It’s 30 days ‘til 30 and I’m sitting at a Peet’s coffee shop in Carlsbad, CA. It’s a lovely 70 degrees this morning and expected to go up to 74 where the weather has been every day this week. The particular Peets I’m sitting at is in the office park with the Trader Joes, incase you need a point of reference.

I am here today, dressed in my only suit that fits, sipping a redeye and prepping for an interview with a tempt agency in just under two hours.

In other words, it’s 30 days ‘til 30 and I have no friggin’ idea how my life will look 30 days from now.

After 12 months of sending out resumes, the husband and I have decided that I should consider applying for jobs in San Diego’s job market as well as Portland’s and we will follow whatever path opens for us.

I spent the first quarter-century of my life fighting with and giving into the pull of the South. I was a pure Southerner who didn’t belong. Like too many people who are born in the South, I spent my whole adolescence feeling like an outsider only to spend much of my twenties trying to appease my guilt for leaving. It’s been nearly a decade since I left the south and, aside from a stubborn sense of propriety, I’m not a Southerner anymore.

I lived in the South for 22 years, the Midwest for 6 years, the Pacific Northwest for 1 year, and now I’m toying with the idea of moving to southern California. The truth is I feel no particular attraction to any of these places. I know I’m done with Chicago and I know I can’t go back to Kentucky but rest doesn’t seem too important.

What kind of life do I want to have—if these two paths open before me. Do I want the quiet, rough-neck, anti-establishment, permanently recessed ways of Portland or do I want the surf, sand, sun, and vapid consumerism of Southern California? Can I bring my Portland personality to California? Is there any soil for it to grow in if I do?

These are some of my thoughts on the 335th day of my 29th year at roughly 8:30 in the morning.

~~~
As I approach 30, there are a wave of changes beginning to happen—mostly in my approach to life and confidence. One of these changes is my approach to happiness, and the idea that it may be much easier to achieve than I’ve made it out to be.

The question I’m considering today is how to move from consumption to collaboration.

Kill consumption completely. How do I make all of the things I experience in life—food, sex, music, film, dance, work—experiences of collaboration rather than consumption?

An Example: Work.
In a given job there are only so many pegs on the board. Your job is to move said pegs. Someone tells you how and when those pegs should be moved. You do it—with precision, clarity, professionalism. If you do this, you’ll always be employed pushing pegs across a board. For the rest of your life. This is the corporate trap.

Another option: You see the pegs, you understand your function, you move the pegs across the board. Sometimes you recognize that your feedback is in the way, so you just shut up and move the pegs. Other times you recognize that there is room for collaboration. You discuss the pegs, their shapes and colors and contours. You know the board and why each peg is placed the way it is. You are not a functionary in this role, but a collaborator. As the people instructing you become more trusting of your feedback you rise in their estimation and when an opportunity presents itself you take it, lifting yourself up the rungs of the ladder.

A year ago this discussion would have repulsed me—the problem I would have said—is that any of us have to play these games in the first place, that there’s no work to be done with our hands that gives us meaning. A year ago I would have believed that was true, I might still believe it’s true today. But after a year of recessed living my outlook has become more rooted in harsh reality.

No, none of us should have to work for corporations. But, try as I might, I cannot single-handedly change that. I can participate in my consumption, avoid all corporate chains, buy my food at the farmer’s markets, resist the corporate machine through my dollar and support all things local, organic, and of the community in which I live. I cannot, however, resist the need to work.

The world is what it is, and I can either fight that and live in my idealism or I can go with it and make my inner world without all this constant struggle. Credit cards and student debt have already tethered me to the system, and other than giving up everything and disappearing into the mountains for the rest of my life, the only real choice I have is how to deal with my place in the system.

We can wear a suit to work or we can wear an ironic t-shirt, either way we all have to work. We can pretend that isn’t true, but that doesn’t change our need for a home, a car (in this culture) and a way to pay for all of those glorious, useless MFAs we were sold as kids.

