Saying Goodbye

I thought I was alone. I knew I had friends, some good friends, some acquaintances. But ultimately I thought I was alone in a city filled with people. Unnoticed, invisible, able to slip in and out without a whisper.

How I was wrong. Once I began telling people of my decision to leave San Francisco, the response was overwhelming. I went on a whirlwind tour of dinners, brunches, coffees, going away parties. People were sad, some visibly so. But most understood. I have a wonderful opportunity waiting for me, a chance to check out for awhile and write in solitude until the economic storm lets up a bit. Still, they were sad.

And that makes me a bit sad. What a missed opportunity, to have brilliant, creative, sophisticated, engaging, kind-hearted people in my life and yet sit alone in the corner feeling sorry for myself. And yet what a revelation.

I spoke with a friend recently who related the story of her ex, who's gone a bit, shall we say, "off". Amongst the stories he's telling himself is that he has no friends, no one to hang out with or turn to. As we talked about how sad it was that he was so delusional and self-destructive, I had to bite my tongue. I understand this. It's a strange veil of occlusion, pulled down by a hand of habits. Some of us habituate depression. When we falter in coping with a major disappointment, we revert not to anger or defensiveness but the stance of failure. We use the disappointment as ammunition to say that yes, in fact we are weak / clumsy / stupid / a failure. It's a delusion. But that delusion begins to spread and infect the truer, brighter moments of our lives.

I think it's common to see ourselves as alone in our misery. In addition to being grateful for all the amazing friends I have in San Francisco, I'm grateful for cracking open that delusion in time to appreciate what I have, if only for a few days. That I can see this and still feel right about my decision to go tells me I'm on the right path.  I'll miss many, many things about this city. But one thing I'll take with me is the knowledge that the party starts right here. All I have to do is ask people to join it.

And in moments of darkness, no matter how lonely I feel, I'm never truly alone.

Transitions

This is my life today. I'm sitting in Coffee to the People at the corner of Masonic and Haight, San Francisco. One block to the east is my home, next door to the former residence of Jimi Hendrix. One block to the west is the famed Ashbury part of Haight and Ashbury, a street corner immortalized by a single rowdy summer and mountains of press. I still don't quite understand why that corner in particular - Masonic is much more of a happening street. And Central, where I live, is at the edge of "Hippie Hill", aka Buena Vista Park.

In any case, it's a pretty mellow day. Not packed, like usual, possibly because of a light drizzle outside. Tourists trickle in, sit for awhile with local shopping bags, have some coffee or one of the exciting and unusual espresso drinks, plan their next excursion, then trickle out again. A few of us are regulars. I recognize the others and they recognize me. Sometimes, if we've had a particularly meaningful encounter, we may acknowledge that recognition with a nod. Otherwise, we pretend the other doesn't exist.

This is my life in San Francisco for the most part. I don't exist. To 99% of the people I see in a day, the thousands of people I press up against on the bus or the subway or pass walking down the sidewalk, I'm an anonymous biomass taking up space. Just as they are to me. Now, after about 4 years in the city and 9 years in the area, I understand that hard shell that forms around the soul to protect it from the sheer crush of chaos, insanity, and life. It's with a mix of relief and regret that I've formed one myself. A shell, perhaps a toughness, perhaps simply a surrender. Whatever it is, it allows me to stand firm while unwashed schizophrenics dash themselves against me and bounce off. It allows me to step over a pile of dog crap, human crap, stale lunch, someone's leg, without breaking stride. I can walk down the sidewalk checking email on my iPhone and barely register the half a dozen homeless, pushing shopping carts while screaming at invisible demons, that I pass en route to my next appointment. Did I say half a dozen? Make that a dozen. Two dozen.

The music at the cafe today is lazy, grungy, distorted. It fits my mood. They added new food to the menu a couple of days ago. I tried the breakfast burrito. I can't really afford it but I won't be here much longer and thought I'd indulge. Now I'm sipping my quadruple cappuccino. My external hard drive sits on the table next to my iPhone and is plugged into my computer so I can continue editing some dance footage I should've finished two months ago.

