You get to ninth and Arizona and you decide to pee. This is illegal, but fuck it. The trucks roll by, purring with the passing storm. In the earphones: Sleepyhead by Passion Pit. “They crowd your bedroom like some thoughts wearing thin. Against the walls, against your rules, against your skin. My beard grew down to the floor and out through the doors of your eyes, begonia skies like a sleepyhead.” It makes no sense.

Unless you’re drunk. The point is this: you walk four extra blocks for a midnight glazed donut at 7-11.

7-11, which was once open from seven o’clock in the morning until 11 p.m. in the evening. Hence the name. And what is a glazed donut anyway? Flour, oil, sugar, that’s it.

And in 7-11 is a woman in her 40’s who is waiting to talk to you. Lonely. So much loneliness. But now in the earphones: “wake up to your window, the day calls in billows, it’s echoing moonlight onto the blue nightmare of your heart, in cozy red rainbow, it’s shaking off halos, and the memory of our sacred so and so.”

You don’t talk, don’t acknowledge, but my god is this a good donut.

The point is this: on Lincoln and Wilshire is a homeless person. One of Santa Monica’s hundreds of homeless people. And it’s 50 degrees. And it’s raining tomorrow. And it was snowing today as you drove over the Grapevine. And you give this person ten dollars. And you wonder why you don’t give this person $10 when you are sober.

You’re almost home and you’re tired of being an adult. In the earphones, New Order: “Won’t you please let me go. These words lie inside they hurt me so. And I’m not the kind that likes to tell you. Just what I want to do. I’m not the kind that needs to tell you. Just what you want me to.”

And that’s it, that’s the point. A minor headache in the morning, but whatever, fuck it.

It’s the question: what is important, what is not important, what is important to know? Is this information important? Can we still decide what is important? And it starts with this absolutely normal, everyday news. But now you encounter, at least in Europe, a lot of people who think, what in my life is important, what isn’t important, what is the information of my life. And some of them say, well, it’s in Facebook. And others say, well, it’s on my blog. And, apparently, for many people it’s very hard to say it’s somewhere in my life, in my lived life.

- Frank Schirrmacher

Sometimes I wish that my computer had a “fuck it” key. I would press it and it would fuck everything up. My Facebook page: deleted; my Flickr account: gone; my Twitter feed: evaporated; my blog: what blog?

The sheer beauty of all that digital destruction. The temptation. The illusion of protection through forgetting.

“Sometimes I feel like all that is important in life is what we can stick on a 4gb USB drive,” a friend once told me. I hate that feeling. I know it well.

(And, yes, I realize that all of this contradicts what I wrote just a week ago.)

So that’s the story of my personal involvement. Now, the story about the World Blogging Forum itself. From what I understand, the whole thing was the idea of a group of far-too-attractive 20-year-old girls from the Romanian Association of Foreign Language Students (ASLS). Mihaela Draghici, the current president of ASLS, and perhaps the most ridiculously attractive of all the girls, spearheaded the event. Mihaela approached the Romanian government – specifically the Agency for Government Strategies – and proposed an event which would bring the world’s most popular bloggers to Bucharest for a meeting about the future of media. In doing so, the event would generate international buzz about Romania and portray the government as open and forward thinking. In the end, the Romanian government – that is, the Romanian taxpayers – agreed to pay $74,347.91. It should be noted, as far as federal budgets go, that is a very small drop in a very large bucket.

Still, the night of our arrival, surrounded by free food, free cocktails, and fawning beautiful girls, I couldn’t ignore the cough cough of my conscience. I remembered my visit to Hospice Casa Sperantei, of the absolute failure of the Romanian health care system, of all the Roma kids sniffing glue.

I remembered the little girl at the train station in Braşov. The girl who hadn’t showered for days, maybe weeks. The girl who couldn’t have been more than eight, all alone at the train station, just hanging out as if it were the most normal thing in the world. The girl who accepted my apple as if taking an apple from a stranger were the most normal thing in the world. If I were to adopt that girl, I remember thinking, to give her a home other than this train station, that would probably be more useful, more meaningful, than anything else I’ve done so far with my life.

Instead I boarded my train.

I thought of all the Romanians who told me that capitalism is only good for 10% of society. And here I was, surrounded by that ten percent. The privileged, the beautiful, the eloquent. We’re drinking mojitos, we’re mentioning the places we’ve traveled to, the languages we speak, we’re touching each other’s arms as we talk.

