On the road again...

Assuming I find an Internet cafe in one of the towns over there, I'll be able to continue this story soon enough. My mind is spinning with thoughts about surfacing, categorizing, vlogging, volunteering, aggregating, and the chaotic democratizing of story-telling exploding all over the web. Maybe some travel will clear my cache.

When I get my next opportunity I need to explain to the boys about the relationship between mosquitoes and water. They seem to have drawn the conclusion that the swarms in our backyard were attracted by their water gun fight. My mind was elsewhere, but my ears recorded their conversation when it happened several nights ago. It just resurfaced now.

One thing I have none of now is peace. My life is agitated, the pace I maintain is frightful. As computers and humans merge, we'll have to solve this 7-24 problem. Okay, outta here...



Happy holiday weekend, everyone, especially my dear volunteers. Get wet if you can.

Also, an update via Brad's Cool Blog, current post, comment two: Welcome Esmond!

Traffic reports

First, welcome any Wiredlings who visit, now so many of us have been aggregated by Adam Powell at:

http://wiredminds.typepad.com/

I hope to post more on technology topics pretty soon, as more and more friends seem to be headed back to start-up land. One I commend to all of you is Mike Lanza's Click TV at:

http://www.click.tv/

Ever since the advent of email, I love the way old friends and contacts track me down, and vice versa. Just today I heard from one of the professors at the Media Leaders Forum at LSU that I was part of back in my days at Salon. We'd been out of touch for probably 8 years; I think she must have found me through wikipedia. In any event, I accepted her invitation to be a guest lecturer at their Baton Rouge campus for a few days. Should be fun.

I've really screwed up this year in brand new ways. Missed the IRS filing deadline for the first time. Forgot to pay my cell phone bill; they freeze those numbers really fast. Skipped car maintenance for 8,000 miles. Got lucky there; the vehicle shows no signs of damage from my neglect.

Maybe it operates on remote control anyway. Yesterday morning, taking a different route in order to reach Colma (a city with many more dead people than the live kind), which is where the dealership is located, my car locked onto a certain vehicle and just followed it through traffic, changing lanes, all the way there.

I was listening to NPR, chewing gum, and paying zero attention. As we reached the Colma exit, I suddenly felt a strange self-awareness of what I had beeen doing. I'd been locked on like a tracker behind a beautiful peppercorn-colored Mini.

Guess my modest little sedan, like a puppy seeking its mother, tapped into its memory bank, and thought it had found its long-lost friend, the one whose rear bumper it always kissed when we shared that tight little parking spot on 27th.

And, from the title, of this, you thought I was going to talk about page views?



That's one cute butt. (That must be my car talking.)

Rauschenberg

Here it is!

My life as an art dealer*

Hurricanes have followed me around for years. My friend Gus is a contractor on Sanibel Island off of Florida's Gulf Coast. We got to know each other because both of us had daughters who were home schooling. After one big storm hit the islands, Gus drove around helping people do repairs and get their lives back in order. He did it in a neighborly kind of way, not for money or expecting to find clients.

One man he helped on Sanibel's sister island, Captiva, was named "Bob." He appreciated Gus's help so much he did become a client. "Bob" turned out to be Robert Rauschenberg, and over the next few years, as Gus built his seaside studio, the artist paid for his work not only with cash but with original paintings as well.

To make a very long story short, Gus called me and asked if knew anyone who might like to buy them. Now, don't get too excited, because over the next few years I only managed to sell three Rauschenbergs for Gus, but I think that helped him and his family make it through some pretty down years in the local economy.

I'll try to post a print here sometime of the one painting that Gus still has, so far as I know, a beautiful piece with a heron against a red background. And when I next see him (which will be soon), I'll update this story.

BTW, the construction business is booming all along all of the Gulf Coasts, courtesy of all the terrible storms brought to you by Global Warming, the industry-sponsored future scientists warned about back in my Rolling Stone years, only to face personal attacks and ridicule paid for by the very polluters responsible in the first place.

