(Part One because my week of relaxation, productivity, and catching up on sleep has been light on the productivity ;))

July 2nd (Wednesday):

I departed from Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta, Georgia at ten in the morning; shortly thereafter I arrived in the nation's capitol for a lunch-time transfer at Reagan International. Ate a decidedly less than satisfying meal at the terminus, browsed the Obama-wear, and wished I could have more time to actually go explore D.C.; I haven't been there since the fall of 2005 and I'd like to revisit it again soon. Hopped the next flight to Logan and I was on my way.

Made it to Boston's airport after a short delay both overwhelmingly tired (I stayed up entirely too late the night before...) and found Sean downstairs waiting for me - turns out he was similarly sleep-deprived from the train. Caught a bus from the airport to the T-station, rode out of town into Quincy, Massachusetts, and had his mom pick us up at the station parking lot... hit a Dunkin Donuts (yes, these will make many appearances throughout my northern adventure) and then went back to Billings Rd: home base for the next five days. Mrs. Cummings' house itself was beautiful - decked out in all the July 4th glory, on the corner of the street just up from the beach and surrounded by other houses, just as striking. Massachusetts made an incredible first impression.

Dropped my bags, freshened myself up, and then we ventured off to the Marina Bay (former home to Tom Brady) to the Chantey restaurant where Julie, Sean's younger sister, works. Walked in to the sounds of the Red Sox playing, said a quick hello to Julie and sat ourselves down outside.

I ordered the fried clam strips and a Sam Adams' Summer Ale on Julie's recommendation; we talked each others' ears off until the food arrived - with occasional drop ins from Julie, whose accent was pronounced, quick, and infinitely charming. Dinner was framed by lobster ravioli and another round of Sam Adams; at the end of the night the restaurant comped our meal and after saying goodbye to Julie, we left.

Spent a solid hour walking around the Marina and the docks enjoying a light breeze and pleasant temperatures. Sean and his mother got ice cream from a stand on the dock, and I was introduced to the seriousness with which Bostonians consume ice cream. It's mean business up there. We were surrounded by sea-salt on the wind; the lights of Boston flirted with me from across the bay.

Rode back to the house, unpacked my things, and passed out in anticipation and the bliss of being in a new city with great companions and extraordinary plans.

(Again... I wrote this last week, but I'm too lazy to manage a real update.)

Once again, it’s been too long since I posted anything worth a damn. Mind you, I’m not making any claims this time around either, but I’m at a coffee shop, it’s too early to be in bed, and I’m bored out of my skull. It’s also still ninety degrees outside, which explains why I’m in here instead of out there.

Work is the primary thing these days, which is how I like it. Work is reliable, and it is damn rewarding too. I’ve been lucky enough to be in the younger kids’ group for the past few shifts, and the change in perspective from boundary-holding to being extremely proactive in building the students’ positive beliefs/identities is reciprocally great. Plus, preteens are so much fun I almost can’t stand it. Educational Moments we taught the students this week: Texas is a Planet, America is Bigger than the Earth, Lepidoptera Can and Will Eat You, The Origins of WW1 in a Nutshell (Serbians Start Shit they Can’t Finish), Toxic Shock Syndrome, The Yeaster Bunny, and my personal favorite: Tara Doesn’t Know What God Is. Good times.

My off-weeks have started to look up, just before the summer travel feeding frenzy hits. Typically when I make plans in my head about fun things to do while I’m at work they end up either getting diverted or falling through after I’m out of the woods. This week the opposite has happened – I keep tossing out ideas that people go for and they actually have fun, which is great. Austin, KT, Caitlin and I hit up the Grit and karaoke last Tuesday night and had a blast; we lost Austin at midnight and played Rock Star which not only made me eat my words about those types of games but kept me entertained until three a.m. Wednesday Caitlin, KT and myself rolled out to the Broad River to kayak which was pretty much amazing, despite some sunburning on the part of the ladies. Thursday night I actually got to dance for the first time practically all year. The rest of the week went equally great: I headed home for the weekend to get some running, lifting, writing, and sleeping done, and as an added surprise I got to hang out with Karri. Back to Athens on Sunday and up to heaven knows what, but Tuesday I should get to move up a level at work (EDIT: Promoted!) and that’s pretty much excellent. Of course my raise will mostly go to gasoline… Christ.

Bought a ton of great music lately, mostly on a whim which is even better.

Finished the final draft of the first short story and I’m six pages deep into the follow-on story and the second in what will hopefully turn into a collection of writing centering on a theme. I don’t think it sucks, and that’s neat.