I didn't finish because I've been looking for work. Scrambling to earn a few bucks here and there in between bidding on projects, sending out resumes. It's been nine months since I quit my "job" as a consultant/journalist. It was killing me. Seriously. I'd reached the point at which the work was dead to me. It wasn't what I wanted to do, wasn't what I was meant to do. And that knowledge, no matter how buried, bubbled to the surface in toxic belches of incompetence. I was beginning to fail, frequently and in rapid succession. The failures, the pressure, the vain attempts to cram 30-hour days into 24 hours, the broken relationship, the neverending stream of disappointed and frustrated clients, the cat who kept shitting on my bed - all sent me into a death spiral of depression. Every night I would go to sleep wishing I had the strength to end it once and for all. So when I finished my last assignment, I said no more, cashed the paychecks, and coasted for a couple of months with a renewed sense of purpose and redirected ambitions. Then the economy went to shit. And when it was time to work again, there was no work to be had. Since then I've sent out well over 100 resumes and out of those got about 10 or so acknowledgements that my resume had been received. And out of those got about 3 phone screenings. And out of those got 2 in-person interviews. And out of those got 0 jobs. I've been to two job fairs, standing in line for multiple hours with multiple hundreds of other people competing for less than 10 jobs in the entire room. I've bid on at least a dozen coding projects and lost them all, some of them mere moments before signing the contract. Maybe someone with more fortitude, or self-delusion, could push through and restart an abandoned career. But it's just not in me. New Agers would say, "You can create anything you want." And that's true. And I don't want this - not tech work, not really. But the things I do want take time to develop. And how can you develop and nurture a new career when you're scrambling to subsist? It's a no-win situation.

Time to make a change. This isn't where I want to be. Broke, indebted, unemployable, hardened, callous, shut off from humanity and my own spirit. Something is broken. I have so much more potential than this.

Fortunately I also have something that few other people have, something for which I'm more grateful than I can put into words. I have a family who loves me and a wide circle of friends, some here in San Francisco, but many, many more in Texas. And I have an opportunity. My dad wants me to take over his job managing a storage rental facility in East Texas in exchange for free housing and a small income to cover monthly expenses. When I say it's in the middle of nowhere, I mean it - it's in the smallest county in Texas and the nearest community is two miles away and has a population of less than 200. The entire county has just over 5000 people and the county seat, my official residence, has just over 2000 of them. Dallas is one and a half hours away, though. A morning commute in Silicon Valley.

In other words: it's a writer's dream. It's my chance to check out for awhile, focus on my writing, get reacquainted with myself. There are huge downsides, of course - small towns tend to inbreed astonishing ignorance. It's also one of the few counties to become MORE red in the last election, primarily because the alternative was to elect a black man. As a whole, the people are racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and ultra religious. Shooting animals is considered pleasurable, a concept I have never understood, while selling alcohol is still illegal, a holdover from the Prohibition.

Is this a good move? An upgrade? Downgrade? Lateral move? I feel like I'm traveling between dimensions. I wonder if San Francisco will still seem real or if my memories will take the tone of a strange but distant dream. Regardless, it's the right move. Of that I'm sure. I've asked the hard questions, looked for the signs, done my research, and undergone all the contemplation I need to feel comfortable. It's a strange decision, completely out of character. This is not about "going home" - East Texas has never been my home, despite the fact that every single member of my immediate and extended family, without exception, lives or has lived there. I'm an anomaly in every sense of the word. An outsider.

But for whatever reason, I feel that East Texas is where I need to be right now. My work here is done. I've tried to hang on but God, the Universe, What Have You, is nudging me a little further down my path. Everything has lined up too perfectly to be other than destiny. The stick behind me, the carrot in front. And my true desire, to live a contemplative life of solitude and writing, looms despite every effort to deny it.

The line here is getting longer, both tourists and locals queueing for their fix. The employees are scurrying - one on food, one on register, one on espresso machine. They all know me, the employees, and I know them. I've been to their parties. I've been coming here two years and I've almost got their names down. They know mine. They know all the regulars. We say hi and we say bye and in between sometimes we chat about things. It's always a little stilted, like co-workers at a water cooler who don't really know each other or want to but are familiar enough to be friendly. When I stop coming here they won't notice. A couple months from now someone will ask "I haven't seen Justin in awhile, have you?" And the other person will respond, "Who?" And the first person will answer, "That tall guy with a beard? Filmmaker? Kinda nerdy?" "Oh yeah, no, I haven't seen him. Double cappuccino!" Or maybe I won't come up. Maybe they won't even think of me.

But then, I won't think of them, either.

This is my life today. An outsider. Alone, tribeless. And this is my life tomorrow.

And I'm ok with that.

Happiness is a State of...ah, whatever.

Yesterday the black dog was looking for a sit again. As someone who was practicing The Secret before The Secret ever came out and knows it to be true and effective, I started thinking about what I needed in my life to be happy, really and truly Happy. But I kept circling back to the fact that happiness is just a state of mind blah blah blah. It's not a thing or person or job or accomplishment or reputation or dessert or body image. No amount of getting back in shape will bring me peace. No amount of work will do it. No amount of success. Or pie. So what will, exactly? What's it going to take?