I tried, but I failed to ignore the cough cough of my conscience. This is my problem. I go out to a nice restaurant or a fancy bar with friends and I try to enjoy myself. But I can’t. And so I grow quiet and distant. And for the rest of the week: “you’re such a quiet person. Why are you staying in? You don’t like to have fun?” And I smile and I nod and I don’t know what to say.

And so I stayed in my hotel room drinking tea the next two nights. It’s not that I’m such a self-righteous funaphobe. (The size of my hangover a couple days ago suggests otherwise.) In fact, I believe strongly in the value of fun for the sake of having fun. I just couldn’t put myself into the right frame of mind. Besides, I had enough work to keep me up until two in the morning every night. Despite my own issues, the World Blogging Forum turned out to be very useful in several respects.

It was great seeing Onnik, and so wonderful to meet Parvana. Helge’s calm and eloquent analysis impressed me once again. I found a new friend in Erkan who says he will start covering the Turkish blogosphere for Global Voices, which I’m looking forward to. I had fun on KosmoShow with Jakub, Matthias, and Wael. (I did my best to badger Matthias into inviting Rising Voices bloggers to the World Economic Forum … we’ll see, though I don’t have high hopes.) And it was so great to finally meet Emin Huseynzade, Dario Gallo, Cyxymu, Dodi, and Zola. And so strange to meet them in the second largest building in the world.

There are dozens and dozens of lengthy blog posts out there about the World Blogging Forum. Ashley Corinne Killough, a Fulbright scholar researching blogs in Armenia, might have the most thorough coverage in parts one, two, and three. Chinezu seems like the king of guy I’d like to grab a beer with. His critical review of the forum is worthwhile. And Dani – one of the few (only?) male organizers – has a good post from the perspective of host.

Finally, even if I would have done things differently, I still can’t stress enough how impressed I am by all the work the organizers put into this. I mean, seriously, a group of 20 and 21-year-olds convinced their government to bring bloggers from around the world to Bucharest, and they even managed to convince their president to come speak to at us. They showed a complete mastery of online marketing for the event. They took care of all the many details that go along with any conference which brings people from different countries, languages, and cultures. And I know they sacrificed at least a week’s worth of sleep in the process. I am certain that all of the girls are going to go on to incredibly successful careers. I just hope that they share their success with a larger percentage of Romanians.

“He has very American eyes,” she told me. I let out a little chuckle, not quite sure what very American eyes are. “They are very big,” she explained, “and they are always staring at you. It makes me feel uncomfortable.”

Now I was laughing. I knew what she was talking about. Lots of cultures are ok with eye contact, but Americans are the only ones I know who so actively seek it out.

Perhaps encouraged by my laughter she went on: “He has a very American smile as well.”

“An American smile, huh? And what is that?”

“It is a smile that is always ready to smile. And it is always the same smile.”

Again, I was laughing. Most stereotypes I hear about Americans (and I hear a lot) ring hollow. The archetypical blonde bimbo with constant high rising terminal does surely exist, but (s)he is much more likely to be on a TV sitcom than in an international hostel. These two descriptions, though – the trigger-happy smile and the wide-eyed stare – I can picture perfectly. I don’t think that they are just WASP characteristics either. White, brown, or black … just about every American I know who has traveled for long enough comes to the same realization: that we’re actually much more American than we had ever expected.

Update: Via Lauren I came across this most sensible question from Olivia Judson: “do some languages contain an intrinsic bias towards pulling happy faces?” Does American English pre-dispose us to smiling faces? (And, one might wonder, does the New York accent produce facial expressions of constant irritation?)

In front of us was a two hour drive in the rain from Budapest to a Communist-era four star resort on the Tihany peninsula. I needed to digest some anxiety so I went for a long run through the misty rain along the shores of Lake Balaton, Central Europe’s largest. When I returned to my room a copy of Hungarian Playboy – complete with a DVD of amateur videos – was placed perfectly on my bed.

