Goals

I rarely set goals for myself, whether qualifiable or quantifiable. I suppose I am not so wired? Or I don't find goals useful? I had a year or two when I set modest savings goals; I committed to running a marathon in 2006. What else? Not much.

Do you set goals? Do you write them down or at all publicize them? Are you far more logical and deliberate than I am?

When I think about the future, I do so emotionally. Does that even make sense? I construct a story—a dream?—about what the future will be, about who I will be. I do not say, by the end of 2012 I will have taken a trip to Alaska with a woman I hope to marry. Rather, an image of the future shifts and dances: I hope to be happy.

That Being Said

I set two goals for myself in 2011:

1. Get a dog
2. Run a mile in less than five minutes by my 30th birthday

Here were two hopes, one qualifiable and one quantifiable, that were nearly always a part of my story for the future. I decided 2011 was the year to set these concrete goals.

Chuquisaca Mona d'Avis

As you are well aware, I brought a darling and ridiculous little dog into my life in February: Chuqui. Goal, check!

Her initial hopes were uncomplicated: please don't let this heat grating turn off please don't let this heat grating turn off. Chuqui became more accustomed to this new world; she gained weight, confidence and character. She responded to training and grew to love our family (as far as I can anthropomorphize her reactions).

One hurdle persisted: Chuqui would not climb the stairs in our house from the first floor to the second. She would climb stairs in the park and everywhere else; she would go down the stairs in our house. But every time, no matter coaxing, commanding or treats, she would refuse that trip up wooden steps to our room, her bed and haven.

I carried Chuqui, every time. In July, I decided I was smarter (duh). When I would take Chuqui upstairs, I would carry her nearly all the way but place her down, paws ready to scamper, one stair shy of the top. The next day, I would place her another stair lower. And on and on. Eventually, I was placing her front paws on the first step and Chuqui would climb the rest.

Yes! So close!

Milestones

As you are likely aware, I put together a group of friends to run monthly mile races with me. I clocked a 5:08 mile in June and a 5:07 mile in July. We ran a gut-busting stair workout in July; I hit the gym and I hit the track. I bought fast new shoes, so flexible and light and bright.

I felt like August could be the month. I felt like August 10th could be the day. I had run a blazing track workout the week previous, culminating with a set of four 400-meter laps at 76, 74, 71, and 67 seconds. I felt strong and fast.

I showed up to the track—Sarah accompanying to watch the clock—to find Andy Lin warming up laps with a bit of good fortune: high school runners. Andy had befriended a 17-year-old miler. I watched the kid run blistering 1200 meter intervals.

"So you're actually fast, right?" I asked him. "What do you run, 4:20?"

"4:25." His name was Brian, and he was willing to pace me. Let's do this!

The young man, all helpfulness and humility, let me lead the first lap: 76 seconds. He gave me the inner lane on the curve then slipped easily in front of me so I could draft on the straights. We ran another 76 second lap, then another. I pushed hard on that third lap, as it was always my slowest. 3:48, and the goal was in reach!

I don't remember exactly what Brian said to me at the start of the 4th lap but it was something like "Well, we need to run this one fast." I pushed hard through the first 200 meters and couldn't even focus to check my time with the last 200 to go. As we entered the final curve, Brian told me, "Just 10 hard steps!"

I was thinking I needed a bunch more than just 10 steps but figured this was indication to kick. I kicked. I felt more tired in this final 200 meters than I ever had before at this point in the mile. But I kicked. I powered out of the turn and into the straight and pushed with my arms and finished hard through the end.

Sarah was all smiles. 4:57! And then I lay down on the ground.

Puppy Steps

That same week, indeed the next night, I was out having tea when Chuqui wanted to go to bed. Sarah and Charlie led her to the stairs and she trotted right up without any aid. My little wigglebutt was growing up, and she hasn't looked back yet.

What's Next?

I have no idea.

You shared this song with me (and he with you?) and now I shared this song with her and here we are another year later or some twenty-five days later. Who will be listening to this melody in another year? Will the notes describe any lines between any hearts, however tangled, yours or mine or hers? Better that I abandon this song entirely, and go searching for a new song to sing into a new heart?

How long along this arc of life will I have memory of you and fennel? The corner never comes until I have stopped awaiting it. Carrots, dirt, wine, a café, a tree on a block in our neighborhood: all these (however ephemeral) materialities grow and root in my connections and memories with you and with you and you and you. I refuse to cast aside cherry pits but I would love to forget the smell behind your ear, evening air and mischief.

