music: Ray LaMontagne- ‘Till The Sun Turns Black
At the age of 24, I made the decision to enroll in a teacher training program whose goal was to prepare intelligent, qualified, driven adults for a career in teaching in the inner cities of the United States. I thought at the time that this would be my task for the rest of the time I walked the earth as a competent adult, that I was to work in the service of those who needed it most, that I was to play a hand in achieving social equity, that I was to battle ignorance and injustice on the front lines. I dug into the task with pluck and resolve, and emerged battle-weary 12 months later with a small piece of paper saying I was now qualified and prepared to fight such a fight.
I realized quickly that my approach to teaching in public inner city high schools demanded a certain degree of martyrdom from me. In exchange for doing the work necessary to achieve progress on the front lines, I gave up significant parts of myself. David took a backseat to his teacher alter-ego Missa Toss, who ran the show for 10 months out of the year. Missa Toss achieved things during his two years in Boston and received many high compliments from pretty impressive people and places, but it all came with a heavy personal price. David was left with nothing. David found himself being given Friday nights after a full week of Missa Toss hammering and blasting, being hammered and blasted. All David could do for those two years was put his pillow over his head and hide in the darkness until the unconsciousness of sleep took the pain away.
Somehow this was tolerable to me. I justified my own suffering by the thought of my students; how because of the work I’ve done for them they will be given some sliver on an opportunity that I had growing up, that somehow my endless hours and incredible sacrifices would give them that little edge that would help boost them into a position of opportunity in their life. And those students would make it, some of them at least, and they would find ways to achieve certain degrees of power themselves and then throw themselves into changing the system that had beaten me and countless others into acquiescence, a system that was designed in many ways to keep them down, keep them pacified, keep them poor and disadvantaged. This hope is what sustained me through countless weekends lost to grading and planning and worrying, and hundreds of accumulated free hours spent resorting the insides of my own head in quiet and darkness. By all measures, Missa Toss made me miserable and I did nothing to rectify the situation for a very long time.
Halfway through my 27th year, over three years after I pledged myself to the service of urban America’s youth, I sent Missa Toss into early retirement. I turned my back on my job and life in Boston, packed my things, and drove clear across the country. I reflect now that I drove as far away as I could from my life as Missa Toss. I landed in San Francisco, took a job that felt more like a vacation than work, and immediately felt the difference in my own life. I was told by those close to me that I sounded and looked much healthier than I have in years. I indeed felt better than I had in years. David had his life back, and was enjoying the hell out of it. My first year in San Francisco was one of my best years to date.
However, the lesson was not learned and that part of me that allowed for Missa Toss to exist was not yet quiet. Because of financial pressures, job market pressures, pressures of professional obligation, and internal pressure to not give up on such an important cause so easily, I found myself last spring poking and prodding at Missa Toss to see if he was really dead. Through a series of tough decisions and unexpected twists, I ended up taking a teaching job for this fall, fully believing that this time, it would be different. I believed that this time, because I had two years experience and because of some structural and pedagogical differences with the school, I could find a way to compromise Missa Toss’s relentless drive with David’s basic human needs.
I was wrong on all counts. I quickly fell right back into Missa’s old patterns and practices, and realized within days that this would once again be David’s undoing. Once again my physical and mental health suffered, once again I allowed myself to believe that Missa’s fight was worth the personal sacrifice. Once again I was martyring myself. It was someone else, someone who at the time cared more for me than I cared for myself, who had the empathy and love to point out to me how damaging it all was. Only six weeks after starting again, I began to plan my exit. The second attempt was not working, the lesson was not learned the first time, and I was realizing how much I’d tried to deceive myself into believing it would work.
I began to write this in the middle of December, almost two months after I snapped into admitting that my personal health is more important than the battle for America’s urban teenagers, and all the while I, and my relationship with this wonderful person who cares so much about me, are in need of rebuilding.
Just before my winter holiday, I gave notice to my principal that I would be leaving teaching at the end of the semester in January. I spent a great deal of time reading back some of the things I wrote as Missa Toss from years past, and was struck at how much I suffered under Missa’s direction. I spent a good amount of energy thinking about what my life has become, and am not at all satisfied or happy with my current predicament, but have been too intertwined with Missa’s work to do anything about it. Everyone in my proximate life has, to some degree, given up on me because of Missa Toss. I don’t blame them; Missa leaves no time for himself, let alone other people. Missa is unfair to himself and those close to him. Missa has slowly been wearing me down to nothing. It is for these reasons that I have decided to leave teaching, and with it, bury Missa Toss for good.
Tomorrow will be my last day in the classroom. Tomorrow afternoon I will turn in my semester grades, hand over my keys, box up my personal belongings, and turn my back on Missa Toss after four very hard years of much struggle and little progress. I, as an individual human being, am experiencing a strange mixture of emotions, including relief, disappointment, anticipation, and deflation. The price I have been paying for fighting what amounts to most days as a losing battle is not worth it. I am excited to be able to soon get to things that have been waiting in the wings for over four years. I am hopeful to re-establish contact with my friends nearby. I am praying that I can mend my relationship with those I’ve hurt in the interim. But I am also feeling quite defeated, feeling like I’ve failed in my work to a large degree, feeling quite guilty that those that believed in me and counted on me to do this important work are being let down. I think: if someone like me, who is qualified and intelligent and in all ways cut out to do this important work, if I am unwilling to do this, then where does that leave our society? I worry greatly about the future, and about the inequity that exists in our world. I worry greatly about people growing up and not being able to contribute productively and positively to the world. I know, though, that I can’t begin to address these problems if I am myself not an effective person. It’s because of this that I have to leave, however shamefully and reluctantly. I know that I have to find a way to take care of myself first, and then worry about the rest of humanity, and I can’t take care of myself as Missa Toss. If I can’t take care of myself, I surely can’t take care of the kids I’ve promised to serve.
The kids…again I am amazed by them. As I leaf through some of the parting words they left for me, I reflect on how frustrating they are, how needy they are, how immature, bullheaded, volatile, nasty, selfish, irresponsible they are, how needy, scorned, protective, resilient, damaged they are, and in the end how compassionate, thoughtful, empathetic, supportive they are of their teacher. For all their setbacks, struggles, and faults the kids I taught are good people. And in the end, that’s all I want for them: to be good people.
So this is Missa’s requiem. He is slipping quietly into obscurity, with very little fanfare or ceremony. He is not finishing what he has begun. He is admitting defeat at the hands of the system he worked so hard to serve, not able to cope with the crush of humanity that passes through his life at school every day. He is leaving me worn out, defeated, underfed, underslept, and depressed. But I am still here, ready to start rebuilding my own life, excited about the infinite possibilities and directions I might take, anxious about what the next short while will look like for David. With Missa Toss out of the way I will able to find the time to take care of myself, and by extension, those other things and people I care about.
This time of year carries with it the most darkness, but also the knowledge that light is ahead. It has been gray and raining all week, but there is hope for sunshine in the near future. I have been crying most of this week, but I am keeping faith that the struggle now will ultimately point towards healing. I reflect on some of the moments in my life when I knew that afterwards everything would be different — my last days at camp, my last weeks of college, my final visits with my grandmother before she died — and I know that this week carries equal gravity. By the end of tomorrow it will be done. Missa Toss is dead; long live David. The future is wide open, brimming with possibilities, and for the first time in years I’m excited for it to come.
music: Sigur Ros- Hauf/Heim
There is something about this time of year that tears at me, rubs me raw, makes me very unhappy on several levels. I’ve spent the past week or so in an irritable, discontent headspace that has colored this so-called vacation in unsavory ways. I’ve been discouraged, restless, exasperated. Full of energy, but without direction or purpose. Craving solitude, but quite lonely. That I have had the chance to catch up on sleep and have had the time to feed myself properly, and that I know that my affect inevitably dips during the final weeks of the calendar year have been my saving graces.
Why does this happen? What is it about the so-called “Holidays” that drive me to wish myself a million miles away from my own life? This year is not an isolated event, not by any stretch. There is something intrinsically…depressing about this stretch of time, and as I sit in the middle of it for the 29th time I can’t say it’s gotten any easier to wade through the murky waters that are the Holidays. This year I spent a good deal of time trying to dissect the subject with the hopes that I could arrive at a meaningful cause for such a downturn in my flow.
