People that say they’re tough tend not to be very tough in the end.

Actually tough people don’t want it put about that they’re tough before it’s needed. The less everyone knows, the better. If everyone knew you were tough, it would kill the advantage that toughness gives you.

That’s what you learn on the playground, and you learn it pretty early.

Don’t be afraid of the tough guys. Be afraid of the quiet guys that don’t flinch.

I was in the fifth grade. Ten years old? Eleven? In the Equip program, which would later be retired as semi-private extensions to the public school system for the “gifted” kids became controversial.

We were dancing in a performance for our parents, everyone in Mrs. Hooper’s fifth and sixth grade combined classroom.

I had my hair slicked back, a black leather jacket and rolled up jeans. Leather shoes. We’d spent weeks learning to dance the jitterbug like proper kids of the period, listening to period music, reading period works and period news. Now here we were, dancing on stage.

I’m not much of a natural dancer; there was and is zero dance and very little music in the cultural DNA of my mixed highly-religious-highly-Asian family. But on this occasion—on this occasion I was feeling it. The outfit, the music, the lights, the immersion had all come together to embed me in the period and in the moment.

And then my hair started to flop around. A little bit at first, and then a lot. The spell was breaking; I no longer felt like Chinese Fonzie so much as like a kid in the fifth grade getting embarrassed on stage. I started to stumble. I said to my partner, mid-song, “My hair’s breaking loose! Oh shit, is it bad?!”

Molly Gallivan. She was in the sixth grade and pretty, so she had a natural authority in that moment as we kept our feet moving and our hands clasped. She used it.

“Shut up and dance. Just shut up and dance!”

And so we did.

Out of the mouths of babes. Funny where the wisdom that we take for granted in our lives comes from, when you get a moment to reflect on it.

The thing that happens next in my life is all about this blog. No, that’s not a metaphor, that’s in fact the case.

I need to get the archives integrated, and merge this with my “home page” and resume stuff somehow. It pains me to leave out all the behind-the-scenes content (for example, the 2011 blog had a massive, complex Drupal backend into which I poured research notes, quotes, citations, papers, and a million other things, more advanced than anything DevonThink has ever put together) but that’s too massive a conceptual task to figure out. So I’ll get all the old public material integrated, and merge it with my persona content.

Then, I need to sit down and have a long, long read. A read of myself, what I’ve written. My own path.

Somehow, I feel like that’s the next step. I’m turning 40. It’s the right moment. Time for a personal life-in-review before I try to figure out what’s next.

It will take a while. Already when I printed this out once in 2005 intending to do this, it was about 1,100 pages. Now it will be longer. But it is what it is. It needs to be done.

And then?

And then…

I know why I don’t ask questions in conversation that open paths for further discussion, but rather shut it down.

Because when the people I want to be closest to close themselves off in response and don’t answer—when the answer is an emotional wall—it kills me.

So best to take what I can get and accept it (“that’s great”) rather than ask a question that’s hoping for a ten-paragraph answer and get a one-word answer with the smell of finality about it instead.

It’s another defense mechanism. It comes out when I know they won’t share themselves with me anyway, generally because they have repeatedly said no already, which I can’t argue with, and each time, I have had a river to drink afterward. And at some point, you have to be kind to yourself and stop beating your head against the rather innocent pavement, which is only being what it is.

There are some defense mechanisms you can’t let go of. They’re there because you actually do need to be defended in order to be okay. Because you need to exercise some self care and stop trying to be close if other people just want to be farther away.

— § —

But is it really me, these feelings, or is it a momentary “cognitive distortion?”

Will the real me please stand up?

And is the real me sustainable in all of this?

Is she going to “lose me” after all? I hope not. I wish things were easier. I wish I was the person that she needed right now.

But I need to stay the person that I need me to be. That’s the long and short of it.

That’s the thing. The thing that has to be faced. The thing that makes the sky spin.

Well let’s see, how quickly can I put this thing to bed?

Never fast enough, it seems.

Regrets, regrets.

This morning I feel young. I took off my jacket and I felt as though my shoulders and arms were the same as they have always been, as they were when I was 20.

They’re not, of course. But they felt that way. It was nice.

— § —

Some people make money doing this kind of thing. They sell advice online through their blogs and earn a living doing it.