My grandmother said in casual conversation today that she doesn’t believe it’s possible to know God until you’ve loved another human being purely and selflessly with the whole of one’s being. I’m pretty sure that’s the truest statement I’ve heard in who knows how long, so I won’t muddy it up with explication. It stands firm by itself, I think.

I’m really, really looking forward to going to Boston for the 4th of July with Sean, and I’m even going to abandon my vegetarian ways for the week in order not to miss out on great seafood. I know, I’m a cheater, but circumstances demand it. I’m also excited about going to D.C. for Obama’s kick-ass inauguration party, which I hear from Sean promises to be quite the ticket. Maybe I can get arrested for being publicly intoxicated on the Mall… oh wait. I don’t think that’s actually possible. I believe I’ve found a willing cohort for a trip to Charleston (where I’ve never been…) sometime this summer which is both unexpected and exciting. The 18-day road trip across the ENTIRE SOUTHEASTERN U.S. looms large in September, during which I plan on consuming an entire year’s worth of vices and writing a hellaciously good memoir of the occasion in dirty hotel rooms and bars on roads to nowhere.

Neko Case is still the Best Thing Ever. Fact.

"…made believe that we were seditionaries, but were too easily moved or else did not ever move at all, and never stormed the gates or walls but crafted clumsy things w/ our hands, and those things were important to us, those clumsy abstracted towers and minarets we crafted w/ our own worried hands. And built our own confused belief systems, which were endlessly and crucially beautiful in their small stubborn tangles of loss, worry, faith, and need… and made small gestures w/ our hands or eyes that were endlessly redeeming, and made us all sometimes almost believe in saints and/or angels, and daydreamed endlessly about living a little more quietly or a little bit louder for awhile and almost always strived for a little more engagement w/this falling/fallen world… or hardened our resolve sometimes and bent our heads and backs into the task at hand and dug and built our erected or transmitted occasional epiphanies or urgent fears w/ photocopiers, silkscreens and cdrs and found answers sometimes in the empty places like gangs of birds flying out of dead buildings, beneath the sun’s blind white hole. Like trees growing thru fences or an abandoned jar filled w/a summer’s worth of rusty water out there behind the place where the heavy rains roll and found hope in the idea of the futile gesture… and manifested sometimes w/ bricks in our hands and built something here in spite of and will not let them take it from us so easily so please o please, let’s please figure out soon what exactly we can build here on this parched and fallow ground. (Knowing all along, that sooner or later their bulldozers will come and tear it all down…) (But we can build it in spite of, and leave dusty notes about our journeys behind… and resistance grew from tender places, and we fought the good fight whenever it staggered down our lonesome, twisted roads…"

The way to create a reasonable facsimile of schizophrenia is to alternate fits of writing a horror story with bursts of lifting weights, add reading snatches of Lovecraft, Michener, and McMurtry, cramming every single errand for the month of May into one week, listening to Carnavas and The Wall on repeat while drinking coffee like it was Zima and ergo going out of style. I'm betting my caffeine and testosterone crash come Tuesday is going to be epic. Blast.

This post was supposed to be about my imaginary house. Maybe tomorrow then. My brain is revving.

But I'm going to write it anyway, because I am spiteful, at least according to some.

My stepmom: Is amazing. On tasting her newest culinary creation (garlic basil polenta stacked with creamed spinach and garnished with freshly grated parmesan), she shot of this one: "Holy Shit. I am a freaking genius."

Running: ...is a spiritual experience. Or I should say a spiritual relationship. It's been five years since I started running with regularity and intent; over the last eight months since I left the Army I haven't run at all. At first, it was because of my injury - I was being extremely cautious because I wanted to heal well enough to actually be able to run for the rest of my life. I told myself that since I get plenty of exercise elsewhere, that the absence of running wasn't really a big deal.

Recently I've been missing it in a big way, I think mostly because of the approaching summer. I've always liked being extremely physical in the heat, ass-backwards as that sounds. My attitude toward running came from two places: First, that since they forced me to run on an injured leg in the military then I'd be damned if I put any pressure on myself to run again, and second, that running was a sore spot (bitter pun intended) because I felt like it was only another thing the Army had taken away from me.

I've been running this week. What really clicked for me today was that running is a relationship, and for me it's a spiritual one. Much like the dual components of a religious practice (the internal experience and the discipline or work of practice) it hit me that though running - especially now that I've been out of it for so long - can be frustrating, difficult, and requiring of patience and diligence, those aspects are completely independent of the personal satisfaction and golden fuzzy feeling during a good run. The further I've gotten away from respecting and searching for that feeling, the further I've allowed difficulties in my practice to drive me away from it, the less happy I end up being.

