I knew that if I didn’t jump first, I wouldn’t do it. Watching and anticipating would only allow for the dread to build up and paralyze me. While I began my descent into anxiety (in preparation from my descent from an airplane), Wil called over, “Michael, do you want to go first?” Yes.

Surprisingly, there wasn’t a lot of training. The tandem instructors pulled Wil and I aside, strapped us into the harnesses, and walked us to the plane. “So we’ll cover what you need to do in the plane, and I’ll explain the landing on our way down.” Good. No need to think about this too much.

The plane was a single prop Cessna.- room for two skydivers, two tandem instructors, and a pilot. Cramped inside, the tiny plane began to go down the runway. Oddly enough as the wheels lifted off the ground, I felt a calm come over me. Like any of the other flights I’ve been on, once we takeoff, there’s nothing I can really do. I was committed.

The instructor, Justin, walked me through the position I needed to get in once we left the plane. That was it. As we climbed up and up to our goal of 10,000 feet, I began to shake again. Wil looked at me and gave a sarcastic toothy smile and a thumbs up. About that time, my instructor started saying something to the pilot. Quick exchanges were made and he unclipped me from the harness, pushing me towards Wil and saying he needed to look at something. The heater in the plane was on and Justin was leaning against it. When he removed his hand from the back of the parachute, there was melted glue all over it. Shit was melting. Panic swelled in me. Wide-eyed I looked at the floor, then up, then at Wil, then at my instructor. “Dude, it’s fine, we’ll be ok.”

After a few minutes pass, Justin hooks me back up. “How about a few skydiving jokes before we go?” What the hell – hit me. The jokes, I assumed, were to calm my nerves, but there’s only so much you can do to distract you from the fact that you’re about to jump out of an airplane and free fall at 120mph.

The time had finally come. Justin opened the door and the roar of wind made the loud Cessna even louder. Wil gave another sign of encouragement and a skeptical glance. I knew in the back of his mind he figured this would be the part where I said ‘hell no’ to the whole thing. Justin put his feet out of the plane, I followed suit. 1, 2, 3. We were falling.

It all happened very quickly. Tumbling downward, there was no sense of direction. Just a rush of air. My eyes open I see the plane veer away from us. It was an image burned into my mind. Seeing a plane from the perspective was almost haunting. It was almost like missing a bus. You see it take off down the street without you and in your head you scream, “Wait for me!” The plane was not going to wait – and the option of jumping back inside James Bond style was not really an option.

I arched my back, lifted my head up, and kicked my feet backwards (the position they told us to get into). As soon as I did that the twirling leveled off. Justin made some maneuvers that spun us around like a top or a awkward cartwheel. There was some element of control, despite the fact that we were freefalling to the ground.

45 seconds is a long time. A long ass time. It’s enough time to process what’s going on, stick your arms out, realize what’s going on, and to think “holy shit, holy shit, holy shit” about 87 times.

Justin pulled the cord, and the mangled, melted, malfunctioning parachute that I signed pages and pages of waivers consenting to the fact that it might not work, I might not survive, I might not make it home, unfurled. With a jolt, we stopped falling and began to coast slowly to the ground.

Elements of control came with the slower descent as well. I drove a little bit – pulling the handles to the left and right. Then allllll the way to the right, which sent us into this quick spiral and fast fall to the ground again. Positive that I had sealed our fate again, I said “that’s enough, I’m done doing that,” and gave the handles back to Justin (after again assuring him that I’m not going to puke). About that time I see Wil’s parachute open up.

We landed on our butts at a slower pace than it felt. The ground was soft and wet and amazing under my ass. I survived, I always knew I would. The adrenaline coursed through my veins and I felt an amazing high. I tempted death, in a controlled environment, sort of. I didn’t do anything except fall out of an airplane.

Would I do it again? Probably not. I’m not a thrill seeker. I can check the box that I experienced jumping from an airplane, but I think I prefer riding in them and drinking to jumping out. Wil and I discussed that maybe, MAYBE, if an opportunity came up where we could do it someplace really unique like the Alps or into some famous canyon or something that the option could be reconsidered.

Skydive Sacramento gets five-stars. The guys there were professional and fun. They put up with our large group and got 7 out of 7 first time divers back to the ground safely. We got our stuff and left to drive back to Palo Alto (and eventually back into SF for me).