Would that I could see myself unfolding and changing along this arc of life, forward and backward. Would that I could fully grasp who I am and was and will be and so trust in the utility of these memories, lovely and painful, given and taken. I must hope and trust and keep singing along to life.

One year ago today I landed in Seattle after 160 days traveling Latin America and 173 days away from Seattle. Happy Returniversary, Carlos. Thanks, Drew.

Good then, appropriate, that I saw Grupo Do-It. (I am endlessly drawn into the circular and cyclical.) Our fearless leader, Eric, was not in attendance tonight: he moved to Palo Alto with Carla last week. I settled in Seattle, eventually, and Eric and Carla left. Who'd have guessed?

One year ago today I had just finished a funny week in Ecuador with Eric. Funny in that the weather and surf were poor and in that Montañita was a weird and unhealthy little beach town. One week was sufficient—I wanted to be done traveling. I wrote End of the Line in Montañita, just prior to my return. Still, I had no idea, then, that I would I stay in Seattle. What did I expect? What did I want?

My personal journal entries from June 13th, 2010 reveal much, but not all. I tried to predict how I would feel in my return, how people would view me, how I would adjust. I reiterated some bit of philosophy constructed in the course of travel:

The world is larger and more complex and wondrous than I can ever hope to understand or experience fully, but I can find love and beauty and connection anywhere, all the same.

I always repeat words in my head; I construct fantastical conversations and act out improbable situations. A phrase can become an ephemeral mantra, unforgettable in some period but then lost completely if not inscribed. So was my consideration of complexity and wonder and so attached to the process and result of my tattoo in Chile. Sometimes I cannot lose a lyric. (Every day I see my dream.)

Lately I twist no philosophy but write poems about carrots, the original never sent to its inspiration but instead lost and deconstructed. Once, “earthbound dreaming ... of the fully bounty of summer.” Now, “chop chop chop chop, fuck you.” Oh, silly me.

For the first time, in this very moment, I realized that I know I will be in Seattle one year from today. Yes, yes, no one ever truly knows anything. And maybe I'll be out of town at a wedding or Taiwanese dog convention. But I want to be living in Seattle in a year, no matter the status of any carrots or the sunshine in Costa Rica. My dog likes it here. I like it here.

Team Grupo Do-It asked me, over our delicious Ethiopian cuisine, whether I preferred these last twelves months or those prior. I didn't pause too long in consideration. No matter the lack of grand adventure and passport stamps, I preferred the last year. I have been happier; I have had less emotional upheaval. I believe—I hope—that my life bends toward a more peaceful and tenable happiness. I could find happiness anywhere, perhaps, but I would like to build happiness here.

Welcome home, Carlos. Many happy returns, Drew.

My family traditionally spends Thanksgiving at Pinkham Notch, at the base of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. We hike, eat a meal prepared for us by the lodge staff, and enjoy the rustic comforts (read: reading by the fireplace). This year, icy alpine roads and distance from Boston physicians were not exactly favored criteria for the holiday weekend, no matter the other qualities.

Our menu was as follows:

• Beet Soup
• Biscuits
• Herb Butter Turkey
• Whole Pumpkin, Stuffed with Rice, Kale, & Cheese
• Brussel Sprouts with Mustard Vinaigrette
• Stuffing
• Mashed Potatoes
• Cranberry Relish
• Turkey Gravy
• Mushroom Gravy
• Llajwa
• Duckhorn 2006 Napa Valley Merlot
• Apple, Pear & Cranberry Crumble Pie with Whipped Cream
• Coffee

I would say we did stupendously, for my family being a bit out of practice. Have I mentioned that my favorite color is beet soup? Have I mentioned that I adore food? Have I mentioned that I am living on the East Coast through the end of the year? Wow.

The last time I spent more than two weeks in Massachusetts was the summer of 2001, having returned to live at home after my first year of college. How old was I? 19? Yes, 19. I will go ahead and call this, now, the first time I will have lived in Massachusetts for a significant period as an adult. I am not sure what to expect from this time.

Well, for one, and most importantly, I will become an uncle. Nicole and Mark are less than two weeks away from welcoming Blueberry into this world. Our family is getting bigger! I suppose our family is already bigger by virtue of Nicole's belly enormity. I love you, Nicole, and this is the best ever, but your belly is huge. You were always little Colie—once I got taller than you at least—but you're little Colie plus a watermelon now.

