So first, there’s Siddhartha:

• Clearly, this is one of those cyclical fables. It’s not something I think I’d return to annually, but once a decade, to clean the pipes, sounds like a great idea.
• Whoever insisted I read this book at 16 had a far higher opinion of me than I deserved.
• I’m not buying Hesse’s paradoxical road to nirvana. In order to realize you are all things, you must deny fundamental parts of yourself, or experience them in a testing zone. I think a few could pull that off, but it’s not for most of us. That said, as a metaphor, sure.
• Man, it’s validating to see I’m not the only person in a deeply gratifying relationship with the nearest body of running water.

Then there’s The Ethical Slut:

• Love does not, and cannot, negate love. No one human being can be all things to another human being. Crushing on someone not your primary partner does not mean you must care less for your primary partner. It means you have to manage your time.
• Communication (in the service of negotiation) is key in all relationships, but especially the sexy ones.
• Easton and Hardy spend the book building the case for their “slut utopia,” a world in which everyone is free to share/exchange as much love and sex as they want. (The magic nucleus of this idea is consent.) Taken for given we’re built for it, this sounds worth working for.
• The heart, like the genitals, goes where it wants. Better to set rules for yourself and your partner(s) that can accommodate that unpredictability than assume you’ll both just… overcome it. The utopian model, amazingly, is how we’re working now: the expectation we can behave as a monogamous species, when all evidence indicates we just plain can’t. Cue this ridiculous commercial:

If you can, ignore the marketing and contemptuous heteronormativism. (And the light misogyny, and the ever-popular misunderstanding of anarchism.) Give those interactions a more realistic pace, and toss in some graceful rejections: there’s your slut utopia. Tell me you don’t, probably with some frequency, see someone on the street you just. want. to. fuck. Of all the Axe campaigns – known mostly for their stunning misogyny – for once, this one kinda has the right idea.

Anyway. As they always do, these books starting talking to each other:

Touch is good; contact is good. Siddhartha compartmentalizes touch: even during those 40-some years with Kamala, his baby-mama, he sits outside his desire, plays with it, examines it. In his last years, living by and learning from the river, he has absolutely no sexual contact. And the bastard never misses it. Buddha or no, this seems fundamentally inhuman to me. I’m not calling Hesse a fabulist entirely: maybe in his sunset years Siddhartha’s libido’s faded. Maybe, improbably enough, he got his fill with Kamala. But he never just fucking longs for sex, much less seeks it out.

And, through most of his life, he’s a bit of a dick. Related?

Yeah, I see you there, Gotama, checkin’ out my shit

But here’s the key: losing your virginity at 25, then fucking one person for 40 years, and never reaching for it again… this doesn’t sound like human behavior. Sounds more like he’s on a quest to master himself. Which, of course, he is – but clearly that’s not much of a strategy for most of us. The whole book’s predicated on the notion that the Buddha’s human journey – enlightenment isn’t taught, only experienced – is the journey. The path to enlightenment is one of self-denial: it’s right there in the four Noble Truths. No wonder the world’s overrun with Buddhists. Of course, one could say the same of Christians, and their entirely successful batshit denial of sexuality.

Seriously, though: why are we so insistent on systems that deny us parts of ourselves we evolved to use? Is it because, as Quinn argues, these systems came out of millennia of culturally-derived misery? I’m guessing as much. Monogamy doesn’t make much sense without property or in highly egalitarian environments, which we didn’t acquire, and didn’t leave behind, respectively, until the dawn of agriculture. Evolution can’t much done in 14,000 years – even less when you’re actively trying to halt it – so it’s possible poor health and the dawn of authoritarianism warped our vision of the human experience. Of course “life is suffering,” if that’s the only way you and your recent ancestors have known it.

Although: “If I see the Buddha on the road, I will kill the Buddha.” Siddhartha both walked away from the Buddha and gave up his asceticism to spend 40 years doing Kamala six ways. Maybe all us hopelessly randy charity cases’re on the path of enlightenment after all.