Comment?

I began writing as a poet. I even applied, and was accepted to, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s writing program as a poet. But by the time I arrived at the school I already had twenty pages of what I was sure would be my first novel in-hand and I spent the better part of my two years there trying to write that novel.

With time, I came to see the immaturity of the novel that I had tried to write and I recognized that I had allowed all of the well-intentioned “advice” of teachers and peers to move the story so far from where I had intended that in the end the book I nearly wrote looked nothing at all like a story I wanted to put my name on. So, eventually, I gave it up.

Since then, plot and I have had a difficult relationship. There are two inherent impulses at work when I write. The first is what I consider to be the poet’s inclination, to capture fragments of language, distilled moments, the feeling without all of the pomp and circumstance that leads to the expression of the feeling. The other impulse is the novelistic impulse, and it is an impulse distinctly tied to the traditionally structured “narratives” that I enjoy reading most.

Of course there is always the possibility that these two forces are not in conflict and that my notion of what a novel “is” needs to change. This was an idea that I toyed with greatly in graduate school, and as much as I love and appreciate the works of Blanchot, Calvino, Perec, Danielski or any of the other fine novelists who explode traditional notions of narrative in their work, those types of novels are not simply not the types that I wish to write.

Because of these conflicts I have always had trouble with plot. I want to write a novel where plot arises from character, and so I have always set out to write with a strong sense of character and allowed the plot to arise from that.

This time around, I’m trying things a bit differently. Using my trusty recorder I have talked through what I imagine the basic plot of my story to be. I have made an outline and today I am going to put each point of that outline on its own page. Then, over the next few weeks, I will write a scene for each plot point on each page.

Of course, the plot will change as the story changes and the finer subplots and asides to the book have not been considered yet. Still, this time around, I want to lay down the plot in the beginning so that I know where I am going and try to avoid fretting about plot as I trudge along. This doesn’t mean that the plot can’t change on a whim; it can. But if it does, my outline will change along with it.

So I’m off for another day of running and writing, neither of which are getting any easier but they both feel good nonetheless.

Comment?

For the past week I have not felt like myself, and not in the ways that one would suspect when packing up their lives and moving two time zones away from anyone you know. No, the feeling of “not self” that I have experienced is more primitive, more innate.

Walking through the park after diner tonight I began to grasp part of what has brought this feeling on. I am living farther north than I have lived before (by my amateur calculations, Portland seems to be about 4 degrees latitude north of Chicago). Because of this, and because we moved here the week of Summer Solstice, we are having the longest days of the year right now. The sun seems to be on the horizon until nearly 10 o’clock here. Even as I write this it is 9:04 and the sun has another good thirty minutes before it begins to set. My circadian rhythms have gone awry. Join this with the loss of 9-5 servitude, and the freedom to be creative at any point in the day, and suddenly it seems as though I am a different person, that I have a different purpose and flow than I did before.

Of course, when you feel you have all the time in the world it’s also easy to not achieve much, and much of the resistance I felt to working last week can, I believe, be linked to this phenomena.

So, to counteract this confounding paradox (more time to create=decreased creativity) I set myself on a schedule today.

My day is now broken up into digestible bits, with time for exercise, eating, reading, emailing, and doing basic household chores all given a fragment of what would be my 9-5 work day. I’m sticking to the schedule this week to see how it goes.

Today, I still found it difficult to completely concentrate and most of my writing did not happen in the allotted times. Yet, tonight I’ve been working more than on recent nights so I think that subconsciously I may be compensating for the time I missed.

Physically, I feel really good today and my running this morning had a tranquil, purposeful ease about it. My writing, as tough as it is right now, seems to be coming along and a “narrative” is arising that seems like it may be the start of something longer. I should know more by the end of the week, when on Friday I stop to take a brief account of the work that I’ve managed to get done in the last two weeks.

For now, Over and Out.
JHW

Comment?

