2019 - Gonna Be Just Fine?

Yeah, OK, I am not going to tempt fate by actually saying that I believe the title of this entry, because we all know what happens when I start feeling good about where I'm at and the things that are going on in my life - the universe decides to throw me a monster curve ball.  Yet I can't help but look back at the last month and a half or so and all of the time that has passed since the previous entry and be both surprised and grateful for the current state of affairs in my corner of the universe.

I don't know how else to put it other than to say that I have been legitimately happy for the last six weeks. Nothing is stressing me out, things make sense, and I've had so many moments that I can look back on and think about how I felt and say without reservation that things were good. Who the hell am I?  :-P

So, let's look at some of the specifics. First, what's going on with 3M? Nothing. Like I said in the previous entry, the odds of anything happening there were already extremely slim, and at this point I'm willing to say that they are indistinguishable from zero. However, I can still say that I've made a good friend; it only took me 5.5 years of living in the Bay Area to do so! Ha! She helped me with the magical mystery pants that I wore to Decadence on NYE, and we talk about random things related to consciousness or how the brain works or various other miscellany from time to time. I actually have a hypothesis as to why she and I met in the first place and what role she is likely to play in my life in 2019, but I will get to that later.

Lots and lots of crazy synchronicities continue to occur on a regular basis. The pop psychology books would claim that this is nothing more than confirmation bias, and maybe some of that is true, except that I'm not actually looking for specific patterns. I'm just seeing weird shit. Several things happened while I was in Denver, but the most bizarre one of all was running into G at the psytrance party. I hadn't seen this cat in 3 years, and he just happened to be there. Earlier in the trip, I was talking to A about music and Spotify and various new artists that I'd discovered; I mentioned one in particular that I had come across recently and had really gotten into, and I was going to play a song in the car when we were driving back to his apartment - the track comes up and A says, "Oh, MC Xander - he's going to be in Panama." OK, so maybe it's not that strange that A would know about MC Xander, but then he tells me that the guy is performing at Tribal Gathering in Panama at the end of February. Guess who else is going to TG? Yeah, this bird. Although as it turns out, MC Xander is performing on the day we all arrive in country, so we will miss his set, but I've talked to him a couple of times on IG and odds are that our paths will cross. Maybe I'll get to hear him do some one-off jam session or something.

Went to R's graduation in small-town West Texas.  This was just a good time all around, although I will forever consider her boyfriend to be a chicken for backing out on the air horns. Not me, I have no shame! Hell, when the dean of the school asked for people to give the new grads a round of applause, apparently that wasn't enough and he called for the noisemakers, so I double-fisted them, loud and proud. The boyfriend seems like a good dude, although it's hard to say what will happen there since they are already doing the long-distance (middle-distance is more like it - only 90 miles) thing, and he's applying for jobs outside of TX. She wants to get out of TX, too, but whether or not they go together I guess remains to be seen. Hopefully it works out.

Went skiing in Tahoe for Christmas. It was kind of a last-minute thing; I'd planned to go at some point before my pass blackout kicked in but I wasn't really sure when. Drove up to Northstar on Christmas Eve, skied for a few hours, and then spent the night in SLT. Christmas Day I was feeling sore (remember, I have not skied for shit in a long time) so I just kicked it around the town, went up the gondola and made a snowman, and got a picture of myself with my jacket off lying in the snow. I don't celebrate Christmas or even really give much of a shit about it, but there was a really nice vibe to just walking around the beach on Christmas morning and watching the birds and the water and the random people out doing their thing. Christmas Eve snowed like a motherfucker, but Christmas Day was all about the bluebirds. That thing I said earlier about feeling like all is right with the world - I felt it a lot while on this trip. It even snowed on me a little bit while I was in the hot tub at my hotel.

New Year's was spent in Phoenix, doing a combination of family visit, hair color, friend visit, and general party mayhem. The highlight of this trip was spending time with M (my oldest friend - we have known each other for 30 years) and her husband J1 and the in-laws (J1's brother J2 and his wife K, J1's son N and his girlfriend T, and J's mother D). I never really know how things are going to go when introduced to a bunch of new people all at once; the only one of the in-laws that I had met before was D; everyone else was new. We all got along extremely well - like surprisingly so, to be honest. There wasn't anyone I didn't like or felt weird around; in a way it was sort of like having my own large family gathering for New Year's, even though I don't think there are even that many people still alive in my immediate or once-removed family. We were all planning to go to what has become something of a NYE tradition for me - a giant two-day rave called Decadence that I've now been to 3 out of the last 4 years.

