Confessions of a Nomadic Urban Professional

This is the barn which has held my worldly possessions for the last 9 months while I was reborn in Florida. Notable possessions include:

1 Sesame Street Lamp circa 1977
1 typewriter
1 felt hat found in Golden Gate Park perfect for mushroom hunting
1 copy of Pulp Fiction
1 cast iron skillet
12 boxes of books and notes

Now it's time to get slapped on the back and start crawling up the linea nigra of asphalt back to the land of milk and honey.

I'm lucky because my work is non-local, sort of like the new physics but without the implicit order. I will merely have to suspend sending zeroes and ones through the air for a week until I can plug my computer into some temporary docking station on the west coast.

With a little more luck, tho, I will be coming home to my own digs with my beautiful and patient lady, who is the midwife to this whole re-entry plan.

I am not very good at being a nomadic urban professional tho because I am longing for roots. It worked well when I was 23 and an archaeologist, rambling all over the southwest, digging up historic whiskey bottles and whatnot. Mornings like the time I woke up in a wildflower meadow in Larkspur, Colorado while visiting other nomadic and piratical friends at the RenFaire.

That was 1999 and now my back hurts when I sleep on the ground; so it goes.

I actually have less possessions than ever before, aside from the books. But the books are now a "library" and they are a mean feat to move around. My archivist nature and my wandering soul collide here, and the archivist wins. (With concessions anyways: the barn was not humidity controlled in the slightest. And spiders currently live in the filing cabinet.)

So I am heading west again with the intention to belong, to come home, to be where I am, to mingle with the oak savanna and the hard clay loam and the wild turkeys and the big laughing Jims and the coyotebrush fusing with the ocean breeze and the intense fluctuations of geomagnetic activity and the traffic and the fog and everything else that makes Northern California the magical place that it is.

My biggest fan

My biggest fan did this to himself. I'm not making this up, this is not my arm. I don't even have that much hair on my chest.

Thanks, guy.

My favorite pirate

It is good, in times of transition, to remember our heroes who inspire us. Here is my all-time favorite pirate.

"Captain William Dampier, who is often quoted as an example of a big, bold pirate, was in fact a mild man compared to the other pirates. He was really a naturalist who occasionally practiced a little piracy on the side, more or less by accident." (from A Ladybird book of Pirates, 1970).

This is a rare shot of Captain Dampier checking his email out at sea.

I also want to take this opportunity to shake my head at Bluebeard, who was a terrible pirate with no sense of imagination and too many empty rooms in his castle.