Go Ahead Kid, Touch The Bike...

I am sitting outside Starbucks trying to enjoy what can only be described as a ridiculously gay coffee (Grande Skinny Vanilla Latte - just screams italics, don't it?) and waiting with heightened anticipation for the moment when one of the kids loitering in the parking lot touches my bike and burns the skin off of his hand. I'm not a violent or angry person by any means, but at this point I'd be completely at peace with this, because it would teach these kids to keep their hands off of other people's things, especially if those things are Harley's and those people are bad-ass road-weary bikers in no mood for dealing with other people's kids.

Apparently their parents, who are sitting in the car right there are incapable of doing this.

Live Blogging Update: One of the kids just reached out to put a finger on the bike, and fortunately (for him) his mother (an obviously exhausted young woman who also seems to wish these kids were elsewhere) yelled at him.

I was considering for a minute yelling at him myself, but as scary as I am when I'm mad I can't compete with 1st degree burns.

I wonder if I could be sued if a kid burned himself from touching my bike in a public parking lot. Probably. That's an unfortunate statement about the legal system in this country. It would be considerably less bad-ass for bikers around the country to have to put a "Please Do Not Touch - VERY HOT" sign on my bike every time we park. It's bad enough that the law requires us to wear these absurd giant mushroom-sized helmets.   

I know that kids are hard to raise. I know kids are hard to keep track of. I know this all first hand. But I also know that this means that parking lots are not an ideal place to let your kids hang out. It's that simple.

The root of the problem here is that people with kids feel like they have the same rights as everyone else. I would submit that they do, but only if their kids can behave in a manner appropriate for the social situation. I don't frolic in parking lots (I reserve my frolicking for parks and sidewalks in he bar district) and I certainly don't expect kids to know this rule without being reminded, but if parents can't do sid reminding with any effect, then as far as I am concerned they all lose the right to be in parking lots.

Or restaurants. If I'm paying good money to eat at a restaurant, I don't want to hear your baby crying while I do it. It's a baby. It doesn't need to be at a restaurant, it doesn't even eat solid food. I hate to say it, but if you are the baby's momma or daddy, then you don't get to go to restaurants either unless you can find someone to watch your baby.

I didn't make you have that kid. Don't make me have to listen to it while I am eating.

And then of course there are the kids that stand in the booths at IHOP and stare at you over the back of the chair. It's cute and adorable for exactly as long as it should take the kid's parents to notice and correct the child, after that point it is only rude and annoying.

Tonight I paid $4.25 for this gay latte, with the expectation that I was also purchasing a seat in this wooded parking lot where as to enjoy the cool peaceful Spring air while I blog about how wonderful and beautiful the world was today. Instead, my nerves frayed 5 seconds after sitting down because of: kids screaming at each other, kids chasing one another around my bike (if it gets knocked over someone's face is getting introduced to hot exhaust pipes - just saying), kids oblivious to cars trying to back out of parking spots, and kids chasing an unleashed dog up and down the sidewalk where I am sitting, otherwise generally being unchecked suburban nuisances.

Never mind the legal system, its a sad state when a bad-ass biker gets terrorized by a bunch of 6 year olds in a Starbucks parking lot.

I guess I'm not as bad-ass or scary as I thought I was... 

This is Your Life, and It's Ending One Minute at a Time

What would you do if you knew you were going to die one month from now? If the answer is anything but "exactly what I am doling right now", then why aren't you doing it? Do you know for sure you aren't going to die in one month?

A Connecticut Yankee in Dale Earnhardt's Court

"Street Surfing" is a term I came up with a few years back to describe what is essentially "getting lost on purpose". It's a good way to kill time if you've got a full tank of gas, and is hands down the best way to find new gems in an area you think you know already, off-track places like beautiful backwoods windy roads, state parks overlooking the city, little hole-in-the-wall bars or taverns, or the parts of the ghetto where it's easy to get shot just for looking at someone wrong.

It's this last occurrence, by the by, that causes veteran street surfers to develop a very keen sense of "what might be two blocks ahead of you at any time". We base this mostly on how many people per block are "loitering on the stoop" rather than "enjoying the warm Spring evening out front".

Important distinction.

How street surfing works is you get a vehicle (preferably a motorcycle, although it works in a car) and drive with no destination in mind. Start on a road in a direction that you don't take very often. When you come to an intersection of any kind, make a gut decision about which direction is more appealing to you at that moment, and take that road.