This was clearly not the typical conference I have grown accustomed to speaking at. Over 2,000 people were on their way and, I quickly realized, their priority – in fact, what seemed to be there raison d’être – was to make money online. The night before the conference I had dinner with a fellow speaker, Norm Johnston, who helped get me up to date on all the latest ways that advertising agencies were making money online. (Norm, I should point out, is an extremely likable fellow despite his occupation.) What, I wondered, could I possibly say to a large crowd from the business class all hoping to make money off of people like … well, me. What I truly wanted to say was this:

The night before my presentation was the famous (infamous, I was told) Internet Hungary party with an open bar and throngs of attractive women in pencil skirts and high heels. I was up in my room. Pitiful, I know. I was adjusting some images on my slides a few pixels one direction or another. I was trying out different font types and character spacings. I was leveling the audio on a video I made specifically for the presentation.

While I worked late into the night I could hear giggling, temporary couples stumbling down the hallway and fumbling with their electronic keycards. By 1 a.m. it became obvious that it didn’t matter what I said the following morning; most of the world at Tihany Club Resort would be too hungover to get out of bed. And for the sober minority, I doubt anything would bore them so much as a 30 minute talk on craftsmanship. But still I worked on. I wanted to get this presentation right – not for them, not for me, but for the sake of the presentation itself.

The peasant pigtails suggest the slow life of the countryside, but her makeup and injected lips are firmly cosmopolitan. It is impossible to know the woman’s ethnicity. She could be from anywhere: India, Ethiopia, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, Brazil, Guatemala, Europe, North America. She is the icon of the 21st century: global, sensual, sexual, and on an advertisement for a multinational chain.

UNITED COLORS OF BENETTON, all caps, white print on green background. There are four mannequins, all white, the men with swimmers’ bodies and the women with hardly any bodies at all. They wear the standard fare: tight pants, tight shirts, summer scarves, designer sunglasses. They are lifeless, and yet infinitely more fashionable than we mere humans could ever hope for.

I desperately needed a break from the daily routine of waking up, checking my email, adding items to my to-do list, and then spending the rest of the day checking them off. I needed a break from the invisible world of bytes; a foray into the outside world of atoms, trees, and buildings. I grabbed my paper journal, the latest issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, my sunglasses, and headed out to Porto’s blinding summer streets.

It felt as though my journey could have taken my anywhere – that was, after all, the whole point. But now it seems inevitable that I should arrive here, Dolce Vita, the “sweet life”, Porto’s most luxurious shopping mall. The four-story atrium of advanced capitalism lures you in with soft light, cool air, the lapping sounds of the ground-floor water fountain, the familiarity of brand names and perfectly presented display cases. The opaque glass floors are sparkling clean; not a speck of dirt to be discovered by the most probing eyes.

Pepe Jeans London has a backdrop of leaning Caribbean palm trees. An orange and yellow beach chair is draped by a single pair of artificially worn-out jeans and a simple red t-shirt. Four cardboard boxes painted deep denim blue sit atop scattered sand and broken seashells. They announce in white paint that from now until September 15 select items are marked 20, 30, 40, and 50% off.

I stare and wonder how the whole display came about. Is it packaged in a single box that is shipped directly from Pepe Jeans London headquarters? Who is in charge of purchasing the sand, and where does it come from? Who is the entrepreneur that thought to collect sand and seashells to sell to multinational retail stores for their display cases?

I try to picture the young woman responsible for setting up the display. She is proud of her work. I can picture her telling her parents over a family dinner that building a display case offers her a creative outlet. Like any artist she has her tools and she must craft beauty with them. I picture her sprinkling sand slowly on the floor of the display case. Then, unhappy with its appearance, she sweeps it up to start over. Her cell phone rings – a special ringtone – and she explains to her boyfriend that she will be late. She really wants this to look just right.

Upstairs on the fourth-floor food court are all the usual suspects: KFC and Pizza Hut (both owned by Yum!), Burger King, and a handful of Portuguese chains. I settle on Ò Kilo, its slogan: “the flavor of Brazil.”

The men wear white button-up shirts, khaki pants, red aprons, and matching visors, all with the Ò Kilo logo. The woman wear red polo shirts and tight khaki pants – no apron to cover the curves of their bodies. Ò Kilo is the Boston Market of Portugal — comfort food reminiscent of Sunday afternoons in the park. You choose three types of meat, three accompanying sides, and you pay a single price. There is even a glass jar of lemonade topped with ice cubes and freshly sliced lemons next to the cash register.

