tourist in my own right

new music! finally named that track i heard at a club last year and loved instantly. swingy & dancy. exciting new music inspires me to listen to more music, so i wandered through the hallways of nightmares on wax, thievery corporation and quannum projects, and in a complete about-face, cemented the weekend with some old country. especially, listened to songs on the road to where gospel and country eventually meet. which is in the sweet hereafter, i guess.

ditching out on large social events is such a gift to myself. not like it leaves me alone. the drift of people that come through our yard anyway - sewing deviants, tribal bellydancers, sweethearted soul-questing djs, lady-loving long-boarding yogis, curious forest-dwellers, recovering misanthropes, sexy special friends - and meet me when i go for groceries - punk psychologists and their unknowingly hip daughters - repel any feelings of true solitude. i thought about it briefly this afternoon; the last time i lived anywhere there weren't people pretty much regularly dropping by was five years ago, right after i moved back from the coast to the city i call home for here and now. except now that i think of it, we had an influx of couch-surfers in that tiny basement apartment anyway. so, barring occasional periods of less than four months, i've lived in social milieus since the last time i lived on my own - twelve years ago.

it's interesting to notice aspects of one's life that have been a long time running. a friend who came for tea was noting the process by which we grieve the long-term past. that even if we don't want it back, we think about our old experiences often. our mind negotiates this for us on an unconscious level - bargaining, measuring against, playing the if-then game (if i do this, then maybe...). when i think familiarity, i think about habits, patterns, addiction. but then, there's the whole argument that stability breeds, i don't know, good things. growing long-term gardens, etc. or something. right?

clearly we see where my experiences have led me. same thing again = ruts, bad. immediately swerve.

so, slow change seems to be healthier for the most part. dynamic homeostasis slowly evolving and the like. where was i going with this? oh, the conversation we had over tea this evening. big changes in lifestyle habits, the sustainability of doing it at ones own pace, the inane distractions the ego comes up with when a momentary moratorium on chaos actually occurs. the ego is the giant corporation in each of us. are there any rules/guides it will follow, or is there simply unhinged sociopathy behind it all? so hard to all get along in here...

got distracted again. whatever. one thing i wanted to mention to my friend, but the conversation didn't go that way, is the risk of looking at a lesson as a huge energy-intensive experience. like, oh, i need to learn how to keep my own boundaries so that i won't let this happen again and tell all the people who regularly cross the line with me to fuck right off, and change my job and - no you don't. you can just learn the lesson.

have the light bulb go off and take it from there.