It seems irrational to need a “break” so soon into this little experiment, but this weekend was not meant for writing. As ambitious as my 30 day goals are right now, I have to remember that I am also still getting adjusted to this new place, to the people, to being away from my friends and family, and to being dependent (for a while) on someone else’s income. So, this weekend was a time for becoming grounded, for discovering something new, and for revisiting some past influences.

This weekend seemed rare in Oregon (or so it seems based on our experience so far) because the weather was sunny and gorgeous all day Saturday and Sunday. So, Brandon and I decided to return to Cannon Beach, OR only this time instead of walking the forest trails in Ecola State Park we decided to park in Cannon Beach and walk south. We began our walk near Haystack Rock, which must be seen to be believed. This enormous rock sits just off the coast of Cannon Beach like a small island jolting up to the sun.

From this point we walked through the crowded beach down to where there were fewer people. There were people riding horses and beach bikes, but mostly we were alone for much of the jaunt. We walked down through Silver Point (where the ocean current has made an arch in one of the rocks), down to Humbug point (people flying kites of every shape and color) and finally down to Hug Point. Hug Point is a large rock outcropping with a narrow path that “hugs” the side of the rocks when the tide is low (in high tide navigating this rock requires some wading). The impressive thing about Hug Point is the amount of sea life you can observe up close on the rock: giant sea anemones, muscles, mollusks, crabs, and kelp are all plentiful here.

After crossing Hug Point we turned and headed back, a nice five mile round-trip all told. We grabbed some wonderful deep fried seafood at Ecola Seafood Market and then jumped in the car and headed back to Portland.

So, I didn’t officially write this weekend, and my exercise regime took a break in lieu of actual outdoor hiking. I come back to the work today recharged, committed, and ready to trudge forward with a schedule.

Comment?

So here we are in day two of my thirty-day respite. Overall the experiment is going very well, though I am beginning to realize just how badly engrained by bad habits are.

Agenda

WRITING (MIND): Yesterday was a day of starts and stops as far as creativity is concerned. I spent most of the morning pouring through my latest journal and typing up the bits of it that I want to work with. After several hours of doing this I realized that what I was getting looked exactly like what I already have, pages and pages of fragments that don’t hold together yet don’t stand alone. I already have more pages like this than I can possibly manage and my desire for this period is to make something cohesive rather than add to the debris that has already accumulated.

So, yesterday, I realized that if I want to make something different I have to try something different. So, I tricked myself out of my holding pattern by finding a new way to write. About a decade ago my sister bought me a micro-cassette recorder for Christmas (birthday?) to record lectures in college. Well, I tried this for a few weeks and the little recorder just wasn’t powerful enough to really capture lectures in a way that I could use for notation. It did prove useful, however, for self-dictation which I did my first year in college.

Going through all of the junk in our Chicago apartment before the move, I came across this recorder and almost threw it into the “junk” pile. But for some reason I didn’t. I remembered that I still had some blank cassettes as well as some notes I had made to myself a decade ago and if I pitched the recorder I would not have a way to listen to those cassettes to see what was on them. Two days ago I came across the cassette recorder again and decided to give it a try. I took it with me on my run yesterday morning and by the time I got back to the house I had several pages worth of notes—story ideas, life ideas, singular lines.

Yesterday I put the recorder to better use. I paced the apartment and recorded notes to myself. I talked through my writer’s block instead of writing all of my resistance down. When I played the tape back I began to see little chunks of narrative that I could use. So, I jotted all of those down in my “compost” file. Then, I went back to some old material and read it aloud to myself with the recorder running. On playback, it’s much easier to tell which fragments still have life and which ones I need to let go of. I even riffed off of a few of them and stories began to emerge.

Yesterday, I added 4,111 words to the compost heap (not counting blog posts) and I hope to match or surpass that number today. I like this method and I hope that it will push me out of my comfort zone and into some fertile new terrain.

