Burning Man 2025

Burning Man.

Hmm.

Where to begin.

If you were to ask me “Hey, did you have fun at Burning Man this year?”, that would be a very difficult question to answer.  Existentially difficult, even.  I mean, yes, I did have fun.  Yes.  I probably would end up saying yes.  But it would take time.

But if you were to ask me “Did you learn anything at Burning Man this year?”  I would immediately say yes.  If you were to ask me if it was worth it, if it was a growth moment, if I would go again, I would not hesitate to say yes, yes, and yes.  This is not a sales pitch for Burning Man; I realize it may come across that way.  I know there are many folks who couldn’t attend or wouldn’t attend or shouldn’t and that is their truth and I honor it.  Burning Man has a lot of problems, some of them self-inflicted, and there were moments that were very much not fun at all.  But it is slowly becoming a sort of necessary medicine for me, a part of my yearly cleansing that I am coming to value highly, and I will tell you why: because Burning Man has the right combination of existential dread.  As I stood in a hurricane-force windstorm holding on to my rapidly disintegrating $800 shade structure that was morphing into a deadly projectile, I knew two things: that this sucked, and that this was largely my fault.  And that may sound unpleasant - and it was - but the thing about Burning Man is (and this is key) that it is largely what you make of it.  Unlike normal life, I could easily pinpoint the exact moment I had failed, and why I had failed.   And there was enough danger genuinely present to inform my neurons that failure had clearly occurred without so much that I became, you know, dead.  In this sense it combines some of the best traits of mountaineering, or skydiving, or riding my bike across country; it does not coddle you, but yet you are not likely to actually come to the end of your time on this earth.  I find have learned the most from these sorts of experiences; spending a week in the forest off-grid without internet, riding my bike across the country, that sort of thing.  I have patterns and routines, both in the external world and in my head, and Burning Man just Does Not Care.  It is the right combination of safe enough to not actually perish from this earth but just dangerous and toxic enough to make you reconsider even your most deeply held choices.  Or, as a burner might more prosaically put it, Fuck Your Burn.

So yes.  I had some growth moments.  Holding on to my rapidly disintegrating $800 shade because I assumed that sinking the bolts in half way was good enough was one.  Realizing that everyone thought I was miserable and having a terrible time and was slowly avoiding me was another.  Trying to rally in the heat only to realize I needed a 10 hour nap.  

But, also, waiting in line with a friend from camp for an hour only to go inside a human car wash and hoot and grunt with a pack of naked gorilllahumans as we were sprayed down with soap and cold water.  Having my brother tell me that he was really grateful that I proofread his book.  Shooting the shit with a guy who runs mediation services for a living while he showed me his hollow-backed banjo.

My favorite moment of the burn came a few days in.  We had had some terrible, terrible weather; an epic windstorm followed by a serious rainstorm.  On the third day, things improved somewhat - only a sprinkle and a breeze - and I hoofed it over to my brother’s tent to meet his crew, only to find them somewhat moping about, partly out of inertia and partly because they assumed the rain had been just as bad.  And I took on a role very uncharacteristic for me: cheerleader.  I told everybody we had to turn those frowns upside down, and: we did!  We went and saw my favorite musical act of the whole time, a Scottish guy named Elias Alexander who totally rocked and combined live classical Scottish instruments like the bagpipe with some electronic backing tracks and live DJing and totally nailed it (the stage was called Reverbia, for future reference).  I felt great that I had been the motivating force to get everybody off their asses; that’s not a role I often play.

This burn was more subdued for me than last year.  There were really no giant revelations.  The bad weather of the first few days wiped me out and I actually wound up sleeping a lot.  I didn’t really go out with the camp until the last night after the man burned.  And there were some bad moments and some tactical mistakes. But still, I wouldn’t change it for the world.

A few moments that stand out in my mind that I want to record for posterity (that I feel comfortable posting here publicly, anyway; a few were too private):

This moment where I was out biking by myself in the mud and it filled up with mud so much that I was at the Man and couldn’t bike anymore and this lady poked all the mud out with a tiny, tiny stick.

Going to black rock public library and checking out a book on graphic design in multicultural settings and them saying they would put hot sauce in every orifice if I didn’t bring back the book next year

Building the tower at the Shire and helping them with it while suddenly realizing just how drunk and woozy I was - just pitching right in and working on it.  Missing a handhold and suddenly realizing I’m drunk and this was a very stupid thing to be doing 20 feet in the air.

Dancing to Goldfish early Thursday night, and against all odds finding Jason in the middle of the crowd and being there for a happy moment for him.

Getting stopped by the folks who wanted me to drink a Keystone Light (Hand Lovers) and telling them they had to shake it up and shove it in that guys’ crotch before I would drink it, and then they did it, and then I had to drink it, because what does a man have other than his word

Doing a journaling table one morning at our camp and having a guy come up and tell us his story about working on the Mona Die Die Die and how it felt apart so bad it took the crane with it. And then seeing it - just a pile of sticks - out on the Playa.

Going to the smaller “trip trap” with the LEDs where Greg got fascinated by all the different buttons, and this kid came up and started using the buttons - then on to the really big trap where you could lay down in the middle of it but it was so busy, and it made really good sounds that followed the LEDs except that there were too many camps around making noise. I went back later and had a better experience on my own.

Laying in the coffin inside the interior of the Moonlight Library with the stairs up, but being worried about my community bike and feeling like I couldn’t relax enough to take a nap.

Jason working on his letters to leave at the Temple, and me making a few of them on smaller pieces, but also realizing that I didn’t really feel any hate towards anybody from my past - I just wanted to move forward.  I’m over the hate of the past.

Giving my gold hat to the high priestess on a violin for the event

People really like my harem pants, and my blue cat hat, and I got a lot of compliments on my clothes just in general.

Oh my god the road being so bumpy

Walking to and fro from Jason’s camp that first night in the mud, and getting Espresso Maritinis at the EMO, and then going back at the end.  Me getting carded and them letting Jason go because I had my card.  So much mud that when you lifted your feet the whole mud mat situation came up with them

Talking to a BLM cop Thursday night about his experience watching a guy counting out individual drug gummies.  Said he worked in Moab, Utah.

Watching the people run the half marathon when I was out by myself one morning.

Trying to get the moon to fit in between the two horns of the sphinx gate with Jason

Sitting on the couch at Atlantic across from my camp and journaling

Having Starla yell out “Kids Table!” to keep us together

Eating Mac and cheese and sausages at their camp, and my lips hurting from the spicy sauce

Emobot the space alien who is supposed to use AI but then didn’t

Walking around with Jodi looking at all the stained glass art of past BM art projects and having her walk down memory lane

Sitting with Jodi at the beginning of her shift on the electric crate and hearing her talk about how the windstorm was not OK and we were all scared

Brooke’s shade structure deconstructing itself as well, and his story about hanging off of it

Enjoying the intro movie and conversation at Playa Paul’s, the used car dealer

Watching the sunrise from the movie seats while somebody played the piano

Not drinking Diet Coke or spending any money the entire week

Talking to Murray, his friends Mark and Candace, eating soup in their RV, Freezer Burn and Iceland for the Eclipse next year August 16th

Doing my 7 massages, and the woman named Myra from the Netherlands, and the last guy Martin also from the Netherlands that I only gave about a 12-14 minute massage

Having the woman getting a massage next to my client get totally rained on

Dancing on top of our roof deck during Pussy Waffles Coffee with Jodi and with Placebo in a Vagina costume

And so many, many more!

And then, just for completeness sake, I want to post my feelings that I wrote, on Playa, after the first really hard day of windstorms. Just to remind myself how I feel sometimes when things aren’t going well:

I feel like I should start my Burning Man journal.  Today is Sunday, August 24th, 2025.  I have been at Burning Man since 3am on Saturday, August 23.  The drive up was relatively uneventful.  I felt as if I was much better prepared, logistically, than last year, and that has proved to be the case, which is good, because apparently last year I was at Toy Burning Man and this year is the real thing.  But I should tell this story more in chronological order.

The first thing that happened is that I sat in line for 6 and a half hours to get in.  This is apparently a known right of passage at Burning Man, and so I’m not special.  I have no idea why getting everybody in is so hard, but apparently it is.  When I got to the front they didn’t even do all that much, just kind of waved a flashlight around in my car and checked my ticket, so I have no idea why it moved so slow.  The problem with it, other than my overall lack of patience, is that they kept saying it was only a 4 hour or so wait, and that was apparently just a lie.

But finally I got in, like I said at 3 am.  I tried to find my camp, and I pulled in at 4:30 and D.  I got out of the car and some people were sitting there.  I don’t know everyone at my camp, and so I thought maybe those were just folks I didn’t know.  But they weren’t the right camp.  And they were obnoxious.  It really is true that people are randomly mean to me.  I had another guy say he liked my bike and then ask me if it came in a men’s version.  So people like to treat me like shit.  Worth exploring later.