Tell me, again, how we became adults and this all happened?

Truly, I could not imagine being away during this period. Blueberry is coming! I need to be here to see Blueberry! I am so thankful for my present circumstance, that I can pick up and fly to Boston to be close to family. The religious or spiritual connotations of the word are not my favorite but allow me, please, to say that I feel blessed. Lucky is hapless and banal and I do not feel lucky. I feel blessed.

Etymologically, blessed is consecrated by blood. Allow me to redefine to suit my purposes: blessed is made dear by family.

Blessed is having been raised well, loved and cared for, in a warm family and home where hugs were given and hot food was served (however infrequently it was turkey). Blessed is the camaraderie, support, roofs, and shenanigans offered by that larger family, my friends in Seattle and San Francisco and everywhere.

Blessed is experiencing the wide world. Blessed is receiving an education, an inquisitive and critical mind, and the means and confidence to make my own way. Blessed is making that way, losing that way, and accepting that lost and found are all part of it. Blessed is knowing that I am never truly alone.

Blessed is returning home to my family glowing, reunited all about Mark and Nicole in this new consecration. Blessed is goofing in the kitchen and playing dominoes after dinner.

Blessed is love, blessed we be, and blessed be Blueberry. Thank you.

I will not offer my own wisdom on the matter—unproven as it would be—and I will not transmit such lessons from the book. Rather, I intend to offer meteorological portraits of Robbins' most beloved Seattle, indeed of the conditions in which we have so recently found ourselves:

On the shores of Puget Sound, October had come in like a lamb chop, breaded in golden crumbs and gently sautéed in a splash of blue oil. Indian summer, some characterized it, incorrectly, for technically, Indian summer must follow a frost, and there hadn't been a sign of frost since that freak freeze back in April. Rather, it was an extension of summer, summer had uncoiled and stretched itself out, like the garter snakes that, having heard no call to hibernate, still sunned themselves in the blackberry patch; snakes, all belt and no pants, startled from their prolonged laze only by the occasional fall of a berry, grown fat as a dove's egg and black as a curse in this longest of summers.

And to tempt and hasten the weather that surely blows near:

On the mainland, a rain was falling. The famous Seattle rain. The thin, gray rain that toadstools love. The persistent rain that knows every hidden entrance into collar and shopping bag. The quiet rain that can rust a tin roof without the tin room making a sound in protest. The shamanic rain that feeds the imagination. The rain that seems actually a secret language, whispering, like the ecstasy of primitives, of the essence of things.

One cannot claim that Tom Robbins does not write like Tom Robbins, or that he does not love Seattle.

I will claim that I begin again to love Seattle, weather be blessed or be damned, and that I read as always I read. Of love more archetypally I have nothing to add, well, perhaps just one opening sentence like a bag of bricks, having prompted me to purchase without further consideration Winterson's Written on the Body:

Why is the measure of love loss?

Truly? No, surely not. Truly? I suppose I will read on and love on and puzzle out the answer one of these years.

This is what I looked like on December 19, 2008.

This is what I looked like on April 2, 2010, the last time my hair was of this length.

And this is what I look like today.

My hair does seem to be the same length as it was some four months ago. Has my face changed? Do I look older, wiser? More caffeinated? More handsomest?

Please say yes. I drink these gloriously poisonous cups of coffee to burn through another day, to pay my way to some brighter future one bit of liver health at a time. Two years have passed, and forever, and what can I trust but that my face ages gracefully?
Another cup of coffee, please.

I have a tendency to remark, seriously and sometimes not so much so, "The moon is full. I should be traveling." I said as much last night at dinner on a friend's balcony. The moon is full tonight and tomorrow I fly to Boston for two weeks with the family. I should be out walking underneath the full moon right now. How far to the Atlantic?

I caught glimpses of Mount Rainier at sunset last night, from the aforementioned balcony, and then again this evening while swimming in Lake Washington. When I arrive late for my swim, and the sun is already hidden behind the hills and trees, I can stroke away from shore and back out into the daylight. At the buoy, with the low sun on the chill lake, the mountain is there. Here, in Seattle, you say the mountain—the mountain is out—and no one doubts as to your subject. Here, in Seattle, the weather and landscape so dominate our perspective. There, there is our mountain, Rainier: wonder at its majesty. Here, here we are in Seattle, where the rain falls always and life is still somehow marvelous.

