{"id":1222,"date":"2010-06-22T19:47:52","date_gmt":"2010-06-23T03:47:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/?p=1222"},"modified":"2010-06-22T19:47:52","modified_gmt":"2010-06-23T03:47:52","slug":"quiet-nights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/2010\/06\/22\/quiet-nights\/","title":{"rendered":"quiet nights"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I sit listening at a table at Velocity conference with eight or so awesome individuals, I smile at the course life has taken.<\/p>\n<p>I met Denny for dinner in San Jose at my favorite restaurant here, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.myspace.com\/goodkarmasj\">Good Karma<\/a>. He&#8217;s a riot. I meet him on a sidewalk near a house I think he&#8217;s just been crashing at. He&#8217;s got a top-hat with half a plastic alligator head pinned to it, all covering bleached + green dyed dreads, with a pile of ties hanging out of pockets. He walks like nothing else really matters and I have a hard time comparing this &#8220;Dennis&#8221; to the Denny I first met so many years before as Jim&#8217;s (James&#8230;) younger brother. We talk about what we&#8217;ve been up to. He&#8217;s been spending the summer traveling, hanging out with musicians and producers, going from one event to another and rarely going home. When I talk about quitting drinking and moving away from people who aren&#8217;t doing anything (producing?) he admits he&#8217;s mostly having fun. I defend him and say at least he&#8217;s having fun doing new things and that each day is not regrettably a copy of the last. He tells me a story of a trip but can&#8217;t remember when it last was, and says it all blurs together. He speaks of how incredible it is to have the resources he has access to.<\/p>\n<p>I finished <em>Unfinished Business<\/em> and continued to marvel at the convergence with <em>Hindsight<\/em>, albeit via two different works. Still, I picked up <em>Free Culture<\/em> immediately, which may mimic this aforementioned trait a bit in regard to <em>The Public Domain<\/em>. The other day I was reading while watering at BH while waiting for H to come by and thought pretty seriously about what it would feel like to take better stock of my free time.<\/p>\n<p>I was talking to J about quitting drinking, about the costs of alcohol, and in another thread I got talking about living in the present. She connected the two and commented about how much more present she thinks I am now, partially due to being sober. We spoke of the avoided costs of relationships, like Lee Kravitz&#8217; discussion of emotional energy and how every bad interaction saps a little bit of what&#8217;s available to you in the course of a day, the stress of dealing with other people is a cost.<\/p>\n<p>On Tuesday I had two waiters refer to me as buddy. Both were hispanic, but one was at a Dennys in Bellevue over breakfast, and another at a late dinner at Original Joe&#8217;s in San Jose. Flying to San Jose made me think about coming down on the &#8216;southbound train&#8217; last summer and thinking of M, of taking responsibility for some feelings that were solely mine to sort through.<\/p>\n<p>Approval? Identity? Theres a concentrated shift toward what I do. It may have always been this way to some degree, but there&#8217;s effort behind it now. A less expectant or desiring love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I sit listening at a table at Velocity conference with eight or so awesome individuals, I smile at the course life has taken. I met Denny for dinner in San Jose at my favorite restaurant here, Good Karma. He&#8217;s a riot. I meet him on a sidewalk near a house I think he&#8217;s just [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1222"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1223,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222\/revisions\/1223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}