I decided to re-focus those reality-warping dream-manifesting powers of actualization on something else this time. In the past I've used visualization quite successfully to bring in work, relationships, even my cat. For example I once realized, sitting at a cafe, that I needed an income again. So I focused on it, did my thing (I have techniques), and literally 30 minutes later got a call from a total stranger, a referral, who wanted to throw money my way for an easy tech job. After that came another job, and another, and another. So it goes.

But what to focus on this time? At some point in the day I realized I needed to take a step back, or out, and look at the issue from a broader perspective. What are the causes of Happiness? What are its roots? Why do some people have it while others, in equally bearable or unbearable circumstances, become overwhelmed by the dark cloud? I need to understand this thing a little better. Then I can go about identifying action items and putting a plan into place. So yesterday I shifted my focus from Things to Concepts. I focused on: "What do I need to learn? Help me understand this. Bring me the experiences that will help me understand the nature of Happiness." I broadcast that out to the ethers and let it go.

Last night I got home and checked the mail. I found one and only one thing - a flyer, not addressed to me, for a conference titled "Happiness and its Causes."

So there you go.

I wonder if China...

is secretly poisoning American consumers as part of a plot to destroy us from the inside out?

Blocking Pleasure Causes Depression

There's a new type of pill out that blocks pleasure, literally. These pills block the pleasure pathways in the brain. The idea is, you get people to stop smoking by blocking the pleasure they get from smoking. Same thing with eating. If you over-eat because it's fun, then take the fun out of it.

The only problem is, these pills also drive people into a suicidal depression.

Does anyone else see approximately a thousand things wrong with all of this?

The world according to Betty Burks

I have no idea who this woman is but she's got something special going on.

I want to create an imaginary character and post totally random Amazon reviews that chronicle my imaginary life in a disjointed yet uplifting way. Betty Burks, I salute you.

Re: Fwd: FW: Pictures from London ~ this is beyond scary..

Hi there,

In reference to the mass email you just forwarded to me showing placard-bearing muslim extremists (which can also be seen on snopes: http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/muslimprotest.asp), thank you for showing us yet more evil muslims to justify yet more wars against large groups of people. I agree that these signs are pretty extreme. But I have four problems with the premise of this email:

1. It selects a small, vocal sample to represent the whole. Did you know that there's a small "christian" family in Topeka, Kansas that uses similar signs in the name of God? They insist that God hates America and will destroy it for being evil. Yet these few people are considered nutjobs, extremists, and in no way representative of Christianity as a whole, right? Nor do "christian" terrorists like Eric Rudolph and Timothy McVeigh (and many others) represent Christianity. So why does this small, sick but small, group of people stand in for an entire religion that, on the whole, IS peace-loving and reverential of life and freedom?

2. The purpose of this email is to incite hatred and violence against a group of people. Presumably, the point is that we should go out and slaughter every man, woman, and child who is Muslim. What Christian honestly believes that's what Jesus would do?

3. It ends with a classic call-to-arms against the "liberal media". This has become nothing more than a silly punchline. Not only does it further enflame tensions between progressives and conservatives (the LAST thing this country needs more of), but it's a meaningless cliche. Fox News is in no way liberal. Nor is CNN. Nor is every other major network (in other words ALL of them) that cave to corporate interests. When your news channel is run by a food company that is only interested in profit and ads, do you really think you're going to get honest, quality news?

4. But worse, that last remark about not seeing these pictures in Canada or the US is an outright lie. I don't know about Canadian coverage but the US actually covered this event extensively, as well as similar events all over the world. See, here's the trick, and why I find this kind of inflammatory email so deceitful and appalling - these pictures are from a London protest over Danish political cartoons in February of 2006 (over a year ago, not "recent"). Every country with a large Muslim population experienced the same thing. If you go back to papers of the time, you'll no doubt see some of these pictures. In fact, Jon Stewart did a great bit on The Daily Show about Muslim extremists protesting their depiction as violent reactives by...bombing embassies.

Obviously, these are some dangerous people. And yes, many people who call themselves Muslims are hell-bent on destroying Christians, democracies, and Americans in particular. But is declaring war on an entire religion the answer? What are we going to do, round up the Muslims and send them to concentration camps? Nuke their countries into oblivion? Do you really think that's what God wants His children to do to one another? Is that really what Jesus was teaching on the Mount?

The problem is, neither can you just invite them over for tea to work it out. They're not going to join you in counseling. And I suspect giving them fresh-baked cookies as a lure to bring them to church will not ultimately lead to their conversion.