Saturday afternoon I will swim again in a small lake, quietly beautiful in the Northeastern way, no grand jagged mountains, no salmon somewhere down there in this same lake as me. But beautiful, with its own little bass: I will swim again in New Hampshire with my family.

I departed for Costa Rica in January and have not seen my father, sister, or brother-in-law since. (My mother visited me in Peru.) Good then that I will reunite with them, that I will join them in a week of escape. Well, relative escape: I will still be working remotely. What's new?

What is new, what is nascent? I will see Nicole, my sister, for the first time since our fateful May 3rd conversation, me in a Mendoza hotel room and she in Boston. She, newly aware, told me she was due with her and Mark's first child, due on my birthday December 9th. This woman, this Colie Wolie, has a little Blueberry in her belly.

I am so excited. Life will continue and our family will grow. And Nicole and Mark will likely not enjoy so many naps in future years. Sleep, then, now for me and perhaps not then: what uncle will I be?

What does it take? Sometimes, a happy song.

Sometimes, a sad song.

Perhaps I'll consider an old photograph of me and Whit, 2001 say.

And then I'll marvel at a new photograph of us, thanks to Dave for the capture.

I'll think about breakfast with Faye and I'll think about my swim yesterday and the cool lake water yet to come in New Hampshire. Okay, I can do this.

Today is Friday the 13th; I returned two months ago to Seattle from Ecuador and all. I have spent the last two months fully tangled up in work. I have spent the last two months up and down emotionally and, overwhelmingly, trying to puzzle out who I am now. I am some version of Andrew.

I was driving up I-5, all the way from San Francisco to Seattle, on no reasonable schedule at all. The time was five in the afternoon, perhaps, and I was nowhere close to the Oregon border. I had been seeing signs for Mount and Lake, all Shasta and gorgeous and northern California.

California was good—so good. Claire, Whit and I ate In-N-Out for our first meal back in the Golden State. I saw my cousins and I saw my aunt and uncle: love. Maren and I drank so much good coffee and ate so many delicious foods. (Brioche doughnut holes at LaMill Coffee are for real.) I had drinks and hugs and laughs with the incredible community in San Francisco.

Whit and Claire's couch felt like home. Sparkle Motion felt like home.
I was good, glorious ol' Drew.

So I was on I-5, right? And I saw the bridge approaching, and I started thinking, Am I the same, the same boring? Driving to Seattle without any magic or perspective?

What am I leaving? Where am I going? Fuck it, I need to jump in this lake!

I crossed the bridge and pulled off the highway, winding my way down a dirt road and nearly bottoming out a few times. Funny that, how I make poor driving choices on country roads whilst in fragile emotional states.

I parked. I made my way down through the brush to the rocky shore and slipped out into the cool milky blue. I am still traveling.

Modest Mouse - 3rd Planet

The universe is shaped exactly like the Earth
If you go straight long enough you'll end up where you were

Passing by the exit for 210 East felt wrong—not heading to Claremont, for once—and so did listening to some random indie-folk as I elected instead 405 South. I changed up The Tallest Man on Earth for Mika; "We Are Golden" felt like Los Angeles no matter the singer's origins. And then I changed again, to the 2004 Braineater Pump Up Mix. "F*ck Wit Dre Day" was just right.

I'll be staying with my aunt and uncle in the Valley for the next few days, catching up with friends in the area and working as much as I am able. Los Angeles... California... what are these places?

I spent the last three days staying near Palo Alto with my cousin Cindy, her husband Jay, and their sons Adam and Eric. I played with Bionicles and regular-type Legos, drew pictures, sprained my ankle, went to the beach, and generally fulfilled duties as cool-older-cousin. So apparently one of the themes of 2010 is catching up with Bolivian family: in other words, being a better person.

On I-5 South, just a bit south of Gilroy and early in my drive today, I noticed first a black plume of smoke up ahead of me. It wasn't the smoke monster from LOST. I reached eventually a mess of brush fire and fire trucks on the opposite side of the northbound lane. Traffic was backed up for over three miles but at the front of this jam were half a dozen people or so, dancing and singing in the median with a trumpet, accordion, and tuba.

My aunt and uncle's street in Woodland Hills smells of sunshine and eucalyptus. California!