So, part of traveling light (one backpack for six weeks) is trying to sort out my reading list. I’m trying to get a good mix of seemingly location-appropriate titles, with stuff I just want to read, re-read, and savor. Not sure how many books I will get to take (although i am mostly ordering old beat-up paperback versions from Amazon, so I can dump them as I go, not to mention the 18 hour plane ride (that’s at least 2 books right there, unless they have quality flicks like “Dude, Where’s My Car?”), but the current list includes:

Location-appropriate

• The Beach by Alex Garland: In the same vein as my reading Tales of the City on the first day I moved to San Francisco, I am holding this one to read on a beach in Thailand. I will watch the movie again before I leave, though.
• How to Practice: The Way To A Meaningful Life by His Holiness Dalai Lama. Seems like a good book for the setting.
• The Art of Happiness, also the Dalai Lama. Same.

Classics I want to enjoy for the first time

• Lolita: Does anyone not reference this book as inspiration to their writing style?
• Madame Bovary: I started this book on a beach in Jersey, too noisy, but Thailand may give me the space I need.
• Great Gatsby
• Death in Venice: Need a little gay lit. Not to mention, well, read other blog entries to figure other reasons it might be appropriate. (Yes, both Lolita and Death in Venice in Thailand of all places?!. I’m aware, but any thematic connection is coincidental)

Big Brother from afar (classics to enjoy again)

• 1984
• Catcher in the Rye

New stuff I’ve wanted to check out

• Dive from Clausen’s Pier
• Life of Pi
• Number9Dream

Most of the books are small paperbacks, so I can carry a bunch. The bigger ones are the more modern ones, which are also the ones I would most likely read on the plane (I’m weird about what I can read and where for some reason), so they will get dumped first. Also taking the Lonely Planet Thailand book and probably a guide to buddhism and/or meditation, so I might be able to take all these, we’ll see.

Any other books that just scream “Thailand Beach Read!!” to anyone?

Thailand is fast approaching and recent events are lining it up like a set-up for a novel that seems too obvious. Let’s start from the beginning.

One of my big complaints lately is that I view myself as an audience member. Most of my free time is spent watching a film, a play, or a concert. Whereas other people I know talk about their recent weekends and talk of dinner parties, hanging out, and interactive activities, mine are typically structured. I am there at the time on the ticket, sitting in a predetermined place, the row and seat number on the ticket, and watch something familiar (they either read the lines from the script/screenplay, or play their songs). After about two hours, it ends, and I go home. You went out and had fun. Checkmark.

For a while now, I have been exploring ways to switch the focus, become part of the event, whether it is hanging out with friends, going out to dance, anything that levels the playing field and makes me a participant at events where the spotlight roams over us all. Create organic entertainment and moments for myself in my own life (and then exploit and make art from them at some point, but one step at a time).

I think one way this will occur is major budgetary changes in my life, whereby an $80 play ticket seems obscene as I can have more fun on my own with my friends and it wouldn’t cost anything. I’m not there yet. But, that is one of the things I will be sorting out in Thailand, and I have constantly framed this internal struggle in terms of becoming the performance and leaving the audience.

Now, in a move that I would find too cliche for anything I could even write, there is a chance I will be hanging out for some time with someone in Thailand. He used to live in San Francisco, although we were never great friends, just casual acquaintances. He moved to Spain, and I recently e-mailed him when I was just doing some casual research about non-Thailand sabbatical options. I asked him if he had any leads on anything cheap in Barcelona, but mentioned that I’m probably going to Thailand anyway. Oddly enough, he was leaving Spain, and going to Thailand to teach English there for a year or so. He arrives a week before I do. Since then, we’ve batted a few e-mails back and forth, and it seems more likely that we will at least hang out for a bit while in Thailand. Our itineraries are rather similar, as far as what we are going there for (hut, hammock, beach), and some of the locations in which we are both interested.

The irony, of course, is that I only know him because he was an actor in many gay plays in San Francisco, so basically my only interaction with him has been… as an audience member. Like I said, the whole thing seems too obvious and strange. I mean, if I ever wrote something this obvious, I would dismiss it outright as cliched.

But, there is a chance I’m about to live this cliche out and see what happens.