How many miserable adoption narratives can you jam in one episode?

I recently spent a weekend visiting my grandma, my son, and his adoptive family. Wonderful. In living this open adoption, we’ve also all adopted one another, becoming a multi-tendriled, mega-family. Then I went and watched another episode in Season 5 of the X-Men: Animated cannon. Mistake.

Holy shit, how did I never realize this show’s take on adoption amounts to “You want to meet your birth mother? She ditched you!”? This show was a shame machine.

When you train your eye on it, the adoption subtext is actually really clear: the team is everyone’s (adoptive, only) family; no one knows, or knows but was explicitly abandoned by, their birth parents. Some don’t even know the circumstances of their adoption. Then this episode, “Bloodlines” takes it almost farcically into the awful. Nightcrawler learns his mother (Mystique, also a mutant) was so shamed by his his birth (blue-skinned baby, glowing white eyes) she nearly threw him into a waterfall as an infant.

I call wack. I mean, I’m sure this does happen, but it means that parent is a head-case, and probably under unbelievable social pressure. It says way more about context than adoption itself.

This also reduces adoption to a wanted/unwanted dichotomy, which is a horrible simplification. And, like, six kinds of stupid. Almost every parent I know, when I first bring it up, says some variation of, “I couldn’t imagine doing that.” Putting my boy up was by far the hardest thing I have ever done, and I was deeply on the “no kids for a good while yet, thanks” end of the curve. However I might have been feeling at the start of the process – very confused, very afraid – by the middle, I knew what was ahead was simple, and terribly hard, but meant my son would have the best life I could give him.

The open adoption movement is predicated in part on the belief that never knowing your child is as hard as never knowing your birth-parent(s). Our adoption facilitator – ardently pro-open adoption – insisted we take lots of photos when our boy was born, including some of ourselves holding him, because he’ll need to understand what a colossal decision it was to let another set of adults parent him. As James’s adoptive mom said to me during my visit, you don’t get out of an adoption un-matured. It’s just not a decision you can make easily.

In the end, Mystique stands between her grown son and assailant fire, in a strange self-vilifying self-sacrifice. (Nightcrawler can fucking teleport, and was never in any danger.) She falls off a dam, and resurfaces discretely out of sight of a contemplative Wolverine and Jubilee. Her son’s around still, but she can’t face him. She can’t even face the X-Men who brought them together.

Finally, something in this whole mess I believe.

Ok, so that’s what I’m clearly against. From this nascent perch in the community, here’s what I’d like to see in the next adoption narrative targeteding me and my family:

Flashbacks to a birth-mother and birth-father unable or unwilling to raise their child, and tearfully giving her/him to a loving set of parents. The child(ren) growing up with both sets of parents in their lives. Love and familial friendship between both sets of parents. Another child, whose adoptive parents have difficult problems with the birth-parents, like immense love despite continuing drug use, or a missing birth-parent. And yes, a few stories of birth-parents told they had no choice: the records would be sealed. Period.

I think these are the very tip of a much more rich, much more difficult story. One that many people live, and one that many of our friends have lived. One that some of our kids are living now. If that’s too hard for you to write, step aside, step aside.

Obama batted it out of the park when he responded to the same question with the equally classic, “Of course I inhaled. I inhaled frequently. Wasn’t that the point?” Clinton created the conditions for that knockout swing so elegantly, the two may as well have planned it.

It seems to me Clinton’s adamant lying, and subsequent admission, was a defining moment in American sexual discourse. Of course he was damned either way, but his denial seems to have opened us, at a cultural level, to a new way of approaching ourselves in politics.

Ah, the bold, recognizable face of admitting.

Everyone knew Clinton cheated, and the years haven’t been kind to his profoundly sad attempts at deflection. Most everyone also knows most everyone cheats, in one way or another, and we still hold ourselves (and one another) to inane, unrealizable standards of behavior. I doubt Clinton could have steered from the rocks by unabashedly saying he’d accepted more than a few blowjobs from his assistant. But what’s fascinating is where it leaves us now: could we be reaching a pivot in American consciousness that vanilla, standard-issue cheating can’t be politicized like it used to? Or do Republicans just arrive on the Hill with Get Out of Scandal Free cards?

