ps

I'm not really that good at saying good bye; I'm better at saying see you later. So stay tuned. There is the potential for a few more postscripts.

rise above the wave ahead

Procrastination makes everything better. I'm sure that's how wine was discovered. (speaking of which, sip)

I'm sitting in a room in a French country house in the suburbs of Paris. Everything that I was building is either built or on hold. Including this blog. This blog was meant to be the commentary on my alone time in the woods of Michigan, embodying the struggle. And I was that struggle, and I am precisely that which I struggled against. But now I'm not struggling. Now I feel more like I'm living.

And so while I've been thinking about it, hinting at it, muttering it under my breath at coffee shops, now it's time to do it: end it. I have come to appreciate moments of cadence, juncture, as necessary to a healthy perception of time. And time is all we really have, no matter how many times it slips through out fingers.

So while this will be my last real post on this blog (I will finish culling for another best of post) I have already started another one: cork in the sea. Not only is it a line from one of my songs, it's the way I like to live my life, the way I'll have to be as I crisscross Europe for the next few months, sleeping on couches, guest rooms, and fancy hotels, hitchhiking and ridesharing to travel; it's going to be fun.

But not a struggle. It's more a matter of flow. As in, go with it.

Which is both exciting and difficult, so get ready for some good stories.

where i lay my head

In wrapping up this stage of my life, I thought it would be nice to pay homage to some of the perks and disadvantages of crashing with friends.

Right now, I'm staying in Nicole's while she is out of town. Having keys is a perk. Living on the 14th floor provides good views but adds a couple minutes in the elevator to the commute.

She definitely has one of the best showers.

She has internet, but it's flaky. But since it's a huge apartment building, there are 20 other wifis around; only two don't require passwords.

Unlike the other high-rises around, this one has a pool in which I went swimming today. It's not big enough to get a good workout in, but I went back and forth a couple dozen times, tread some water, and did some vertical kicking.

And then there's the unexpected. Nicole had told me how she went to IML last weekend; I had actually tried to go too but couldn't find it. (I had 2 hours to kill between bike tours.) IML is international man of leather and is primarily a gay leatherfest. Knowing all this, I was a little less surprised to see this calendar appear on the wall.

Do you like that egg shape I added? The gayest I felt was digitally altering the photo to hide the pen15. When I first noticed it, I was startled but in the hours and days that followed, I hardly even notice it. I think that's a decorative whip of some sort hanging next to it.

Speaking of gay, I read today that most homophobia grows out of homosexual desires that are perceived as repulsive and repressed: "there is a growing body of research that supports the notion that homophobia in some men could be a reaction to their own homosexual impulses." Looks like homophobia is uncool. Especially if you believe what Glee says. They (apparently) make homophobia look like something expressed by stupid bully jocks, casting it in a negative light. Some douchey conservative guy (who, at this point is still repressing the shit out of his homosexual urges, unlike some people...) thinks it's unbalanced, promoting a pro-gay anti-homophobe message. Um, duh? It's a show about musicals or something.

Although it is interesting that it's on Fox.

time for a sabbatical

I am always on the lookout for when things I see or read reference things going on in my life or the lives around me.

The other day, for instance, I went off to O'Hare to see Quentin before he heads to Europe for 2 months. Sound familiar? We're going to meet up along the way, so we have some things to talk about.

Related to something else, a conversation I had today, I found this article. It is ostensibly about "nervous breakdowns" but in the meat of the article brings up other terms, such as "burnout syndrome." It seems to me that you can be burnt out without having a breakdown. So maybe they're not perfect synonyms but part of our on-going quest to be more precise with language.

The scientists in Europe who came up with "burnout syndrome" talked about 3 varieties: frenetic, underchallenged, and worn out. I like those categories and think they may prove helpful to people to pinpoint the source of their angst.

I think I was dabbling in all three without really focusing on any one, avoiding completely burning out.

