Day One of the February 2019 trip

(slightly edited from my journal version)

2:30 pm

I can't recall ever being here in February before, but I could be wrong. I don't have a list of all the previous moonshots, nor does that seem like something I'm likely to put together any time soon. What matters is the now, and I'm sitting at the Bell in Tring, drinking a Greene King IPA. I landed five hours ago and it took me that long to get here.

Henry will be heading out of school in about an hour, and I'm just going to sit here quietly. I'm trying to steal Internet from the restaurant across the street where I was taken to lunch last year. Someone in here is eating something with vinegar, likely on the chips, I guess, and I'm reminded of the fish and chips I had that last time there as a guest of a lovely couple who live here.

It's quite warm here at the moment, and ridiculously sunny, and it's so much more pleasant than back home. The narrow road is busy, and the 500 to Aylesbury rolls past. These roads would never work at home, but here these roads are home. It's supposed to be this way, or at least, it always has been this way. Differences, but the people largely look the same.

A man just drove by in a white convertible, and that's followed by a little boy in his own convertible, on a narrow sidewalk, right next to the roadway. That would make me nervous if I were his father, but again, there's an ease with it that seems to fit in.

As I took the bus from the station, I noticed that Henry's picture adorns the advert for the History Boys that's posted on the way to the theatre. That made me smile.

A dog defecates mere inches from the road, and a man carrying a large parcel stops to pick up the deposit. Vehicles zoom past. In the 15 minutes I've sat here, so many people have come past, and I'm struck with the sense that it's impossible to catch all of it. The dog is now tied to a post while his master sends the parcel off on its way.

The bus I was riding zooms back the other way. I could have taken it all the way to Henry's house, but I don't want to go there yet. I'm barely going to be here. This time next week I'll be back in the office, getting ready to pick up Sam from his mother's house. There's no way I can stay here, no way I can do anything else other than come over here periodically to see the world I left behind.

I can't seem to get on the Internet, it seems to have dried up. I don't really want to connect except to tell Henry that I am here, and to figure out what happens next for our evening. I'm staying at an inn in Wiggington, I think, and I'm already looking forward to being asleep. I didn't sleep much on the plane.

Mack the Knife, or a version of it, plays on the speakers, and the line "back in town" strikes out at me. There are people here who know me, though that's more the case in Dunstable than here. Tomorrow night I will go there, and it will be an adventure.

I keep thinking I see people I know, people from Charlottesville, but they're not the same people. Similar looking faces, but different. A world that's incredibly different, and here I am again, six months later.

The building across the street has soaped up windows, and I can't tell  what it was supposed to be, or what it will be. It's for sale, and maybe I could buy it, maybe I could make that work out, somehow. Another impossible idea, another fantasy that won't come true, now would I want it to. I have enough crazy ideas, but I find myself not wanting to implement them. I'm scared of being myself back home, especially in these days where everyone can be a target. I don't want to be a target. Who does?

The beer isn't as nice as I would like it to be, but this could be because I'm looking forward to seeing Henry and I'm tired and I'm nervous. This trip will be over before it begins, and that's just the way of it.

I'm mesmerized by the cars speeding past on a narrow street. I'm fascinated by the people, such as the man walking past with the balloons for someone's 60th birthday. A woman around my ages tries to jog in the opposite direction. So many people, and what do we do about it but sit here and try to document it?

The time I am here, though, I have to think about what will happen when I get back.  I don't want to think about that, because I'd like to be here, would love to find a way to stay here. I keep looking at the women around my age who walk past, and then remember I have so little to offer anyone. I dismiss myself from the picture before its even resolved.

It's almost three in the afternoon, and the sun is at a different angle. I saw the moon in the eastern sky as I waited for the bus, and I remember seeing it on the plane last night. I'm a fifth of the way around the world, or something like that, and there's more than a bit of confusion related to this travel.

I thought I just saw Jay Urgo walk past, but of course it's not him. In a moment I'm going to head out. It's a nice day and I'm here. I feel incredibly fortunate, and slightly foolish, to be here. I'm going to make the most of it.

9:40 pm

"You've lost that loving feeling" plays on the speaker system at the Greyhound Inn here in Wiggington. There's maybe ten people left here in the bar, which is proper and real, and unlike what we have at Court Square. I keep forgetting what these places are supposed to be like, as opposed to what I'm used to.

