Lack of Color

My parents and I went to visit my friend Anna in Paris last week. Naturally, by the time I got home yesterday I had only just started to adjust to the time change over there, and so now I have to adjust back. I woke up at 6 this morning. *shudder*

For awhile I pondered what to write about the trip. I've decided not to write anything, because there's too much. If I started at all, it would become a "we did this on Monday, and that on Tuesday.." Boo.

But I will mention two things that I discovered. The first is that I can never live with my parents again, and I'm not sure I can travel with them again either, at least not without my own sleeping quarters and enough time on my own. Understand, I completely love and adore my parents. They are wonderful and generous people, and I am glad to have been born into their house. But spending every moment in their company was... taxing. Lesson learned.

A friend of mine has a brother who he didn't know about for the first decade of his life, and then lost again for the second. They've only just recently rediscovered eachother, and I think I understand now what that feels like. Anna is an old friend of mine -- one of the oldest -- and has become something like an adopted sister. I've certainly taken to referring to her that way to my other friends, and I know my parents think of her as a daughter, but I was struck this time with the power of the idea. She *is* my sister, in all the ways that really count at least. I have a sister! Who knew.

There is a tension building in the country lately. Large moments in our history are approaching, and each catalyzing event is like a single heavy footfall, stirring up the dust and scaring the birds into watchful silence. A friend wrote in her blog, "There is something brewing around here... I have this strange sinking feeling in my chest lately that we are on the brink of something huge."

I tend to see the world as a hierarchy of living things which does not stop at the individual creature. This worldview leads to my notion of spirituality, which I won't go into here, but it has some interesting implications. For example: our culture is a living entity with its own beliefs, personality, morality, and all the normal phases of development. I think it is about to pass out of adolescence, which might sound exciting and wonderful until you remember what a painful and violent experience that typically is for an individual; it is not likely to be any easier for a society. We, as a culture, will have to pass through fire into adulthood. If we're lucky, we'll grow into a wise and benevolant society-creature, but there is no guarantee; may also become a short-sighted, cruel and abusive adult society, just like some adult humans. It will be an interesting time to be alive.

On a smaller scale, I've felt the tension in myself as well. Mostly it's been centered around the prospect of moving, and all the associated financial and social and professional and practical side effects thereof. It fits nicely into the larger theme of change; the world and I both prepare for transition, for transformation. It's an exhilirating feeling of unity, like being at a concert and suddenly realizing that your own heartbeat has taken up the rhythm of the song.

But for the moment, sleep calls. Transformation is exhausting work.

Hidden messages?

Tonight I am cleaning my room. Doing my laundry. Sorting out my old emails. Reminding myself who I haven't been in touch with for awhile, and planning to change that. Listening to Malian music by Tani Diakite. Spacing out. Planning what to pack for Paris. Looking for the hidden messages in things. Pondering a random trip to New Zealand. Thinking about stuff differently.

I rode down to the bike shop today to get a water bottle and holder, my own tire pump, and a different shim to fasten my lock to my bike. Then I rode home and installed or otherwise employed these various devices. I enjoyed the physicality of it; I've been lost lately in abstractions, both philosophical and technological. It's good, sometimes, to see a thing with your eyes, touch it with your hands.

It struck me today how tragic and disappointing it is that our culture has turned the making of music into an economic undertaking instead of an artistic one. There is a certain class of "musician" we've invented whose intention is not to make music, but to make a career out of the making of music. True music is a natural product of bright souls living; it is the blood of culture that must be shared with everyone, to nourish their hearts. Only when it becomes a tool to make profit do things like piracy even have meaning, and then it is not art which is being pirated, not living blood, but dead skin.

I occasionally have existential crises involving the different people throughout recent history who have borne my name. There was, for example, this fellow in Minneapolis circa 1999 who had the same name as me. He had some neat ideas, and I do think fondly of him, but we have a hard time finding any really solid connection. Another guy down here in Madison just last July, we even had the same birthday. Creepy. We had some good times, actually.. he's definitely got a good view of things, he just had some issues to work out in practice. Hope he's doing well, though. Anyway, part of the problem is, I can never nail down when they each begin and end. It's like they run together, one into the next, except they're so distinctly different. Then I realize that I don't even know when I began, exactly, or when I'll case to be, or who will be next. Very disorienting.

On a less cerebral note, I am getting more excited about moving back to Minneapolis. It'll be a chance to break some habits, start new ones; a little disruptive eddy in the current of my life that I can try to catch and ride to some new places. Very exciting. It's not that I wasn't excited before, it's just.. these things come slowly to me. Even after I've discerned the right path, it still takes time to really understand why it was the right path. But I'm starting to get it now, and I'm basking in the tranquility of it.

Blogs are inherently self-aggrandizing. This doesn't make them bad; Western culture typically frowns upon self-promotion or the expression of self-importance, but would disintigrate if its people began earnestly living by selfless philosophies. The blog becomes, then, a sort of perverse indulgence of self-centrism, an accepted outlet for the underlying faith of each individual in their own principality. Blog writing styles reflect this in the frequency of the first person; a blog loses its natural flow when the first person is avoided, because the reader expects a certain self-centrality of the text and is jarred by its absence. For example, note the pattern of the previous five paragraphs; in each one, the first person is referenced within the first sentence, in all but one case within the first three words. In fact, over 80% of the complete thoughts expressed in those paragraphs contain an implicit or explicit first person pronoun.

