CURRENT MISSION

To explore far and wide, because life is short and maintaining a sense of wonder is paramount

ABOUT ME

I'm a writer, editor and designer by trade, but more accurately, I'm a fitful Cherokee/Irish misfit and jack-of-all trades who learned too much about the world to exist easily in a nation, a place, or any given culture. I wander, I watch, and I participate humbly. Sometimes I can make art or meaningful words out of my experiences, but that's not why I have them.

I spent most of the early oughts living a bicycle-centric zero-impact life in the Oakland Bay Area and publishing a political magazine, then spent most of 2009 in Taiwan, China, Mongolia and Tibet. Other than learning some Chinese, meeting new people, eating as many new foods as one human can, and generally reacquiring something like a naive state of mind, I did not have any specific goals in mind for these travels, though I did publish an interview with since-exiled Chinese people's poet Liao Yiwu, and also produced an article about Mongolia's mining boom that got picked up by the (UK) Guardian. Since that time, I've been living mostly in far northern California, Humboldt County, where old growth redwood trees that have been alive since the time of the Roman Empire still tower.

PHILOSOPHY

Live life unattached to fleeting things and seek electricity. UPDATE: I was in China when I wrote that, so I'll add a paraphrase from the philosopher Lao-Tzu: you may dream you are a butterfly, but upon waking, is it not possible that you are the man (or woman) troubling the dreams of a butterfly?

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I like to participate by engaging meaningfully with the people I'm lucky enough to meet. I suppose I'm poor at small talk, but only because I'm always itching to get to deeper and more lasting things. This is a time of unparalleled opportunity, it seems to me, and while globalization has its undeniable ills, the chance to weave a web of meaning and connection across the planet, and to transcend the specifics of one's place of origin is exciting and worthwhile. In the future, I'd like to travel without flying.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I've only couchsurfed through CS a few times, but I've traveled a lot and stayed with many generous hosts along the way. Specifics include: A summer in the mountains north of Asheville, North Carolina, living in a treehouse with my dog while trading my construction skills for a nature retreat; Being a household cook for a collective home in Oakland in exchange for my keep; collecting money from spectators for a street-performing bellydancing troupe was another good one. I like to contribute, in one way or another, and create a give-and-take relationship with anyone who hosts me.

Interests

Photography, guitar, ecstatic and marvelous nature in all forms, literature, entomology, open source software, indigenous and aboriginal modes of existence, public relations and propaganda as mind control devices in "democratic" societies, esoteric bullshit (as long as it's intended to lead somewhere new or marvelous), food (both eating it and preparing it), ecology, the game of Go/Weiqi, tea, liminal states of experience, natural disasters as large-scale correctives, cats, dogs, birds, and all animals except maybe mosquitoes and sharks, who I fear with something approaching a phobia (except that it's perfectly logical, as a land creature, to fear a gnashing, never-sleeping eating machine with replaceable rows of teeth that's had no need to evolve since the time when dinosaurs roamed the planet)... Also: gallows humor in all its forms.

• animals
• cats
• dogs
• birds
• arts
• culture
• writing
• literature
• design
• photography
• dining
• cooking
• flying
• traveling
• guitar
• scuba diving
• ecology
• entomology
• philosophy
• software
• rivers
• mountains

Music, Movies, and Books

MOVIES: The Lives of Others, The White Meadow, A Most Wanted Man, Gravity, Under the Skin, Adaptation, Spirited Away, Century of the Self, Let the Right One In, Requiem for a Dream, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Blade Runner, The Dark Knight (for the Trickster, as embodied by Heath Ledger's Joker), Brokeback Mountain, and too many to list without boring you.
MUSIC: Brian Eno, Velvet Underground, Tom Waits, X-Ray Spex, Pixies, Bob Dylan, Django Reinhardt/Stephane Grappelli, 70's Ethiopian jazz, TV on the Radio, Fugazi, Amon Tobin, Howlin' Wolf, Os Mutantes, Sleater-Kinney, Janelle Monae, Neko Case, old Studio One Jamaican soul and reggae (esp. Joe Higgs), Prince, Blackalicious, Wu-Tang Clan, Will Oldham/Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Captain Beefheart, Curtis Mayfield... lots of jazz and classical, too.
BOOKS: "Magic and Eros in the Renaissance,"; "The Art of Not Being Governed" + "Seeing Like a State," by James C. Scott; "The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property" and "Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art," by Lewis Hyde; "Suttree," by Cormac McCarthy; "Lolita,"by Vladimir Nabokov; "Hopscotch," by Julio Cortazar; almost everything by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez; all essays and reporting by David Foster Wallace; "Imagine the Angels of Bread," poems by Martin Espada; "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung," by Lester Bangs; any plays or short stories by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig; "Perfume," by Patrick Susskind; "Speaker for the Dead," by Orson Scott Card

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Just one? I've gone cliff-diving into icy snow-runoff canyon rivers in the mountains of northern New Mexico. I played guitar and sang Pixies songs with one of China's most prominent (now-exiled) dissident poets and historians, Liao Yiwu. I was in New York the day after 9/11, and saw hardened NYC cops weeping behind their blue barricades. I've walked through fern-gullied old-growth redwood forests in Humboldt County California that have been alive since the Roman Empire still held sway. And a cat name Felix literally gave birth on my left foot.