tangledupinblue

Well, no great thoughts tonight.

I do have a thought or two about the fall and what it holds for me.

This boy is going to travel. I am going to perpetrate the heel turn on my firm. As I am bound for the academic life next fall, I don't exactly have to work the 80 hour weeks to roll down the partnership track any longer.

So, I am off on weekends. First up, New Orleans, early and often. Got to get to Charleston too.

I'd really like to hit San Francisco, especially to take in the Dasheil Hammett walking tour (yeah I know I am the lamest) as I have never been to California.

Another place I have never been is the Northwest (not counting Canada). A friend of my Pa's lives in Little Big Timber, Montana. He says the trout fishing there is righteous and holy. I think me and my pa will hit it. I've fallen in love with fly fishing and will be practicing casting in the garden of my building to the undoubted amusement of neighbors and pigeons alike this fall.

One thing is for sure. After I cook Thanksgiving dinner for my family, and after I share that dinner with my family I will hop me a seat on a big bad jet plane baby and go to a far away land of whack assitude.

That's right, Vega$$$$$$$$ baby.

It's the fight that EVERYONE has wanted, well everyone except for anyone who cares about Erik Morales' wellbeing!

It's time for Barrera-Morales III



Make no mistake about it, the third and final fight will belong to The Baby Faced Assassin.

So, I reckon me and a few friends will head west from the Apple on the night of Thanksgiving and roll into Vegas on Friday. The fight is at the MGM Grand, and I've never stayed there, so I think that would be fun. I like Bellagio, but this is more a get down and drink bourbon, spend 3 days in a sports book and crash an afterparty type affair than a try-to-look-suave-for-the-ladies-now-that-we-finally-get-paid type weekend.

I feel happy that we are out of the pretender stage. I mean, it was nice to be third year law students with no bills and sick amounts of bread, but we were huge go-tards. If we were Transformers, we would have all been Starscreams, or worse, Soundwaves.

Yep, we were the dipsticks who talked too loud and were undecided as to whether we really liked cigars and single malts or whether we SHOULD like cigars and single malts.

It turns out for those keeping score, that I do like cigars, but not all that often and when I do it is usually at Belmont or Aqueduct, that single malts blow goat, that bourbon will always rule over it's allegedly more sophisticated cousin in much the same way that small ball beats ponderous home-run dependent lineups, and if I am ever going to spend that kind of coin on liquor it is going to come in a nebechanedzer (how cool are the old testament names for huge wine bottles by the way?).

Anyway, as my blue trash nickname suggests, or actually codifies into the signifier (start snare drum apply wayfarers to face) despite my allegedly lofty breeding, I am a man of the simple, nay the trashiest tastes. I like the harder liquor, the baser pleasures, and prefer the manly to that which the world often considers cultured.

It's not that my mama didn't try to give me an education. Like Philip Marlowe, I can speak English when my job requires it, it's just that I am probably not the droid folks are looking for when they make assumptions based on my curiculum vitae.

To say it in plain speaking to foster plain understanding. I am a simple man. It's the world that is complicated.

So now I go home away from this corner of the quieter country.

Things have happenned and the fall looks peaceful.

There are less things to vex me in New York now than there were when I left a week ago.

Some folks got shivved and don't know it.

Some folks got a lot of respect and care coming that I hope I show them daily.

I am glad I figured this out without letting everyone know I was figuring it out if you know what I mean.

I have been undermined at times by the inability to keep my own counsel.

I am better at it now.

It's enough that folks see the actions, they need not be privy to the process.

It's not grade schoool. I ain't showing my work.

It's funny that I can be far more honest with you all because you just kind of pass by in that you do not know me in the context of my life as I live it from day to day.

It would be interesting to see how it would work -- becoming friendly with you in a more contextual setting knowing that because of the comfort provided by relative anonymity, you all get a lot more honesty on certain subjects than people who know me better in my 'real' life.

This is of course assuming that what I write here is honest -- that the good things are not just delusional aspirations and the sad things aren't dramatized moanings.


What I always think on is the nature of authenticity.

I was thinking tonight that any people who had access to my journal here before meeting me and with whom I would corresponded prior to meeting would have a different view of me than someone with whom I struck up a relationship through the usual channels -- which are for me mutual friends, work, parties or random encounters.

Point of fact, i bet the entire arc of the relationship would look different because they caught my writings in a medium in which perceived anonymity gave me freedom to speak freely even when it was not flattering to do so. I speak here when I want or need to.

Now, taking that a step further, if these people are meeting a different 'version' of me only due to the medium in which they encounter me, is one version more authentic. or are all representations just variations on a theme?

I was thinking about a movie I love -- get your laughing out of the way now, --the Legend of Bagger Vance. In it the awesome Will Smith speaks of our 'one true swing' that is locked inside us. It's the one way each of us was meant to swing a club. He reveals that our job as the golfer is not so much to learn how to play golf, but is to discover a swing we already have.

From my experiences as a golfer and a pitcher, I do indeed believe Bagger speaks the truth. There is something authentically ours, one Right way to pitch, or hit for each of us. Anyone who ever felt the click, who has ever visited the zone, knows that in his heart.

My question that I have been stammering about is this -- do each of us have a natural authentic voice and personality as we have a natural throwing motion?

I know I run hot and cold, from high to low from introspective to ebullient pretty quickly, though less quickly and less drastically in recent years. I also know that I have hit times of great contentment and terrible restlessness. Better yet I have been deeply crippled by anxiety as well as carefree. Hell I have been under a doctor's care and medicated as well as clean and in command.

Now. . .

can all of these manifestations be authentic?

Also, another conversation for another time . . . is it selling out your spirit to medicate away anxiety or is it no more self-denying than correcting an insulin deficiency?

At any rate, I may have to edit this for clarity not because I am agonizing over this, but because I am really too stupid to think this through on the fly. But it seems important and it seems like i've almost had it before.

So I will try one more time in a condensed form:

I have a lot of voices textured with a lot of emotions. I have given people various levels of honesty and effort depending on where I am in my life when I have met them.

Who has really met me?

Who have I really met?

Do we ever find our One Voice and is there one to find?

Do we owe that one voice to every one?

Do we owe anyone the revelation that we may not be all the way there yet?

Thoughts on this and related issues are appreciated, as I am scratching my noggin late into the southern night.

Anyway, I am off and likely out of here till I return to Manhattan.

I will go lay down and listen to the Alarm, a great and underappreciated band of the 80s.

/check them out some time/ best live show ever.

Have great safe and righteous holidays, odd folks who know me surprisingly well.

JPK

~~Declare yourself an unsafe building. Suffer the indignations of your world~~~~