Which is to say, I'm wanking.

But that's okay, because that's exactly what blogs are for, and you wouldn't be here if you didn't want to read the result. I am vindicated by the contract of your expectations.

My laundry is now done, my emails sorted, my plans (for the moment) made, my space outed. Next, a hot shower, some food, and maybe a phone call. Then Paris for a week.

(Worry not, I know how spoiled I am.)

One Plus One Is One

Originally I had plans to go buy and drink some nice wine with my friend Meredyth last night, but she cancelled, which was both lame and not at all surprising. Instead, I ended up going out to dinner and then ice cream with Emily, which was really fun. It was the second time I've seen her since we stopped dating a few months ago; the first was at Fermata show at the King Club, which was horrible and awkward (the interaction, not the show), but now I think we're ready to be friends again. I'm happy about that.

Our conversation drifted to politics a lot, and I mentioned that I've long had the suspicion that eventually, there would come a time when I would either have to go into politics and try to do something for this country, or move away. To Ireland, maybe, or New Zealand. Someplace more civilized. It seems now that every few months, something happens that makes me think that time is going to come sooner rather than later.

For example: apparently the NSA can summarily halt any investiation into their own activities by simply denying the required security clearance to anyone who wants to investigate. This strikes me as very Wrong and very Un-American, but what really boils my blood is that nobody seems to care anymore. The Washington Post reports that something like two thirds of the country is perfectly fine with being spied on, tracked and controlled by Big Brother, as long as he mumbles something vague about security while he does it. Two thirds! What's WRONG with you people!? Even the conservatives ought to be up in arms over this stuff; weren't you guys all about small government? Or does that not apply when you're in charge of every branch of it? Bloody hypocrites.

Tonight I went to a wine tasting at Barrique's with a few friends, and amidst the requisite mockery of ourselves pretending to be wine snobs, I think we all had a good time. We had tastes of two Sauvignon Blancs, two Merlots, three Cabernets and a Sirah. I had never been to a wine tasting before; it was very different to have a half glass of several different wines back to back, rather than having several glasses from one bottle before starting another. I enjoyed being able to compare them more directly.

I bought a bottle of the second one and got to chat with the hostess about wines for awhile, which got me thinking about the differences between the art of light and sound as opposed to taste and smell. The former are continuous physical phenomena that we can model, analyze and reproduce mathematically, while the latter are combinations of discrete objects that we can't easily model or predict. We know every frequency of light that our eyes can detect and we can produce them at will, so the challenge of visual art isn't to discover new colors, but to come up with novel and inspiring patterns of the same colors. Taste, on the other hand, is something else; there is no complete inventory of molecules that stimulate our tongues in any particular way, and we can't easily produce a specific taste if we haven't already discovered it. The art of taste is therefore more arcane, somehow; more at the mercy of trial and error, history and experimentation.

I'm working on a mix cd to bring Anna when I go to visit her in Paris next week. There is entirely too much music that needs to be included. Oh, the struggles of a hard life.

In the past few days I've been assembling my thoughts for a good ol' political tirade. You've been warned...

Chapter 1

I was born twenty-three years ago yesterday, making me a certified child of the internet era. I think (too much) about everything and although I usually say fairly little, when I get started I have a tendency to go on; I, like Jubal, am flawed in that way. I've been told I write well by people who are not my mother (although she is a professional writer and reader herself), and I figure at least one of those people was probably not full of shit. But despite all this, I have never had a blog. Today's the day.

The beginning is the hardest. At the beginning, everything is yet to be said, which makes everything critically important and completely banal at the same time. I feel like I ought to start with the Big Stuff, try to establish some kind of grounding to put all the future posts into context, but I suppose that has to just emerge on its own. For the moment, you'll have to be content with making ill-founded judgements about me based on the comments and anecdotes that arbitrarily end up in writing.

I went out drinking last night and was approached by a girl. I'll admit that I am of the very American bar-going mindset, in that I don't often talk to people at bars who I don't already know. I don't approach them, and they don't approach me. But this girl approached me, and she was stunning; that is to say, when we started talking, I was stunned. Within moments, I was overwhelmed by the powerful conviction that this was a girl I would not at all like to talk to. Something about her manner was just completely awful, and yet she persisted in being infuriatingly interested in everything I had to say without betraying any outward sign of real comprehension. Nonetheless, as uncomfortable as the whole interaction was, I found it strangely therapeutic to talk about my thoughts and plans with someone who neither understood nor particularly cared what I was saying. I found myself answering her probing questions and then suddenly realizing that what I'd just said was actually true. Maybe that's why I've started blogging.

It rained all day today, and when I got home from work I discovered that the power had gone out at some point. Then I tried to take a nap, and the power went out again, except this time it was followed by a number of short bursts of very worrisome humming noises, like a huge eletrical arc someplace very close. A fire truck and the electric company arrived shortly and parked a block away, but the power remained off, so Erica and I went out to dinner with some of her friends from work. I ate a positively ridiculous sized steak (which wasn't actually very good), drank my share of beer-in-a-boot, and had a grand ol' time. Now I'm home and the power's back, which is good because I need to set my alarm for tomorrow and go to sleeeeeeep......

Adieu.