Repeat. Rinse. Repeat. Get lost.

By definition, what I did today wasn't street surfing, because I left the house with a destination in mind and made turn choices based on where I hoped each street would take me. What I did today, however, is very similar to "getting lost", in that I didn't get anywhere close to where I wanted to go.

Still, it was one of the best rides I've ever taken.

If you look at a map of Virginia, specifically focusing on the coastal areas, the first thing that's important to take note of is that the Chesapeake Bay cuts up into the heart of the state like a knife, with tons of tiny tributaries and fjords and such spreading out in all directions from it. As such, it's actually difficult to find the actual coast here, because unless you end up in Virginia Beach (where I have been before and was trying to avoid - not because it isn't a fantastically joyous little beach town but simply because I was hoping to go somewhere new) you aren't really on the coast looking at the ocean, you're on a weird little fjordy doodangle thingie looking out into the Chesapeake Bay.

Which is all well and good and beautiful and scenic, I am sure, but today I had a hankering to see the ocean, so that's what I set out to do.

I picked a spot on the map that seemed bottom of the Bay enough to allow me to get my ocean fix, pulled up some simple-to-remember directions and set off on the bike. Somewhere around the Richmond International Raceway everything fell apart, as somehow I missed what was supposed to be the simplest turn I would be making on the trip, but I decided to press on. I knew I was heading East, I knew the coast was East, so I figured I couldn't go wrong.

And missing that turn ended up being the best thing that could have happened to me all day.

Not long after I passed the airport, I rode by a Nabisco factory (bakery? baketory?). It was like what I would think riding past Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory would be like - the sweet crisp vanilla-tinged smell of what I could only imagine were thousands of little 'Nilla Wafers baking covered the road like a warm, comforting blanket, and I closed my eyes and grinned like a retarded kid with a new Scooby Doo lunch box and inhaled deeply to get the full effect of it all as I passed. It was bliss.

This is one of the reasons why riding a motorcycle is so much better than driving a car - the smells are inescapable and immersive and you become one with the landscape you are riding through.

Coincidentally, that's also one of the reasons why riding a motorcycle is worse than riding in a car, especially when you are behind a truck filled with chickens or a dumpster hauler or riding through Vermont. (They have very smelly cows).

Shortly thereafter, the scenery turned to farmland (as it often does around here if you drive in any direction for more than 20 minutes), with some of the most beautiful windy country roads I've ever ridden. From time to time the roads were buttressed by forest, which would break - shooting you out into farmland again only to reform like a train tunnel for you to ride into a few hundred feet later.

When I moved down here from Connecticut I thought I would miss the windy wooded roads, but Connecticut has NOTHING on this state - today's ride alone took me through more beautiful and fun-to-ride areas than I had ever found in my years of riding up North.

After an hour or so of these curvy autobahn-like stretches, I ended up in Williamsburg, which is a beautiful and richly-historic area. I street surfed for a little bit through downtown and around the William and Mary College campus, enjoying the scenery (college towns in the Spring mean summer dresses, tank tops, and jogging shorts - YUM) and trying to find the Williamsburg beaches so I could get my fix of ocean. As it turns out, there are no Williamsburg beaches. I don't know why I was so convinced there were, but as I confirmed on the Internet when I got home, they most definitely do not exist. I decided to cut my losses  and head back towards Richmond after an hour or so of bumming around the area, as the sun was getting low in the sky and my back was starting to hurt. As well it should have at that point - I had been on the bike for about 3 hours straight at that point.

I happened across a state road that cuts through Richmond right near my house, so I hopped on it pointing West and started for home. By the time I rolled into Richmond it was dusk, and rather than just shoot through it on the street that runs by my house I ended up getting a little twisted up and making my way through the city on an artery I hadn't been on before. This turned out to be a good thing, because as I found out when I recanted my route to a friend who's lived here some years longer than I have, the road I intended to take goes through a part of town that's, well, not so beautiful. And the road I ended up on led me through an area I had never been before, and gave me a chance to see first hand just how beautiful and hip our fair city really is.

Richmond has a bad rap. Hell, I've personally badmouthed it myself in the past. In fact, my first interaction with my new home city was about 3 or 4 years ago. I was on a motorcycle trip from Connecticut to Florida, ironically because I thought at the time that I was going to be moving to Florida, and wanted to check it out. I rolled into Richmond at the end of my first day of riding, and after 8 hours in the hot sun on the highway all I cared about was finding a hotel and a place to eat a nice fat burger. So I took a downtown exit, and ran smack into desolation. I wandered around, found a few abandoned hotels, didn't see much sign of life, and immediately popped back onto the highway to go South a few more exits to stay at one of those highway hotels that exist purely to serve highway traffic.  

