babble

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t have a car. I walk to work. And home from work. To coffee and back. To the store for apples and cheese and then home from the store with apples, cheese, crackers, cookies and Cap’n Crunch. If I added up all my walking each week it adds up to about 25 miles. More on busy weeks. Like weeks where I want to wander down 5th Street because it reminds me of Chicago. Or weeks were I want to smell the market and buy a French magazine.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I spend at least 8 hours a week walking. And 99% of those 8 hours are spent alone. They are quiet. No music or iPod. Just me and which ever bag I grabbed that morning with whatever stuff happens to be in it. And my Chuck Taylors. And my sunglasses. I daydream the whole time. When I get home, there will be entire stretches of the walk that I don’t really remember. Sometimes I almost get hit by cars. And I bumped into a newspaper box once. My inner life is quite rich.

You know, what I’m trying to say is that there is some part of me that works on sorting out problems that I don’t really know much about. It’s like the flip side to my daydreaminess. It grabs my worries, puzzles, ennui and takes them out to lunch and figures out what’s really going on. It formulates and draws charts. Power Point may or may not be involved. But when it’s figured something out, when it’s gotten the a-ha, it sends it home. Sometimes fully formulated. Sometimes just a word or snapshot. Suddenly I have the key. Or suddenly I have the question.

But maybe what I’m trying to say is that this is how T::h::e F::o::r::e::v::e::r S::u::r::v::e::y happened. I was walking home. Day dreaming. Things being working out. And it popped to the surface. Whispered almost. T::h::e F::o::r::e::v::e::r S::u::r::v::e::y. “Hey, what’s that?” I said to no one. “What does it mean?” No one said back. I wondered what it was. What it could be. It took me a few days to figure it out. But I decided it’s a quest. It’s a search. An Important Task. It’s me finding the thing that motivates me the most. Love.

I know what I want to say. I want to say that this is how it all started.