2025-- The First Full Year of Portland

I have a tendency to fly by the seat of my pants. My whole career has gone this way, galavanting from one landing pad to the next logically sound landing plan. I consider it to some degree being led by God's providence, and that is the reassurance that moves me through life, but it's still to some degree finding the most sound notion of flying by the seat of my pants. There's more foresight than this, but not much. I'm not the one who makes the structure here. I can only see maybe two or three moves ahead on the chessboard. I've never been a particularly good chess player.

I'm 17 months in on my move to Portland, where I uprooted my life in San Antonio in the pursuit of making music the main drive of my life considering it's been a central thread of it largely throughout it. It's a fight, and I anticipated as much. It's an adjustment, and I anticipated as much. I've lived an interesting and varied life filled with an assortment of experiences that make me feel particularly attuned to all I'm facing here, and I anticipated as much. But I'm forgetting a thought I had just briefly upon first arriving here that I want to keep in mind-- the freedom a good public transit system provides gives me a sense of freedom I felt when I first moved to Atlanta for college. Part of my constant tagline for my moving here -- I'm not in love with Portland, but I'm capable of it -- is this feeling that I can graft together signs of culture, exhibit the Spirit within me that can express joy with nuanced completely (through the filter of DuBoisian double consciousness). To not be afraid of joy, but also to know not to waste anyone's time. The second stage of knowing the responsibility burdened with freedom.

Over the last year, I've developed a steady groove of an afternoon radio show, falling for a pocket of jazz I've always loved and unknowingly leaning into my college nickname of Retro, something I just realized upon typing these words at this very moment. I'm expanding into the next phase of myself here and growing into the place just as I hope to make my changes to it and as it goes through its constant changes and phases. The unrelenting nature of radio, of filling time entertainingly, has made reflexion on the last year of work particularly difficult, but I still feel like it's been a productive year, adding to a body of work and creating with a team of folks who feel that same dedication in the entertaining filling of time.

All the while, I'm continuing along with a fight on multiple fronts within the workplace, growing accustomed to the travails of a corporate life but remembering every lesson my parents taught me in work ethic, truthfulness, and affability. It's a trick wherein I give away all my tricks in my pithy turns of phrase and continue to get away with it because if one genuinely applies the assorted adages -- "Better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it"; "I can read a calendar and I can read a clock"; or the Leo Bailey-attributed classic "I can count better than that!"™ -- one can navigate anything, or I'd like to think that way.

I'm finding these various expressions and the Spirit within me guiding me through this place and the few other places I've wandered this year -- back to New York at the start of the year for the first time in nearly a decade and Durham, North Carolina, for the first time in even longer -- to remember this life of connections and times and stories to tell. For remembering the tales written in the pages of the canon and others just told on background with friends as that other part of the canon which makes up this connected scene, the underlying part of the culture where whispers are the glue contextualizing the stories we tell one another above board.

In the process of getting used to this place and this next phase of my life, of finding new awesome brains that I like bumping into, of experiencing things I never fathomed and finally getting around to things I'd always meant to, of discovering what I will be in this last year of my 30s and what kind of man I am and what all defines that, I'm satisfied. I'm excited to see what comes next. I'm interested in the future and what will come of it, of what I can predict because I love being right about things, and what the next steps will be after that when a promising future reveals itself. I'm gaining better understanding of the responsibility burdened with freedom.

This year had problems. I pass by an office building that was transformed into a beacon of tyranny on my commute to work everyday. I'm actively fighting for recognition and fair wages at an organization that still doesn't quite know what to do with the cool factor it acquired a decade and a half ago but doesn't know enough to just let it cook, and spreading positivity in the face of all of it as my occupation. I fought for years to be able to do this, even if I never anticipated actively fighting against the odds while doing it. Had I not gone through the journey before me to get here, I would be downtrodden in this, but somehow I'm exhilarated. I can see around the twists in turns here in all due time. I'm not in love with Portland yet, but I'm capable of it.

Let's see what next year brings.