I believe I called Richmond a "shithole". I believe I described it as "one big ghetto".

I was so wrong.

When you drive through the rest of the city - the part I didn't see those years ago - you see things like a beautiful state park atop a hill overlooking the city, where battles were once fought during the Civil War. You drive down these beautiful colonial brick house-lined streets that could almost be cobblestone in their antiquity. You see these little corner restaurants with irreverent names, packed for dinner on a Monday night. You drive through a downtown that is actually living at night, unlike cities like Hartford or Charlotte that become ghost towns after 6 PM or on weekends.

What I learned today is that I live in one of the most beautiful and diverse states in the country. I learned that Snoop Dee Oh Double Gee will be in town tomorrow night. I also learned that I don't have to go far to street surf what is undoubtedly one of the most interesting cities on the East coast, which is exactly what I intend to do next time I go out for a ride.

On purpose, this time.

Hello Me, It's Me Again

It has come to my attention that we haven't been properly introduced, so I'm going to take this opportunity to tell you a bit about myself. This is, after all, my blog, and if blogs can't be used for shameless self-important self indulgence (essentially, I suppose, amounting to public mental masturbation), then what the hell good are they, I ask you. So grab the tissues and let's get into it.

This is my third such blog. I've been writing stupid shit and posting it on the Internet for strangers and friends to read for the past 5 years. You might recognize my writing style from [REDACTED] or [REDACTED], but let's not make a big deal about that here, shall we? I'm trying to start fresh. To turn over a new virtual leaf, as it were. Frankly I'm trying to attract a better class of readers this time around. If I'm not involved in any restraining orders this year then I'll know I'm headed in the right direction.

So, as far as you know, my name is Chuck. At the moment I live in Virginia, or as it says on the highway signs when you cross the border from Maryland: "Where the South begins"*. And Virginia truly is the gateway state to the Southern U.S. We have rednecks, but they are well behaved and generally have decent dental plans. You will see the occasional confederate flag, but it's usually tastefully displayed or small. Or both. We do have corn liquor, but it's not sold in stores. And while we have hundreds of baptist churches peppered throughout the state, there aren't a lot of anti-abortion anti-gay pro-God billboards along the highways.

So it's the South, but not "Banjo and Overalls" South.

I haven't always lived here. In fact, just last year I was wrapping up a 15+ year tour of duty in war torn Connecticut (a.k.a "Where Fun Goes to Die"). At some point after moving there back in the 90's (from Boston, for those playing Blog Bingo) I lost my way and started an insta-family with a girlfriend and her two daughters; we bought a nice house in the suburbs and I drove an SUV, wore polo shirts and khakis, mowed the lawn with a push-mower, and started taking prescription drugs for high blood pressure.

10 years, about 23 assorted pets, and one very broken relationship later, I was left alone, paying a mortgage for a house I didn't want to live in anymore, in a state that I never really wanted to be in in the first place. I burned all of my khakis, bought a motorcycle, got tattoos, started blogging, and promptly spent the next few years struggling through yet another disaster of a romance whilst trying desperately to sell my house.

Last summer I finally found a sucker buyer to give me enough money for the property to cut lose and break out of Dodge, and so here I am.

The original plan was to head as far South as possible and settle somewhere in Florida. For the record, the motivating factors for choosing Florida were 1) sun, 2) sand, 3) palm trees, 4) bikinis (not on me), and 5) my B.F.F. Brian lives there. But for reasons that are not entirely your business, I instead found myself just outside of Richmond in a little apartment complex with a lake and fountains and a pool and just the right amount of old people (enough to guarantee that someone will chat you up if you go outside at mail time, but not enough so that there are bingo games held in the clubhouse every Saturday night).

According to the grey hairs starting to salt my otherwise brown hair and reddish goatee, I am pushing my late thirties. I suppose this means that in a few more years, I'll no longer be relevant. In general. I'm having a bit of an issue accepting this, but it's not because I'm in denial, mostly I kinda just think I'm still pretty cool, for an old guy.