Of course there are a lot of factors here – maybe best summed up by the rise of both post-60s radical sex-positivism and the radical religious right – and there’re plenty of recent suggestions that, no, we’re not there yet. Anthony Weiner makes a particularly sad example. Poor, apparently politically utopian or naive guy.

Ah, the bold, recognizable face of admitting.

We’d never seen the consequences of being caught, at that level, for adultery. Maybe, in another universe, when Clinton was upfront with the truth, he was pounded for infidelity – not ‘lying under oath.’ But something tells me if that Bill Clinton had the balls to tell the heavily conservative American public he had a second cell phone, he might have then told us it was really none of our fucking business, too. It was between him, his wife, and his lover. At the furthest edges, it affected their family, not us. The inquisition to impeach, as Dan Savage points out in that Anthony Weiner piece above, probably did greater damage to their family than anything. Clearly, the sex wasn’t putting the country at risk in itself – but the national distraction sure did.

What galls me about this is that, of course, Clinton was vilified, and Gingrich now a little for the trouble, for something so many people have done. Demanding our leaders live to an inhuman sexual standard is asking for this kind of fissure. And I think Clinton accidentally started the foundation for a movement to push against it, at even the presidential level.

Is that happening? Well, no, not quite. But for the first time in American cultural memory, it could.

So what an awesome surprise last Sunday to see a handful of John Cage pieces in the mix. If you know anything about Cage, it’s probably that he’s the lovable asshole who gave us 4’33″. If you’re not familiar, the piece was first performed like this: pianist David Tudor sits with hands over the keys for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, in three movements, marked by closing and opening the keyboard lid. It always generates the same responses: fresh ears silencing themselves and one another, waiting for the music; experienced ears listening to everything. I’d never heard of “Living Room Music” before, but man, was it a weird treat. Four percussion parts, starting with a man center-stage, playing Lead Brass Lamp, and I think his wife next to him, strumming a mid-century heating vent. The percussion was all tightly scripted; the instruments just had to come from somewhere in a living room. Awesome.

I don’t know how I got my taste for Indeterminate music. Maybe, my first year of college, I thought the sounds of things breaking served those things right. And Indeterminacy seemed like the endgame of that: it can’t break if it was never even assembled. And if chaos takes form naturally, it must be a magical form. That worked well for me, like I said, for about a year. But then I started letting myself enjoy some of the musics I really did enjoy, and I got attached to constructed things. To good’ol reliable singing voices, and their guitars. Music taught me a certain kind of intimacy.

Hierarchy isn

Recently my life’s been a real fuckin’ circus show of the unexpected. As I licked wounds from a relationship that taught me just how gyroscopically “out of control” can spin, I fell in love, and learned yet another intimacy. There were also those three deaths in 2010 I’m only beginning now to tangle with. And I’m living with a friend (and five cats, one of which insists on yowling through the night) while money thins.

I have a son. He’s, like, stupid-handsome.

I’ve been learning to look over my shoulder for a moment, to breathe. To dance. Put another way, forces have been pushing me at the cliff’s edge lately, and suddenly they’re tossing wings out after me, too.

I’ve said before that I believe one of the critical forces at the center of art is intentionality. I intention fits nicely with indeterminacy: you can willfully release control. It’s no coincidence one of the Cage pieces performed last week requires the performer consult the I Ching to determine sequences and instrumentation. Cage was really turned on by Taoist thinking, and it’s a really Taoist paradox at the center of that piece. How can Cage claim authorship if the performer has to roll the dice, literally, to determine the piece? I say intent. Cage gave the parameters, and, with room in there for the universe to compose, it’s his larger composition. A meta-composition, in the parlance.

This is what I’m after. When you reach the last section of my book, the parameters are mine, but you determine how it all fits together. We’re collaborators, you and I.