I spent the first few months defining the problems and then the next few months healing. Now I'm ready for an adventure. And then the cycle begins again.

take your machine to the airport

In a few days I'll be in Europe. My friend (and former student at Iowa) Quentin will be there during almost the same period as me. He left Wednesday from O'Hare and had a few hours before his flight, so I went out to hang.

I was in Andersonville, which is not on the Blue line, the most efficient way of getting to the airport. I had my bike, so I thought I would bike to Wicker Park, pick up the Blue line and then hang out in the WP with Laura afterwards. But then, the time changed and I decided to ride straight west, picking up the Blue line wherever I crossed it.

But then I crossed it and kept riding, making it all the way there.

To be honest, I did some research on biking to O'Hare finding this page. I took Foster straight west and then followed most of the suggestions, taking Higgins to Mannheim. Here's the route I took.

Higgins was fine at first--low traffic, 35 mph limit--but started to cause me worry when I saw some narrow bridges and other highway features. But, just like in the picture, there was little traffic. When the speed limit got to be 45, I was even more cautious but almost never felt unsafe. There was one SUV driven by some apathetic, life-hating SOB that left less room than I would like--when cars are passing faster, they should leave more room--but most were quite considerate.

Higgins to Mannheim isn't maybe the most direct route--a crow could do better--but is probably route that uses the most straight lines. I turned left on Mannheim, to the confusion of drivers and truckers, but since I turned with the left arrow, the bulk of the traffic stood still waiting at the light. I only stayed on Mannheim for a block, turning right at the first light and getting on Bessie Coleman drive going south.

The Higgins part was the worst; Bessie Coleman and the subsequent access road had much slower traffic, more lanes, and a really nice shoulder. I think it's funny that O'Hare is one of those few places in Chicago that you can't really get to without using some machine--car or train. Human power transportation--walking, biking--is somehow incongruous to airports--near the top of the industrial food chain. [A similar incongruity to when I rode my bike into and through the steel mill--marauding.] When I got to the terminals, there were a couple guys who had, apparently, passed me and who said "hey it's the bike guy." Whatever, sure. Das bin ich!

Then I met Quentin and had a coffee at one of the few places to buy anything to eat or drink not past security and talked about music, relationships, divorce, bikes, and meeting in Prague.

To leave, I was thinking of just taking the train to Wicker Park to meet Laura. But it was 5:40. There's a ban on bikes from 4-6pm on CTA trains (and 7-9am), which, ostensibly has something to do with rush hour. I was hoping to cheat the system (by 20 minutes), especially considering I was headed into the city--a reverse commute.

But no. The letter-of-the-law CTA peon checked his watch and barred me from entering. Well shit. I tried asking him how else I could leave O'Hare on bike but his only response was to wait 20 minutes. Not my M.O.

So I biked. Took the access road and then took Mannheim south (see photo at top) but jut for a few blocks (wide shoulders are key) and got on Irving Park going east. Irving is not the best bike road either but the best I could see on myPhone. I played with the lights a little to avoid riding in heavy traffic (~45mph) but mostly rode in the gutter like the disaffected minority I am. It's much more stressful, taking much more energy, riding along such roads. But I made it, only cursing under my breath at a few impatient drivers. Then, beautifully, like the sun piercing through the clouds after an afternoon thunderstorm, a guy in a metallic red pickup truck gave me a thumbs up. It totally worked, changing my whole perception of drivers from nameless, faceless tailpipes and license plates to people operating machinery. He turned somewhere behind me and then passed me. Then I passed him. And so on. It was super cute. Then, on Milwaukee, I passed him definitively and passed a long line of cars never to look back. Milwaukee progressively became better for biking, and I could feel the tension float away as the neighborhoods got more familiar.

So yes. It's possible to ride your bike to and from O'Hare, but it's not for the faint of heart (literally and figuratively; it's over 10 miles and you should go ~20mph so as to mimic the speed of traffic).

