Notes from My Little Black Book

Below are a series of little rants that I revisited recently and really enjoyed seeing them all now in sequence. I figured I'd share them here. I've left them unedited and uncensored, so forgive the poor sentence structure, I think I was drunk for quite a few of these.


Oct. 29, 2006
Seattle, WA

I spent today doing nothing, absolutely nothing. And though I needed it badly it doesn't at all feel good. I've been reading a lot of my old writings. Rants, poems, short stories, and they all say I'm lonely. They all say I have been since Hawaii. How is this? Are most people this way? I can see all these patterns in me, ways of being and circling thoughts. I keep striving for someone and its likely its that thats keeping me. Maybe that's what made the walk great. I had everythign but a friend with me, but I haven't had that so it seemed perfect. It goes all the way back too. Friends were always my family and losing that one ever present best friend was the loss of my family and now I can't function. I'm deteriorating quicker and quicker these days and I keep thinking writing or projects or something need to get me going. But I don't and won't and it makes the most sense to me now that its that missing friend, not a lover, just a friend. Whatever this is with Rachel too is depressing some. This flirtation/just friends thing. I don't know that I can do it, it sort of smacks hard of the Allyson scenario but more aceptable. She's scared of this friendship I think.


Nov. 24, 2006
Seattle, WA

Liberalized in as much bullshit as I can be there is a requisite that allows a certain allotment before it becomes stritly extremist PC. Why am I angry with my surroundings? They embody everything I believe I stand for. And I still think I do. Catch phrases, groups, gangs, organizations of the such stand to tell the world what about what they don't already know. And what we know is what they say, and what we could care about is why they repeat and chant into our heads like new age idolotrists chanting new religion. Who believes in religion? New Age or otherwise or slogans all the same.


Jan. 13, 2007
Wilbraham, MA

Nana is dead and the ties to childhood finally whither completely away. It does not feel like a stage into manhood or adultness, it more feels like the ideas I've known and looked to for family are dead as well and its time to form a new concept of the idea. With these ties all gone I must reinvent what family is to me so that I can find its beginnings and create it a new. Seeing how different other families interact among their own reminds me of this.

I look over my genealogy research and had always wondered how it came to be that someone was the head of the family, the father or mother of it all centuries ago. I knew each generation had its own head, ours was Nana, but she was not the "mother of it all". I'm seeing now, with all the divorces, the lack of family cohesion, that many of my generation will have lost the large families in closeness and potentially could become mothers and fathers of new segments of a family. I'm realizing if I have a family that will be my role in history. Family history at least. Maybe not, since Wendie and I are so close, so then I think it might fall to my mom. That seems wrong though.

The idea that I'm not apart of my family after today is oddly familiar and strange. Like my comfortability with exploring new places. The ground itself is unknown, but the feeling I have going into it is my most comfortable. I am alone and I've learned to love that and with that as my seed I can relearn how to have a family again.


Jan. 13, 2007
Wilbraham, MA

The Grocery Store story is my favorite of Nans because it tells most of the principles I inheritted from her. Her legacy was Loving and Family and in those are Trust, Faith, and Community. MJ told me of a new aspect to the story I didn't know so I'll retell it to myself here for a new meaning in it.

MJ said the day before this story she had been aught with a Tootsie Roll in her pocket by Nan. Nana gave her hell for it wondering where she had gotten the money for it. Papa had been out of work and money was extremely tight, so for little Mary Jane to have a nickel for a Tootsie Roll was suspicious.

It came out that she'd taken it from Nana's pockets without asking. MJ had justified it to herself because Billie used to clean out the car and was told any money he found in there was his, so MJ leaned out the coat pockets. Now MJ described Nan going off on her, out of character, as a sign of how tight money most have been. I'm sure that's true, but I also see it as how imparitive it was, especially during that time of hardship, for family to trust one another. So begins the story of the groery store.

They were living on Edgewood Ave. in Longmeadow and the house was becoming bare. There was no money to feed the family but there was no food to feed them either so Nana resolved against her values of Trust for her Family and set off to the grocery store with an empty checkbook. She wrestled with the idea of writing a knowingly bad check to feed her children and in the end couldn't bring herself to do it. She returned home wondering how else she could get food on her table when she opened her door and saw, like water turned to wine, it was already there.

