In my rarely humble opinion, I’d like to declare that if you write; you are a writer.  I mean, I know we all like to make distinctions, like a subway employee is, apparently, a sandwich artist (which is supposed to sound better than being called a sandwich maker), but are there really distinctions for writing and being a writer?  I mean, I write grocery lists that are more fun and interesting to read than half of the famous novels I’ve choked down in a desperate attempt to study the craft of writing.  (Black beans and cilantro—no way!)…

At any rate, something struck me as I prepared to lecture 165 students, 33 or so at a time, for five straight classroom periods, about being an adult and a writer:  What do I tell a room full of 14-17 year olds about what it’s like to be a writer, much less “an adult,” when I don’t believe that anyone out there is really “an adult”?

What is an adult?  As far as I’m concerned, you become an adult the day your state decides that it can try you in a court of law as an adult, and beyond that, there isn’t a single correlative factor that every “adult” shares.

Some adults hold down steady jobs, but many do not.  Some adults can control their substance abuse, but many cannot.  And I have enough adult friends at this point that I feel very confident about making the following assertion:  Most adults don’t feel like adults. After all, a lot of American adults pay other adults (who are licensed by older adults) to listen to them talk or complain about their adult problems, most of which are problems that have occurred since childhood, but failed to “magically go away” at adulthood.  Ergo, most Americans do not feel like they are adults, yet we all believe in this American myth of “adulthood.”

Apparently, I was a big “hit” with the kiddos in Southern Oregon because I didn’t lie to their faces and pretend that things get easier when you become an adult—because they don’t.  I think I also convinced many of them to embrace their youth and at all costs to avoid hypocrisy, because adult or not—no one likes or admires a hypocrite.  I think former governors Rod Blagojevich and Elliot Spitzer can attest to this.  I also lectured them on hegemony, and how it affects personal interactions as much as it affects unilateral politics—yeah, I’m that guy.

For me, becoming an adult means worrying about maintaining responsibilities with people you don’t really know and don’t really care about.  An adult pays taxes without questioning the representation, worries about their income, bills, and unexpected costs like car repairs, and an adult, most of all, tries their best to stay off YouTube.

There are things that I wish more adults would consider: like how to sustain mental happiness and how to forgive themselves and others more often.

And I’d like to add to the “list of adulthood things that suck:” nose hair (and I’m told by older friends that up next is ear hair (I can hardly wait)), having to shave before important events, getting nervous when my heart skips a beat, because technically, men my age can suffer heart attacks, and “dressing my age.”

Things that make me still feel like a kid include: The fact that I still giggle when a fart sounds funny, the fact that I still think “that’s what she said” is an appropriate and funny response to any vague sexual euphemism that was made by a person who doesn’t usually make profane jokes, and the fact that I still get silly crushes on cute women that work in retail, and then fantasize about how I could and would ask them out, and then further fantasize about how I would blow it, since I still think farts sound funny, and I still…you get the point.

My ten year reunion for High School was this past weekend, and it was a very odd experience.  Many of my former classmates seemed like adults; they were dressed to the nines, they had “careers” with companies that I’ve not only heard of, but ones that I actually support, and a lot of my peers had a spouse and a child, or children(!).

Now, don’t get me wrong, “creating” children does not require an adult act, it actually requires little more than barely pubescent hormones and a lack of concern for proper birth control (see: The South, The Midwest, and The Wire).  But having a baby and attempting to raise it will usually turn someone into a “trying-to-be-responsible-person” (a.k.a. an adult) just about as quickly as anything else I can think of (other notable catalysts to adulthood: overcoming drug addiction, witnessing a serious crime, experiencing domestic violence first or second hand, having to take care of an invalid.).

But is there more to life than being a responsible (read: boring) adult?  I know plenty of careerists who spend all their free time and money abusing drugs and getting wasted in order to feel like less of an adult, and I know plenty of parents who use “grandma” to raise their kid about three to four nights a week so they can “get their drink on.”  I’m not judging, I’m just noticing.  And Mom, you’re lucky you live so far away, because I’d probably raise the bar to six nights a week….JUST KIDDING!

The worst part of being an adult is that what appear to be perks to a teenager are actually mere rites of passage that quickly lose their appeal.  Because I am an adult, I can drink recklessly in public so long as I don’t fall down or make a scene, and I can legally fly to Vegas in order to gamble away all of my money and then declare bankruptcy to avoid paying my real bills, but this doesn’t change the fact that I care more about respecting myself than I do about bending rules and pretending that my body likes being poisoned in order to provide me with a brief inhibition of judgment that never lasts long enough for me to do anything more than commit to an unnecessary late night drive-thru at Jack-In-The-Box.

The bottom line is that at 28, I’m not very different from 8.  My body and its routine functions still provides me with simultaneous disgust and intrigue, my imagination is still 1000 times more interesting to me than any aspect of our so-called reality, I still refuse to settle for anything less than what my dreams provide and demand for me, and when I’m really sad, I still want to see my mommy for a hug.

So if you want my advice on adulthood, which I’m sure you don’t, I’ll tell you the same exact thing I told 165 high school kids: “Don’t take anything in life too seriously, except the importance of being as kind as you can be, at all times, to everyone you encounter.  You never know what you’ll need and who you’ll need it from in the future, but you certainly only make things harder for yourself when you close off opportunities just because they don’t seem appealing or cool to you, at the time.  Be nice; your life will be a lot easier that way.”

Now I have to get back to lamenting my one point loss in my championship game of fantasy football, because that’s what adults do best; they figure out how to cope with loss.

In June of 1991, the love of my life was born.  This love was my dog, Hudson.  I don’t know how many of you are animal lovers, but Hudson forever instilled in me a deep and infallible appreciation for the loving relationship that can develop between a human and a different animal (Humans are, after all, animals).

I am an insomniac, and have been one since I was about twelve years old.  My parents used to go to sleep very early, usually by nine o’clock.  So growing up, the only company I had during the cold, awfully lonely evenings was my older brother.  Unfortunately, growing up, my brother and I had very little in common, and we did not get along very well.  As a matter of fact, my brother used to take Hudson into his room at night, and close and lock the door, confining me to the depressing prison that is an insomniac’s high school bedroom.

When my older brother left the west coast for the east coast, for college, in the fall of 1997, I was left “all alone” in my house.  On the outside, I pretended to be “happy” to see my nemesis leave my turf “for at least four years.”  But on the inside, I became secretly depressed and lonely, and the insomnia only got worse.

But dogs are not as dumb as some humans would have you believe.  Hudson sensed my pain, and he knew what to do.

Up until this moment, even though I’d come up with Hudson’s name and tried my best to train him and to love him, he’d been more like a toy to me. He was an object that was sometimes fun to play with, but at other times, an object that seemed to be more of a nuisance; something that had to be fed or looked after in some way.

Hudson proved me wrong.  Hudson was not a toy.  He was a sentient being who was full of nothing but love, empathy, and tenderness; and he proved this to me over the course of the next two years.

After my brother left for school, Hudson began to hang out with me all night, every night, keeping me company while my body refused to subdue my mind into what you humans call “sleep.”  He would scuff around the room, even though my door was wide open, and prefer to stay with me and wag his tail, laughing at Letterman’s bad jokes with me.  And I rubbed off on him as well, as I turned him into the most die hard Oakland A’s fan that any dog has ever been and ever will be.  It was a well balanced relationship.

And even though he would often kick me during his dog naps, just as I was finally beating that evening’s insomnia, I realized that even Hudson’s sleeping kicks were “love kicks.”  He was teaching me a lesson that I still treasure; that love matters most.

One year after I graduated from college, in 2004, Hudson came down with some form of cancer.  He had slowly stopped eating and drinking water, and my parents were in hysterics (in their own way) about his declining state.

Never in my life have I experienced such a fierce and loyal determination to play god.  I don’t remember the details, but I flew back to Iowa to see my parents and to save my puppy’s life.  I was convinced that I owed my puppy this, at the very least.  After all, he had done something nearly impossible for me, just five years prior: he had saved a teenager from a serious bout with adolescent lonely depression.  He was my hero.

Even my father, who is about as comfortable with showing love as an insecure obese person is with sharing their body among a room full of super-models; even my father was having trouble coping with what all of my family knew was inevitable; that Hudson was going to die.  Hudson was truly special.  Even my friends who hated dogs seemed to perceive that Hudson, bad smells and full-on-physical-greeting tactics aside, was more human than dog.

I’ve lost a few people that I truly loved in my life, and each and every loss hurt, and each loss hurt differently.  But the loss of my dog hurt so bad that I still wake up crying sometimes when I think about my last week with my dog.  Today was one of those days.

When I went “home” (Iowa is where my parents live, less my “home”) to care for my allegedly dying dog, I was actually able to get my beloved dog to eat and drink, and to regain some of his mobility and “youth.”  I remember that even my parents were impressed by this turn in our beloved dog’s health.

I was the best nurse you’ve never seen.  I stayed by my faithful puppy’s side as often as I could, just as he had stayed by my side for the last two years of high school.

I nuzzled his muzzle with my face and whispered thanks and kind words of love to him.  And I tried my hardest not to cry in front of him, and to keep him thinking positively.  At no point then, nor now, do I think that anything I did was crazy or unrealistic.

As a matter of fact, Hudson’s positive reaction to my tender love and care was life changing.  It proved to me some conclusions I’d already made governing personal health.  Having already had some eerie medical history of my own, I was convinced that your attitude matters most when it comes to staying healthy.

Unfortunately, the same afternoon that I left Iowa to return to my life in New York, feeling confident in my puppy’s return to glory, Hudson quit performing what was evidently a mere charade, and he relapsed into his former status of “on last leg.”

Basically, Hudson had humored me.  This dog had seen how his own demise was affecting me, and so he had taken it upon himself to remain the strong one in our relationship.  I “shit you not,” as I write this, the memory of Hudson’s brave and bold behavior in the waning hours of his own life are so vivid in my mind that I am beginning to cry.