I've been a computer programmer for 20 years, and am sort of going through a mid-career crisis at the moment, thinking defiantly that I'll be able to course-correct without crashing - even at this late stage in the game. It's going to be tough, for sure, on account of not actually having a college degree. I do have plenty of mostly useless skills, however: I was a classically trained pianist (lol peen-ist) as a child (I dropped out of Berklee College of Music because I slept through a meeting with my advisor and ended up getting stuck with a shitty major), and before I truly became a real grown up with actual bills and stuff I was a sandwich-maker, a record store manager, a college town pizza delivery boy (best. job. ever), a rave / club DJ, and an assistant manager at an Army and Navy store.

Not all at the same time, mind you, I don't have that kind of energy.

Lightning round:
I can spin a basketball on my finger for about 10 seconds, but never longer than that. I'm tall enough to have never dated a girl as tall or taller than me (but not so tall that I would become freakishly gangly). I can juggle. I hadn't touched a piano in 20 years until my buddy Rich conned me into playing a chopsticks duet with him at a restaurant bar in LA a few months ago. We ended up jamming some blues together. It may or may not have sounded good, we were pretty hammered. I rarely throw up (except when someone else is hurling). I am missing the tippity tops of both of my index fingers, lost in unrelated vegetable slicing incidents. I fancy myself a writer; I've got about a dozen unfinished books and screenplays sitting in my documents folder on my laptop. I'm single, but not looking (sorry ladies).

(That last one is a whole other blog post, so I'll leave it at that for now.)

And that's it. You now know more about me than my mom does (true story).

Before I leave you to clean up, I'll answer the burning question that I'm sure is on everyone's mind, which is: "That's all well and good Chuck, but what's this blog all ABOUT. What's it all FOR?"

Correction. I won't answer that. I can't. I honestly have no idea. I've done this long enough to know that I have no clue what this will turn into or where it will go, and that's part of the fun. For both of us. What it has been up until now, is probably a pretty good indication of where it's going, but since I don't really pay much attention when I write I'm going to be just as surprised as you are by the results.

Thanks for visiting, and don't forget to tip your waitress. Kisses!

*  The highway signs don't really say this. At least I don't remember for sure whether they do or not, because every time I've passed them I've been sun-stroked and choking on truck diesel fumes after being stuck on the back of a motorcycle throughout the Beltway traffic corridor. **

** Consider the above footnote to be a generous correction of truth, and as such you probably shouldn't expect that it will ever happen again. Now that we've gotten to know each other, you should know that I'm simply not to be trusted to be a source of truth and knowledge, let alone wit or creative banter. On the scale of "things you should believe on the Internet", this site should fall somewhere just above Fox News, but below Wikipedia. I won't lie to you or mislead you intentionally, but I damn sure am not planning on fact-checking what I say, and whether something is funny to me is more important when deciding what to write than it's verity. You want independent and honest journalism, go here. 

Hiatus Status

I am, as previously stated, on hiatus from work, due simply to the fact that I've got a comfortable cushion of savings in the bank account and no desire to go to work at the moment. Rather than spending my time noodling with terribly interesting and smart people as I'd previously imagined I would, however, I've been mostly lumping around the apartment with the windows open (it's been beautifully spring-like here in Virginia), sneezing and coughing constantly because of my allergies.

I suppose that if you consider lying on the couch watching 3 seasons of Sons of Anarchy or repeatedly listening to side A of the old DJ R.A.W. Hellborn* mix tape or catching up on the last season of Dexter to be productive, then I've been a veritable Viking of efficacy, but otherwise, not so much.

I suppose that's not quite accurate. I've actually done stuff the past few weeks. Terribly productive stuff, in fact, like completing crossword puzzles (mostly) without cheating, writing, reading, and finishing a programming project I've been working on for the past 5 years. But mostly I feel as though I haven't done squat, I suppose because I haven't taken any gloriously long motorcycle trips or met any avant-garde intellectuals to drink a good chocolate stout with while we muse on the inner workings of the human mind or quantum physics. This is, of course, how I envisioned spending my hiatus - like one big renaissance of the mind and body that would inspire me to finish all of the writing and music projects I had ever started.

Of course, this whole concept was duly thwarted from day one by the fact that my seasonal allergies kicked in full force a week ago, and have subsequently led to me catching an insufferable cold, complete with a fever. This seems to happen every year. My body, quickly reacting to the THREAT of FLOWERS POLLENATING protects me by immediately and persistently creating the urge to sneeze, replete with the production of mounds of mucous and redness and itchiness from my eyes through to the bottom of my throat, all of which culminates after a week and gathers in my sinus cavity, which is apparently the catalyst for my immune system promptly giving in and succumbing to whatever biological weapons have been cast towards me from my neighbors the few times I ventured out to the grocery store.