On the audience metaphor thing, I told my mother this weekend (in one of those TMI moments) that I keep trying to buy happiness instead of grow it in my life. And that I needed to learn to be happy without a stack of concert tickets as a means to ensure I will be having fun. My goal is to learn to be happy 24 hours a day, and get rid of a lot of things that do not cause me joy, whether they are jobs at which I spend eight hours a day, or boring nights where I sit in my apartment as a vibrant city bustles outside.

It is why I haven’t been writing. When I read the novel, I’m not finding the joy. Shock value, good material, a strong sense of purpose, characters that are slowly finding their voices, all of that is there. But underneath the book, in its foundation, I don’t find any joy. And I feel that subtext colors the way people will read a book. If I have fun writing it, the odds of people finding joy, humor, and diversion while reading it will increase.

I think I could write an entirely well-structured book that hits all the right notes, arcs and curves where it should, and without joy, something would just be missing.

I also think that is WHY the book has taken so long. Anything approached as work will take on that shape. It needs to be a passion, nearly lustful, when I am working on it. Writing needs to be an affair from a wholly lived life, and neither exists right now.

At this point, I’m no longer sure what I write in my diary, what I tell friends, and what I think to myself. Like I’ve said in the past, I never read this stuff. I just write it.

But one of the lasting metaphors I go back to with the book is that it is like putting items on a shelf that I can barely reach. I want to stand on my toes, stretch out my calves, feel the full extension of my body, all the way up through my elongated fingers, barely able to push the item on the top-most shelf. I want to do that with each sentence, stand back, and wonder how I ever got everything up there.

The moments of joy and inspiration in the book stand out in such color and light in contrast to the rest, that it would be fradulent to bundle up the gray connective tissue binding everything together and call it a book.

It must all find its birth through joy.

There is no such thing as a scene that just needs to exist to move the plot along.

Every paragraph is an opportunity.

But, ultimately, I have to take that path first. The book will follow me.

Our orders were very clear. Go to Dolores Park between the bell and the playground, holds hands and form circle(s), sit down, wait for something to happen and (according to the instructions): “You will instantly know how to play along.”

My friend Kirk and I join a circle, sit down, then a person three people down from me, gets up, and starts tapping people on the shoulders.

He taps some stranger. “Duck!”

Kirk. “Duck!”

And then me. “Goose!”

The sad, tragic moment where I realize that I have no clue how one plays “Duck! Duck! Goose!”

People all look to me, most saying the same thing. “Run!”

But run where?

Kirk says, “Run.”

The guy who started the game, looks at me, doubles back, tags me again and says “Goose?!” He wears a pleading look, desperately wanting me to say, “Oh! Duck, duck, goose!” and proceed to chase him.

I get up, chase after him, tag him, and somehow things proceed. Around me, I hear other people whispering the rules to other people. “When you are tagged, you chase the person that tagged you, they get to sit down, and then you have to pick the next goose.”

Our group is a rather large circle, 40 people maybe?, but we rarely have more than one or two people running around at any given time. A lot of people seem relieved when the person walking by them says “Duck” and keeps going.

After ten minutes, the crowd disperses as instructed to “run away!” War whoops and running and the square of land that was previously our playing field is now empty.

I’m not saying it wasn’t fun, but we seem to be missing the point of the flash mob here.

First of all, the location. While only 5 blocks from my apartment, I can’t really complain from a convenience standpoint, but Dolores Park was mainly filled with dogwalkers and sunbathers. Unlike the first flashmob, which was in a very tourist-centric location, this one was mainly targetting San Franciscans as our “audience.”

But, I just don’t think we were doing anything that would bring out that “What the hell is going on over there?” vibe. At Flash Mob #1, passerbys actually had no idea what was happening, but they joined in, which was less likely to happen here as well. Ultimately people watched, shrugged, and continued sunbathing as near as I could tell.

Also, it seems the tenets of the flash mob didn’t pan out this time. The park was mainly dog walkers and sun bathers, and our group appeared dog-less and a little too jeans-and-a-T-shirt to be sunbathers. So, we lose the notion that this was just some moment of communal insanity that just overtook people. We looked like people who arrived in the park if not together than with a common purpose. And the exit, with everyone running and hollaring and leaving the park, solidified the group notion.

