Please eject the tape, and switch to side B

I open my eyes.

This is it, the last time.

I roll over and turn the alarm off, lay in bed for a few moments and collect myself, letting the day wash over me sense by sense. The person in the bed beside me stirs, murmurs something encouraging, reminding me of what I need to do. Feels like I've always had someone there to do that.

I get up, unplug my phone, and walk to the bathroom. I'm not really there yet, my body is just doing it on autopilot, shuffling me through the seamless steps of a path well remembered. In the bathroom I turn the lights on, see myself in the mirror. I'm so different than before, different than yesterday, different than nine years ago when I started this journey. My face has swollen, eyes sunk deeper into my skull, and the sides of my hair have kept pace with my eyes from above, pushing my brow back into what some would call an educated look.

I don't feel very smart.

Nine years. What some made into a molehill I turned into Everest. In the time it took me to do what they've done they've changed careers, started families, made large purchases, and probably destroyed one or all three. They're probably just starting over right now with their lives, too.

I think about the face in that mirror, everything it's seen and done, everything it's dreamed of doing. Is it happy with all that? Does it feel like it's made a difference?

I smile. Bad idea, keep moving.

I go to my laptop, open it, and then go to the sink. Have to give it time to remember who it is, too. Pour myself a glass of water to get my metabolism going, wake up. I've been doing that for three years, ever since I read about it in Outside Magazine. Feed the cats, they're pining at me with tiny mews and rubs against my legs. I've learned to love them like my own children, obsessively and in everyone else's face. Everyone loves to hear about my cats. Everyone.

I sit down at the computer to the sound of tiny food pieces being pushed around glass bowls. I remember this, too.

This is the part where I sit and think about all the things I'm supposed to be doing, then go to gmail. Gmail is the gateway drug of social networking. It's okay to open Gmail, right? Because it's my email, that's where I do all my important correspondences. Have to keep up with everything, stay organized, you know.

I scan the list of my contacts who are online. Anyone I want to talk to? Nah, not yet, but I bet there's someone to annoy on facebook. And off we go.

Two hours later I come to the realization that I haven't started working on what I was supposed to be working on, yet, nor have I eaten breakfast, put on clothes, and the class I was supposed to be writing a paper for is about to start.

Then I do the one thing I'm good at, natively and with flourish, and create some incredible piece of writing in the matter of moments. It's the one sail that always stayed up throughout this journey, the one that kept me moving forward when nothing else would. When god was giving out gifts, he gave Hermes' pen to the wrong soul. Better it had gone to someone who was going to use it with some effort, than someone who'd use it to supply his own aversions to work or duty.

But that's the way it is, and the way it's been done.

I print it off, my fool's masterpiece, and take my time getting ready. I'm already late, there's no point in not showing up late looking good. Procrastination is something best done with style, because style is too cool for clocks.

After I eat, dress, wash my face and find my favorite track on my ipod, I walk outside and get on my bike. I look around at the house that I've spent the last career of my attempt over college mountain, with it's widely ignored yard and tiny square footage. I look around at where I am, and wonder what the fuck I'm going to do next.

I put my foot on the pedal, scream at the sky for want that the neighbors will hear me, that anyone will hear me and know that somewhere today, someone finally found release from their long-path to adult enlightenment, and I go to my last day of school.

-Sean

Storms again

It's been storming now almost every other week in DFW this summer. The effect has left a constant fug of water in the air, humid to the bones... my bones, specifically. My knee is screaming every day now, without me doing much of anything on it. Awesome

I've decided a blog entry isn't worth writing anymore unless I start it out complaining about my physical ills. This is because that is the most interesting thing one person can talk to another person about, and it is guaranteed success in making friends and entertaining audiences.

I came up with an easy costume/gimmick today for burning man: I'm going to be a flunky for the DJ Census Bureau. It came to me when I was trying to figure out just how many people at Burning Man are DJ's. At population numbers well over 30,000, with a large majority of burners being fans of dance music, I'd guess that at least 5% of the total population claims to be performing DJ's of some type. A the most modest of projections, that would mean 1500 DJ's were all at the same event.

But these are just theories. What science and legal loopholes stand on is facts! So someone's gotta get out there and go camp to camp, figuring out just how many DJ's each camp will claim for the 2009 DJ census. In addition to my shirt-and-tie buracratic gag, I'm going to try to collect mix CD's from as many of the named and registered DJ's as possible. This way I could potentially upload all of those mixes (with permissions given, of course) and have a decent representation of the performing talent at BM 2009.

Thank the almighty god of cats I'm bringing a bike.

I figure, if nothing else, it'll force me to actually go to every single camp and say "hi."

-Sean

Naps

An unfortunate side-effect of quitting caffeine is that I need to nap a lot now, and for some reason unknown, I always drool when I nap. No idea why, except that that's what you see people doing in movies when they have an unplanned sleep happen. I don't like waking up to a wet cheek any more than cinema heroes, so why's it gotta happen to me? Makes me wanna brew up a batch of tea and take some Aderal.

There's something I miss sometimes, the hard edge of a good accelerant... and who doesn't? I think everyone likes cruising the front wave of their morning coffee, red bull, whatever shit you gotta do to make life a little less mundane. In that time there's so much potential, so many tangents of thought spinning out from your brain and into the wake of moments left behind you. It's the kind of vision that hurts for a reason, because if we could think that way all the time, some of us might just DO something with our lives.