I worked at Boston Market (a subsidiary of McDonald’s) as an 18-year-old in Washington. Every item on our menu arrived weekly from a central distribution plant in clear, frozen, plastic bags. Preparing food at Boston Market is as simple as pulling one of these bags from the freezer, inserting it into an industrial steamer, and pouring the guts of the bag out into the black plastic serving bins. Every single gram of food was measured, quantified, tracked. Food scientists had developed perfect recipes to maximize taste and profits. The kitchen was the essence of stainless steel industrial efficiency, and the restaurant outside was covered in clever imagery of pastoral pastiche.

A couple days later I was sitting with Sara and her family at their dining table for a freshly cooked meal. Sara had just arrived from East Timor where she had been working with a group of women who make cloth dolls and textiles. She has been trying to build a market for these goods here in Portugal, but all the shoppers are at the malls and the retail stores don’t deal with small scale suppliers.

The next week I sat in on lecture after lecture by various academics pontificating with lefty lament that the wildly independent internet that we once knew and loved is being replaced by a few gigantic corporate platforms.

Just as the small independent shopkeepers of our city centers closed down, unable to compete with the efficiency of retail shopping malls, so to is the online ecosystem closing in around the digital versions of mammoth shopping malls and food courts. It is an unfortunate trend I suppose, but I think that it is far from the inevitable future. The 1990’s was a decade of massive corporate consolidation toward centralized efficiency. In major cities around the world independent stores closed down and were replaced by multinational retail corporations that today can be found from Johannesburg to Jakarta to Japan. The era of artisans and boutiques, it seemed, was over.

But in recent years local artisans’ movements have taken hold in just about every major city in America. Downtown districts are gentrifying, boutiques are back, farmers markets are spreading, and most young fashion designers would prefer to sell their designs to just about anyone other than major retail chains. Against all odds, independent bookstores and music stores are surviving in the digital era while their big box brethren file for bankruptcy.

Facebook, Amazon, and future ‘online malls’ will always be around; as will their real-life equivalents. But I predict that in the next ten years (if not five) we will begin to see an artisan internet emerge around open standards like OpenID, and led by digital natives yearning to express their individuality in a world of indistinguishable mass-manufacturing.

In what I have come to regard as standard Boston crabbiness the woman muttered, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’ Then she glanced back at her father – who looked just a few months shy of needing a walker – and added with a softer tone, ‘but maybe for my dad, if you don’t mind.’ I’m not the best at gauging age, but I would say that grandpa had to be at least 75, if not 80. He looked, and spoke, just like Walter Matthau right before his death.

The college student stood up, ready to give her seat, but grandpa waved her back down. “No, no, you stay seated. I’ll be just fine.” And he continued trudging his way to the back of the bus where he joined his daughter and granddaughter, holding on the the poles to steady his balance.

The reason the brief exchange between the grandpa and the college student has stayed with me ever since is that the life experience leading up to those two seconds has been so different for each one. Assuming that grandpa was 75 years old, that means that he was born in 1934, at the dawn of the New Deal, Hitler’s rise to Führer of Germany, and the beginning of the Long March of the Chinese Communists. He was 21-years-old – likely a college student – when Rosa Parks was found guilty and fined $14 for refusing to give up her seat on the bus. I wonder what his reaction was to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Where was he – as a 30-year-old – during Freedom Summer in Mississippi? Did he cry when Martin Luther King was assassinated? Sadly, I am not able to look back at his weblog to find out, but I am fairly certain that a young black woman giving up her seat on a bus fits into a different context for him than it does for her.

There was a recent article in the New York Times about improved race relations since Obama took power which, for those of us who grew up in multicultural urban surroundings, seems laughably quaint. For example, this line:

“I go to a gym where there are a number of black people,” Mr. Schmidt said. “We don’t often communicate. They tend to have their own circle of friends. But now, there’s been more communication. Now you have an opener. After the election, I started saying hello. I said, ‘Hey, what do you think of Obama, about our new president?’ ”

Hence Jelani Cobb’s rephrasing of the headline: “Obama Wins, White People Speak to Black Ones.” As quaint as the New York Times article may be, the poll that lead to its publication is indicative of just how little exposure most white Americans had to black Americans. Familiarity may breed contempt, as the saying goes, but ignorance breeds bigotry.