Like it or not, my experience has taught me that a “stupid” dog can be more emotionally mature than a human.  After all, a “mere dog” was able to realize that for the sake of my lasting memory of him, and for the sake of my mental health, he needed to feign an air of health and confidence.  Yes, you read that correctly, my dog was capable of ‘feign.’

Hudson did something that week that most humans cannot do; he sucked up all the cancerous pain that was literally eating him alive in order to stop me from crying and losing my stability.  And that just about defines altruism for me, in so far as I’m concerned with definitions.

Attitude alone will not prevent illness, but a bad attitude tends to hinder recovery and can often speed up a process of declining health, whereas a good attitude can combat a lot of illnesses.

How can I present such a bold and unscientific theory as though it were a fact?

Well, I tend to form my opinions based on an amalgamation of my own experiences and observations as well as those of other humans, and every single nurse that tended to me after my car accident was fervent in vocalizing the power of positive thought.

But this column is not about “MikeyOpp Psuedo Science.”  (I’ve actually written that column, and never released it…it’s too much, even for me).  No, this column is about love.

This column is about the fact that I was watching a movie last night in which one of the characters said: “Love is a wish you hide in your heart that no one else knows” (Terry, a character in Bandits directed by Barry Levinson, 2001), and about how this quote did not deliver a new epiphany; it did something equally powerful, it re-triggered the memories of an old epiphany, one which I still need to work out, in my own life.

The older I get, the more children amaze me, because while children may fear boogey monsters and “the dark,” they do not fear lightness and love; as a matter of fact, they embrace love and reject hate in ways that should make most adults feel shame.

I guess dogs are like big children, or little children are like big dogs-whatever way you want to set up the analogy, up until a certain point of social interference, all young animals seem to have nothing but a desire to give and receive love–and again, I stress the fact that humans are animals!  It seems to me that it is only as animals grow up that they learn about predators and prey, and this intricate threat tends to make love shrink on the hierarchy of survival.

But what is necessary in nature is no longer necessary for the human species, for we have organized societies that are supposed to diminish the threat of predators.  We have set up a tremendous global enterprise of  agriculture in order to circumvent the necessity of dealing with predators and prey alike!

So what is preventing our species from turning away from hate and fear, and towards love and security?

I recently wrote my parents a letter in which I told them that I had suddenly realized that I never appropriately thanked them for the greatest gift they ever gave me; the gift of unconditional love.

My parents have faults, just like every other earthling out there, but one thing they got right, for certain, was the act of giving truly altruistic love to both my brother and to me (and to Hudson).

The results of my parents’ love are complicated and diverse, but the overwhelming byproduct of their love is that I am not afraid to show love, to give love, to receive love, and to openly talk about love.

Because if we continue to harbor our love ‘as a wish in our hearts,’ hiding it from the world, then how are we ever to move forward towards a universal goal of world peace and harmony?  You think any rational human on earth, at the end of the day, doesn’t wish for anything short of unconditional love and security?  Osama Bin Laden, as evil as he may or may not be, I’m sure even he desires nothing more from life than to feel loved.

And I don’t particularly care if that statement offends any of my readers, because when you carefully ponder the concept of humans and our collective and individual desires for love–and the sense of security that only love can bring about, then I think it’s quite easy to see how even Bin Laden deserves a chance for love.  For I posit that if he were given enough love, even he would surely put down his sword, so to speak.

I currently live in East Oakland, California.  This is a section of the Bay Area that is notorious for its appalling violent crime statistics (It tends to land in the top three category, annually, in “worst homicide rate per capita of any city in the United States” (see Wikipedia: Oakland).).  But when you investigate the nature of the homicides here in my city, you’ll find that most are committed by very, very young people.

The vast majority of crime in Oakland is committed by young people who seem to have been instilled with a sense of cultural and/or racial shame.  Young people who see more local money being spent on law enforcement than education.  Young people who have not yet been given the proper amount of time, distance, and perspective to see the counter-productive results of their naïve and morally questionable codes of ethics.  Young people who, simply put, tend to be growing up with a depressing lack of unconditional love in their life.

When I first moved here, I was full on ready to buy into the cycle of self-protectionism based upon my fears and stereotyping; after all, violent crimes are, um, scary.  Fortunately for me, one of my best friends from Portland helped me to move down here, and when we arrived, she told me, a la Harry Truman that “the buck stops here.”  She further added that it’s foolish to be afraid of my own neighbors, no matter what the statistics say!  Her advice was to smile at everyone in my neighborhood and to let my love shine; to become a friendly addition to my neighborhood, and not just another jaded, uptight “alert citizen.”

And she’s right.  What began two months ago as a work in progress has turned into a very real and empowering personal state of using love to conquer the shaky foundations of fear and hate that purportedly surround my new community!  All the time I am shocked by what a difference it makes to give another human being the gift  of your smile.

And I will stop at nothing to continue in my quest of providing anyone I encounter in my life with a sense of unconditional love and support.  Hudson may have passed on, and I may be “all alone” in the sense that I am very much a bachelor in my late twenties studying the solitary art of writing, but I don’t feel alone, because I have the love that so many give me, and the love that I in turn produce, to give to my world; and it’s a beautiful thing.

So my love is no longer a secret wish.  It’s now a patch I wear on the sleeve of every shirt I don, each and every day.  And no matter how bad the new census’ report on crime statistics becomes, and no matter how many people in world continue to play games based on blame and fear mongering, I will not stop in my quest to mass produce the only product that I believe can and will save everyone on earth from world wide calamity.  It’s called love, and it is indeed, a wonderful thing.

My Hudson and me.

Allow me to introduce myself.  Really, I’m nothing special.  I’m just one of a breed of humans that I like to refer to as the “five percenters.” It’s the five percent of humanity who still wishes to, and therefore actually continues to think about the bigger picture.

We look just like everyone else.  We’re not very different. Some of us are doctors, others are lawyers, some are Republicans, and some are Democrats.  We even work at mini marts, clean rich people’s toilets, and serve fast food.  A few of us, and I stress FEW are even working in politics.

The only thing that separates “us” from “them” is the fact that we do our best to act with the repercussions of our actions in mind.

Me First, That’s Mine, More for Me, The Jones’, and most people who run in elections to get a job, instead of interviewing with the person in charge of paying them; these fine folks make up the 95%.

And it’s got nothing to do with dumb or smart.  I run into careless, thoughtless smart people ALL the time.  In fact, these people piss me off more than the dumb ones.  The dumb ones actually get a little pity out of me, and a lot less anger.

This is what makes me angry: The fact that most people don’t seem to want to think anymore.  They want supervisors and superiors and all sorts of government programs to do their thinking for them, and I think it’s a crying shame.

It seems like most everyone wants to be given a job, a schedule, and a paycheck.  They don’t want to pursue a cause they believe in and then see how that creates its own schedule, and its own paycheck.

Sure, wheels need axles, and machines need all sorts of reliable cogs and gears, but you can still be excited to be a cog, and take pride in it.  You can still realize your intricate role in the system, rather than trying to un-realize your role by thinking as little as possible.

But that’s not the nature of Nature, and so I’m naturally neutralized.

I think I’m living in an age where I get to witness the beginning of a new humanity, and the end of an old and exhausted one; one that I wanted to see die.

But be careful what you wish for, man, because the dinosaur that was mankind rising up from it’s Neanderthal roots is now transforming into a modern Neanderthal…a Neanderthal that knows how to text it’s basic feelings.  Instead of OOGA!  Booga! Ooga Booga!  It’s: LOL UR KEWL or  BTW I C U L8R.

Sometimes when you absentmindedly pull on a thread, you can end up picking an integral thread, and then the whole carefully woven article unravels at a rate you never saw coming.

Hell, when you absentmindedly do most anything, you run a serious risk of not seeing what’s coming.  NINETY FIVE PERCENT OF HUMANITY seems to be oblivious or unconcerned with this simple fact.

I was always bad with statistics.  Especially the ones I make up.  So I’ll tell you what; Take whatever percent of humanity it would take to lead the entire human race into the direction we’re moving in, and these are the people whom I hypothesize do not care about thinking any longer.  They only wish to be entertained, nourished, and looked after.

Who was actually there to witness the opening of Pandora’s Box?  We don’t know how it actually happened.  Most folklore is a metaphor anyway.  Not to be taken too literally.  A picture is worth a thousand words.  But no one had a working camera when and where Pandora lived, so give me a break, you don’t know and I don’t know who the four horsemen are, and by the time we realize who they are, most of us will probably possess a photo featuring one of them, have a subscription to another one’s media outlet, we’ll have elected the third one into an important office, and the fourth one will be on the New York Times Best Seller List, metaphorically speaking, of course.

We as a culture seem to enjoy revering and obsessing over the very people and things that are most bad for us.  It’s in our nature.  It’s no big deal, I was just trying to say one more witty thing before I went off to watch The Sopranos followed by Dexter.

The thread of modern man has been pulled in a funny way, and we no longer care about caring for ourselves.  We’d rather be taken care of.  And I can’t explain why this frightens me any more than I can explain just how much it frightens me.

I’m appalled by consumerism.  I’m appalled because it has become evident that consumerism only works when the rate of consumption remains constant or moving in an upward trajectory.  How can we realize this, and then continue to believe that we must remain a consumer based economy?

This is stupid.  I feel like telling Coach that I wanna hit the showers, someone else can take my spot.

Actually I don’t.  Not at all.  But I don’t know a way to describe the feeling of apathetic disinclination towards participation that I sometimes feel.

It’s like that one time, when that country elected that cowboy and some oil tycoon friend of his into the executive office, and then let them run care free for eight years.

After four years, when the people said, “I’d like more of the same!” I kept thinking, but, uh, guys, we’re going to have to pay for all of this…isn’t this maybe a bad idea?

