music: Bob Dylan- Blood on the Tracks
What can you depend on absolutely? What in this world is so rock solid that you’d never give it a second thought and always count on it being there? Quite literally, I suppose that rock ranks pretty highly on this scale. Not the music (although that has always been there for me as well) but the geologic substance. The stuff underneath our feet. The stuff upon which our homes are built. The stuff that makes the dinosaurs look like wet-behind-the-ears newcomers to creation. For my entire life I have taken the earth beneath my feet completely for granted, assuming that it would be strong enough to support whatever weight i might pile on top of it. All that was thrown into question for the first time last friday, around 4:40 AM. I was shaken awake - again quite literally - by an earthquake.
I’d felt minor tremors since moving out here, but they were mostly weaker than the sensation you might get from standing next to the highway as tanker trucks fly past. I also remember thinking as a kid how ludicrous it was to build and enormous city right on a major fault line. (I’m still not completely over the apparent oversight, but now that I live in the Bay AreaI can understand why people would want to put a city here.) This one was worthy of some attention, a 4.2 on the infamous Richter scale, and centered somewhere in the Oakland hills. Nothing like Japan’s quake of last week, but enough to wake me up and completely freak me out. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than thirty seconds start to finish, and all my books are still right where I left them on the shelf, but it was enough to make me reconsider my relationship with the earth below.
We humans take a lot for granted. It’s a mental adaptation, I think: were we to consider and reconsider every single variable we might encounter during the course of a day we’d be paralyzed, unable to properly weigh the relative risks and rewards of certain actions and interactions to the point where we do nothing at all. through some incomprehensible calculation, the human brain has determined it a very safe bet to assume that the ground isn’t going anywhere. This allows us to walk upon it, dig holes into it, move piles of it from one place to another, build things upon it, get on with our lives. But assuming something to be a very safe bet isn’t any sort of guarantee that it is 100% dependable. And out here, near the San Andreas and Hayward faults, “very safe bet” looks something like a major rattler every 25 years or so. The last one, baseball fans will remember, was in 1989, which means we’re overdue. Suddenly our assumptions about this essential consideration shift. I’m beginning to pick this up. What do I know of it? I’ve been living in Wisconsin, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts for my entire life.
I was not overly concerned for my safety, but the earthquake freaked me out. Like being caught in a mountain lightning storm, coming face-to-face with a bear, taking a small boat over serious whitewater, feeling the sting of a -40 degree winter wind, or being sucked under by a Pacific wave, an earthquake reminds you that nature does not carry one speck of concern for my individual well-being, and that I need to be incredibly respectful of its power. The earth is a dynamic entity, slowly shifting and morphing. Continents move, given enough time. Sometimes the earth feels the need to high-five itself. Sometimes the earth belches out its insides. Sometimes the earth needs to readjust its crust a little too quickly for human comfort. But the earthquake also made me reconsider my operating premises. What do I take for granted? What do I assume that maybe I shouldn’t? What am I prepared to deal with? How will I act when taken completely off guard? And what, when it hits, will shake me wide awake?
music: Babaloo: En Vivo
I’ve been living on the East coast for nine years and the West coast for one, but Wisconsin is still my home. The winters are brutal, sure, but the summers are divine. Or can be, if you get lucky with the humidity and the blackflies. Regardless, people out on the periphery of the country just don’t get it. Maybe this will help them:
Photos of Wisconsin by Johnny Blood
Then again, maybe it’s better they don’t get it. Next time I head Up North I want some peace and quiet, not sedanloads full of tourists (or worse) Chicagoan day trippers. No, I’m not about to pack it up and move home, as California has its advantages, but I gotta represent. (Especially when the Brew Crew is still in first place!)
music: Top Shelf- “The Thunder Sessions” 6/21/2007
Something is keeping me awake deep into the night on this Independence Day and I’m not able to put my finger on exactly what it is. I’ve been in a reflective phase for the past couple weeks, more so than usual, and tonight i’ve thinking about how and where I’ve spent July 4th in recent years. Last year I was the sole occupant of a hostel in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, sleeping alone in a room meant for 12, with the Camry parked outside filled to the brim with all my worldly possessions. The year before that I flying through fireworks on an airplane headed for Sydney, Australia. Three years ago I was camped out at the High Sierra Music Festival. I could keep tracing back: celebrations on the Charles River in Boston, the shores of Lake Amy Belle, all the way back to an olive green convertible in Fox Point, WI dressed in my little league uniform and eating ice cream for breakfast. The larger point is that for whatever reason, right now I’m currently very aware of how things have changed around me over the course of the last 28 years. I can’t say for certain how I have changed (although I know I have); I have no perspective on myself. But from where I sit right now, using the not-so-arbitrary temporal marker of our nation’s birthday, I can see very clearly just how much the world around me has changed.
