40 Days to Christmas

After 6 months of spending my time twittering, facebooking, and generally plugging into the internets on a daily basis for the purpose of work, it's been an interesting experience to stay out of the daily cybernetic spasm. What I find at such times of retreat (for lack of a better description at the moment) is a refreshing release from all the noise (or at least a good portion of it). However, I've received a lot of comments of late about the dearth of blogging on this and my other sites, so I've decided to take up the challenge and once more use this forum as a place to play out my life in public. So, here we go... Once more into the daily breach... Among a few other things that I hope to do between now and Christmas, I am renewing my dedication to daily writing, and something - at least close to - daily posting.

I've also restarted one final crack at my 40 Day regimen... I'll be holding forth on the progress of that one last time over at 40 Days To Life.

All in all... I'm really seriously burned out on all the raging cyber-realities and after almost 15 years of almost daily virtual living, I'm getting pretty damn close to heading after a less virtual and more real encounter with the universe and my co-residents.

Don't know where that's going but I'm damned determined to find out.

Instant Karma's Gonna Getchoo!

The classic set of Washington Mutual commercials that came out in 2008, just as the bank - and the rest of the economy with it - was tanking, were about as perfect a social barometer as there has been in my lifetime. While the bankers, and their Wall Street co-conspirators were trading up and getting out on the real-time roller coaster of fiscal disaster, my bank - Washington Mutual - was running a really fun collection of consumer messages with theme Whoo Hoo!!!

I'm guessing that not too many people are finding it difficult to grasp my point here. One might find it amusing to watch the game show bankers speaking cluelessly except for the fact that it was a little too close to reality to accept with proper social aplomb.

Come the meltdown, CHASE bank bought up Washington Mutual and promptly launched a whole set of new CHASE ads for banking in California, using the lovely chorus line "We all shine on..." like California is the Sunshine State (which is actually Florida, and we WON'T go there at the moment). What the bankers at CHASE and/or the creative types at their ad agency don't seem to have grasped is that this lovely little light hearted chorus comes from John Lennon's absolutely brilliant song Instant Karma which - it seems to me - is exactly what these greedy funny men (and their greedy pocket politicians) are courting with every new move of their greedy little pens.

I'm Walkin' Here

This new feeling of unexpected freedom continues today with a unexpected set of communications and the discovery of a surprising sermon, seemingly launched by the Spirit into the internets and onto my computer.

I explain the situation, and a little of the strange circumstances over at Bleeding Daylight.

Goodbye and Good Luck

As most folks who have read my blogs for any time are aware, I moved to New Orleans at the beginning of August 2005, just three weeks before Katrina.

For two years thereafter I lived a peripatetic life moving from place to place, part time in New Orleans, part time in San Francisco, a brief time in North Carolina, always semi-docked in Petaluma and anchored in New Orleans. Then, just over two years ago (almost exactly two years after The Thing), I gave up the basic struggle of bouncing back and forth between the Gulf Coast and The West Coast and came back to California. At the time, I made the assumption that at some point in the relatively near future I would regroup, fix the problems that I was still juggling like so many oddly sized balls, and find my way back to The Crescent.

What happened instead was that I found new love, and new life, right here in the place from which I had spent many previous years running. As I explained in several posts (including the one immediately prior to this one) I found myself surprisingly at home in the very place I thought I could never be at home.

But this didn't change one thing about my previous abbreviated grounding in New Orleans. I have for the past two years, despite living my life out in Petaluma, lived on the feeling - and the longing - that I would some day soon make it back home to NOLA.

For the last six months I've been building those old hopes on the enjoyable, and financially fortuitous, surprise job of Twittering (and blogging and facebooking) for The Hotel Monteleone and Carousel Bar on Royal Street in The French Quarter. There were significant frustrations in this process because the whole time I was doing it, I was sitting here in my little apartment 2500 miles away, sometimes pretending to be in The Quarter, sometimes pretending to be at Jazz Fest; always placing myself in those places that I know so well, and literally imagining myself into those locations.