First and foremost, to my analysis, is my birthday on the 24th of the month. There are the mini-explosions of existential meltdown that accompany me turning one year older, and those steady reminders of my limited time on this planet do not really cheer me up. I should be thankful on my birthday: thankful for my health, that I have made it through another year, thankful that I have had opportunities most people do not have and have enjoyed relative good fortune, thankful for my mother who allowed herself to be sliced open such that I could breathe air for myself and bask in the light of the world, thankful thankful thankful. Instead I find myself quite the opposite: discouraged. Discouraged that youth is quickly becoming a thing to be spoken of in the past tense, and that whatever divine clock that keeps track of the rest of my days as David Taus is moving inexorably towards zero. Because of the date on which I was born, my birthday is overshadowed by someone else’s birthday — most people have heard of him; he was nailed to a cross about 2000 years ago — and because of this other guy and the special brand of spirituality he preached the country decides to whip itself into an economic frenzy, buying buying buying consuming consuming consuming consuming. This generally happens to coincide with travel to family far away or exotic vacation spots, so as a result most everybody I’d like to spend my birthday with is elsewhere, predisposed with the great American spirituality of capitalism. I’d like to have the option to drown myself in some degree of consumerism, to at least take myself out to a moderately nice dinner on my birthday, but in the greatest of ironies I find the rest of the world has closed for business on December 24th. I am really left to myself on my birthday, and try as I might to see that solitude as a gift, I struggle mightily.
Secondly, and hardly coincidently, is Christmas. If I were someone who celebrated the holiday, or even had the option to be part of the culture that celebrates it, I might see it slightly differently, but I’m not so sure. As it is, Christmas is the party that I am not invited to, but everyone else is And the whole universe reeks of Christmas: decorations in the store windows, muzak in the elevators, sweaters and velvet stocking caps on the populous. Christmas becomes part of the common greeting between strangers, becomes the reason to do this and that, becomes the excuse to do this and that. It’s inescapable, and from my vantage point on the outside, its existence and role in the country’s fabric is largely one of economics. Christmas is pitched as that other guy’s birthday (not me, the other guy from 2000 years ago), but the funny thing is that all scholarly analysis tells us that he was born in the spring, and in a different city from what the holiday purports. Furthermore, the jolly fat man in the red suit, his entourage of reindeer, and the presents he drops has a connection with the foundations of Christianity that is tenuous at best. And the kicker, even in the age of environmental awareness, is that celebrants of this spiritual occasion take it upon themselves to cut down upwards of 30 million trees (remnants of a pagan solstice rite appropriated by Christian missionaries) and put them out on the curb a week later. What is left of Christmas, then, is buying, giving, consuming, expecting. I wouldn’t want part of it even if I had the option, but just being surrounded so completely by Christmas is enough.
Beyond that, the natural rhythms of the planet are screaming “Hibernate!” to most large mammals this time of year. It is the coldest time of year, the time with the least amount of daylight, and in many places the time when the first snows hit. My instincts have most definitely been to crawl under my blankets and wait it out.
And this year certain specifics have made my December quite difficult. I have every hope that these circumstances will work themselves out in January (more on this late-breaking story as it develops), but the hurdle between now and January is to wait out the Holidays, which make for a period of stasis in all my efforts to rectify what has been dragging me down for the past couple months. So I keep to myself, weather the onslaught of consumerism, phototropism, existentialism. It’s been difficult, and especially so because I never really had the chance to solidify New Years plans that I am excited about. Those close to me who I would choose to share my last day of the year with, are far away, already committed to something I am not a part of. The drop-back plan, which is turning out to have incredible amounts of potential, is a pilgrimage to Yosemite. It is an attempt to contact that which inspired me to come out this way in the first place, an alternative to the inevitably mediocre party I might attend in the city with one-offs and acquaintances, and a means by which I can take stock of all that has happened in 2007 and clear some mental cobwebs for the start of 2008.
2008. I welcome it grandly. It will prove to be a most interesting year, full of incredible transitions and potentially some big decisions that will divert my life’s stream in significant ways. But not yet; I first have to get through The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year. With this much struggle, I expect some really significant progress.
music: Miles Davis- Kind of Blue
In June of 2006, Missa Toss hung ‘em up. Two hard years as a schoolteacher in Boston Public Schools was about all he had in him. David left Missa Toss be, and drove clear across the country. By himself. Now it’s the end of August in 2007, about 14 or so months after MIssa Toss said goodbye, and he realizes that it wasn’t goodbye after all. Tomorrow Missa Toss rises from the ashes and takes on a new school, a new city, a new group of kids, a new set of challenges. Missa be mad forcin’ it.
I myself am surprised at my decision making here. To be absolutely and perfectly clear, I am quite excited to be getting back into the classroom. There are so many good things to be said about teaching high school that I often take them all for granted. But there are also enormous challenges, herculean struggles, impossibly high mountains to climb. Teaching takes its toll on all fronts, especially the more sensitive, personal fronts. And after this past amazing year of movement and growth, after many who have been close to me as Missa Toss have said that I look and feel and act measurably better than I did when I was teaching, going back into it can seem like completely lunacy. Maybe it is.
Last March, when I realized that my current gig as a Naturalist in the Marin Headlands was not sustainable nor personally challenging to the extent I needed it to be, I began to consider other professional options. Resumes were e-splattered all over the Bay Area (because one thing is for sure: I’m nowhere near done here), and of the 30-odd probes into sectors ranging from education to nonprofit to consulting, not even a second look from any institution outside high schools. It’s like that in a city like San Francisco, I suppose, with thousands upon thousands of overeducated, overqualified, upwardly mobile young people all vying for the same 15 jobs on Craigslist. This significant reality check crystallized certain sentiments, though, namely that teaching (and more specifically public urban high school teaching) is what I’ve been trained to do more than anything else, it’s something I’ve been told I’m good at, and more importantly, it’s something I enjoy. That the David on paper could only appeal to that for which his resume was groomed made things much simpler and much more clear. And so by no large surprise, I’m back to exactly where I started.
But Missa Toss has come out of retirement to entirely different circumstances. The school I’m in now is a drastically different place: much more progressive in terms of pedagogy, much more collaborative, much more young, energetic, motivated, intelligent. Instead of planning for ten classes a week from scratch on my own, I am co-planning for three classes a week and working from precedent. Instead of traditional drill-and-kill tactics, I’m encouraged to think creatively about assessment and demonstration of understanding. I’ve been in PD for the past three weeks, and for the first time I feel like I’m being treated like a professional. All this, of course, is the backdrop to the real work that hasn’t even started yet. When 8:00 hits tomorrow morning and the kids are in their seats, expectant and restless, everything changes. No doubt it will be hard work. No doubt I will sweat, bleed, and cry over these kids like I did the last group in Boston. But given the perspective gained from a year away and the years I have under my belt already, I think I’ll manage much better. Beyond the job, I’m in a much more healthy place mentally, socially, and physically and I’m quite sure that I will spend far fewer weekend nights staring at the insides of my room by myself.
I’m apprehensive. That much is certain. I’m determined to put David ahead of MIssa Toss this time around, but I also know how David and Missa Toss have this tendency to work themselves into the ground for the things in which they believe. There will be some serious adjustment, and some long hours, and some days where there is nothing I’ll be able to do but come home and faceplant into my pillows. But I’m also expecting moments of exhiliration, transcendence even. Missa Toss is much more grounded, sure of what he’s able to do and how he’s going to do it, and because of this new context is all fired up. There will be time enough for all that in the coming months, but for now it’s time to get horizontal. It’s a school night, after all.
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.
music: Cowboy Junkies- The Trinity Sessions
It’s always amazed me how well the roads in this country get you to where you need to go. We should thank Ike for the larger veins and arteries that push our metal and rubber cells to and fro, but roads have been sponsored by all levels of our society, from the Feds down to the private citizens. The fact that there is continuous pavement between my house in San Francisco and my old house in Boston is quite an engineering accomplishment. but the real achievements in human ingenuity are those roads built through otherwise untouched and hostile landscapes. We can and should give thanks to those large sections of unpaved land such as the stretch of the Sierras in California, the tundras of Alaska, and the sandstone chasms of the Southwest, but we have to keep in mind that the only reason most of us has had the opportunity to take in such wonders is because of industrial America’s paved vascular tissue.