On Flash Mob #1, there didn’t seem to be the same “gathering” and “dispersing” issues, and the mob gently disappearing back into society worked. If you compare our flashmobs to others, it seems that most of them stay more in the realm of propless performance art. It may just happen, but the guise of it being a random spontaneous act disappears quickly.

I think the mobs I’ve been most interested in are the most subtle. the New Yorkers on the hotel mazzanine enamored with something in the downstairs lobby that doesn’t exist and making everyone else wonder what they aren’t seeing. The spinning San Franciscans. I like it when people aren’t sure what is happening, but most mobs seem to scream that something is happening.

I think in the larger cities, the risk is the mob becoming the event, rather than the chaos surrounding the mob being the event. With a group of 100+ people, anything done in tandem will seem like an organized group as soon as it occurs. Of course, with the groups split up into at least four units beforehand, there is no actual need for everyone’s piece of paper to say the same thing, but that might be even harder to plan.

The ones whereby a lot of people enter a place of business seem to invite danger, which I saw firsthand as a drunken Santa last year. But, if any large group of people enter a place of business, dressed as Santa or not, they will freak out.

So, I guess what I look for in a flash mob are:

- location, location, location (areas targetting tourists, shoppers, and rush hour commuters are best)
- graceful entrance
- seemingly random event
- subtle, seemingly natural exit

Rather than just criticize (although I do appreciate the efforts of the people who do organize these things, I just want to make them better), I offer the following as examples of what I think would work:

– The most spastic group tai chi ever in Yerba Buena Gardens, and rather than everyone starting at once, let a few people start, then others join in, let it build. Keep it seeming organic.

– A group of people go to Pier 39 to see the sea lions, until some people learn that the animal’s squawking gives them sexual pleasure. And as some people start moaning in ecstasy to echo the sea lions groans, more people get pulled into the mix. This will be worth the video alone of tourists with kids quickly running away.

– Pick a block with a lot of bars and restaurants with bars, and have people start at different locations within the set-up and at the proper time, they all exit their location, go to their right, enter the next place of business and ask something (which will result in every place saying no, at least when they initially bother to reply), and this also helps disperse the large crowd by having people enter businesses in smaller groups.

– You can also do the above, and instead of going into any businesses, everyone walks out to the street, finds a parking meter, and starts rubbing it. Ecstatically.

Of course, if we play Duck, Duck, Goose! again, I’m ready this time!

At the time of this writing I am 34.

Just got home on a subway full of people returning from the Bjork concert, whom I never liked. I spent the night seeing one decent movie, one pretty awful one (SWAT and Bad Boys 2 respectively). I initially was going to come home after work and just chill out, but I knew that wouldn’t work.

You see, in 33 minutes, I will become 35 years old. I typically don’t think twice about my birthday, but the ones that end in 5 or 0 always have more impact. Milestones. Usually moreso about what I have yet to accomplish than warm reflections. So, i figured I should spend the day at the cinema instead of hanging out at home.

For my birthday, I will be going to my favorite San Francisco restaurant and to a rather fun play, Urinetown. I saw it on Broadway, but figured I should do something proven and fun for the big occassion.

My sabbatical was officially approved at work today, so we are locked and loaded. Thailand seems to be the final destination. Still hard to fathom that in a month I will be there. Even harder to imagine an 18 hour plane ride. Sounds awful.

28 minutes…

I think I am starting to see through my recent haze, see my future starting to sort itself out.

Within the next year, there is a strong chance I will: quit my job, become more of a dandy, stop padding my schedule with activities where I am an audience member, fall in love (and have someone fall in love with me), lose weight, start meditating, try yoga, have more sex, finish a novel.

Not as sure about leaving San Francisco. I think I need to change my life more than my location.

For some reason, I recently thought of people I admire, who took their lives in some whacked out direction and found their joy. Changed their names. Invented an identity. Decided at some point that their life needed to go in a new direction.

I was thinking about Marilyn Manson today, because I know one day he was just Brian Warner, a rock journalist and wannabe musician. Then, he re-invented himself. I think my issue is that I always thought that line remains intact. That he’s always Brian Warner pretending to be Marilyn Manson, but once you put that energy out there, people begin reacting to who you seem to be, and that’s who you become.