Her neighbor had emptied out the food in her kitchen that would spoil while they went away on a trip and had delivered grocery bag upon grocery bag of food for Nana and Papa to enjoy knowing that times were tough then.

As I've found going through my life keeping unwavering to all your values as Nana did that day, and trhough out her life, everything comes to you as its needed. I've realized looking bak over my own life that I think on that very story at least a few times every year and I have always found it as my compass when my values were put to a test and I believe I've succeeded in those tests having had Nana as my guide.


Jan. 14, 2007
Springfield, MA

I'm in a place I've been in over a thousand times before and nothing's the same. Nothing has changed except the passing of years in my absence. Its hard to behold. The memories of my stay here have been washed away with Earth's rotations. My ghost does stay, but on a shelf, like a well read story loved quickly, followed quickly by a different but equally loved well read story. I am the past here and I can't see where I'm a future. My present is a muddled confusion of wishing the past and wanting a future. And this point I see as an historical point of power. Transition is when the sense of self is weakest and the power to change completely is at its height. A comfortable mind in a transitional period is the most powerful of things. I lack resolve and this is where it seems previous generations, save for the most recent, held their strength.


Jan. 23, 2007
New York City, NY

Today was an interesting bit of insight. I went to see mom's palm reader who, back in '93, predicted her meeting and marrying Musty and the quality of marriage it would be to an extent. Not bad for a '97 meeting and '99 wedding. Wendie saw him a week and a half ago saying its likely she wouldn't have kids and would find a man to love but not until late in life.

Anyway, so I went to see him today with all this transition going on in my life and we talked for two hours then went out to lunch for a bit. The things that shocked me but resonated were when he said I was trying to be someone I'm not with all my adventures. That that was a part of me but not a main part and that stability and security and routine were what was natural to me.

It rang deep in me, but what threw me was his insistane that I'd be happy as an accountant or insurance guy or something. That I hate that idea now beause I'm rebelling against that notion of myself. I don't see that, or more importantly, feel it. He did say it was high time I got off my ass and made up my mind career wise, and I agree my happiest career would not involve travel but more likely community. Something to keep present in my up and coming job hunt.

The other thing was he said in my mid to late thirites, 37 he guessed, I'll get involved with someone I know now, and have peripherally for a long time, and hate. And she and her friends hate me beause of our subconscious recognition of our similarities. He said likely we'd have kids and family, and though its rocky will last a long time.

I have no idea who that could be. Anyway, Margo's meeting me soon so I'll write more tomorrow.


March 21, 2007
Seattle, WA

So according to astro people the last 19 years are over. A new age and rise in change will be oming. Wend and I thought for us it was in reference to the divorce and family issues. I'm now thinking maybe I'll go back to the more reclusive self I was at 11 and earlier. The tranquil years of inwardness, its where I feel myself drifting.

Laurence backed that feeling up and encouraged it. I suppose I have been hiding that since then, the contentment with reclusion that is. Another Walk is a must, but in a few years. I'd love ot leave right now, but it'd be horribly unhealthy spiritually.

I wonder what all my cells ould remember if provoked. Its been the latest question among Wendie and I, and Rachel and I. What would I do best because I really think I could impress people.


Aug. 23, 2007
Somewhere on a train from Seattle, WA to Washington D.C.

And another trip is on. Looking over these last blurbs its interesting to read the shifts and turns that happened these past 6 months at SPUD. I'm still trying to recognize that its over and yet here I am on the train.

This is a definite first of being a night over inot a train trip away to drastic new change and still feel so very much like its a temporary vacation and will be back to work in a week. Wend feels the same way, like I'd be back in abit. Its very weird, unsettling, but also a little nice, oddly. I'm wondering if I've just driven myself into such a work mode at SPUD that, with all the website stuff, I still feel like I'm working?

Sitting here on the train, staring out the window feels strange, like something to get used to again. This slow recognition I'm thinking might be nice, because I hope it will be a steady unwinding from this.


