This beautiful short film is so painfully real for me it’s hard to watch without getting clenched up. Getting a second chance at life was a precious gift, but damned if I’m not already bombing bikes again for exactly these reasons. The first minute of dialogue alone is a nearly verbatim transcript of internal dialogues I’ve had over and over with myself since I was a 3rd grader.
Powerful and humbling.
It’s easy to fall victim to the stereotypes of the working musician – for both the musician and fan alike. A life of public adulation, excess, and grandiosity (is that a word?). The exquisitely tortured artistes extracting beauty from life’s poignant moments all gypsified and moving nomadically from town to town. But the reality of a career in the creative segment is more blunt, and there’s entire curriculums of required knowledge they didn’t teach me in music school. The kind you have to skin your knees and bloody your nose to learn. The dirty secret of the game is that it’s not good enough to be a talented musician or artist- you gotta be a warrior in both practice and spirit if you wanna live the life longer than a year or two.
We’d had spotty electricity all day due to an automobile accident up the street taking out a power line, so when the lights started flickering back on and off Monday evening my son and I figured maintenance was still in progress. The sound of helicopters in the distance were a bit non-standard, but we still tucked in and went to sleep anyway – not knowing that the Thomas fires now ravaging the area were the new reason for the outages. It wasn’t until the sun peeked up and shone a blood-red glow into my bedroom that I realized things had gone seriously sideways while we slumbered.
Today would have been my nephew Jesse’s birthday. We lost him due to still-undetermined medical reasons in his sleep, late last year. The unexplained cause of his death makes it all the more unsettling, unresolved. I’ve had to process a lot of loss over the last few years but Jesse’s death may have been the final straw, bringing me lower than I’ve been in decades. I write to heal, and this is no exception. However, I’m writing this a few days earlier and scheduling it, as my hopes are to be somewhere along the coast with Devin at sunset to wish Jesse a happy birthday by the ocean he loved so much.
I woke up suddenly around 3:30am this morning. It wasn’t just a minor stirring amidst the sheets, a quick mid-sleep water break or dazed round-trip to the bathroom. My eyes came fully open and my head was clear, although my thoughts were anything but. I’d gone to bed early after my Sunday rehearsal and a quick dinner. However, despite pleasant company throughout I felt unsettled and withdrawn the whole evening, and not in a particularly social mood. Some words I’d spoken still hung in my ears:
“I feel like a stone in the eye of a tornado. Like I’m barely holding onto balance while everything around me goes crazy. And I mean batshit crazy.”
At that moment, I hadn’t made any connections between that phrase to any other particular event or circumstance. There’s been an awful lot on my mind over the last couple years, and I know at times things have seemed a little scattered. It’s been sometimes hard to put a finger on exactly which brush fires are causing me the most heat, generally speaking. But when I looked at the calendar again things started to come more into focus.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had my ass handed to me. Last month I got the comeuppance I’ve been due for quite some time, and it’s been incredibly humbling. I love to mountain bike, and in particular jump and hop said mountain bike around, between, and over obstacles both large and small. The feeling of flight and weightlessness is something I’ve chased since my skydiving days, and frankly, only get to experience when leaping a bike these days. Having been a rider for most of my life, this type of risk is really nothing new or unexpected for me. I’ve been doing it for so long I take my skills for granted, as the feeling of flight, speed and weightlessness are as close as I can come to feeling superhuman.
However, on October 12th of this year I took what was to be a simple, innocuous ride up and back on the coast- which ended in utter disaster. Approaching one of the many ravines I traverse on this trail, I really didn’t feel differently- no sense of foreboding, hesitation or even concern- I’d jumped off this particular ledge so many times that it’s almost become reflexive. A quick bunny hop off the top and I was floating over the edge, slowly rotating my center of gravity to match the angle of the transition 18′ below me. But as time compressed and weightlessness engulfed me, I knew in my gut something was wrong. The bottom of the hill had been churned up from the normal hard-pack and was instead loamy and soft. The angle I took over the edge had me going a few degrees left of my usual line, and despite a last-ditch effort to push my rear wheel out and down to adjust and shift landing weight off my front wheel, it still dug into the soft dirt and washed out just as I flipped my heels to pop the clips and get free of the bike, and everything went wrong. Horribly wrong.