And I wonder a little if my urge to unthread Wellesley’s history isn’t, maybe just a little, secretly still about breaking it. History’s such a delicate thing, you know? It’s so new to us. And still dogged by the same problems that follow its sibling, the ever-looked-down-upon Oral History. That’s what you get, I guess, with humans helming both. But there’s something extra vicious to me about a falsified record, because we trust written history with so much heart. As the story goes, Thoth gave us writing to ease the strain on our memory. So we wouldn’t have to work so hard to keep track of everything. Herodotus gave us history to conquer the memories of our enemies, or go down trying.

There are parts of me that want to force our dependence on writing into the sunlight. They feel noble, those parts. Maybe that’s how you gotta feel about a project you’re determined to stick with no matter what elephant-sized, baby-shaped crazy shit the gods throw in your path.

Amazingly, our answer may be at the end of Season 4 of the most unlikely hideout for such wisdom: there is peace in purpose.

Let this be enough.

I’ve been indulging the hell out of my mostly-quiet inner 9-year-old with a 2-week marathon of that classic 90s Saturday morning toon. This is only sort of like my Star Trek: TNG Obsession of 2010; I watched TNG religiously, with my family, every Saturday night. For seven years. But X-Men was mine and mine alone. My sister didn’t care; my folks didn’t get it. I had to be careful not to blow my weekend TV quota before Saturday at 11:00. Sometimes I hid so my parents wouldn’t know I’d indulged away that precious half-hour.

Lemme lay it out for you: A TV show, about a band of misfits, with super-human powers, with all kinds of interpersonal problems, fighting to make the world safe for their kind. That’s like the most righteous shit conceivable to an 11-year-old. Not only could they do whatever the hell they wanted – because they were fucking mutants – but because they were adults. (Except for Jubilee, but she had a good five years on me, anyway, and I had a thing and a half for Rogue, anyway anyway.) I longed for Wolverine’s fearless bravado (and claws), Gambit’s ability to convince anything to explode. I wanted so fiercely to be able to fly, even by telekinesis. I dreamed of the bravery that seemed to come with responsibility. I dreamed of the glamor – even if it was the glamor of being a self-healing, adamantium-skeletoned pseudo-wolf rejected year after year by the woman he loved. I’d have settled for being a villain in that world, if it meant I could turn into any shape at will. Or fucking teleport.

At least, that’s how it played in my 11-year-old heart.

Does everyone look pained at all times in this world?

Unfortunately, in the middle of my 29th year, it doesn’t really look so… three-dimensional. Every plot either revolves or resolves around violence, and the deus ex machina in this series is mighty. The jokes are Mia Wallace/Fox Force Five terrible. As Gambit says at one point to the Professor (I think), “Seems we spend more time trying to make the world safe for ourselves than mutants.” Wolverine’s love for Jean Grey, and her romance with Cyclops, are so unremarkable: there’s no room in that 19-minute package for tenderness. Gambit and Rogue, who I remembered as star-crossed lovers, don’t even let on they like each other for the first two seasons; as they do, it’s all, “Oh, I could give a crap about Cajun. Why, what happened? Is he hurt?!” Even the animation, I guess characteristic of the early 90s, looks a little flat.

And then there’s the racism. Oh my god, the stereotypes. And how is it that a series which posits Difference Is Power – a pretty transparent mask for the civil rights movements of the latter 20th century – has only one black character? The few times an Indian shows up, he’s got a goddamn feather in his headband? In the Savage Land, where everyone’s half-dressed and so-tuned-in to the natural world, our protagonist’s tribe are fooled into worshipping a mutant trapped ages ago in the rock. Every time an Asian character enters, or the gang’s in Japan, the music switches to traditional drums and flutes? I know, it was only the 90s, and we had so much deprogramming left. I’ve got my theories – maybe Stan Lee and crew were really crusading for nerds’ rights, and everyone else was a convenient overlap. It is true that Muir Island, Scotland gets the same treatment (bagpipes), which makes me think the production team were just after lowest-common denominators.

