A year ago I used to come out on this balcony every night and spend time staring across the bay at the hovering headlights and the disembodied swooshing sound they made rushing across the freeway. I was fresh to California and this nocturnal ritual made me feel like it was home. Maybe even Home with a capital H. In my eager idealistic scramble for the West Coast, I blinded myself into believing that this larger, freer locale could provide me with a feeling I'd yet to find anywhere else.

Then a year passed. The balcony visits stopped after three months. The hope that this might be my home died out within six. But still now a year later, even following some crappy luck and misfortune, even after a year of some of the stupidest mistakes of my life and the hardest months I've ever experienced... Even now, I am not entirely prepared to abandon California's embrace.

Ready or not, in less than a week I will stuff myself into a car filled to the brim with boxes of my belongings. I will drive and be driven for several days through states too warm and uncomfortable to dwell in or too flat and boring to remember. And at the end of this journey -- at the end of this epic, year-long roller coaster ride -- I will arrive...right back where I started.

Tonight I stand out on the balcony one last time. Whether or not this state or any other will really be my home, I truly hope that my time in California is not over. I've found more friends here than I could ever deserve and far more success than my skill warrants, and I do not believe I can give up on either. But for now, I leave one place that very nearly earned the title of home to return to another place that never came close to it during the 18 years I spent there. This time, at least, I will not let the setting get the best of me.

[For those who would like things spelled out a bit more clearly: Next week I am returning to Minnesota for an undetermined length of time to handle some personal family issues. I will continue in my role as online producer for Current Gaming, which is great, because we have some truly fantastic stuff in the works with our San Francisco team -- I'll just be backing them up from afar for a while. I'll also be working on a new personal project or two in an attempt to save myself from going stir crazy.

To all of my San Francisco friends and colleagues: If I didn't get the chance to see you before leaving, I send my sincerest apologies. This return trip fell into place far faster than I had expected, and things have been rather hectic. Rest assured, though, that if you've hung out with me, worked with me, or otherwise helped me during this last year, then you mean a great deal to me, more than I could fit into some paltry blog post. I hope to be back soon, and I hope there will still be a place for me in your real-world, meat-space lives.]

I've discovered a new obsession: digging through things I wrote in high school and college, polishing them, and then desiring strongly to share them. In keeping with that desire, the spoken word piece below is something inspired by some events my friends and I went through in high school. I wrote it my first year of college for an intro creative writing class. Most of my submissions for the poetry section of the class were too non-traditional for the prof and the other students to approve of  too heavily, and this was no exception. So:

Anarchy in the American School System

It began, as all adventures must, with ‘A’. A large, messy ‘A’, scratched onto a plate of armor, a golden gauntlet representing the fall of the diffusive dictatorship that has forever ruled our school. What it led to was unexpectedly reflective, at least for us involved, if not for the captors of our hearts. The disheartenment had grown too heavy, and the joking front was crushed. Inside us all we’d built a wall that crumbled into sand. We still had plenty to learn before we weren’t young and foolish, but the ghastly teachings were so marred by a need to rip all individuality from our souls that our walls were all that kept us sane. They made us refrain from actions sustained that would have caused everyone much more pain, but the stress upon these pillars was more than too much to take. It was only a matter of time before the break. For goodness sake, look at what you’ve done! You’ve made the most knowledge-thirsty students in the school turn and run. We had no fun, forgotten sons, by teachers shunned, by students stunned, for ignorance did run most rampant in this place. So for months we just replaced the feelings of disgrace with our fake happy face. That was the counselor’s wonderful advice. “Please just smile, please be nice.” So full of caring, and so fucking concise. If only the slightest bit of wisdom had trickled from that brain of hers, we might have saved the trouble of the stir. But instead…we scratched away with nails of steel, an extension of our innermost desires to feel like we actually had a place where we belonged in this place where we’d been wronged. That was it, the anarchist’s song, disjointed and mathematical and underwhelmingly strong. That was the trick that no one understood. Anarchy was our answer to a question that no one had ever asked us, and in the darkest depths of our own drenched heads we were fading fast. No need for us to last. No thoughts about the past. No, only dreams of the future: every choice would be ours without censor, and each day, we sighed, would be its own adventure.

