I find myself returning to my more "traditional" modes of operating, sitting back in my safe zone. I suppose that this is natural in a way. I broke out of my usual patterns for a little while, did a few off-the-wall things, and now the part of me that says, "let's just hang back, stay out of trouble, and bide time" has taken dominance again.

I envy people who are able to stay in quot;the wild zone" seemingly continuously. Maybe it's just a matter of always reaching out, always taking risks, always venturing into uncharted territory. I do it for a while, then I stop and go, "Wow, where the fuck am I?", and recoil.

This is how I stretch myself. Test my limits and expand them. Every now and then, in order to feel fully human, I need to do something completely unpredictable and insane. The more insane I get, the better. The past couple weeks have been nothing. Eating in dumpsters, giving away dvds, making up grand plans for impossible futures -- that's child's play. Child's play can be fun, but I want to get out of the sandbox.

But first I have to stop, restate my assumptions, lick my wounds, scratch my bug bites (from the night I didn't document during which I slept on the bare earth), and blah blah blah. Sit back, write some code, eat some crackers, watch a few Xena episodes, and thus ease myself back into so-called "reality" for a while again.

Fuck reality. Reality is a trap we use to imprison ourselves. There, we are confined by the limits of the past, by perceived constraints on what is possible, and by our own stubborn cowardice. Reality is a rut from which one is incapable of seeing the very existence of other directions in which to travel. Reality is where I am right now.

For the weekend, I don't have a whole lot planned. That doesn't necessarily mean it will be boring, although it could be. The one fixed point I have mapped is to go into Boulder tomorrow afternoon, hang out at the bandshell, and see if this mythical Food Not Bombs gathering actually exists, and if so, what role I might play in it.

Another possible activity: installing Gentoo on Argo. I'm considering that I might jump in head first by backing up my current debian partitions to the big hard drive mounted on /home, completely wipe the 40g clean, and turn it into a freshly repartitioned drive with only gentoo. I think that would be the cleanest, and in the long run, the best way.

Of course, there's also the ever-fun possibility of going biking to some yet unknown location.

Finally, there's the ongoing challenge I'd like take a little bite out of each week: Getting rid of excess belongings. Most of the time, I don't anticipate it to be nearly as dramatic as offering big items to people whose online journals I lurk; that was mostly just a warm-up to show myself what I could do. It may involve trips to used book stores, dumpsters, or donations to Goodwill.

(Last time I went to the Goodwill center (not to donate anything, but just to look around), I had an annoying experience with a rude, condescending middle-aged female employee, so I'm a bit reluctant to return there. Maybe I'll be able to overlook it for the greater good though.)

Anyway... I've spent long enough sitting in this chair today. Onward, and outward.