BODY: Today was day three for running. I started my jog with clarity and determination and the first lap around Pier Park went pretty well—I even thought I would add another lap to my course. A quarter way through my second lap, however, I just lost the ability to move forward. I couldn’t breathe, could move my legs, and certainly couldn’t run. It’s often difficult at the start of a run routine to tell the difference between the pain that you need to push through and the pain that’s going to screw you up for a week if you don’t listen to it. Today, I believe I experienced the latter so I dialed it back and briskly walked the remaining loop before exiting the park and exploring the neighborhood a bit more on foot.

As for food, we’re continuing to eat healthy though I realize that I am a “bored eater.” When I’m home and procrastinating I eat, and even if it’s health food I just can’t do this for the next thirty days. Brandon’s obsession with all things Ben and Jerry’s also added another indulgence last night that was wonderful, but certainly unnecessary. So, today I’m trying to measure out my food and to not snack between meals. It’s tough but I think I can do it.

Cigarette count yesterday—three. Quitting is for quitters. :)

Peace and much love for now. Over and out.

JHW

Comment? [1]

You may notice that yesterday was supposed to be the first day of my 30 day life “reboot.” Well, it was supposed to begin yesterday but the beginning did not meet my expectations. It seems there were still lingering move issues that I had to deal with yesterday and much of the day was spent on final unpacking, picking up essentials from the store, FINDING the store, and developing a working budget. An undertaking like this should be conducted with all seriousness, and so I’m going to delay the start for one more day, a.k.a. “today.”

Today’s Agenda

WRITING: After I finish this post I will write for a solid hour, grab some lunch and read, and then come back to work for several hours this afternoon and tonight. How I’m approaching this downtime is this: write 30 pages without looking at it. These pages can have entries lifted from my journals but I want nothing older than a few weeks to make it into these pages. The purpose of this exercise is generation, without expectation, without direction, just simple generation. When I have 30 pages I will go back, read it all, highlight what seems to work the most, pull those chunks to the front and move forward from there, working in the direction of the chunks I favor. Turn off the brain, just create. Ideas will come later. After this raw generation, my hours tonight will be spent pouring through older material and selecting fragments that seem worth saving. This is evening, editorial work, which should not cross paths with the raw generation that my mornings and mid-days will be devoted to.

FITNESS/FOOD: I’m happy to report that I did make it out for another run in Pier Park today. The run was difficult and had more stops/starts than I would have liked. Still, on my second loop around the park I approached the final hill and wanted to just quit jogging and walk it. However, I saw in that moment that I had a choice and I had to make it immediately or the hill would defeat me. So, I quieted the quivering in my legs and hunkered down. My legs hurt but a zen-like clarity came to my mind and pushed me over the last hill. When I got to the top, I went from a jog to a walk and felt much better about the day knowing that I had concurred at least one small thing before nine.

SMOKING: I had one cigarette last night, so as long as I can stick to this regiment I may be able to evade the “cold turkey” route.

Comment?

Greetings from the West Coast. Today, July 8, 2008, officially begins my 30 day respite from the world of work and toil. It’s been ten years since I’ve really had a period of my life without paycheck work, where I can free my mind of clutter and coworker prattle and really focus all of the energy I have on my self and creative work.

We do not live in a world where this type of behavior is favored. The basic demands of our capitalist culture lock us into a lifelong cycles of work, production, and sanitized recreation. We are tricked into colleges and graduate schools, coming out of those institutions with pieces of paper that have no intrinsic value in and of themselves. More importantly, we come out of those institutions, most of us anyway, with mounds of student loan debt—amounts so high that we pay for them every month for thirty years before we see our way out. My combined loans from and undergraduate education at the University of Kentucky (most of which was paid for) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago topple well above the $60,000 mark.

This is the beginning of the trap, followed by clothes, food, housing, cars, insurance, plane rides, vacations, big screen TVs, psychiatrists to keep us all in check. It’s an unyielding, relentless, pitfall of a way to live.

