The first since I arrived in New York City.

I was beginning to wonder if the weather had any balls here. It has been far too balmy for October.

Today has been a productive day.

Today I have engaged in more “thought work” than I have done in ages. Years, at least. Not academic thought work, but personal thought work. I shall watch Otto e Mezzo tonight before I go to sleep.

I was troubled by the dream I had last night, and I still remember it and in a way am still troubled by it. But it has been helpful, and has led to the victory that is today. And it is a victory. I have, in a way, rediscovered myself, something that I suppose must be done every now and then—every few months or years, almost like a molting.

Bah. Bad metaphor. But no matter.

Life proceeds in cyclical stages, primarily because of the atomic and idiosyncratic nature of being. You are you, subject, and the revolutions, though evolutions, still always return to their origin in some way, despite the linearity of time, the multiplicity of reflection inherent in social being, and the silliness of crap.

Once a long time ago an instructor told me that I am an idiot prone to flashes of brilliance and I am happy to have internalized such a statement, though I sometimes wonder if I haven’t amended it to “When I flash, it is brilliant.”

—

I should have been a philosopher. Okay, I am a philosopher, but I mean professionally. I am in the “philosophical wing” of the social sciences. Social workers are aliens to me, while epistemologists are golf buddies. I suppose the primary reason I didn’t launch into a philosophy Ph.D. is that it’s the only doctorate less monetizable than the social sciences Ph.D.

—

I don’t talk to my cousins nearly enough. Doctors all, now, oddly. They were large influences on me when I was young. They were the people that I played with or admired, and the people at whose weddings I’ve stood. We need to rope this family in, bring it together. We are already a dynasty.

Not that I’m a capitalist or anything. 😉

—

The most redeemable thing about Goleta was Freebirds. What I wouldn’t give to have a Freebirds on the corner of 125th and Broadway. Silly rhetorical question. I would give exactly $20 right now to have a Freebirds on the corner of 125th and Broadway.

That total will no doubt increase.

You can not remake the world in your own image. That goes without saying.

But if you were to decide to try anyway, like Don Quixote throwing himself against the windmills, there is only one way to do it: principle first and action second and only as a result, without compromise, and never, ever be afraid.

That’s the main thing. If you’re determined to try to make the world in your own image, succeed or fail (and you will fail), you must not be afraid.

—

I look back at some moments in my life—at hard handshakes, deep stares, clear speaking, purposeful strides… and I realize that some of my favorite moments are also some of the most taut. I realize that I love conflict and I love resolution at its end. Conflict and resolution are symphonic, lovely, glorious.

I suppose that’s the testosterone in me. “War and peace” and so on. The opposition of wills, followed by their respectful agreement to disengage or the concession of the subdued. It’s a resonance so deep and forgotten that it’s not usually even detectable. But it’s there.

My god, we are members of the animal kingdom.

After the last couple of months and meeting new people from all over the world yet again, the thing that I keep thinking to myself is that on the whole, we Americans are a really angry, bitter, lonely people. Everyone else is talking without shame about their feelings: people that they love, people that they miss, things that they want from life, things that they enjoy.

We can’t do that here—it’s weakness. I could swear that a lot of Americans I’ve known don’t love or enjoy anything in the first place. An American talking about their friends and family is circumspect at best, sarcastic at worst. It’s not just British-style reserve, either. We really do tend to be damaged goods. We really are bitter to the point of comedy, especially in my generation. I suppose that’s a side effect of market economies.

Then, to talk to international students, so full of feeling—it makes you realize just what you’re missing, and just what you’ve missed by growing up here.

Or maybe it’s just people from the western half of the United States. I don’t know. I know we had the disease in Salt Lake City. And it’s as plain as the nose on your face in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Boise, and Seattle. Less so in Chicago. Hard to say in New York, since it’s such a melting pot.

But I really like some of the international students I’ve met. They’re different. More alive. I really like them a lot, and envy them in a way. It makes me want to leave the U.S. and go somewhere where people still care about each other.

It’s completely different this time around, in that so far the vast majority of the people I could say I “know” in New York are people in the neighborhood or people at school, rather than people in the building. I guess I hadn’t really thought much about the difference—I’m sort of an intutive thinker anyway, I let thinks percolate and then suddenly an question and an answer tend to burst forth at the same time—but in any case, I think I now know what the differences are.