As it stands, I'm content in my little college town, reading my little sci-fi books, and thinking about a time when I won't live here anymore. It's not that I hate Denton, Texas, it's just that I love so many other places more. Like Austin, or San Francisco. Portland. New York. Seattle. Anywhere but here. In those places I might never get booked for a DJ gig again (and who would care if I didn't) but at least I could find a like minded individual on a night out or at a book store. Here it's a valley of apathetic hipsters who can't get excited about anything for fear they might rip their jeans from jumping for joy. They certainly don't dance.

Maybe that's my problem. I haven't had a good, hard dance in a while. Every time I've gone to in Dallas has had me dancing for the sake of not letting everyone else around me soak up the space like tiny black holes. I want some floor pumping, four-on-the-floor, ear raping jams, and right now with my foot the way it is, I don't think I'd trust myself to dance if I even wanted to.

And there's the rub. I'm getting old, god dammit. My heel keeps tearing, right knee hurts constantly, and I still haven't written that book everyone keeps telling me I should, and nothing is inspiring me to do it except spending a lot of time by myself. For some reason the less I can talk to other people the more I want to write about them. Or create them. Sex, too. Apparently there's an inverse-proportion rule with how much sex someone who can write well should get.

...and when you look at pictures of Douglas Adams, that kinda makes sense (gods rest him).

-Sean

Imported Italian Finery

I just imported my Italy blog onto here as well, because this thing needed some meat.

-Sean

I'm listening to Sarah McLachlan right now. I don't know what the fuck is wrong with me, I don't want to talk about it. It's just happening, and I'm strangely comfortable with being massaged by her nasally tone and pop-infused lounge-ness.

Today is a good day. I shed the shit of tired, angry Sean from the weekend and went to the gym, albeit on a somewhat unpredictable achilles tendon. I tore my achilles back in January doing Capoeira, and after three months of healing, I thought all was well. Then I was back at Capoeira last week, and I felt something make a weird sensation there. It doesn't hurt like it did before, but now I simply don't trust the fucking thing. It's a scary feeling not trusting a tendon that's strung so tight it could easily snap and wind up in my calf, where doctors would have to surgically restretch it back into place after slicing my whole fucking leg open. I sure as fuck don't want to be in a walking boot for burning man, which is only three weeks away.

My tentative plans have solidified, melted into a puddle of amorphic goo, hardened, calcified, shattered, and been reconstructed using uncooked spaghetti and glue. You'd be amazed at how much weight a bridge made from spaghetti and glue can hold, though. It looks like I'm camping with Fringe (address: 4:00 and B), my San Francisco friend Kelly's camp, that is this year bringing the Janky Barge. It looks like Jabba the Hut's airship, but with wheels. And DJ's.

Another new burning man thing for me, I'm bringing Havilah with me this year. After Flipside and PEX, I'm not worried anymore about the whole "bringing a significant other" thing with burn events. The open dynamic of our relationship makes us work seamlessly at burn events, and it's nice having someone to share stuff like that with who's okay with you sharing those things with other people as well. She'll probably be joining me on Thursday, so I'll have four days to figure out where all the good trouble is before she gets there to steal it all.

-Sean

Emo

Today was a tired day.

Did you know I've never had a shoe thrown at me in anger before this weekend? Apparently that's the newest form of youthful self-expression. Kids these days. One moment I'm leaning against my car and talking to my friend Jessica, and the next an SUV comes flying by with a fat douchebro standing out of the sun roof and screaming as he hurls an article of footwear at me.

Honestly, I wish it had hit me. For the size of dent it put in my car, it was probably going pretty fast and would have hurt, but bruises heal and car panels don't. Now I get to decide if its worth paying my deductible to take a fist-sized dent out or not. Yay.

It's okay. I live across the street from a popular frat house. With luck, the idiots will accidentally park on my street one night (you better believe I'm going to be checking now) and I'll get to show them how awesome having your window broken and a sack of pee spilled all over your interior can be.

After that happened, my mood for the weekend was shot. I had started out the night in Denton in the first place with some kind of expectation that I was going to get to see Havilah, who had a date in Dallas but had told me she wanted to come see me afterward. The planning was tentative, but since we don't get to see each other a lot I ended up sticking around and hoping we'd get a chance to spend the night together.

Things went better on her date than she planned, and after a few miscommunications, I went to bed. I felt kind of stupid for the whole thing, because it made me feel wanting or greedy, like some love-sick puppy who's simpering for attention. I don't like feeling that way.

I think it also made it hard for me to hear about how great of a time she had, or to get the spotty report from shey on what happened with her night persuing an ex-lover in Austin. At least I made a good thing of it and used the opportunity to finally catch up on a bunch of sleep I was missing. Unfortunately, now that means that I'm awake at 12 AM and not tired.

I spent a lot of the day in bed (when I wasn't asleep) meditating on things, how I've let myself get too relaxed being in a school semester, even though I'm only taking one class. Wanting to start moving in some direction toward my post-graduation plans, even though they're vague as it is.

I think this week needs to be a lot of gym time, writing, applying to schools, and thinking about getting jobs. I've had my head up my ass for too long, and it's not comforting anymore.

-Sean