But anyway, after getting called a fucking c*nt, I ended up sleeping for a few precious hours in the back of my car all curled up.  Then I got to work pitching my tent and everything else.  I had a brand new shade structure from Blackrock Hardware, it was supposed to be the best of the best, and I got some help installing it.  I was quite proud of it.  Everyone said it looked quite nice.  Foreshadowing.

Then, at around 3 or 4 pm, a dust storm started to come in.  I didn’t realize really what was happening.  Visibility started to go down, and a few folks started making some moves, but there didn’t seem to be any panic.  Then I went to my tent for a minute, and when I got out, everybody was just gone and the dust was blowing.  I walked back to my tent and sat in a chair for a minute.  Then I noticed that the shade structure had started moving in the wind. [Editor’s note: I stopped typing here, but the end of the story was that it disintegrated around me and was terrifying but, in the end, other than losing the $800 shade structure, no permanent damage was done]

But you know, as I sit in my tent, listening to the sound of the desert rain on the canvas, drinking a cold beer, using this laptop and eating peanut M&Ms, I feel like maybe, just maybe, the worst of it has passed.  I hope I can find some space to actually start enjoying this, instead of just living through it, and surviving.  I guess the challenge out here is to find a way to incorporate all those things we want, like openness and joy, in the middle of this - let’s call it what it is - hellscape.  I’m not yet decided on whether the hellscape is needed, but I’m still willing to try and stay open to it.

(And it turned out, by the way, that the worst of it had passed!)

Meow Wolf Denver - Convergence Station

This week I went to Denver to see my friend Kaska but also to go and see Meow Wolf’s Convergence Station in Denver. Meow Wolf, for those that don’t know, is a kind of art house/performance troupe that runs a series of difficult-to-describe “interactive art museums” at various spots around the country. I’d heard of them many times and went for the first time to the one in Las Vegas, Omega Mart, about 4 or 5 months ago, and I’ve made it my goal to get to see all 5 of the existing ones, as well as the 2 new ones when they open. I’m about to talk through my experience at Convergence Station and compare it to Omega Mart, but let me just say before I do: everything Meow Wolf does is amazing and you should absolutely go see it, right now. If you happen to be lucky enough to live in a city where they have a facility, go immediately; if not, make some travel plans. The work they do is almost unique in America; the combination of art, storytelling, interactivity (both digital and analog) and whimsy is something worth supporting.

With that said, I can’t help but feel that Convergence Station was…well, a bit of a let down compared to Omega Mart. To be sure, CS is still a total 9.5/10. I went back for a second day. There are things that are done amazingly well there, sometimes even better than at Omega Mart, but then there’s one key aspect - arguably the most important aspect of the experience, to me - that didn’t stack up.

But first: Convergence Station is amazing. It’s the only Meow Wolf facility that was custom built to house the experience, and it shows. Omega Mart, for all its wonder, is obviously cramped a bit, and the introduction/entrance to the show in LV is a little janky because of it. CS feels like what it is: a fun, paid-for museum experience. There’s an extensive lobby and gift shop, an entire cafe, a coat check; the whole first floor is devoted to what I would call the “meta experience”, which I’m sure helps a lot with families and people not used to the Meow Wolf “thing”. OM in Las Vegas is built into a whole set of experiences called Area 15, so they don’t fully control the experience. CS is a custom-built experience. There is a ton of space inside, and everything felt very accessible, even when it got busy on a Saturday. While at OM there were often queues for interesting parts of the experience, CS never got too busy. There are way, way more of the “boop” terminals that use NFC cards to move the narrative story forward.

And the art is, as always, astounding. The huge soaring vistas of Numina, the weird catacombs of Ossuary, the odd slightly-off urban C Street; all are amazing. There is a tiny Japanese-style cyber cafe, a security room with CCTV cameras, an automated popcorn-making concession robot outside a functioning movie theater, some time machine Deloreans, and room after room of funky, cool abstract art. There’s a room that consists entirely of moving black and white patterns on the walls, a room of just Himalayan masks, and an entire area devoted to a fake 80s-style chain pizza restaurant, complete with super creepy mascots. The place is astounding, and every inch of it is made over in the art style of Meow Wolf.

And…yet. I had way more fun at Omega Mart. Let me explain what my bias is, in coming to these installations: I love narratives. I come from a background of participating in ARGS, Alternate Reality Games, like I Love Bees or Marble Hornets. I love the idea of a story-within-a-story; think the Da Vinci code, or even Sixth Sense, or Fight Club: a story with a surface that hides a deeper, twistier tale. Omega Mart is this, quite literally.

-WARNING WARNING WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD-

From here on out, I’ll be talking about the narratives of both OM and CS. If you haven’t been to either of them, and you enjoy discovering stories on your own, you’re going to want to skip these parts. Go see them, both! And then come back here.

So, Omega Mart is, quite literally, a false front: a seemingly-normal-ish grocery store hiding a deep dark secret. And not figuratively; they are literal secret tunnels and false doors that lead you to the back of the story, narratively and physically, where you uncover conspiracies, fight evil, find your way through a story, make choices, and ultimately wrap up loose ends. It’s a tight, intricate narrative about the quest for power leading people astray and causing them to harm their loved ones. One entire subplot deals with the coming of age of a young woman who thinks she might be a lesbian and is also trapped - quite literally - in a tiny small town. There’s an evil corporation, a bunch of environmentalist homesteaders, ancient space aliens - it’s great. And more importantly, even when it gets very funky, it is very human and relatable. The story of the young woman, whose mother is the CEO of the evil corporation, growing of age and finding her own way, is deeply resonant. And the environment supports it: all the art (well, 90% of it) is there to support the narrative. The homesteader town is fully rendered, with tiny cottages in a desert, complete with ads, protest posters, diaries hidden on the computers, etc. The “factory floor” feels urgent and corporate and modern, pipes sluicing things from one place to another. Almost every nugget of information you find relates to some other piece somewhere else.

By contrast, the story of Convergence Station is…loose, at best. Before arriving, there are a number of videos available to prime you, narratively, for the experience, and they are all themed around the idea of a transportation/travel company that can take you between worlds, done in the style of travel brochures. The overarching corporation (which, yes, is ultimately evil) is called QDOT and is a transportation company that runs trains. A lot is made of the Quantum nature of things and how time can get out of order. Memories are brought up; that you might forget things when you get on the TRAM, their version of a train that takes you from Station to Station between the worlds of Numina, Ossuary, Earth, the Immensity and Eemia.

When you arrive at the physical site, this metaphor continues; the bottom floor is made to look like a light rail station, with clean signage in different languages, some invented, and signs for “TRAMS” to various destinations. It all feels coherent, narratively. We’re introduced to two main characters: the evil bad guy, and his sort of doctor sidekick. All good.

Then, you get on the “TRAM” (which, it turns out, is just a big elevator; kind of disappointing tbh) and you “get off” at C Street, the hub of the experience and….all that narrative vanishes. Instead, you find yourself in a kind of conjunction of somewhat overlaid settings; the urban setting, the icy setting, the weird plant setting, etc. You’re given to understand that the currency of the realm is memories, which can be extracted somehow from you and traded around as Mems to buy things. There’s some loose effort made to back this up, with a kind of convenience store that takes Mems to buy snacks. The whole quantum time thing is pretty much thrown away. You begin “booping” your little narrative NFC card at these various terminals. The whole thing about a “transportation company”? Kinda gets lost. You don’t take a train between worlds you just…push through a door and there you are. In fact, the story describes that all the areas between the different worlds are kind of physically conjoined in which case…why is there a train company? You don’t need a train.

Pause for a moment: this is one of the best parts of the Omega Mart experience, which uses the same physical boop system. In that world, you have to boop at a specific terminal first, signifying your “first day on the job” at the grocery store, where you go through new employee training and start getting introduced, narratively, to the underlying tensions of the place.

Conversely, at CS, you can boop anywhere you like to start, and all that really happens is you start…collecting memories. From people you never heard of, and who turn out to mostly be of no importance whatsoever. As you kind of boop around, randomly, exploring, various folks you never heard of reach out to you and loosely explain that…”something” called the Last Stop might be happening, and might be evil. It’s a slow burn at best.

Also, at OM, every boop terminal has a specific meaning. Some advance the story, some give you quizzes, some play a movie. At CS, they (almost, with one exception)…just give you Mems. Most of the time, you can go to any one you want. Sometimes you do have to be in a specific area of the exhibit to advance the story, but oftentimes you don’t. Also, at OM, they rarely make you go back and boop the same terminal twice, and when they do, there’s a narrative reason for it. At CS, if you wait 5 minutes, you can boop any terminal again, and it will just give you another Mem. There are exceptions, of course, but they are few and far between.

Also, at OM there are many computer terminals spread around, each of which is unique and belongs to a specific person and shows their unique desktop with interesting narrative content. At CS, there are only 2 or 3 of these, and (with one supercool exception for the Japanese cyber cafe), they’re kind of generic.