In my interview with him a long time ago, he said, “If it’s an act, at some point in my life it consumed me and is no longer an act, because it’s all that I know.”

19 minutes…

So, that is definitely part of the plan. Dress me up in womens clothes. Mess around with gender roles. Line my eyes and call me pretty.

OK, probably not that much change. Probably keep the name, too.

But, there will be enough change to be noticeable.

14 minutes…

I’m listening to the new Macy Gray CD for the first time. I already heard a lot of the songs when she came to the Fillmore recently, but she is always a lot of fun. Appropriately, Macy is really Natalie McIntyre and talk about a persona! She rocks. Guess she is a very appropriate choice for my midnight music.

I think Thailand is going to be the start of my new life. It is the most time I have ever had to just think. The money will keep dumping into my bank account, and I can just chill on the beach and figure out who I truly am and who I want to be. Not to mention, my hair should be pretty long when I return. We’ll see if that turns into a new look or not. It usually drives me crazy when it gets long, but I think it will be fine letting it go while on sabbatical. Now, growing a beard, THAT would annoy the hell out of me.

7 minutes…

Hmm, I think I pre-stressed out about my birthday because I seem to have found more of an acceptance in the past two days. not that it matters, it is occuring in 5 minutes whether i want it to or not.

Hmm, I guess I could procrastinate more if I wanted. I was technically born at around 8 p.m. on the east coast, so technically I have until tomorrow at 5 p.m.

No, I should just get it over with in… 4 minutes, and be 35.

Actually, I think my biggest challenge isn’t aging, it is letting go of the past. Like I said in my last post, most of my time is spent talking about my future anyway. What I need to do is become grounded in the present. I also want to find new people who bring joy into my life, and vice versa.

Two minutes.

Macy is talking about being high. Oh well, too late for any of that. Nothing in the house and I’m not sure whether it would be a good night for any of that anyway. Pot went bad when I started writing the novel insanely, as it magnified my frustration. Back when i was mellow, it would just make me more mellow, which was fine.

One minute.

I didn’t even drink tonight at dinner after the movies. I will probably have something tomorrow. Doing lunch with Kirk, a flash mob in the afternoon, Millennium, and Urinetown. Sounds like a nice day.

At the time of this writing I am 35.

I’ve never been good at keeping journals in meatspace. When I was growing up, I would always start journals on New Year’s Day, and then they would drift away shortly thereafter. When I went fag, the journaling switched from New Year’s to gay pride, so that I could annually whine about not having the body I wanted. So tired…

I always wonder whether journals would provide insight or cringes if I had kept them. On many levels, I think my life has been very static. Even when I write journals or blog entries or whatever, it isn’t the present. The writing journal is more about something to look back on when the book is complete. The book is something to look forward to from the perspective of having finished it. In my past, I’ve traced back my need to lose weight as the source of unhappiness. And in my future, the one that doesn’t yet exist, I’ll be skinny and finally happy with myself.

I would have been happy if I was thinner. I will be happy when I’m skinny. I should have taken writing more seriously growing up. Soon, I’ll finish this book and work on me.

Nothing I do is now. It’s never here.

Even TypePad, this diary, is part of a free trial to determine if this place will be right for me. So this diary entry has the ring of instability to it, too.

I’m not sure what is going on with me lately. Almost everything I do makes me question where I am in life. Work is insane lately. I wonder if I want to live in San Francisco moving forward. I wonder if wanting to leave is just running away from something and, if so, what? I wonder if the problems I feel about San Francisco are about this city, or if everything ultimately traces back to me.

This evening, I wanted to write a short story but, of course, it would require a lot of research. And, ultimately, it’s not that deep. The story was going to be about an agricutural disease specialist, who is called to save a precious crop before it bankrupts an entire town. His job would be to determine the height at which the crop could be saved, but his skill is getting the blade to cut as close as possible to the disease, because every quarter inch of crop saved would add up to significant profit. And, if he didn’t do it right, all of the good crop would be tipped with diseased ends and the manpower it would take to cut it off of each stalk individually would eliminate any profit from the harvest.

The guy would be one of these quiet types who can just feel the crop and know what other people, and science, and anything else would never be able to. A sort-of weed whisperer. Trust me, this could be written properly and be beautiful, but it probably won’t be done by me.