“Courage isn’t an absence of fear.
It’s doing what you are afraid to do. It’s having the power to let go of the familiar and forge ahead into new territory.”
~John Maxwell
I’m going to the NAMM show this year, for the first time in almost 20 years. I’ve been saying 12 (when I last moved from Carpinteria, and its comfortable, less-than-8-hour drive to Anaheim), but doing the math it’s been 20, as I didn’t attend NAMM any of the years I lived here last, either. Craziness. In case you’re confused, NAMM stands for “National Association of Music Merchants”, and is *the* biggest music conference of each year. To be looking back at 2 decades of avoiding NAMM as a constantly-working musician is, frankly, a bit strange to me. Maybe even a bit embarrassing, honestly.
It’s nice to rediscover pens and pencils lately, although I’m not sure I’ll stick with these newfangled ‘brush pens’ for long. Too much pen, not enough brush IMO. Beautiful morning of sun, coffee, Jimi Hendrix and a clear page in the big Moleskine.
The holiday break has been wonderful here, albeit a bit colder in weather than I would have hoped (which is mostly unnecessary whining, as we still wore shorts to the beach on Christmas Eve).
(Yeah, I’m wearing thermals in the pic above, but swear I was actually wearing shorts over them.)
Mostly it’s been a quite chill-as-in-relaxing holiday week for me more than the get-a-sweater variety, and I’ve spent the entirety of it with my wife and son. Doing randomly stupid but oh-so-therapeutically-beneficial tasks like shooting stomp rockets at the beach, kinda like this:
But that’s not all…
My 2012 Holiday to-do list. Not ambitious at all.
For the body– I already agreed to up the exercise quota back to late-summer levels. The last few months I’ve seen my exercise regimen slipping wildly due to the loss of Daylight Savings time, colder weather and wetter beaches, and many, many more excuses just like that. So I’m going on a run a day. Doesn’t have to be a big one, just a good one – that’s all.
For the soul– I need to finally quit my sneaky, occasional cigarettes. I like to insist that I’m “not a smoker” simply because it’s not a daily, recurring habit for me. But enough’s enough, so it’s time to throw out the hidden pack of Spirits and return the lighter to our candle drawer where it belongs. Just the peace of mind (and clarity of vocal passages/reduced risk of cancer) this would bring me – priceless. I’ve been fighting this one for years, though. Wish me well.
For the mind– I need to be able to kickstart my creative process more spontaneously, and finish equally as quickly. Writers’ block is a bitch, and I’m tired of submitting to it. So I’ve decided to host a few small, private sci-fi RPG sessions this holiday week, as building a good campaign will both expose my son to math and storytelling in an approachable way, and force myself to learn how to create on the fly again in the process. Win/win. Being a game master forces you to tell an interesting story on the fly and is a great way to get comfortable being spontaneous with your muses. 1d20 vs intelligence? Critical success!
For the spirit– we’re going to our friends’ Xmas dinner instead of cooking this year. It’s a simple statement to make, but such a relief in practice. I’ve (nearly) always planned and cooked Christmas dinner when we hosted the day in our Oakland house. However, as we’ll be self-contained this year, it’s time to stop acting like a stressed-out host and relax for a change. I’m also going to spend as much time as possible off this computer and on with my family, as frankly – family is what the holidays should be about.
All my best for a wonderful 2012 holiday season, and a fantastic 2013.
In retrospect, I’m honestly not sure how 2012 turned out so well, given how it started.