But that is another story.



*with all due respect to Lincoln Steffens

Our shadows

One of my other blogs is devoted only to the language of street art, but it occurs to me that my visitors here might appreciate a recent posting I made there, so I will reproduce it here, rather than inconvenience you to follow that link.

The story behind this image is my lover and I were strolling along The Embarcadero one late afternoon, when we spotted this boat in the Bay and I shot it, unwittingly capturing our shadows in the process. (I'm not much of a photogragher, clearly.) Soon afterwards, she sped up her pace as we neared Pier 39, where she bought caramel apples, one of her favorite treats.

Why do I tell this story?

Because I have to. I don't understand why this is happening to me -- why I had to lose my muse. We used to talk for hours; I told her all of my stories. And she told me hers. Maybe, in the end, she grew tired of my story-telling.

So now I shout these story fragments out into the wind, and wait for a reply that never arrives. All I hear now is my own echo. So my voice is growing weaker...

Who knows how or when this story will end? Not me.

Tonight, let me start again with this beautiful little story of two lovers, fragile and lonely. It is very romantic. Neither anticipated the other. They might have lived their lives out and never have met.

But they did. Then they lost each other. It's a sad story, tragic even. But it isn't over yet. I can't write its ending, because I don't know what it is.

Tomorrow, maybe I'll start all over once again, by writing about some of the special moments when I first realized I was falling in love with her. It was a season very much like this one, with warm summer nights, and the fog thoughtfully held itself hovering offshore, until the two of us could warm each other against its frightful assault.

But for now, I need to tend to my wounds, and my voice is slipping away from me. I can't hear myself because her silence is deafening...

That hole in my heart

Just when I think it may be shrinking, something happens to cause it to open up again. Can a relationship really be over when one party continues to feel as I do? I guess it isn't over for me, at least, if I listen to my intuition and my instinct.

She remains silent on this and all such questions.

***

My little girl got the note she has been waiting for, from J, for a month. She loved it, and got tears in her eyes as she read it. Then she taped it next to her bed. "I don't want to ever lose this, Daddy. I'll look at it before I go to sleep, it will be my sleeping note."

Young hearts fall in love too.

The fish house

We'd stick close to him, as we wended our way along the path through the woods at the edge of camp, following the circle illuminated ahead by his Coleman lantern. I tried to keep my arm stiff enough to not spill too much water out of the sloshing pail filled with our catch, while swatting mosquitoes with my free hand. Our shadows danced over the birch trees, their white dark lightening the night every bit as the stars above.

My sisters and I usually went along with him on these nightly excursions to "help" him prepare our dinner. Then the door of the smelly little building slammed behind us, and we hung up the lantern from an overhead hook. Looking back, we weren't much help, but we did provide him company.

And I, as usual, provided him an excuse to try and teach me how to clean fish. In our family, those summers, this was actually a pretty essential skill, much like how to get the car started when it broke down, or the outboard engine on our small rented boat going again when it flooded.

He poured the fish out on the metal and wood table top, with a large hole in the center, underneath which was a garbage can filled with the remains of others' catch. We had the usual array of perch, sunfish, croppies, bass, and an occasional pike.

The fish were usually still alive when we laid them out on the table, and some still flopped. These he stilled with a quick blow to the head from his pliers. "That's what you do about that," he said. Then he scaled each fish, before cutting it's head off and proceeding to produce fillets that my mother would be cooking up soon afterward.

One sister shivered at the fish heads in the garbage can, their eyes still wide and glassy. "Can they still see?" she wanted to know.

Dad was too engrossed in teaching me how to clean each type of fish to answer. Over the years, however, I almost never cleaned anything, because he did too good a job. I just watched, my mind drifting out toward the sounds of the forest around us. There were raccoons, skunks, possums, rabbits, deer, bear and lots of other animals in those years.

