Ensenada

Just a quick entry as I'm waiting in Starbucks for a teleconference... It was an easy trip down from Isla Coronado Sur here to Ensenada, but because Rogelio and his crew were likely playing futbol in the yard at their lunchtime break, nobody answered my hail at Baja Naval, so I ended up going into Cruiseport Village Marina, which was more expensive than the $35 at Baja Naval, and they also wanted $50 to fill out all my clearance paperwork for me (which Rogelio does for free for his Baja Naval clients). So... big mistake, and I ended up waiting for about three hours at the ventana unica (single-window check-in place, with the Port Captain, Immigration and Customs all in one building) because of my less-organized paperwork I tried to do myself.

I've decided against trying to get a Mexico Telcel account, as one month just isn't worth it. Instead, I've downloaded Skype for iPhone, so whenever I have wifi I'll be on Skype. So if you want to be in contact with me and you don't have Skype, get it. :-)

Leaving Ensenada in an hour or so, and my next communication will probably be from Cabo San Lucas where I know of an open wifi or two out in the anchorage. There's nothing much between here and there, as Turtle Bay is a technological backwater, and Bahia Santa Maria (a sub-bay off Bahia Magdelena) is just a rest stop without any services at all.

TT

Isla Coronado Sur

I left San Diego just after noon yesterday, fueling up at the Harbor Island West fuel dock and then navigating the crowded bay as various class sailboat races and Sunday day-sailors criss-crossed all around. It makes it tricky to manage all the sailing jobs, single-handing and watching out for all the other boats out there (almost all of which have right-of-way on a sailboat under power).

It was about a three-hour sail out here to Isla Coronado Sur, the southernmost of the Coronado islands and the only one with what could even be remotely considered an anchorage – and it’s really more of a “roadstead.” It’s very rolly, horrible for sleeping or even being comfortable, especially with the cold, and it’s only good because I have a relatively short day today to get into Ensenada after a little bit of fishing this morning. As I came in to anchor yesterday, I passed a few boats out there at about 120’ jigging – large charter fishers out of H&M Landing or Fisherman’s Landing (my neighbors on Shelter Island) out for ¾ day or full-day charters.

It’s coming up on 4:30 am, and I’ve been up since 3 – this the product of going to bed at 5:30pm. Partially it’s due to the wind and the movement of the boat at anchor, but mostly it’s due to a severe hangover and lack of sleep Saturday night before my exit from San Diego. I went out with my step-brother Ryan to a few places downtown, then met up with Donna, a friend I’ve met through this blog, and we all went up to Altitude – the cool rooftop bar at the top of the Marriott downtown (the new Marriott, not the hotel/marina where I worked in college). Anyway – it was a long, great night, and the couple of beers and then six or seven Don Julio rocks w/splash of sweet & sour really did a number on me over the course of the night, and that number lasted until… well, still.

I’ll drop a line as soon as it gets light (in about an hour or so) and then start the sail into Ensenada, where I’ll check into Mexico and see what options are out there for communication. I sold my Pactor II modem to friends John & Susan Rabe before I left the dock, as they’re planning a trip to Mexico and then across to the Marquesas and beyond, starting October. And since a sailmail email address (the email you have to use with the SSB radio / Pactor modem system) costs $250/year, I opted to not do that this time, for this one-month trip. It seemed like it would have been overkill to use an offshore modem when I’ll be in mobile service most of the trip and if it really came down to it I could just turn on my iPhone and roam for $0.50/minute. Although I certainly can’t do an annual commitment, I’ll check out what phone & data plans are currently being offered by Telcel, the Mexican cell provider with the best coverage between here and Guaymas / San Carlos. If I could pick up a data modem and get a pre-paid data plan, that might be a good compromise, as I can do everything with data anyway (and Skype).

TT

Back to Mexico

When I returned here to San Diego this past January, I came back for the proximity to an airport, the chance at better job opportunities, and the 100% Internet connectivity via my Verizon v-card. And although I've enjoyed my time and have been pretty comfortable here at the Sun Harbor Marina on San Diego Bay - Shelter Island, the job situation hasn't worked out so well, as the Internet search has been nearly worthless and the in-person and local-contact search has netted two interviews in total (in my field), and of course, rather than restaurants hiring (I seriously considered it and even went to my old college employer to check it out), they're actually shutting their doors.