And parts of the CS story just…make no sense. The story loosely centers around a single cataclysmic event that brought about the Convergence of these 5 worlds, and 4 women that got caught up in it. We learn their stories, which are well done and interesting, and we start to care about them. Then we just…give up on them, and meet a new person, who contacts us and says she has “interesting information”. Who is this person? Why do we care? No idea. It turns out, of course, that this person is the key to the whole thing, and actually represents all 4 of the women at once (?), but this is very loosely explained and even more loosely motivated.

And the ending…oh, the ending. I actually went back to CS a second day because I didn’t have time to get to the ending and wanted to see it and I was…underwhelmed. As an artistic work, it’s really good; a very anime-style movie about sci-fi and evil and good and it’s flashy and cool. But (like some anime) it just kinda…makes no sense. The characters act in unmotivated ways, the guy who saves the day is someone we barely know, and the whole thing just sorta…stops. For various technical reasons related to the ending not being very well explained, I ended up “failing” the story the first time, and had to redo it (which they allow you to do, which is nice), so I ended up seeing both endings (good and bad) and they are….almost exactly the same. Most of the deep narrative content about the good ending is delivered to you after the fact in a text message/email from the doctor sidekick who tells you, in text, what a great thing you did and how you saved the world(s).

I dunno. Maybe I’m being too harsh. I loved so many things about Convergence Station - the cool urbanity of C Street, the amazing self-playing band, the awesome anime style, the idea of a travel department between worlds, the nutsy pizza parlor - but the narrative payoff is so loose and lacking. I can’t help but wonder if some of it is designed to respond to the logistical hurdles of Omega Mart; for example, because the story at OM involves specific terminals at specific times, there often was a line to get to the next part of the story. That rarely happens at CS. But what’s lost there is context; a character may tell you a part of a story at OM that involves where you are physically standing, and because that can’t happen at CS, the story writers are forced to make everything…kinda vague. It ends up feeling like a really cool avant-garde art museum with a sorta half-baked attempt at a story which, again, is still better than 99% of the entertainment out there, but feels like such a letdown compared to the masterpiece that is Omega Mart.

And the art…as cool as it is, it doesn’t really serve the narrative. At one point, off of the main C Street, I wandered into a room which was filled with puppets and blacklight paint, a kind of circus gone mad. It was very cool and….made no sense, narratively. Why is it there? What’s the point? There were no hints. And the cool black-and-white room I referenced earlier; yes, very neat, but…why? Is it a portal between worlds? A tunnel for the TRAM to go through? No idea. It’s just there. By contrast, almost everything at Omega Mart is tied into the narrative; when you go from the grocery store to the backroom, you go through a tunnel, where everything starts out looking like grocery products and slowly warps its way into abstract shapes. Cool, and narratively satisfying.

Again, I do not want to make it sound like Convergence Station is not worth visiting. Even if it was just a loose collection of amazing art with no narrative at all, I would go: the narrative is icing on the cake. But, oh, what icing it is! And this icing is a little…bland.

2025 - Andorra

Last week I took a trip to Andorra, which is a small country in between France and Spain. Why Andorra you ask? Well, other than the fact that it’s beautiful, I’ve always had a fascination with microcountries, that is, very small but completely sovereign nations, like Andorra or Monaco or San Marino. They shouldn’t exist, yet they do, which is a feat of absurdity that even Douglas Adams might find appealing. It didn’t hurt that Intrepid Travel, on which I had a travel credit left over from the pandemic, had a relatively inexpensive “adventure tour” that sounded right up my alley: mountain biking, whitewater rafting, hiking. The whole trip was organized around a central hotel, which ended up being the Hotel Roc du Sant Miquel, a chraming inn owned by a couple, a British man named Nick and an Catalonian woman named Nuria. We had communal breakfasts, communal dinners, sandwiches made for us while we went out hiking. The weather was phenomenal and, not to bury the lead, I had a great time. I’ll try to sprinkle in some little facts about Andorra and what I learned on my trip along the way, but for now, let’s get to:

Day 0: Navigating Travel, Toulouse, and the first night at the hotel

Thoughts about my brief stint in Toulouse: It's been beautiful weather, it's very Oakland-esque here, but the plant life is much more Buffalo or so. Apparently it is known for its aerospace industry, I saw a plane and lots of businesses. I ended up in a retail district and wandered into mall and a gigantic Menards-style department store. Everything here is reasonably priced, less New York and more Austin-style. I'm sitting on a deck here at the hotel and listening to three people who are on a tour, the tour guide is telling me abuot how he lived in Austin for 30 years and the other two are from California. There's something very surreal about that. But then there are little differences, too: for example the table I'm sitting at on the deck has an ashtray on it and there are obvious remanants of someone's cigarette, and actually just as I write this, a guy came out and sat not too far from me and lit up a cigarette. You know, the smell doesn't bother me as much I remember it bothering me in the old days. Not sayin we shold bring back smoking but it looks cooler when French people do it. I'm really pleased with myself and how easy it was to slip back into my French. I had no trouble with the woman at the front desk, or the guy last night, even though I'm pretty sure they don't speak English at all really. Decathlon was closed, though. The hotel room is very small but very pleasant and well-appointed. As I always say, it's nice to go places and realize that I have it just as good at home. Certainly I could make a life here but I don't feel any significant pull or anything.

The first night in the hotel, called Le Roc du Sant Miquel, it rained hard. I was so tired that it felt a bit disorienting and I started to wonder what I had gotten myself into. I often find in situations like this that I start slow; I have to give myself time to warm up to situations and people and not put too much stock in how I feel the first day. At least as I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten more aware of this.

Day 1 - Mountain Biking and Ropes Course

After getting through all the travel and spending a night in Toulouse, which was fine but uneventful, the first day in Soldeu, Andorra, was slated for some mountain biking and “zip lines” (which ended up being more like what I think of as ropes courses, but I digress). The mountain biking was relatively straightforward and not too hard, except that we were at 7000 ft elevation, so I was a bit out of breath. But the ropes course was really challenging. I’m not terrified of heights but definitely I’m not a huge fan either, and these weren’t that high but they were high enough to hurt. A lot of the course required you to be pretty active, like walking across tightropes and swinging across gaps on a rope. But the one that got me was a set of barrels that you had to wiggle through on your back. The edge of the barrel kept getting caught on my harness and I got stuck, but I eventually made it through! It was the first day of “the sandwiches”: Nuria, the inn owner, made us sandwiches every day on the trip out of nice crusty French baguettes, tomatoes, meat and mayo and butter, and they were delicious. By the time we got back everyone was wiped out, and dinner was made for us at the inn. A great first day and a great start.

The one hiccup I had today: I went up into town today to get some cash, because they mentioned I might need it for biking and for the buses. But the machine ate my card! First time that's ever happened to me in all my travels; even in Ukraine I had no problem. I assume it was some kind of fraud prevention thing. As always, I'm reminded of the tentative position that immigrants or tourists find themselves in when they visit the United States. I think about that time that I ended up in Dallas when they canceled the second leg of my trip home, and there was zero information available about what I was supposed to do. I got through that situation by booking a hotel last minute and walking to it, but how would that have gone if I didn't speak English and didn't know what the heck was going on? It would have been a bit of a disaster.

Day 2: Hiking

Idyllic. Pastoral. It's interesting when specific experiences really line up with what you're expecting. We've all seen the movies where the character wanders the (usually French, in my imagination) countryside, a bell off a cow ringing in the distance, while a stream burbles down through a perfectly green valley, while stone buildings dot the landscape. So, magine my surprise when it turned out that is exactly what it looks like and felt like. I laid on the hillside and listened to both the close and far sound of the streams. What's interesting too is the juxtaposition of the very modern world of people bustling about with this very rural vision of a specific time and place. The literal juxtaposition, physically. I won't say it is cleansing; it reminded me of the need for community, oddly. But it's interesting that these things are real. They feel almost more real than real. Lots of thoughts bubbling around in the ol' brain, but precious few of them are coalescing into anything useful. One that is pretty consistent, though, is that physical activity is good. It makes me feel good and powerful and centered and it erases a lot of my anxiety. It's a good way for me to spend my precious time on this earth. Also, community is very important, and I can't get too picky about the kind of community. We did about 6.5 miles up through the Pyrenees. We visited a lake and got near a peak and got some views of the surrounding mountains, and climbed about 2000 feet up to about 8100 feet. It was a very fun if exhausting hike. I would like to be in better shape to be sure. There was a couple in their late 30s and they added on extra hiking at the end. I don't think they're even tired. :) Also we got to play my Unlock escape room card game! It was a mixed bag as a game but it was so fun to get to play!

Even after our 7 mile hike up into the mountains, I got off my butt and went out and ran 4.5 miles down to the end of the payment at the Valle d'Incles. And it wasn't even that bad! I had to walk the uphill parts, but I had a great time and felt alive. It makes me feel physical and masculine and sexual and alive. I have to get back into doing physical stuff. Having physical adventures! That's the way.

