proteanme

Lately,  I’ve been looking back a little and thinking of those times in my life when everything changed, like in my mid 30s when I quit my job at the Shelter. I was 34 then. HDG and I went on a big road trip out west right away. Our 2nd one in 6 months. I can still remember driving Kings Canyon and missing a turn off and the nerve wracking climb back up the road that edged the mountain. We both tried so hard not be distracted (aka terrified) by the sheer drop off. I think we smoked a butt load of cigarettes to manage. I went back to school and started dating HL when I was 35, and then graduated from college (finally) and moved to Portland when I was 36.  Somewhere in there I also became friends with Bec and David, Jim and Ned and the whole Carmel crew. I started playing electric guitar and recording with whoever would play with me and reading Foucault and Chomsky and Zinn and listening to Pavement and the Pixies and Liz Phair, Stereolab, the Beach Boys and Johnny Cash. I started riding my bike again. And playing racquetball. I started running. I started having a relationship with my Dad.  I became a vegetarian for  a while. I became friends with a born again Christian dude. I started becoming a programmer, even though I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. Much of it was unplanned. Much of the rest of it was not planned very far in advance. Maybe the only real plans were: quit the Shelter, go back to school and move to Portland. All big stuff which I let open me up in a way that I had not been open for a long time. Which is why I think that so much from that time, friends, music, riding, reading, has stuck with me, become part of who I am now.

This year has a seminal feeling about it. For totally different reasons than 16 years ago and definitely with less exterior shit going on, at least for now (the future is tough to predict, though). But I am open again in my heart and head and there’s some big and grand stuff going on the inside.

Last night I was walking back to the house after walking MTB out to her car; it was kinda late the sky was bright but you couldn’t see the moon. There was a thin layer of clouds covering the sky, but you knew the moon was right there. You could feel it every where around you.