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I’ve been thinking about my next steps, and these most certainly are automatically coupled with goals that I want to accomplish this year – but these aren’t quite New Year’s goals or resolutions. It’s more of a result of taking what is around me now in this new environment and putting it to work. I moved out here in a bit of last-minute unexpected emotional jazz, not to mention the shit that comes with uprooting one’s life; I let myself for awhile mentally recharged. I was emotionally and perhaps even more importantly – creatively – drained. I was burnt out on nearly every aspect. I don’t say this to complain or garner any symphathy, but rather I say this with a silver lining: I recognized where I was and I gave myself several months to recoup, recharge, explore, wonder, and generally fall back in love with curiosity and creatively once again – but in a brand-new way, having deposited myself into a city that is unending in it’s sources of mental, creative, spiritual energy and inspiration. In short, I feel it’s a bit of a personal rennaisance. I’ve kept myself during this period from working on too many projects of my own – most notably my two long-time, four-year in the work projects: theCalifonriaSource.com and my book. I’ve started work on both these things again, and it feels good.

Specifically, with the site, I’ve begun narrowing things down. I’ve always added to the site. The result is that unless I suddenly find myself with a three-person staff and 50 hours of personal time a week to devote to its upkeep and general freshness, as it exists right now the entire thing is just too large for me to handle. So I’m scaling back. Deleting a lot, stream lining. Then we’ll see if we can’t get one thing going.

The obligatory introductory post is always my stopping point in introducing a new blog; a thought is generated, or a desire to document a process or a creation is inserted into me, but then I let myself get rattled into thoughts of lack of an established voice, audience, et cetera. Not that I am at all new to the blogging world (I’m a veteran of back when before the now-defunct blogging phase captured the attention of every adolescent and menopausal woman), or that I don’t have several different personal and commercial online venues to point to this blog, instantly creating an audience. If I can set this aside I then come to the thoughts of who it is that I’m shaping up my audience to be: what do I, we, hope to accomplish here in our youth, in these cities, with these skills that are sometimes back-shelved, sometimes burnt out, sometimes hated, but always return? With some of my closest friends this continually-renewing and continually-dissipating fire is writing or music. Those of us involved in creation, or with wide-eyed hopes of being the ones doing the creation in the face of climbing age and obligations, oft wear different hats in this real world – or in the case of San Francisco – on this theater stage. We do this so we can financially support ourselves and our crafts, and we are very seldom enveloped by those who understand; in turn we do the expected, we cocoon ourselves together and encourage one another, listen and bitch with one another, and work with one another – on one hand to keep the theater running for the masses; on the other, to continually work backstage into the retreats of our relative realism, tinkering with our imaginations that we hope to one day share.

We are at home in the back alleys of the City, behind the food kitchens and restrooms and down the stairs and up the ramp to a quiet spot, in the parks with the drum circles in the distance, in the emotionally darkened single occupancy rooms in the Mission, a shaky four stories above a rapidly breathing city. We stand aloft on our fire escapes smoking our cigarettes, above the wires of electric busses and BART tunnels and ambulance sirens and the calls of the street – indecisive crackhead speak – and we absorb it all, block what we need and use only the good parts. Or the bad parts, depending on our mood, our project, our propensity to give up on ourselves as failures in that, or any other remotely accessible, given moment. We’ll probably never do anything.

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