First of all, obviously, it takes a different kind of person to go to Chicago vs. go to New York. I’m not talking about schools or institutions, but about the cities themselves. New York is (without a doubt) for climbers. That’s it. That’s what it’s here for. Chicago, on the other hand, is for sensualists—people who want the experience of being there, despite the knowledge that it’s not New York.

More to the point, though, International House Chicago was an island. It was on the University of Chicago campus, a small school and campus that are relatively alone as “professional” or “academic” venues in the otherwise disadvantaged south side of Chicago. Not only did every single person in International House Chicago attend the same small university, we (the university crowd) were the only people “like us” (young, educated, diverse, professional, representing a small handful of fields for which the university is famous) for miles around.

New York is… New York. Throw a rock here and you’ll hit a college, university, or professional institute. The crowd here attend a ridiculously broad assortment of institutions and disciplines. Musicians, artists, photographers, bankers, hard sciences, social sciences, philosophers, social workers, K-12 teachers… every morning when the leave, they go to different places, and when they return, they return from different places. We all know different people in our “day lives” that are not the I-House people. In Chicago, I had an assortment of different I-House friends in most of my classes. The difference in fields also makes a difference. I can keep up my end of the conversation about traditional university disciplines. Much less so about the insides of the trading floor on Wall Street or the subtleties of antiquarian chamber music instruments.

The diversity is interesting… but it also means that what we have in International House New York is “collegiality,” in the general case, as opposed to Chicago, where we had “deep familiarity.”

Of a particularly different dynamic in New York (and this carries beyond the walls of I-House) is the tendency of the crowd to separate along national lines, or more specifically, according to native tongue. This didn’t happen to nearly the same extent in Chicago as it does here.

I like I-House New York well enough, but I can now say with some measure of authority that it was much easier and more automatic to feel a part of things in I-House Chicago.

An uneasy morning. I have been trying to think, trying to reflect on things.

Everything is confusing to me these days, muddled and odd. It shouldn’t be this way. I feel as though there is a stronger core of being in me than there ever has been in the past, which stands to reason, since I’m older and more experienced than I ever have been in the past, as well as more credentialed.

I’ve written books, traveled most of the country, earned multiple degrees, worked on assembly lines and as management, earned through my artwork, founded companies, and read broadly.

I think that last one may be part of the problem: I am always reading these days. It has been a number of years since I regularly wrote creatively—not just wrote, but wrote creatively. Personally. There was a time, years ago, when I was an undergrad, during which I wrote almost continually. About myself, the things that I thought (not just political things, but all things), and about how I felt. “Men must talk about themselves until they know themselves” goes the saying, and I think today that it must be true.

I need to write more. Just about whatever, this and that. I need to post once a day, maybe twice a day, yet limit the number of times in a week I’m allowed to mention politics or philosophy. Also, I need to “design down” a little bit. This thing is so polished, so visual, so fast. On my side, it looks like a webform, it can be wedged between visits to CNN.com and my bank account and my approach to it is no different. Click. Click. Type. Click. Posted. On the front, it’s all colors and images and shapes.

There was a time not so long ago when this was just a diary. Not a blog, not a home page, just a diary online. It was black on white with a date. That needs to come back in my next incarnation, which I’ll probably build over winter break. I used to write in emacs—a text editor—for the postings. It was an act apart, a transcendence of my daily routine for a moment, to reflect back on it as an object. It wasn’t just another thing to do in a quick hit after laundry and before lunch.

My high school English teacher, years and years ago—Kathryn Romney was her name—said that the most important thing for a writer to do is write. Not to forms, necessarily. Not another chapter in the novel each day. Just write. So that you know how you think, how you feel. Good things will follow because you and others will read what you wrote and find it insightful.

The insight is in the honesty, and that honesty is lost… well, not lost… but maybe submerged when writing becomes a means-end oriented act, where the goal is to get some point about something out there, or to express some opinion in a public place, rather than merely to reflect.

I still have some of my ancient web diary code, written as a giant shell script for bash. I wonder if I could resurrect it in place of these “blogging” systems, since I’m really tired of “blogging.”