This was our first day to be on our own for dinner and I ended up with the couple, Jessie and Chris, and after a few false starts we hit up the only restaurant we could find, a self-professed “snack bar” where I got a paella-based dish (paella is Catalan for “pan”) which ended up being what your roommate made for himself for dinner when he got drunk; Rice-a-Roni style noodles in a pan with chopped up ham and sausage bits. It…wasn’t bad? But wasn’t good.

Day 3: White Water Rafting

Today was whitewater rafting. We took a van with Nuria about 2 and a half hours to Sort, Spain. The rafting itself was really great. One of the other participants Shelley fell out of the boat and screamed bloody murder. Fear is such an interesting thing. We were in Spain, so I guess I can cross that one off my list. I had a 3 euro glass of white wine at a hotel with a beautiful blue pool in a green lawn. The rafting guide was named "Ot" and he was very skilled. I still felt fear from my last whitewater rafting experience, but I made it through. We went to a bridge where you could jump off into deep water and swim over to a shallow part - and I did it! It wasn't even that scary in the end. But boy it sure is when you are up there looking down at the water.

I really need to get back to Sacramento and do more whitewater rafting.

Dinner tonight was rewarding, the fact that I was able to speak French with the restaurant proprietor and kind of save the day for the group. His whole demeanor changed when I spoke French and I was able to get us seated despite the fact that they weren't technically open yet. What a very French man; frosty but in the end excellent service and very kind. And some tasty fried squid. It’s been great how well my French came back; I can tell it’s rusty but to the rest of the group I sounded native. :)

Day 4: Via Ferrata and Spa

Day 4 was supposed to be our “day off”, but of course nobody really wanted to take a day off. Our hosts recommended a friend of theirs, Carlos, who could take us on a “Via Ferrata”, which literally means “By Iron”, but in this case meant vertical rock climbing using preinstalled iron ladder rungs, sunk into the rock. You are clipped in (barely) to a lead attached with some bungee cord in case you fall, but still, it’s scary AF. We were apparently on “level 3” (out of 7) of via ferrata, still suitable for families. I actually had no problem with the vertical climbing bit, that just felt like being on a ladder, but when we switched to lateral travel, I got really scared that my footholds wouldn’t hold me or my shoes didn’t have enough traction, and it got pretty scary. At one point you had to basically go hand over foot across onto a sort of rope bridge and that almost broke my brain. But I got it done.

The afternoon was a lot more relaxing: we went to this place called the Caldea Spa, the most well-known 4-or-5-star spa in Andorra, and it was amazing. Huge beautiful pools of water in a modern stainless steel arrangement, both inside and out, complete with cold showers and aromatherapy and lots of bubbles. My only complaint was that the hot water wasn’t, by and large, hot enough. But it was a great way to wind down and relax, and it gave me lots of good memories.

Then in the evening we all agreed we wanted to explore the capital, so we had some ice cream, and then went to dinner at a cheesy-looking place called The Excalibur Tavern (or something like that) that turned out to actually have really great food. Helen cheesily pulled the sword out of the stone like a good tourist. Our server was Australian; a lot of folks here aren’t from here of course, especially those that work the tourist trade. By the time we got home everyone was exhausted. A great day all around.

Day 5: Mountain Biking, Part 2

Today was just straight up mountain biking, pure and simple. With all the optional trips added in we ended up doing about 20 miles across the Andorran countryside. At one point we decamped and had lunch along a lake which was half in Andorra and half in France. It got me thinking, not for the first time, about how silly borders are. The idea of an invisible line in this idyllic countryside in the middle of nowhere, and on one side cigarettes are $13 and on the other side they’re $3, just because people said so.

It’s really great to be good at things. I was the best cyclist in the group, and that made me proud. And it’s fun to bike downhill across these rocks through beautiful landscapes.

Day 6: Hiking, Part 2

In the evening, we finished up the third round of Dark Tomb, this little DnD-game-in-a-tin that we’ve been playing all week. One of the really great parts about the trip was the feeling of being in a community, something I miss so much here in Oakland; just a bunch of adults doing fun stuff together like playing a board game. Dark Tomb isn’t perfect but it’s a great way to just get some adults together playing something fun; it’s a bit silly as a game but the role playing part of it is perfect for how light it is, and easy to carry. We had a few lemon shandies and a little chocolate and it was very nourishing and social and fun.

The Catalonian way of drinking wine is to use this decanter that never touches your lips, you just cast a stream of wine into your mouth!

Recap, Tolouse, Lessons Learned

Toulouse was nice; I had almost a full day to wander around. I ended up eating lunch with Alexa at an Indian restaurant where the food was incredibly spicy, then I went to the MC Escher museum and then walked the full 4 miles to the airport along the river, which was beautiful. By the time I got to the airport I was exhausted and must have looked like a homeless person.

So a few things about this trip: first of all, I’m down for more Intrepid Travel tours if they are at all like this one. There were a few great things about this trip: it was great to be active every single day, first of all, but secondly being in community with a bunch of other cool adults was just so much fun. So I’m thinking about trips to Morocco or other spots. I’m incredibly happy that I took the trip and it was really inspiring.

The Between Times - Chapter 9: I'm Done

That’s it; I’m done. There comes a time when staying silent is just cowardice, and now is definitely that moment. Today, February 28, 2025, is my personal Amnesty Day. If, up until this point, you have supported Donald Trump and his cast of minions, but you have recanted that support, then we’re good. I won’t ask any questions, I don’t care if you “admit you were wrong”, I’m willing to offer a full pardon, so to speak. But if, as of today, you still support that man, or anything he stands for, then I’m done with you. I do not want to be friends with you, I do not want to date you, I do not want anything from you. If you still support what is happening right now, your moral compass is so far off that I just am wasting my time trying to relate to you.

The last five weeks have been so obviously, unrepentantly petulant, unkind, mean, and also just quintessentially unAmerican that I just don’t see any path back. But today’s outburst of childishness, in front of a world leader who is trying to protect his people against evil, was so bald-facedly ignorant that it boggles the mind. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look it up). And I am not afraid; I’m not afraid of what’s coming next, I’m not afraid of change, and I am not afraid of being on the right side of history. The man is a bully and a coward, and he has surrounded himself with the most idiotic sycophants bent on destroying American democracy that to do anything other than openly proclaim that idiocy is tantamount to supporting it.

So I’m done. I’m out. No more. Tolerance only extends so far, and that time is today.

The Between Times - Chapter 8: Forgiveness (and Syria)

So, Syria.

There is a well-known saying about how sometimes a week’s worth of things happen in the world in ten years, and sometimes ten years’ worth happens in a week. Guess which one is happening right now?

The theme of forgiveness has been coming up a lot in life, and listening to all the talking heads discuss Syria, something that struck me was how many of them focused on whether the rebels, flush with their success, would try to exact retribution. In fact, the rebels have surprised everyone by very explicitly saying they would not do so, which has led a lot of commentators - with varying degrees of subtlety - to admit that they don’t quite believe them.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that in a situation like this, we assume that others will not forgive? Yes, of course there are cultural western biases here at work, about people in the Middle East, about Islam - but I think, even were this a South American or even European country, we might immediately wonder about vengeance.

And, in wondering aloud about vengeance, the unspoken message hanging in the air was that peace, true peace, can only happen without vengeance. The seeking of retribution - whether it be called justice, revenge, closure, whatever you like - seems associated with a return to violence. And yet, of course, seeing the scenes of the Sendaya prison and the emaciated half-corpses that dragged themselves into the sunlight for the first time in 15 years, there is part of any right-thinking person that turns their thoughts towards some sort of punishment.

Now, I am not nearly so wise as to even pretend to know what the right answers are here and, fortunately, that is up to the Syrian people (or, at least, it should be). But it did cause me to think about what forgiveness means in my own life. There’s a whole blog post coming someday about game theory and governance and the way that punishment and rehabilitation becomes part of that, but for the moment, I’ll just say that I think a good start is to take whatever vengeance or closure you think you want and just shave 15-20% off the top. Human beings, as a rule, overcorrect. And something I’ve noticed about vengeance, and closure, is that the desire for them often (but not always) fades. I’m not, by the way, saying that revenge and justice and closure are always bad. I’m not sure that’s true. But I will say that it’s in our nature to way overdo it.

So, while I hope for justice for the Syrian people, what I hope most for them is freedom and happiness. May they, and us all, achieve it, and soon.

The Between Times - Chapter 7: The Paradox of Tolerance

For those who aren’t terribly social media savvy, there is a new app out there called Bluesky. It’s been variously described as the “new Twitter” or a “Twitter reboot” and while that isn’t 100% true, it will suffice as a basis for today’s blog post. This post isn’t about Bluesky per se (I may post one of those later), it’s more about the Paradox of Tolerance. As this new platform starts to pick up speed (it’s passed 21 million users at this point), one of the main conversations being had is the approach to free speech and moderation. Other than basic technical competence, this is in my opinion the number one hurdle facing social media platforms: what speech to allow, and what to forbid, and how. It reminds me somewhat of the challenge we face choosing roommates, or partners. There’s clearly a balance to be had: nobody except the most foolish of absolute idealogues advocates for complete free speech without restrictions, and similarly a platform with too draconian restrictions is just not a fun or ethical place to hang out. And to be clear, I don’t believe there are any right answers that can be easily expressed in a single sentence. The closest I’ve come is my guiding principle for all things: When in doubt, be kind.

