Welcome back. It’s been a little while, hasn’t it? Let me get you up to speed.

First and most obviously of all, this place looks a bit different. I’ve been putting off the task of redoing my blog design for years, but a switch of webhosts a few months back involved the reinstallation of my old blogging software (Greymatter), support for which had been discontinued before I ever started using it in 2002. A band, The Anniversary, has a song lyric around which I formed the crux of my former design: “Painting without colors / Tends to make it better / It bleaches out the world.” And that nicely summarizes my mental disposition four years ago, when I first started journaling (both here and on paper). If you have a glance at some of the earliest entries of this blog (which have been successfully imported into my new blog software, Wordpress), you will notice some running themes: verbosity, angst, and self-doubt. I was a depressed little camper four years ago, and I needed to talk about it — and I needed a blog that would visually convey my feelings. I wanted to cast the world in a hueless light so I could better focus on my own colors. So, with a few pointed exceptions meant to draw the eye, the last design was entirely black, white, and shades of grey.

As time went on, I climbed out of that quagmire of depression (the reasons for which you could glean from the topics of the early posts, if you are inclined to such curiosity), but the look of the blog remained. It started to hold me down; with every passing month, the person I was and the person I had been were walking down ever-divergent paths — but still, the look of the blog remained. I post here less and less frequently because it reminds me of that person — and while I’m neither ashamed of that person nor the things through which he went, I’m ready to be the person I’ve become.

So I’ve livened up the joint. I’m not saying I’m as happy as this new look would suggest; but then again, I was never as unhappy as the previous design’s swirls of grey implied, although perhaps I wanted to be. It was a pain, getting everything on the backend of this blog installed, converted, and cleaned up (I finally deleted all of those crappy spam comments — there were over 1000!), and it would have been very easy to archive the whole lot and start anew. But I have a nostalgic streak; I have a soft spot for the past, and I felt it was important to not try and repress any of that. Repression, after all, used to be chief amongst my faults.

San Francisco. I moved here about three and a half months ago, and I can’t fully describe in words everything that’s been going on with and within me — though in time, obviously, I will try.  I want to relegate the point of this post to being the “state of the union” that you just read, so I will refrain from describing the specifics of the last fourteen weeks… But I’ll be back for more, soon.

Thanks for reading this.  It means a lot to me, that you would check in and read about what I’m going through, even given my three month absence. I have been writing, by the way.  As I mentioned, I started journaling and blogging at the same time, and right now, I’m starting my sixth journal (given to me by Aaron; Chelsea gave me the fifth).  It’s full of thoughts, worries, hopes, and yes — song lyrics. But that’s a post for another time.

Can someone name the next line in the song after which this blog is named?  It’s all I can think about, right now.

New blog coming soon.  I swear!

Yesterday, I was on the search for pants. Ever since my old pair of $10 Gap khaki pants, much treasured and loved through the majority of college, sprouted several gaping holes (not the smallest of which conjuring itself in the crotch region) a few months ago, and the Spilled Wine on the White Pants Incident of yesteryear (read: last week), I have been making do with my collection of what can only termed “second-tier pants”. Sad as it may sound, I felt out of place without a sturdy and dependable pair of pants. What would become of me, were I to don pants that I could not appreciate myself wearing? Where had my Dumbo’s feather gone? And so it was, with these worries saddled on my brow, that I set out for the Haight district yesterday. Nothing could keep me from my goal of pants.

I searched high and low. Frustration began to percolate deep within my soul as I moved from vintage store to vintage store, thrifting my way down Haight Street to no avail. There were no pants to be found; none, at least, that seemed to want to conform themselves to my 33 x 32 frame. Even the trusty Gap, sacriligeous though its location on the famous Haight-Ashbury intersection may be, let me down. As the rain began to fall, intermingling with my crocodile tears, I was ready to call it quits, but I made my way into the last stop of the afternoon, the Crossroads Trading Company. And lo, was there a pair of pants that fit me to a specification so perfect, I could not have asked the very genie of the lamp to fabricate them, for I would have known not how to guide their construction. In fact, there were two. And so, dear reader, I purchased them, and I am wearing them now, and all is just a little bit more right with the world.

Such was this tribulation a microcosm for the set of all experiences that have comprised my emigration to San Francisco. The pursuit of my passions has brought me to this City, but I cannot find everything I need, exactly when I need it. There is something hidden in the cracks of this City that I have always sensed but never possessed the discernment to identify — and it is always the unexpected intangibles that step in and rescue me from the need to trash the day’s emotional progress due to the small rigors of a big life. The Victorian bay windows that stand in grand repose to my right; the skyscraper landscape I see now for the first time with the eyes of a resident instead of those of a guest; the diminuitive Chinese elderly that congregate around fruit markets; the change of weather every four hours. These are things I can name, but it is the unique interaction of all of these kinds of items together in one gelled atmosphere that create a whole much greater than the sum of its parts. It is the recognition of this gestalt that lifts me out of any worry even remotely related to the tumult of having uprooted myself and transplanted my life into a garden that boasts a much more fertile soil and the promise of a bumper crop of emotional levity. At times, I feel out of place and agoraphobic in this City, as though this place or these people desire my departure. I have relinquished some semblance of stability by leaving Modesto, but I gladly do so to live in a place where the large bulk of its residents invest purpose in their daily routine. I have been pretty moody these past days, with high highs and low lows, but such a life lies embroiled in delicious contrast to my time in Modesto at Gallo, where it was a struggle most days to get myself to feel at all. San Francisco is some sort of ignition key, an emotional catalyst, or whatever one wishes it to be. One needs simply to wish it to be something. This city is many things to many people, but I feel that it somehow will end up being one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

But perhaps it’s too soon for such declarations! After all, I only yesterday found a good pair of pants.