Just a week ago DJ 1ey and I pushed forth into the wild tangle of concrete and managed to navigate ourselves to Boulder, CO for an amazing wedding and reunion (and an AnizeCon of sorts now that I stop and think about those present). We then put the Camry back into the Utah backcountry, properly hiking the Needles section of Canyonlands after our first attempt in the spring of 2005, and putting some time into the oft-overlooked wonders found in the Escalante Grand Staircase. The continuous pavement then wound us through deserts, valleys, salt flats, and mountain passes until we ended up right where we started. What good would all those roads be, after all, if they didn’t take you to the edge of somewhere where there are no roads?
(There is much to say about Utah and what we found there, but there’s another place and time for that. Suffice it to say that we are already plotting our return: the Paria Wilderness Area, Hole-in-the-Rock Road, and the Maze are next up.)
What is more amazing to me is that the web of roads don’t just take you where you need to go, they’ll take you pretty much anywhere you want to go. Roads, from the seriously big Eisenhower arteries to the unpaved one lane country capillaries, have and will taken me and millions (billions?) of other humans places we couldn’t imagine, and places we could very well imagine, no matter how far away. I remember thinking about the magnitude of it all while driving last July: given the sheer number of intersections and possible turns, what would the improbability be of starting at 12 Curtis in Somerville, MA and ending up in San Francisco just on random chance? Infinitesimal. But you really could go anywhere.
Most of the time I’m disdainful of all those roads, especially when I rely on their currents while traveling. I’ve read too much Abbey, and grown self-righteous riding my bike around town, I think. I’m too conscious of those dead dinosaurs in my gas tank. But I have to recognize my own hypocricy. Without the road, there wouldn’t be a journey.
The staggering number of roads out there, and therefore number of traveling possibilities, reminds me that there are far more paths to choose than I would consider under normal circumstances. Upon returning from my motorized paddle up and down a few asphalt tributaries I fell into some serious changes back home: the ending of my job as a naturalist in the Golden Gate National Rec Area, the exciting and uncertain future of the band poised to either break out or fall on its face, the prospect of a couple free months which with to make music, explore, hike, surf, read, sleep, and indulge, and the highly likely return of missa toss at summer’s end. These are things keeping my hands full and keeping me up late. Sometimes life takes a couple months to reach a significant juncture, and sometimes almost every day is filled with groundbreaking, river-diverting events. Now is one of those transitory times, somewhere in between a routine-laden spring in the field and a blissful summer. No doubt the road and I will have a few reckonings before Labor Day hits, but for now I’d do myself good to be reminded just how much the river climbs, tumbles, and bends.
And, of course, know that my travels will not go as planned.
music: Something for Rockets- Something for Rockets
The dust has finally settled. I’m squarely entrenched in a quasi-normal living situation that falls squarely within the parameters of 21st century American social norms. Despite the various ideations and fantasies that have floated through my mind in the past four months, I’m not backpacking the Far East or South America, hiking a seriously long trail (as if the HST-JMT stroll were a short one…), squatting in converted warehouses or industrial buildings, or anything else that deviates too far from what is good and reasonable. No, despite the infinite possibilities, despite the steps I carefully took to ensure that I could really truly honestly do whatever I wanted, I played it safe. I’m now paying rent, receiving mail at a regular street address, buying groceries, paying bills. I have a job, I receive health and dental benefits, I own furniture. I am conscious of my allotment of daytime minutes on my telephone and the number of miles until I need to change the oil in my car. I do my dishes. I separate recycling from food waste from other trash. I am located in a major metropolitan area, with coffee shops, bars, and various commercial chain stores within walking distance. There is a steady stream of email coming into and out of my computer. I have picked up, moved, and unpacked, and in the resetting of my life 3,100 miles to the West I have, more or less, held to the same basic operating rules and assumptions I left behind. And now that the dust has settled, and I am able to survey the foundations I’ve laid here in San Francisco, I realize I’ve played it safe.
I’m sure that from some people’s viewpoint driving alone across the country with all your worldly posessions packed into a Toyota Camry is an enormous leap away from playing it safe. To me it was standard operating procedure. If anything, it was an appetizer, a small taste of what could be. If there ever were a time in my life to stray from societal norms it would be now: I am young, independent, unencumbered, relatively free of responsibilities, have a bit of money saved up…and look what I’ve gone and done. Got a job, a lease (albeit month-to-month), bills to pay, the whole domestic bit. And two weeks ago, once the dust began to settle in earnest, I started to think about going back to school.
Applying to grad school can be a full-time job, and I began to realze that applying to Ph.D. programs would prove much more involved, more intense, more specific and delicate than applying for a Masters was. It would be a minimum of four years, would involve a stipend in exchange for teaching undergraduates or assisting with research, it would culminate in my designing and conducting original reseach and scholarly work, contributing real and unique knowledge to the world. It would be an enormous commitment, as well as an enormous encumberence. Doctoral work and instruction at the post-secondary level is something that I want to do at some point in my life, but over the past couple days I realized that right now is not the time for it. I have always behaved well within the bounds of normal and expected action. I have played society’s game, and by most measures I have played it well: respectable colleges, well-paying jobs, a sparkling credit history, and the like. I have had a vague-yet-concrete roadmap of the likely path my life would take, born and cultivated in the suburbs of the Midwest and tempered in the intellectual soil of the Northeast, but there always has been an undercurrent of dissent, an interest in alternative living situations, a fascination with falling off the grid for a little bit.
After taking a small step in that direction this summer, and a small step back from that direction so far this fall, I have come to realize that jumping back into graduate study right now would be a step away from the momentum I’ve been building since rolling out of Boston and walking through the Sierras for a month. That I have resettled in a big city and almost immediately resumed paying rent and seeking employment is enough. I’ve taken an enormous pay cut for the sake of extra free time (and opportunities to spend my days outside in a National Park!) and pay about $500 per month more in rent than I have to in order to have access to certain opportunities. There are reasons why I have chosen to do what I have done, however passive and automatic, but now, more than ever, I’m fighting not only to maintain a philosophy of freedom but also practice freedom. Now, if ever in my life, is the time for it. And because of this I made the decison today as I was driving back from Los Angeles not to apply to graduate school for the fall of 2007.
There are more practical, mundane, concrete reasons. One, my GRE scores could use a boost. Two, the deadline for applications is in three weeks and I don’t know if I could reasonably get my letters of recommendation back in time. Three, I haven’t adequately researched programs and, more importantly, professors whose research aligns with my interest. Four, on an even broader scale, I haven’t narrowed down exactly what I would want to study and make my profession for the rest of my academic life (potentially the rest of my natural life). I know generally which fields of study I want to dip into, and know that I want my doctoral work (and all work for that matter) to have real-life impact and application, but until I can succinctly state what it is I want to study and how I believe it can impact the world-at-large, I have little reason to apply to doctoral programs. This all began to creep out some time last week when I sat down in front of my computer and began to draft a generic Statement of Purpose.
The Statement of Purpose is perhaps the most personal part of the Graduate School application, and the hardest piece to include. Graduate study is not something you jump at uncertainly in the same way you do when you apply for college out of high school. In applying for my masters, I had to narrowly focus my interest and intents, and as I started to try to piece together a Statement of Purpose for doctoral work, I found that I could not do it. An outright statement of your intentions, desires, goals, and aspirations as a potential doctoral student is a very hard thing to do preemptively. It should demonstrate commitment, interest, tenacity intellectual prowess, and reflect one’s willingness to work very, very, very hard. I realized quickly that I could not claim to possess all of these qualities at the present moment, perhaps because I just removed myself from a professional situation in which many of these qualities were demanded of me in such high quantity that I was drained of them by last June.
So instead of writing a Statement of Purpose that I would submit to graduate schools, I instead find it much more appropriate at the present time to make a simple statement of purpose here and now. And here it is:
I want do do everything I can. And since I’ve focused so much on the intellectual for as far back as I can remember, I want to do something else for a while.