It's incredibly hard to be productive when your body threatens to collapse from weakness every time you stand up.

So I've given up, at least for this week. Even as I am feeling better today, the storms are moving in, and will be hovering out there for the next few days, looking gloomily threatening and having the potential to create some more Southern hail, which would be disastrous were someone unfortunate enough to be out riding a motorcycle. Looks like I will be missing Bike Week in the Outer Banks this year.

Oh well, there's always next year.

Then again, this is what hiatus' are for, aren't they? They are for nothingness. Therefore I will embrace the Zen of my hiatus, and relish in the accomplishments I have made, rather than yearn for the productivity that my allergies and mental energy (or lack thereof) seem to be conspiring against me having at the moment.

And it is good.

Next week I will finish the next Great American Novel and publish a CD of original music, but this week I've got the rest of season 5 of Dexter to plow through.

And that couch isn't going to hold itself down.

*Interesting side note: Hellborn (currently playing as I write) runs at ALMOST the exact same B.P.M.  as my washing machine. Wonderful when they are synchronized, not so much when they fall off. 

Mental Floss

Part of my rehabilitation, during this hiatus from work, is to work on my memory. I'd like to strengthen my mental skills all around, in fact, but mostly I need to focus on recollection. I have sharp short term recall, but have been cursed with one of the worst long term memories of anyone I know. I'd almost prefer it was the other way around. While it's great to be able to distinctly remember everything that's happened or was said over the past several months, sadly there are huge parts of my personal life that I simply can't recall. So I have to rely on friends to retell stories as if I wasn't there.

Part of strengthening the mind is understanding how it works. While scientists on a whole are still in the early stages of identifying and mapping brain function and linking it to what we perceive as our mind, we actually have a unique opportunity, each of us, to explore how the mind works ourselves, having access to a fully operational one at all times as we do. The trick, of course, is to get past the concept that you are using a tool to analyze itself, which some say is why we will never be able to fully understand how our mind works. I wholeheartedly disagree with this - our mind is capable of visualizing such unimaginable things such as invisible protons or vast solar systems - so why not think that one day we will be able to use it to understand how we think?

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. My perception of the mind (based solely on the exercise of being aware of my own thoughts and where / how I become aware of them) is that it is made up of two distinctly separate pieces: the conscious and the subconscious. The subconscious mind operates exactly like the mind of an alligator or a dog or a cat; it is what allows us to function, to eat, to sleep, even to experience emotions. The conscious mind is a completely different animal, and seems to be capable of logical thought (based on pattern recognition and the ability to predict outcomes and make decisions accordingly).

This is pretty close to scientifically proven, and it doesn't contradict Dr. Freud - he was talking psychology and we're talking pure thought here. In fact, there are literally two different physical areas in the human brain that when measured for activity during different mental challenges each fire at different times. Scientifically, this seems to support the theory of dual conscious and subconscious minds by indicating that these distinct thought patterns take place in completely physically separate places in the brain.

Separate they may be, however these two pieces of our mental fiber are in constant communication with each other.They don't act as one, but they work together in near-perfect harmony.

Ever try your hardest to remember something only to fail and then have it pop up later when you are thinking about something completely different? That's your subconscious working in the background, executing a search, and then passing the results back to your conscious mind in the mental equivalent of a browser popup window. Ever have deja vu? That's your subconscious mind constantly comparing current sensory input with previously-recorded memories and sending an alert to your conscious when it finds a match that is worth noting.

I tend to think that we dream in our subconscious mind, and in a rested state with no sensory input, our conscious mind wanders over and watches from time to time, like some residential voyeur peeking over the fence at a suntanning neighbor's wife. This gives us a glimpse into the strange and jumbled world of our subconscious, a peek into how we actually think and process input.

Like dreams, this process is is illogical, intuitive, nonsensical, and completely meaningful.

It's also stubborn. While our conscious mind can be reasoned with, our subconscious cannot. It learns from repetition, and unlearns the same way. Have a cigarette with your coffee every morning for a year, and the first day you have a coffee and skip the cigarette, your subconscious (albeit fueled by chemical dependencies) will scream out for a smoke, desperately sending images of your favorite brand pack of smokes to its conscious cousin. Wake up every Monday dreading your work day for long enough, and even after you quit your job, Monday morning will arrive along with that same feeling of dread - now out of place and illogical, when viewed in the perspective of the rational conscious mind.