I believe it's easy to allow things to drive us away from spirituality, difficulties in making Mass on time, troubles getting the right people together for a ritual, whatever. I also believe that that distance can quickly start to look insurmountable. I absolutely believe that even (as in this case, when I spend a few days running a very small number of miles) when it's pretty apparent that there's plenty of work to do to get back to that point where passion and discipline come together, even the small steps are filled with wonder, excitement, and grace.

The month before I left for boot camp I was running between 25 and 30 miles a week; today I turned back at 2 because muscles I apparently don't use while hiking or working out were promising to kick my ass tomorrow. Before I left I was usually running on a treadmill or a track, headphones on, lost in my head and only thinking about my time and mileage; today I ran down an arrow straight road framed by fields and, in the distance, mountains.

Changes are good. I am optimistic, and I feel like I've found a fundamental part of myself again. It's one of those things I do. I run.

Sometimes, the simplest answers are the best. Last week was one of those 'life-changing' periods of days that really should come with fanfare. I'm pretty comfortable using that grandiose term, but I'm not certain I can actually convey that to the rest of you out there in any meaningful fashion. Suffice it to say that sometimes, the simplest answers are best. With that platitude held closely in mind, I've been trying to reduce my system of dealing with the world to some kind of easily conveyed whole... this is what I've come up with so far:

1. Drink enough water to piss clear, every day.
2. Never pay for anything you can do yourself.
3. Don't wear a watch if you can get away with it.
4. Walking is still honest.
5. When in doubt, get outside.
6. Never pass up an opportunity to travel.
7. Learn something new every day.
8. Surrender friendships by tooth and nail.
9. Never be ashamed of your roots.
10. Family trumps everything.

I've been trying to think up anything else that might fit under this rubric, but I'm not coming up with more than what you see above... the only thing that strikes me as missing is my lack of willpower when it comes to books, but I think that's better filed under 'compulsions'.

Few things more effective than beautiful weather, a welcoming city, and stout coffee to circumvent any bad mood I might have had brewing this morning. Couple those factors with the time I spent with a Guinness, a good book, and a hammock around noon today and you've pretty much got a recipe for a perfect Thursday.

The dirty details - I skipped into Chattanooga this afternoon with the express purpose of grabbing quality coffee shop time (read: no one I know taking attention away from the book I had along) at Stone Cup on the north shore. Got there just as they were rolling up the huge windows to let the breeze coming of the river roll through the cafe and out the front door, found myself a comfortable table, and settled in for the long haul. Whether the temperatures know it or not, it's summer here in the south - with the time change safely behind us, it stays bright well into the evening and those giant, clear blue skies do little to argue for the fiction of 'spring'.

That being said, between the weather and the general mood of the cafe (customers happily engaged in conversation, few schoolbooks lurking on tables, plenty of laughter) I started to get that first twinge of my blind summer optimism. I can't wait - for the heat, for the blistering sun, for shedding layers of clothing and bearing my skin to the elements, for the smell of honeysuckle and cut grass. This summer, for me, promises much - not the least of which is a great deal of travel (contrast with last summer, the definition of being stuck in one place) and, hopefully, a great deal of Figuring Shit Out.

I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'm not above the quarter-life crisis. As a matter of fact, it really shouldn't surprise anyone... the last year has brought with it the largest shift in my mental map for my future I've ever experienced, and, though I'm extremely happy (ecstatic, content, satisfied) with my job, I've definitely got some questions to answer by the time all this travel winds down in July.

Like, for example, where I'm going to live.

I tend to forget how great Chattanooga can be, despite having the same reaction every time I make the time to get downtown and just relax. I tend to forget that the city has a great deal of draw to it for someone in my position, someone my age. Different coin, same side: Asheville definitely holds those same pulls. How do I choose? Three towns I like, one of which I know well, one I don't know at all, and one somewhere in between. Just like me.

In keeping with my last post: More Things I Really Like:

Firefox, Sunbird, and iGoogle:

My life is so organized it shines, and all it took was a few minutes installing mods and add-ons for those three applications. The calendar and the toolbar for Firefox were the two biggest things, both of which seem way to simple to get rid of so much unnecessary crap weighing my computer down.

Julieta Venegas:

Limon Y Sal is an incredible album; I don't have a clue what she's singing about, but the way 'Me Voy' whirls through my headphones had me hooked last summer. Now it's my unofficial soundtrack for the approaching season: promising beaches, swimming for no real reason, getting sand everywhere it can possibly get, and watching my skin turn the shade of honey brown it desperately wants to be. Seriously, if you don't like Julieta, I'm going to question whether or not you have human stuff on the inside.

