San Francisco

A little over two months ago as Margie and I were cleaning out the rental home we lived in to move to Olympia with my parents out of necessity because I had been laid off for the millionth time in my life from a job that I hated, I had this creepy feeling in my gut..."What if this is it?" I said to myself. "What if my life has been resigned to bouncing around from job to job, town to town and my poor undeserving wife gets to come along for the ride?" This has been a haunting idea for a long time.

About a year ago, a good friend of mine advised me to move to California. I thought, in one of my few and far between moments of pure and unblemished snobbery, told him that the idea of moving to California is cliche and generic as I facetiously asked him if he would be willing to consider my bourgeoning screenplay idea. He then replied, "No, you should seriously consider San Francisco, you cocksucker." So, I began the asinine process of consideration. I thought through the pros and cons, "Well, it's not Seattle, that's a downside...um...there's a great deal of sun but it's a lot more expensive and about three times as crowded as Seattle..." At the end of thinking this thing through, I was still living in Olympia with my parents working construction with my step-dad attempting to go into business with him so we can have one big happy mormon compound in Rainier, Wa stockpiling food storage and guns. Although this neo-depressionist/pre-apocalyptic idealism was very enticing, there was an element to it that made me lose all hope for the future. So my wife and I had a very brief conversation. I asked her what she thought about San Francisco and in not so many words she said "Sure!"

Then on a whim, I began applying for various editorial internships in the bay area. One was for a semi-traditional copy-editing internship for a local weekly. The banality of that sort of job was very enticing to me. They contacted me for a phone interview and I bombed it. The other was for an internet start-up web 2.0/new journalism company that I wasn't crazy about, they contacted me for a phone interview. I nailed it. They scheduled a second phone interview. I nailed that one as well. Then they scheduled an expense paid interview in San Francisco after which they revealed the name of the company that was funding this start-up project. Then I became very excited about this prospect, but nonetheless I was very doubtful about the likelihood of my actually having a chance at getting said position. At the very least, I looked at it as a free vacation for my wife and I. So we made arrangements to drive our car to San Francisco, stay in an affordable boutique hotel in Downtown San Francisco and hang out for a week. It was an amazing experience. Never in our 3+ years of marriage have we ever rolled into a city (Note: we've collectively lived in Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Portland, Seattle, Burlington, VT, LA, SLC & Boston) and looked at each other and said "Holy Shit!" It just clicked. We made adventures to J-town, Chinatown, The Mission, The Wharf, Balboa, Golden Gate & SoMA. This was OUR city. There was this sense of belonging. We felt like ourselves. We felt stripped of all these cultural things that were expected of us and for a few moments we felt like humans again and not like ants in an assembly line. It was a liberating feeling.

Day two of our stay in San Francisco, I went in for the on-site interview and after stressing myself to the point of nausea, they offered the internship to me. I gladly accepted and agreed to be in San Francisco by the beginning of September. In addition, I'll be starting school at the end of August to finally finish my degree and to hopefully get our life started, FINALLY.

In christian circles, they say things like "I feel like I've been called to..." or "I feel led to..." but I feel those words are thrown around too much and have subsequently lost their meaning. I don't feel a sense of call, to be honest I'm not sure what that really means. In my experience, all that a "call" has represented is a justification from the divine for people to just do what they want to do. I want to take care of my wife. I want to be in a position to start a family with my wife and I want to raise that family in a diverse, major city. I have no idea what the future holds, all I know is that on August 10th, my wife and I are moving to San Francisco.

P.S. this blog post remains vague because I am contractually obligated to do so

Veritas: Part 1

It often baffles me when someone makes such an extravagant claim as, "This is true." In Mormondom, where I spent a great deal of my youth dodging guilt trips and blonde haired/blue eyed Aryan "daughters of zion," the truth is something often defended on the personal level by stating that one knows the "truth" with "every fiber of my (their) being." Seemingly, the truth is something that, at it's very surface, seems to fully exist apart from error. It is unadulterable, perfect, flawless & pure. I'm not going to go into a linguistics lesson but the very word truth is derived from the old English/Proto-Germanic word trēowe which is a direct connotation to ones faith or religious beliefs. So the very essence of the idea of truth is inseparably interconnected with faith & religion. So with that in mind, truth being homogeneous in it's relation to faith & religion, it has created a culture of right vs. wrong and good vs. evil dynamic, or rather a John Wayne-ism.

I'd like to counter the faith-based perspective (I believe in, love & follow Jesus, at a later time we will discuss how this is possible) with a perspective from a former adjunct Rhetoric professor from UC Berkeley. His name is Daniel Coffeen where he unapologetically declares, "Everything is an argument." Bertrand Russell who falls in a similar almost nihilistic school of thought argues that everything, even something simple as a coffee table--which is the example that is used in his book "The Problem of Philosophy," is valued differently by different people with differing "perspectives." Data factors such as light, individual vision & each individuals interperation as to what a coffee table is and what it is used for. A very basic example, but Russell finds a way to build an entire book built around the analyzing of this simple object whose assumed purpose is to furnish a home. Here's the one and only thing I know to be(ironically) "true"--Don't assume anything!

Truth has always been a very bizarre thing to me, especially in the asking of something or someone's integrity, as if we could actually come to know this at all. To merely ask if something is true, is to merely ask the wrong question because what you'll get is not discovery, but you will get a blanket answer and maybe a head nod or a "yeah, dude." But if you're "honest" with yourself, you're not after a yay/nay sort of situation. What you're really after is definition. I'm a journalism student, and the main reason I love journalism is because it really deals the shit life is made of on a very fundamental level. Questions and Answers. Problematically,in some cases you ask the wrong questions and get the right answers that lead you somewhere else. Or sometimes you ask the right questions but you get the wrong answers, or maybe not exactly what you were looking for. To sum up the art of living in a sentence, "It is & it isn't." Life is Yes & No. Life is True & False. Life is ambiguous and fucked up and you can't label everything...or you can. Merely asking if something is true doesn't get down to the root of a problem or intellectual, theological, perspectival dilemma. All it seems to do is give a blanket statement and it doesn't really answer the question. What you're really asking is, "What is it?" It's usually (to apply a blanket statement of my own) about defining things.

This is a particularly epistemologically perplexing idea. Especially on a day like today, when we are essentially celebrating being "right." So what are we right about? Democracy? The right to bear arms? Capitalism? What does "right" mean? What is democracy? It is totally besides the point, but it also is the point. Are we really after truth? Or is it really that we have no tangible idea about the concepts and dogmas and realities that we've latched onto from a very early age? Is it social conditioning? The herd instinct? It's neither and it's all of them. Nothing is certain and everything is ascertained.

I would also say, be careful when you ask these questions. You might not have any idea whose core belief systems you may be in the process of shattering.

Happy Independence Day.

****I understand the paradoxical nature of this argument, even in the discipline of language. Using words such as right, wrong, true & false to make an argument about their lack of existence is dichotomous at best. But try not to interpret dichotomy as being equated with being "false" or an idea that can't be considered.****