measure myself.

Reposting it for posterity sake so that I can move on:

2manydjs
65 Days of Static
Air
Akufen
Atari Teenage Riot
Autolux
Boban Markovic Orchestra
Booka Shade
Boys Noize
Broadcast
Caribou (x2)
Cave
Chemical Brothers
Chrome Hoof
Coldcut
Crystal Castles (x2)
DJ Cheeba
DJ Food
Dan Deacon
Daniel Higgs
Daniel Menche
Dosh
Drumcorps
Editors
Emeralds
Ex, The
Factory Floor
Fever Ray
Foals (x2)
Four Tet
Fuck Buttons (x2)
Fukpig
Glenn Branca & Ensemble
Godflesh
godspeed you! black emperor (x2)
Grinderman
Gum Takes Tooth
Hallogallo
Hangedup
Head of Wantastiquet
Her Name is Calla
Holy Fuck
Hot Chip (x2)
James Blackshaw
Jónsi
King Midas Sound
LCD Soundsystem (x2)
Lucent Dossier Experience
Marc Almond
Massive Attack
Master Musicians of Bukkake
Melt Banana
Miserable Rich
Modest Mouse
Mothlite
Napalm Death
Neurosis
New Pornographers (x2)
New Young Pony Club
Nisennenmondai
Obstacles
Panda Bear
Peaches
Pierre Bastien
Plastikman
Public Image Ltd
Qemists Soundsystem
Red Sparowes
Robot Koch
Roxy Music
Rufus Wainwright
Swans (x2)
These New Puritans
Tim Hecker
Tindersticks
Tricky
Unbunny
Weird Al Yankovic
Wolves in the Throne Room
Wooden Shjips
Voice of the Seven Thunders
Xiu Xiu
Zeni Geva

back to business.

It's hard to believe nearly two years have passed since posting the last entry, here. People use words like "rollercoaster" to sugar-coat and uptalk and fauxite what often ends up being countless hours of cold, numb grinding. But I did it. I launched what I set out to launch, skinless teeth and all. Dead broke and freshly-accomplished I had little choice but to put my newborn away and find a way to pay the rent. I wonder if mothers ever feel repulsed the moment that cord gets cut. Regardless, I needed the break away from mine. (Perhaps cellmate is the better parallel.)

They say that idiocy is next to godliness, and so I took a job at a pressurized and unstable Seattle startup. Where will I work? Wherever I can, right now.

More to the point of this resurrection: I'm fed up with the Facebooks and need a general outlet in which to get it out. There's but a single silent link leading people here, allowing the relative anonymity of this blog to give me a voice without the breadcrumbs.

I welcome ideas for how to circle the wagons a la the LJs of yore without having it all sold out from under you. Blogger might not be the best venue for such a thing. Perhaps these handful of entries are best left as a tiny time capsule, a marker of a journey that will ultimately outlive me.

In any case, I miss writing.

out of touch.

In the early days I used my passport as a form of escape - losing yourself in a strange land can remove you from your daily reality in the same way as alcohol, video games, or fiction can. It's incredibly important to travel for the right reasons: exploration over avoidance, the journey over the destination, and most importantly realizing that the allure of the new and the unusual is not inherently "better" than what you left back home.

"Wherever you go, there you are" is an overused adage but remains one of the hardest lessons to learn when you find yourself alone, thousands of miles from home. Exposure to other cultures does not soothe crises of the self and it doesn't somehow bestow clarity of purpose. In fact I'd argue travel does the polar opposite - it throws everything into question, it shows you a myriad of ways you could be living, and generally leaves you with the uneasiness of insignificance - playfully coated by terms like Wanderlust. For me it's more of a philosophical addiction.

My fantasies of returning to Seattle were unrealistic at best and hint of an inverse irony to what I describe above. I sought to return to solid ground, to be back among the familiar, to open myself up to the possibilities of romance, to get some help with the project I'm working on, and to merge myself back into the conversation I'd somehow lost among my stateside friends. Was my return an escape from an escape? Or did I come back full-circle as intended?

In only a handful of months I've found myself in the perfect little rental, surrounded by all the familiar possessions I've done just fine without. Am I playing house? This disheartened heart wants nothing more than to return to the security I've come to crave in the utter unknown of that endless horizon. THIS is the escape I speak of, and the type of travel that I think can be incredibly self-destructive.

Then again, if I'm to play the part of lone wolf I should be taking full advantage of my dwindling freedom.

Cutting off your nose to spite your face might seem extreme, but it sure makes you breathe easier.

I can't wait to get back on that plane.