As anyone who knows me well will attest, I have a hard time with both praise and blame. Maybe that's because my parents were so resolutely even-handed in their parenting. The difference between getting straight As in school and spending the month of January unwilling to go to school was extraordinarily slight. There are good and bad aspects to that sort of upbringing. Few things trouble me to the point of implosion. But I also have a hard time setting goals for myself. It's like I'm living in a perpetual present of could-be-worse, could-be-better ambivalence.

Now I'm trying, ever so slowly, to become more future-oriented. With this in mind, I'm making an effort to turn people's comments into motivation. Today my intellectual role model Steven Rubio wrote some extraordinarily nice things about me in conjunction with that book Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer I have a piece in. It won't be easy living up to his words, but I'll do my very best. Steven reads my sentences about Joe Strummer as a kind of self-description. I read them, in turn, as a reflection of his own beautiful way of being in the world, which merges in my mind with that of his fellow Baby Boomer Joe Strummer. It's an honor to do something worthy of their excellence.

Mode: bliss
Muse: the soothing sounds of the diswasher