I felt like Piggy on the island in Lord of the Flies, only I have more charisma than he did, so I got laser eye surgery, ditched my glasses, and pretended to fit in as best I could.

I’d choose almost any state of life to death, because I’ve never met anyone who died, but I know that sometimes, living is FUCKING AWESOME!

And a lot of the opponents of the cowboy and his oil friend, the ones who backed the man who invented the internet and the man who somehow couldn’t tell the difference between oral and oval in his office, these guys told me not to worry, that, “soon we’ll get all the power back, and we’ll fix everything.  Internet Man and Young-Multi-Racial Guy say that we can save the future by saying change, hope, and green a lot.”

And I ‘was all like,’ “um that’s more of the same too, just in the opposite direction.  It’s just a different mantra.  Are you crazy too?”

And so then EVERYONE told me I was a real downer.

And I was.

And I am.

Everyone then thought that I was too dumb to be a Piggy, I was more of a Chicken Little at that point.

And I was.

And I am.

Because every time a piece of sky hits me in the eye, someone passes another bill that stimulates our economy by creating an order for someone to create more fake sky pieces to install in the giant sky illusion before anyone notices that it is a giant illusion.

This is the sort of shit that can give Houdini a real Napolean complex.

I mean, I just thought that we couldn’t keep doing this.

Funny thing is, so far, I am so wrong.

So it goes.

Thanks, Kurt V.

Here, I’ll finish up this modern day history lesson in a way that I think you’d appreciate:

Where was I?  Oh yeah, so the rich kid cowboy and his snakeskin oil selling buddy got kicked to the curb in a demand for “CHANGE!”

And then things changed.  Really quickly.  Stocks plummeted, crazy bitches in Alaska got even crazier, Wall Street hit a real wall, and some people didn’t jump for joy, but they dived to avoid the depression…meanwhile, we taught a whole new generation the word “Ponzi” and told them to scheme their own way out of this mess, cause we’re not really trying to change anything, and we’re ‘gonna take their money before they even make it.

We told them that money doesn’t grow on trees, it’s created the same way we create toilet paper, only it hurts a little more when you wipe with it, it burns differently when you ignite it, and it has more trace semen and cocaine in it.  Oh yeah, and it’s way harder to counterfeit!

Next up, we decided not to penalize HMOs for making it hard to afford good health care, but we saw nothing wrong with telling “Homos” they couldn’t marry.

Penultimately, we decided that in order to save the children, we had to increase military spending by cutting back on education budgets, so we fired a whole bunch of teachers and told them to have an extended summer vacation.

And then, right when everything seemed about to fall apart at the seams, right when the big thread really began to unravel, the big old fat cats on the hill took a recess in order to avoid a meeting with some guy called “The Piper” who was making some ridiculous claim about being owed something in return for all that we took from him.

This piper seemed really steamed, and about to do something about it, but no one even noticed him, because football season was starting, along with a new season of Mad Men, which was a show that made people feel nostalgic about how covertly depraved things used to be, you know, before we got YouTube, Elliot Spitzer, and Energy Drinks.

Besides…what the hell is a Piper anyway?  Can you smoke drugs with it, if you get cancer in a western state?

Maybe I’m a lot dumber than I thought.

I’m sitting in a large, breathtakingly beautiful public park, typing on a “Netbook.”  I look out to my right, and I see a homeless man sleeping like a baby, snuggling with the trunk of a tree, tightly wrapped up in a see-through plastic bag, like the one that I imagine would line a brand new HD flat screen TV when you pull it out of the manufacturer’s box.

I look back at my “Netbook” and type.  But then I notice two figures darting in and out of my peripheral vision, up and to my left.  I look up to see just another elderly Portland couple practicing Tai Chi.  The man has a ZZ Top beard, several tattoos, and an enormous beer gut that seems to defy the tranquil and Zen-like character traits that I stereotypically attribute to a Tai Chi practitioner.  But this man moves fluidly, much like a well practiced ballerina.  And even though I don’t have a beer gut, I can’t even come close to touching my toes, so, really, what’s the point in judging him?

Yes, it’s another slow, cool, and lazy sunny Sunday morning here in Portland, full of squashed stereotypes and drizzly day dreams.

My heart jumps as an inner voice removes me from my state of tranquility by insisting:

Enjoy it now, because YOU ARE LEAVING.  So say goodbye. Things are going to CHANGE.

Change.  I used to hate that word, then I learned to embrace it, and now I feel an abnormally satisfying indifference to the concept of change.  Change is a lot like a lazy fly buzzing around my leg.  I can leave it alone, or swat at it, but it is only doing its thing.

It’s the summer of 2009.  Everything that occurred last summer was last summer. I’m here now.  And it’s now this summer.  The Summer of 2009.   The summer where I am sitting here in a park typing this into my “Netbook.”  This is change.

It’s 2009 and a “Netbook” is not a “Laptop.”  The “Netbook” differs from a laptop, because it’s not a laptop.  That’s why.  And it has no CD Rom Drive.  But I turn it on just like a laptop.  I open applications just like I do on a laptop.  I even surf the internet and use the touchpad just like I would on a laptop.  But it’s a “Netbook,” they tell me.  And the front pages on all the newspapers tell me that it’s 2009.  Things keep changing, damn it.

When I first moved to Portland, Oregon, On June 14^th, 2005, I had one stop to make, before I could do anything else, and that was to stop at “A-One Mini Self Storage,” which was located on “South East Main Street.”

I endured a full hour of perseverance-meets-futility filled frustration, full of wrong turns, wrong exits, and hectic, unfamiliar traffic patterns, and then one last, (and very reluctant) personal-pride-killing stop to ask directions at a gas station before I was finally able to locate the self storage center on South East Main Street.

Upon finally finding this holy grail of damp, mildewed, but reasonably priced box storage units, I unloaded all my earthly possessions as quickly as I could, and headed east on South East Main Street, in order to meet a potential roommate at her house, to interview for a room to sublet.  The year was 2005, and I was marveling at how I’d arranged for this meeting on some weird internet site called “Craigslist.”  Craigslist is now a household name.

We adjust to change.  I am writing this on a “Netbook.”  You are (most likely) reading this “on-line.”  Many of the June protests and riots in Iran were apparently organized by Iranians using an online social network called Twitter.  Twitter is the new Facebook which was the new Craigslist, which was the new Yahoo, which was a brand new part of a thing called “The World Wide Web,” which is the latest paradigm shift to create a slew of nonsensical buzz words.   The Internet; where the spider meets the bee.  Web Buzz.

I was a little late to that apartment meeting, the one that I’d set up on Craigslist, thanks to my machismo-driven hour long refusal to ask for directions to the storage unit, but at least I showed up to the interview in an empty, clean looking car, as opposed to the overloaded “Beverly Hillbillies” mobile that had taken me and all my shit from Ithaca, NY all the way to Portland Oh-Rah-Gone, (as I called it back then).

Michael Jackson hasn’t produced anything of relevance to society in more than ten years, but upon hearing about his “untimely demise” on Twitter,  Our most trusted talking heads and pundits have reviewed his legacy and decided, in an historical sense, that he is to be one of the most revered people in modern pop-culture history.  He had a pet chimpanzee named Bubbles, a massive ranch that he called “Neverland,” in honor of a fictional place in which boys and girls never grow up, and he was accused of child molestation on several occasions.

But we, as social historians, better yet, as humans, we are capable of not only creating, but also of adjusting to change.  It is not uncommon for us, as a species, to collectively reconsider the labels and judgments that we made in the past, and to attempt to amend them, whenever an event creates a new juxtaposition that allows for an opportunity for revision.  Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King!

The Earth is no longer flat, the sun doesn’t revolve around us, we don’t bleed patients to cure diseases, and, as it turns out, Michael Jackson is not a weirdo, nor was he a reviled pedophile.  No, he is and always was a brilliant artist who died too young, and the death was tragic, and so we forgive him for any crimes, both real and imaginary, that we, the people, may have accused him of, once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away.  Amen.  Some things never change!

The interview with my potential new roommate went well.  I apologized for being late, she apologized for making me drive 3,000 miles in order to be screened in person before committing to my offer to sublet.  The place was very nice; it had a tranquil back yard that emulated this picturesque garden I had read about once in a book that someone had left in my hotel drawer (some guy named Gideon wrote it?) The only downside to the place was that I was told that the apartment was non smoking, and I liked to smoke.

Smoking used to be good for you; doctor’s recommended certain brands over others.  Margarine is better for you than butter, if it’s the 1960’s.  They’re both good for you throughout the 70s 80s and 90s, but recently, margarine became bad for you, because it has too many additives.  If you stand by the microwave, you’ll get cancer.  Anti-oxidants prevent cancer.  Blueberries have anti-oxidants as do pomegranates.  Anti-oxidant based food and beverage products saw a 21% upswing in American and European sales from March of 2007 until March of 2009.  4 out of 5 doctors smoke Lucky Strikes.  The Japanese live longer than Europeans do.  They, as a culture, eat a lot of fish.  Fish is good for you.  Some fish have mercury.  Mercury can kill you.  My doctor tells me that I should…

A lot has changed since 2005, now that I think about it.  Maybe these changes I perceive are only a product of the way I tend to view change, or maybe they accompany the fact that I am getting older.  Science calls this “the aging process,” and as I learn to deal with the slow, deliberate destruction of my body’s cells by my own body, I’m also learning, gradually, that one of the hardest parts about being young, is actually the easiest part of growing old:  And this is recognizing and accepting the fact that the only thing in life that seems to be constant, is change.

It seems to me that it is only through a process of retrograde analysis also known as looking through the heavily-subjective-thick-Mr.-Magoo-beer-goggle-esque lenses of nostalgia that we are able to reinvent our narratives, and therein circumscribe meaningfully-meaningless tags of “beginnings, middles, and endings” to our stories.  We sometimes even refer to these events as “life changing.”