The story is very Rainmaker, a quasi-religious tale where, of course, the specialist doesn’t just know about plants, but he knows about people. And, in many ways, they are the same. And, personally, the story is about me and my upcoming reinvention, so let’s just skip the fictional foreplay bullshit, and get on with it…

I do feel like part of me is wrong. Sure, there’s the weight thing, and the unfinished novel constantly bearing down on me. But I really think those are symptoms of other things. And the question is how far down do I have to cut, to make sure I separate what is good in me from what went wrong.

Is the city what makes me feel off, or is it my disdain for the city, job, being single, overweight (pick a card, any card)… are these all diseased offshoots from what is still a healthy stalk somewhere?

This afternoon, a friend told me that his mother was debating whether to see a show with us this Saturday because (I will quote him as to not get it wrong), “you kind of really annoy her when you’re sarcastic to her (often) so she didn’t want to go through that again.”

I have no recollection of this. I barely see her… maybe twice a year. I can’t recall any particular negative incident with her ever. In fact, she has a ticket for the play because I know she likes musicals and I told him he should definitely buy her a ticket because it’s such a great show.

I do have theories about her issues with me, but always thought them to just be part of our reparte together. The only thing I can recall is me saying something whereby I made her son the butt of whatever joke was going around. He is just as quick to do this to me, and often, so I think nothing of it. And, each time, she would always cap it with, “I think that’s what you do, not him.” At the time, I wrote it off as a, well, flat effort of trying to save face, getting the last word in, etc. Like she didn’t know that a) I had already won the verbal debate, or b) I was kidding and will say whatever rings funniest, whether there is a hint of truth to it. (B is seeming to be the winner today, of course).

After this latest reference to her not even sure she wants to have great dinner and see an amazing show with front row seats because it would mean spending the night with me and my sarcasm… it does come off as pretty severe.

Of course, now it would be worse if she came, because now I will just be quiet all night, as to not step across whatever insane line exists that I have heretofore been unable to detect.

Now, whether a friend’s mother likes me or not is typically not really enough to rattle me, but it is another cause to think… am I really the person I want to be now, or am I saving whatever good there is in me for this future when I’m a happy, skinny, published man in a relationship who doesn’t go to an evil job every day to write drivel for insane people.

Or does every day need to be one step toward becoming that person? In that it isn’t going to just happen one day…

I have a sabbatical coming up, six weeks away from everything… and I don’t know if I will crack a single book at the rate I’m going. I will be spending a lot of my physical allocation on the beach, but I think my mental faculties will be focused inward.

It’s all rather strange.

But is it a personal cathartic breakthrough? mid-life crisis? nervous breakdown? pre-35th birthday angst?

Only time will tell…

Jeff

Finally got around to starting up my TypePad site. I’m hoping to use their service to migrate jeffwalsh.com here, so I’m just using the free trial to check it out and see if everything is working as planned.

I do like the pricing and the elegance of the service, just need more information about domain stuff, domain parking (so I can point domains I have registered for future novels to this site, etc.) as well as what, if any, e-mail services they plan to add, or whether that will be an additional outsourced expense.

We’ll see what TypePad Trotts out in that regard.

Jeff

Back from vacation… did a week and a half in Pennsylvania, with a Jersey Shore vacation-within-a-vacation. Of course, the real vacation is approaching, the six week sabbatical. Where will I end up? Thailand? Europe? No decisions just yet.

Travel always makes me contemplative. Actually, lately, being awake makes me contemplative. Big changes afoot, but not sure what just yet. If I’m having my mid-life crisis now, does that mean I’m going to die at 70?

Not too much “novel talk” back home, so that was good. And most people seemed fine with the whole notion that not writing something from a place of joy means I’m not going to have a joy flowing underneath the text. How to find one’s joy, thankfully, was not the follow-up question.

Here’s the other issue: whenever I leave San Francisco, I want to leave San Francisco for good. When I am in New York, I want to move to New York City. I have been talking a lot about Portland lately, but part of me is even thinking Venice. Well, Venice, California. The whole notion of living next to a useless section of ocean is getting to be a bit much. If I’m going to be at the ocean, I should be able to swim. Otherwise, what’s the point? Oh, look, lots of freezing water?