And what if James F. Blake, the Montgomery bus driver who told Rosa Parks to give up her seat and then pressed charges against her, had a blog? What would it reveal about the man? What were his thoughts about serving as an American in Europe during WWII, a war which, for many, had nothing to do with this country. Would he have ever mentioned the day in 1943, probably just after returning from the war, in which he cruelly left Rosa Parks to walk home in the rain? Or, 12 years later, when the same middle-aged black seamstress refused to give up her seat (“No. I’m tired of being treated like a second-class citizen.”)? And how would his blog have changed in the 19 years that followed during which time he remained an employee of the Montgomery City Bus Lines? Did his views on race change along with the rest of the country?

Despite that history has tended to be the story of the oppressors, we know much more about Rosa Parks’ life than we will ever know about James F. Blake. I guess that says something about who, in the end, were victors of that particular battle.

According to the Guardian’s Blake obituary:

Looking back on his unintended eruption into history years later, Blake said defensively: “I wasn’t trying to do anything to that Parks woman except do my job. She was in violation of the city codes, so what was I supposed to do? That damn bus was full and she wouldn’t move back. I had my orders.”

We all like to think that our ethics and values today meet the expectations of future generations, and that, had we lived in the past, we would not have stood by and watched as Native Americans were exterminated, Nazis killed Jews, and Blacks were treated as second class citizens. That our individual ethics somehow trump social norms. That we would have been among the small minority who protested during Stanley Milgram’s famous “Obedience to Authority” experiment. There is only one way to know, however, and that is to judge our actions today against the ethics that govern society 50 years from now.

I am fairly certain that fifty years from now the vast majority of our grandchildren will look back at those who protested against gay marriage as wrong, if not bigoted. Fortunately I’m safe there. (HP, not so much.) They will also probably judge the carbon footprint that we left behind. There, with all my jet-setting, I don’t fare so well.

What I have been wrestling with over the past few days, however, is whether or not humanity is on a moral journey from the raping and pillaging of our past to an eventual vegetarian society of the future. One of many lenses through which to see the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries is as an ever-widening circle affording the same rights to groups that had previously been excluded: slaves, lower castes, certain races, nationalities, poor, women, handicapped, gays. By law, if not in practice, nearly all of these groups are now afforded the same basic rights as the others. Our moral trajectory seems to be one of empathy, and already the animal rights groups want widen the circle further to other species of the animal kingdom. “Animal Law” is now taught at 110 out of 180 law schools in the United States.

After the Gay Rights movement eventually (and finally) achieves its objectives, will the animal rights movement become the next (and last) to extend fundamental rights to a formerly excluded group? Will they judge the meat-eaters of today like the James Blakes of our recent past?

I have no idea. I can’t predict what my children or their children will believe in and fight for. But if they judge me as cruel for that gigantic steak I just ate with Pablo I ask them to read Michael Pollan’s essay in the New York Times, “An Animal’s Place,” and to (hopefully) realize that the ethics behind humans eating meat are both complicated and confusing. And, while I’m asking for favors, I also ask that they give up their seats on public transportation and that the young ladies don’t report me when I give little pats on the buttocks. So kind your are, dear future.

Walking around Monrovia I spotted Prince (a common name in Liberia, most notoriously belonging to Prince Johnson) who had set up his mobile barber shop – a dusty mirror, plastic chair, two combs, and a bag of new razors – on a palm tree along the side of the road. Here I am with Prince before my haircut:

Prince asked for $5, probably ten times the price paid by the customer before me. I had no problem throwing down. A growing peanut gallery of local teenage boys and shy smiling girls started to gather behind us. “How you gonna cut this fellow hair?” one of them asked, but Prince muttered a few words about how he had cut white person hair in the past. Ten minutes later, still orbiting me like a moon of absolute confusion, it was clear that he hadn’t. He took out a shiny new razor with his callused fingers, lined it up against the side of his purple comb and began pushing it through my thick matted hair, which fell down in defeated clumps on the dusty earth below. I was sure I’d leave Prince’s barber shop a bald man.

But Prince did alright. As he took off the mosquito netting (probably from some NGO) to display his latest work of art with an inflated chest, the boys’ snickering turned into all-out laughter and the shy smiling girls lowered their heads as if to hide their teeth.