What went wrong with the interviews? I felt I was definitely qualified for both positions - quite a bit overqualified for one of them - but I think given my history these last few years I'm not coming off as much of a long-term committed employee. And with my blabbermouth, even the mention in passing of my boys half a continent away would sorta make me feel emotional about missing them, and I'm sure I didn't hide that too well.... Bottom line: I think they saw my thin level of commitment to San Diego and that I'd have a hard time sticking around for more than a year or much longer than it took to get back on my feet. There are too many other qualified candidates out there for them to go with, I suppose.

So... in the interest of not paying crazy marina + liveaboard fees anymore, and getting the boat somewhere more financially reasonable where I can keep her while I see the boys and then seek work wherever it may be after that, I'm going to sail Chemistry back to San Carlos / Guaymas, lock her down tight, and then go be with my boys.

A good friend, a very reasonable and conservative friend (G), said to me before I bought Chemistry: "Maybe you should rent a boat. Can you just test it out to see if you really like that life and everything?" And he was spot-on with the conservatism (fiscally - we all know he's wrong about his social conservatism), but what happened is that I absolutely loved the "cruising life" and the people I've met so far in it... what didn't pan out so well, and has made his concern almost Nostradamus-esque, was the economic downturn that caused my startup's funding angel to walk away and leave the company to shrivel as we just tried to keep the thing breathing with no salaries, no more passion, and very little hope.

So yeah, it would have been better if I'd never signed on that line to buy this boat, but I probably would have continued to sink my entire 401k into my vacant house anyway, just because of a need to do the right thing - to pay the debt I owed the heartless mortgage company. But more importantly, I wouldn't have experienced the amazing time I've had in Mexico (or the amazing time sailing down from Seattle, for that matter). And as I watch the trash compactor walls close in around me and my boat (I'm Han Solo and Chemistry is my faithful Chewbacca), I keep reaching for the pole that will slow the walls just a bit longer, and right now that helpful pole is getting the boat back where $100 is a month's worth of a mooring ball in a safe harbor. I've had my R2D2 friends and family, tapping into the Death Star's systems to help with life-sustaining loans, but those loans have been helpful for much more than the boat and my "keeping the dream alive" - they've enabled me to stay almost but not quite current on my responsibilities as a dad - the school and child care stability that keeps my boys from feeling the pain of this economy and this situation.

So what next? After getting the boat back to cheaper digs, I'll get almost a whole month with the boys while R goes on travel. I'll get amazing little kid hugs from a two-month absence, and I won't want to let them go. They'll have grown so big since I last saw them in February, but I know also they'll be happy and content, as R & I do our exceptional job of navigating through this process of divorce, relocation, life change.... And at the end of June I'll travel somewhere, anywhere in the world that could use me. Or, maybe lightning will strike, and one of my projects will hit just the right chord with an investor, or my writing will find its way to Oprah's desk.

TT

What's Next for Ashton Kutcher and Twitter?

Ashton Kutcher won the race to a million Twitter followers because of his enthusiasm, his star power, his likability, the fight against malaria (and future causes to come), his supportive and co-tweeting wife and just enough tech savvy to make the whole story compelling. After last week’s stretch run he’s been crowned the de facto king of Twitter, and will hold that title unless and until Oprah gets up to speed and starts engaging with her followers rather than just making announcements.

Throughout the chase with CNN, we heard a lot on Twitter and on his streaming video channel (especially in the excitement of the night, with friends and other celebs crowded around him at his desk) about how this accomplishment was a validation of the “social media revolution.”

“I actually see this as a historical day,” he said as he began his broadcast. “I mean it’s truly the television versus the web.”

But it’s not television versus the web; you can watch television on the web. The Internet is a little bit of everything; it’s not accurate to exclude television as a completely separate medium. It’s another part of what makes the web… the web.