At we made our way home, the girl driving wasn’t looking and the car ahead of us hit their brakes. I made that noise that all mom’s make when their kids are new drivers. Wil looked over and said, “Really? That scared you? You just jumped out of an airplane.” Touché.

I accumulated a lot of stuff over the past year. Tomorrow I leave for the first work trip of the year – the first of 18 scheduled ones so far (and I manage to squeeze in some personal trips and work tacks on another couple when I am too idle in Austin). Who am I kidding, I love every minute of it and would travel nonstop if I could.

On my last flight (coming home from Boston after celebrating New Years there) I watched ‘Up in the Air.’ I loved it and completely related to the main character…and also turned the movie off 3/4 of the way through. (I know how that shit ends and I liked feeling good about relating to Georgey…didn’t care to share in his doom). Oh, spoiler alert: It ends on a kind of depressing note, except for his weird sister, but I digress.

So, on all my trips last year, I brought this backpack. Throughout the year my bag got heavier and heavier. I could go off on a metaphor about how that represents my life and I’m hauling all of this extra weight…….oh my god, this IS like ‘Up in the Air…’ I’ll stop. Promise.

The point of this entry though is to explain what I did tonight. I emptied out my backpack completely. A new year, a fresh start. Annnd I just wanted to see what kind of shit was in there.

So here it is, everything I pulled out of my magic bag after 12 months of nonstop travel:

1. laptop
2. iPad
3. journal
4. busted iPhone
5. bag of cough drops
6. laser pointer and slide advancer
7. old name badge from Cincinnati
8. iPhone charger
9. 2 camera lens covers
10. RayBans
11. alligator bracelet from Australia
12. woven bracelet
13. business cards
14. hand sanitizer
15. Afrin
16. eye drops
17. 100cal bag of almonds
18. apple
19. several pens
20. 5 boarding passes
21. rubber bands and clips
22. 2 thumb drives
23. Burts chap stick
24. allergy medicine
25. mouse
26. green sharpie
27. NYC metro card
28. taxi cab receipt
29. tissues
30. currency from 3 different countries
31. proof for an agenda concept

Friendships new and old, lost and forged. Relationships burned. Kicked in doors. Revolutions in career, in family, in self.

Two-thousand twelve. A year that many have feared, speculated, doubted, waited – a year that is associated with endings, and yet, so far, this year has been about rebirth for myself. A personal Renaissance.

This post isn’t about a particular topic. It’s about starting something anew. Just get something out there. I’ve tried in the past to define this blog as a medium to track the course of progress, yet in maticulously plotting my life around what I should do to present to the world, I found myself stuck in a gridlock. Nothing created. 

I truly hope to turn that around this year. There is already plenty of fodder – a horrible relationship morphing into a book, being abandoned in a foreign country by one of my closets friends, a job that keeps me traveling around the world 75% of the year…plenty of things to comment on.

So whether it is travel or work or dreams or musical theater or boys – I plan on keeping up here. Resolutions abound. I feel like 2012 will be a lot like 2008. I made some promises to myself and I religiously kept up with them. I want these things.

Here we go. 

The line had been there all along. Why hadn’t I seen it before? Probably because I did not have the sight yet. “You can be a real asshole.” This seemed strangely familiar. Maybe I have come full circle. I’m back. Instead of recoiling from the insult, the corners of my lips curl upwards. Now, what to do with this mess. It’s a mess the spineless self of my past created. This will never do.

At some point I abandoned my list altogether. The people I met didn’t add up to what I wanted, they added up to what I needed – change. Pushing limits, foreign ideas. It’s what excited me. As I cycled through the deck of boys I realized, my list was flawed – it didn’t account for my own change. I wasn’t me yet and by abandoning my ideal and embracing the unknown, I discovered some truth.

It’s odd, these two paragraphs. One, embracing the return to what I was and the other, embracing the ambiguity of dating. Both instances the conclusions are the same; however, I really think the technique has improved. Nothing more really to that.

1. 3 people getting masters degrees in theater showed up at my apartment and needed a place to stay.

2. Had dinner and had drinks with those 3 and 2 more and discussed plays and musicals the whole time.

3. Saw ‘Next to Normal’ in NYC

4. Went to Musical Mondays where they only played songs from musicals all night

5. Met Cole Escola from VGL Boys

As I was en route back to Austin, I couldn’t help but feel like I’m not taking advantage of the resources I have here in Texas.