Where I sit right now is, of course, in front of a laptop screen. This is a reset, a homebase, something that has not changed a great deal over the years, and a quick scroll through this little weblog I’ve been pounding out for the past four years will stand as ample evidence. In terms of blogging I’ve been diligent. I’ve just done some digging myself, and find it remarkable that I can track most of the environmental changes I’ve undergone in the past four years right here. Reading posts from months past, like any proper historical document, take me back to a time long gone, a time where I was living in a very different place, struggling with very different things. In reading back some of the first entries here I’m reminded that I started this weblog in the summer of 2003 as a way to keep my writing sharp, to allow communication between the people in my life and the contents of my mind, and more practically, to chronicle my journey through graduate school and my career teaching. Now, four years later, I’m still practicing this reflective exercise in completely different environmental circumstances and this now familiar exercise, as a result, has changed.
These are days full of transition, days demanding some mental energy and processing. I recently took a trip back to Boston to watch my former students graduate, visit friends, and revisit a former phase of life (most of which can be read about here). The trip was indeed overwhelming, mostly in positive ways, because it brought transition into such dramatic focus for me. Like the haunting story “A Christmas Carol” (another horribly reflective day for me, incidently), I was reminded of my recent past, and my present by contrast. The future remains a bit more elusive.
These changes, these thoughts, haven’t been shared here as of late. I’ve been conscious of it. That the gnomes toiling endlessly in the underground bunkers of Anize HQ can’t seem to get blog comments working without spammers blasting us results in a monologue of sorts, which is less interesting to me. Moreover, Anizers across the board are much less prolific than we were in years past. But there has been a more personal shift. That I took the year off from classroom teaching (and that I moved clear across the country) might start to explain the dip in blogging over the past year. My time in California has been one of the most extroverted years of my life, a rediscovering of myself as a social creature, which might start to explain why I don’t feel the need to check in with myself and this computer screen on such a regular basis anymore. But more than that, I think I am beginning to reconsider the byline written directly above. This year has not been without its struggles, but since moving out to San Francisco I have not struggled nearly as much as I have in years past. Or maybe I have struggled, and haven’t experienced it as such a struggle. Regardless, despite the lack of perceived struggle, I can say that I have progressed in amazing ways. Frederick Douglass isn’t to be thrown out completely here, but I’m addressing the rest of the world in a fundamentally different way than I was in the summer of 2003.
Right now I find myself once again at a pivot point. It’s not nearly as dramatic a pivot point as July of 2006, or July of 2004, or July of 2003 (read all about it) but it’s a point worth documenting here at the very least. I’ve been out in California for about a year now, and it’s been a year without a winter. If I care to look up past the familiar soft white glow in front of me I’d realize that I live in a different room, in a different building, with different roommates, in a different city. This has been a year of meeting new wonderful people, hiking camp counselor style in a National Park, not making a lot of money, making music I’m starting to be more and more proud of, and reconnecting with old friends in anew context. I have technically had a job for the past year but I feel like I’ve been on vacation since moving out here. The time has flown, and blissfully so for the most part. But this July, instead of heading off on some foolish adventure as I have done for the past three years, I’ve elected to push the wanderlust aside and stick around with no real agenda. With such a gap in activity, and with a lot of my people cleared out (or clearing out) on adventures of their own, my month with not much to do is becoming a reframing and repositioning. Once August hits my life in San Francisco will shift again, possibly in dramatic ways: MIssa Toss will come out of early retirement. But even Missa Toss has his transitions to work through, and things will not look the same as they once did. That I’m determined to see through. So because of all this, and despite my original purposes for writing here, The ritual of sitting down in front of my computer and documenting my thoughts for public viewing will go through a couple changes as well. They already have.
I’m not signing off. The documentarian in me wouldn’t allow it, and I find this to be an incredibly valuable outlet when I need it. But like everything else around me, things here are changing. Maybe that’s why I’ve kept myself up far too late tonight: to remember that things are in transition, that I’ve grown quite different, possibly away, from the person who started this weblog four summers ago, and that I need to take a moment and recognize just that.