Aug. 25, 2007
Somewhere on a train from Seattle, WA to Washington D.C.

I feel convinced of my lack of conviction and I'm not sure if that's good or not. Good in the sense of identifying something or not because it doesn't matter if that needs to be clearly seen or not.

I've been arguing in my head with Musty about what this step in my life is doing for me, this travel. Is it simply a palette cleanser from Stu, coffee shops, SPUD, and Seattle, or am I going somewhere with this and just haven't identified where? I strongly believe its the latter, but I strongly also agree that ould be wishful thinking to make this trip healthy. There's a lot to this trip because its a period ending not just a sentence or a paragraph, but a long chapter with no notion of what the next will bring. Like a cliff hanger with no subject matter for basis, just the knowledge that quite a bit still needs to happen to have as story.

Vague options hang hungrily in the air and I'm relutant to grab at any of them, but longing and desiring eah possibility there. Life seems to have ripened without maturing yet. This trip seems a lot like a way to keep stagnane off, while I work on decision making. Maybe that's why its good to do. Trying to figure out how or what to decide while growing stale sounds like a brilliant way to fuck everything up and lose myself.

Its interesting that that's the battle everyone is fighting as all these things ome now. Me, Wendie, Jane are all trying our damnedest to hold on to our sense of self. And I think we all feel time is our challenger.


Aug. 25, 2007
Somewhere on a train from Seattle, WA to Washington D.C.

Here's a good question. Where to live after this? I'm obviously not going to answer this now, but even that general idea of some plae new again or return yet again to some place known. Neither sound very good to me.

New but familiar feels better, but logically sounds like the worst of all. Leaving the country as a permanent or even just indefinite time I don't like either. I like being an American, minus all the connotations that brings with it. Its the only thing left I can solidly say I am in that way. I'm not a New Englander or a New Yorker as much anymore, and I@m definitely not from Denver or Seattle. I don't even have a place I can say my family is home to. I never really realized how extensively homeless I am.

I've said this before on the Walk but after this trip I really should dig in where ever I land next and arve out a new home, like a pioneer.

It feels somewhat like finding a wife for a family. I suppose it exactly like that. Someplace I'll love until I die, and love entirely until then. I am convinced I'll find both those.


Feb. 23, 2008
Denver, CO

Getting back into Denver, the reality is starting to settle. I'm mostly excited to get all my stuff back in one spot. I'm worried about falling back into my old pattern and dragging on my usual way of skimming. I'm feeling the need to settle and get life really going again.

Jane really got me excited about that and a real idea of a family. I agree with her though that maybe I want that too much right now. I know the key for me is to feel like I have a home. I need to fall in love iwth a plae as muchc as I need to fall in love with someone. Denver may be exactly what Jane was saying she was to me; the right enough person for me when I want it.

I lack resolve and I need to find it now. A business plan is porbably the most important thing because it gives me something to keep me from feeling aimless and it keeps me in Denver wiht a purpose and an attachment. Friends will strengthen around me as I prove to be a fixture. Then I'll find a family one I feel like I have a home.

My "big ideas" need to now be oriented around the idea of being in Denver. I like the idea of find a lake house for family summers. Classes are something that will help establish me as well and the tax course in September is perfect timing for that.

I'm excited to see Jane then as well, but I'm wary of letting the idea of her and I tempt me away because we won't be ready for each other then either.


Feb. 23, 2008
Denver, CO

Can I avoid dating? I know I'll hit a point where I'll want to date again and that it will only be out of loneliness and I'll be back in a pattern of getting excited about a girl and fous only on what's right about her until I'm used to her and I then focus on what's incompatible between us and break it off, then find another.

Jane sniffed all this out quickly and it possibly is what happened with her. She knew I was too exited for myself in the beginning and we both knew it wasn't right at the end. I still think that it could really work something in the futrue but a few years up. Until then I can hold a little comfort in knowing someone good for me is in fact out there and known.


Undated
Denver, CO

To avoid dating and drinking in the sense of it being hand in hand I need an alternative sense of excitement and sociability that I can do on a whim. Kareoke is good so long as I can always find someone or become known enough to drop into places.