I could never do that.

They do it a bit differently, of course. Their properties are presented in such a way as to support ad money and social sharing, and they focus and hone their “articles” for impact and for Facebook-friendly headlines.

Thing is, most of them have f**ked up lives themselves. At best, ups and downs. At worst, their blogs are a weird amalgam of “I am completely off the beam and full of mistakes in everything I try to do. So here’s what you should do.”

I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. I couldn’t presume to give advice to anyone who didn’t find me and ask for it. Even then, I’d include a disclaimer.

“I seriously don’t have anything figured out. I mean, look at my life. Are you sure you want advice? Come back in an hour and ask me again, when you’ve had a chance to think about it.”

— § —

Last night I stayed up and did some data migration. I now have all entries from 2004 to mid-2009 and from mid-2011 to present in a single database. I’ve exported a bunch of Drupal nodes from previous versions. That’ll get me mid-2009 through mid-2001.

By tonight, hopefully, I’ll have mid-2004 through present all online in one place. That will leave the raw HTML blogs from 1999 through 2003 to cope with. I don’t think I still have the source files for those (the HTML files were actually rendered by a shell script from a fairly simply formatted text database, my own code back then). So I’ll have to do some parsing and cleanup.

Maybe by the middle of next week, I will have one blog that contains all of my public blogging from November 1999 through January 2016 all in one big timeline.

— § —

Why now?

Because now I’m brave enough to do it. And there is an opening.

– My academic career is likely not going to happen, having suffered suicide
– My wife is not living with me and isn’t sure at times that she likes me anyway
– I am in the middle of a massive self-teardown and self-rebuild
– There is still every chance that my life circumstances will fall apart
– So, in short, I do not give two s**ts about caution

It is time to own up to myself, to own up to it all, in front of the whole world, and see what we have here. What is salvageable, and what it means for where I should go. There’s no point in trying to obfuscate any longer.

My wife never liked some parts of me, including the blogging parts, since they were somehow dark and unreassuring. But right now she’s often not seeing any part of me as reassuring, at the very core of things, so what’s to hesitate about any longer? This is me. It is the me she married, and she knew it, and she read, and she married me anyway.

So after years of not doing this, I’m back to doing this and owning this.

— § —

It’s when I’m working on this, which is turning out to be something of a life’s work, the only one I really have, that I have sustained throughout my adult life, that I hear music in my head. The rest of the time, I live a basically music-free existence these days. It doesn’t fit anywhere, and marketing (day job) and kids (night life) don’t really lend themselves to beat drops.

But here—here, when I type—all I hear is music. Silent, internal. Insistent.

David Bowie right now. Maybe David Bowie forever. I continue to feel a kind of awe at his work, now that he’s gone. I wonder what it was like to be him, what he thought about when he was alone looking out a window for a moment, how he felt about his life and career. The meta of it all.

— § —

Chicago is a dream. Los Angeles is a dream. Portland is a dream. New York is a dream.

There are a thousand dreams in my life, things that I totally made up, complete fictions that were obviously never real. The story of my Ph.D. The story of my life as an editor. The story of my M.A. The story of my travels up and down the west coast. The story of my life as a Linux guy. The story of my life as a professor. The story of my life as a small mixed-race kid on the west side of Salt Lake City. The story of me.

Light reading, unfocused writing, something to peruse when you don’t have anything else to do, late at night.

But they’re all here, in this anthology of short stories starring the same flawed, often unlikeable character.

It’ll never be published—the quality, focus, pacing, and plot just aren’t there, not to mention that the author narrates rather than using vivid writing, describes rather than shows everything—but it’s a valiant attempt by a student that always wanted to tell stories and is getting a chance to do so before he graduates to Real Life someday.

— § —

Chartreuse and coffee.

Once upon a time, I turned up every day at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein library drinking just that, spinach and feta in other hand, purple hair, strange trousers, to study and to be.

I’m still that guy. Can’t shake him. Every single detail is now different, but turning up to study and to be in a kind of glorious, apologetic strangeness… that’s me, boy. That’s me.

— § —

“So you train by shadow boxing,
search for the truth
But it’s all, but it’s all used up
Break open
your million dollar weapon
And you push, still you push,
still you push your luck…”