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 Reading posts from months past, like any proper historical document, take me back to a time long gone, a time where I was living in a very different place, struggling with very different things.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.
Posted by davidtaus at July 5, 2007 03:27 AM | TrackBack