[It only took me 50 minutes, which is about the same as driving (with traffic). Bikes FTW!]

music and the brain

For some time, I've followed the New York Times "Most Emailed Articles" feed on Reader. I find it a good way to ensure that my reading material is both well-written, topical, and popular (to NYT readers).

Here's a quotation from an interesting one recently:

Both species are vocal learners, with the ability to imitate sounds. We share that rare skill with parrots. In that one respect, our brains are more like those of parrots than chimpanzees. Since vocal learning creates links between the hearing and movement centers of the brain, I hypothesized that this is what you need to be able to move to beat of music.

aside: Darick

I was at Darick's last night working on a post when he came home in a state of tense distraction. Somewhere between leaving the house in the morning, driving to work, working, and coming home, he had misplaced his wallet. We looked all over the apartment finding nothing, and he checked the car a couple of times.

He came up with two possible places it might have been left or dropped--both of which were dumpsters. In the morning, there were some new dress shirts still in the packages sitting on top of the dumpster in the alley. Maybe he had his wallet still in his hand and dropped it to pick up the dress shirts.

[Let's pause and appreciate the strangeness of new dress shirts being thrown out.]

Then, at work, he threw out a bag of garbage. Did it get mixed up?

We had dinner in, some really good homemade chili from Amish country in Ohio, and just as we finished watching what may be the best-worst movie I've ever seen, he got an email from the Old Town School. Apparently one of their teachers had found it and turned it in.

But the Old Town School is 40 blocks south. So how? Darick must have kept his Old Town membership card in his wallet, and whoever found it turned it in there. It's like what people used to do before the internet. They also could have just googled him and found darickmaassen.com.

narrative

Maybe what I am doing is telling my own personal narrative. Not just telling, wrangling it. For the overarching narrative arc has never been my forte. I can manage 5-10 minutes in music, 3 hours on a bike, but putting together days to make weeks, weeks to make months, months to make years, is a higher level.

A couple weeks ago, I stepped back from the day-to-day and made a highlight reel list of bullet points of my life, thinking it important to have some perspective. Right now, I am the only one charged with both the living and the telling of my life; some are not so fortunate:

"How does a man who invented himself as a force by writing one of the most eloquent memoirs in political history lose control of his own narrative?"

That is Maureen Dowd talking about Obama. I'm having a difficult enough time drawing an arc in my life; I can't imagine also having to contend with external biographers.

Sartre was famous for saying: "Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose." I've spent the last 6 months, among other things, destroying and then rebuilding my own meaning, documenting it through the blog. Obama seemed to have a good sense of where he was from and where he was going--when he wrote Dreams. Maureen Dowd may be right, but I'm not too worried, hoping that his loss of core meaning is temporary.

hOpe.

Sartre and Beauvoir lived out their philosophy, but it was mostly Beauvoir who then turned her own biography back into philosophy by writing thinly disguised narratives of her life. (Which I hope to read in Paris, maybe finding the books used chez les bouquinistes.)

Beauvoir is remembered, of course, for The Second Sex, more of a dissection than a narrative, that posits women as second-class citizens. A lot has changed in the last 50 years--in America we almost just had a President who was a chick--but apparently there's a new translation that restores cuts made in the 1953 translation. According to the review, it is becoming more and more irrelevant.

Just like Obama, feminists have to tend to their narrative, pruning it like a tree.

As for me, I think I'm out of the "tending" phase and am moving towards "growing".

temperature

Monday, Memorial Day, I forgot to celebrate. The day started out a perfect temperature, as I rode down the LFP at 8am without any food or coffee in my system. It wasn't too crowded, but there were enough obstacles to keep it interesting--mostly runners who mostly know how to comport themselves on a multi-use path.

By the time I finished the 8 mile trek, in about half-an-hour, I felt a little warm and had gotten a bit sweaty. It felt like a nice day.