Like most kids I knew, I was scared that a bear would corner us sometime way out on the trail. We liked to gather blueberries, which led us straight into their habitat, so it wasn't an entirely baseless fear, but no doubt wildly exaggerated by my overactive imagination and the sports magazines I'd read with articles about brave hunters shooting charging grizzlies.

The bears in these parts were mostly black bears, hardly the type to inspire fear, but that didn't stop me.


***


Twenty years later, I was carrying a pail filled with fish out on our long dock one summer's night, as my oldest child tagged along with me. In a phone call earlier that night I had learned of Dad's heart attack. He was a day's drive north of me, and I was waiting now for the follow-up, to find out how serious his condition was from the doctors, and to set my plan to drive there and visit him the following day.

I turned on our battery-powered lantern, and laid out our catch -- sheepshead, mackerel, sea trout. Several flopped so I bashed them over the head with a stick.” Those eyes, Daddy, can they still see?" asked my tiny daughter.

Not nearly as efficiently or successfully as my father would have done it, I proceeded to fillet our dinner. Times were much better and this was strictly supplemental food to our diet. Some mosquitoes came after us. Off the dock something big jumped and splashed. My little girl shivered and edged closer to me and our little circle of light there in the wide blackness of the bay, under an enormous sky filled with the Milky Way.

Inside the house, I heard the phone start to ring. I tossed the remains of my work into the bay for the crabs to feast on, picked up our dinner fillets, and, holding her hand, walked slowly back inside, thinking:

Maybe I learned some things from him, after all?

Here we are fishing together in Florida a few years before the night described above.

Our house

This is the kind of random beauty of clutter I encounter from time to time.

A different face in every mirror

So, there are always a couple ways to read any article, and far be it for me to simplify that challenge for any readers who may choose to grace my site with a visit tonight or tomorrow.

Maybe this is about aging. Or maybe about our views of ourselves as compared what others see in us (or don't). Or maybe it is about our emotional age, quite a different number than our biological age, IMHO.

Anyway, I notice every morning when I look in my bathroom mirror that, perhaps due to the lighting or the angle or the color scheme in that small room or some other factor that I seem to look pretty good. It's like, "Dude, you're okay, no wonder some women still find you attractive."

That's nice enough, but later when I return to my bedroom, a much larger room with different lighting, a different mirror and a different color scheme, I seem suddenly to look perfectly awful!

Who is that man and how did he age so rapidly walking from one end of his flat to the other?

Something similar happens at work between the elevator mirror and the one in the men's room. I'm not sure what I am looking for when I look in mirrors, but is most definitively is not to find out I have aged myself out of any definition of beauty altogether, because I still have my ego, you know?

Does this happen to everyone as we grow older? America is so much the land that celebrates youth, but demographically we are graying rapidly.

Then there is the matter of the human mirrors we provide for each other. You don't have to have studied Jung to be aware that our Western concept of romantic love includes a strong element of falling in love with how another special person sees us. What (s)he reflects back to you is intoxicating in a way no drug could ever be. Once somebody sees your inner beauty in a new way, that helps you feel valued and loved, it is like no other experience, and you are going to be hooked to his/her attention.

Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who is the most beautiful of all? The one who thinks you are. That is the essence of love. Turn away from him or her at your own peril. You may well find lust or some other value elsewhere, but the way our world works, you won't easily find that kind of love again.

Or, maybe that is my mirror image talking. Nothing is simple, let alone the image that surprises us in the mirrors surrounding us. Especially the human mirrors. Each new one sees a new you.

Online dating

So, I’ve never done it, but lots of people do. The geek in me wonders about creating algorithms for love. A decade ago, when I was at Wired Digital, the creators of SecretAdmirer.com stopped by for a visit. Their idea was you could send someone an anonymous email telling her she had a secret admirer; if she guessed it was you and entered your email address -- ping! -- we would have a match. I liked the idea but my colleagues with MBAs did not, so we never got to do business with them.