EDIT: It's on nights like this that I desperately wish I smoked.

So it's been a while. (Isn't that how these posts always begin anyway?)

Excuses, excuses: I've been extremely busy with 1UP stuff, including launching a new podcast -- 1UP FM. I'm loving my job, and I'm loving living in California, but everything is unbelievably busy and stressful and exhausting. In the kind of way that I guess things should be when you're in your 20s and can deal.

And though I haven't been sleeping much at all lately, being young I can recognize that not sleeping is the new sleeping eight hours a night. In our brave new energy drink-infused world, productivity is higher than ever, and the only real cost is restfulness, and really, who cares about outmoded states of being such as that these days?

If my choices are to burn out like everyone else in this industry inevitably does or to burn out better and brighter than everyone else in this industry, then dammit, my decision is already clear. Wake me up in two hours, and I'll be good to go for another 24.

In Whitman's words: "Who has gone the farthest? For lo! have I not gone farther?"

I'll be trying to write words in this specific text box more often in the near future, as it's a good change of pace.

Amanda and I spent Fall Break (Saturday to Tuesday) in San Francisco. Sam housed us and drove us around a bit. Pretty much he was just a great guy in every way possible. Most of the time we were there -- all day Sunday and about half of Monday -- Amanda and I just wandered around various sections of the city on foot.

Sunday night: After being stereotypical tourists and visiting the Golden Gate Bridge and Fisherman's Wharf, we ate in Chinatown. Then we wandered over to the slightly more shady part of Broadway for a reading of Jack Kerouac's On the Road at the Beat Museum. Laurel and Emily, also exploring San Fran over their fall break, were wonderful enough to invite us along for that. And while I'm still on that note, many beautiful photos of their trip can be found on Laurel's profile.

Monday: Patrick took a moment out of his busy day to be awesome and give me a tour of the 1UP building. I met Garnett -- who quickly handed a DS game to review -- and a couple others, all of whom were cool and generally as nice as they've seemed online. It was a little surreal meeting people who I've interacted with on some capacity for so long and seeing the offices that I've watched on the 1UP Show every week. When Kathleen walked by with her dog, I genuinely felt like I was trapped in an episode of the show, which was actually kind of cool.

Later, after we'd left 1UP and spent a while checking out the Metreon and other deeply capitalistic ventures, we decided to stop at a Walgreens for a soda on the way out of the city. Standing outside the Walgreens was a homeless man with a colorful sign explaining how his wife had been kidnapped and he needed money for ransom. Amanda decided to get a couple of dollars in change at the Walgreens, not (I assume) because she believed his story so much as it seemed necessary to reward the effort.

When we exited the Walgreens, a few dollar bills clenched in Amanda's hands, a couple of tourists were standing next to the homeless man, taking a picture. He was carefully holding up his sign, making sure it was clear for the camera. Amanda saw this, blushed, and rushed over to hand him his dollars, strangely careful not to get in the way of the photo op.

I have a weird habit -- I'm not sure why -- after fantastic nights like this one of getting viciously depressed. I don't understand exactly how this happens, but it's usually preceded by worrying that I don't have enough of these nights, that my life is being wasted because of that, and that it's somehow my fault.

But I'm not here to discuss these things. I'm here to give my promise and to prove that I can keep it. I have a choice between being pointlessly upset or basking in the warm glow of something true, and given that path, I choose truth.

A curiously random incident from the day: to pass some time this afternoon, I sat down to read A Disease of Language by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell -- a beautiful hardcover signed edition that A picked up for me in England this summer. I've felt bad for not having read it yet for a while, but Alan Moore isn't the kind of comic writer you can sit down to and blast through his stories any old afternoon. Still, I wanted to try today.

So, on the afternoon of Saturday, September 15th, one day before my birthday and mere hours before birthday celebrations, I read "The Birth Caul," a poem-put-to-pictures by Moore and Campbell. "Birth Caul" was written by Moore on his 42nd birthday; today, tomorrow at the time I was reading it, I turn 22.