What he said at another point, and the more important message, I think, is that it’s about the dissemination of messages (original posts, RTs and @-replies) by the same people who consume those messages, versus the one-way type of communication that has defined television for the past sixty years:

“At the end of the day, what’s this about? This is about the changing of the guard, from the old way of consuming media to the new way of consuming media. We, together can decide… can make the news on our cell phones, on our iPhones, on our cameras, on our video cameras. We can edit the news. We can broadcast the news and we can consume the news. We can decide what news we want to hear, how we want to hear it, when we want to hear it, and we can get it faster on the web. That’s all we’re saying.”

While the idea of a “social media revolution” is an interesting thought, and Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and others (is MySpace still online?) have done much to move forward the idea that this medium can be the breeding ground of many millions of Butterfly Effect messages and follow-up actions every day, with the incredible potential for good, I’d like to suggest that the momentum behind the Twitter-based part of that revolution is unsustainable because of its most basic nature – the fact that it’s just text. Real people are more than their byline, their quotes or their description. Moreover, we don’t know the real intentions of the people who helped Mr. Kutcher get to a million. We don’t even know if they are real people – Twitter doesn’t require an email address before you start posting so theoretically someone could sign up a million times. The person who won a prize as the millionth follower, at the time he started following Mr. Kutcher, had no avatar, zero followers and was following nobody else. More significantly, why, we have to ask ourselves, do people even have thirty thousand or more followers and why do they follow those thirty thousand or more people back? Are all thirty thousand that interesting and important or is it just a numbers game? How can they possibly keep up and truly interact with that mass of humanity, the twenty, thirty, fifty messages every minute? It’s a system of dissemination that is so filled with noise that in the good tweets we are clearly seeing only the tip of the iceberg. It stands to reason that too often the important messages or the brilliant, insightful tweets are not seen or acknowledged unless they happen to be re-tweeted by an @aplusk or @mrskutcher, a @guykawasaki or maybe, eventually, an @oprah.

In an off-handed but telling statement in the heat of his pursuit of 1 million followers, Mr. Kutcher said he knew we were getting tired of all the retweets and the “follow @aplusk” posts, but that soon we’d be able to get back to telling people what we had for breakfast or that we were on our way to the doctor or etc. It was meant to be funny and he knows as well as anyone that those aren’t the sort of updates that are generally useful or encouraged on Twitter, but still, they’re there in abundance. Add to that all the people who follow new people all day long in hopes they’ll follow back, who openly state that their profession is “Internet Marketing” or “Success Coaching” which means they rely on Twitter and other social media to disseminate information about their new ad-splashed blog entry or their “make money online” e-book. And there it is in a nutshell – amidst the amazing accomplishment of one million plus people following one famous person’s short messages, amidst the fight against malaria and human trafficking, there is simply a huge amount of noise made by an astonishing number of Twitter accounts, and the noise is crippling Twitter (literally, “fail-whaling” it much of the day, every day) and crippling its ability to do much good.

The messages that do matter, however – the tweets that somehow lead us to care about the people affected: the children fighting for their lives against malaria, for example – have to point to something more than just text if they’re going to make us care. Just like at some point along the way in SEO / Internet Marketing there *has* to be a purchase to pay for the advertising upon advertising, the razor-thin margins in arbitrage that make the Internet go, at some point along the mechanism of caring there has to be a real person. And Twitter in and of itself is not going to present us that real person or even make them relevant. There are cases where text is all it takes to get involved, but it’s not real emotion. To feel real emotion you need to not just follow but also see the web site of the real-life story of a boy fighting brain cancer (@jonthanjay). You need to see dozens of follow-up messages and thank-yous from someone who maybe threatened suicide on Twitter but was coaxed back from the brink due to a sudden outpouring of support, and inevitably the community will seek out and embrace that person in real life (“I found her MySpace page. Looks like she lives in Indonesia”). Bottom line, to become emotionally engaged we have to see images and video or at the very least read passages longer than tweets. And we have to see and hear good stories because in the end, Twitter is less powerful as a motivator than the images and commercials provided by Jamie Lee Curtis and the Save the Children Foundation.