But really, during any moment, like right now, you are simply here, and you have to deal with the here, because, well, YOU ARE HERE, and you cannot re-create the past, and you can’t be sure of what future you are creating.  Everything is always life changing; life is a series of changes that can only be reviewed retro-actively, not pro-actively.

And so it’s tricky stuff, this whole “trying to pretend that life has a course, a course that I have any control over, and a course that I can plan my life around.”  It’s hard to pretend that I can predict even a slight minority of the millions of changes that are occurring at all times, all around me!

SAY WHAT?

I said: it’s getting trickier, as I age, to pretend to believe that we as humans can accurately plan for the future, when change is so unpredictable and inevitable.

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

I posit, that we, as humans, pretend, again and again and again that we can somehow predict and plot out trends from the past to the present and then into the future to wait for, to follow and to rely on, because if we accepted the fact that this is ludicrous, then we’d also have to give up on our absurd and uniquely human notions of personal-autonomy and authorship (the notion that our Ego screams is true every damn moment of our life) and this crushing blow to the ego, well, it could be the end of everything as your ego knows it.  It could be the end of the status quo…the end of things as we know it…why, it could mean tremendous change.  And I’m not talking about some “Twitter-NeoCon-WiFi Internet-Obama” Change.

Last summer, in 2008, when a car collided with me on SOUTH EAST MAIN STREET, right here in good old Portland, Oregon, I experienced many crushing and delightful blows to my body and my ego.  And I remember thinking that this event was the most deliciously ironic event of my life!

“How perfect,” I thought to myself, “How perfect is it that I can now demarcate my Portland experience with South East Main Street as the location for BOTH the front and back pages to the story of my life in Portland!”  What an enjoyable narrative.  Hurrah!

MySpace. You Tube. Google.  Black Swans.  The Earth is really a turtle.  A god named Atlas holds the Earth above his head.  God Created Earth 6,000 years ago.  There was a big bang, just like when your parents created you.  You cannot go faster than sound.  I meant to say light.  I mean, time and space are only connected in our perceptions.  There is an electromagnetic spectrum, and certain animals can see parts of it that we cannot.  But that change, the one you predict, it’s impossible.  Things cannot change that much.  There’s simply no way on Earth that that could happen, it’s just not possible.

South East Main Street, as it turns out, is a repetitive page in my Portland story.  In less than two weeks, I’ll be showing up to the very same A-One Mini Self Storage, on South East Main Street, here in Portland, Oregon, to pick up a U-Haul truck which will take me, and the same worldly possessions that I showed up with here in 2005, (plus a futon bed, a couch, a TV, and a TV stand) down to Oakland, California, where I will be attending a graduate school program.

For those of you keeping score at home:

I left California for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1999 to become a world famous film maker.

I left Pittsburgh for Ithaca, New York in 2003 to become a nationally famous musician.

I left Ithaca for Portland, Oregon in 2005 to escape my own ambitions and to learn how to relax.

I am “now” leaving Portland, “here” in 2009, for Oakland, California to go back to school.

Electricity is witchcraft, a product of Satan.  Radio waves and TV waves could be lethal.  According to Thomas Malthus, the world’s population will forever be curbed and checked by rampant famine (FYI we’re at 6.778 billion and counting, Mr. M).  The war in Europe, the Great one, the one that was fought between the years of 1914 to 1918, it was the “war to end all wars.”  Glad we stopped doing that!  Neil Armstrong actually walked on the moon, but more people associate moon walking with Michael Jackson, and more people know who he is.

Swine Flu is the new Avian Flu which is the new SARS which was the new AIDS which was the new Spanish Flu which was the new Bubonic Plague, which was a curse sent to us humans by god in order to kill off humanity because of its many sins.  But from A-Bomb to H-Bomb, we’re still here.

Bank of America, Chase-Manhattan, Wells Fargo; according to the U.S. Government, these banks are “too big to fail.”  That system could never work. The current system is broken.  I know how to fix it.  No, I do.  No you don’t.  You’re wrong.  That’s impossible.  Things can’t change that much.  Change doesn’t work like that. What if we tried that and it didn’t work?  I don’t like the changes you are discussing.  I can’t accept those changes in MY plan for OUR future.

The Wright Brothers, Chuck Yeager, The International Space Station, Hula Hoops and Yo-Yo’s.  Gandhi.  The French Revolution.  The Indo-China Revolution.  The Cuban Revolution.  Atari, Nintendo, and Microsoft.  Rosie The Riveter and Rosa Parks.  Rock Hudson is the manliest of men.  Did you hear that Rock Hudson was gay?  Changes like that just don’t happen overnight.  9/11 changed everything.

I used to get angry about current events.  I mean truly angry, with a capital RAGE.  And I would suffer in my anger, because I was not capable of accepting the fact that I was unable to change my world, and that my world was always changing around me.  Dick Cheney, George Bush, and an army of angry, ignorant, misinformed people were constantly trying to shape my world into a design that I did not approve of.

The “I” who existed in 1999-2007, if he were still alive, he would be mad with rage, sick with disgust, heavy hearted, and sulking with his guitar, because “too big to fail” would have sent his head spinning into insanity.  It would have been the last straw to break that poor camel’s back.

Instead, “I” am “here” in 2009, and instead of moping or getting angry about things, I’m out on my bicycle, touring around town, reading literature in parks and coffee shops, hanging out with friends, imbibing brew, eating meat from a grill without asking if it’s free-farmed, licking my sauce filled fingers, and basically saying to the universe; I accept you for what you are, for what you are not, for all that you can be, for all that you cannot be; it’s cool with me, thanks for the ability to have feelings.  I am choosing the feeling we call good, thanks for offering!

I’m calm.  I feel relaxed.  I don’t rely on the internet or television in order to be entertained.  I oftentimes forget to smoke cigarettes when I’m supposed to be addicted.  I’m not full of angst.  I’m not mad as hell, and I can totally take it.  I mean, it’s funny, actually.

Believe it or not, but from where I sit perched, I see an ineffable beauty amidst the chaos that is a world full of cognizant, conscious humans who believe that they can predict changes in things like “the economy” “weather” and “crop cycles.”  Somehow, during all the time I’ve spent watching humans argue about how to best control change, I have learned to find this perpetual struggle very amusing, and it’s given me a dearth of material from which to write about, for the rest of my days.

This is the part of the column where I’m supposed to rant and rave about the demise of the United States, the demise of our way of life, and the demise of our economy.  I’m supposed to be witty and poignant as I rewrite jokes about objects that are “too big to fail.”  But I’m okay with the fact that in 2009 change became a buzz word.

Bees buzz as they mindlessly weave around a strict course between the nearest plant in need of pollination, and their hive.  They do this in response to their Queen, because they’re drones, and drones follow orders.  Bees don’t instigate change, but they sure do react to it.  They do this, as most animals do, because it’s a necessary strategy for survival.  Buzz.

Lately, I’ve been watching the animal that we call the human, and I’ve noticed that instead of reacting to changes, like other animals, humans seem to be scrambling around, quite madly, in an effort to try and implement changes that will supposedly restrict things from changing.  They are instigating “necessary” changes in order to prevent things from changing.  I find this odd.  I also find this amusing.  I don’t, however, find it ironic.

I don’t know who my queen is, and I’m not sure if I’m heading away from her or towards her and the hive, but somewhere along this great journey of mine, I’ve happened to notice that sometimes I exist in moments in which I cannot hear the buzzing buzz of humanity (it’s usually when the television is off) and I’m a lot happier during those moments.  Buzz.

Buzz words create buzz concepts which allow for buzz laws of reality, all of which are, naturally, part of

a beginning

a middle

and an End.

And you?  Why, you are right —>  Here.  <—  Always in the middle…

Apparently, my intuition regarding the sanctity of life does not mean that I can now easily operate my life based on this concept alone. Apparently, if I am to make the most of my life, I’m going to actually have to remind myself that I need to work, in order to make something out of my life.

But the more I think about things, the more it makes sense that sometimes I feel more motivated to sleep than to work. After all, sleep is not like life; sleep does not require hard work, determination, goal orienting, working with others, or follow through. And these components of success are the basic building blocks of life that I have been trying to skip over since I…um, all my life.

But regardless of my personal near death experience, I’ve always thought that waking up and wishing to sleep away the day is a bad sign, because I don’t think it’s healthy to want to sleep your life away. But I’m also realistic, and I therefore understand that throughout my life, I’m bound to have some periods wherein I feel like I’m in a rut, and all I want to do is sleep. No matter how hard I push myself and “go for the gold,” I’m positive that life can always wind up seeming to be monotonous, and the only way to escape this is to make some changes, or to adjust your expectations. I’m convinced that here on Earth, your attitude is everything when it comes to enjoying your time.

Thankfully, I’d classify myself as not only an optimist, but also as a “happy camper.” For the most part, I’m an amicable and affable person who enjoys the company of friends. But I have my days, just like I’m sure you all do, and these days sometimes frighten me, because there is always that impending threat of: “What if this is how I’m going to feel for the rest of my life—good god!”

I usually feel like my life is a total waste when I find myself spending too much time alone, without doing anything productive. These mornings usually follow DVD marathons in which I consume a few hours of some HBO drama, along with a couple of vodka martinis, and then I wake up feeling like LIFE IS SHIT.

And these sorts of nights usually occur because I find it difficult to be productive when I’m alone, and no one is watching me. I think this is human nature, and a good friend of mine recently told me that there are plenty of psychology experiments that back up this notion of mine. Namely, people tend to work harder, and better, when they think that someone will notice their work or when they think that someone is watching them.

This is why I am going back to school to become better trained at the art of writing. At the very least, the next two years of my life will be spent in the company of other writers, as well as professors who have to invest an interest in the progress of my writing career. And I need this. I need it bad.

But someday, I will have to learn how to motivate myself, by myself. This is why whenever I meet someone who seems interesting to me, I usually open up to them and try to pick their brain, because interesting people seem to be self motivated, and that’s what makes them interesting; they have “strayed from the herd.”