Formal academics funnel you into tighter and tighter spirals; as you move on in school, your field of study gets narrower and narrower. And this is not the direction I need to be moving right now. One of the hardest things about growing up was having to make choices about what I would study, what I would do with myself, because with each decision made there is also avenues not taken, opportunities lost, doors closed. I am very glad to have studied psychology and education, to have taught high school and done biological and psychological research, to have worked in outdoor education. It may turn out that I do some or all of these things again. But I would have also liked to seriously indulge in other fields: music, engineering, river guiding, creative writing, political philosophy, computer science, ecology, exploration, cultural anthropology, carpentry, ethnomusicology…
I still want to do it all. I still have not given into the idea that life is finite and time is limited and that I won’t ever accomplish everything I would like to accomplish. Like Siddhartha(novel) I believe we are necessarily bound to different sorts of experience on the path towards enlightenment: the intellectual realm is only one of many. With the exception of two turbulent years following college, I have been in school for my entire life. So instead of committing to the highest form of intellectual training I could imagine, I instead want to take the near future and do other things. I want to make music, begin to compose more, study jazz theory and push my guitar playing to the next level. I want to hike, meander and saunder through some of the most fantastic natural beauty available to humankind while it is still natural and beautiful. I want to spend time in the ocean I live so close to now, perhaps take up surfing or windsurfing or diving. I want to put more energy into my relationships with others. I want to open myself to possibilities, to not define myself by my job or my formal education. I want to struggle in new and exciting way such that I may progress in new and exciting ways. This involves certain risks, certain deviations from the roadmap I’ve supposedly internalized. This may upset certain sensibilities or value systems in certain people, but it’s not their life I’m living. This is Thoreau finally succeeding. This is the practice of freedom. For what it’s worth, I’m going to let the application deadline for graduate school come and go, opt out of the expected and known, risk a little, and give it my all to try to not let the dust settle on my life too much.
music: Grateful Dead- Europe ‘72 d.2
July 1, 2006 was a day long in the making for me. I’d been scheming about packing up everything I owned and driving from Boston all the way to the Pacific ocean since I returned from a three week trip in Dinosaur National Monument three summers ago, since I started graduate school, since I started this weblog. And now that it’s done, and now that I’m down from the high country and the long walk between Sequoia and Yosemite is behind me as well, I’m able to put two enormous checks on the life list. Life since July has been dynamic, challenging, rewarding, and vital. The place in which I find myself currently is completely staggering as well-there are warm, sunny days and cool, foggy nights, I zip around town on my bicycle, moving from the beach (5 minutes from my doorstep) to coffee shops, dinner parties, bocce tournaments in the park, and free concerts at very regular intervals. I am reconnecting with old and new friends, sometimes even running into friends I haven’t spoken to in over 5 years just by chance. And the ‘job’ i’ve taken is equally as appropriate: my office is a National Park and my duty is to take school groups around sharing an appreciation for the natural world and certain scientific knowledge. I am living a life low on obligation and responsibility, and high on hedonism and experience. I also am allowing myself to linger in transition, not make any large life decisions or movements (other than a solo cross country move, of course) and unencumber myself to enjoy life more and worry about it less. There is a little voice in my head that quietly reminds me from time to time that there are greater things to which I will eventually dedicate myself, but for the time being I’m having quite a time. I also think that certain decisions upcoming will be more permanent and have a greater impact on the trajectory of how I spend my time on this planet, so between a very serious and dedicated life of service as a teacher and those decisions yet-to-come, I’m finding my groove. Even my migraines have all but stopped.
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
It is quite real, I must assure myself from time to time. But I am still enjoying a bit of a honeymoon period in which I have the flexibility and financial cushion to not buckle down out here and dig in. But there will be a point sometime soon where I’ll have to confront reality on a much more mundane scale, where I’ll have to start making enough money to support me and my few extravagances (which means actually working), where I’ll have to start making those tough decisions and stop acting from such a…selfish? standpoint. My time in San Francisco has been exclusively that of the wayward traveller, the hiker and adventurer. It just may be sustainable to do that but chances are greater that at some point the grind will catch up to me. But it hasn’t yet, and that’s just fine.
California is a place of extremes. The tallest mountain in the lower 48, the lowest and hottest valley, the largest trees in the world…oceans and volcanos, earthquakes and traffic, wide open spaces and multicultural centers…this is a place like no other. And it’s strange to think that I live here. Maybe this is one of the places where it’s OK to mingle fantasy with reality to a degree. It is noticably different from Boston and the East Coast, but how far will that carry? I’m curious to find out. I’m out here for the forseeable future, the pace and focus of my life has changed a great deal, and although I terribly miss some things about who I was a few months ago I am very glad for the change.
Open your eyes, look up to the skies, and see.
And on that note, I’ve noticed that my activity here has lessened as of late. It could be a function of this life shift, that maybe the weblog was meant to be a document of my thoughts during graduate school and teaching, and now that my environment is quite different this isn’t as immediately relevant to my day-to-day. Sometimes I feel like Bobby (with whom I apparently share a city now) about this whole business. While it’s good to keep in the practice of writing I find myself with less and less that is worth saying publicly (or less and less desire to say things publicly). Like my realtime experience, I think virtual Taus on the Internet might need some refocusing and adjusting. And like the currents i’m currently riding, I’ll wait to see what happens, what I’m feeling like in the near future, what will inevitably motivate me one way or another. But in the meantime I’m having fun with it and surely am not stressing over it.
Any way the wind blows, doesn’t really matter to me.
music: Townhall- Live From the Point, d.1
This morning I woke up and made myself a sandwich of doom for breakfast. It was so good that I made myself another one 5 minutes later.
music: King Sunny Ade- Juju Music
These are days of change, these spring days. The weather is turning. We now have a blessed extra hour of light at the end of the day instead of at the start. The school year is sliding into its homestretch. I can once again see a horizon and am completely dumbstruck as to how vast it is, how many possibilities there really are. Ultimate frisbee is starting up again. Music is plentiful and in full swing on three fronts: two electric and one acoustic. And despite all this, I don’t have much that needs to be said. These spring days are filled with routine and logistics, and bring a certain stasis to things.
I was sidelined for a good week and a half this past month with the second (and hopefully final) installment of periodontal work. It was better this time around-I think the dentist cut me up a little nicer than last time. Lesson learned: always go in for surgery in the morning when those with the knife are still fresh and alert. Doctors are people too. But a period of relative inactivity and reduced caloric intake left me fairly miserable for a short spell. It reminded me precisely how little exersice I’ve gotten this winter, how bad my cabin fever was getting, and how ready I was for the warmer months and all the adventures they are to contain.
We expect exercise to be a negative feedback system: the more we exert ourselves, the less energy we have and the less we want to exert ourselves. Exercise is, instead, a positive feedback system: exercise begets exercise. The tricky part is that not exercising is also a positive feedback system and it takes a good deal of willpower to break out of the dental-surgery-invalid state of complete apathy. But now that spring is here and my mouth has more or less healed, it is much easier to take steps towards getting my heart rate up and breaking a sweat. Now begins weekly ultimate games, biking to work in earnest, weekend trips to New Hampshire. Even stasis requires an upkeep, but it is slowly becoming untapped. The gears are once again turning. The blood is once again flowing, and I’m feeling much better about things. These spring days carry with them infinite possibility, but right now exercise is all I can do to work myself out of the tiresome winter paths I have worn.
music: Studio One Rockers
Imagine a small country where there are no stoplights and no fast-food chains. You can take school buses all the way from one side of the country to the other for $3. Shoes are a rare occurrence (and shoes mostly mean flip-flops) and cell phones are even more rare. What’s more, this tiny country has an astounding array of natural beauty: tropical desert islands, atolls and a barrier reef, rainforests and jungles, mountains complete with waterfalls and rivers and swimming holes, and caves that need exploration. The people, while most likely considered poor by most Americans’ standards, live a life rich with the stuff that matters: long meals with family and friends, morning full of sunshine burning off a layer of fog, music that evokes island breezes, and the valuable understanding that very few people, in fact, are out to get you and what’s more are woth talking to.
Imagine not. Welcome to Belize.