Although a bit of it is lost without Eddie Campbell's beautiful illustration, here is an excerpt of Moore's words that I'd like to share with you:

"As skinny as we'll ever be, reluctantly we tear down all the hopeful pin-ups of ourselves tacked up there in the mind's back bedroom... gradually replaced by studies more composed, more realistic in their expectations. Failing beauty, we make a belated lunge at character. We try to get in touch with who we really are and only get the disconnected tone. A constant sense of someone missing although... everyone is here.

"The flow of vital youth along school corridors like sheep towards a shearing. Frisking, unaware, the real curriculum is punctuality, obedience, and the acceptance of monotony... those skills we shall require later in life. Oblique aversion therapy to cure us of our thirst for information and condition us so that thereafter we forge an association between indolence and pleasure. We confuse rebellion with a hairstyle.

"Nightmare of the teenage jobscape, suddenly made stupid, weak, and clumsy there amidst the calloused adults. Some have been there since they were fourteen, due to retire in five more years and never missed a day. We glimpse the abyss, staring into our discoloured tea-break mugs. We have been shown the contract. Now we realize what put that look upon our parents' faces, that fatigued complaint into their voice. We are too old not to see their failings and too young to understand or quite forgive. Our parents do not follow a traditional perspective, growing smaller on approach. Only later will their true scale be apparent.

"Find old photographs of both of them in post-war dance halls that are lit by nothing but the dazzle of mens' shirts. Both happy, not much older than ourselves. We grow afraid."

So it's official: I'm not a child prodigy. I'm not going to be the youngest millionaire alive. I'm not much. But I think that in 22 years I've done fairly well for myself. Thank you all for being part of that ride, and may the best of you continue with me.

"I'm sinking like a stone in the sea."

begins this CD that I bought when I was in my senior year of high school, but which still has some inexplicable grasp on my life.

A couple of years ago a friend now mostly lost to religion was speaking to me. Specifically he was talking about Green Day's American Idiot CD, but he was including it in a larger context of CDs including the one I quoted. He asked if I was as excited to be hearing this music as he was, and of course, I agreed. But: "Not in that way. What I mean is, isn't it exciting to be listening to this music that we find so amazing that we'll still be listening to it when we're adults, having our children listen to it... isn't that amazing?"

I don't think he listens to much of this stuff any more, so hell, maybe he's the one who has truly grown after all. Because this CD still has hold on me.

I've been working on this letter thing for a friend. I have such trouble lately writing long-form letters. I used to do it all the time -- that's basically the foundation upon which my friendship for Amanda was built, for example. But now, well, I'm not totally sure what the problem is. Maybe it's that I spend so much time writing other stuff or (more likely) perhaps it's anxiety. I expect my friends to expect something from me, and I'm never so sure that I can live up to that expectation, so more often than not when I sit down to write a longer letter, I end up making it short and pithy, sweet and just slightly hollow.

Anyway, though, I've been working on this letter thing for a friend to the soundtrack of this CD. I'm actually going to finish this one eventually, soon. So I should get back to that, though this interlude has been nice.

So I'm back. "Due to popular demand," I like to say.

Things that are new

I know I mentioned this previously, but I'm getting paid for writing now. Unfortunately, I haven't actually been paid for writing. But whatever.

I'm not longer doing the podcast. Our last episode, #66, was recorded a couple of weeks ago. Now I'm focusing on finishing college and working hardcore for 1UP in the hopes that they'll give me a full time position when I am done with college.

That's mostly it, I guess.

Things that have been driving me crazy lately

Three years ago I was just starting my first week of college (where I subsequently met half the people reading this). That means a little over three years ago I was in high school. That's fucking unbelievable to me. I know this is a pretty trite thing to marvel at, but the changes that have happened to me and in my life in three years are too astounding for that short of a timespan.

That's probably normal too.

Things that I'm terrified of

Starting a "real job" as an "adult," dancing, and being poor.

Things that I am

Starting a "real job" as an "adult," dancing, and poor

How are you people? I'm going to be reading LJs again when I have the time.