Sad Humanity

Last night I was almost asleep around 11pm. I heard someone yelling outside, followed by loud bangs. I woke up to make sure some drunk dude wasn't beating up the BattleWagon. I lucked out. He was just beating on the bus stop. Intrigued, I went to the kitchen, the room with the non-screened window, drank some water, and watched this guy. I debated in my head whether or not I should inform Denver's finest that a loud, obviously intoxicated public nuisance was waking up decent people in the middle of the night. The yelling continued. The punching continued. He repeatedly stumbled off the curb and onto Lincoln Street, a busy artery serving Denver's downtown. I watched as he yelled obscenities at cars, making gestures with his hand indicating he was going to shoot himself in the head. He peed all over the bench at the bus stop, and shortly thereafter, I saw a white Crown Vic with a light bar slowly make its way down the alley across the parking lot from where this gentleman was making his presence known. Slowly, the officer made his way to first street, where he circled around and, followed by another cruiser, engaged the flashy lights and crawled up to the bus stop. Two patrol cars. Two patrol officers. One drunk and angry young man. The officers got out and approached him. I couldn't hear the conversation, but I watched as they talked to him, checking the bag he was carrying and frisking his body for possible threats to their safety. The conversation wasn't all to loud. At one point, I heard an officer say they had called a big, white taxi to come pick him up. Minutes later, what looked like an animal control car pulled up. The young man began yelling again, as two more officers got out of the paddy wagon. The now four officers set off to put this guy in a compartment in the passenger side of the truck feet first. His feet connected with the outside of the truck and he resisted. The two patrol officers then took him head first into the truck and somehow forced the door closed. The man, now in custody, began yelling even more fervently and kicking the closed door loudly, forcefully. Mission accomplished. Another drunk, angry, and violent jerk off the streets. The paddy wagon drove off, and the patrol cars sped off after it. I got to see a live episode of "Cops". I got to see a sad commentary on humanity and the state of things. I slept well last night, but awoke with an oddly conflicting view of what I had seen the night before, both thankful for the people serving and protecting everyone else around, yet disappointed that some people just don't get it. However, for me, today will be a better day, better than it was for a troubled young man yesterday.

Another Monday

This past weekend I drove most of the way to my friend Todd's house in a little town called Turret, Colorado. I got stuck on the snow-packed roads, and he saved the BattleWagon from a fate worse than death: tickets from the Chaffee County Sheriff. I parked on the side of the road, and he drove the rest of the way to his place, where we caught up, listened to some music, treated some back pain, and burnt some spaghetti on his fireplace. His sanctuary is a beautiful log cabin overlooking the Arkansas River Valley just north of Salida. From what I understand, it's off-grid and self-sustaining. I would love to he able to emulate this in my own life at some point.

Meanwhile, I feel it best to move into the van again at some point. I think I'll shoot for June or July. HomeBase is great, but it has really just inspired me to be lazy lately, and that laziness has kept me from some serious adventures. However, it's great to stay in and eat good food and watch good movies. I did make a red chili that was incredibly delicious. I suppose there are perks, too.

A Snowy Saturday

Today I'm sitting at home, sipping a cup of coffee and watching the snow trying to fall from the cloudy sky. I'm listening to Gordon Lightfoot on the last.fm station I have pulled up. It's a mellow day. My cat is perched on top of the kitchen cupboards watching the snow, too. I love Spring in the Rockies, when the snow flakes get bigger, the weather gets warmer, and I get to be more optimistic about my coming summer.

The time I spent in the HomeBase has been bittersweet. It's a luxury to be able to shower and use the restroom at any time, and I don't take these novelties for granted. But the converse is that I now am starting to feel tied down, grounded, and too comfortable. I've gained weight. I eat too well too easily. I spend my free time watching DVDs instead of staying acquainted with my friends and being outside. I'm not really seeing anything new, and while I'm happy to have what I do, I'm also saddened to have lost what I have had. As I said, bittersweet.