And before you get your Dude, It Was A Kid’s Show boxers twisted up, it’s because it was a kid’s show this shit matters. What did that teach us 11-year-olds? Oh, they must be Japanese because of that music. Oh, that must be an Indian, judging by the feather popping out of the back of his head. It’s clear the protagonists were, at their most profound, two-dimensional characters. That means the odd support from some (Chickasaw? Sioux? Comanche? Who?) Indian was at best a one-dimensional man or woman. All the diversity on that show seemed to be funneled into mutant powers. The most profoundly anyone could imagine was about how the creators could be anything other than what they were. Sounds familiar.

Still, there are little things that charm me. Wolverine might want to solve every imaginable problem with his claws, but he’s a funny motherfucker. When Bishop, mercenary from 2055, keeps popping up in the War Room, Wolverine’s response is, “Watch yourself, time-jockey.” When one of his old lovers shows up, in a sewer under the city:

Prof. X: (concerned) Who is that?
Wolverine: An old friend. (affectionately) She wants me dead.

Or this gem, on saving the empress of the Shi’ar Galactic Empire:

Jubilee: Anyone know what she looks like?
Wolverine: She’s from another galaxy. You see a woman you don’t recognize, rescue her.

Gambit and Rogue have some good ones, too. And Beast, while he’s mostly just incongruously stating the obvious in fancy language, or quoting Tennyson while under attack by hotel-sized robots, has a few moments of genuine clarity. Wolverine’s insistence he must face his demons alone – which he does, head on. It’s those surprising moments of profundity that make it so hard just to dismiss the series. Ok, that, that and that for all its shortcomings, this show waited for me every Saturday morning in some of the first years of my dreaming imagination. I feel I owe it something, even if the deeper I get into it, I realize that’s less and less.

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.

I read an article a while ago about how this age of lawsuits in Apple’s history represents a lack of innovation. I’ve been saying for years now Apple would have considerably less to fear if they spent all those resources thinking up new features; instead, they spent three years resting on their haunches, adding a compass here, an auto-focus (otherwise unimproved) camera there, while competitors caught up. Essentially, they were asleep until the iPhone 4, and by that time, their competitors caught up: faster processors, different form factors, better cameras, and most importantly, cheaper phones. There still good reasons the iPhone trumps others – its resale value is impressive – but the fact remains Apple fed us a bunch of marketing-bullshit about how every other phone software developer is just scrambling to reach the territory they staked in 2007.

That’s simply not true: Android-based phones have been much more at-pace with consumer-desired features, like general visual customization and assigning your own SMS tones to particular contacts. For many of us, we jailbreak/broke our phones to get access to a lot of cool stuff Android users have enjoyed out-of-the-box. Sure, Google’s operating system requires some advanced knowledge to put those changes into effect, but jailbreaking and downloading non-approved software is a far more complex process than tinkering with your contact settings – and there are millions of jailbreakers out there.

But that only skirts the issue. According to Apple, it’s not enough that competitors “can’t keep up;” they’ve gotta wear ankle-cuffs. Says an Apple spokeswoman, “Competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.” We’ll sue.

Problem is, if humans didn’t “steal” and indepenently develop one another’s technology, we wouldn’t have knives, bicycles, automobiles, stereo equipment or… cell phones. Hell, we “stole” fire. Apple’s conflating intellectual property with the innate human compulsion to improve our lives as technologists. That’s a ridiculous, embarrassing, and dangerous game.

They’re using the more sophisticated patent courts of the 2010s to protect themselves where the courts of the 1980s paved the road for the Microsoft/cheap drone revolution. Amid the waves of hardware manufacturers pumping out phones that run on the competition’s software, they want to protect their market advantage, as they famously failed to 23 years ago. But I have far less sympathy for the “ripped-off innovator” when they substitute litigiousness for innovation. (Not that I have much sympathy for a corporation whose cash assets totaled more than the US Treasury’s at one point this year. Or who manufactures all their goods in obvious sweatshop conditions.)