One of the questions I always want to ask interesting people, but I usually don’t, is: “What do you do when you are alone?” The main reason I don’t ask this is that regardless of a person’s comfort level, this is an unusually jarring and dramatic question, and some people can be put off by it. You kind of sound like a stalker-wierdo-psycho if you ask a stranger “what they do when they are alone.”

In my defense, I don’t think that this question is actually creepy. When I want to ask, or actually ask someone this question, I’m not looking to find out about their masturbation habits. What I want to know is what passionate, successful, intelligent and interesting people do when they have hours of time, with no one to share it with?

Personally, being a self proclaimed member of the “passionate, intelligent, and interesting people club,” (read: elitist, and also take note that I removed the word successful), I constantly vacillate between craving time alone, and fearing time alone, and I wonder how many other people are like me. They say that “no man is an island,” and despite my years of trying to prove this wrong, I’m finally beginning to come around to this philosophy.

But “Lord knows” how hard I’ve tried to prove this aphorism wrong. I’ve lived in studio apartments for years of my life, I have moved to the middle of Iowa in an attempt to surround myself with gravel roads and the isolation that can only come about from living in a toxic cloud of pig shit, I have refused to date perfectly datable women in order to remain independent, and I even, once, turned my cell phone off for three days (side note: This last example of my attempt at isolation is the most pathetically honest and telling anecdote for just how attached I am to my cell phone and communication.).

Throughout my life, no matter how hard I have tried to become an isolated island, apart from humanity, I always come around to a nagging longing for friendship and conversation, and lately, I’ve been exploring the merits of my dependency for personal relationships with other humans.

The most important thing that I have learned about what satiates me has come about from my most recent move back to Portland. What I have learned is that good times are absolutely contingent on good relations with good people. I have met and made amazing friends all over this nation, but only in Portland, Oregon do I have an army of friends who opt to live a life wherein work comes second to hanging out and enjoying the company of others. For this reason alone, Portland is a “magical” place for me.

And don’t get me wrong, people all over the country enjoy hanging out more than working; it’s just that you can’t actually afford to hang out in most of the other cities in this nation, because our inflationary depression is kicking most people’s asses.

The last two days, thankfully, I’ve woken up feeling excited about facing a full day of work and play, and I haven’t had one moment wherein I’ve wished for the bliss that is sleeping my life away. I am, however, quite sure that I will have more of these blasé days at some point in my future, and I have no choice but to accept this. What really irks me is the fact that I want to know everything about this human life I am living, yet I’m fairly sure that I’ll never know if my personal feelings regarding work, success, and the meaning of life would actually exist if I didn’t have role models and a social pecking order to drive me away from my lifelong urge to “slack off.”

If I didn’t come from a community of achievers who attend good colleges and then find good jobs and pretty wives, and then sign mortgages and have babies, would I ever feel like I’m “behind” in life? If I really was ON an island, and I lived alone, with unfettered access to food and water, would I ever feel lonely, despondent, and out of touch with humanity? Or do I only get to feeling this way because I’ve experienced good times, good relationships, and the burning blush that comes about whenever I’m complimented for something I actually take pride in?

No one can answer these questions. And I’m not expecting anyone to. I’m just curious as to how many other people even have these questions. Sometimes I worry that I worry too much about worrying, and this is my manifesto to that cause. If you’re out there, and you’re reading this, and you have ever felt the same loneliness, there’s some quality irony for you; you’re not alone. Yes, together, you and I, we’re alone, but this notion always puts a smile on my face, because it’s only human to enjoy dramatic irony.

My very close friend and “on again off again” boss has always told me to relax a little, and to enjoy the “underachieving phase of my life.” But I’ve never been very good at this, and this column has basically been a catalogue that articulates my struggle to fit into adolescence. But this week, as I prepare to commit to a graduate school program, I suddenly felt very reluctant and afraid of this decision, for it seemed to mark the end of my underachieving phase of my life.

Lately, my brain has been plagued with one consistent thought: “I don’t want to grow up.” After all, what could be better than living the high life that I currently live (pun absolutely intended)? My life is a life of debauchery, wherein day by day, I get off from work, then go out to bars, hang out with friends, consume unhealthy food, and fail miserably with women…it’s great!

Fortunately, there is a rational side of my brain, and it tells me that my urge to accomplish something important with my life has very little to do with the lifestyle I lead. What I mean to say is that I’ve observed plenty of successful adults in my brief stint here on Earth, and I’m convinced that most success stories involve people who ignore standards and do what feels right to them.

And I have certainly never been the type of person who conforms to any of the standards that I come across as I meander through this existence of mine. I mean, I have personal standards, don’t get me wrong, but they are bizarre and, to most everyone I know, these standards of mine seem arbitrary at best. But they’re mine, and I like ‘em!

The other night I was eating dry cheerios from the bag they come in during a game of Scrabble and my friends took notice and ribbed me a bit for this “weird” way of eating cereal. What they didn’t realize is that eating dry cheerios from the bag is one of my earliest memories in life, and therefore quite the “creature comfort” for me. As a matter of fact, whenever I eat the “cheerios dust” (not to be confused with angel dust) at the bottom of the bag, I am automatically transported to a magical land of nostalgia featuring one happy kid (me), who is watching “The Smurfs” on our thirteen inch Trinitron television in the kitchen in the house I grew up in. It’s damn nice, I tell you.

As I get older, I begin to cherish memories like the aforementioned one. Maybe it’s because I know I can never actually return to my true childhood, or maybe it’s just the amazing power of nostalgia; but I really miss being a kid. I miss feeling wide eyed. I miss getting overly excited about future events. Nowadays, no matter how “fun” something sounds, I know not to get too excited, because more often than not, the things I look forward to don’t meet my expectations when they occur.

But the more I think about it, and the more I observe the reality of my condition, the more cocksure I become about the fact that no one is really a “grown up” in this world of ours, we’re all just faking it, and longing for that feeling we used to get when we were real young, and innocent, and “wide eyed.” Everyone’s just chasing the tail of the dragon of their memory equivalent to my “Dry Cheerios Dust and Smurfs” memory.

This past Saturday, I took a trip to the local Science Center here in Portland, called “OMSI” (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry), and I was suddenly transported back in time to a magical land of being a child. This place had it all; paper airplane wind tunnels, giant rooms filled with rubber balls and pressure hoses to shoot said balls all over the place, water bottle rockets, and general mayhem.

The best part was that I was surrounded by loud, obnoxious, pre-pubescent awkward looking children, who were each having the time of their lives, and it was a beautiful site to behold. Despite my lack of compassion and understanding for what it means to be a child, lately, I’ve been finding myself constantly fascinated by children.

I’m fascinated by their lack of socialization, by their lack of adult goals and the adult stresses that come with said goals, and most of all, I’m hopelessly curious about their ability to get excited by things in life that normally seem expectable and mundane to me.

As I made my way through a tiny portion of the Science Center on Saturday, there were fleeting moments (read: the entire time) in which I found myself wide eyed, curious, excited, and unaware of my adult problems as I traversed the unique landscape of science exercises disguised as toys.

And I think I would have stayed in this magical land of childhood if I wasn’t being escorted by one of my “three nanny’s,” the incredible “J-Nine” (She’s also the lead singer of the Bolt-ons, the only all acoustic Michael Bolton Cover Band). I am speaking literally when I refer to J-Nine as one of my three nanny’s, because here in Portland, three of my closest friends are all professional nanny’s with years of nanny-ing experience under their belt, and I think I get along with these three girls so well because they are used to dealing with small, annoying children, so they understand how to keep me from getting bored and desolate. After all, despite my age, I am, for all practical purposes, a whiny, attention starved little kid masquerading in adult clothes and therein making a mockery of the adult system.

As a child, I constantly dreamed of all that I could, and would achieve. But now that I’m encroaching on my thirties, I feel full of doubt and reluctance. I can’t understand my reluctance, because I am on the cusp of achieving most everything I ever thought I wanted, but I can’t shake this nagging fear of achievement, because I’m worried that once I achieve the things I think I want, I’ll be left with ennui, which is the French term used to describe eternal boredom.

But I think this is, actually, total bullshit (excuse my French)! What I’m really doing is failing to understand that in life you simply do things, or don’t do them, and no one else really notices or cares. No one out there is waiting for me to finish my next novel. No one is losing sleep over the progress (or lack thereof), of my career as a writer.

A close friend of mine, who is in his early sixties, and basically an older version of myself (extremely witty, well mannered, down to earth, sophisticated, always interesting to talk to, well, you get the idea…), he gave me some great advice the other day, which led to the preceding epiphany. I was going on and on about my struggle with writer’s block (read: procrastination in the first degree), when he interrupted me (I told you he was like me!) and said, “Mike, Just Do It. It’s the only good thing Nike did for this Earth; they summed up how you accomplish things. You Just Do It.”

Even if I were famous and beloved by millions (which, incidentally, is both my greatest dream and my worst nightmare, and this dichotomy explains a large percentage of my insanity…), it wouldn’t change a thing in so far as my personal motivation goes. Because my friend’s advice is both simple and true: In this world, successful people just do things or they don’t; and it really is that simple.

I hate you, close friend of mine (you know who you are!), for always making the solution to my artistic problems sound so simple. Maybe I don’t want to “just do it.” Maybe I want to write column after column and book after book about my writer’s block. I mean, writers block, it’s a truly amazing thing! After all, without writer’s block, I wouldn’t have all of my eight hundred CD’s alphabetized with every single CD backed up into mp3 form, I would never have finished my taxes on time, my apartment would be a total mess, and I probably would not have been able to watch all five seasons of “The Wire.”

They say that the only way to begin fixing a problem in your life is to first identify and then accept that you have a problem. It is in this spirit that I hope this column will thereby mark the beginning of the end of my personal onus. Because my problem is not writer’s block, and my problem is also not that I am afraid of success and adulthood. The problem is that I’m hallucinating; I’m seeing the trajectory of my life in terms of black and white, when there are a million and one shades of grey!