Healthy Compulsions:

I cannot, and I mean cannot, walk past a used bookstore and not enter. Following that loss of willpower, it is pretty much impossible for me to leave that bookstore (we'll call it a 96.66% likelihood) without a new book in hand. Walking past A Novel Idea in town today, I walked in fully expecting it to be one of those times that I don't, in fact, buy anything. Of course, as inevitably as the fact that I would walk in the door of the shop, not only did I find something, but I found Something Great - a crisp but loved trade copy of William T. Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels. A little over a month ago, I had the luck and opportunity not only to hear Vollmann speak, but to have a drink with him afterwards and a bit of one-on-one conversation. Seeing the author picture on the back of YB&RA took me aback - the man I met was comfortably middle-aged, the author of this book was young, and looked it. I'm not exactly sure why, but that picture was definitely part of the reason I bought the book, along with finding a moderately obscure author's work in a small used bookstore in Tennessee, and my complete lack of self-restraint.

Picking up these books:
Alias, Grace
The Namesake
The Light of the Sun
City of Golden Shadow

Picking up this album:
Knuckle Down

Picking up this gear:
-a new, spring opening knife
-rain pants that don't suck

Not throttling anyone. Not a single person, which is a miracle.

(I don't remember writing this at all, or what kind of story I was going to turn it into. Curious.)

He sits. He sits and he reads the paper, in the same way everyday. As the sun rises, he stays stuck to that chair, never going anywhere, barely moving. Every day, the same paper, for the same amount of time - a steady line between the tick marks on the clock, ticking and ticking another dawn, another thirty minutes of him reading that damn paper, every day.

Every day.

She, on the other hand, bustles and moves, twists and turns through the kitchen, glancing up from hands firmly planted in dishwater, from hands quickly assembling sandwiches, wrapping vegetables in wax paper and folding close the tops of bags. Four bags, each crafted from sundry materials out of cupboards and drawers and boxes.

Every day.

I like to make grand plans, especially when it comes to reading lots and lots of books. I make pretty decent headway (most of the time), but even still my retentive side rears its head and makes lists, like the following one, of the books I want to read between now and... say... July. Feel free to tell me if any of these aren't worth the time, or if you have additions to the list: I'm always up for new recommendations.

The Rainbow Stories - William T. Vollman (I'm about halfway through, but I need to finish...)
Falling Out of Cars - Jeff Noon
Needle in the Groove - Jeff Noon
The Last Apocalypse - James Reston Jr.
Tracks - Louise Erdrich
No One Belongs Here More Than You - Miranda July
The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky
Eastward to Tartary - Robert Kaplan
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Alias, Grace - Margaret Atwood
Sacred Games - Vikram Chandra
Jaguars Ripped My Flesh - Tim Cahill
Confessions - St. Augustine (I've read it before, but it's been over a decade.)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling (...also an already-read, but it deserves a second time around.)
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon - Rebecca West
The Ottoman Centuries - Lord Kinross
The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri
The History of the Kings of Britain - Geoffrey of Monmouth

Hit me up, kids.

Once, when we were more intrepid creatures, the world was as large as our imaginations... once, when we lacked an endless stream of poor analogues to our experiences (maps, travel guides, agents, advisories), we were free. Free to explore, to discover, to risk, to chance. The age of exploration sets fire to our imaginative powers not through our admiration of an particular explorer's bravery or daring, but because they had opportunity to tread upon ground not yet categorized or easily limited.

This is a fiction. Those 'firsts' weren't any such thing. Lending exception to some truly unique moments (Hillary, Everest), the larger than life figures whose name we attach to mountains, trenches, plains, and seas were also following in someone else's footsteps. The difference between us and them lies in the fact that they weren't aware of it. Representative of reality or not, those 'first' discoverers had the luxury of believing they were forging ahead into virgin territory. I believe we want that, we ache for that feeling.

Nowadays we aren't travelers any longer; tracing the same patterns and lines, the same tired trails as countless others, we divorce ourselves from the very element we are seeking out there - on the road, in the wild, on the trail. We seek meaning: the kind of personal challenge and private conquest that constitutes the art of self-discovery (in this case, external). Without that risk, the danger of stumbling upon territory neither safely packaged into a discreet unit (a product) nor easily categorized as leisure (again, a product) our experiences are echoes, reflections, poor xeroxes of actual life. Only when we throw away the maps, when we abandon the notion that our experiences are so conveniently catalogued do we begin to explore the reality that those lines on the paper, those borders and boundaries are fictions made tractable only through our behaviors and our complicity. Remove that compliance and those imaginary lines cease to exist.