They’re beginning to lose the battle because they played the hare to Google’s tortoise. Now Google, fanned by a proliferation of hardware manufacturers, is catching up, and faster than a turtle should ever be able to move.

I’ve landed in New Mexico. Tonight my team launches An Underground Guide to Alburquerque #6. This weekend I unpack some, try not to unspool. Monday starts a shitstorm of work I’ve been putting off, including building a new business model and clearing the queue of paid work. Believe me, I’m thrilled to have that work, I’m just eager to get onto the next phase. This year has demolished and rebuilt me.

I’m eager to see what else I’m capable of.

As my friend Erin would say: Right. That was a thing that happened.

By Day 3 I thought I was past the hardest of it. I left Massachusetts. I left Rhode Island, my mom, my sister (in for the holiday) and Jen, whom the internets don’t much know I’m in love with. Drove to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, then Baltimore and crashed on my wise, adventuring friend Barb’s floor. Virginia Beach, and my anarchist organizer brain-on-wheels friend Maxwell Despard. Asheville, NC, and my age-old carpenter friend Tom Gibson. Columbia, and my brother artist THE Dubber. Atlanta, and Karen Garrabrant, who knows how to smile and hug better than near anyone, and sent me off with a bag of dubiously healthy road snacks. Nick Fox and his very friendly ladyfriend Corin, and their intoxicating third, New Orleans. Now Austin, Phil West’s couch, a detour through Mike Henry’s lovingly successful ND bar. While my beloved Corollita gets its oil changed (and the power steering basin replaced…), there’s time to clean this thing up and lob it out the door.

I’m tending a lot of raw wounds. Each clamors in my head to be the big grieving focus. I’m becoming smarter about grieving: it’s selfish. The best way to fail at it is to indulge everyone who wants your sadness. Last week I was prone to falling out of conversations. This week I’ve figured out I can’t be trusted for cogency after stepping out of the car. I fantasize about seven hours with a bottle of whiskey and a campy 80s teen comedy marathon.

The Hot Club of New Orleans does their thing. Their thing is very, very sexy.

The kindnesses my friends have shown me on this trip have been astonishing. Dinner. Road grub. Friends sleeping on the couch so I could take their beds. One took me on a city tour after work – city tours. These words here might suggest I can articulate my gratitude, but you can’t truly thank someone until you truly know what she did. And I’m a mess. I got only a hint of how my friends are repairing and preserving me. Thank you each and all. I couldn’t have asked for this.

The friendships I formed and deepened, James’s safety in Berkeley, and the deepening relationships I’m finding with my family these seven months balance the horror of all-scale failure in my heart. I’m processing a hell of a lot. My phone’s spell-check keeps suggesting my ex/baby mama’s last name when I start typing “grief.” Thanks, iPhone. Good to know where your allegiances stand.

I’ve been crying a lot about leaving, which I think alone represents some huge personal growth. I’ve also been crying about my son, my ex, my current relationship that’s now ending, and the enormity of what’s not in my hands as I return. In Burque I have love, second family, chile, pseudo-jobs and my beloved writing posts waiting, as I leave behind my first family, my lover, and one of my closest friends. More than any trip I’ve ever started on, today truly feels like the first day of the rest of my life.

I’ll miss you something stupid, homeplace

I’d be lying if I said I thought Massachusetts was ready for me to go. I was just beginning to have the first real, semi-adult conversation of my life with Wellesley just before I left for ABQ in September. That’s far from over. But this was both the wrong and perfect time to be here, of course, and I have to go back, so I can make a living, and come back again. I see many cycles between this place and that, that place and this. Bring on the fusion-powered jets, Science.

I’ll post lotsa pictures from the road again, so keep turned. I’ll be back in Albuquerque by the 9th. There’s some huge party I’ve gotta tend to that night.

Still, it fucking pains me to leave. A needle that blooms to heartbreak.

I love you, Massachusetts. Asshole.