Undated
Denver, CO

This is hard to remember that I am on the road to somewhere. Right now I feel like I'm back in the exact same place I've always been in. But I am heading somewhere and I need to figure out how to make that feel more concrete. I need to establish steps to take that don't need money or location specifics. Possibly set a size for the location as a base for planning.


March 18, 2008
Denver, CO

Since that last email exchange with Jane needing to be on her own I've felt a resurge of loneliness. I suppose I really was hanging on to the idea of us getting bak together, and still am, but I did know we weren't going to be anytime soon. Cutting off communication, though, really drives that point home that everything I want in life won't be attained anytime soon.

I think its more than just her and I, but an emphasis of how behind I've gotten on myself. I've been thinking a lot about my old film days wondering if I was right to drop out of it. I still know I was, but its hard to remember that at 23 I had a good career and was on my way and now at 31 I'm still starting over.

I should be working on a business plan these days, but I think above all I need to feel more sociable to feel like I live here now, and not that my boxes are all here. I think that's improtant so that I don't frustrate myself and decide somewhere else is better again and have to start all over. Then I can make a plan without feeling like I'm holing away, because right now I feel a frenzy of wanting to move elsewhere to Seattle of all places, to New York again.


March 26, 2008
Denver, CO

I am here again, and that location is irrelevant. Shades, Netherworld, Barricudas, Bonzai, the bars of the world. I'm here, enjoying it on my own and its strictly the hope of nostaligic resurgence. I like my regularity, but loath the routine of it. Why do I fight my natural ways?

Is it as Laurence says, that I resist myself? I seek repetition naturally and loath it when I get it. What cures that other than the walk? Would a walking lifestyle cure it? Why do I feel as if that's completely out of the question? As if its been assessed, considered, and dismissed.

How many parts of me am I regularly dismissing or ignoring? How much of me will have surfaced by 70? Will I have kids then or will I be handing these notes to Izzy and Aenea? Is that upsetting? Somewhat.

Loreli told me I don't understand infancy. I know that to be true all too well. I get the theory, but that theory, I believe, is what rules out a walking lifestyle. How much will Loreli appreciate having a daughter, of all options, when Izzy is 24 and out on her own and Loreli is 47 and still young enough to run around? Will she regret not being free in her 20's and 30's, or revel in her late 40's having all by then while I hopefully am in pre-teen hell.

This place is a pirate ship.

I should have kids by now. I don't and see none coming soon. Laurence holds me steadfast, but if I hit 40 with nothing I hold little to scorn but myself. I am baby crazy. Fucking 30's.

I say that but just as easily i could say fuckin' 5 year olds. It's pretty clear I just feel like I lack family.

Why is that? I do love Mom, Dad, and Wend. That's a political statement right there, isn't it, to myself. I was left out, I knew it at 5, I wanted family sine then. That seems wrong but not far off.


April 5, 2008
Denver, CO

What kind of jerk am I up to now? I'm looking to make friends yet I'm turning down obvious invites out for a strange variety of trite reasons. I can tell I'm resisting making new friends, as well as closing the gap in becoming closer with old friends. How do I catch myself quicker to stop this?

I am a hermit, and I am because I'm pining after long dead days in New York and mass in the deep recesses of my mind. I'm looking for new days like those without letting them manifest through the little paths they do. I'm controlling it.

How do I not? How do I make sure I go out when its my head saying no. Is this that seratonin thing? My reasoning tonight was money and rising early for something I can easily skip. Drinking also makes a case to me when I feel withdrawn. Nikki, tonight, was clearly looking to go eat and I could only think of getting home despite my ravenous hunger.

I need to route this isolation in me otherwise I never will be able to date healthily. Am I taking on too much to try to do this to myself on my own? Is that a symptom of itself? I'll have to draw in some outside thought on this.


Undated
Denver, CO

So celibacy? This has been an interesting experiment in counter intuition under the name of mental health reparations. I have recently convneced myself well enough that I should kiss Elizabeth. This process and resolution was so long and tricky that it seems to me that it has become more of a defence rather than a recovery, though I still realize the recovery is well needed.

