When I was 17,  I almost went to live in a Buddhist monastery for a year.  Someone talked me out of it, altering my future in ways I can never know.  I wish I’d gone. Instead, my life slipped into the American, middle-class trajectory followed by so many, including the habit of collecting posessions and imbuing them with meaning. Now, at 42, I’m sitting here in my living room, filled with my possessions, a veritable castle of meaningful objects. That Alexander Calder print over the fireplace? That’s not just any print, it’s my print. It’s a stone in the castle that is my identity, built up stone by stone, its gravity planting me solidly into life and the world. 

Yesterday I bought a car, an old Volvo. I haven’t owned a car in two years, and already I can feel the weight of this car pulling on me. I enjoy the freedom it’s brought me to travel places for my work and for my elderly mother, but I fret about the oil leak, I tensed when I had to crank it twice this morning.  These things hint at problems, and money I may have to give up in great chunks, chunks a monk could nibble on peacefully for years, riding a bicycle, feeling sunlight and smelling the earth instead of exhaust. 

For one year at 17 I would have owned nothing. And then? And now? I own such beautiful things. My furniture is almost all mid-century modern, stylized and made by craftsmen who loved their work. But maybe even the most beautiful piece is less than the empty space it occupies.  

And when the ties are all cut through death, I shudder at the thought of my estate sale. Strangers will waddle into my home, finger my possessions and try to haggle down the cost of things I loved. Christ, I hope I have enough time in the end to burn it all or sell it and give the money away. 

Or maybe I will die like Walt Whitman, penniless and smiling. Regardless, God help me, I have undeniably become a middle-aged man feeling the push of obligations and ownership and the pull of freedom he fears is lost. Will I ever again spend a day on the beach with the summer before me? I don’t mean as a condo-owning, water park customer on vacation.  I mean that place I occupied existentially—living, enjoying my freedom instead of being terrified by, as Kundera called it, the unbearable lightness of being. That lightness, we try to counter it with the weight of objects imbued with meaning. I fear they drag me down, suffocating me, making me a prisoner instead of the free creature I understood I was supposed to be when I was 17.

A Mormon anti-porn group is calling on ICANN to ban all porn from Port 80, the standard protocol port for the web. ICANN is considering the petition, and has asked for public comments. You can send ICANN your comments—hopefully telling them you oppose the petition—by emailing cyber-safety-petition@icann.org.

Not surprisingly, Utah leads the nation in online porn viewers. 

Elsewhere:

• cp80.org is the website created by the Mormon Church to organize support for the petition. 
• Read current ICANN comments here.  
• Get more information about the proposal from  ICANN’s website, or from news articles on the proposal.

I just got home from having coffee with a guy.  It wasn’t a date, but I couldn’t get comfortable. My friend has a very loud voice, a voice that projects, so he was effectively shouting to the whole coffee shop. People were looking at us. I tried to keep my voice low—lower than usual—in the hope that I’d lead him to talk more quietly. It didn’t work. And just that scenario—me over here whispering, him shouting and shouting—made the night hopeless. I ended up walking home, just to be in the night air by myself. I like myself, I’m comfortable with myself. I think I’ll always be alone and lonely if every encounter remotely close to a date rubs and pinches like new shoes. Where is my friend, the new friend whose presence feels familiar, comfortable, right, easy, resonates, smiles and recognizes me? “Like knows like,” the Greeks would say. Somewhere someone understands, and one night I’ll have coffee with him.

While some people whistle while they work, I prefer to listen to smart podcasts while doing my Sunday cleaning. Among my favorites is The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe which each week scrutinize popular claims (vaccines cause autism), theories (intelligent design) and general mumbo jumbo (Tom Cruise).  Fortunately, the hosts aren’t a bunch of angry adolescent atheists poking sacred cows, they’re adults who clearly love science and critical thought. Give it a listen and judge for yourself.

Coolibar Face Shield Mask.  Coolibar’s slogan should be, “Our customers frighten easily, but they’ll be back, and in greater numbers”.

This concern that I wrote about yesterday, that I have been neglecting friends and family, actually started around Christmas. It began when I received no Christmas presents. Not one. I’m reluctant to tell people when such pathetic things happen to me, but I told one of my friends who’s a Muslim. His only response was, “Did you give anyone a present?” 