December was miserable. December is usually terrible, but this year December was miserable for a bunch of reasons. But luckily Reuben found himself with a teacherly break in between Christmas and New Year’s, and he and I skipped town for a week in Belize, leaving his wife and our sorry excuses for lives behind. Both of us have been living, breathing, eating (barely) and sleeping (even less) for our students and were very much looking forward to a week of time in which we did stuff for ourselves- the last time we took an extended trip together was four days in Yosemite back in 2004, and before that was a road trip through Canada in 1998. So after some nice days hanging out with old friends in DC we hopped a very early morning plane for Belize City. We touched down in the tiny airport a little after noon, and scooted out to the cayes with a quickness. Thus began a week bookended by lazy days on”Caye Caulker.”:http://www.gocayecaulker.com/ In the middle of the trip we based ourselves out of San Ignacio, adventure town up in the hills. We took day trips to some amazing places: two caves in which some beautiful geology was occurring and in which Mayan rituals were performed, and a trip to Tikal, the capital of the Mayan Empire (and site of the rebel base on the fourth moon of the planet Yavin). It was a week packed full, but barely stressful. We did a lot, we saw a lot, but we didn’t feel drained from it in the least.
There are a lot of tales to tell, but I think it’s best to let the photos to do most of the talking. Suffice it to say that the trip and the time with my old friend gave me a very necessary respite from a life in Boston I’m now ready to admit is far from healthy or good. What struck me most, though, is that the perspective on people should live is so refreshingly different once you leave the US. And despite some amenities that Americans have grown soft over, in some ways the quality of life is better for those people I met in Belize. We here have things like efficient cars (and plenty of them), fast food delivery, a mighty military and well-protected borders, liability waivers, prestigous universitites, enormous leaders in industry, wireless internet, an overwhelming selection of food and drink, reliable plumbing and electricity even, but I can’t help but think that by my count, We The People are far less happy on a basic level than the folks I met in Belize. There is something to be said for simplicity and moderation and modesty. Belize and its people (a highly diverse bunch) manage to enjoy themselves, get along famously, and live fulfilled, happy lives despite not havng a lot of the stuff Americans find so valuable. I’m a week removed from my trip to Central America and am quickly losing that perspective at the hands of this Babylon System, but it’s something I’d like to hold onto as long as I can.
My life is once again governed by the obligations of Missa Toss. But like any period after significant travel, I am trying to find a balance point between the job I signed on for here and the ideals I discovered out on the road. Belize tourist traps are full of shirts and stickers that say stuff like “UnBelizeAble!” and “You Better Belize It! but the one I think summed it up was found on Caye Caulker, a gem of an island in which the main modes of transportation are bicycle, golf cart, and sailboat. As you exited the water taxi you walked over a mosaic with a simple message: Go Slow. Yes, I. Can’t think of a better way to usher in the new year than remembering that, the simplest but most potent lesson learned from a tiny beautiful country on the other side of the Carribean Sea. There is change on the wind, and 2006 will prove to be a year full of change. Here’s to an excellent start to the year, and here’s to making sure to make time for what really matters.
music: teenagers screaming in the hallway
So I have my arms full of books and papers and a mug of tea and i’m struggling to open the door. One of my students asks if I need any help. I issue a stock reply: “no, I can get it.” I’m thinking about something else. Meanwhile I still haven’t opened the door.
She looks at me, rolls her eyes. “Mister, why don’t you ever let anybody help you?”
Um.
I mean.
There are a million reasons that I give myself for choosing to live the way I do, and I believe strongly in most of those reasons. But she’s undeniably right.
These kids…honestly. Someone has to call me out; funny that it’s the people I work for.
music: Jerry Garcia Band- 7/23/1977, Berkeley, CA
I have everything to say. and at the same time nothing at all. nothing that’s new and worthy of being cyber-inked, anyhow. It’s all been said before here, in one way or another, and I’m trying to make a point not to indulge in redundancy.
These are strange days, indeed. A lot has been happening. But at the same time nothing at all. In the same way the movement of a rat through a maze is tracked relative to a certain starting point, i have been a flurry of activity, but my net movement has been zero. No, perhaps I’ve been inching imperceptibly towards something new. Perhaps. I’ve conditioned myself for deep introspection in order to make myself more aware of such small movements, but right now, in the latest session of navel contemplation, I realize that I’ve forsaken my own training.
I’ve always been very comfortable swimming around the contents of my own head. The essay that got me into college was about how I made a point of taking an hour or so every night, steeping some tea, and tending my mental garden in some way. Right now I have a mug of tea by my side, I have a decent chunk of time before I send myself off to bed, and I have a good amount of mental dirt to till and aerate. Roots haven’t been taking as of late in my cranial terrarium.
The point is, I think, that I create routines which allow me opportunities to meditate and reflect on what is happening in my life. I have always strongly believed in exercises such as this, that I could do nothing better for myself than to close the door to my room at the end of a given day and take some time to muck around in my thoughts. Most of the time I believe it to be very helpful. I can step back from the daily bombardment of information, idea, and experience, pick out the things that are worth keeping, and try to make sense of them. Over the past 10 or so years I have made some headway; parts of the mental garden are well-tended. But there are also bramble patches and rocky soil, and it seems that no matter how I try to dig into these spots there is no untangling them. Even after all this time. 10 or so years-worth of nightly quiet head time and probably thousands of mugs of tea. A whole lot of struggle, and some progress.
I no longer sit end-to-end on the couch in my basement room in Milwaukee, nor do I sit out on the fire escape of my college dorm. The impulse is still there, but the routine has changed. This here weblog is, of course, the latest incarnation of my nightly efforts to sift through the contents of my mind. Its contents are carefully selected and censored to a degree, but the core purpose remains and is evident, I think. But as of late my engagement with this medium, and with it, my commitment to the nightly routine of introspection, has dropped off a bit. Things are no more simple or manageable. Certainly not. But through this recursive process of mind-tending I have recently hit on a larger truth, one that is logically impossible given the closed nature of the system, but one that has happened nonetheless: in digging through the insides of my mind I’ll never get farther than the inside of my skull. Through my well-intentioned conditioning I’ve started to reduce myself to a brain in a jar. And because of my conditioning I’ve grown accustomed to thinking (thinking…of course thinking) that Truth lay deep in my own gyri and sulci.
I am older than I was when I started this little practice of introspection. Mind-tending has turned into headbanging as of late and I have clung to the more objective perspective enough to know that I no longer benefit as much from the inner mental exploration as I once did. I hear Erikson mocking me, his epigenetic cycles giving me a sound i-told-you-so’ing. The truth is out there, of course, not in here. The everything I have to say, in this light, is hollow. A lot has been happening, true indeed. But after enough intellectual digestion, a lot becomes nothing at all.
Quite contrary. How does my garden grow?
I think it’s time to crack the terrarium and let the rain in.
music: The Flaming Lips- Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
I was walking back into school today from a quick trip out for lunch and I stop to say hi to a student I had last year. He asks:
“So why didn’t you bike today?”
I thought it was going to rain and I told him so. (although I just realized that I haven’t gotten on my bike since I knocked into a minivan making a wild right turn two weeks back…)
“What about the windchill? You still would bike in the cold?”
I show him my jacket.
“You always do things the hard way, Mister. Why don’t you do things the easy way some time?”
um.
I mean.
There are a million reasons that I give myself for choosing to live the way I do, and I believe strongly in most of those reasons. But he’s undeniably right.
Back to work.
music: Pink Floyd- Dark Side of the Moon
It is less curious and more sombering that money is the gauge by which we measure worth. Everything, it seems, has a monetary value. It’s our adaptive system that is able to measure and quantify everything from the availability of food we eat (apples: $.89/lb) to the intangible value on one-of-a-kind collectible items (priceless) to the importance of one’s work (doctors make more money than garbagemen, who incidently make more money than teachers). Money is precious-there is no doubt about it. We’ve been turning in our hamster wheels since we were old enough to walk because of the need to accumulate this stuff in order to maintain the ability to keep running on our rodent treadmills a little longer.
For the first time in my life I’m making money to the point where it accumulates. Money has afforded me a home and assured me of food on a daily basis, and I can’t take that for granted. This excess of money has directly informed my life experiences (see travels), and even afforded me some small luxuries in the meantime, and for all that I’m eternally thankful. However, money has its price. The price of course is not measurable in a monetary sense, because if it were I’d imagine some grand calculus would just deduct that price from the money I do receive. Instead, we pay for our money in time.
This is not the place to get into the evils of a system that requires you to work for it in order to eat. Suffice it to say that the lack of basic survival value bestowed to anyone living in the developed world is upsetting. But this is the place — the time rather — to slip into a quarterlife crisis of a reasonably high degree: the one most precious resource given to us as living beings costs nothing, is being used at an alarming rate, is non-renewable (short of the invention of the flux capacitor), and is being seized from me.