Mr. Kutcher implicitly acknowledged this when during the stretch run he moved from Twitter to his video broadcast. Twitter in and of itself is simply not enough – there has to be a audio/visual component (if not an in-person meeting) in order for people to connect and to believe. You cannot have a revolution with one hundred and forty characters of text. Enough words have been said about the other big story on the web last week, the emergence of Susan Boyle into our consciousness and our hearts. But I’d like to reiterate what we all know: that it wasn’t simply her exceptional voice. It was the person, the dramatic and very well-done editing (the over-mascara’d “ohmygod”, the sighs, tsk-tsks and “yeah right”s in the audience), the eyebrows and the sweetness, the frumpiness and the never-been-kissed that turned a beautiful and well-sung song into a performance that has literally changed the lives of so many people.

So where does this leave us? I certainly do believe that social media can do great things, but like anything there’s a coordinate system that contributes to those great things, and Twitter is just one of the cogs in that system. It’s a means to mobilization and maybe with some better search filtering it can be a better accumulator and more accurate disseminator of information. But it’s not yet and never will be real, engaging, human communication. What did Ashton Kutcher do after the Twitter million? He went on Oprah. He went on Larry King Live. And he brought those shows – their star power and their viewers – into his realm. He integrated the power of the separate mediums, the separate networks of people and ideas, and showed Larry and Oprah and the world how the Twitter cog works. And that coordination – not the negation of one of its pieces – is where the revolution lives.

TT

I Saw You... The Girl at Altitude

Cold night on the rooftop bar you hold your arms and shiver
so thin and pretty while I stand comfortably
by the fire pit at twenty-second floor altitude, the cold
rooftop tequila and city lights spinning beats, the deejay
of the moment. One couple slouched together in a chair,
she on his lap his arms holding her under
the bar’s blanket.

I invite you into my spot, my warm privileged place.
So beautiful but then talking you come to dirty water -
and the world too crowded anyway but I’m five tequila-rocks
drunk, talkative and flirty and I can’t tell you
I hate what you said - can't make myself
walk away but I see small black
children drinking gray water bug-flecked and warm.
You don’t have children surely and barely
any conscience but my god you’re beautiful, texting
until I say enough interesting things
or your co-texter goes offline to find someone
who doesn’t hate the world.

We spread ourselves around -
open a fire-space for the cold welder
who wants to be a cartoonist
and together we take turns reporting
on the couple on the chair, their progress -
their round movements
her eyes shut mouth open,
his head down
kissing
her neck.

I form my fingers into a gun and hold it
to the welder’s head.
“What do you want to do with your life?”
“I I I I I… I wanna draw!”
I give him two weeks to start on his dream.

Your friends ready to leave
give you a ten-minute warning.
I don’t want to ask your number -
don't want to be another person you text
waiting for your next text.
I sip my tequila, you your wine, the welder his beer.
We admire more openly the couple making love
under the blanket oblivious to dramas, prejudices,
life ambitions evolving by the fire.

Your friends take you away - you leave
behind the smell of beauty,
the couple now quiet and still,
engaged with each other
to an almost infinite degree.

I Saw You... The Girl at the Beach

You were laying there on the beach but I didn’t see you until I stood up to leave. You were on your stomach, propped on your elbows, your hand to your mouth as you popped in another grape or something else that seemed to make eating really, really fun. You chewed politely, closed-mouthed, but there was something about your face that was smiling. Maybe you wrinkled the corners of your eyes.

At fifty feet away it would have been a lot of beach to cross, dragging my bike through the sand – to be completely wrong and embarrassed about whether or not you were looking at me, so I just packed up my backpack. I looked back once more as I was walking away and beneath your large sunglasses I still wasn't sure, so I rode away.

As I was riding down the boardwalk a barrage of quotes came into my head – quotes that can be tedious in the abstract but inspiring if there’s a specific application. There’s a good friend’s “How long ya gonna be dead?” Mark Twain’s “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed in the things you didn’t do than the ones you did do….” My stepfather’s “If I could change one thing about my life, I would have approached more women I was attracted to.” The magic moment – what finally made me turn around – was a stray volleyball that bounced onto the boardwalk from a game on the beach. It bounced from someone’s mishit high off a condo and back onto the boardwalk, and I adjusted my course to get under it on its second bounce. I palmed it with one hand and threw it back over my shoulder to the volleyball game in one motion. As a bike-riding, volleyball-handling ninja, it was my duty to turn around and talk to you.