I was slated to do 2 Obama tours, riding down there in the morning with some people at 9, then meeting some more people down in Hyde Park at 10, finishing at about 12, sending the first people back to downtown, and meeting a new group at 1. Busy. There was only one woman who rode down at 9; though she seemed incredibly high maintenance at first, she turned out to be a good conversation partner. Good thing, since I basically hung out with her the whole first part of the day.

She also turned out to be a good rider and pushed the riding tempo faster than I would have on my own. At least, faster than I wanted to go that day, for I had already ridden a tour Friday, 2 tours Saturday, and one on Sunday with all the requisite commuting from Andersonville; I was really hoping for some relaxed riding.

We got down there in 29 minutes, about 15 minutes faster than with a "normal" group. On my road bike, I've made it in 22, but we were riding hybrids, quite a disadvantage.

The two people who were supposed to meet us in Hyde Park didn't show up, so we were still on our own. We ended up finishing the tour in an hour-and-a-quarter, 45 minutes faster than usual. And just as we pulled into the cafe at the Hyde Park Arts Center, it started to rain. I knew about the rain, I knew it was coming, but all signs pointed to it blasting through quickly. We watched it pour, and she shared some of her nosh, me waiting for my next tour, her waiting for the rain to clear before heading back.

The rain didn't end up stopping before the next tour showed up, snapping me out of my rainy-day reverie and into the reality of work. The four of them were of two groups: a mom from Pittsburgh visiting her daughter living in Chicago; a couple from something like Ft. Wayne, IN.

Fortunately, they were great sports, since the rain didn't let up till just after the tour ended. I was doing my best to be a great sport but was horribly unprepared, thinking that any rain would be brief and avoidable, and only had shorts and a t-shirt. The temperature dropped with the rain, and, in stark contrast to the first tour, I couldn't get the tour to go fast enough to build up any body heat; by the end of the tour I was shivering and cursing under my breath as we rode.

And then we couldn't see Obama's house. He was in town over the holiday weekend, so the security was much more strict. On our way out through Kenwood, in the blocks behind his house, we found nothing but blocked streets. I kept us going--mostly to stay warm--until we got to 47th street which was all blocked off. We stood there on the corner of 47th and Ellis, paralyzed in all directions by flashing lights: city cops, uchicago cops, state troopers, secret service, traffic management.

And then, in lieu of any glimpse of the house, we saw his motorcade. That seemed to suffice. Warmed the cockles of my heart but real warmth had to wait.

The tour ended, I got another coffee--my 3rd of the day--but this one mostly to warm up. It maybe worked, maybe not but ended up not making me feel great. At least I could fly up the lakefront and build up some heat. I took this photo on the way back as the rain finally cleared. I got back to the shop and stood in front of the hand driers for a while, warming up and drying off.

I borrowed a hoodie to ride back and was plenty warm, sweating just slightly. Had dinner at Corbett's--fish'n'chips, yum--and rode back. The weather had returned to perfect after a long, strange journey.

[I was a little disconcerted when I struggle to remember the people on the second tour--names, faces, origins--since the tour seemed so memorable. But then they came together like remembering a dream. I guess it's only normal; I figure I've seen a hundred people or more over the weekend.]

best of: Dec '09 - Jan '10

I killed a bottle of Absinthe and started sifting through my past. Here's the first installment.

• I make no small plans, but no good are big plans left unfinished. - 12/15/09
• I'm digging new grooves in the soft clay and yet they seem so familiar. Soon they'll become ruts but of my own doing. - 12/16/09
  
• Draguer is the French verb for flirt; bloguer is the French verb for blog. And here in Michigan, with a limited array of options [for the former], I can focus on the latter. - 12/17/09
  
• His characters are not studied tissue by tissue as under a scientist's microscope, rather they are built up living cell by living cell out of the author's experience and imagination. - 12/18/09
  
• There are still some piles destined for storage or things I just don't know what to do with yet. (and there still are) - Every week's end is another's beginning 12/20/09
  