What gives? It’s been a horribly discouraging weekend time-wise, and a rough couple of days mental health-wise. Friday was payday (read: some sort of palty compensation for choosing to spend my time in a way that causes my physical and mental health to suffer, restricts my personal freedom, and is sometimes downright unpleasant). I came home exhausted, laid down to take a nap, and woke up at 4:30am, completely missing out on what plans I had. Saturday’s plans also fell by the wayside, so I spent the day on modern-living upkeep and grinding through stacks of paper for work. The red grading pen was ablaze until about 1am, when I decided to treat myself to a couple hours of unconsciousness before pounding paper again on Sunday. The weekend was spent either working or sleeping because I was so exhausted from working. The crazy part is that I like my job, but weekends like this one call into question the overall worth of this work I’m doing. I believe in it, yes, but when it cuts into time that should be mine everything falls apart. Time is something I need to be selfish with, or more selfish with at least. It hasn’t been three weeks and I’ve once again lost myself. I would have less problems giving my money to work instead of my weekends Which, come to think of, I do anyway.
Aesop Rock weighs in on the issue.
——
This summer I took a dayhike up the Na Pali coast on the island of Kaua’i. The traditional dayhike route keeps people close to the ocean coast and reveals spectacular views of the Pacific, the reefs below, and Na Pali’s cliffs. After making good time to the first beach on the trail I decided to take a side trip because I had the time. I made the push inland and followed a poorly marked trail up one of the valleys towards a remote waterfall. At that point in the day I was the only hiker out there. The jungle was dripping from the morning’s rain, and everything smelled of ripe guava and coconut. Foliage was pretty dense, and besides the trail and river at the valley’s center there weren’t many indications of human use. After about 30 minutes or so of serious hiking the trail opened up into a shaded bamboo grove, and perched on top of a rock in the middle of the grove, almost crouching like an animal, was a thin, incredibly tanned man. He was shirtless and shoeless, his eyes twinkled, and his beard was enormous. He smiled placidly and greeted me with an aloha, asking for food and pakalolo. I was dumbfounded. I gave him a granola bar, and tried to get my bearings, thinking I’d just stumbled into a faerie tale. After about a minute of what I thought would be appropriate small talk I pushed on towards the waterfall, head spinning. The bamboo grove disappeared behind me, jungle proper resumed, and I was left wondering whether I hallucinated the whole thing. I made it up the the waterfall eventually (and an incredible waterfall it was…) and between swimming and hiking thought of a million things I would have liked to say to the man/elf back in the bamboo grove. I got my chance-on the way back I passed through the bamboo grove, still no other humans in sight, and he was perched exactly where I left him. We dined on cheese and pita and shared stories. He said his name was “Yahveh,” and he’s been living out in the jungle for over three years, subsisting on wild fruits (over 12 varieties, he says) and the kindness of strangers. He said he hadn’t been out of the jungle in 8 months. I asked him what he did with all the time he had, and he didn’t answer as much as hold his hands up and look around.
——
I left Yahveh and the jungles of the Na Pali coast with a new understanding of wealth and time, one which is haunting me tonight as I sit in Boston at the end of an absolutely miserable weekend. Yahveh, of course, is a rarity, an anomaly, an extreme case. But I realize: could I be on the other end of that spectrum? Have I sold my one most precious nonrenewable resource out to the system that keeps me docile and obedient and too obligated and exhausted to do anything for myself anymore?
The fourth of four points that I outlined as my quest for life some years ago is “spend time on what is important.” What is important is a relative term, I guess, but I’d like to refocus on things that are of primary importance. Spending time to make money is important in a sense, but it is of instrumental importance. On the back end of a weekend like this I can only hope that personal philosophy is feasible in this current frame of reality. Because regardless of what I think, hope, or believe, that clock which is marking time by my bed will ring in a few hours, dictating exactly how I will be using the time given to me.
music: Louis Armstrong- When the Saints Go Marching In
Midsummer Night. The Summer Solstice. The days start getting shorter starting tomorrow. And I haven’t even started.
music: Townes Van Zandt- Live at the Old Quarter
I caught myself trying to do nine things at once today: laundry, troubleshooting the electronic crackle in my guitar amp, purging unused clothes from my drawers, pulling down three concerts from archive.org, boiling ravioli for dinner, fixing a zipper, checking my bank statement against my receipts, unloading the dish rack, and worst of all, making a list of all the things I had to do tonight (check about the table hockey game I ordered, go grocery shopping, write a quiz that the kids are taking tomorrow, write a rent check and drop it off, call a guitar technician I know about amp repair, refill migraine prescription).
Ridiculous.
This is the time of year when things gain momentum. School is sliding into its final days. I’m beginning to think about summer. The warmer weather (whenever it comes) catalyzes all life’s reactions. There’s a lot to get done and a short time in which to do it all.
Some people are able to handle having thirty things going at once; I can handle it as well but not happily. I’m the type to order my obligations by relative importance and then run down the list, checking them off one by one. It’s a sign of my mental health when I crave order and productivity enough to start up with the lists, but these days lists grow long and untended. And even though I work my way through them they seem to grow longer such that I never seem to make much headway.
In the midst of all this personal entropy I started to reorganize the cookware cabinet because it was pissing me off how the lesser-used stuff ended up in the front and the big mixing bowls were balanced on top of the smaller ones. I stopped about 30 seconds into the exercise because the ravioli was done and the shows finished downloading and I resigned myself to the fact that in three or so days things would be in a similar state of chaos.
In doing nine things at once I don’t really get any one thing done well. This life of mine has me turning in my hamster wheel something fierce.
Part of the crush I experienced today was because I skipped town to go hiking in the Green Mountains this weekend. The trip to the backcountry afforded me some time and space to meditate and ruminate, to let my mind process so many backed-up thoughts. In high school I made a point to take about an hour before bed every night to sit with a cup of tea and just think-let my mind wander here and there, let it delve into corners of my psyche that needed attention-but there just isn’t time for that sort of thing anymore. Quiet unstructured thinking time has become an extravagance. Hiking, however, provides me with that opportunity again. Hiking itself is a meditation for me-an amount of physical exertion mixed with a self-sufficient philosophy put to practice and a very, very long path to walk as slow as I please. There is no thrill to hiking the way there is to rock climbing or whitewater paddling; you just walk. You walk the path and think. Sometimes after struggling uphill you catch a nice view, but there is no opportunity or reason to do more than walk. Spending time walking through the wilderness gives me that space to let my mind grind and digest all the stuff that it needs to.
It usually takes about three days to acclimate to the backcountry lifestyle, to clear my head of the bombarding demands of regular life, to have my ears stop their city-noise-cancelling ring and be able to actually listen, to get used to sleeping on the ground, to drop into a calm and focused and crystalline mental state. By the third morning of the weekend I was approaching this goal but had to cut off the exercise and come back to Boston. I spent a good deal of yesterday nursing an incredible migraine and spent most of today mopping up all those little details of post-post-modern living that I left scattered last Friday.
This is a time of transition, which doesn’t make things any easier. But my transitions are more internal and seasonally routine than others. I spent my time in the mountains with two friends: one from Boston who won’t be here much longer, one an old roommate from college who I don’t see nearly enough. We three had a positive time, but in our conversations and in my own meditations while hiking I was reminded how much is in transition right now across the board. Jojo is moving to a new and unfamiliar city for a boy. Evan just graduated law school. Each had their own reasons and needs to be up in the mountains and meditate, perhaps more reason than my pedestrian lists of errands, but from my perspective it was good to spend some time with my friends. They are two examples of this flux in my extended circle: another college roommate just received his M.D., and another is off to become a Broadway actor. My sister just shed the majority of her material possessions and is now making her way out of the deserts of Arizona to start her adult life. Things are afoot at home as well- one roommate has already moved out, with at least two more on the way out by summer’s end. What of the countless other individual lives out there swinging through transitions of all kinds this time of year?