Last December I was suffering a job that demanded more and more of me in my time, ethical compromises, sanity and grey hairs, yet returned less and less as time wore on (salary and benefits notwithstanding). My wife was increasingly depressed, struggling to keep a therapy business afloat in an area (Oakland) that was already ravaged by the macroeconomic landscape before Occupy Oakland and the Oscar Grant riots tore it even further apart. My son was happy but at great financial and emotional cost – a very expensive school that would only support him for another year before we had to choose between bad, worse or unacceptable options locally, or ship him off to somewhere with an affordable option for the attention that his wicket-smart brain already demands. (With a lot less of Oakland’s well-documented senseless crime to either tempt or threaten it.) Looking back now, I can easily see how I rarely felt proud as a father, or even as a person in that environment.
So believe me, to say I’m really proud of 2012 is something I hadn’t seen myself doing, not by a long shot. And there’s a lot of reasons why.
Things are moving quickly now. We have a condo down South, movers scheduled to shuttle our belongings down to it, but have not yet sorted out renting our home in Oakland- which is proving to be a bit more challenging than I’d hoped. If we can close this game of property manager phone tag this morning, the last push to Santa Barbara county should gain momentum and carry us through to August, and settling down thru the remainder of the summer.
Who needed a real vacation, anyway? 🙂
Friday afternoon I turned in my ID badge at the guard booth as I pulled out of the Adobe garages. “Oh, sorry” said the guard, making the safe assumption that like pretty much everyone else who leaves the ‘country club’ at 600 Townsend Street I just got handed a pink slip. I felt a bit fake in just giving the nod of thanks and not correcting him, but it did little to dent the elation I had that moment, metaphorically passing across the threshold of job security into the unknown.
I spent Saturday morning in penance for the hubris of my prior evening, nursing a hangover and cursing the silence of our empty house. Picking up Desiree and Devin at the airport was the highlight of Saturday, as every other waking moment I wallowed in self-doubt and criticism. By the evening I’d decided I needed a few days to sleep things off, just let myself decompress and catch up with the events of the last month or so. The relative quiet from my phone and email only amplified the emptiness I was feeling inside at the thought of leaving my home behind, my job behind, my security behind. It was time to look ahead.
Sunday morning we woke up, packed a few bags and drove to Carpinteria so we could catch the evening sunset on the beach, and then spend the next few days looking for a place to rent in the area before heading back and renting out our own house in Maxwell Park up north. Even though part of me really just wanted to curl up in a fetal position and sleep for a few days before sorting everything out, I think what I really needed most of all was to force myself forward.
And forward we have gone. I’m typing this now on my iPad in a Carp hotel room while my son sleeps in the bed behind me. As his eyes fluttered asleep a few minutes back, he muttered “this was the best day ever, Dad. I want to live here.” I flashed back a few hours to his shock of red hair coming alight in the sunset as we dodged the waves at Fourth Beach, the gleam in his eyes as he played in the seaweed and foraged for shells and rocks. He felt then what I felt when I first came to this place some 17 years ago.
This is home.
We just haven’t gotten back down to it quite yet.
Today I wake up to begin my last day at Adobe. I’ve known this day was coming for a long time, but never really expected I would feel this way when it did- a little nervous, a little excited, and a whole lotta anxious. It’s a bit like the morning before your last day of school when you know the people and places you see today are ones you’ll remember the rest of your life, but they won’t be part of your day – to – day life after this evening, for the first time in 12 years.
I’m preparing for my day by packing up a laptop I won’t return home with, attempting in vain to clean out an Outlook inbox I’ll never reach the end of once today’s over and my Adobe accounts are disabled. Rifling through a neatly – ordered closet of clothes that will all get yanked down into boxes in short order. Wondering if I remembered to do that one last thing, for that one last time, before the light goes out in my offices and I move my family six hours away from this place – and I’m pretending as if it’s just another day.