But this is not strictly speaking about any of that either; it’s about the Paradox of Tolerance. The Paradox of Tolerance is a succinct problem we are all going to face over the next 4 years, and it goes like this: if we regard Tolerance as a virtue, then we find ourselves facing the question of what to do with Intolerance. For the sake of argument, let us say we can only Tolerate it or be Intolerant towards it. If we are Intolerant towards it, then we are, first and foremost, breaking our rule, and because of this, others can point to us and say that we are merely hypocrites. But if we are Tolerant towards it, then by the very nature of Intolerance, which stamps out dissent, we will eventually be overtaken by it.

In the context of social media, if we are Tolerant towards Intolerance, Intolerance will eventually dominate the conversation, but if we are Intolerant towards Tolerance, we risk becoming the very thing we disdain. There are many real-world approaches to this, the most common of which is the Tolerance Rules, or what I call the “Tolerance, But” plan. For example, we may say that we disallow Hate Speech. But this just really kicks the can down the road, ethically, because now we have to define Hate Speech. Clearly, it can’t just be any speech indicating that somebody hates something, or I wouldn’t be able to post that I don’t like TV shows about sparkle vampires. So, is it speech that hates a person? Well, then I can’t post that I hate Donald Trump. (And maybe I shouldn’t be able to, but that seems a bit draconian). Is it speech that hates groups of people? Hates people with specific intent to commit harm? We can construct counterargument scenarios for all of these.

I don’t have an answer here, by the way. There is no big reveal at the end of this post. But I do think that this is the essential challenge if we want to build a happy and tolerant society, and it mirrors the challenge of the penal system, of building our own relationships, having friends, etc.; how much tolerance is, well, too much tolerance? At one point are we just being taken advantage of and how do we know the difference?

When in doubt, be kind.

The Between Times - Chapter 6: He's My President?

Sometimes, on this blog, I show up with fully-formed opinions and ideas I want to communicate. But other times, like today, I come across something I’m not sure how I feel about, and I like to just open up the discussion publicly and put my preliminary thoughts down.

A YouTuber that I follow, who makes no bones about his feelings about Donald Trump in general, has recently been posting about the aftermath of the election, and has chosen to take what he calls an “eternal optimist” approach to the whole thing. He’s a channel I follow about the war in Ukraine, but he’s an American who used to serve in the Air Force, and his take on the situation is that while he still is fervently anti-Trump, he is hoping for the best and hoping that Trump will do the right thing for Ukraine because, in his words, “he’s our quarterback now and we’re in the third quarter”.

And I’m kind of torn on this approach. On the one hand, I am a fervent believer in confronting things as they are, and not as they should or could be. Donald Trump was legitimately elected president by people who knew what they were doing when they picked him, and I live in America as an American citizen, so in some sense it is entirely correct to say that he’s my president. He is. And I also do support optimism as a life strategy. I do hope he does the right thing, for Ukraine, and for transgendered folks, and for people who need healthcare, and everyone else.

However I also think sometimes optimism can turn into a denial of its own. The truth is that we have no reason to suppose that Trump will do the right thing for any of these groups of people. There is every reason to expect that this will be a dysfunctional, corrupt disaster. And, in this case, it is important to be prepared to resist dysfunction and unethical and immoral behavior as soon as it occurs, as forcefully as we can.

In addition, I’ve been struggling lately with this idea of me “being an American”. That’s worth its own blog post, but the fact is that I don’t feel ethically or morally responsible for the acts of a man I’ve never met, didn’t vote for, didn’t want, and don’t agree with or like. There isn’t much I could’ve done to keep him from being president, and what little I could do, I largely did. So in some sense he isn’t “my” president; I don’t feel any sense of ownership, and in fact I feel quite disenfranchised. (There’s an important conversation to be had about whether he really would be my president even if I had voted for him, but that’s for later).

So I don’t know how to feel about this. What do you think? Is this sentiment of “well, he’s what we’ve got, so I guess I’m rooting for him” a positive way to look at things? Is optimism ever unwarranted or unhelpful? What’s the right way to look at this?

The Between Times - Chapter 5: Maybe You Should Try Yoga

Yesterday I taught my first yoga class in over 3 years. In person, to actual humans, in a calm, comforting room in an actual yoga studio. Can you imagine? How 2019 of me!

It was everything you could imagine: terrifying, cathartic, calming, amazing.

Of course, most folks don’t need to become yoga instructors to engage with yoga or find a place on their mat. I’ve been doing yoga as a student for over 10 years now. It has, at various times, been a huge part of my life, but more recently I’ve let it slip. Which is fine: that’s how life goes, there’s a rhythm to everything. Luckily, however, about 3-4 months ago I decided to pick it back up and, while it’s been tough, it’s also been really rewarding. And I say “Luckily” because, well, it turns out that now I need that yoga. I need it bad.

We do things like eat well, do yoga, meditate, get sleep because they fill a meter. I’ll call it the “You Meter”. The You Meter is the reservoir of patience, calm and confidence that we need when things like the election happen. This period of time feels like the calm before the storm (to wear out a cliche). Now is the time to fill that meter, because I think we’re all going to need it soon. And the thing about the meter is that you can’t fill it when you need it. It isn’t like the gas tank in a car; it’s more like a house. When the wind and rain comes, you can’t build a house during the storm; you have to buckle down and hope that what you have can shield and support you. This includes building community, keeping on top of your personal fitness, avoiding drama, self-actualizing, etc., etc.

The exact structure of how that works for you isn’t nearly as important as that you listen to yourself and stick to things that make you fill your meter. Yoga isn’t for everyone and I get that, but there’s a list of activities that I would consider “nourishing”, including fitness, yoga, sports, meditation, eating well, sleeping, engaging in creative activities, building community, etc., etc. that broadly speaking fill the meter for most folks. I don’t necessarily include relaxation and entertainment in this list, although those can be fine too (TV, movies, video games). The idea is not to be judgy or picky about this, just to listen to yourself; your inner self knows what activities it needs, if you just listen.

So take a yoga class! Maybe even mine!

The Between Times - Chapter 4: Do Good Every Day

All of us will process what’s happening in the world in a different way, and that’s totally normal. A concept that I was recently introduced to, which has been working for me, is the idea of habit stacking. This is essentially doing a set of small tasks every day, ideally in order, which improve your life in some small but measurable way. For example, I have a reminder set to do squats every morning; I do 12 of them to improve my hamstring flexibility. I’ve got a reminder to do my Duolingo, to make my bed, etc., etc.

Recently, I added to that list a task to do something good for the world. It doesn’t have to be a big thing, in fact it’s better if it’s not, because the idea is for the process to feel sustainable. Most days, I’m just micro-donating to a cause I support. Today for example I gave $5 to United24, which is Ukraine’s governmental charity arm which takes donations from abroad and uses them for whatever purpose you indicate, such as Medical Aid. $5 is the amount I’ve chosen to donate daily because it’s meaningful but sustainable.

If you can’t afford to give actual cash or just don’t want to, there are other ways to help, such as picking up trash in your neighborhood, volunteering your time, making phone calls for a charity, etc. But I do find that simple monetary donations are convenient for a daily exercise.

Why do this? Because doing good consistently like this builds a reflexive habit of reaching out into the world and doing something useful. Repetitive donations like this build a “muscle” to think about others and they make us feel like we can do something to push back the tide of darkness.

The Between Times - Chapter 3: Hate Doesn't Work

If that title triggers you, read it again, carefully. Note that I didn’t say that you shouldn’t hate things. I personally think that’s a silly thing to say: we all hate stuff. People hate things, it’s one of the things our brains do. You’re going to have your own feelings, and feelings are valid. You can no more stop hating something than you can stop being sad or feeling grief. Plus, it would be the height of irony for you to hate your own hate. So, no: you will hate things.

Hating, however, doesn’t work. It isn’t productive. You might, if you know the quote, go first to Martin Luther King: “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that”. And he’s right, but I think he didn’t go far enough. What I would have said is “Hate cannot produce any positive results at all in anybody, including yourself”. Am I exaggerating? I actually don’t think I am.

Think about your own life. Imagine times where you really hated something, and then you actually tried to get something done out of that place of hate. Imagine a time when you started a conversation with someone you hate, and let that hate out into your voice. I won’t presume to guess how that went for you, but I will tell you how it’s gone for me: not well. It turns out - and there is science to back this up - that once somebody can tell that you hate them, you lose all ability to make any change in that person. The old saying about “talking to a brick wall” is entirely apt.