So, for thirty days I am stepping outside of it. Organizing my days in a way I see fit, working toward no goals other than goals of mind, body, and spirit—-essentials that I have neglect for far too long.

Today I jogged in Pier Park in the St. John’s neighborhood of north Portland. The park is truly a beauty to behold, with it’s swaths of unearthly pines blocking all sounds and sites from the city. Dirt and paved trails lace through the park, and try as I might I never seem to hit the same trail twice.

Today’s run was difficult. After a long, withdrawn winter in Chicago I’ve put on 15 pounds too many. I am out of shape, a chronic smoker, with a terrible diet and a sedentary job. But these things are changing. Since arriving Brandon and I have found the Portland farmer’s market, and we stocked the kitchen with loads of fresh fruit and vegetables, local meats, spices and herbs from the surrounding countryside. Brandon has been on a kick of preparing simple, wholesome, and delicious gourmet quality meals. Even the simple meals (salami, ham, and sharp Wisconsin Cheddar cheese on olive and garlic bread and champagne mustard—fantastic) become works of art.

I’ve also limited my smoking to 1-2 cigarettes a day, consumed at night. No, I haven’t technically “quit” yet, but as my running increases I anticipate a marked decline in my nicotine cravings. If these craving begin to get the better of me, then I suppose I will have to go the cold turkey route even though smoking is one of my favorite things in the world to do.

As for work, my job for the next thirty days is to reshape my body and to recapture the writing bug. I will be writing a lot, most of which will probably never see the light of day. This “Notebook” is going to be a record of my progress rather than one of the actual work.

So day one, I feel energetic, my mind is cloudy but free and I’m recognizing the need to lay down a schedule for the next 29 days (this is what I do first, followed by…., etc., etc.) Is it wrong to impose structure on this “down time,” maybe, but this downtime needs to be productive and holding myself to my own rules seems to be the only way to ensure that will happen.

So, now I’m off for a shower, chores, and a few course hours of writing. Hopefully by my check-in tomorrow a schedule will begin to emerge and my anxiety about making the most of this time will start to wane.

Comment?

It’s 11:15 at night. I’ve had three drinks at the Huttenbar in Lincoln Square—Chicago, IL, strong German Beer. It’s 11:15 and despite being awake since 6 a.m. due to an overly eager and amorous husband, these are the first moments of the day I have to myself.

Where I am at today: In 23 days we will pack everything we own into two 8×6×7 foot pods, throw the feuding cats into the backseat of the car, and head cross country from Chicago to Portland, Oregon.

What is waiting in Portland: a 730sq. foot apartment an hour from downtown. No job. No friends. Pristine forests of Douglas Firs and the Pacific Ocean an hour to the west.

For one month I have made myself a promise: to exercise my body and to honor my creativity by working every day.

Thirty-day challenges, at this point they seem like such a cliché: Jenny-Craig, NANOWRIMO, vegan-detox. Thirty days, a magical number that can turn your life around, make you stop smoking, finish that novel.

Do they work, these thirty day trends? Who knows? All I realize is that at this point I am starved for creativity, nature, and decompression. I am overstimulated and shutdown; starved for the essentials so severely that I am willing, and in fact find it reasonable, to pack my bags, throw the cats in the car, and take off cross country.

How can I enjoy these last days when my mind is already headed west; I imagine it’s somewhere in the Rockies by now, on foot, climbing higher with eyes set on the indelible west, just beyond the horizon, with all the possibilities that it holds.

Image courtesy Stiphy via a CC license.

Comment?

If you are like I once was, the thought has occasionally crossed your mind: “maybe I watch too much t.v.?” You look at all the things you once dreamed of accomplishing, learning to play guitar, mastering the fine art of cooking, writing a novel, getting inshape, keeping in touch with friends and family. Each New Year’s Day you say to yourself, “alright, this year is the year I’m going to reach my goals” yet when December comes you find yourself in the same situation as the year before, except you are a year older and more removed from those dreams you once had.