Since then, of course, social networking and personals services have exploded into one of the major features of the online world. I know people who put up profiles and use dating services all the time. This seems like a pretty efficient way to conduct "casual dating," one of those terms that confuses me, but seems to have grown in popularity along with the web. I'm fairly certain it includes sex, NSA.

Given the topics I write about, Google's AdSense engine sometimes chooses ads for my site about how to mend a broken heart, meet new people, etc. In case you don't know how it works, AdSense crawls my blog, identifies keywords, and matches advertisers to those keywords. Those are what those little blue links at the top of this page represent.

Back to online dating. As I said, I haven't tried that, but I did post to a site asking for female readers who might help me mend my broken heart by reading my blog. This is different from dating, of course, but how could I date anyone new when my heart still totally belongs to another? It wouldn't be fair to any of us.

Besides, I have no doubt that any woman reading this blog carefully would run in the opposite direction before proposing to start a relationship with the likes of me. I quite clearly qualify as "damaged goods," as I have been told.

Heading south

Not literally (I wish I were) for I love to visit the South in summer and for many years I did, usually to Sanibel Island, where we had a place, in the Gulf of Mexico north of the Florida Keys. This summer I'd thought about us visiting there again as part of a return through Biloxi, but that's before the breakup. Now, I just dream about the South and its many charms.

No, I'm heading south emotionally, after some bad experiences converged to knock me off of the higher ground I'd recently achieved. It seems like every step forward is followed by two steps back. The cycle of emotions never stops, propelling me toward heights of hopefulness; then plunging me into dark depressions.

At least, I'm out in the world a bit, connecting with friends, eating well, sleeping better. Over the worst months of loneliness and sadness I dropped 30 pounds -- who says a broken heart isn't a serious illness? My apppetite disappeared, and I often skipped meals if no one was around to eat with me.

Sleep was erratic. My 3 a.m. nightmares all centered on losing her to another; that I had already lost her to someone; that the deep trust I'd placed in her was in fact misplaced. Somewhere along the way, I must have misplaced my own essential sense of balance.

I became unhinged.

Now, just when I thought I was better, there have been more setbacks, disappointments, confusions and sadnesses overtaking me. This is apparently the summer not of the South as my physical reality but very much the summer of my descent.

The Problem Is...

So I'm tooling along, minding my own business, on this lovely Gay Pride weekend, one of my favorite times of year in this City, when all of a sudden a memory pops up to ruin it all. The weather here has been gorgeous and rare, a time when windows can be left open at night and you don't need PJs to be warm in bed. The back door is open to the sun setting over the Pacific, and the sounds of the kids' latest basketball party drift up to my bedroom/office, where books and papers compete with electronic equipment, almost a telescoped war of old and new media forms, fought right here in real time.

I'm staring at a photograph of two hands, their little fingers intertwined; her middle finger is wearing a turquoise-and-silver ring; his pinky wearing a black-and-silver ring. There's no blaming the world in general for this sentimental touch, as this is my bedroom, so I put it there. Sometimes, I've put that photo away, in anger, sadness, resentment, or more vague feelings of discontent. But I always get it out again.

I snapped that photo on our last night together in New York, almost three months ago now. It was the night before we agreed to "break up," which we did the following morning back in San Francisco -- or Redwood Shores, to be specific, as she dropped me off at my office.

Later that same day, I started this blog. So it's coming up on Q-1, as we like to say in the private sector, on this breakup, and how are we doing?

Well, the overall outlook may still seem bleak, but recently there are indications the bullish trends that have dominated recent months may be weakening their stranglehold on the entities in question. The markets remain unsteady, but with the advent of warm weather, yours truly has started to host these backyard parties, inviting various guests, and delighting in them meeting each other. The other night I introduced three women writers to each other; none of them had ever before met, though I've known all three for years. Tonight I am welcoming back home an old friend, another writer, and introducing him to an editor he's worked with, but never met.