I'm exhausted after the journey, but I had a 45 minute nap after being dropped off here by Henry. and his mother. Wiggington is not that far away, maybe the distance between my house and Beer Run. It's not fair to compare the two, though, not fair to really combine these things together in any kind of a way that would create a direct comparison. I wonder, though, if there's any place this remote outside of D.C. It would seem that everything there is overgrown, everything is a little overbuilt. The land use patterns are something to behold, and I'm always amazed at how that all works. I should explore more.

I'm a stranger here, despite these being familiar surroundings. I took the tube from the airport to Euston, and got the train to Tring. Then I took the bus to the town centre where I had a couple of pints while I waited for Henry to get off from school. He's much older now, and every time I see him he's closer to being a man. This is the shortest turn-around I've ever had between trips, and it already feels like it's going to be over before it's even begun.

I waited an hour and a half or so, at two different pubs, and there he was. I'm trying my best to not be a stranger to him, which is why I'm here. I'm also trying to think about what my life will be like in the time I have remaining. The exhaustion consumes me these days.

Tring is much the same as I left it. There's a couple more new restaurants, and Henry seems to know more people than he did before. He genuinely seems to love being here, and I'm so glad for him. I wish that Sam and Phin could be here with me, but they're not going to be over here. That's an avenue closed off to me for well beyond the foreseeable future. I'm a problem to be solved, it would seem.

Tomorrow I'll head to Dunstable in the evening, though there's part of me that would just like to stay here. I won't, though. It's necessary to go there and get a little more of an urban experience, compared to the more rural one I'm having at the moment in this country inn.

It's the first day, and I'm already thinking about how I get back over here again.  Obviously it would be smart to get through this trip first, but the reality is to remember that the here and now is about trying to get to what I want. And what I want is to try my best to be here as much as I can, with "here" being defined as where I want to be.

The young bartender knows Henry, and it was quite amazing to be able to talk to a stranger about him. He's been here since he was five months old and this is where he has grown up. I don't have any claim on him, but here I am all the same, trying to make sure that he knows that I love him and that he's an amazing human being.

The grayness of the airport, the awareness of the day

Elevator music of the smooth jazz variety gurgles out the loudspeaker at the airport bar, the one before I get my boarding ticket for today's journey. Of course, the journey has already begun, as I left my house about five and a half hours ago. The speaker is almost directly above me. 

For some reason, the television screen is showing entertainment and sports news from sometime in 2016. Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 has just come out, and Stan Lee is still working hard. This is jarring and I just had to ask the bartender to make sure I'd not gone back in time. 

Everyone still has the latest cell phone, and my news feed tells me there will be a national emergency, so I'm in the now, I suppose. I'm sitting here, waiting for the time I can go through security, prepare to wait for the plan. In years past, on trips past, I would be writing in a paper journal rather than typing in this blog. But I am at the point now where I have boxes and boxes of handwritten journals and perhaps it would be better to commit words to this box. 

I worry one day this box will go away, and disappear into corporate non-existence. There's no sch thing as Google + anymore, and this may not be important. Perhaps it would be better to scrawl my thoughts using pen and paper. That will likely wait until I'm on board the flight in a few hours. 

This is the second time in a year I've been here, at Dulles, about to go on a trip to see my family in the United Kingdom. In six weeks from now, that country is set to exit the European Union, and that sounds more like a national emergency. I am at a point where I'm tired of the drama and emotions that comes from politics, at all levels. Yet, it's part of the way humans move around the stage.

The airport does not seem to be crowded. It's the middle of winter and the sky over Loudoun County is gray and dreary. A man about my age who was just sitting next to me at the bar has now gone out. He raced up here from Fredericksburg to drop his girlfriend off, and apparently, there was a lot of stress. It's Valentine's Day, but the first words I heard from him were not kind to her.  I could feel the tension of him not feeling like he was being thanked enough for speeding through traffic so she could catch her flight.  I remember that feeling of fighting inside of a relationship, and I always found it so uncomfortable that I'm in no hurry to ever be in a relationship again. And it's been long enough now that I don't know how to do any of that anyway.

I'm traveling to see my son Henry and this will be my 26th or 27th or 28th trip to England in my 45 years of life. It feels ridiculously indulgent, but what's the point of being alive if you're not going to live?

This is a trip in which I need to think about the rest of my life. We're in an era where it seems there are more and more emergencies in our future. I feel this tremendous urgency to write what I can, and to share it where I can, and to try to explain things the way I see them. That's all I've ever wanted to do. I want to share my curiosity and try to make things better. This also seems ridiculously indulgent.