I'm optimistic, though. Very optimistic. I've recently undergone some soul treatments, and I feel like I'm in a better place altogether. I feel like I've accomplished more in these past few years than I would have thought possible before the BattleWagon experiment started. Now is just a time to assess my thoughts and keep the momentum going.

Thank all of you who have read this since I started. I hope to keep going for the foreseeable future, but I can't do it without those of you who are interested and especially without those of you who have been a part of this journey.

I love the Spring.

Video Games and Immaturity

Last night I hung out with my friend Dan and played Super Mario Brothers Wii for 5 hours. My left thumb is almost calloused. It was great! It's ironic to me, however, that he has a PlayStation 3 and a Wii, and all we wind up playing is a 2-dimensional Mario game. I guess that makes us a little older than the typical video game crowd. Oh, well. It was a great time, and Dan, thanks for the pizza. I love your inadvertant William Shatner impression!

The Solitude of Individuality, a Sermon

A while ago, feels like years, the minister at the church I'd attend somewhat regularly, Rev. Mike Morran at First Unitarian Society of Denver, challenged me to write a sermon. I put it off for a long time, putting it on the back burner, avoiding it or neglecting it for whatever reason, but tonight, I just sat down and wrote down a first draft. I don't have a title for it yet, but it's based on a blog I wrote in March of 2008 called "The absense of control/The sweetness of solitude". I emailed it to Rev. Morran tonight, and I thought I would share it with you as well.

Have you ever been in a place in your life where you suddenly discovered that everything you thought you knew was absolutely false? The easy answer would be to say that some point after your teenage years, you understood things a little differently, as most people do. Some people are late bloomers. I was. I’ve fallen victim to what John Mayer calls the “quarter-life crisis”, something akin to a “mid-life crisis”, except at a younger age, where people are still very spiritually and emotionally malleable. Maybe it’s because there’s a socially accepted point in time where we have to decide that everything we have left to experience is a family and a career, kids and a house, and the crisis comes when we’re faced with this settling… and it scares us. Maybe we don’t want to settle down. Maybe we’re not ready for the family or the house or the job. Maybe we’re not done exploring.

Should we ever stop exploring? Do we really ever stop?

There were times when I was younger (and I freely and proudly admit that for me, younger is a relative term), I can remember going on vacations with my family or starting new jobs or going to college or Basic Training. I remember with all of these events that the overall impression in my head was overwhelming. I felt almost like I was the first person to see any of this, like a stranger in a strange land. Sure, I knew that plenty of other people had seen and done the things I was about to do, but to me, this was all new and exciting. With some places I’d gone more than once, every other time I went there I always got a warm, nostalgic feeling.

I was lucky enough to stretch this feeling of discovery far beyond my adolescent years. I got to live in a small mountain town and go rafting and hiking and off-roading and snowboarding every weekend. I met friends and was able to go to Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine to visit them, jumping in the ocean for the first time in my life. I even got to go to General Assembly in Boston in 2003, where I attended lectures by the Rev. Forrest Church, Julian Bond, and Dan Savage. Then I moved to Denver. And I started to settle. I got caught up with great girl, and we had a beautiful little boy. And that boy, my son, lost his life to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome when he was just 4 months old.

For a couple of years there, I was lost. In many ways, I still am. I came to church sporadically, and would go through very brief phases of involvement and long stretches of neglect and spiritual avoidance. I had no way to capture that old feeling of excitement, that feeling of seeing new things with young eyes. And I felt like if had found that quickening of my pulse, I was supposed to feel guilty for not being able to share it with another life, a life that was supposed to be growing and learning too.

A while back, I took up blogging. I think it was my way of digging subconsciously into my soul, although I kept it pretty superficial. After all, having the courage to really get involved with my emotions has never really been my strong suit. I started writing about all of the adventures I was continuing to do, although my own perception of these events was that they were as mundane as work or grocery shopping. I wrote about trips to the Utah desert, trips to the mountains of Wyoming, to my hometown during their annual whitewater rafting festival. None of these things seemed to really phase me at the time. I was just going through the motions.