Before I visited the Science Center, I thought that becoming a successful adult had to mark the end of my childhood innocence, but I was dead wrong. Hanging out with little kids and acting just like them helped me to realize that I will never truly “grow up,” because I am still in touch with my childhood instinct to seek the fascination that comes about from learning (about) new things. I am therefore pleased to announce that I am no longer afraid of success, I will no longer complain about writer’s block, and I am no longer convinced that I will someday become an adult. And I have Toys ‘R Us and Nike to thank for their apt, corporate slogan advice, for I have found a zen like mantra in reconciling their two slogans: “I Don’t Want To Grow Up!” and “Just Do It.”

Patience. What the hell is patience? I know that patience is a really good song by Guns and Roses (and I can whistle along with pitch perfect harmony), and I’ve been told, repeatedly, that patience is a “virtue” that I must learn. But lately, I’ve been beginning to feel like an old dog, and patience is some new trick that I’ll never learn.

I want to write a whole tirade about how many things in this world are “virtues,” and how patience is just another one of these “many things,” and it’s therefore not that important. But this would be a bald faced lie, because I may be impatient, but I am not stupid, and I am more than aware of how my impatience is the root source for most of my anxiety and unhappiness in life.

The worst part about this whole “I have no patience” thing is that I know I’m capable of practicing patience, but I find the task of practicing patience to require a lot of patience; it’s a real catch-22 for me. I’m so impatient that I can’t even wait long enough for hot food to cool before eating, and this results in me burning the roof of my mouth nearly every single day of my existence.

I can theorize aplenty about patience. I know that one who acts with patience has a deep understanding of pacing and timing that results in a behavior that is neither rash nor fickle. But as a card carrying member, and perhaps even president of the ‘Rash and Fickle Club,’ this basic premise of patience tends to irk me.

Intellectually, I understand patience. I understand the concept that you don’t need to rush or speed in order to catch a green light, because once the light goes red, if you wait for a bit, it eventually turns green again, and you still get to go through that intersection, and to where you were headed in the first place. But I don’t really care, because I want to keep moving, and stopping is boring.

I also know that patience is leaving for work a half hour earlier than you need to, so that you can walk, bike, or drive at a nice steady pace, show up a bit early, grab a little coffee, and not get worked up about rushing and being on time. Well, I get the first part of this idea, just fine, for I usually show up to work early. The only problem is that I show up early because my sense of impatience tends to ruin any time I have before work, so I end up showing up early and working for free a lot. This is precisely why I hated bartending and working night shifts, and prefer to work early shifts.

I even understand that patience means letting other people make decisions at whatever pace they need to, even if you think that you already know what decision they should make. This applies to superficial things like waiting for a friend to choose what they’re going to eat off of a menu as you sit there with your menu closed, but it also applies to very serious matters, and folks, I suck at both!

I want to raise children someday, but I see my impatient attitude as a major roadblock, since kids should be given a lot of time to patiently make decisions and learn lessons “the hard way.” Hopefully I’ll marry a very patient woman who will patiently tell me to shut up when I’m crossing this line!

Ask any of my close friends, and they’ll all tell you just how much I suck at patience. I rush into almost everything that I do, with an insanely energetic amount of zeal and fanaticism, but I rarely take the time to consider how my decisions will actually affect me, down the road.

My only saving grace is that I DO actually consider, and to a stifling degree, how my actions will affect other people, and so my impatience rarely causes anyone besides myself any harm. It just keeps me constantly eyeing calendars and clocks, wishing and waiting for a future moment to enjoy. And this keeps me from enjoying the actual moment at hand, which is, so I hear, kind of the point of existing.

The last few weeks have been full of face blushing moments wherein the results of my own impatience get flaunted in my face. Most of these moments have occurred because I decided it would be a good idea to apply to nine graduate school programs last fall. I applied to each of these programs in mid-December, and then shortly thereafter received confirmations that I would be hearing back from each of these programs “by April first.”

“By…April…First!?” I screamed. “How can they do this to me? The deadline is December 15th, and they need three and a half FREAKING months to decide if I’m a good writer or not? What a crock of Sh—”

I give a lot of advice, and I’d have to say that a lot of the advice I give is hilariously hypocritical. For example, I usually cite the adage “Time heals all wounds,” which is a polite way of saying: “be patient, and in time, this too shall pass.” But I cannot follow my own advice when it comes to any event that I am anticipating, both good and bad. And this is a serious problem as I try to pretend that I am an adult (I’m convinced that no one ever grows up, we all just fake it.).

“Practice what you preach,” they say. Well, damn it, I try, I really do. But more often than not, I preach what I wish I could practice, and it’s gotten me to the point where I’m finally going insane with impatience, waiting on these stupid schools to fulfill my request for some semblance of knowledge in regards to my future.

I impatiently applied to these programs in an effort to provide me with a secure knowledge about my own future, and the irony is that the waiting process for these schools’ decisions have caused me more anxiety than my lack of a secure knowledge in my own future. I think people get committed for far less insane reasons than this.

I really just want to give up on patience, for I cannot seem to practice the art of patience, for the life of me. I’m like a kid who stares at a math book for hours, alone in his room, wishing he could study, but for some reason, refusing to open the damn book, waiting for his parents to finally let him do something else.

But if I cannot master patience, then I will be forever destined to practice impatience, which ruins most of the gloriously unpredictable and delightful moments of existence. I truly believe that the whole fun of living is to “be here now,” and my impatience makes this virtually impossible for me.

The humorous/tragic reality about my own impatience is that I don’t care as much about which graduate programs accept or deny me as I care about knowing their decision. And this is really insane, the more I think about it.

And there is another insane paradox created by my impatience: I’d rather know about horrible, traumatic future events than good ones, so that I can change the way I live my life based on the occurrence of this future event, when in reality, with hindsight, only a fool would not want to live every day that they could shrouded by a cloud of optimistic ignorance of a future trauma. Once trauma occurs, we have the rest of our life to deal with it, why would I want to deal with trauma before it occurs? I am fairly certain that this isn’t normal.

Why am I so obsessed with my future, when the future is a mere trajectory created from everything that I do in the present? I am not obsessed with my past, at all, as I rarely revisit it, and I cannot name a single regret that I have, so how on Earth did I become so obsessed with that other unpredictable and absurdly irrelevant tense of time; the future?

“Actions speak louder than words.” I love this saying because I think it’s a courteous way of telling someone who talks a big game, but never does anything about it, that they’re full of shit. Only it has a nice, mature, and ominous ring to it, so you can say it to anyone without fear of hurting their feelings. Plus, it’s just so damn true, that it’s hard to ignore.

This column is coming to you on (actually around) the three year anniversary of the birth of It Sucks To Be You. Yes, that’s right; I started this column back in March of 2006, and it’s now 2009. If anyone back then (all twenty of you) had told me that three years later, I’d still be plugging away, still not making any money off of it, and still loving to do it, I’d have told you that you were crazy, because I’m far too impatient to do something for that long with no pay off.

But I have continued to produce these columns, and I have continued to do so because I really enjoy the process that is writing, editing, and then sharing my thoughts. And this means that this is one of those extremely rare moments in my fake-adult life in which I get to sit back and reflect on the fact that I do have a bit of patience.

This column is documental evidence that in one area of my life, my actions ARE speaking as loudly as my words (it’s kind of tie, the action isn’t necessarily louder, but this is only due to the fact that the action I am performing is the action of writing my thoughts, as words, and then sending them out. Therefore, my actions are AS loud as my words. I love twisted MikeyOpp logic!)

So I may still be obnoxiously impatient when it comes to waiting for anything I desire to come my way, and I may be similarly outraged when I have to follow a slow car on the highway, or wait for some idiot to order ahead of me in a line, but I am also capable of escaping from my forward thinking through the art of writing, and this makes me feel like everything in my life is okay, and will continue to be okay. And I’m more than okay with that. I’m even okay with living the rest of my fake-adult life with a burnt mouth; it sure as hell beats waiting for hot, delicious food to cool down!

I haven’t been sick in months, yet for two months now, I’ve had a sore throat. And every morning when I wake up I have to blow my nose. This morning I went for a light jog through a nearby park and within five minutes of running my lungs began to hurt and loads of thick, suffocating stringy spit began to launch into my mouth, from an abyss somewhere inside of me that I cannot pinpoint, but I can always feel.

After finishing my jog home, my lungs continued to burn and I have been clearing my throat like an old man for the last hour and a half. My throat hurts when I swallow a lot of the time. This pain in my throat does not occur often enough to warrant calling it a sore throat, but the pain is nevertheless there, and I know what’s causing it.

After a vigorous exercise routine, followed by a large glass of water and a shower, I neglected to feed my body with food, because, well, “priorities call” and it was time for that blessed first cigarette of the day.

I don’t care anymore as to whether or not I’m going to die young, which is a ruse I have often used in my past in order to justify my habit of smoking cigarettes. I no longer care about this because I’m actually beginning to feel the unhealthy side effects of smoking right now, in my youth. And so I have recently come to terms with the fact that the powerful, ominous threat of nicotine addiction is no longer a threat; it is my reality.

I’ve never been more stupid (I wanted to write stupider, but worried that someone would fail to catch the joke) in my whole life, about anything, than I have been about smoking cigarettes. I’m totally serious. Even at the height of drunkenness, I’ve never made a more stupid decision than the decision I make ten to twenty times every day, which is to light up, puff away, and ruin my good health.

I don’t care what non-smokers think about smokers. This is not some kow-tow to the non-smokers wherein I beg for your forgiveness and ask you to take me back on your team. No matter how long I live, smoker or non-smoker, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for smokers because I understand the mentality that accompanies smoking.

Smoking cigarettes is a great way to say “I don’t care how beautiful my life can be, I care about how great life is RIGHT NOW.” Personally, one of my biggest problems in life is the fact that I have trouble existing in the moment. I’m obsessed with my future, but every time I reach that darn carrot on a rope, I don’t even remember the joyous process of getting there.