We all walk some sort of path, but most of the time we’re so distracted by computers and dirty clothes and bank statements and boiling ravioli to realize we are — right now — in the middle of our journeys. Given the chance to simplify and literally walk the path, the more basic terms of our journey comes into focus for a brief moment. I walk up and down mountains and canyons with 50 lbs on my back, in part, to work myself into this perspective. (That and the chance to catch a view of some fantastic scenery.) The rest of my time on the path is spent oblivious that there is a journey beyond what has to get done for today or tomorrow. And here again, late into Tuesday night, a good hour and a half after I would have liked to be in bed, I’m scrambling, trying to go nine directions at once, not keeping up with my own lists, trying to make these microtransitions as smoothly as possible, stumbling over myself, stretching for that mental place I cultivated nightly in high school and daily on-trail, and trying to remember the lesson from this past weekend in the woods: all I have to do is walk.
music: Portishead- PNYC
I woke up this morning, stumbled into the bathroom, and shaved off my beard. It had been growing since I rolled out of Milwaukee last June. To add to the effect (and because I fumbled the clippers a little too much), I went out and got my hair cut short. I’ve lost four or five years of street cred. My face is raw. I don’t quite look like myself. This will take some getting used to.
music: Phish, 4/4/1998, Providence, RI
(The clock is now working against me. I downed two jade liquid-filled capsules about 3 minutes ago which means I have about 27 more minutes until I’m involuntarily horizontal and drooling all over myself. I’m looking forward to the cold medicine stupor.)
We attribute significance to the dates of the Gregorian calendar, numbers which are assigned loosely to the turning of the heavens. We could be much more in alignment with the spinning of the Earth of the phases of the moon, but the dates we have are close enough for ritual. I find that I rely heavily on the meaning I attribute to certain dates, perhaps moreso than most. We all signify certain events with dates: July 4th, September 11th, the last Thursday in November, and so on. This weekend is a big one for me: the first weekend in April is when we Spring Ahead.
The extra (extra?? more like a repaid debt of 60 minutes from late October of the previous year) hour of daylight has always signified a turning point in my life. For one, it means that spring is hear in earnest, that snow is pretty much done, and that we can all start to come out of our burrows, shake the darkness from our underused muscles, and warm our faces in actual sunlight. It means that I am entering the homestretch of the academic year. It somehow makes the universe much more possible to navigate. Spring Ahead, for me, is a marker that I’ve made it through another cold winter, and that better days are around the corner.
I’ve had an especially difficult and dark eight months. They say that it’s like that your first year of teaching, and I’m banking on it getting easier. It had better get easier, damnit. I’ve been in a steady habit of letting out and then dropping my sails over the past eight or so months as to not capsize in Missa Toss’s maelstrom. And as a result, almost all of my personal voyages have been nipped in the bud, boats left in their harbors to float in the eddies of my mind. Every time I talk with my mother she asks what is new with me, and every time I falter, unable to think of anything that is new with me, and I say ‘nothing,’ and I’m telling the truth. I’ve spent more than a good amount of time by myself. I’ve found myself staring into absolutely nothing and allowing my mind to run wild, splashing disjoint images and memories up against its insides. By all measures my mental health has slipped significantly in the past eight months. Still, the music playing in the background (Phish over the first weekend of April, 1998: an island of sanity in a far worse maelstrom) reminds me that seven years ago the condition of my mind was far, far worse.
April of 1998 is a story for another time. So, now, to this evening.
(I’ve exceeded my allotted cold-medicine time limit and my head is growing lighter and lighter as the viral C-clamps at my temples release a bit. Waking is currently a slippery business, but perhaps it should be so.)
Perhaps I need a good stumble down the rabbit-hole, a dip into the Dreaming, and ultimately a re-emergence on the other side of things when the daylight lasts an hour longer in the evenings. Despite the grey and the incessant rain, my head being full of mucus and snot, and this weekend being a complete waste of my time, I feel positive motion on the horizon. Tomorrow I’ll wake up, stumble around a bit in cold-medicine aftermath, and when my hands are steady enough I’ll shave my beard off. Then this coming week: the beginning of Spring League Ultimate, the addition of a keyboardist to the band, and a potential visit from my two college roommates.. Then hiking in Utah, only two weeks away. And the biggest dangling carrot: Australia/Hawaii this summer. Now close enough to start making solid plans, outfitting myself, and getting very, very excited about it.
Franklin intended to save daylight in his crazy scheme of putting an hour’s time on loan between October and April, but the result in my reality is much more momentous, much more saturated with symbolic meaning. What I attribute to the first week of April is not unlike what major religions attribute to their Spring holidays: a rebirth, a new sprig of hope. No, I am not actually saving daylight in this displacement of Gregorian time. Instead, I think the daylight is saving me.
music: Buddy Guy- Feels Like Rain
It’s not that nothing has been happening, and it certainly is not that I’ve been mentally stagnant. It’s the end of March and things are in transition, often moving faster than that which I can keep pace. The snow’s melted, the days have lengthened, the trees have even begun to perk up. Things are in motion in several directions at the 1-2, I’m back on my bike, music is coming along nicely, I’ve been getting out more. Daylight Savings in one week, Utah in three, summer vacation in about 15. Stuff has been happening and I certainly have been thinking, but I, uncharacteristly, have not had the desire to ruminate on it or document much of it. It’s not that nothing has been happening; it’s that time is sliding past me almost too quickly.
I happened upon an email I shot off a couple months back as I was looking for an old message about tax preparation. The underlying question was something like this: if my life were a performance (well…arguably…um…never mind), and this weblog is a representation of my public self, then what would it look like backstage? It seems to be a nice summary of the state of things these days. I’m told I’m pretty good at summarizing things.
12/28/04
this funny image is materializing: backstage at the david show. i think you’d find a bunch of people drinking herbal tea and talking about camping gear, someone picking at a guitar in the corner, a small group reading books in beanbag chairs, two people rooting through the dumpster out back to see if there is anything usable, someone cooking and someone else doing their dishes before they are done with them, at least three people staring precisely into nowhere, a trash can and bucket percussion jam session, three people throwing a frisbee the length of the room to everyone else’s annoyance, someone operating a smoothie machine and a deep fryer, two people mixing chemicals and pouring them on stuff to see what happens, someone consulting a map, a group of people fast asleep and drooling on themselves and the furniture, someone keeping things organized with the help of a giant whiteboard, and a team of chimpanzees dutifully typing on laptops as to transcribe all such events onto anize.org for the world to read.
music: Recordings from the Biosphere (with Matt and Sebastian)- 2/18/05
Another week of vacation from school is upon me and my goals this time around are modest: resurrect some of that which I lost to Missa Toss over the past six months. I knew going into this nine day stretch that some sort of ritual was appropriate to mark the reclaiming of my own life that was to take place, and in the days before the vacation proper I considered doing a three-day fast to help clear the cobwebs and to create some mental space from which a more healthy, balanced perspective could take place. The topics of hunger and the inescapable need for food have been rattling around in my head for the past couple weeks, and the idea of a fast appealed to me as a way to manage both my accumulating emotional and visceral clutter. As the vacation hit, though, I realized that I did not need to empty out; instead, I needed to fill up. Enough of my time has been spent in personal deprivation that a physical acting out of that deprivation was not the proper means of making the most of this time given to me. No, instead, I thought to see what I could to to fill time with things of substance. My eating habits are poor enough during the work week.
If I had the inclination, I could easily fill my time from now until the end of break with work for school. I’ll have to dip into it at some point-lessons must be planned for the week after this and an entire curriculum in psychology must be outlined for next year-but for the time being I’m content to do things for myself. And even though break has only been dented by this past weekend, it is of significant substance. Time is being filled with goodness, mostly with that infinitely difficult but unspeakably positive thing I’ve been working towards and pushing on since I returned from my trip across the country: music.
Friday night, by all personal measures, was a watershed moment. I connected with two guys from Craigslist, a bassist and a drummer, and got down to it for about two and a half hours in the 1-2 basement music studio. We threw around some original ideas (I’m re-listening to the 30-minute straight improv we opened things with now), a couple Dead covers, a couple Phish covers, and some other assorted works. It was the first time I got to put the room downstairs to good use, and it was also the first time I got to put the newly-tuned and tweaked Gibson through the motions. Both earned their keep and then some-things came out better than I ever could have hoped for. Considering that it was our first time playing together it was downright incredible now that I’m listening to it again. Peet, a man who knows his music and takes it seriously, said that he’s paid good money to hear music much worse. It occurred to me afterwards that this was possibly the first electric jam session I’ve had on guitar…ever? It legitimized a lot for me: all that time spent noodling in my bedroom playing along to CDs, all that work put into recording demo tracks, all that money thrown into the new Gibson. It also made me glad I dropped some bills on mixers and microphones-we got a great sounding recording out of the session. We three are going to make a habit out of it and hope to eventually bring a keyboardist into the mix. Friday night saw a big goal of mine for this year come to fruition. I couldn’t be happier about it and am already itching to have another go at it.
