just dropped in

All man­ner of con­texts have been pre­sented for my acquain­tance with Dark — solo hikes, late night strolls home from new love or a heavy buzz, lazy snow­storm morn­ings with the sound (and blue strobe) of plows thun­der­ing by, and the long black that only the bot­tom of the Earth can provide.

You could say we’re on friendly terms, Dark and I. We have pact of ease that allows for an encom­pass­ing, com­fort­ing cocoon to enve­lope thought. There is a warmth that car­ries res­o­lu­tions for the present and the sub­tle travel part­ner of good nostalgia.

Dri­ving north tonight, a short hop along the front range on 93, I saw only moon­lit moun­tain sides and the light-shells of small cars miles ahead. Each of us trav­el­ing along, iso­lated, hold­ing our own fort in the world around us. Dark allows that pri­vacy — the rar­ity of men­tal silence in the mod­ern world.

It could be that recent change (small pota­toes — a move an hour north) left Dark in the pas­sen­ger seat, could be that I finally found some clear think­ing. In the end, the drive pulled past and present together, offered up new thoughts on love, on old friends, and offered a few new per­spec­tives for my sec­ond try at the non-seasonal world.

In a moment of serendip­ity, the ran­dom tracks play­ing across my stereo blended all of it together seamlessly.

For shar­ing pur­poses (best rounded out with a moon­lit drive away from city lights, a life­time behind you and a life­time ahead):

Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago — Soul Coughing

No Regrets — Aesop Rock

Just Dropped In — Kenny Rogers

Yuma, AZ — Damien Jurado

Gone For Good — The Shins

The Mast — Feist

Ball and Chain — Social Distortion

Field Below — Regina Spektor

Done Got Old — Heart­less Bastards

Paris 2004 — Peter, Bjorn, and John

From a Pay­phone in the Rain — Teague Alexy with the Feelin Band

Air­line to Heaven — Wilco

Is This It — The Strokes

Par­adise Lost — Storyhill


the side-slip and the mind-drift

I’ve done so lit­tle writ­ing in the past months, less so here.  This exists as a bizarre con­trast to the changes and pur­suits that my life has held in the last year.  I’ve been liv­ing a life out­side of my nor­mal scope — been directly answer­ing the ques­tion I wrote one year past about when


a fresh start

It’s been far, far too long since I last wrote. This is the begin­ning of clean­ing up the mess behind the hood of this site — one nec­es­sary step in remov­ing the road­block excuses I’ve been using to avoid writ­ing.  The site will likely be a “work-in-progress” for the next cou­ple of weeks.


out and about

One of the dif­fi­cult aspects in the life of a wan­derer can be a lack of a home. We all take own­er­ship of a space, an area we can return to for men­tal sta­bil­ity, to breathe a lit­tle eas­ier, to recharge. Bounc­ing city to city, stay­ing with friends, I end up lack­ing that. No mat­ter


on bailing out

I drove through the sun­rise this morn­ing, from the dark of night to the full of the day­light. It was the first com­plete sun­rise that I’ve seen since the one-month won­der that marks the morn­ing at the South Pole. There’s magic in the sub­tle changes that exist in the hours of twi­light and dawn. Even


commentary on socialism

From The Atlantic, a great visual rep­re­sen­ta­tion of just how “social­ist” our econ­omy has become: “What Social­ism Looks Like”


rounding the same mountain

Funny how, almost three decades in to this life-thing, I still strug­gle with some of the same issues. I sup­pose that on many lev­els, we all do. One good thing? They’re more famil­iar with each pass­ing. This time around I can rec­og­nize the odd mix­ture of excite­ment and melan­choly of tran­si­tion. It’s still affect­ing me,


webmail access

So if you’ve used web­mail through me and this site over the past cou­ple of years, you’ll have noticed that it hasn’t worked very well (or at all) lately. All should now be resolved and all of the old accounts are still around if you still need access to check up on them or clean


abstraction

I work in abstrac­tion these days, in an arbi­trary world of num­bers, rules set atop rules to meet account­ing and inven­tory track­ing stan­dards, spread­sheets grow­ing in cel­lu­lar com­plex­ity daily, inter­con­nected by for­mu­las and ref­er­ences, a web of imag­i­nary num­bers based loosely on real­ity. I crave a return to trail­work, to man­ual labor where the days


a laugh not soon forgotten

On the way back to the air­port tonight, I watched the sun set low over the Mis­sis­sippi River. This is not an unfa­mil­iar sight — I’ve watched it many times in my life. Each instance man­i­fested vastly dif­fer­ent than the one before, some­times sub­tle, some­times dras­tic changes in the nuance of color, the shapes of