Smoking is one of the only things I’ve ever discovered in life that stops me from the clock watching, future thinking, forward counting, and constantly anticipating hysteria that is my life. For a few, precious moments, several times a day, when I am smoking, I don’t think about anything else. And this is good for me.

What isn’t good for me is the fact that I want to be able to walk up several flights of stairs in my forties and fifties, and smoking could give me emphysema, which in turn could render me dependant on an oxygen tank for the remainder of my days. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that the thought of cigarettes killing me is far less scary than the thought of cigarettes severely disabling me from leading a normal, healthy lifestyle.

Look, I don’t care about how cigarettes make me smell, and if some dream girl out there wouldn’t date me because I’m a smoker, than she doesn’t have enough compassion to be my dream girl, so I’m not quitting to become “more attractive.” I’m also not a big fan of social stigmas, and the anti-smoking establishment of this country actually angers me enough to make me want to continue smoking in order to spite them, in spite of what it’s doing to me.

But I’m slightly (read: barely, just barely) mature enough to separate my vehement hatred for bandwagon peer pressure from the collectively negative toll that smoking is taking on my personal health in order to be mature about this. I think.

I say “I think,” because as many of you know, I have “successfully” quit smoking for more than three months at least five times in the last nine years that I have been a smoker. I’ve quit for over a month about two other times. As a matter of fact, I’ve never once been a smoker for an entire year; I always quit for some period of the year, each year, because deep down, all my life, I’ve been very afraid of the consequences of smoking.

But the addiction one gets to cigarettes is only believable and relatable to someone who has, well, actually been addicted to cigarettes. So you either get it, or you don’t, and there’s no use in wasting your time or my time in trying to articulate how tricky cigarette addiction is.

The only think I can think to say about nicotine addiction is that it operates by making you think that you are actually choosing to smoke, when in all reality, it’s your reward center in your brain that is constantly pumping you with lame excuses that you are willing to buy in order to continue to be in denial about your addiction.

The only thing more frightening to me than being a smoker who is in denial about their addiction is becoming the type of smoker who has acknowledged their addiction and given up on fighting it; for these men and women are resigned to die from smoking, come hell or high water. These same people tend to be the people who buy cartons of regular filtered cigarettes and smoke indoors (as opposed to those who purchase individual packs of light or ultra-light cigarettes and only smoke outdoors).

My personality is such that I can never convince myself to join the brigade of “die-hard” smokers in the category that I just described, and yet, as of only very recently, I have been unable to continue to remain “a smoker in denial,” because I can no longer believe that I am “in control” of my smoking, in a long-term sense. And what this means for me is that, since I do not believe that there is a possible third category that lies between denial and acceptance, I have no choice left but to quit smoking, right now.

And I don’t care who does and does not believe in me, because what really matters to me is that I’m trying. And trying to quit smoking is one of the most ironic events in a person’s life; because you usually quit things that are hard to do, not the other way around. So I look forward to the awkward challenge that is trying to quit (again).

I was about to write a really entertaining and funny conclusion to this column, but I forgot what I was going to write because I just had another coughing fit. How apt.

I suppose that the moral of this story is that we all create burdens and struggles in our lifetime, and quitting smoking cigarettes is my personal burden to carry. I do not feel that this burden is all that great; it’s just a personal struggle that I have to face, accept, and then do something about. What I cannot accept, however, is just how stupid I feel for ignoring so many adults who tried to convince me, when I was young, curious, and convinced of my own invincibility that opting to smoke cigarettes would be a horrible mistake. They were absolutely correct. Smoking has proven to me that there is a lot of truth to the adage “you live and learn.” I just hope that I am able to follow through on my decision to actually live. ]]> http://mikeyopp.com/stby/96-just-quit-it/feed/ 0 http://mikeyopp.com/stby/95-inner-dork/ http://mikeyopp.com/stby/95-inner-dork/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:39:55 +0000 Mike Oppenheim http://mikeyopp.com/?p=358

It all started on a trip to visit my beloved college friends in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There were about twelve of us, and we were a few drinks into the night when we began to debate whom out of the twelve of us was the funniest.

Naturally, I assumed that everyone considered me to be among the funniest and most cool people in the room. It was therefore quite natural for me to announce that I considered myself the third or fourth to funniest person in our group. I mean, I know I’m not “out of this world” hilarious, and a few of my friends actually are, but I considered my patented wit and wisdom to carry me into the running for third or fourth place.

Apparently, this is not the case. And apparently, I have a very skewed perception of my reputation. I state this because after I announced my candidacy for “third or fourth to funniest member of my group of college friends,” I was subjected to a seemingly endless marathon of laughter, and by the end of it all, I could feel my cheeks burning.

What upset me was not really the fact that my friends did not consider me among the top “funniest people they know,” I mean, a sense of humor is relative, and relatively speaking, my sense of humor must be so amazing that few people can tap into its field of relativity. Einstein knows what I’m talking about. What upset me about this conversation, was that I am apparently, known for NOT being funny, and on top of that, I’m considered a total dork by all of my friends.

I felt slighted by my friends insistence of the fact that I am a total dork, so I did what any cool person would do in that situation; I attempted to argue that not only am I a very funny person, but that I am also very cool.

I guess you’re not cool, however, if you have to argue and prove that you are cool. I don’t think James Dean or Paul Newman ever did what I did next; which is to say that I announced an oral resume of my coolness, citing my history of forming rock bands, having sex with a few pretty girls, and I even dug deep and mentioned my extensive CD collection.

But my friends responded to my arsenal of coolness by saying that I’m the least cool musician anyone knows, that I’m obviously only lucky, and that some pretty girls just feel sorry for me, or find my dorkiness “cute”, and worst of all, my friends, apparently, think that my taste in music is “sub-par,” and I’m substituting that phrase for the truly mean, offensively articulate terms they actually used to describe my music taste.

So I returned home, and began to ask my friends in California, and in Oregon, what they thought about my sense of humor and my “cool factor.” Uh-oh, spaghetti-oh. It turns out that the Mike Oppenheim fan club, well, it doesn’t exist. All my friends, everywhere, from Ithaca, New York to Portland, Oregon they all think that…that…well, that I’m a total dork.

“Mikey, You dress like it is still 1991 and grunge is still cool.”

“Dude, You still listen to bands that no one even liked in the first place.”

“Mike, You actually own every album put out by Bush, Third Eye Blind, and Nada Surf…that’s not just dorky, it’s pathetic.”

“Are you serious? You look like a hobo. Seriously, you dress like you sleep on the streets. There’s nothing cool about that.”

“Mike, You’re a gimp. You have a broken hip and you’re only twenty seven. What’s cool about that? And then there’s that time you sprained your wrist for a month chasing a bouncy ball in the street…” (Look, I was really drunk, it had just rained for the first time so the streets were slick, wait, I don’t have to defend myself!)

Anyway, I could go on and on, but thinking about how many of my friends did not have to hesitate for even a moment before explaining precisely how I am a total dork kind of brings me down, and I’m in the phase of my life where being moody and sullen is no longer cool or rebellious. (Take that society (and Morissey)!) But the point remains. I am a total dork.

But you know what? I’m okay with that. I’m more than okay with it; I’m actually enamored by the concept of my own dorkiness. I have searched my soul, and the facts are in; I am, indeed, a total dork. And I am now embracing my own “inner-dork.”

I love playing trivia contests in bars. I think showing off my absurdly useless fountain of knowledge to total strangers while getting drunk is extremely fun.

I love to do karaoke, even though I can actually play real instruments and have been in real bands, I get a totally different rush when I sing Third Eye Blind or Nirvana on a stage in front of my friends and a slew of narcissistic alcoholics waiting for their turn to sing Journey songs.

My single greatest accomplishment in the year 2008 was winning first place in BOTH of my fantasy football leagues. Yes, I played in multiple leagues, and I actually spent enough time researching players and watching games to beat out twenty other fully grown men in an elite competition to prove who can best predict what real person is going to do really well in a sport that I don’t actually play.

I watch the television show Lost with a fervor normally saved for religious ceremonies and attending to dying relatives. And I get nervous when people ask me to do something on a Wednesday night because I’m not sure how to properly relate to them that the reason I’m perpetually “busy” each Wednesday night is because I am hopelessly addicted to the show.

The things in life that I am truly the most arrogant and cocky about are my absurdly impressive skills at ping pong, doing the crossword puzzle, and “rhyming on the spot.”

I am obsessed with eating shelled peanuts. I love shelling peanuts, because I am convinced that I can tell which kind of peanut belongs to which shell, based on the shell’s texture, color, and “firmness factor.” I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I’m fairly sure that if you cut me open, I bleed a strange concoction of peanuts, salsa, and whiskey.

I miss writing term papers and being a student. I call myself a novelist.

I love strange smells. Here’s an anecdote that will explain that statement: The main reason I didn’t want to vacate my old apartment in the industrial section of Portland was because it was really close to a bread factory, and I loved waking up and falling asleep to the occasional smell of burnt toast.

My favorite game show is “Deal or No Deal,” and this is because I think that I’d be “really good at it.” This is not only dorky, but it is pathetic as well, because the only skill you can bring to the show is the ability to stop gambling, and there’s really nothing impressive about not having a gambling problem. That’s actually normal, and therefore nothing worth being proud about.

And this brings me full circle to my analysis of inner-dorkiness. First of all, the fact that I’m analyzing dorkiness, and philosophizing on the subject is totally dorky, and therefore inherently ironic, and the fact that I’m elated by this situational irony, and proud of it, makes me even more dorky; it’s a cycle that never ends. And this is because what makes someone a dork is when they are proud of something that “normal” and “cool” people would never be proud of. I mention this, because I like for my readers to learn something from each of my columns.