My past recent trips haven’t left me feeling trapped or as if I am dissatisfied with my choices. Life in Austin is great, but safe. The thing I loved about hanging out with all the theater kids and seeing all of the B’way boys at Musical Monday was all the passion. They are all in love with what they are doing and take chances.

I have a good life in Austin, but it’s built on top of all the safe choices. I want to be smart about this, but take some risk soon.

I have a date in mind and I’m building out a plan.

While I’m not on a vacation in Austin (I live here), it’s still a place that constantly surprises me.

A few weeks ago I was talking to friend of a friend who said he really couldn’t imagine me in Austin. “You seem like you’d thrive in a bigger city than this.” I can’t really argue that. The thought of packing up and moving to New York or Los Angeles is definitely tempting; however, last Friday, I did pack up and move.

I moved apartments, about half a mile down the road from where I was living before. It wasn’t a brutal move (aside from moving at all being a sucky experience). The uprooting and starting in a new place really resonated with the travel chord in me.

I’ve lived in the Austin-area for almost 5 years. During that time I’ve moved 5 times from Round Rock to Hyde Park to Hyde Park to Manor to North Austin and finally (well, probably not finally) to North Austin.

Each time has been a different experience, different people have helped, and the different places are consistently getting nicer. The only thing that doesn’t change is the feeling I get when I’m done moving.

I have friends all around the country and some, who have never visited Austin, have this movie-molded view of cowboys, horses, BBQ, and twangy accents. Austin isn’t really about that.

After 11 hours of moving, my furniture was set back up, knickknacks positioned, pictures hung, and floors vacuumed. The place was quiet. I

The uniqueness, matched with my new surroundings, caused me to go into a deep state of reflection. At home, in Austin, I’m usually not pushed from my comfort zone like I am when I’m on the road. At home, I am in my bubble, I work, I have dinner with friends, drinks with coworkers. On this particular weekend though, I was in a exceptional place. The air was charged with energy from the SXSW Festival and the perfect weather.

Then my neighbors called.

My neighbors, also gay, and I haven’t really hung out all that much. They were at the pool and wanted me to come join for drinks. After the marathon moving session, I gladly joined. The conversations that followed were not important. We laughed at some of the people we’ve seen around the new complex. Complained about living at previous places, discussed work and daily lives.

The thing about Austin gays is something I haven’t really seen anywhere else (this is probably because I haven’t spent a significant amount of time in another city getting to really know the people). Austin gays all seem relationship focused. They want to get married and settle down. Not for the equal rights stance, but because they have this sentimental mentality that getting married is what they are supposed to do.

Regardless of that, my neighbors, a couple, are witty guys. We sat by the pool, drank, watched the sun go down and felt the air turn cool. My phone rang and my friend Adam wanted to go to dinner.

Adam met me at my place and he told me that he was moving to Boston for a new job soon. This didn’t come too much as a surprise, but it suddenly dawned on me that this would be the last time we would get to hang out in a long time.

That realization brought on more reflection. Austin is a transient place. Things are constantly shifting about. The fluidity of the people, and especially the homos, constantly keeps things fresh and interesting. Just in the period of 48 hours, I moved, my friend Adam was moving away, thousands of people had descended upon the city for SXSW, and the weather was changing was warm to cold.

The way things constantly move keep the people and ideas original. People have the saying, ‘Keep Austin weird.’ I didn’t really get it when I first moved here, but now I do. It’s a saying that I think I’ve only come to know because I constantly move around. I’ve seen the many unique perspectives and people this place has to offer, and recognize that it’s probably the most important thing it has to offer.

It’s nice to be semi-rooted here, now, while I’m young. While Austin might not be the biggest city in the world, and I may hate it sometimes, but the people are pretty great and have prepared me for my next adventure…y’all.

In doing that, the ideas of hiking the ruins of Machu Picchu were replaced with logging miles on the treadmill at the gym and dreams of snorkeling everyday in the Great Barrier Reef faded into a non-fat soy latte as I wake up on my way into the office.

That being said, I have managed to see my fair share of the world so far.

A disco nap is a short nap you take to recharge before going out for the night. They are vain attempts muster up some energy before a rally. I look at my disco trips in the same way. Often times they are short excursions over a long weekend, but despite the length of the trips, they get me through the night.