This is how I started my day today. Saturday and Sunday I rose full of hope and rested (despite not sleeping well), but this morning I woke up with the same nagging feelings of dread I used to get knowing that checking my e-mail would open a Pandora's box of misery to kick off my work week.

This is interesting insight, to say the least, into how complicated - and yet simplistic - the subconscious mind is. It tracked the day of the week in order to prepare me for my Monday, but couldn't track current events enough to know that work was no longer a factor.

Or, more to the point, it couldn't reason and predict that quitting my job meant that Mondays would no longer be depressing to me.

That's a task for the conscious.

And so the conscious and subconscious work together quite well, but then again are completely independent creatures and that's where we fall short of our true potential. The duality of man, so to speak, in that we literally have two minds operating for us (and against us) at any given time. How frustrating that I can be conscious of the difference of this Monday and last Monday, but still be a slave to my subconscious defenses that kicked in despite being no longer relevant.

Just like deciding to quit smoking isn't the same as quitting smoking.
(For those keeping track, by the way, it's day 4 and I'm not looking back. My subconscious mind can eat it.)

It seems to me that the key to life then, the key to enlightenment, and perhaps even the key to happiness is to tune our independent minds to work as one. Imagine how powerful a man would be if he could harness the strength of both halves of his mental capacity; the whole undoubtedly being greater than the sum of its parts.

Forward Looking

There is a term: "forward looking", that in business describes a method of decision-making with the implication that it is strategic rather than short-sighted; planned instead of reactionary. This applies to all aspects of life, not just business. All too often people react rather than plan, deny rather than fix, flee rather than fight.

Since the start of the year I've been honestly and abrasively looking forward in my own life, comparing the path I've put myself on to the future I wanted for myself, and realizing that there were no roads that connected the two. What I saw was that I had been in deep denial about the future of the company I was working for, that I couldn't see a particularly fruitful or fulfilling future there for myself or my team, and more importantly, that I couldn't imagine leaving that job for a carbon copy of it, starting the cycle over again, not bettering my situation, instead simply moving it somewhere else, like I had done in the past, over and over again.

For 3 months, this realization, as well as my father's words echoing in my head (something about not leaving a job without having an offer from someplace else, or maybe it was about hatching chickens) kept me mostly undecided about what to do to fix this. I was flat out miserable, this I knew. I woke up every day dreading going to work, even though I worked from home and all I had to do was turn on my laptop or dial into a meeting. I spent time and energy looking for other work and talking with a few other companies, but nothing seemed like a step forward, instead everything seemed like a step to one side or the other. Like dancing.

Dancing around the issue, perhaps.

Rather than continue to tango with inevitability, then, I finally and simply handed in my resignation. I realized that as scary as it was, I had to terminate the abusive and unhealthy relationship I have had with my career. I needed to do this swiftly and unequivocally, leaving no room for greyness or misinterpretation. I decided to jump out of the airplane, and check for my parachute on the way down rather than dick around in the door and risk losing my nerve.

I realized that I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. But I'm damn sure that it's not what I've been doing. I'm not cut out for the corporate bullshit, I want off this stupid ladder.

The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.

So the first step, now that I'm in free fall, is to clear my head. Reboot my mind. In order to do that, I need to restore my emotional and physical health. I have quit smoking, quit eating junk food, and quit drinking (at least for the foreseeable future). I will be exercising daily in an effort to get back into the physical health I was in just two years ago. I'm going to focus on the things that, while working, I never made enough time for.

Writing. Reading. Making music. Drawing. Crossword puzzles. Long motorcycle rides to nowhere. Hobby programming.

Like leaving an abusive relationship with a woman, I need to find myself, my own identity, and most importantly, my own values before I can move on to a new partnership. Nothing short of that would be right for me, or whoever I re-engage my career path forward with. It's terrifyingly exciting.

I won't be working for the Man ever again, because now I AM The Man.

But for now...

Lawrence: Well, what about you now? what would you do?
Peter: Besides two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Well, yeah.
Peter: Nothing.
Lawrence: Nothing, huh?
Peter: I would relax... I would sit on my ass all day... I would do nothing.
Lawrence: Well, you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he's broke, don't do shit.  

- Office Space