it’s strange reminding myself to walk into a different room when coming home from the 9lb.

Where are all your lady friends? You change girls like you change your underwear.

Not intentionally; long conversation with K about this tonight, M intercedes and comments on my habits.

In any case, home to the woods in less than 24 hours. Now, more than ever, this feels incredible. I need to leave all of this bullshit behind for a while.

Line from a song that made me think of you: “I wear a coat of feelings and they are loud.”

While out at the bar with friends, one of them drunkenly yammering along beside me, the aforementioned bartender came in to grab something. On her way out, she looked at me with a face implying I was up to no good. I just gave an embarrassed shrug and grin. I have no way to communicate the realities of my life to those people who aren’t close. Sometimes I feel like I’m getting further away all the time.

The last of my photo upload queue is empty now. There are photos from Honk Fest West on Saturday, including the CD, Georgetown and Hazard Factory. There’s some more Alleycat stuff there, and random photos from thereabouts.

I was describing a happy memory, and how I feel when I think about it to J, about how I feel like I lost something, like opportunity or possibility. She thought my feeling was on of sadness and disappointment over losing a connection to someone. That I felt that M understood me and simultaneously appreciated me. Despite emails hence that may have proved this contrary, there is no mistaking how rarely I feel connected to anyone. Which makes a bit of sense considering how far the scales were tipped toward awesome, past prior expectations. Which is to say that what felt like enough a year ago doesn’t feel so important anymore.

CD Site: Start, Finish. Looks, it’s me.

The Volpe is finished again, and the fixed IRO (as opposed to the 29er IRO) got some love. When I stop to think about how much of my life that fixed IRO has seen, I’m amazed. Built during a high point, it has rolled with me since through thousands of miles consisting of daily commutes, pretty regular fifty mile average Sunday rides, and even a trip to Olympia and back. Then, my jaw drops remembering how short of a time it really has been with me.

A while ago someone commented on how they almost wished I had never met M. I rarely regret, and recently I was talking to M about how I don’t get angry either, how jealousy is my weakness. She knows this. A friend mentioned that he never tells people about his plans because he hates when they fall through and I can appreciate that. That’s the scary part about heart.

I think I”ve given up on being happy a while ago. Is that weird?

Sometimes you just love someone more than they love you,  which  isn’t enough to be relatively important to them. That’s how it goes.

My legs and arms are torn up from moving around blackberry bushes at the second Alleycat Acres site.

I talk to my father every Sunday. I will see him before the next Sunday, for the first time in over a year.

Tori asked me today what we’ll be doing in Mane. Driving, I told her. And spending a lot of time in the woods. I still wish M was coming. I guess that means I’m tired.

I told a couple people today about going to camp in T5 R7, Maine. One of them wondered if it would be dehumanizing to live in a place that didn’t even have a real name. I don’t think so. The roads are closing in these days.

Sometimes the stories I tell the most are the ones I’m still trying to figure something out about. There are holes to be filled that perhaps will find their mates upon being vocalized. I spent a recent evening with a friend at a local bar, hiding outdoors from some kind of event inside. The waitress has decided I’m a regular and offers me a jack + coke with a bowl of veggie chili every time, which I mostly recant to back up that she was comfortable enough with us to ask us to come inside when we wanted to close out because it was to cold outside and that we would because “we loved her.” When we did, she told my friend, “You know what I love about this guy? Every time he comes in here he is with a different girl; he’ll be here with one girl in the morning and one girl in the afternoon.”

I didn’t catch most of the story at the time, my friend had to tell me what she said before I put it together. I wouldn’t have put that together on my own. While she certainly exaggerates, the perspective is there. I’m not that guy, I’m a geeky awkward kid sarcastically wandering around doing things because it’s much more interesting to do than to talk. But there are, apparently, differences between my own identity and how others look at me.

Telling someone that I’m not interested in hooking up with them feels counter to how our culture seems to imply I should be. Of course, that’s a ‘should’ and therefore is a ‘black box’ of implication without grounding, without base. I too often feel that I’m trying to have conversations with people that they’ve never had with anyone before, and it too often leaves me feeling lonely in a way that makes me feel like I don’t fit with anyone.

You can’t articulate how you feel and what you want without getting angry? Wait, how old are you again? Yes, I know it’s hard. Life is hard. Grow up already.

I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen for years, who I met through SWN, recently and had brunch with him. SWN was the first realization for me in Seattle that I was more, and capable of more, than I gave myself credit for. Perhaps it was equal parts coming from the edge of nowhere and coming out of a long-term relationship where my partner didn’t think I was awesome. We talked of wireless, the security scene, the world, traveling, vegetarianism as entitlement.