I’m still staying true to my roots on the music front. I’m working on some more structured singer-songwriter type stuff on acoustic with Jono, a guy who contacted me about playing music a couple weeks back. We met up this afternoon, ran a few of his tunes including some covers, some of my originals and some of his. We’re shooting for an open-mic at the Middle East tomorrow night. It isn’t perfect yet, but it sounds good enough to take out there and let hang in the breeze for a little bit. Another goal of mine to be realized: playing out. My musical horizons are expanding by leaps and bounds given this short time in February and the best part is that these recent aural explosions are by no means limited or isolated incidents; they are beginnings.
Music, no matter how good it can be, is not the sum total of anyone’s existence. This week saw, by my standards, a staggering amount of social movement. C. and I had our weekly Thursday night dinner for the first time in a couple weeks and it was good to catch up with her. We came up with a great hairbrained scheme: I supply the music, and she’s going to make us Hammer Pants. (That’s word, because you know…) I also got a chance to see M. twice this week, a monumental feat considering I haven’t seen her since last September. Jono invited me out for the time honored tradition of drinking beer and then throwing really sharp pointy things last night. And tonight we had a dinner gathering at the 1-2 that blossomed from an offhand comment to Peet this morning into a way cool get-together. TiMO and JZ came back to the 1-2 from dogsitting, Jono stuck around after running through songs and convinced Sam to join us, Matt and Gina came up from downstairs, and Jojo made the trek up from Central Square. We had a good hour or two in the kitchen full of frying, boiling, slicing, talking, eating, drinking…even a good grease fire in the oven. We then did a good amount of lounging and laughing in the common room while we waited for our digestive systems to do their thing. It was a simply beautiful (and beautifully simple) Sunday night at the 1-2. It was a study in what is necessary this break: food. I do not need to be emptied, assuming a passive stance towards my surroundings. Instead, I need to be forceful and purposeful in my actions, to indulge in and enjoy food of all kinds, and as the song goes, share it with many friends. There are seven days left in which I have a lot to accomplish here in Boston. This vacation isn’t about leaving, and that’s important. It’s tough work resurrecting one’s social life after over a year of neglect, but I’m already beginning to taste the rewards.
music: “One Last Vesper” Cassette
We were enjoying a typical Sunday night at the 1-2 earlier: sitting around the kitchen table, listening to The Playground, and tearing through a couple artichokes and lemon-butter sauce when this song came on that really twisted my head around. It’s an old folk tune called The Circle Game done by Joni Mitchell and assorted others, a song I know incredibly well but haven’t heard in years. We used to sing it in music class in grade school, and it was the first song I ever learned on guitar (which was actually my mother’s ukelale). But one of the most vivid memories I have of “The Circle Game” is a performance of the song by a fellow leadership trainee and old friend Chris Dallman at Camp Minikani a summer evening long ago. Hearing the song for the first time in so long opened a floodgate of memories and I’ve been spending the rest of the evening picking through them, as well as old pictures, journal entries, and cassettes.
I’m caught up in my immediate reality more than I ever have been. My fond memories of past years usually consist of the past couple years, maybe college. College seems like it happened in another lifetime. I all but forget that I lived a life in Wisconsin for 18 or so years, and it was a life full of events and places and people. Of course I know that I did live in Wisconsin, and that I was a kid once (declarative), but I forgot what it was like (episodic). I had not forgotten the fact that I had been in high school once, but I had forgotten what it was like to be in high school myself. Upon hearing that song on the radio the feeling of it all, the physical and mental sensation of what it was like to be a child, came rushing back. It was incredible. I flipped through old photos, yes, actual photographs on kodak paper; I put in old cassette tapes (remember those?) that I wore down in the late 80’s and early 90’s. I took a whirlwind tour of myself as a child, and even with the primed sense memory it seemed frighteningly distant. ‘That was then, this is now,’ you can say, and yes, but there is something tragic about no longer being young like that. I realized I miss the child’s eye, the struggle with questions and ideas encountered for the first time, the complete amazement at experiencing things for the first time, the struggle to become a competent, educated, experienced human being. Part of why I thought the National Parks I visited this summer were so spectacular was because they made me feel like a child experiencing Nature for the first time again. It was wonderful. I miss that feeling.
Out of all the corners of my childhood that I visited tonight, I found myself gravitating towards camp. To those that have been there, two anize’ers included, Camp Minikani is a phenomenon that doesn’t need to be explained. To everyone else, it can’t be explained. I have camp to thank for a lot. I find myself in a profession that stems directly from my experiences as a counselor there. I point to camp as one of the primary reasons why I have such an affinity for the natural world. I am reminded almost daily of how camp has shaped my core values and philosophies. And as “The Circle Game” reminded me, camp is mostly responsible for my wanting to play guitar. To remember so clearly what it was like to be a child at camp is overwhelming. Much of that feeling has been lost in the six years I have been away from camp. And since there is no way to go home again, I can only hope to take whatever I found there and somehow find a way to make it work, here, now, as an adult, in inner-city Boston.
The end of every day at camp is marked by a vesper, a quiet time where cabins of children lie in bunk beds, blinking in candlelight, and exchange their thoughts on the universe. It generally starts with a song and a simple question: “What was your best part of the day?” Vesper, to me, was always my best part of the day. The song has continued to the present date, but the question is one that I’ve unfortunately ceased to ask myself, but one I should revisit more often. But vesper has ceased to happen. I try to sit at the end of the day with a cup of tea and process stuff, but it isn’t the same. Were I to have time at the end of the day to discuss the universe under candlelight with friends even once a month…it seems, though, that vesper is not something that happens in the adult world. Perhaps because adult life requires that sort of interpersonal exploration less. I would still welcome it. For my part, though, I have colored pieces of cloth hanging on my wall to remind me, a guitar that made its performance debut over the crackles of campfire and chirp of crickets, and presently a candle lit, a candle that probably hasn’t been lit since my last summer spent in Wisconsin, a candle approximately the shape and size of a dixie cup, a candle with flecks of Crayola scattered throughout the wax, a candle with a small rock embedded in its bottom. To those familiar, it doesn’t need explaining. Remembering where this candle came from, and more importantly that I came from the same place, was my best part of the day. Childhood. I miss it terribly.
Years move by and now the boy is twenty
though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There’ll be new dreams
maybe better dreams
and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through
music: The Be Good Tanyas- Chinatown
Dead of winter in New England. Boston hunkers down for the onslaught of cold white, spends a week paralyzed, and slowly re-emerges from underneath the piles and piles and piles and piles of now filthy snow. It warms a little, some melts, and piles of opaque liquid fill crevices and potholes citywide. Weather reports indicate a fresh dose of celestial solvents tonight, due to grace our cobblestone and concrete for the next two days…
The past couple of weeks have allowed me a lot of head time and have elucidated some incredible challenges, neither of which have made me too happy. I can fully expect to dip into a dark mood for a week or two every year at some point, and I think that this past stretch of time was it for me. I think I’m coming out from under the covers, or starting to at least, or am just sufficiently distracted by work again to not think too much about the state of things in my own three pounds of gyri and sulci. This time around the normal morose mood was accompanied by a fairly healthy existential crisis recalled from years past: I remember being very young, five or six maybe, and lying in bed staring at the shadows my night light cast on the opposite wall which looked remarkably like E.T. and fully realizing what my mortality means. I remember sobbing uncontrolably back then until i passed into sleep, knowing that I was going to die one day, depart from this universe forever, for-ever, and there was nothing I could do about it. For some reason that incredible dread popped back up these past few weeks in fairly acute spurts. It didn’t quite reduce me to tears this time around, but it did in some ways paralyze me, forced me to call into question exactly what I am doing with the short time given to me in this universe.
We humans don’t function on this level of perspective most of the ti