I think removing myself from the equation may have been where I went wrong. The solution of things in general seems often to be finding and managing the balane of the extreme and the lack. Hence why most see life as a bitch. I do like a good teetering and tottering, however, which to me is the spice of life.

So, in lieu of this, how do I broach the challenge of putting more meaning back into sex rather than the hedonism I revel in so much today?


Aug. 26, 2008
Denver, CO

Following my feelings and intuition I believe is what I really need to do to move forward. I think the conflict and frustration I'm feeling is that I've stopped doing that and everyone has been encouraging me to stop. I need to start taking it very seriously and stop half assedly doing it as a way to conveniontly excuse my dreaming.

Faith is what I need to regrasp and I believe that's what Todd re-entering my life was to inspire but I don't think I'm meant to travel long with him. I think what i need to do is travel alone, but more intently, and in the same way Todd's doing now, I need to follow the signs provided for me but fearlessly, patiently, and without hesitation. I should leave after jane goes adn publish everything I do and experience.

The focus needs to be not on what I'm to do when I'm finished, but of who I am. I think people are right in seeing me as a waste away. I have incredible potential and I'm wasting it on aloofness and fear of responsibility. I need to own that and open up to truly accepting concequences.


Oct. 15, 2008
Denver, CO

There is nothing here. Not here in this room, but here in the muscle memory of my hand and fingertips. I sit straing at this lined blank page waiting for the expressive automoton to turn back on and vent reflexively its surroundings. Instead I feel a deadened connection between my brain and the fingertips that manage the pen work.

Thoughts ramble continuously through the forest of synapses and grey matter marsh encompassing them, but when the book opens and the pen is in hand a blockage pops up, somewhere around the neck and shoulders I think. As I walk notions bombard me and the world articulates itself. My mouth will open to expel it and there it becomes stuck again in my tonsils.

This could explain my cough and shallow breathing. My gnawed fingertips are possibly chips away at walls to break out from the inside. Everyone around me seems glazed over in a similar focus on trying to emerge from themselves. Open books with eyes looking anywhere but the pages, conversations with half written expressions between faces betraying the lack of interest or comprehension of what's being said. Laptops seem the only ones successful at suking in all sense of attention, taught by its television cousin as primer.


Feb. 1, 2009
Denver, CO

I am planning to leave Denver once more to go on this crazy intuitive journey with Todd. I want to go but I don't want to leave for once. I don't even know if I want to go, I just want to live out of a pack again.

I am a little concerned about traveling with Todd, or even just wiht anyone particuarly with the purpose for this trip being to reconnect with myself and intuition. That may be difficult if two intuitions clash and one wants to control the other. Something to watch out for. Otherwise it will be nice to have him to rebound thoughts and notions off each other.

What am I really looking for? It seems I'm after reconneting to life which I've been distant from with these day-to-day coffee shop jobs. In film it didn't seem that way as much. I need to regain that freedom of moving my own way again. I've been doing that but only with tension all around me like Vince, Nick, Henri, etc. all cracking down over me.

Todd wants the same, I think, but isn't as clear on the reality, I think. I might be totally off about that. Either way, I travel for a while, or not, but I want to be able to go to the plaes I need to to answer questions, and I don't wwant to stop until those are satisfied enough to stay put again.


Feb. 25, 2009
Denver, CO

These past two months have been quite amazing. I find myself, once again, on the cusp of picking up everything and traveling again. The difference this time, however, is that I'm not feeling lost at all about it. I'm not having the hesitations now about should I or shouldn't I, or what will happen next or to me in the future; am I just wandering? Any of that.

I think the convction comes in facing up tot he fact that I am just wandering now, whether I stay here or move on. I've been aimless since things began falling apart in new York back in '99. Ten years later I'm finally identifying that, not that I haven't stabbed at it, or had inclinations in between, but the bouts of stability attempts and intersest lock downs confused me into thinking I'd solved the mystery feeling. Then I'd quickly realize I hadn't at all.