I accept that. And I accept that I am here, about to begin a journey to my other home. In the meantime, I sit here watching the bartender talk to a couple, telling them his observations about Americans. He appears to be from southeast Asia. He's been incredibly friendly. Earlier he pushed Valentine's Day candy, and the man from Fredericksburg got ticked off a little. He sat here and drank a couple of shots and pounded a couple beers before heading out into the world, into the long line of traffic heading south the Fredericksburg.

Another member of this wilderness ensemble is a woman about my age who is eating a salad, while drinking a Blue Moon. She's talking to someone on the phone and I flash back to my trip from 1995 when almost no one would have had a cell phone. That trip was my longest ever as an adult, 21 days or so traveling around just after graduation. I can barely remember what that was like, or how I awkward I felt. I weigh now about what I weighed then, as I've gained back all the weight I lost after my second divorce. I don't have nearly the same motivation as I used to have to be in shape. I only seem motivated to have a stream of consciousness, constantly gurgling out the textual equivalent of smooth jazz, words that seem to have a rhythm, seem to have a point, but does anyone need to read this, or even know it exists?

I'm about to enter the international world, about to disappear from one place to another. Would it were I could be back in time and remake all the decisions. Would it were that all of this added up to something. Would it were that I was something different...

The older I get, the more I just want to release out whatever it is inside of me. And you can either choose to read or not read. It's going to come out anyway, I suspect. I have to pass the time, somehow. I have to document what I can, somehow. Isn't that what I'm here for? Isn't that why you're here?

Essay for school

I did this essay for school. For anyone looking for new writing for me on planning in the community in which I live, this is it. This is intended to be an overview. 

Albemarle and Charlottesville are two communities both known for high levels of planning as well as major efforts to engage the community. There is a tremendous will to plan, perhaps best evidenced by the large amount of time  both localities put into their Comprehensive Plans. 

However, many of the barriers to implementing these plans across greater Charlottesville were created because both  communities that have often planned in reaction to the other. For much of the 20th century, Charlottesville's plan to grow was to annex Albemarle County. In response, Albemarle laid the foundation for its growth management policy by adopting a Comprehensive Plan that sought to demonstrate to the state that it could provide urban services to its citizens. However, Charlottesville continued to take land away from Albemarle until the county agreed to a landmark revenue-sharing agreement in 1982. From that time forth, the two communities have experienced soft hostility, complicating the will to cooperate on planning. 

Many times the two communities will come very close to cooperating on something, only to have it collapse at the last minute. Two recent examples are discussion about creating a Regional Transit Authority in the late 2000's, as well as the failure of a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to coordinate the Comprehensive Plan updates in both Albemarle and Charlottsville. In both cases, failure for the planning to result in meaningful implementation fell apart because of a distrust between both communities. 

In the transit situation, Charlottesville staff had deep concerns about Albemarle's willingness to pay its share of the new authority. The General Assembly did not pass a bill requesting a referendum on a sales tax increase to create a dedicated fund for the service. With no new funding in sight, the idea fizzled out of the minds of elected officials in 2010.

In the Comprehensive Plan situation, the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission received the grant but some members of the Albemarle Board of Supervisors were skeptical. The $1 million was to help the coordinate plan review with the goal of addressing sustainability. Members of the Jefferson Area Tea Party attacked the grant and demanded that the county not participate in an exercise they believed subverted the citizens of Albemarle. The original goal of the planning grant was quickly lost, and the two plans were not adopted in synch. An opportunity to plan was lost.

However, the future of planning is much more positive than those two examples might indicate. Since those two failures, newer elected officials in both the city and county have pledged to work together on implementation, as well as planning. This resulted in the signing of a series of memorandums of understanding on topics including transportation, education and affordable housing. These memos have provided the underpinning for a series of initiatives that are ongoing, such as a regional transit partnership, a regional housing partnership and a renewed effort for both communities to work on efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

Time Keeps on Slipping

I sit somewhere and the Steve Miller Band sings loudly that Time Keeps On Slipping into the future, and I'm annoyed that I've spent the last 15 minutes trying to find a draft blog post I wrote here that disappeared into the nothing. I hear this in Charlottesville and I flash back to all those times as a kid hearing this song, plus the time I saw it covered by band called Party Akimbo at a fraternity somewhere here in town way back in 1990 when I was still in high school.

I'm annoyed that the past keeps on slipping, as well as contemporary recollections of that past. I wrote a long article last night in this window about my history with early television, but for whatever reason the  draft doesn't exist anymore. Did that even mean I had those thoughts, now that they weren't captured? 