I love hosting parties like these ones, informal, the kids having fun on their own, the adults connecting through conversation. I drift in and out, as usual, since my self-diagnosed attention-deficit disorder prevents me from concentrating on any one topic for longer than a few minutes.

But I'm doing all the right things, aren't I, for a man in my position? My heart aches for her. But I am trying not to isolate, but to share (here) and in person with friends, what this feels like for me. Before tonight's party, I took my two little red-haired boys to a game store where they wanted to spend their allowances.

I was listening to my bluegrass music, admiring the outfits of returnees from the parade, especially any pretty girls who came into view, with their skimpy dresses, tank tops, shorts, tight pants, etc. Visual cues, as I call them. Then, all of a sudden, as I pulled up to the game store, it wasn't today but last November 15th. I was in this same neighborhood, but alone with her. There is the car wash where she got her Mini ready to drive across the country for the first time. There's the Chinese coffee shop where I bought her one last coffee and pastry before she hit the road.

That time, unlike her departure last month, she firmly promised she would be returning to me. But I had felt very uneasy as she pulled away, smoking a cigarette, her window down, the music loud, simply because I could see how happy her flight was making her.

Our more recent parting was far sadder and much more explicit. This time, she cried as I held her for the last time, and when she drove away, it was without any promises to me at all, except that we will always be friends, and she will always "love" me. But I'm not sure what love means to her, any more.

So, suddenly this late afternoon, the ghosts of our recent past overtook me. More images found their way into the view from my windshield as I drove the boys back from the store. Her old apartment, or at least its roof, with that little room tacked on up top. We rarely went there, but we did the first day I convinced her to let Chip go outside after a long, wet winter.

The park, where we went and she played her banjo.

A coffee house, where sat together, me feeling so proud that this lovely creature was my girlfriend, no one else's.

Gone. She's gone. I have no girlfriend.

I have memories, I have my friends, I have my children, and I have a huge hole in my heart. It's summertime. I miss my lover, now so far away. Does she ever miss me?

A World of One's Own

A study published in the American Sociological Review, and funded by the National Science Foundation, found that one in every four Americans consider themselves socially isolated, lacking anyone with whom they can discuss personal issues. The size of this cohort has doubled in the past 20 years.

Meanwhile, over the same period, 50 percent more people reported that their spouse is now the only confidant they have. So, here's my take. As friendships have been unraveling all across the land, we've been coupling up, becoming our partner's best friend, putting so much pressure on our partnerships that they almost inevitably break down.

That's when the real trouble begins. Because, when your most intimate friend leaves you, the magnitude of the isolation monster surrounding around you suddenly rears its terrible face, looming in the dark at 3 a.m., night after night. You're alone and you always will be, forever and ever, amen.

This is a bad dream. Of course, there is one thing you can do, and that's reach out and try to break through some of social structures that confine us one from the other, all feeling lonely, isolated, sad, unlovable. As I write this, I suddenly have an image of the men at Guantanamo Bay, held in isolation these many years, and their repeated attempts, sometimes successful, to kill themselves.

The image I have is actually from a stage in the Village, where my girlfriend and I saw that play about the horrors of Gitmo as told in the words of some of the inmates. That is one thing Americans know very well -- the torture of being isolated -- so it is what we impose on those we hate or fear the most, the alleged "terrorists" caught up in our worldwide sweep of potential "enemy combatants."

Where was I? My political anger ran away with me for a moment there. Unlike those being held in caged cells at Gitmo or Bagram, we presumably are only under house arrest, builders of our own traps. My girlfriend has always said, "As long as someone has you in their mind, you are not alone."

I'm not a sociologist, so I don't have a coherent theory about all of this, though I do have a plan. Especially when it comes to facing that scary monster in the middle of the night. As usual, I got my idea from a song, in this case, Bob Dylan:

"I'll let you be in my dream, if I can be in yours."