Now, you may counter by saying something like “we have to fight for what we believe in”, and I absolutely would agree. Acting in a way that produces change in ourselves and others for the common good is a noble pursuit. But doing it in a way that is doomed to failure would be like Quixote tilting at his windmills. In fact, I would argue that pursuing any change from a place of hate is not only useless but might, actually, if inartfully done, make the problem worse. Imagine letting loose a person who believes in the right to abortion and has a heart filled with hate about those who don’t, to knock on doors in a rich neighborhood. Do you think that person will convince anyone? Can you imagine that they might actually cause those they meet to retreat further into their opinions? I can.

So, we must allow ourselves to hate, but we cannot act out of that hate. If you hate Donald Trump, I feel your pain. If you hate all Republicans, or all men, or if right now you hate all people, my heart goes out to you. But if you walk into the world wearing that hate on your shoulder, and if you project it onto others, then absolutely nothing good will come of it. And I think it’s worth considering where that hate comes from and whether you really want to carry it around. After all, if, as I claim, it isn’t doing anyone else any good, then the only person left it could benefit is you. Does it? Do you feel better because you hate? Maybe you do; I’m not you.

We must work for change. We can be angry; we can be sad. We can be hopeful. We can work for change; we can insist on change. We can stand still in our beliefs and let the world do what it wants with us. We can sit, calmly, and refuse to indulge in misogyny, in racism, in nationalism. We can do all that with a fierceness and an insistence and a bravery. But once we act out of hate, we are wasting our time.

The Between Times - Chapter 2: Moving Past Denial

I’m glad he won by a lot. That might sound odd, but here’s the thing: it makes it easier to move past the Denial phase. Imagine, for the moment, that he won by just a thousand votes or so in Pennsylvania, or some such noise. There would be so many different suspicions, including on my part. Maybe it was Russia’s influence. Maybe it was fraud. Maybe we should have tried a little harder to make a few more phone calls.

I’m also glad he was such a jerk leading up to the final vote. I mean, he didn’t pull any punches. He didn’t try to pretend he wasn’t a populist kiss-up. He put his full, rambling persona out on display - and he won, and won by a safe margin. There’s going to be a lot of time, later, for thinking about the details of why this happened. But there are, as far as I’m aware, no credible accounts of voter fraud or anything nefarious.

No, the cold, hard truth is: this is what America, by which I mean the majority of Americans, wants. They want this man and his promises. They know him fully, and they want him anyway. Oh, sure, some of them may have more subtle rationales. Some might have held their nose and voted for the economy, or for abortion. But by and large, I don’t see any way around this conclusion: This is what Americans, at least most of them, want.

And I think, for us to make any meaningful progress, both as a country and in our personal lives, we have to first accept this. We do not have to like it, to be OK with it, to approve of it. We can be very, very angry about it. But that is different than being in denial about it. We have to look it right in the eye and say that on that day, November 5th, 2024, America approved of Donald Trump. 51 percent of the country, or whatever it winds up being, think this is our guy. We cannot work to change that, or even process it, until we fully and completely acknowledge it. No Russia. No vote fraud. Not because people don’t know who he is, or what he stands for; not because we didn’t knock on enough doors, or raise enough money. Not even because of Kamala Harris. No, Donald Trump is what they want.

They want it, they want him, completely and wholeheartedly. And until we fully acknowledge and accept that as reality, we can’t make it change.

The Between Times - Chapter 1: The First Stages of Grief

“Sañjaya said: Arjuna, having thus spoken on the battlefield, cast aside his bow and arrows and sat down on the chariot, his mind overwhelmed with grief.” - Baghvad Gita

I am reopening the blog, though perhaps not for the reason that I wish I was. This will be a difficult time, and I, for myself, need to feel connected to others. It’s too much to handle what’s about to come alone, and one of my goals has been - and will be even more so now - to build community around me. This blog is part of that; posting here makes me feel connection to others, even though I may never know who reads these words. But the thought that perhaps someday, some of these words might help others makes me feel just a little bit better.

Every religious text in the world talks to its disciples about grief. There’s going to be a lot of time to talk about different aspects of what just happened, and what’s about to happen, but before moving on to any of that there has to be some time for grief. I find it important not to wallow too long in grief - there’s a lot to do - but skipping too fast over grief never works. There’s kind of an “optimal amount” of grief, like bread rising in an oven. Too little and the bread will be flat; too much and it may cook alive. Knowing when to indulge and when to stop is one of those things they never teach you in school.

But whatever the right amount of time is, clearly I, personally, haven’t hit it yet. Grief is an odd emotion. It’s a feeling of loss, a desire for something that never existed, that can’t exist, that won’t exist. It’s a feeling about a future that isn’t going to happen, and so it’s hard to reason with. You can’t talk to the thing that doesn’t exist. You can’t wish it well. Sometimes we get to say goodbye, sometimes we don’t, but either way, I will never - or at least not for a long time - know what it’s like to have a president I trust, to have a country I love, to see what could have happened if we chose love, if we chose engagement, if we chose to move forward.

So, for the moment, there are no words. You can’t reason with guilt anymore than you can reason with yeast. They need time to eat up all the sugars and spit out their bubbles. The gas of the emotion has to travel, slowly, painfully through the dough, pushing it, spreading it. There is no shortcut, at least not one worth taking it. It is, at times, one of the least interesting parts of the process. Later, there will be lessons to learn, actions to take, words to write, speeches to give, but for now there is only a pit that swallows all light.

But one advantage of being well, older than I used to be is that I know this feeling is temporary. If I give it time, it will slow to a dull throb, and I’ll be able to think again. For now, it’s time to curl up into a little ball.

Please Vote For Kamala Harris

….sigh. OK, kids, listen up. 96.2% of the people who will read this already know me, and already know how I feel about politics. The other 3.8% either won’t read this, or might read it and get mad. In no way do I think that anything I say will convince anybody. But, I feel compelled to do this, because I don’t want to look back and say that I didn’t do what I could to help out my country, my friends, and myself.

And trust me: I don’t wanna do this. I enjoyed being a bit checked out of politics and quite frankly I’m looking forward to going back to that. I’m not, by nature, a political guy. But much like a man with a toothache, I suddenly care very much about dentistry. If you get my drift.

And let me talk to that 3.8% for a moment, in case any of them read this: Look: I get it. You might feel like the world is moving too fast. You might feel like the world you used to understand is under attack. You may feel that Kamala Harris is too weird, a poor public speaker, a flip-flop artist, a typical politician. You may have legitimate policy differences with her; perhaps you feel like the Democrats spend too much money, don’t care enough about families, are out of touch, represent the elite class. While I disagree with some or most of this, I think these are very legitimate things for adults to disagree about. And I wish this election was about any of that. I long to return to a world where politics is about things like taxes or tariffs or public school education.

But this election is not about that. Smarter minds than I have produced more eloquent descriptions of the moment we are in, but let me try my best. It is an interesting facet of history that we rarely recognize what’s important about the time we live in until it’s over. And it may be the case that those of us who are concerned about what’s happening right now are “overselling” it. Perhaps the threat is not so dire. Maybe we will look back in 30 years and just have a little chuckle about how worried we all were.

But can you afford to assume that? The thing about history is that sometimes momentous things are happening, and we rarely realize it until it’s too late. Do I think we are living in pre-1938 Germany? Do I actually think Donald Trump would take over and corrupt our political institutions, install himself as a sort of totalitarian despot, leverage the DOJ and the military to target his political enemies, remove competent autocrats and replace them with his cronies?

Well: I don’t know, for sure, of course. But I do know one thing: he wants to. If he doesn’t, it won’t be because he has respect for rule of law. It won’t be because he thinks democracy is a superior system, or because he cares about the common people. How do I know this? Because he says so. Listen to the man! Believe what he says! Understand when he talks about the “enemy within”, and about the “stolen election”, he is quite literally telling you what he believes. There is a saying: when someone tells you who they are, believe them. Donald Trump is friends with despots. He is a man who wishes he could just wave his hand and have people bring him women and wine. He likes power, and attention. This is a man who used to be a Democrat when it was expedient to be one. He has no center, no moral core. We all know people like this in our life; perhaps we’ve had bosses like this, or ex-husbands. He is a man who would sell his grandmother for a few ducats.

And so, his policy ideas, his political stances, his tax and tariff policies are irrelevant. He is a man with a loaded gun pointed at the center of our democracy. It does not matter the color of his suit or the content of his speech; until he drops the gun, the only response he will understand is force and strength.

Luckily, we have that strength: we do have democratic institutions, and for the moment, they are strong. The solution, such as it is, is simple: do not vote for Donald Trump. If you must vote for Republicans down the rest of the ticket, please vote your conscience. But at the top, it cannot be Trump. It cannot.

