One eye on the road

If I’ve been elu­sive here, it’s not because I don’t care. Since giv­ing Face­book the boot (which, it turns out, con­fuses most every­one it doesn’t piss off) I’ve been strug­gling with what hap­pens here. Tra­di­tion­ally, I’ve used this space to talk about (and some­times process) the ques­tions that emerge writ­ing this end­less book. Some­how I’ve painted myself into an academic-​​colored cor­ner. And while it’s awe­some to have a stone to sharpen my think­ing on, that’s far from all I want to talk about, much less how I want to talk about it. If you know me in real life, you know I adore a good swear word. I sound like a sailor chas­ing a run­away nail gun.

Then there are other problems: How much of myself do I want to put out on the Inter­net? There’s a lot I sim­ply won’t put on the Inter­net, both because it’s inap­pro­pri­ate to vent it pub­licly, and cause I don’t want that shit find­ing its way to the peo­ple I’d like to com­plain about.

I also don’t always have huge polemics about my evolv­ing spir­i­tual con­scious­ness – they usu­ally came up because I was writ­ing and think­ing a ton, and had few peo­ple to bounce it off. Now I’m in a slow patch, and con­cen­trat­ing on other parts of my life. Again, the cor­ner: mostly, I’ve been read­ing and think­ing about sex. When it gets really abstract, sex isn’t exactly irrel­e­vant here, but it’s not a major theme in the book. Maybe in another book.

And it’s not as though I’m not scratch­ing at the big ques­tions. Jesus, do I have some updates for you guys. I had a con­ver­sa­tion with Dan Long­boat after the last SEED Dia­logue that just flooded my per­spec­tive. But I was about to have a baby, and my heart was with my son. Seems lately these great oppor­tu­ni­ties come only paired with other great events, and both want your atten­tion, and both suf­fer for your try­ing to split it. A month before 2011’s con­fer­ence, my edi­tor died, sud­denly. A few days before the con­fer­ence, a friend suc­ceeded in killing her­self. This time out, baby. I tried to make a space dur­ing the time the Dia­logues were hap­pen­ing that I could push every­thing else out­side of. Was that fool­ish? Christ, I still don’t know. The Dia­logue is a sacred space, and I see argu­ments for both putting your day-​​to-​​day on hold and rec­og­niz­ing you’re only there at all to ele­vate the expe­ri­ence of your day-​​to-​​day. I did the same in Welles­ley, in the weeks before return­ing to Albu­querque for my boy’s birth.

Among the things I’m cer­tain of: I sold lemon­ade from that bench one summer.

The trou­ble with box­ing every­thing up is I haven’t been able to get it all out of those boxes since. I’m strug­gling a lot lately with this: is my trou­ble a sign from the gods to cool it and wait, or is this just a nat­ural sit­u­a­tion I gotta sort my way through? Both? I strug­gle some­times more than any­thing with hav­ing no con­vinc­ing frame­work for that ques­tion. It’s a lot of why I’m writ­ing this book at all: the deeper I get, the more the world seems to take shape, become sensical.

Any­way, this all comes down to niches. A good blog has a focus, right? Video games, pol­i­tics, someone’s daily culi­nary adven­tures in sandwich-​​slicing. This one’s been zeroed-​​in on the helix of books, words, and the spir­i­tual. I’ve hes­i­tated to expand it, cause I haven’t known how. But seems to me, it’s fig­ure it out or let it die. And I’m not ready to do that yet. Nah, fuck that. Next time, we talk about sex. Or Sid­dhartha. We’ll try both. See where it goes.