It's late. Not Billy late, but the new kinda Jet City late where the witching hour isn't so commonly seen and two o'clock in the morning is foreign ground. Buttons is all crashed out, sleep-innocent, wrapped around a pillow, dead center in the bed, leaving me just enough room to lay down when I decide enough is enough and toddle off to slumberland.

Just watched Rushmore again for the nth time and I'm still reeling a bit. The flick just flattens me. Dunno why. I laugh when I'm supposed to laugh and cry when I'm supposed to cry, but there's something else in it that just sneaks out and wraps around me, makes me wish for more. Not more of this world, really, but more inside myself, makes me wish for strength and sureity of action, of deliberate forward motion. I still feel like that belongs to someone else, that my movements are randomized, driven by base emotion more than rationale, that acceleration towards a goal is too deliberate for me, that I need something of earth-shattering nonsequitur to move to the next level.

Old idea hitting me fresh tonight. Travellers hitting the spacelanes, gathering the human story that's lost in the shuffle of the corporate and political. A thousand thousand smart, driven, curious people moving through the background and listening to barroom stories, to knitting circle anecdotes, to pulpit-thumping preachers screaming brimstone on agricultural planets, to stuttering junkies lost in the grime of metropolitan back alleys. I dunno that it's any kinda new story, but I find it comforting. A thousand thousand smart, curious people seeking a common thread that can be used to tie together the whole mess. Decent background. Now I just need a plot that could possibly matter.

Heh. Yeah, I'm sucha fucking writer.

I miss my kids a bit today. Talked to D this afternoon and I'm feeling detached. I can't say that the East Coast has ceased to matter, but I just don't have the verve on it anymore. It's there and I'm...well, shit, I dunno where the fuck I am. Not here, yet. I will be at some point, when there's a job and places to hang with and a slightly larger circle of pals, but right now I'm a still a traveller. I'm gathering info, hitting the high points. The reality of the place isn't here yet. I'm just floating.

No consequence, but I rode from 65th Street to the top of the Burke Gilman yesterday. Many miles, from here to Bothell. A beautiful day and I saw many folk on my ride, including a few idiots on recumbant bicycles. I don't suppose that it's right for me to dismiss folk just because of their bikes (the one Joe's lent me is green and black and stickered up like something for a teenager, which I haven't been in a decade and change), but it seems like the recumbant guys are always twice as geared up as anyone else. Special shoes, helmets, shorts, socks, shirts, etc. I rode in my ripped up Forced Reality tee and a pair of Old Navy painters shorts and I hit the pedals with my old blue Chuck Taylors. My pack is a UN rucksack that I don't even remember buying. I've got a fit-anyone helmet that Joe & A gave me and gel gloves that were the cheapest I could find that fit. I like the idea of bottom-feeder gear, so long as it does the job. The trappings take away from the honesty.

I'm rambling and out. Sorry it's been sporadic lately. Too much to do and too little to write about. Hang in, brothers and sisters. It'll get better.