• I realized that the remote, undisclosed location is not a magic bullet (go, go, go!) but is just part of the overall solution. I still have to show up and be present. - 12/21/09
  
• Time to get down with some cartography and chart a course. - 12/22/09
  
• I think therefore reality exists. - 12/23/09
  
• Having forgotten the "reason" for the season, I am still looking for a way to root myself, some tradition or belief that gives the holiday depth and purpose.
• The echoes of the past seem louder and heavier this year than before. Maybe that's because I'm finally listening. So maybe soon I'll understand. - 12/27/09
  
• sift for gold in a sea of crap. - 12/28/09
  
• Sometimes you have to close your eyes while you type so you can see your thoughts more clearly. Sometimes you have to close your eyes while you listen to hear the music better. - 12/30/09
  
• I am not my preferences. - 12/30/09
• NYE: After 4 hours of sleep, I was wide awake and the world was spinning with possibility. And just spinning.
• "Well do you live somewhere? 'Cause I don't." - 1/2/10
• I managed to bring in the new year with the perfect amount of planning and surprise, leading from one brunch to another, from coffee pot to pot luck. - 1/4/10
  
• Tomorrow begins tonight, but tonight began this morning. - 1/5/10
• Daft Punk!
• Sometimes you make your own great force in opposition to yourself. - 1/6/10
  
• Even if someone else had the right answer, I wouldn't believe it until I found it myself. - 1/6/10
  
• It's funny how I spend all day tweaking details and then the stuff I show you I made in like 10 minutes. - 1/6/10
  
• I am learning a lot about music the old fashioned way: aurally and through imitation. - 1/8/10
  
• Mad World, Va Tosca
• In my music, I strive to create organic change. - 1/12/10
  
• Off to the side of the road, I found some footsteps from days before; turns out, they were mine. And I got the silly idea to walk in them - walking in my own footsteps. I realized that it's a pretty good metaphor for what I'm doing up here. - 1/13/10
  
• I've also been trying to incorporate a new thought habit into my life: when I see people, I want to see them as the complex mystery of history and interrelationships and not as a 2-dimensional automaton. - 1/13/10
• Live each moment as if, when you die, they take a random, 15-minute sample of your waking life and use that to preserve your legacy to the universe. - 1/15/10
  
• Ostensibly, no big deal. Ostensibly, it's just a thing, an object, practically immaterial. But in this case, it had become even larger as a symbol than as an object. - 1/17/10
  
• I'm watching Anikan fall to the dark side; he's such a whiny crybaby. It reminds me of someone I'm getting to know all too well. (Me) - 1/18/10
  
• no matter how much I pretend, I am still holding out hope for something meaningful with someone. - 1/19/10
  
• That bottle didn't really contain wine, for me, but a year's worth of waiting, hoping, and disappointment. - 1/19/10
• I'm an intensity junky. - 1/19/10
• The things we keep we keep for our emotional attachment to them. In our Materialist culture, it's our' version of karma. - 1/19/10
• I got emotionally drunk and then had an emotional hangover. - 1/19/10
  
• [The] One thing that I love about Webern is that his entire catalog fits (as mp3s) on one CD. - 1/21/10
• My new process is to imagine the sounds - where they should be, what instruments, the overall gesture - and then draw them. - 1/21/10
  
• What goes through someone's mind when they put the entire beatles catalog on shuffle? Really? Aren't we sick of them yet? - 1/23/10
  
• In moments of inactivity, our brains have better access to autobiographical information. Maybe that information is painful, so we gorge on new information to keep the old pain from coming back. - 1/26/10
  
• This was tut-tutted by the U of C crowd... - 1/26/10
  
• The process by which you create reveals itself in the final product, so to really invent something new, you have to invent a new process. - 1/27/10
  
• And then Live crashed some more and made me sad. - 1/28/10
  
• I'm rediscovering the image that I had of what I am trying to do: some sort of mix-up, mash-up, covers, originals, electronics, live performers. - 2/3/10