I'm sad that the 2,000 words or so I wrote are gone, but what should I have expected, writing anything in a box sketched out to me by corporate overlords who sometimes seem benevolent, sometimes seem malicious, and here I am, just a person trying to sort it all out, somehow. 

How does any of us get born? What world do we come into? Why am I here in this place, in a world that changes every day, lined out by the parameters of what we've come to expect? The older I get, the more I feel John Donne was wrong and that all of us are islands, condemned to evolve in ways that are not productive to the greater good. 

Time keeps on slipping, states the song, and yet that might not be the right words. Reality, as each of us perceives it, keeps on slipping. Where I sit, somewhere, I still sit lamenting that all I've written before, all of it, is in danger of disappearing away forever. I spent two hours last night documenting something of importance, and my stupidity was trusting the corporate overlords to give a shit.

It is my goal to get this blog away from here. I don't even care if anyone ever reads it, sees it. I just need to have some phantom hope that one day anything I could have said might be used to build me in a court of posterity. 

 

Council moves forward with long-range planning package

The Charlottesville City Council has voted unanimously to spend nearly a million dollars to hire a consultant to help complete the review of a state-mandated vision for the future.

“The acute need is to get the Comprehensive Plan finished and to have an integrated affordable housing strategy within that Comprehensive Plan and then to roll immediately into the rezoning citywide,” said City Councilor Kathy Galvin.

Council also agreed to move forward with hiring a new position of “long-range planner” who would oversee the overall planning vision, including implementation of small-area plans.

“Now is the time to use the dollars for long-range planning and to hire an individual with the skill set to shepherd these and other projects going forward and to have that person report directly to the city manager’s office,” said Mike Murphy, the city’s interim manager.

The city Planning Commission has been working on an update of the Comprehensive Plan for two years, and the plan’s review took a turn following the Unite the Right rally in August 2017. The commission’s membership changed, with four new members added in the last year on the seven person body.

Council got an update on the plan at their meeting on December 18. One area of concern related to a Future Land Use map that depicted more intense density in several areas of the city. Council indicated they wanted to take a pause and help the Planning Commission complete their work.

“One of the directives to the city’s manager’s office was to bring back what resources might be required for competion of the Comprehensive Plan,” said interim manager Mike Murphy.

A list of resources was compiled after consultation with the Planning Commission, the Housing Advisory Committee and others.

The total amount before Council to complete the plan and and hire a firm to do the zoning rewrite would be $975,890.

Just over $85,000 in the funding comes from a $100,000 Council previously allocated but has not yet spent. Another $200,000 was funding that had been set aside for a housing needs assessment. Another $600,000 would come from the capital improvement program fund contingency fund.

It is widely assumed and expected that a rewriting of the city’s zoning ordinance will be required upon completion of the Comprehensive Plan.

“We’ve been hurting terribly for a long time because our zoning is out of sync with our community vision,” Galvin said.

The funding for the long-range planner would come from a position that Council authorized and funded in the current fiscal year, but the city has yet to fill.

“We are going to be at least three quarters of the year having never used dollars that were in this year’s budget that were in for a long-range planner of assistant city manager,” Murphy said.

Councilor Wes Bellamy wanted to know if the new planner would have staff. Murphy said no.

“Think about this position as somebody who is making systems more effective, refining processes, steering big picture items and maybe relieving some burden from staff to direct things like the small area plans,” Murphy said. “They are operating from a level that’s not wedded to one department’s point of view. They’re operating across all silos.”

Earlier in the night, Council took action on a rezoning on River Road for a mixed-use development with apartments and storage units.

Mayor Nikuyah Walker said the discussion of the River Road rezoning helped her appreciate the reason for why the position was being proposed. But Walker expressed concern about filling the position before the city manager is hired.

Galvin said staff is overwhelmed with development review. She also said the position could change once the city has a new leader.

“The new city manager could decide that he or she wants to restructure everything,” Galvin said. “But that person is still an important and essential professional with skills that are going to be needed regardless.”

Walker said she heard loud and clear from the planning commission that they needed assistance following their five-hour meeting on January 5.

Murphy said he felt the position should be independent of the planning department.

“I find it pretty difficult to imagine that someone who reports to the NDS director and is [also] the agent-of-change in the development process,” Murphy said.

The position was one of several recommendations made by the Novak Group in an efficiency study of NDS. The draft budget for FY2020 will also include a support services manager in NDS to help with the caseload.

Council was unanimous in its vote.