Writing like a monk (six days a week, three hours a day) profoundly changed my outlook on the city. Because I stopped using the city. I wasn’t eating out all the time. I wasn’t going to shows all the time. I wasn’t trying to fill my days with activity. Even now, having not been writing, I come home after work. I don’t go to the movies, see what concerts are happening, nothing. I come home and do computer stuff, or clean, or watch a DVD, but whatever zeal I had to be constantly busy kind of thinned out. Without writing, of course, it just makes me painfully boring at present. But I’m not considering doing anything drastic or regrettable like getting TV, though … it’s not that bad, and I will be writing again in the future.

The other thing I like about being in PA more than SF, not that I’m necessarily making a case to move back to PA, is just how accessible I find everyone. Now, this is entirely skewed now, of course, because when I am home, it is for brief windows of time visiting friends, so I’m not sure how much of that would exist regularly. People might be uber-flexible because they want to get together in the few days until I leave. But when I lived in PA, it was far more about a small group of people who did everything together, and perhaps it is just me not actively looking for or finding that here in SF, but it seems most of my friends here are very calender-centric and, aside from parties, no one seems to add people to events.

If I call someone and ask about hanging out, I may get a dinner slot next Wednesday. But very rarely do people do things on the fly. There are never calls of “Hey, I’m in the city with whomever, want to grab dinner with us.” Everything is compartmentalized. When people do things with their friends or boyfriends, they don’t invite other friends. I invite different people to shows and concerts, but no group solidification has occurred. Most of my friends are acquaintances of one another.

The one thing that is prevalent in both areas is the notion of “what people do for a living.” Here, of course, it is ingrained and connected to your worth in some circles, whereas in PA it is because so many people are out of work has made it a constant source of conversation (possibly for job leads). I would ultimately like to find a place where no one cared less what you did for a living, as so few people experience their joy and happiness in their careers. That may entirely be me projecting, though.

A lot of times in PA, when the job market wasn’t as bad, I remember people saying that X would be at the party, and that I’d probably like X because he told really funny stories. I mean, isn’t that more important than X being an ad exec? It is in my book (not literally my book, it’s just an expression).

There has always been thought of leaving the job, trying to make some sort of odd living writing novels. In any case, do something for my job that isn’t writing, to bring back some erotic charge to firing up Microsoft Word. Part of the romanticizing involves moving, moreso because I will need to live on less money, so why live in the most expensive city in the US? (Or did NYC reclaim its title? I know we snared it briefly during the dot-com days, at least from a rent perspective). So, part of that issue has been: if I don’t live in SF, where would I live?

I know my family would root for Texas, since there is momentum for everyone to gather there in the future. But I can’t see that happening. Just not my cup of tea. I will still visit, but no need to set up residence.

Pennsylvania could happen again. Not back in Wilkes-Barre. Probably more of a Philly thing, and probably not even downtown. I think I might be getting over my city thing. I still need to be driving-distance-close to a major city, less than an hour, because there will always be concerts, and plays, and, as a single fag, there will always be more homos in urban areas. Once I get hitched, we can stay in suburbia for the most part. Even the notion of driving distance, though, adds the issue of having a car, so it is quite the Pandora’s Box.

My friends in PA just got an amazing home in downtown Reading. Of course, my experience with Reading is driving to and from their house, so I can’t say that would be a destination for me. Not ruling it out, but it is just on a list with so many issues and qualifiers, it’s all too hard to sort out. I mean, I would have written my first novel at this point, be working on the second, quitting my job, living on a tight budget, so many other things, hard to even figure any move on top of all this.

The other interesting thing was that I really don’t feel like I ever experienced Pennsylvania. I know I drove by the Liberty Bell once, and maybe had dinner in Amish Country, but the majority of my time, I was just not into day trips and exploring and, of course, my old job there paid horribly. So that may have been a factor. On a lot of levels, I am the same way now about a lot of San Francisco. I have seen a lot of things, all the tourist stuff within the city, wine country, and all that. But for the most part, it is a routine largely based within my neighborhood that just repeats.

So, using the same logic, should I even consider leaving San Francisco without fully experiencing it? Or have I?