I remember now that I also wrote a post about my last haircut in Argentina, one that I never published here. So:

Alejandro knows this: one of the great soccer rivalries is Argentina versus England. Has to do with that little war they had over the Islas Malvinas … or the Falkland Islands depending on which side has your sympathies. Ironically, the fact that Argentina lost probably led to the downfall of the military dictatorship here and the end of the Dirty War.

In commemoration of those who died in the war, yesterday was a national holiday. It came just a week after another five-day holiday, Semana Santa. I live in San Telmo. It’s the ‘bohemian’ part of town in Latin America’s most bohemian city. When it’s busy, it’s busy: a sea of hipsters, hippies, yippies, and yuppies. When it’s dead, it’s a morgue. Stiller than you could imagine. Absolute silence. Just a couple street dogs running in circles to smell each other’s culos.

I’ve needed a haircut for a few weeks now. I love paying a visit to the barber. In Sao Paulo a drop-dead gorgeous Brazilian shampooed my hair for ten minutes. Why, a friend recently asked, does it feel so good when someone else shampoos your hair, but not when you do it yourself? When the Brazilian stopped the water and said it was time to cut my hair, I almost had the nerve/guts to ask her if my sun-damaged split ends might need a second round of conditioning.

In Park Slope last year I found an old Puerto Rican barber shop filled with reggaetonteens waiting to get their fades. I asked the barber how business was going. Bad, he said. “It’s this gentrification going on. Wealthy white people don’t groom themselves. If you’re brown and you’re poor, you get your hair cut every two weeks. If you’re rich and white you look like you live in a cave.”

But back to Buenos Aires. This time my barber was a rough 40-something, reeking of cigarettes and with a hairy pot belly sticking out of the bottom of his t-shirt. He was complaining to a much older friend about the 20-day agricultural strike that has left grocery stores without meat and factories without grain. “They protest, protest, protest,” he said with his fingers cupped in that famous Argentine-Italian gesture, “but no one is willing to work, work, work.” He had various nicknames for his friend, but my favorite was macho. “Macho, como es que crece un país? Protestando? No boludo, laburando. Mira, hoy es festiado y yo estoy acá. Laburo, laburo, laburo.” He pointed at me with the scissors. “Mirá los yanquis. Cómo es que se pusieron tan ricos? Laburan como burros. Sí o no amigo?” I nodded yes, hoping that he’d start doing a little more laboring and a little less talking himself. I had a conference call to get to back to at the apartment.

The classic phrase from American expats living here is that they moved to Argentina because here you work to live. In the US, they go on, compelled to finish with the punch line, you live to work. In Kevin Johannsen’s song Puerto Madero he makes the obvious observation: everyone who visits Buenos Aires wants to move here; everyone who lives here wants to move somewhere else.

I think it has to do with the seasons of life. In Hinduism – at least according to my religion professor in Kathmandu – there are four phases of life. First you’re young, what they harmlessly call a pendejo here in Argentina. The point is to learn, to experience, to mature. The second phase, you work your ass off. You do it for your community and to get ready to start a family. Third phase of life is the longest. You have a family, raise your children, pass on your legacy. The fourth phase of your life you go walk into a forest, question everything, and lay down to die.

Our generation lives an entire life season in just a year. One year we’re hustling our asses off. The next, retirement. Then back to the hustle. We romanticise and fetishize both. When we’re resting we think about everything we want to accomplish in our lives. And when we’re in the thick of it, we just want to get away. The secret, I suppose, is learning to accept the back and forth.

The drive, it starts out like this, a quiet coasting down Leucadia boulevard with a thin strip of silvery marine blue always on the horizon.

Leucadia, with all her Greek gods and goddesses, settled by spiritualist quacks at the end of the 19th century, overtaken by nouveau-riche surfer yippies at the end of the 20th century. Its eccentricity, a perfect melding of both.

I would arrive to work at 5:50 a.m., as would José, always right on the dot. He’d be blasting Maná. I always started the day with KSDS.

- ¿Qué onda pinche guero!!?
- ¿Qué dices puto? Tu mamá te manda saludos!

And so the day would start. The first thing you do is brew the coffee. ‘Cause the same five customers are always going to be there at 5:55 a.m. no matter how many times you tell them you open at six. We took turns: hosing down the patio, cleaning the bathrooms, prepping the kitchen, cleaning the espresso machine, putting out the pastries. There was no division of labor, no hierarchy, no script. It was all jazz, improvisation, two musicians who know what chord is coming next.