And if you are inclined to vote for Harris, then please: vote! Don’t sit this one out. It’s important. This is not a time to indulge in third parties, or in protest, or in esoteric philosophical arguments about whether the United States is the best way to run a country. The threat here is potentially existential. The house is on fire; it doesn’t matter what color the drapes are.

So, please: vote. Vote for Kamala Harris. I’d like to continue to live here.

Thanks.

Burning Man 2024

So, I went to Burning Man. It was amazing and awful, fantastic and terrifying, beautiful and scary. I wanted it to last forever and also could not wait to leave. I learned a lot about attending Burning Man, but I also learned a few things about myself. I had very low expectations going into it, which I think was wise. I "only" went for four days, from Wednesday to Sunday, which I think was wise for my first time. I definitely want to go back, although there are many things I would do differently.

Before I get into any of that, a big shout out to my two friends that helped me attend (they know who they are) and also to the team of guys that I ended up actually camping with.

So, without further ado, here are some things that I learned about Burning Man, and about myself. They're not in any particular order, though some of them are definitely more impactful than others.

I am, essentially, an extrovert. This was one of the biggest takeaways about myself that I learned at Burning Man. I have been living an introvert's life for the last 6-8 years. I kind of slipped into that for reasons that are likely too long to go into here, mostly trauma-related. But at Burning Man I had an epiphany: I am not drained by being around people, if those people are people that I trust. The problem, of course, is that I really don't trust most people and in fact they scare me a great deal. Because of this, I have been avoiding doing things that are "extrovert things". I have a job where I work from home. I'm single. I eat meals by myself at fast food restaurants. I live a life that would probably be perfect for someone who really is introverted. But I've felt very unfulfilled lately by many of these things, and now it makes sense. I can't avoid the pain of interacting with others and still be happy.

This one thing alone was worth the cost of going.

I'm not a Burning Man bus guy. My friend encouraged me to take the bus, and I totally get how it could be a great approach for certain folks, but there are some serious disadvantages, the biggest of which is that you can't bring very much stuff. I was tremendously unprepared logistically. I lacked shade. I lacked a good way to get my stuff around. I didn't have enough clothing, especially socks. Some of that is because I didn't know what I was doing, but some of it was because I didn't have the space. The second problem with the bus is that I really don't trust people, so having my travel arrangements be at the whim of others was really anxiety-producing. On the return trip especially, I had a hell of a time getting on the bus; I ended up doing this dance of me, my belongings and my bike which was really stressful. The Burning Man ethos of radical self-reliance makes situations like this, where you really could use a little bit of somebody's help, extra stressful. I think this ties in with the extrovert and not trusting people thing; a better fit for me would be a camp of people I like and trust that builds a community. That way I would have a support structure.

Climbing three flights of rickety stairs and then doing monkey bars up another 10 feet of scaffolding so you can get a view down on top of the Slut Olympics is pretty awesome and you can get some great footage of the, um, events that way. Thanks to Chloe for dragging me up there; it was awesome. And thanks for the things you said to me while we watched a guy named Minnesota and a woman named Ukraine air-fuck.

Speaking of Ukraine, I saw a *lot* of Ukrainian flags. I took pictures of a bunch of them, probably at least 7 or 8, and there were a number I missed. That's particularly interesting because I didn't see any Israel or Palestine flags, in fact very little political stuff at all. But lots of Ukrainian flags. Which is awesome. Slava Ukraini!

One night, I was out biking with Jorge and I was telling him about my idea for a camp called the Ankh Society (get it? the o and c are silent) which would be all about anxiety. I got the idea from having really bad anxiety myself and also seeing booths around about mental health related topics. He asked what I would do there and I told him I would have people there to talk to folks about their anxiety. He said "why don't you just have a booth where you give people anxiety?" and I said "why would I do that?" and he said "because Burning Man is mean" and then he laughed. And suddenly, it all clicked: *Burning Man is mean*. There’s a reason Burning Man is in the most inhospitable place you can find: Burning Man doesn't care if you're having a good time. Burning Man is not terribly interested in your problems. Burning Man does not want to listen to you talk about your anxiety. And in that moment, I felt a real release, a kind of freedom. My problems are not anybody else's responsibility but my own, and their problems are not mine! It's OK to just go out to the desert and enjoy yourself - or not, if that floats your boat - without necessarily caring about the intricacies of everybody around you. As somebody who is very empathic, and spent time with an overbearing mother, I learned as a trauma response to be hyper-sensitive to the moods of others around me. But Burning Man does not care about your mood.

I am more open to drugs than I thought I would be. I took at least two I've never taken before, and it was great, actually. But I have to remember to drink more water.

The dust really is everywhere, and yes it mixes with your sweat and makes a particularly noxious and weird-smelling thing that coats your socks and hair and is kind of gross but you know what? You get used to it pretty fast.

You can have a camp where you just hand out coffee, or have a kind of ersatz public library. It doesn't have to be about sex and it also doesn't have to be a big deal, and those were some of my favorite camps.

I really like hanging out with men. I camped with a bunch of guys that I barely knew, and hung out with a few other groups. I didn't chase women nor, to be fair, did they chase me, and that was totally fine with me. I don't hang out with enough men and enough guy groups; this is a thing I've known for a while, but it really clicked for me out on the desert.

The Man definitely Burns. It burns hard, and it burns fast. It's kind of impressive and tribal actually. I dig it. Spinning around and seeing the neon stretch around the edges of the city like the distant skyline of some futuristic dystopia while being lit by the glow of the fires of what looks like the gates of hell is just as rad as you might think it would be.

And now, in no particular order, a few other interesting thoughts and anecdotes:

At one point, I was trying to move ten gallons of water across the desert, and struggling, when a man sitting outside his RV said "Hey! You look like you could use an ice cream sandwich." It turns out I *could* use an ice cream sandwich. The man turned out to be Murray, a guy in maybe his early 60s, with a bit of a belly but not too far gone, and a wry twinkle in his eye, who was Canadian but of Ukrainian ancestry. We traded stories about traveling there. He told me about taking a train through Krakow only to wake up and realize that he was in the middle of a forest and he was on the only car left; all the others had been detached and were nowhere to be found. Would have made a great movie. Then he invited me back for pierogis on Saturday morning and of course, I went. He made the best damn pierogi outside of my grandmother for me and 5 other burners, complete with onions and bacon. We drank bottle after bottle of champagne. I told his girlfriend Trixie about my anxiety and she got very solemn and looked me dead in the eye and said "Well, you're a great conversationalist", and I probably would have married her if she asked. I don't know if I will ever see any of those people again, but I have Murray's number, and I hope I do.

The most famous musical act I saw there was probably my least favorite, which is some kind of lesson. I won't say who it was because I don't want to be negative. But I learned what a "DJ set" is. Anyway, Vintage Culture was really good, as were a bunch of other no-name DJs. But you don't go to Burning Man for the music.

Burning Man had a lot of challenges, but it also had a lot of validation. Some people were very nice to me when I least expected it, some were mean though they probably didn't mean to be. Sometimes I felt good, sometimes I felt overwhelmed. I learned that telling people up front about how anxious I was made things a lot better. I think sometimes I "look normal" or even look like I've got it under control, so I guess people are surprised find out that I am about 5 minutes away from a panic attack most of the time. Ironically, the more I leaned into the anxiety, the less I felt it. It was only when I denied it was happening that it got really bad.

I'm definitely going to go back. When I got back off the trip, I felt amazing. I felt a release and enthusiasm that I haven't felt for a while. That's particularly odd, because often the end of a big trip where I'm around people can be a very sad and depressing time for me. I think it's because my life is very much devoid of the people energy I need so much, and when I get that people energy for a while but then it gets removed, ,I get so sad. Maybe this time is different because I feel, instinctively, that I can bring the enthusiasm I feel for people back into my daily life. And for that alone, I dearly appreciate Burning Man for its influence on me, and I appreciate the people who made it happen, especially Jodi and Katie. I'm not going to claim that Burning Man changed my life or anything, but then, I also wouldn't not say that. If you know what I mean.

And with that, I look forward to next year.

Weekly Journaling

I have decided that I want to do 15 minutes of weekly journaling. I like the idea of spending a few minutes every week just thinking about my own thoughts and writing them down. It might sound silly but I really enjoy interacting with my little old Apple MacBook Air 11 inch, typing on these nice capsule keys, surrounded by some coffee and all the little stickers of the trip I took in 2014 or whenever that was (man, I can’t believe that was 10 years ago). So what am I thinking about this morning? I’m pondering the idea of relaxing. I started recently on a low dose of these SSRI medications, specifically one called LexPro, on the advice of my therapist. I thought it would be interesting just to see if it made any difference; I wasn’t feeling particularly depressed, but in a way I thought that would be a good time to try it, because then I would feel free to stop doing it if I wanted to without fear of reverting to some super-depressed state. So here I am, on LexPro, and the thing that is most obvious is that I have a lot more desire - and ability - all of a sudden to just rest. I’ve been taking naps on a couch that I put in the back yard, outdoors because the weather has been amazing - and usually I have a hard time napping during the day but because of the drugs it’s been easy to just lay there and listen to the birds and fall asleep. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about rest, and what rest means, and why we rest, both from a medical standpoint but also a philosophical one. I don’t really believe in God in a literal sense, but if the universe was designed all at once, I think it’s interesting that whoever built in included the idea of rest. If you think about it, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious reason why it would be neccessary. It’s not an evolutionary advantage; the last thing you want, when a lion is chasing you, or you’re hungry, is to also have to deal with falling asleep. But I think perhaps, if whoever designed the universe has a sense of aesthetics, it might be to introduce the idea of contrast. I’m fascinated by this idea that in music, to make something sound louder, you reduce the volume slowly in the lead up, so that by the time the “loud” part happens, it might not be that much louder than normal but it sounds louder because of the contrast. So maybe rest is the antipode to activity and adventures; the way to make them seem even more, well, adventurous.