—

This New York (shall we say) excursion has been different from all that went before it in that I can see in this one the light at the end of the tunnel. Whether I get a Ph.D. or don’t ultimately, this will be my last visit to the academy. Suddenly I see “real life” and “middle and old age” open up before me like a meadow, like arctic tundra, like something that’s big, empty, open, full of an infinite number of directions.

And I ask myself: “What do I want, not now, but later?”

I guess it’s a classic question reformulated. The parental version is: “Where do you see yourself in ten years?”

For the first time ever, my answer is not “probably still in school.” This new answer opens up a whole realm of new possibilities. School is, after all, an entire lifestyle, a fully constructed set of circumstances, living arrangements, financial arrangements, relationships… it is an entire world unto itself. I often wonder if maybe this is why I’ve always hesitated to leave it: I’m invested and comfortable in the lifestyle that it circumscribes.

But soon, in a few years or maybe even sooner, depending on how winds blow, I’ll leave it forever, and be just myself and whatever I’m able to build for myself out there. What do I want that to be?

When I make for myself an idyllic scene, the “postcard from my soul,” if you will, I see myself middle aged, living somewhere suburban. How very ugly and American, I know. But that’s what I see. I live in a house (yes, it’s white) and have some semblance of a yard. I am mowing lawn and raking fall leaves and I’m happy about it. I have a dog. I watch football. My career? Either professor or writer, both of which now feel at least somewhat open to me. I have a wife. I (gasp) probably have a kid or two.

Recognize it? Yes, it’s the ugly American mythology. And it’s what I imagine to be the logical destination of all of youth, whether I’ve realized it before or not. Of course, my version is different from the traditional one in many ways as well. The house is smallish, probably 1,500 square feet or less. I’ve installed solar panels and wired the place for energy efficiency. I don’t have too many things. There is no giant television set, a relative lack of gadgetry and consumer goods. There is some basic, long lasting furniture and a computer for writing, etc., and whatever the rest of the family needs.

Family. That’s another thing. Mine and my spouse’s. They come and go, they visit, we are on good terms. There are people in my life, and they are not just neighborhood friends, co-workers, or acquaintances. It’s a warm, live-and-let-live sort of ethos with gentle nudges toward anti-consumerism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism. It’s very autumnal.

It’s not a kingdom. There are no edicts. It’s not me towering over my own space and the things that I claim, dominating them and everything that surrounds them in isolation.

Autumnal. I love that word. I love the season, I suppose. I think the picture in my mind must be New England somewhere, though God knows where, and of course since my family is west, far, far west, I’m not sure how that all works out.

I suppose it doesn’t. But that doesn’t change the fact that there are revelations for me here.

– I want to live in a house in the suburbs, not an apartment in the city?! Apparently.
– I like to mow lawn, rake leaves, and shovel snow, when all these years I thought I didn’t.
– I require falling leaves once a year. It is the season of my regeneration.
– I maybe don’t want to be as alone as I thought I did.
– I really am finally ready for a career, either in academics or writing. It’s been a long time coming.
– What do I really think about having kids? I’d always ruled it out. Now I’m not sure.

No doubt all of this musing will cause everyone I know except my own family and my adopted brother to disown me. Certainly most of the women and most of the progressives in my life will now be angry and disillusioned. I myself am a bit confused.

But I’m sitting in New York thinking, “I don’t want to live in New York. And I don’t want to be alone and work for myself and my own career for the rest of my life. I want to mow lawns, relax on a hammock, garden, teach.”

Maybe even teach K-12? If you’d said to me a year ago that I’d someday say “Maybe even teach K-12,” I’d have laughed like a hyena. Now… Now I remember all of the things I did in grade school. Gluing together hallowe’en decorations. Being taught how to write my first poem. Playing dodge-ball. In a world of negativity and cynicism, there are two places that I realize still hold no taint for me, or that I will not allow be tainted:

– Home, complete with family, wherever that eventually happens
– Childhood, even though bad things can happen during it

I suppose this is a kind of personal manifesto that says, I will someday make for myself a warm, busy home and I will someday find a way to reuinte with childhood, whether through education or through writing.

Let the dominoes fall as they may.

I hate dreaming. Nothing can knock the wind out of your sails and let you know how you really feel like dreaming can. Yeah, I love waking up sad and wistful. God.