I am not here to criticize you for watching television, but I would like to share with you my story about giving it up.

When the husband and I met I was a closeted television watcher. I had a 12” television with a wire hanger attached to the back from which I could watch PBS and the major networks. Brandon, however, had cable, a luxury I had not had the resources to enjoy since moving to Chicago.

At first I was mostly impervious to the allure of cable, however, as our first long Chicago winter together progressed our television viewing hours increased exponentially. At the end of that winter, we looked back and wondered what the hell had happened. Somehow, our social calendar had been reduced yet neither of us had produced any creative work.

When we moved in together in April of 2006, we made the decision to give up television. We knew it would be a hefty sacrifice, for we had grown accustomed to our daily doses of VH1, The Daily Show, and Stephen Colbert, as well as our weekly forays with Battlestar Galactica, South Park, and others seemingly important shows that I have since forgotten.

In the spirit of honesty, l admit that the first few months were a challenge. Instead of a rapid outpouring of creativity, we found ourselves bored at night, constantly feuding, and moving through our Netflix queue with a tenacious rapidity. However, over the course of several months our longing for television began to wane, and as it did we slowly began to fill our lives with the pursuit of those dreams that we longed for but that evaded us in our first year together.

My website, DJing, a renewed interest in reading, and creative writing have all been outcomes of giving up television, and I find myself enriched by these activities in a way today that I could never have foreseen when we began this modest experiment. I am often asked “So what do you do at night” when friends realize that no, we actually do not watch television. I’ve decided that the best response to this question is simply “We make dinner, we eat together, we separate and have creative time, and then we fuck. What do you do?”

I am not here to espouse moral superiority as though I have reached an enlightenment unattainable to those of you who watch television, but I am here to say that since giving up television my mind has reached a level of intellectual nuance and creativity that I could not access otherwise. The result of this clarity is most obvious to us on the rare occasions that we stumble out to see the latest blockbuster on the big screen. In the long wait leading up to the actual start of the picture, Brandon and I find ourselves watching the commercials and trailers leading up to the feature presentation with voyeuristic curiosity and detachment.

Popular culture, particularly the culture of television consumption, perpetuates itself through a systematic language of sign and signifier that is deeply ingrained through marketing, repetition, and habit. We like to speak of it this way: “In a commercial we saw before Beowulf, there was a series of signals, cute kid/ clumsy dufus guy/ accident/ explosion/ product placement.” All around us people laughed and cheered, but Brandon and I could not relate to the commercial. We are effectively so far removed from the broadcast paradigm that the symbols no longer work on us. Like bookworms and recluses everywhere, we need a connection between the signifier and signified. Marketing, particularly in the form of television commercials, has so desensitized the viewing public to these connections, through constant repetition, that the rest of the story is no longer necessary in order to sale a product. The general viewing public needs only the symbols, the punch lines, whereas we need a marketer to draw logical, thoughtful connections before hear the persuasion. In essence, by giving up television, the husband and I have become bad consumers. The easy jargon of the marketer fails on us because we do not make such simple connections. Our minds are focused on our lives, and we do not “turn off” several hours each night for a marketer to sale us the latest “must have” product.

We are by no means perfect in our withdrawal, and we own well worn copies of “Arrested Development” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” on DVD. However, the experience of watching these shows on DVD is far different than watching them on network T.V. Stripped of commercials, these shows, and others of equal standing, speak only of the art and craftsmanship that their writers intended. Our enjoyment of television as a medium, through DVD, is focused only on the show itself and not on the marketing sound bites that bookmark a show on network T.V. As a result, we are also far more discerning in our tastes.

Capitalism at its worst creates wants in order to sale us things we “need” in order to fulfill those wants. At its best, the inverse is true of capitalism. This is a pattern that is difficult to see, and only when an individual sufficiently removes herself from the medium do these connections become clear.

