The Hitchhiker

Last night I was driving home from Wal-mart at midnight. And yes, this is a fairly regular occurrence, unfortunately. At this time of night, Highway 24, an unlit 2-lane rural highway, had almost no traffic. The temperature was about 25 degrees so I had the heater going full blast.

Out of the darkness, I saw a glimpse of someone on the shoulder of the oncoming lane - a man waving his arms for me to stop. At that speed, all I could see was that he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and what appeared to be shorts.

Instantly the thought crossed my mind - "Oh hell no!" I had images of a crazed hitchhiker with a butcher knife. Or a gun. I thought of every slasher movie set in Texas or some other isolated rural area. This was a no-brainer. Just keep driving.

Then I thought about what he was wearing. It was freezing outside and he had on almost nothing. Was he stranded? We were at least 10 miles from the nearest town. What if he stopped to rest and ended up freezing to death?

As I imagined all the possible outcomes, I let up on the gas. This was turning into a metaphysical crisis. What kind of person did I want to be? As a political junkie, I'm constantly railing against fear-based conservatives and their creative form of domestic terrorism. My basic viewpoint is that conservatives = fear, progressives = hope. But how committed was I to that ideal? Or was that viewpoint relevant at all in this case? I want to be compassionate, I want to follow in the footsteps of saints and angels who dedicate their lives to helping others. Then again, fucking crazy rednecks.

Would I have my compassion squashed by fear? Or would I have the faith to risk an act of kindness and know that I would be ok?

Ultimately it came back to the question - what kind of man did I choose to be? That was the clincher. Whatever the risk, I choose compassion. It's scary. Damn scary. But if it came down to it, I would rather live a short life of compassion than a long life of fear. This one moment was an opportunity to demonstrate that choice.

I pulled onto the shoulder and turned the car around. With my heart pounding, I drove back the way I came. I couldn't remember how far back the guy was, so I drove a little slower and kept an eye out. After what seemed like 10 minutes, I crossed a bridge I'd noted before I saw him, which told me for certain that he'd already been picked up or otherwise found help.

Whew! Relief. I made a choice for compassion AND didn't have to pick him up. Win / Win!

And then I saw him.

This time he was waving his pants at me. Nutjob.

I hit the brakes and pulled over to the side of the road. I could barely swallow. I didn't dare back up for fear of running him over. But it was so dark I couldn't see anything and I was scared of him suddenly appearing in my window. Eventually, I saw him in the rear view mirror, sprinting up behind me, a ghostly image coming out of the dark in the glow of my tail lights.

I rolled down my passenger window. He ran up to it, breathless. The guy was about 25, very cute, and as it turned out, wearing pajama bottoms and carrying his pants. He was also out of breath, and obviously scared. Uh oh. Like a friend said later, this was either the setup for a slasher flick or a porn film. It could go either way.

"What's up?" I asked.

"Do you have a cell phone?"

"Yeah."

"Can I use it? I need to call the sheriff."

"I can make the call for you. What's going on?"

"My girlfriend's husband got home early and he's beating the crap out of her."

Wow. That just said it all right there.

I dialed 911 and put it on speaker phone so the poor guy could explain the situation. After the operator agreed to send a sheriff to meet him, I invited him into the car. Definitely not a slasher flick. The jury was still out on the porn, but probably not that either. Really, I was just worried that the guy was freezing his ass off.

I drove him to a defunct gas station, where he'd parked his truck and asked the sheriff to meet him. Evidently he had a rendezvous with his girlfriend, but the husband decided to quit his truck driving school that night and came home early. In a rage, the husband grabbed his gun. My guy, a sheriff's deputy in another county, had left his gun in his truck. Fortunately, the husband's dad came in and calmed the husband down enough to set the gun down. That's when the stud took off, sans pants. His girlfriend threw his pants and shirt out the window but the guy's truck keys, cell phone, and wallet were still there. I guess the last thing he heard was the woman screaming.

So now I had a freezing, scared straight boy in his pajamas sitting in my car. What else could I do - I introduced myself. He told me his full name and we chatted a bit. Then I made sure the husband did NOT know where he'd parked his truck. I found out what town he lived in and a little more about the situation, and casually mentioned that he might want to tell the sheriff that the husband is armed. I tried to keep things light and simple until the sheriff showed up, which he did shortly. My boy tossed his pants on the hood of his truck and talked to the sheriff. After the two of them left together, I stepped out just to make sure I was alone and that I wouldn't run him over when I backed out (the gas station was completely shut down and had no lights - yeah, I know). Then I updated my facebook status and drove home.

This could have had many different outcomes. But in the end it turned out to be a very good thing that I stopped. My only regret is my hesitation. If a woman was being beaten could I have saved her some pain if I had stopped sooner? If my reaction had been more instinctual than methodical?

Hopefully I'll know the end of the story soon enough. Being the son of a well-connected ex-county judge and ex-law enforcement officer has its advantages. My dad knows just about every sheriff in the area. When I told him the story (leaving out the part about how hot the guy was), my dad wrote down his name so he could check with some of his buddies.

I'm glad I'm ok, obviously. But I hope everyone else is, as well.

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.