I have no discomfort with who I am, nor who I’ve become. I feel that I’ve solidly reached a point where I’m wanting to do more and searching for that now. Often I walk, feeling a tinge of age, of wisdom of who I am, and marvel at how far I’ve come. I still blush, it’s not me they’re talking about, is it?

Everyone searching… doing well is not doing good, but running away doesn’t change anything. Oh…

My photos are out of order, because they’re on different computers right now. I’ll get them all up there some time.

Waking up for a 7am phone call from our sales engineer in EMEA mad working from home and then heading over to Colin’s shop work out alright today. I finished welding my first Haulin Colin knockoff trailer today. Colin let me exchange some help with some projects for the use of his design. I’m going to build two, I’m planning on one for regular Alleycat Acres use and one for personal use. I’ll wrap one up before I leave for Maine next week at least. You’ll be able to get a production version of this made by the man himself pretty soon from Dave.

It’s bigger than my initial bicycle canoe trailer prototype, but will be more useful all around. I don’t know about carrying this one with bikes in the canoe for bicycle + canoe camping, but I should be able to rig up an alternative hitch system to use this for that project.

I got a head-tube race removal tool recently. JR asked if I couldn’t just borrow one from Ashok and I told her if I was going to spend my disposable income on anything it might as well be bike tools. In any case, the pile of parts in the garage keeps growing and I’m not doing very well on getting out there to get any of the projects done. While Sunday is once again dedicated to Alleycat Acres, I’ve only committed a couple hours of Saturday to volunteering so far. So maybe I can work the pile down a little then. I should have everything I need to finish the Volpe handlebars (camping/touring), build the xtracycle, and get the brakes back together on the cyclocross bike by the end of the week.

A motorcycle trip to the woods wouldn’t be all that bad.

Wait, my motorcycle is all busted up still. Oh right, another neurology appointment in an hour. Good times.

At least it’s sunny out.

I just turned down an awesome, creative, intelligent guy who I had a lot in common with, partially because I am just not emotionally interested in people who I don’t feel I can look up to.

For as far back as I can remember, my Sundays are either bike rides with friends, or working on the Alleycat farms.

The mayor came out to visit yesterday, which brought unwelcome media in my mind. They weren’t much interested in us and as much as the mayor is a public official I sort of felt like their questioning was invasive and was ruining the day. I thought upon this for a bit, politics, and the reminders of my favorite dilbert comic.

Today I had a choice of doing something important that no one would ever realize, or doing something useless that would look like an accomplishment.

Last night, well, during the period between my naps from exhaustion and the period that is the closet I’ve been coming to sleep for a while, I watch a documentary on Hulu called The American Ruling Class.

Mike Vanzetti: No offense, but do you really think you can change things, much less the world, by walking down a country road singing a song? By singing a song anywhere, at any time, for anybody, for that matter?

Pete Seeger: I s’pose not, but I am going to make darn sure the world isn’t going to change me. It’s like this. Imagine a big sea saw and one end is on the ground, because it has a basket half full of rocks in it. The other end is up in the air, because it has a basket one-quarter full of sand. And some of us got teaspoons and we are trying to fill it. And of course most people are kinda scoffing at us. They say, “Don’t you see it’s leaking just as quick as you are putting it in? People like you been trying for centuries, but it’s never going to change.” And we say, “You might be right, but we think we get more people with teaspoons all the time and one of these days that whole seasaw is going to go zooop, and people will say ‘Gee, how did it happen so suddenly?’ Us and all our little teaspoons, over the centuries.” Who knows?

At some point in time, I decided the best way to change to the world was to touch individual peoples lives. I’ve failed at sharing my excitement and introspection as a result of Kenshin with anyone. Perhaps I’ve been more successful than I let on, but that I hold a subtle grudge against M that blinds me. In any case, I change the world by being who I am.

If there is no last morality here to be offered, it is an individual question. The last thing people always say as they go out is not ‘I wish I had had more money.’ They’re usually wishing something else, about what they did with their lives.

Dad used to comment on what a shame it is that the same lessons have to be learned by every generation. As I learn more lessons that a book can’t teach you, that only life and experience can, I appreciate that it is less about what you’ve done than how you’ve done it. Repeated in the documentary is that doing well is not the same as doing good.

I pride myself in being a hard worker, in caring, and being thoughtful.  Sometimes I look at a group of people and wonder, “what have they done?”, because I feel they are living in a fantasy land. Is this a real place created by entitlement, by not having had to work for what they have? It’s difficult to judge without getting too academic on the subject, which I tend to view with disdain.

I guess, more than anything else, I end up with a way.