It worked too! There were many times when the fact that I was communicating about and for New Orleans really placed me mentally right there. It was as if I was dreaming at my computer as I wrote to, and related with, people in the place I so longed to be. It was a great imaginary exploration.. and it was a lot of fun. At the same time, I worked to build up additional connections and relationships and I kept hanging on to the connections that still remained from that time when I first moved to the city, four years ago in another world... another life... another reality.

Not any more.

Earlier this week I was replaced in my Twitter job by the local PR firm and the in-house promo people at The Hotel Monteleone. As a friend of mine says, "without so much as a boo... hey... or kiss my ass" I was told in an email to stop immediately. I was then promptly locked out of the accounts that I created and that I had been dedicatedly relating from within. I had placed myself - however virtually - into the person I created (a sort of amalgamation of my every day self, but more my "New Orleans self" than "my California self") to represent the hotel and to relate both personally and professionally to folks with whom I interacted. Since being let go... the replacements at Hotel Monteleone have turned the interaction into an infrequent and impersonal interaction purely based on self-promotion, and in my opinion completely wrong for Twitter... but hey... that's another story.

What I'm trying to communicate right now is the combined sense of loss, grief, homesickness and new life that I am experiencing as a result of this interaction and outcome.

The simple fact is that I feel released.. I feel found... I feel free!

Four years ago next week I returned to New Orleans as people gradually began to move back into the ghost town laid bare by Katrina. I was determined to make life work. I was determined to go "home." I was determined to stay. This last six months has been the way out of the lock that my meteorologically aborted migration to The Big Easy has held me in for the past four years. I've gone round and round, back and forth only to find - like Dorothy returning from The Land of Oz - that home was right here with me all along.

There will be many days, and many moments when I still miss New Orleans. I hope to return there from time to time for rest, or work, or play, but it is not my home any more... maybe it never really was.

I live in Petaluma... in California... on the Western edge of the Continent and I am happy here.

Settling Into Place

For the last two years I have been moving through a process of settling in to the ground of being that seems to be home for me here in Northern California in general and Petaluma in particular.

In August of 2007, after two years of attempting to live in New Orleans (where I moved three very short weeks before Katrina), I gave up my peripatetic struggle to move back and forth between my two worlds and decided to re-settle in NoCal instead of NOLA.

Almost immediately, my life changed (and I've written on and on about that in this blog) profoundly. I began to find a depth of love and friendship that I had not experienced in a long time. It was as if as soon as I stopped trying so damn hard to figure my life out (who I was, who I was supposed to be, where I was supposed to be, and why I am), my life rose up to meet me. People and things (sweetheart, friends, work, and a place to live) became real in my life in ways that I had come to believe were not any longer possible for me.

Basically... for the first time in a long time, I had come home.

When I moved into a new (and pretty much perfect) little apartment, my sweety and my friends threw me a great party.

And for the past two years these experiences have continued... mounting on top of one another the pleasures and joys of friends, and family, and home and place.

I never thought I'd feel like this... but I have become a Petaluman.

So... to further solidify this geographic relationship, I registered this summer for the Petaluma Leadership Class, a year long collection of meetings, classes and activities that are designed to give a greater sense of place to those who want to be more planted (and more active) in this community. The picture at the top of this blog is from the "History Day" class which happened last week. My friend Trish snapped it of me coming out from checking on upcoming shows at Petaluma's wonderful Mystic Theater.

The day was great, with an introduction to the Petaluma History Museum, and guided tours from past notables in P-town history, and drop in at the Petaluma Adobe State Park where Mariano Vallejo raised cattle before California was a state. And since any good town history involves a solid drinking past and Prohibition story, we ended the day at Volpi's Speakeasy.

I've covered much of this material myself in the Petaluma Audio Tours that I created last spring, but to get a full day of information, entertainment and engagement with and from people who know and love the community was particularly special.

The fact remains that I still have one foot (or at least my big toe) stuck in the swamp water of New Orleans, and I don't expect I will ever be free of the hold that San Francisco has on my heart, but the people, places and things of this little chicken town have definitely captured me in a way that I have never before been captured and, frankly (and surprisingly), I like it.