Jose

I’m quiet in the mornings, nearly mute, until I have my first cup of coffee. Then José and I would begin our wit fest, laughing and cracking jokes at the expense of un-caffeinated yuppies who didn’t understand our strange sailor’s spanglish and the inside jokes that develop over years and months of such early morning proximity.

On weekends we would sometimes work the night shifts, drinking beer and serving coffee until midnight. Then we’d go next door to the struggling Mexican restaurant and José would drink another beer while I sobered up before driving home. Only then would we sometimes have conversations resembling anything serious.

- What are you going to do with your life? he’d ask me, wondering why anyone with a university degree would still be working at a coffee shop.
- I dunno, work in restaurants, factories, on farms, on trains. One day I’ll write a book. Until then I’m just gathering material.
- Pinches gringos, guey.

One Saturday night, after finishing a night shift, José went to go meet Jared, a mutual friend, at the Leucadian, our local dive bar where middle aged beach bums and young indie hipsters would pretend that they belong together.

The next morning Jose and I were to open shop. I’ve written this story before:

I’ll never forget – it was about a year and a half ago – when Jose and I were supposed to be working together at 6 in the morning. Then at 6:30 he comes in and he’s bleeding and there’s bits of glass poking out of his forearms. I’ve never seen a face so expressionless before.

He was out the night before with another friend of ours, Jared at a local bar, the Leucadian. Neither one of them should have been driving – but after having a burrito at Juanitas to sober up, Jared said he was ok to drive. It was already 3 in the morning. Jared was driving Jose’s new white Honda Accord, which he had been saving up all his tip money for. At a notoriously unsafe dip on Vulcan Avenue the car bottomed out and then flipped over landing upside down on the sidewalk. Jared died immediately. Jose was unscathed except for some minor cuts by the glass. No bruises, no broken bones. He was asleep and when he woke up the car was in midair and when he realized what had happened, Jared was already dead.

A couple months later Jose’s wife gave birth to their first son, Jared. Neither one – at least at the time – could pronounce his name correctly. Jose wanted his son to be a doctor or engineer. He could never understand why someone like me, with the opportunity to get a college degree, would want to work in factories and on farms. In fact, he told me I never would, that it’s not what middle-class White Americans end up doing.

José and Jared

Of course, he was right. But on days like today, waking up at 5:25 a.m., I try and fail to figure out how I’ve come to this point. How the ball of yarn unravelled.

It was exactly five years ago that I first started this blog. Those words read like they belong to someone else. I can’t relate to their author. I wonder if it will be the same five years from now.

Last night I had a great conversation with a good friend on the difference between ambition and purpose. The two, sadly, had become intertwined and inseparable as one in my mind. Over the past couple years I have surrounded myself with a small army of unstoppable ambition. People who work on five projects at the same time and are writing books meanwhile and then giving thought-provoking presentations and then interviewing and then being interviewed and then … I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

It’s not that I’m an unambitious person myself, but over the past couple weeks I have been. Short on zeal or oomph or caffeine. Or so I thought, but no matter how many cups of coffee I would drink, the ambition still waned.

Then last night I was reminded that ambition is a personality trait; something that is instilled in us at a young age. Or, more likely, in our DNA. But purpose comes from somewhere else. We don’t know where – quite possibly the same place where consciousness itself comes from. Or maybe purpose is one more thing we construct to cope – a call to a higher power, an objectively noble pursuit.

But that isn’t what I was thinking about last night driving home from the gym, the neon lights of the car lots and liquor stores competing with the flashing lights of the cop cars on Broadway, the last two miles of downtown Oakland to resist 21st century development. On the side of the street, the same story played out again: two young black men, cornrows, sagging jeans, handcuffs.

I was thinking about my own purpose. My shoulders dropped, almost imperceptibly, with relief when I realized that my purpose in life – at least so it seems today – is to introduce people from different communities to one another. Republicans to democrats, youth to elders, ethnicity to ethnicity, sexual preference to sexual preference, nationality to nationality. However it is that groups of individuals choose to cluster, I would like to help set up a handshake. It is a purpose which is entirely modest and manageable.

And so I woke up this morning ready to do my job not because I needed to, but because I wanted to.