The answer was No. I don’t get many presents on most years, so in reality it wasn’t the lack of presents, it was the lack of friends and family who wanted to give me presents.  My friend’s question made me ask myself what I’d been doing over the past year to care for such relationships. Had I visited? Christ, my niece is two years old and I’ve never met her. My dear cousin’s been married for 10 years and I’ve never met her husband in person. At most I’ve been communicative and available for friends and family, but my real time, my energy and real space presence have been given almost exclusively to my work. I love my work…. But I’m a failure if I love my work at the expense of people I love too. 

And the soundtrack to this epiphany was this song by Madeline which I played over and over and over this Christmas. Some songs are midwives. 

Good Houses by Madeline

As friends and visitors know, I live in Mississippi where I fight the good fight to elevate Human Rights in the south. It’s an adventure. Or so that’s the story I tell myself.  Autobiography is all story telling, for there is no objective narrative outside the story strung together by the narrator. Who would tell it otherwise? God? Even he would impose subjectivity onto his narrative. 

So, this is the story I tell myself, that I live in Mississippi and fight the good fight because I think it is important that Human Rights be elevated and human suffering be diminished. But the cost of living this adventure is forfeiting another kind of adventure that I wish I could also live. To see that adventure, I visit my friend Visty’s blog and listen to her narrative. Mine is full of monsters, hers full magic and fantastic creatures. Mine encounters brutal suffering at the hands of bully government. Hers meets love, home and family. 

I would not trade my adventure for hers now, and surely she would not trade hers for mine. Yet much of the goal of my adventure is to make the path safe so that abused Southern people can one day reach quiet, radiant lives like hers.  More personally, I look forward to the day that I can walk that path, albeit alone. 

My only real fear is that magic and fantastic creatures may not wait for us adventurers to find our ways home.  Maybe they wait around, but if neglected then they go somewhere else where people love them in the present.  If so, I’ll find them gone and all I will have are exciting stories of adventures to tell acquaintances, and the satisfaction of having helped people far away when I was younger. 

The Greek adventures almost always end in tragedy. Jason sets out bravely, but he’s killed when the bow of the Argo crashes down on his head. But Jason was a hero—and I don’t want to be a hero. I want to be a man, a human being (which is much harder to become than a hero).

Visty is a human being, and she makes the path safe every day. Somehow I have to learn to be more that kind of adventurer. I want that part of my narrative to be more like hers—full of friends, family and the penultimate victory of battles won by love. In the end, that is the narrative I want to be my own. I want to make the path safe abroad, but also the garden path safe at home for friends and family to come and go and come home again together.

I just woke up from a nightmare. I woke myself moaning loudly, “Come back!” I spooked my cat pretty badly. 

In the dream I was a ghost. Or, rather, I thought someone had mistaken me for a ghost. I knew I had to catch this person’s attention by jumping in front of him (as real ghosts will do, presumably), so I was running, running to position myself in front of him. Just when I thought I was in front of him, I moved to jump, but as I did so he bicycled ahead of me (he was apparently now on a bicycle). He was riding away from me down an isolated beach road—which is when I waived my hands and shouted, “Come baaaaaaack!”…and woke my cat. 

Fuck. Is that what ghosts go through every day? I’m exhausted and melancholy. Who was that guy?

For no reason I can name, tonight I’ve been thinking about Boulder. How did I not realize I was immersed in beauty when I worked at the bookstore, when the shy barista would bring me cups of hot chocolate and we’d step outside together in scarves and sweaters and smile genuine smiles? If only I’d appreciated how scarce such things are. I’d have tasted all of it more completely, kissed the barista more often, stood a minute longer outside in the cold and breathed in the clean air a while longer.

My mom is in surgery as I write this.  I’ve been sitting in the waiting area, sleeping on-and-off in these incredibly uncomfortable chairs. I’m glad I’m the kind of man who’s willing to sleep in public and look like a complete goof, my mouth hanging open, my head lopped to one side. I was sleeping really well, actually, when I was awakened by a very loud-talking man who chose my little corner of the waiting area to tell the dark story of his dying wife’s terminal prognosis. Still, it’s hard to be mad at anyone with that story to tell. 

My mom’s surgery is for knee replacement. Not the scariest surgery in the world, but still it is surgery and she’s 73 years old. I can’t help but be a little worried. 

Today is also my birthday. So my mom was in the hospital 42 years ago today as well. 

*Just got a call from the nurse… She says about another hour, but everything’s going well. They’re about to start the implanting. I hardly want to think about what preceded this point in the surgery.

It was a crazy party. Kittens, unfolded laundry, red sofas! Happy new year, everyone!