Groping is what its been. Wendie was one who helped me along on this realization when she said last fall that making a commitment to either staying put or wandering is still a commitment and seeing a commitment through is what helps focus you. That was the great achievment of The Walk. It was the only thing I saw completely through. And even that had blank spots missing with my incessant pushing forward to conquor my dwindling savings time clock.

I am feeling like I'm not abandoning a place this time, even though I don't know how long I'll be gone. It feels more like going on sebatial, an intense researh trip from wich I'll returne when I'm done. That's what makes me feel not uprooted, like still have a home.

Shift in Perspective

The weekend in Massachusetts visiting my Dad was a rather introspective one. With my sister there to relate the strange layers of complexities recently developing in the land of our upbringing, with family of every variety in the mix, it brought to the surface a lot of the thoughts that have been swirling around under the surface with me. Things that didn't even relate to being there at all, but just what's going on with me.

Being comfortable with calling Massachusetts home when people ask that ever elusive question to me of "where am I from?" has only just resurfaced this past year. In fact, only since the visit earlier in the year with Todd back in May. It wasn't a shame or anything like that which prevented me from feeling comfortable calling Western Mass my home town, it just seemed inaccurate. Longmeadow life, and my life from 18 and earlier, has been dead to me for a long, long time. Probably ever since I returned from Hawaii in April of '95 to a grey town, literally smelling of sewage, and scattered friends, half of whom I'd felt had betrayed me, the other half had run off as I had. My stay there was only for a summer, and that was only because I felt I had nowhere else to go. It was the last time I was to feel trapped by lack of options.

It was during this time I met Stacey. In fact, I met her the first week I was back and was a horrible boyfriend to her the two months we dated. Gus was my companion as usual for the summer, and when I left for New York that fall I had no intention of ever returning, and only hoped Gus would eventually make his way to NYC to keep up our daily friendship, but that never happened.

Years passed and I went through many lives in that time. While in high school going through my suicidal teen phase at 14, as I think most go through, I came to the conclusion I didn't like the idea of suicide at all. It seemed very final, perhaps I was afraid of the commitment. Instead I decided that if life got to that point where an end seemed the only solution I would simply pick up and leave rather than off myself. I did this going to Hawaii and after New York I did it again moving suddenly and inexplicably to Denver. This is what I mean by saying that I'd lived many lives between 18 and now.

Being home in Mass, now, particularly with my sister, all the business going on with my Dad's health and living conditions, and the reacquaintance I've been growing with my aunt and cousins both in Mass and on a whole it was a very tangible reconnection to a past life deeply buried in my subconscious. Wendie has been going through very much of a similar process as well, and having her to reflect with while both being in the home we'd long rejected and forgotten about was refreshing.

We took a trip up to Amherst and Northampton for Saturday. Driving up through the old New England winding stony roads it no longer looked like plowing through a ghost town, and grunting through a return to appease Dad. As we drove up the landscape, and hung out in the area for the day, it oddly felt like going to a place you'd never been to before, but felt comfortable in as if you'd lived there before.

My Mom and sister talk about when they go to the west country in England and how they feel very "at home" there. The three of us are all firm believers in reincarnation and they have strong feelings that they must have lived very impressionable lives there for it to resonate so strongly. It was this feeling I was getting from a land that I had in fact lived in no more than 15 years ago. It was interesting to me that it was a mystical feeling of home rather than a concrete recognition of home. That sort of feeling that boils out of your flesh as if its tied to the land rather than simply knowing this place or that place. Tourist spots to revisit from your youth and say "huh, I remember that".

I'm not sure if I'm making sense, but anyway, that was the jist of the mindset I fell into upon returning home, and Wendie seemed very much to be feeling the same.

There were also still tensions among the family between Dad and Barb and the reactions being given to the great mustering by the family for his 63rd. Dad was sweet, he was more emphatic than I'd seen him about coming up to get me with Wendie in Albany, as well as spending time with us on Sunday, when the party for him was. Because of that there was a undertoned bitterness brought to that Halloween evening when there was to be a dinner at my cousin Tim's house with the family and Dad and Barb opted not to show. None of us could understand it, but in my mind I've resolved just to let these things go and enjoy the family that did come.