The first night was me, M, J1, N and T, and the second night was all 7 of us (everybody but D). Easily the best NYE that I've had in years. Above & Beyond played the closing set on the first night, and I think pretty much everybody teared up a little bit. Someone in the group said that A&B are their own genre - not psytrance, but crytrance. That's a bit trite, I suppose, but hearing their music on a large sound system does have a certain emotional impact to it that you just don't experience when listening to the music of most other electronica producers. I danced my ass off, as I tend to do at these things, and was sore as fuck after the first night, but that didn't stop the second night from being even better. K asked me if I had any "party favors" or knew where to get some, and it just so happened that I did indeed have some enhancements on me; I brought stuff with me not knowing whether or not I was going to take any of it and thinking that I probably wouldn't, as I never had at this event before, but it's good to be prepared, right?

So, on the second night, K and I both went down the neurochemical engineering rabbit hole and said hello to Molly; J2 asked me at the party if I had any more with me, he would have joined us on the excursion if I had said yes, but it was back at the house in my backpack. Next time, dude, ask for things before we all get in the car. =)  Anyway, like I said, the second night was the first night but more - more dancing, more lights, more fun, more emotions - and I'm sure that at least some of this was facilitated by the extra serotonin that was flooding through my synapses - but it didn't matter - I had a great time. Eric Prydz closed out the second night with a remix of U2's New Year's Day that had the whole crowd smiling and singing.  The vibe at this event is always fantastic; people saying "Happy New Year" or dancing together or fist-bumping and high-fiving each other. It really is a good example of what PLUR is supposed to be, and I have never had a bad time there. It's cheesy to say it, but there really is so much love and hope in that crowd, and it's not like any other event, even the giant psytrance festivals.

Got to visit one last friend, H, who I had not seen in quite some time, and we caught up a bit. Seems that things for her are going OK - at least better than they seemed to be based on the most recent second-hand information that I had from earlier in 2018. Then it was back on the plane and back to the bay, where Priss was more than happy to register both her happiness at my return and also her disapproval of my disappearance. Meow. Back to work on Monday. It is usually easy to go back to work after a week off, but now that I've been off for two weeks, it may be a challenge those first few days.

OK, time to change gears a bit. That was a recap of events, but not all the events of the past month. Two things still left to cover.

C might be moving to Atlanta in the first part of 2019. This will be good for her from a cost-of-living perspective and a child-raising perspective, but if she's out in April and I'm still here until November (at which time presumably I would re-engage the Denver plan), then I will have 6 months of being stuck in SF without much in the way of friends that I see on a regular basis (N doesn't count - we see each other every quarter). This is where I think 3M might fit in. Maybe she will be my "regular-basis friend" after C is gone; just someone to shoot the shit with or hang out with from time to time and talk about work or life or whatever comes up and seems interesting. I also think it's possible that 3M was the catalyst for something else, to be discussed in the next paragraph.

I've been on three first dates in the last month or so. One of them was a "that was pleasant, but no thanks." One of them was a "maybe there's a friendship here." Then we have the third one, which was actually the second one, chronologically, and it's here that I think there could be something. Her name is A (not to be confused with A and A in Denver), she's a few years older than me, and she works as an attorney for a tech company in the South Bay. She likes skiing, sushi, and cats. That's three out of four. What about psytrance? I don't know yet. At least on paper, she reminds me of me w.r.t. some of the characteristics that I would really be looking for - one of them, and this is going to sound bougie, I know it, but I get the sense that she likes to travel the same way I do. Yeah, I will go to a psytrance festival and camp for a week and be covered in dirt, but I also don't fly internationally in the cattle car. I just can't do it, and fortunately my income is such that I don't have to. I suspect she's the same.

Of course, I actually don't even know if there will be a second date; we met in early December before the holidays and haven't spoken in a couple weeks since I was traveling and she was traveling and her family was visiting. Last we had talked, it appeared that we were heading towards a ski trip, but we will see how this all goes.

Remember how I said earlier that lots of crazy synchronicities have been happening to me? A has a certain resemblance to M (yes, the M from this entry that has been my friend since high school). It's less apparent in person as opposed to one of her OKC profile photos, but still, that's kinda interesting. Also, at the hotel I stayed at in Tahoe, I came across a bottle of wine (A is a wine person) that had the same design as the necklace that she wears. The name of the winery - Hidden Crush - which is sort of amusing, I guess, but it was the graphic that caught my attention and made me think of her. So, at the very least, hopefully there is a date #2 so that I can give her said bottle (and then I can hope that the actual wine does not suck - given that I know zero about wine other than some of it is white and some of it is red - who knows if there's something tasty in this bottle or something she will hate); otherwise I have a bottle of wine just taking up space in my cabinet that I will never drink. That would suck.

So why did I say that 3M might have been the catalyst here? I would not have chosen to stay in the SF area for another year if she and I hadn't met - in fact, I would be writing this entry from Denver right now. But I'm here, and maybe something good is about to happen. Keep your mind open.