I’m hoping to share some unique perspectives on the places I’ve been and hopefully shed some light on different destination from the traveler’s perspective when you type in ‘gay <random city>’ into Google. If you are debating on staying home over the weekend over a random trip across the country, may my experiences help you buy that plane ticket.

With that, disco trips.

I have all the materials at my fingertips to create this thing that I want. In my journal from 2005, there is a quote that my friend John wrote inside, “What words preserve experience?” I am a writer, among other things, and want to find out.

All of the writing I’ve done so far try to capture experience. The experiences are either of love or travel. They involve some amazing people and chronicle a lot of growth within myself. The next steps for me center around piecing them together. Find the bigger picture from these isolated experiences.

Why contemplate the validity of experience? I think the answer to that will evolve over time, but for now, I think it’s going to uncover some of the answers I’ve been looking for.

I read the first, Acharnians, a story about a man who grew tired of the political body debating the continuation of the Peloponnesian War, instead of discussing ways to find peace. The man sought the help of a decedent of two gods, and found peace independent of the rest of Athens. As the story progresses, peace and chaos are juxtaposed in several odd situations, finally ending with a general being called to war, and the man who got peace being called to a party (where he wins a drinking contest on top of it all).

The more I thought about it, the play seemed incredibly relevant to today’s political climate…kind of sad that the same things are happening 2500 years later. Not surprisingly, a theatre group at Stanford also had the same thought last year…geez, I need to go to grad school.

One insignificant line jumped out at me:

“And the young men use that mincing sissy

Cleinnias’ son,

Alcibiades; and from now on, when it comes

to fines and exiles, only the old

should ostracize

the old, and the young the young.”

The footnote briefly explained who exactly Alcibiades was and I immediately knew we would have been best friends. “The golden boy of Athens and a pupil of Socrates. He was beautiful, talented, arrogant, unscrupulous, and dissolute.” I know we would have been best friends because it sounds a lot like my best friends today.

Wikipedia didn’t offer too much interesting information, aside that he was a Athenian general then defected to Sparta and then went back to Athens again. I probably would have enjoyed the younger, golden-boy version better than the general, but who knows. Coming back from The Golden State, leaving two of my best friends behind, I felt a little like I was defecting from the people I cared about most. Maybe instead of my friends being like Alcibiades, maybe I was drawn to him because I saw a little bit of myself in him. Uprooting my Texas life for mountains and beaches is definitely a tempting idea that has crossed my mind a few times. Maybe one of the next plays by Aristophanes will strike other chords with me, pushing me West.

(On a side note, I was going to take this entry in a totally different direction until I looked up recent productions of the play and the Stanford (where one of my friend’s goes) website popped up)

It’s been odd noticing the coincidences tying me to California ever since I got back. Keeping my eyes open there.

This blog was created to track the progress of some kind of creative endeavor. My interests always left me in a gridlock, begging the nagging question-  which way do I turn? Everything requiring immense amounts of time, energy; creating many opportunities to fail, and few to succeed.

In August, I stopped. I quit piano lessons. I stopped journaling. I can’t name the last book I read (after thinking about it, actually, I think it was Shadows of the Wind – five stars). My lattice of support was crumbling. There were warning signs long before, I was prepared. With the exodus of my best friend from Texas, I knew that I needed to get ready to really shine.

I used the past few months as an opportunity to re-evaluate a lot of things, break apart my interests, find a common denominator. I want to create something. I want to use notes, words, letters, emotions- I want to move people. I feel a great sense of completeness when I focus on moving people. When I move someone else, I’m moving.

Chewing on that idea for a bit, it dawned on me that I was going about everything the wrong way.

I want to move people, but I’ve only been focusing on moving myself.

Instead of concentrating on what I can create to influence people, I should focus on what people can do to move themselves. It seems that’s the only way people move anyway- if you choose to move yourself. So, for the time being, I’m going to take a big dose of empathy. I’m going to look at what I can do to help other people become successful. That may be the key demystifying the gridlock that’s kept me standing still.

As soon as that thought entered my head, things moved.

In Shadows of the Wind, the main character of the story didn’t even enter the picture until the last 20 pages. He influenced from the shadows.   My creativity is going to thrive in the shadows for now. I am going lift people up high and see where that leads. Regardless of the outcome I feel the movement, and sometimes just moving, is all that it takes to get you where you want to go.