I got to see my Uncle Bruce and his wife Cheryl who I rarely get to see. I was also able to meet my cousin's new daughter, Mina, and roam around the neighborhood for his son, Deniz's, first trick or treating venture. It was still Big Family feel, but I was wishing Dad could have been there, and more so that he could have made the effort to get there. He is relatively immobile, though, in regards to driving distances, and completely reliant on being taken there. For this, the gap in his presence there fell to Barb in my mind, whether fairly or not.

Sunday, however, was a nice display of family which was bitter sweet for me. My Dad's favorite cousin, my Uncle Don and Aunt Mary Ellen, came down from New Hampshire since "the kids" had flown in declaring this odd numbered birthday a big event. My Dad's sister, MJ, her husband Frank, my cousin Tim, his wife Burcu, and their kids also came to my cousin Amy and Corrin's house where Wendie and I were staying to really make it a grand celebration. We'd all chipped in to get my Dad a laptop since he's recently taken to writing up stories of his life.

The gathering was bitter sweet because it stung of nostalgia to me of a long dead tradition of big family gathering together and this seemed like an isolated tribute to those days 20 to 25 years ago. It was a wonderful day, and knowing it would end not to be repeated anytime soon was the lingering thought in the back of my mind. I think Wendie was of the same mindset.

Over that weekend, she and I entertained ideas together of either one of us, or both, returning to live there some time in the near future. This has been the main shift in perspective lately. For the first time in a long time I'm contemplating returning to the place I had long sworn off as dead, and regarded as a life failure if I ever returned. For the first decade of being gone, my visits back had rarely been longer than 24 hours if that's any indicator of how little I regarded the place.

Things now seem to be in the air that have rerouted my compass from south to north, much to my very great surprise. I don't see myself settling in there, but I do see myself possibly setting up there as I have in Denver. While in Boston in the beginning of that week I reconnected with my old best friend, Josh, whom I hadn't seen in about 20 years. He and I were inseparable from about preschool up until I was about 12 or 13, and this reconnection was intensely casual.

I couldn't get over how much of every detail of our childhood together that, not only he could remember vividly, but that I couldn't recall at all. I've always regarded myself as having a very good memory extending back well into my youth, but as he quizzed me I realized how little I knew.

Along with him, my friends Bill and Laura have moved up to Boston from DC, and although they aren't all keen on it now, its interesting to me to see they are part of this new draw home. Stacey also is a major reconnection. When I left Boston she picked me up for a ridiculous day and a half roadtrip from Boston to my Mom's house in New Jersey. I have completely fallen in love with her spirit for adventure and outlook on life.

While on this wandering, twisty road adventure we talked over all of our thoughts and events concerning our lives these days which obviously included these new thoughts on returning home on my end. She was very kind to offer her place up as a place of refuge in exchange for me building her a shed. I'm not sure she knows my complete unfamiliarity with carpentry, but I think I could pull it off.

The road trip, however, was immensely fun including an hour long visit to Ikea for an impromptu photoshoot, a visit to the Gillette Castle in Hadlyme, CT, and several stops along the coast. We were also very strict to her brand of roadtripping, which means staying clear of any and all interstates, hence taking a day and a half for an otherwise five our drive.

During this week I spent a lot of time revisiting my old writings, as I often do when I'm under shift in perspective. Normally these revisits are somewhat depressing as I can literally read the depressing cycle of my life; go off and travel, get bored of that, return home and try to root in, get bored of that, repeat. What was inspiring about this looking back was that I didn't see that this time.

Instead, this time I saw progress. Granted it was unrecognized progress forward at the time, dating back to '06, but seeing it now with three years hindsight it became quite visible. I've decided I think I'd like to share those writings on here, so in the next few days I'll update them.

As for right now, once I got into New York with Stacey we had a grand visit with my Mom, then a really great night meeting Stacey's friend Craig. I flew out the next day to Iceland, had a day there, and now have been in London for the past few days whiling away my time on the computer with evening jaunts out to the pub with my friend Jane, and her friends. Life is good, and the best part of it being good is that I'm now looking at December which two weeks ago I had seen as "all laid out to me" and am now completely baffled as to what to expect.

We shall see.