This week has been pretty awesome. Which I'm not going to write about, because even if I could adequately sort out my scattered brain after little food and much coffee, I don't think I could do my daily life justice. So for now, the most salient issue: being homeless.

I really, really like being a hobo. All joking aside, the freedom my job affords me to go wherever on my off-weeks provides a much-needed counterbalance to the stagnation I dealt with at Fort Benning. For a few months after I started at Second Nature, I was on the fence about moving back to Athens, moving up to Asheville, or some other option. Over the last six weeks or so, circumstances have definitely changed. My draws back to Athens have fully overwhelmed the few reasons I had not to move back... what I've realized the last two weeks is that I'm no longer on the fence regarding where to live.

Volunteering at Common Ground has taken off the way I was hoping it would - I got my feet wet the first week and now I'm planning some pretty decent involvement in a number of things over the next few months. Yet another reason to make Athens my official home once more; it's just not feasible to put in the kind of work I need to do there while I'm couch-surfing. The friends circle I truly care about and derive much of my inspiration and meaning from are (or will be for another couple of years) settled in Athens. Maybe that isn't quite an adequate statement: the happiest I am is when I'm engaged and interacting with a small, tight-knit community of people (yes, I'm constantly looking for that temporary autonomous zone and a tribe of my own) and doing something direct, with impact, that I can see benefits the areas and people I care about. Ultimately, I don't see a better place to do that. Work is close, there is an amazing amount of community mobilization and resources available to sit back at the end of the week and say "There, I helped make that happen, and that is pretty damn great".

So... anybody want to rent me a room? I'm quiet, clean, and won't be around 14 days out of the month...

Neat. The interwebs knew what I was maybe going to write about even before I did. Like magic.

Ahem.

In any case, I'm looking at two hands here - the first is the amount of writing, reading, and research I've done in the past few days since leaving Athens and heading north (which is a veritable fuck-ton); the second is how organized my head is about putting it all down in some easily-digestible format (which is Not at All). On to those resolutions and how they're going:

The vegetarian shift is going pretty well, I think. The upshot is that I haven't caved yet, despite plenty of temptations and some poor planning on my part last weekend at home. Hooray for beans and hummus. The downswing is that I've been constantly a little bit hungry. I'm not certain if that's from less protein or my metabolism gearing back up now that I'm working out regularly again. I'm guessing I'll find out in the field this week one way or another. I feel good, though, and I think I can make this work. I went the entire week in the field without meat - not even tuna packets, and I didn't miss it at all physiologically (even if the smell of frying bacon was something akin to waterboarding for my stomach). Physically I felt great - strong, healthy, and, best of all, clean. I'm in a weird position, I think. People keep asking me why I dropped the meat, and the only real answer I can come up with is that red meat makes me sick and I wasn't really eating meat all that often anyway, which doesn't seem to satisfy. I could co-opt the ethical line, but let's face it: I'm more interested in my health than the Horrible, Awful Things the livestock industry does to Poor Defenseless Animals.

The projects are coming along really well... the newspaper is slouching to be born and will enter the world like some sort of Omen hell-spawn relatively soon (that is, if a couple of key contributers get off their asses and Make Shit Happen). I have faith; I believe that good, honest writing will find a home in the world down to my very bones, and I believe that with a little hard work and a lot of shameless self promotion people will read. Our secret cabal for the project have all sorts of great ideas: I'm desperate to see them come to fruition. If it finds traction in Athens, we'll look into a website. Some events. Who knows what else?

This past week in the field was great, despite the Brain Numbing Cold. I got to work with a great staff team again with one of the two groups I've spent all my time with, I got the chance to start stepping up into a larger role in the group and got my feet wet running some events I've never run before. Most importantly I got some excellent guidance and feedback about where I need to be to advance to the next level... and I got to spend a week in beautiful wilderness with friends I'm growing to care deeply about. We did two days' worth of backcountry hikes, crossed an impressive section of our field area, and spent the last two nights on top of a gorgeous ridge covered in hemlocks, firs, and pines. At night the stars felt close enough to touch, and when the wind blew it ripped hard enough through camp I felt like it was bearing away much of the crap I've been dealing with lately. We talk about the wilderness as a tool to bring up conflict with our students; every time I go into the woods I feel I leave more and more bullshit behind me and come out stronger and more whole...

Time to shower.