Funny how, almost three decades in to this life-thing, I still struggle with some of the same issues. I suppose that on many levels, we all do.

One good thing? They're more familiar with each passing. This time around I can recognize the odd mixture of excitement and melancholy of transition. It's still affecting me, still pulling my mind and my heart in different directions, but its face is familiar. I'm not struggling to understand the basics this time - instead I'm getting to nitpick at the nitty-gritty. I have a chance to dig into which directions I'm being pulled instead of just trying to hold all of my pieces together.

Most of my birthdays in the past ten years have taken place on the cusp of a transition. Some have been in the middle of nowhere, driving to the next adventure, just the road and my wandering thoughts. The timing isn't quite there this go 'round (I leave Boulder a couple of days after my thirtieth) but the craving that I have for the head-space of the road is strong.

I'll get to settle out my mind and the past few months (let alone the past two years) over the long road back to Minnesota. I'll have an entire summer on a bike to catch what the plains of Nebraska don't. I'll lay out my mind, map the twists and turns, and (perhaps) reorder it a touch underneath the big sky that I find so comforting.

Posted by noblehobo at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So if you've used webmail through me and this site over the past couple of years, you'll have noticed that it hasn't worked very well (or at all) lately. All should now be resolved and all of the old accounts are still around if you still need access to check up on them or clean them out. The new link to webmail is http://webmail.noblehobo.com and you now have a few different choices over what program to use when checking mail in your web browser.

If your old password no longer works, email me from another address at nathan <@ symbol> noblehobo com and I'll reset the password for you.

Apologies for the inconveniences...

Posted by noblehobo at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I work in abstraction these days, in an arbitrary world of numbers, rules set atop rules to meet accounting and inventory tracking standards, spreadsheets growing in cellular complexity daily, interconnected by formulas and references, a web of imaginary numbers based loosely on reality.

I crave a return to trailwork, to manual labor where the days tasks are more easily aligned, the outcome more completely visualized. Here and now, I am struggling with the same battle that I often fought with in graphic design - a mental knowledge of work completed that I have difficulty connecting to a physical reality. I know that I am completing a set amount of work daily, know so rationally, but cannot feel it in my bones, nor in my exhaustion when ready for sleep.

I play atop human concepts that rest loosely upon natural ones. I can rationalize a successful path in tracking inventories...but I can feel the weight of a granite stepping stone slide into place.

In the here and now, I find myself an observer of things in the same removed way, diminished in force and passion. In the here and now I am bearing witness to the end of small businesses, to family dreams, to the stability of jobs, to the change as one massive company acquires another... I am indirectly affected by our economic instability through the stories of the lives that touch mine.

I witness human struggle of the immediate reality, but know my own struggles only loosely. Survivor's guilt, as it were... So you offer what you can - hold a friend who lost her job just the other day, listen to the story of another as she tells of dealing with layoffs, reason with a co-worker rationalizing if he will be employed in a year, and ponder bankruptcy and financial despair in the trials of friends and family. I am stable, for now, but know that all is precarious.

In light of that, I breathe deep the mountain air, await the stars racing in after sunset, and remember that there are greater things to explore, to accept, and to be accepted by than the systems we devise on top of the natural world.

Posted by noblehobo at 6:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)