So many small routines that you get used to over the years, small comforts that support you you throughout your days, your weeks, your months, that become an imprint on your life after 12 years. All to change as of tomorrow morning, much as if I had time-warped back to that last day at college, facing a summer vacation with no end and the need for myself to think life all over from scratch again. It’s a little bit scary too, I’ll admit. One foot before the other, though– I’m going to enjoy this last day of routine no matter how difficult it really is for me inside. None of my schools even lasted 12 years, though
– these people, places, sights, sounds, and smells are part of me now. I never really acknowledged the separation anxiety I’d face leaving Adobe until now, with it staring me in the face so brusquely.
This isn’t going to be easy– I never thought it would, of course. But it’s certainly going to be a bit more difficult than I expected. I guess starting afresh never is.
Well, here I go.
It’s been a wonderful 12+ years in the Bay Area, but as of July 1st Des, Devin and I are packing up our East Bay house and renting it out, and moving down to Santa Barbara county. Carpinteria in particular, and to a new job at Lynda.com as their developer content marketing manager. My last day at Adobe is June 28th. I’m really going to miss Adobe- and all the wonderful friends and colleagues I’ve made during my oddly-erratic 12 years there (including the Macromedia years).
In some ways it’s not the choice many would have expected- bad time to sell a house, tons of jobs flowing through the Bay Area/Silicon Valley, HTML has never been more pervasive and full of promise than it is today for someone of my background. The easy path would be to stick with my job and the amazing Dreamweaver team and keep cranking out the hits, or hang out around the Bay as a free agent jumping from startup to startup making a pile of cash but with little personal time to enjoy it. The decision was a tricky one for me, and my family/quality of life factored in more heavily than ever before.
It really came down to the need for change. To shed the old skin I’ve been in for the last 12+ years and reinvent my career with a family I adore, in a town we both love, working on a set of challenges I’ve always wanted to, and the right balance of my time to enjoy both. I’ve been working around and with the same company, products and technology for over a decade and despite the maturity that sustained focus can bring, it also has it’s drawbacks. Whenever you view the same problems through the same lens for so long you run the risk of becoming complacent. Predictable. And I don’t care for either of those traits, honestly. Although I love the Web like an old friend, I’ve slowly come to realize that I needed to do something else entirely. I love Dreamweaver (and Adobe) like crazy and can’t help feel an almost paternal separation anxiety leaving them after so long at the helm, but it’s time for both of us to fly free.
So here we are.
My managers and closest colleagues are all who’ve known so far, and have been working with me to transition the multi-million dollar business of Dreamweaver, Inc. out of my hands in the next 10 days or so. I’ve been dreading the infamous ‘Goodbye Email’ to my broader team and colleagues, but that will go out today as well. Followed by a rush of exit paperwork, legal documents and the like as the door whooshes shut behind me at Adobe’s SF offices and a new rush of realtors, moving vans, renter screening, school hunting, and general busywork required to move a family and 12 years worth of their collected junk 6 hours south so I can hit the ground running on July 23rd, my first day at the Lynda.com offices.
I’ll admit in some ways I’m nervous as hell undertaking such a huge change, but mostly I’m just looking forward to a complete change of environment and challenge, and to work at a company 100% focused on educating and enriching people’s lives and careers in Lynda.com. A privately-held company without shareholder pressure to elevate the stock price quarterly, serving customers with problems that I can help solve with a team that’s sitting in the same room as me and not a distant voice across a Skype or VoIP bridge. And those customers are largely the same ones I’ve been building tools for the last decade or so, old friends who I’ve only been able to help by building better hammers, not elevating the craft of what they do, of who they are. It’s time for me to focus on that for a while.
And that’s exciting as hell.
It’s been almost 12 years since we left Carpinteria, but it feels like I never left once my feet hit the sand. Down South for ‘serious matters’, but trying to enjoy the zen of our old hometown while I’ve got the chance. Didn’t realize I missed this place so much.
I took the opportunity – during a recent server migration – to start rethinking my personal site, so will be down for a little while getting things redone into a way I might actually use in the future. So thanks for paying attention, if you have been. Should be back up in Autumn 2012 for serious business. See you then!