So I want to end this short missive on what a dork I am (read: bad-ass, crossword filling, grunge trivia memorizing, peanut predicting novelist.) with my theory on Dorkiness. This way, you can begin to self-analyze your own inner-dork, and double check to see if you have a skewed perception of your own “cool/dork-factor,” like I once did. Because there is no worse feeling than finding out that all of your friends think that everything you take pride in is really pathetic, and, well, dorky.

I learned a lot this last month, as I explored the inner workings of my inner-dork, and the end result was an odd sense of self-pride and self-acceptance that most people pay a lot of money for professionals to help them discover…so I leave you with this MikeyOpp Aphorism: Dorkiness occurs when you take pride in something about yourself that gives no benefit to the human race. Dorkiness is the byproduct of a narcissistic obsession with something inane and irrelevant, and the more logical and relevant you think your obsession is, the more your friends probably assume that you are a total dork.

Personally, I still think that I’m totally cool, I just think I’m way ahead of my time, kind of like Bill Gates, whose dorky obsession with computer programming got him a boatload of money. Based on Bill Gates, I can only assume that someday I’ll win a reality show wherein contestants win money based on their ability to accurately guess the type of peanut hiding in a shell. You’ll see.

I’m slightly hung over, it’s a Sunday morning, and I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Portland, Oregon, attempting to write my ninety-fourth column. As I write these very words, I think to myself, “Hot diggity damn, Mike! This all feels so natural, so normal, and so…nice!” And it should feel this way, because writing a column on a Sunday morning with a hangover in Portland, Oregon is something that I did nearly every single Sunday for two years when I lived here.

And as I delve deeper into the personal significance of this very moment, I begin to experience yet another personal epiphany; I suddenly realize how THIS all started. And thus a patented goofy grin makes its way across my face in the same way that coffee can slowly spill over the edge of a mug and into a cloth napkin on a table; it’s a slow and steady march, and there’s really nothing I can do about it.

Something has become clear to me, and the results are making me smile; I realize, today, for the first time, that the main reason I started writing a column back in 2006, on every Sunday, is that I needed something to occupy my morning on a Sunday, in lieu of the Crossword puzzle that I do every Monday through Saturday. You see, since I cannot finish a New York Times Sunday Crossword puzzle without cheating on a level reserved for someone like Tonya Harding (she’s a local Portland celebrity!), I see no point in even trying to do the crossword on a Sunday. Evidently, in the Spring of 2006, I replaced my morning crossword routine, each Sunday, with a 3-5 page “essay assignment,” in order to bide my time. And that is how this column started!

But this epiphany is only possible because I am in a highly self-analytical mode of thinking right now, due to the fact that I’m here, in Portland, at this very moment because I am looking for an apartment to move into. Yes, you read that correctly, I have made the seemingly flippant decision to move back here, for about six months, until I attend graduate school in the fall

For those of you who know me, you just smiled, shook your head, and probably pictured me loading my overnight bag into the back of whatever car I owned the last time I visited you. Because you already know something about me that I am only just now learning about myself, and this is the perfect recipe for an ironic moment between a writer and a reader. You are very welcome.

My epiphany is that I am addicted to Transience.

Let me try that again, in a more professional manner: “Hello, my name is Mike Oppenheim, and I am addicted to transience. I’ve been a transient since I turned eighteen, when I left my home for a random locale 3,000 miles away, and ten years later, I’m not even close to becoming a recovering transient addict, because I actually move and travel more now than I ever did before. Wait? Why is there nobody else at this meeting? What’s that? All the other transient addicts went away for the weekend? Go figure…

If you glance over my track record, you will clearly find a few things out about me: The first, and most obvious, is that I love to move. But this doesn’t mean that I’m not without my creature comforts. I mean, if you dig a little deeper (pretend you’re vetting me (that sounds vaguely sexual, and I like it!)), then you will discover that despite my transient nature, I also have an absurdly long list of ridiculous routines that defy said transient nature.

I mean, for someone claiming a dependency on transience, I sure look like a fraud given the facts that I enjoy self imposed weekly column deadlines (I am the worst boss I’ve ever had!), I do one to three crossword puzzles a day, six days a week, I enjoy eating the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I smoke cigarettes at pre planned intervals throughout my day, I predictably forecast the same dire “contrarian” results for the world economy, regardless of the current public sentiment, and I listen to the same ten bands, over and over again, day in and day out, rarely giving any of my other 800+ cd’s a chance to spin and strut their stuff.

And while we’re on the subject of music; I would just like to say that I listen to the same ten bands because I am NOT willing to hold my breath any longer for the next great band. I have adopted this policy because good music officially died the day that Limp Bizkit was nominated for a Grammy award, and so I see no point in waiting for the next Beatles-Doors-Talking Heads-Nirvana-Pavement-Radiohead-Spoon to come into my life. I feel the same way about the woman of my dreams. I’ve given up all hope on anything great coming into my life, and I blame Clear Channel for this personal dilemma.

I further think that it is important to note that this event (Limp Bizkit’s Grammy nomination/the death of my idealism) occurred less than a year before September 11th, 2001. This leads me to believe that this event actually sent “the terrorists” into motion, for they were so outraged by America’s piss poor collective consciousness at this point in time, since the single last redeeming quality of our culture was our good rock music, that they saw this event as “the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.” Don’t kill the messenger; I’m just reporting the facts as I see them.

Back to me, and my transience: Ever since I bought my first car, in the late summer of 2000, I have been a road trip machine. I’ve driven to almost every single state, and I’ve flown to the ones that I couldn’t drive to. I once drove from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Tampa, Florida in only twelve hours. Go on Google maps and do some mileage calculations and you will realize just how much this statistic corroborates with my personal focus (read: insanity) when it comes to driving long distances. I only stop for bathrooms, gas, and coffee.

I love change. I love looking forward to “the next big thing.” And when you move around a lot, and constantly travel, you are always creating “big things” to look forward to. Think of road trips and moving as my own unique “mikeyopp” version of a carrot rope. I’m just so complicated and intrinsically-self reflexive, as a person (read: moronic, obtuse and slightly insane) that I have figured out how to create my very own carrot rope, and I have further discovered how to dangle it in front of my very own nose. I’ve cut out the slave driver; I need no middle man, hear me roar.

I think I like to travel so often because constant change prevents me from becoming close minded about my world. I enjoy making and perceiving connections between two seemingly unrelated, tangible aspects of my Universe on the same level that I enjoy drinking coffee, reading, eating chips and salsa, and doing a crossword puzzle; it’s a base pleasure for me, and one that I see no harm in indulging.

So I travel because weird notions pop into my head when I see new things, and I love to experience new thoughts! A good example of this occurred this summer, when I was driving in New Mexico and I happened to notice that New Mexico has the highest ratio of white cars to other colored cars in the lower forty eight states. This is an official Mike Oppenheim fact. I drove all the way through the state, and I swear to the god you do or do not believe in that two out of ever three cars with a New Mexico license plate is white. I have decided this is so because it’s so damn hot there that people are more inclined to buy a white car, since white reflects the solar radiation, whereas darker colors tend to absorb the heat from the sun.

New things sparkle, and old things do not. I call this my “new credit card theory.” I remember when I got my very first credit card, at eighteen, how exciting it was to possess such an item. I mean, having access to a bunch of money that I didn’t actually have was an amazing experience, at the time. I can fondly remember how exciting it felt every time that I used to pull that shiny little plastic card with my signature on the back from my wallet, and hand it to a clerk in a store; I mean, that little plastic card practically sparkled in my hands! But now? Now a credit card is a thick obstruction that bloats my wallet, and what’s even worse, instead of shining, it represents capricious spending and painful lofty bills with an itemized list of just how much I spend eating and drinking at bars, and how often I do this, and so, well, it’s old to me now, and it therefore doesn’t sparkle anymore!

I have realized, and accepted the fact that currently, in order for ME to grow as a person, I require a steady dose of change in my life. Moving around apparently provides me with ample medication for this psychological condition of mine. So be it. Some people cure their own boredom by using drugs or by getting drunk, by sleeping around or by dating a total loser who provides them with unlimited personal drama. Me? I just throw my favorite two shirts and some boxers and socks in a bag, grab a pack of smokes, and I hit the road for a night or two, whenever I need some excitement in my life.

But this year, a funny thing happened to me. Actually, depending on your perspective, it was possibly tragic, but in my loony world, it was quite comical. A car hit me and totally EFFed up my traveling life; and now that I’ve recovered a whole lot from that awesomely not awesome un-awesome experience of not traveling and sitting on my ass for weeks on end, my personal solution, or so it seems to be, is to not only travel very frequently, but to actually, literally, move very frequently. I’ve changed the carrot on my rope; I’ve raised my personal bar for achievement; yikes!

So it should now make perfect sense to you, dear reader, that after a brief stint in ABUC (say it backwards), and then an even briefer stint in Portland, Oregon, my old stomping ground (when it’s cold, rainy, and dark, I tend to stomp a lot and pout like a little baby…), I have decided that California was not properly sating my quench for some deeply intangible, yet nevertheless very real desire of mine, and I’m betting the farm (read: moving all my things) on the fact that Portland can best satiate this need of mine for the next six months. And fear not, because it’s a foregone conclusion that in about six months I will pick which graduate school to attend, and then I will pack up all my earthly belongings, for the fourth time in a twelve month period, and move, yet again.

The nature of the Universe is to constantly change and grow. Nothing lasts forever, and I’m just a working model of this deeply esoteric philosophy. I’m also an insanely superstitious sports fan, so I don’t think anything I write about the nature of our Universe should hold too much water with you (except my “New Mexico White Car Theory,” that’s as good as gold!).

So if you are reading this, and thinking that you might want to update your address book, I’d say, “don’t bother,” ’cause you know that the second I get to where I’m going, I’m already nine tenths of the way through with planning my next vacation, the vacation after that, and a contingency exit plan, just in case. My name is Mike Oppenheim, and I am addicted to transience.