I feel like personal adventures are coming up soon; I’m still not sure exactly what form they will take, but this period of rest I think is preparing me for them. And it’s interesting to think about people who, for whatever reason, are lacking rest. I think of course all the time about the poor folks in Ukraine, and the bombing, and the inability to slow down, and what it does to a person’s psyche. I feel that one thing it does is make anything good or fun or adventurous so much less so, because all you’re thinking to yourself is “this is nice, but what I really need is a nap!”

So I’m grateful today for naps in my backyard with the birds.

Visiting Denise - New Jersey/New York

I spent the last week or so visiting my half-sister Denise at her home in Summit, NJ. I also took a bit of a quick trip into the Big Apple just to fart around, and to visit Veselka, the Ukrainian restaurant there. Overall the trip was totally awesome and I’m really glad I went. Denise and her partner Jon were amazing hosts and they have a beautiful home, a huge mansion that they’ve got totally decked out with pool table, shuffleboard, outdoor fire pit, pool, etc., etc. plus an awesome guest quarters with a killer comfy bed and a really nice shower. So it was a really relaxing time. I didn’t get to do too much bike riding, mostly because I was just exhausted and recovering. But I did take one nice little jaunt about 15 miles round-trip to Irvington. Some random thoughts here, in particular order:

• New Jersey, unsurprisingly, is really nice and pretty, especially the very upscale area of Summit that they live in. Garden state, indeed.

• The weather totally rocked. I really miss the Upstate New York/New Jersey weather and it reminded me how important weather is to my happiness because I roasted my butt off down in Florida. I’m glad Oakland weather is so good as well.

• Denise is awesome, and so is her son (my half-nephew) Owen. Good people.

• Denise has an assistant, and that totally blew my mind. I need an assistant.

• New Jersey needs more bike paths.

• There is an amaaaaazing diner in Summit, the Summit Diner. Perfect old school diner.

Now, some thoughts about my quick trip to New York City:

• It’s a lot cleaner than it was 15 years ago, and it smells better

• The bike infrastructure is much improved

• The 9/11 memorial is pretty cool, at least the outdoors parts. The “well into nothingness” really captures the emotional mood of that moment and that place, like a portal into nothing. As we were standing there I looked up and tried to think about seeing a jetliner crashing into the (new) tower and it’s hard to even fathom.

• Veselka (the Ukrainian restaurant) totally delivered. I bought some souvenirs and soaked in the atmosphere. The Borscht was legit and the server was very Ukrainian. Plus they make their own pilsner and it was really good.

• I found my old apartment but couldn’t find my old office. Oh well.

• I got the street meat, with the white and red sauce, and it was like I was back 15 years ago, as if no time had passed. Weird feeling.

• The New Jersey transit train to Summit….not so great. Only one train an hour and the return train was canceled on me. Denise and Jon had to pick me up in Seacaucus

Catching up with Denise about things; about Dad, about life, about dating, was amazing and I really can’t wait to go and visit again!

Florida Bike Trip Day 9 - Marathon, FL

The second-to-last day of a trip is always the best day, and this was no exception. We tied one on at the Dockside Boot; we showed up around 4 for a 4-7 pm happy hour which involved Painkillers and $7 for a dozen wings. There was a rather terrible professional karaoke guy entertaining us as we sat on a dock next to the water, followed by a Ukelele cover band that tried to play 80s and 90s hits on what was objectively the wrong instrument. We talked, we laughed, it was great. I wish every day was like that, even though I understand why it can’t be. There’s something magical about the second-to-last day; everyone has gone into full vacation mode and we are all comfortable with each other, but we’re not yet thinking about home and our responsibilities.

The riding was fine; hot; the rain has finally stopped. I rode with Rob and he got 3 - count ‘em, 3 - flats until finally I had to leave him behind because I had snorkeling tickets. Then I went snorkeling with Carla and Jim, we went out to a reef and saw a ton of multi-colored tropical fish including Blue Tangs and lots of other iridescent and crazy looking fish. It’s so fun to just watch them move around in schools. I got way too much sun, but I got to chat with Carla and sit on a boat. So all in all a great day.

Florida Bike Trip Day 10 - Key West, FL

Last day blog posts always serve as an interesting bookend to the trip. The riding today was challenging; we started out with what’s called the Seven Mile Bridge, coming out of Marathon, which was long and windy with a headwind. After that things evened out a bit, but it still was a long, hot day. From long experience I’ve learned that it’s never about the destination with these trips, and this was no exception; I’ve learned not to expect any big celebration or anything at the end because everyone is tired and just wants to get on with things. The night before last is always the big celebration. We finished at a nice enough park and waited for the rest of the team to come in and watched some police officers play Bocce in the heat. Then we headed over to a Pier to do donuts around the southernmost point, then off to the church, where we all split up. I ended up having a nice dinner though with Carla, Paul, Jacob and Dan, and then off to have a drink with Sully. It was nice getting to meet and get to know Megan, one of our “brand new” riders. Rob jetted off to go home, he was itching to get going. I smell really bad but I once again had a great trip.

Oh, and we got to swim in the ocean down at Taylor State park, finally! The water was great, if a bit rocky. And, randomly, Foreigner was playing - what a fate for them to be playing in Key West to a bunch of middle aged folks.

These “in between” days can be a bit challenging mentally because it’s a bit sad to lose this new community and go back to being (at least temporarily) alone. I get used to being alone, and it’s fine, but it’s great to have new and old friends around for a while!

Key West is exactly what I imagine - like a really hot plantation. Today I’ll swing by and see the Hemmingway museum before flying out to see my sister. Happy to be here but ready to move on to what’s next.

Florida Bike Trip Day 8 - Tavernier, FL

A great day. 60 miles of riding in the heat and sun, getting in as early as 1pm. The first 20 miles or so was on a Miami Busway, which was basically a completely flat and straight road with no cars allowed, only buses; other than the stop lights there was nothing to impede our progress. Then after that was another 20 miles to Key Largo on the straightest and flattest highway ever. So basically the riding was easy but also a bit, as Rob would say, “tedious”. Sully drove over a knife blade and destroyed Tomorrow is only 39 miles, so several of us (Carla, Dan, Richard, Paul and I) took Ubers down to a beach and public park where they also had food carts and several 80s cover bands who entertained us for hours. I got to “swim” in some very warm and very shallow water. Apparently there are few if any natural beaches here because of the coral reefs and the few beaches that exist are largely private. We ate some donuts and talked to some locals and played some dice. There was also fish sandwiches with Rob at Captain Craig’s across the street from the church, and a shuttle to a local gym for amazing showers. Today really felt like a genuine Bike the US for MS day.
http://www.biketheusforms.org

https://www.biketheusforms.org/our-routes/

https://www.biketheusforms.org/ms-bike-ride-florida/

Florida Bike Trip Day 7- South Miami Beach, FL

So many great things about today: a great time with Rob, Sully and John, hanging out at the Daleland Mall, at an American eatery, then a cigar bar, then an Indian restaurant, talking aout plans for the future of the organization and just life in general. It’s been fun getting to know Rob and listen to him talk about his work and his wife and all of his various life journeys. We are once again in a very nice church, lying in between the pews with air conditioning and power outlets. Only 3 days more until I fly out to see my sister!

Today was the third day in a row with rain; at one point we had a good old-fashioned Florida deluge that drowned us in water. Various parts of my body including my private parts are very sore from being immersed in water and then worked; there’s a lot of chafing going on, which is a real mental challenge. But I’m still having a great time.

Today we rode straight through downtown Miami, and it was crazy! I can’t believe how big the apartment complexes and office buildings are in Miami; I was prepared for it but still wasn’t prepared for it. We had horrendous traffic to weave back and forth through, and at one point I lost my rear bike light/radar device, which is sad but oh well. It was still a great day of riding even if the last 15 miles or so was definitely on the struggle bus. There’s learning there as well.

We also rode through Hollywood Beach Boardwalk, north of the city, which was fun and reminded me of San Diego or the beaches of LA; lots of restaurants right across from white sand beaches. We also rode past Trump Hollywood (lol).