Once again on the edge of a journey

This has been a year of journeys outside of my comfort zone. I've been on one for the past nine days and it ends tomorrow when I board a train back to Charlottesville. 

Would anyone ever want to know this information? Is it worth typing out? 

I do not know anymore. I only know that at any moment when I am writing, I am alive and capturing the moment I am in. At the moment, the cat I've been sitting wants attention but he keeps realizing I'm not his regular people. 

I do have people but I get lost in myself so much I don't see them. I wake up every day and don't quite know who I am. I dream about cities I've never seen, and wake up in a small town that's growing fast and I've documented the progress. 

Will I keep doing it? 

That's the question on my mind as I am at the end of this journey and very close to being home, the home where my parents' furniture is waiting for me to allow me to continue to live the rest of my life. 

I will likely continue to live in Charlottesville. I would like to travel more and see other places. The other night I drove to Philadelphia for a concert, something I had to fight my anxiety to be able to do. 

The entire day of the show the anxiety in me kept trying to tell me reasons not to go. My knee hurt. I would get lost. I would be alone in a crowd.

But I went, and I will forever have many memories of overcoming myself to have an experience I really wanted to have. 

I'm not ready to write about that yet. I have a feeling I need to be typing on some of that furniture that used to belong to my parents but is now in my own home. I'm a human and I attach memories to physical objects and now I've got the dining room table I grew up on in my own house. 

The house I'm not sure how long will be there. I have a lot of anxiety about that and it's tied to why I am looking forward to being off of this break and back home.

I'll take the train. My favorite part about being here is hearing the train horns every 20 minutes or so. My journey here began on foot and my journey home will end on foot. 

I'll keep writing. This unadvertised public journal feels sometimes like the safest place but obviously I have no idea who will read this. I just know I have to write to stay alive. 

The congestion of thoughts

As I add more things to do, I find myself never having any sort of downtime. Forcing more work has always been a way I've sought to get to new levels, but at the moment it's a Sunday and I'd like to relax a little or maybe keep messing around, but it's a day I write things and people expect them to be written. 

I'm sitting in my kitchen listening to the latest Built to Spill album and I don't feel any desire to write about the various meetings coming up this week. I'll get to it eventually, but there's so much I need to do and the only downtime I get is in the morning when I wake up before 6 a.m. but won't let myself do any work. 

This time next week I'll be in Pennsylvania. That's another thing I need to do which is making it very hard to relax. I don't really like being away from home and the routine and I continue to think that one day I'm going to go away and not want to come back here.

That feels almost inevitable. I know in my head I've made that decision but now I'm waiting for the path to form. 

Sunlight through the forest of the new friends

For the first time in a while, I'm sitting facing the window in my front room looking out. There's a sea of plants in front of me and I wonder if they can hear the needle skipping on the record still playing behind me.

I keep thinking a lot about what's going to happen next after a season or two of turmoil and a real sense of impending calamity. I keep thinking about wanting to be safe and how I seem to not want to leave the house very often.

This morning I'm enjoying watching people walk to work as the Earth rotates to a point where the sun is beginning to shine directly on the trees in the park.

I could so easily stand up and change the record but I don't know what I would put on next. This morning I seem to be fixated on needing to sit here writing the many things I need to write to inform people of what's happening. I seem to need to start this process as soon as possible and sometimes I can zone out and it's done easily.

Other days, I really don't want to go through it. I just want to sit back and watch the world go by, wondering what will be in this space in 50 years.

The construction of the school behind me is affecting me with a constant vibration during the day, a humming that pervades the assembly of infrastructure for a school that will certainly be there in 50 years.

These existential thoughts don't the bills but they help me power through a moment I need to step out of the flow of information and just mark a little time for me.

Now, back to Hanover County.

Sewer line, shortwave, sewn, a strewn

For those keeping track, I am now up to Season 18 of the Amazing Race. This is much more interesting than any of the other shows I've been watching because the stories are simple and I like seeing parts of the world I've not been to yet.

But this is the first season where the filming is in HD and it's a remarkable difference. It's so strange how much the way we experience video programs has changed since I was a kid.

Last night in my somewhat-more-organized but completely-not-organized basement, I plugged in an old shortwave radio receiver that looks to be from the seventies. Maybe the 80's as there is a digital display of the frequencies.

My dad had a much older unit when I was a kid and I remember being fascinated with using it to pick frequencies from all over the world, using a device specifically designed to do that one thing.

The new receiver did not work for a while, as I'm fairly certain the components within need some repair. This has been sitting on a shelf for who knows how long and I don't remember where this one came from. I picked up so much equipment over the years that's piled up with no rhyme of reason.

Now that the sewer lateral works, I see this place differently. I am not planning on leaving for a while because while I feel tension when I am outside in Charlottesville, I feel relaxed in the confines of this place.

I can't see a long term future here as I suspect in a few years there will be tremendous pressure to develop. That's my main concern with the zoning code. Proponents appear to dismiss people's fears of their neighborhood, or seem to delight in punishing them for what they see as the abuses of the past.

Me? I didn't get a say in any of how humanity as a whole got to this point, where I'm able to more precisely target people with information that sticking a lot of electricity into the air and just the right frequency. I strive to try to reach as many people as I can, and I'm grateful that the turbulence of technology shift has me at a point I can produce the work of an entire information outlet without leaving my house.

I'm going to try out that radio later on and see what I can still find on shortwave. The basement seems to have a lot of electrical interference that just produces a massive hum on every channel, overpowering it. I want to learn how these things work, and remember how people used to communicate.

My own newsletter is an attempt to communicate the way newspapers used to communicate. They'd cover so much more than right now, out of a responsibility to educate the public on what's happening. I feel that same responsibility, so I've dedicated my life to that work.

But I want more. I want to see the world, even if I can't always get out there myself. So I'm grateful for all the technology shifts that brings me something made for broadcast television in 2011, while also writing out a report for people who want to know what's going on this week in local government.

Archiving everything including this moment here

Sometimes I start my day by reviewing my recent journal and moving it to an archive form. I've also begun reading through emails I wrote on the same day. I have multiple journals I update this way. 

One is on my life as it passes through the days. 

Another is on my journalism career.  

Another one is made up of the things I write to my Substack subscribers.

On the days I am able to go through some of the past, I remind myself of initiatives I want to take on in the future and I make notes. Today I've used this experience to write out two ideas. 

I want to take a day off but there's no such thing. My entire life is wrapped up in the work that I do. I'm comfortable with this and thing it's how I decided my life to be a long time ago. 

Sometimes I post these directly to Facebook but I need to stop writing things there because I know that it's not a safe place to be myself. Parts of me are out in the world and I have to remember to protect myself from other people. Not everyone who is friendly is a friend. I wish I'd learned that lesson earlier, and I hope to never unlearn it.

In any case, this moment here has not been archived, and it is a little bit of everything.