Then one day, more recently than I would care to admit, I had a look back at some of those blogs. I found things about my recent life that I wasn’t present for at all, even though I was there. I missed out on a lot of things. Friendships. Romance. Spiritual connections. Introspective existentiality. I showed up, but, like the Broncos do so often, I didn’t REALLY show up.

We grow from these experiences. We learn, and more often than not, more often than what is probably considered necessary, we learn from our past experiences and mistakes. A great mountaineer once said “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.”

Towards the end of our periods of self-discovery, our crises that arise in our lives when we start to feel stagnant and stale, we begin to learn that we do have hopes and joys and goals and dreams. We begin to re-discover our will and our motivation and our willingness to learn and take risks. We dare ourselves to do things to please ourselves and start to worry less and less about the consequences. We persevere. We survive the fire that burns away our excess baggage. We grow, blossoming into a taller and stronger tree than we ever knew we had the potential to be. We see on our trunks the scars of our growth, the places where the bark has been scored or scraped away by passersby or by nature’s ever changing forces. We look upon these wounds, not as scars, but as simple parts in the definition of who we are and where we have come from.

The world is an interesting place. In staying with the tree analogy, it’s a forest of trees, all competing with each other for the sun’s attention. I think the reason we have our life-crises is that we don’t want to simply live in the forest with the other trees. We have a natural drive to stand out, to be unique. We know that the entire forest of civilization is made up of individuals, with their own worth, their own rights, and their own goals. But, we also know that while a single person is usually smart, a group of people is usually harder to convince that your dreams are not crazy fantasies. They’re harder to convince that you haven’t even had a meltdown. They believe you’re nuts, and sometimes they make you believe it, too. The crisis comes when we start to remember that we were, and still are, something special, something worth saving, someone with ideas and drive to make those ideas a reality.

I guess what I’m proposing to you is that a mid- or quarter-life isn’t a crisis at all, at least not for you. Sure, to the people in your life who aren’t close to you, you’re freaking out, losing control, going off the deep end. But you and your friends and family know that you’re just discovering yourself again. Don’t be afraid.

l’ll close with these words from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Light Snow at the HomeBase

Yesterday it snowed lightly here in Denver. I don't think we have more than an inch, but I'm excited as today will be my first opportunity to drive the BW2 in the snow. I think it'll do fine, even though it's over-powered and rear-wheel-drive. It just means I'll have more creative license when it comes to fishtailing and donuts.

Driving in the snow makes me nostalgic for home. I used to work with my friend Todd. After work, in the wintertime, his friend Ben would come by and we'd take off into the woods, into the snow, into the dark. He had a truck almost identical to my own at the time, a 1994 Toyota XCab 4x4. We would drive up until one of us got stuck, and then we would dig each other out and swap leads. One night, we had a few people with us, including my brother, who was maybe 10 at the time, and we drove up to the top of Marshall Pass in a foot of snow. The moon was full, and the snow sat in the pine tree branches as if it were ready to pose for a postcard photo shoot.

I miss those days. I miss Salida. I miss the van life. Still, the city has tremendous opportunities for those willing to make use of them. I think sometimes I question my own intentions a little too much.

Cozy on a Snowy Day

I'm here at the HomeBase. The Weatherbug says it's 31 degrees out, and it's lightly and steadily snowing. I got up around 8:30 this morning and made some coffee (a little too strong), and found my cat, Miss Harry Dean Stanton, hidden under a blanket on my couch. Now, I'm not saying it's cold in here. I'm walking around in gym shorts and flip flops. I think she just wanted to feel cozy and safe on a snowy day. Maybe we'll watch a movie later on. Oh yeah, it's Super Bowl Sunday... I have a love/hate with that. I just hope it's a good game. Last year's game was spectacular. The Cardinals almost rallied to beat the Steelers! Good luck Saints, and good luck Peyton Manning. Both are worthy.