So, if your life feels muted, if you reach the end of your day and wonder what happened to all those hours since you woke up in the morning, if year after year passes and you continually find yourself farther removed from your most fundamental and idealistic goals, then perhaps the time has come for you, too, to question your addiction to media.

I never believed, when we began this little experiment, that I would come down so harshly on television as a medium. Yet, two years into the experiment, I find that my thoughts have grown broader, my awareness more acute, and my life so abundant in simple, creative, enriching endeavors, that I can never go back to mindlessly sitting through 3-4 hours of television per night. According to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation: “American children and adolescents spend 22 to 28 hours per week viewing television, more than any other activity except sleeping. By the age of 70 they will have spent 7 to 10 years of their lives watching TV.” Seven to ten years of your life seems like a vulgar amount of time to spend engaged in such a passive endeavor as watching T.V. Life is simply too short for that. So, if you feel that your life has become muted in ways you can’t explain, perhaps the time has come for you too to consider turning off your T.V. Give it some time, you will be surprised by the outcome.

Image by Roo Reynolds courtesy of a CC License.

Comment? [3]

Happy 08!

I am sitting, on this very cold January night, in my office, looking out across our wide car-lined street and dreaming about my life a year from now. It’s a hard life to imagine. The husband and I are considering a move to Portland, OR. In every way, the city sounds perfect on paper: progressive, focused on green technologies and sustainable living, a modest city within a stone’s throw of the mountains or the ocean, a city where we can start over and someday raise a family.

I still don’t know what I will do when I get there, or even if I will find the culture agreeable. It will be hard to say goodbye to all my midwest friends and family, and to move even farther away from my Kentucky roots, but I am a firm believer in following the the intuition’s calling. Life in Portland may not be easy, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take.

Sitting here tonight, I am also projecting a year into the future and thinking about the swearing in of a new president. By the time he leaves office, George W. Bush will have been president for nearly a third of my life. It seems unreal that a man with such blatant disregard for law, democracy, and separation of church and state is still in power. It seems equally surreal that this tyrant’s reign is almost, finally, over.

I have been monitoring the ’08 election with an almost compulsive fervor since last February. I can name all of the major candidates on both sides and I can give you a basic outline of what they stand for (well, this breaks down on the Republican side because it’s often confusing to know just what they DO stand for). So I was fixated on the Iowa caucus this week and I never imagined that it could turn out as it did.

Though I am an avid supporter of John Edwards, I am quite content to see Barack Obama pull ahead and take the lead in last night’s primary. I still believe that Edwards is the best candidate, however I will confess that watching the acceptance speeches of the three top Democrats last night no one matched the passion and charisma of Barrack Obama. It is a passion that I have missed from Obama during his run for President. Too often I have found Barrack “towing the line,” being submissive where I have longed for him to be a strong front runner. I have already voted for Barrack once, as an Illinois Senator, and if he wins the nomination for President I will be proud to vote for him again. Both Obama and Edwards represent a renewed optimism our country desperately needs after the cynical fiasco of the Bush years.

So, I hold my breath and follow the candidates to New Hampshire where I will also monitor this elaborate political game as it plays out. Though I wish for a strong showing by Edwards, I don’t believe that his appeal will reach the masses on the coastal states. Rather, I believe his true staying lies is in the West and South. My predictions for Tuesday’s primary goes as follows:

Democrats: Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton (a close second), and John Edwards.
Republicans: Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Mike Huckabee.

Never in my lifetime has there been such a radical gathering of political candidates running for President in the two party system. From the religious fundamentalism of Huckabee and Brownback (no longer running—-thank God {?}) to the popular libertarianism of Ron Paul, the radical leftism of Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, the popularism of McCain and Edwards, and the assumed reign of Hilary Clinton, this has been a fascinating race to watch. At long last the diversity of America has finally been presented on the national political stage where an African American, a woman, and a Mormon all have equally shots at the general election. I will keep watching regardless of the outcome, and I remain optimistic that this time a year from now much will have changed in my life and in this nation.

Comment? [1]