So what's the solution? Yes, there's a problem. What's the solution? Ridicule liberals? That doesn't seem to be getting us anywhere. Elect another cowboy? Looks like that just made things about a zillion times worse. I think we've seen that for every "terrorist" we kill, we inspire a hundred of his friends and relatives to take up the cause against us. So what's the solution?

You might want to research a woman named Imaculee Ilibagiza. To start, here's a small description: "Imaculee Ilibagiza is a Rwandan woman hunted by her friends and neighbors during the Tutsi genocide in 1994. She lived for 91 days in a 3x6 bathroom with 6 other women and never made a sound. Her family was massacred in the most horrible way by people she knew and trusted."

Quick history lesson: by 1994 Rwanda was divided into two ethnic groups, Tutsis (the minority) and Hutus (majority). They'd had a history of war and tension, which escalated into a full-on genocide in April of 1994, in which millions of Hutus, armed with machetes, hacked to pieces every Tutsi they could hunt down, whether neighbor, friend, or family, man, woman, or child. No one in America noticed because, just a few months later, we were all glued to the tv as OJ Simpson drove a white bronco down the 405. And the Clinton Administration (lest anyone think I revere them in any way, which I don't) did absolutely nothing about the situation. You read that right - despite declaring ourselves the global police when it comes to oil-soaked dictatorships, we did absolutely nothing to stop Hutus from hacking the limbs off of small children or murdering their parents in front of their eyes. It wasn't until France, yes France, sent troops in did the genocide finally stop.

After Imaculee Ilibagiza's family was slaughtered, she convinced a local priest to hide her in his bathroom with 6 other women. He covered the door with furniture and didn't even tell his own family. For 91 days, they flushed only when he flushed in another room. They ate only what crumbs and scraps he could shove under the door when no one was looking. They slept propped up against one another, covered in filth. Again and again, they could see Hutus through the cracks searching the house for them, calling out to them, singing hunting songs, holding their machetes inches away from the hidden door.

So what did she do? Did she jump out, guns blazing, and mow down everyone in sight? No. Did she pass the time plotting her revenge? No. Did she send out mass emails convincing all her friends to bomb the bad guys? No. So what sustained her? How did she survive?

In her words, it was an unshakeable connection with God. A profound, intense connection so strong that she knew, beyond any doubt, that no harm would come to them. That faith sustained her for 91 days until the FRENCH (!) military finally intervened and set up safe zones. By the time she limped out of that bathroom, she weighed only 65 pounds.

But the ordeal wasn't over. Just a few hundred yards away from freedom, the women were surrounded by machete-armed Hutus determined to finish the job.

But here's the important part. This fragile woman could barely walk, much less fight back. Yet when a man stood directly in front of her and raised his machete, a man who had massacred dozens, if not hundreds of defenseless men, women, and children, you want to know what she did?

She loved him. She looked directly at him and loved him. And in her love, she forgave him.

So great was the power of her faith in God, so great was her connection with God, and so overpowering was the love that poured from her that she stopped this man in his tracks. Whatever look she gave him, whatever force she pointed in his direction, his response was to lower his hand and drop his machete, then stand aside and let them pass in peace.

THAT is how we'll end this violence. THAT is how we'll stop this insanity before millions more get killed and maimed by our hands or the hands of extremists. By letting God's love work through us and overwhelm those who would do us harm.

Frankly, I'm no longer interested in how the "liberal media" is hiding the truth, or how democrats or republicans are destroying our country. I'm not interested in stirring each other up with inflammatory emails, declaring war on other religions, or inciting hate and violence against people we don't know.

I'm interested in inciting a genuine connection with God. I'm interested in being inspired. I'm interested in loving my enemies so powerfully that they can no longer even conceive of doing me harm. I'm interested in pictures that remind me that God is at work in our lives. And that he doesn't pick sides. Most of all, I'm interested in remembering why America is great - because through our bounty and freedom we have the privilege of evolving in the truest sense of the word. We're not cavemen who can only stop someone by beating them into submission. We're better than that. We have great, great power. I'm interested in ways we can use that power to serve. And how to inspire our enemies to lay down their arms in peace, WITHOUT holding a gun or a nuke to their heads.

I see so many mass emails, like this one, that try to inspire violence and hatred against other human beings. And then mock or demonize anyone who thinks it's wrong to kill. I wonder if every person who forwards those emails has the courage to forward a call for compassion as well. Or is that more "liberal hooey"? I can think of one long-haired Jewish hippy who didn't think so. Since mass emails end with a challenge, here's one for you: choose your side. Hatred and violence? Or love and forgiveness? It starts with you.

Justin