Exile on Drone Street: Self Actualization

I suppose self-actualization is different for everyone–we all have different selves. Just before the calendar flipped over to 2012, I made the decision that I was no longer resigning myself to the dreary routines I felt like I was embodying. No, I told myself, 2012 would be different, it wouldn't be all talk.

Finally, just past November 2011, I bought airline tickets to-and-from Europe without telling anyone at work. For several months, I held the secret inside my chest like a boot. We planned to visit friends in Germany & Belgium, family in the UK, and in-between see new cities and baroque facades and drink deep from cultures and urban smells and ripe public transit–––and when we returned...well. Well, something else would happen.

I went up to Chicago for my birthday and hung out for an extended weekend with my old roommates. We had started writing songs in my basement on a lark, locking ourselves into the dank space with a 4-track, our instruments (which we played fecklessly), and a bottle of Jim Beam Rye. The results weren't stunning; they weren't even that impressive; but they were songs–they were compressed gems of artistic intent and ambition, wrought from our own post-recession brains.

While in Chicago, in-between sessions at the Hopleaf and 3 Floyd's, we decided that 2012 was going to be the Year of Doing Shit. We'd make a full-length. Amelia & I had tickets to Europe and a planned-but-blank slate for five-plus weeks. We had aims to head west, minus the conestoga, to new lands, faces, landscape color schemes.

That didn't quite transpire–but when life has no rules, you have to roll with opportunities, and sate your wanderlust in domestic flights, bike wheels, or Megabus tickets.

The other thing about self-actualization? If you think you are actualized–you're not. Let 2013 be a continuation of my efforts.