You were looking at the water when I came back, and I surprised you a bit as I laid down my bike and crouched there next to you, but you listened to what I had to say.

“As I was leaving a few minutes ago,” I said, “a movie from the 80’s came into my head. Have you ever seen ‘About Last Night’? Rob Lowe, Demi Moore?”

You shook your head no.

“Well, there’s a scene early on, where Rob Lowe sees Demi across a bar. They exchange a couple looks and later he comes up to her and says ‘I noticed you noticing me.’ She says ‘There was a clock over your head.’ So… as I was getting up to leave before, was there a clock over my head?”

You laughed, understanding and appreciating the idea, the approach, but shook your head, a little embarrassed and not at all interested. You made a comment about having a boyfriend; you did just enough to be nice.

I told you to have a great day and shouldered my bike back to the boardwalk, continued past the volleyball game for the third time. No more quotes clanged in my head. No more stray message-bearing volleyballs came my way. But still, there was the satisfaction of having tried.

TT

Poem: Fog

Fog

One day maybe we'll recall
How it was unpredicted,
How suddenly it settled in,
How thick, how heavily it lay,
Debilitated us for days...

But for now we sail along,
Carefully with radar on.
Stay warm and peek out now and then
To see it lift, or maybe fade,
But hope that it will always stay.


November, 2008

I Saw You... The Bike Girl

There's not enough time to be brave and aggressive, sometimes. And when there's only a second, both of us flying around a bend in the bike path and a sudden smile of surprise attraction, it's even harder. For me, it was a smile that validated the quality of a movie - a happy ending in difficult times - the young carny + carny summertime fling that turns into more.

I'd smiled twice already on that bike ride back to my boat. There was the older man who'd warned me - before the movie in the theater lobby - about the amount of salt I was putting on my popcorn, his concern for my heart and health fatherly with a bit, maybe, of just wanting someone to talk to. And as I left the theater and started down San Diego's Broadway there he was again, crossing the street in front of the bus I'd stopped next to. I smiled again but he didn't see me as he was preoccupied with whether or not the bus was going to stop at the light or run him down.

A couple miles later I smiled and held up a "peace" sign to an old homeless man who was staring as I approached, my arms dangling lazily at my sides as I rode casually along the sea wall. He waved back, but with a bit of a smirk like "yeah, fella - you're gonna kill yourself or ride right into the bay like that."

And at the turn where a year and a half ago I would have turned, too, when I was berthed at Harbor Island instead of the America's Cup Harbor, you came around the bend and presented me with a split-second "do I smile" decision (yes) and then you were past and there was the "do I chase and ask her to coffee" decision (no, another day). You had short, light brown hair, a bit curly, sassy, bike-wind-tussled, and even in the short time I saw you I could see that your shy smile dimpled your cheeks in a perfect and beautiful way.

We passed, I stopped at the light and looked back and you were already around another corner and I was left with the regret of a moment good but gone. I started writing to you immediately, composing this, imprinting your look on my left brain so my right could share it later, or now.

I sit at my favorite Starbucks, near my marina. I locked my bike again next to the same two bikes that have been there since I returned to San Diego in January. The bikes never move. They are matching beach cruisers, inexpensive but new not too long ago, one red and one blue. The red has a mass of cobwebs connecting the rear brake to the rear tire and the blue has an open and empty tool kit. The girl working the Starbucks didn't know the story behind them, so I suggested a scenario: There's an old couple, both sick, in pain and incurable, who for Christmas bought each other the bikes for a last ride to their favorite Starbucks. They locked their bikes out of habit, then went inside and sat, held hands and watched each other across the table for that one last coffee. And after that coffee they walked up the street to the bridge and went out of this world together, the bikes a legacy of their act.

Real is what we make it. I choose to believe in good stories because they make me feel good. The couple in the movie will live together, he'll work himself through graduate school and she'll finish at NYU and they'll be happy. The older man at the theater will return home after his careful walk home and defend himself in a friendly and loving way saying "Yes, I had some popcorn but I didn't add any salt, dammit." The old homeless man, for a while tonight, will feel a little less invisible. And you... I guess I'd like to think that somehow I'll see you again.