some guy in lebanon

So…. this is my first real post to satori redefined, and I think that it’d be fitting if I tried to recap in some detail what the past five months (five months!?!?) have been like in my life, and maybe sketch out what the next five months might look like. So, without further ado (and apologies to anyone or anything I might be forgetting…), here we go:

May

May was an eventful month in my life, considering that I made the tumultuous decision to upend my life and move back to Maine. Leaving the life I’d built in DC and my former life as an Analyst for PayStream Advisors was not easy, and I’ve obviously got my regrets and apologies. Henry Ijams and PayStream were a great home for a long time, and he taught me a lot. DC was good to me this spring, but when I left, it was time for me to go.

Renting an SUV and packing my stuff at Christian Berle’s house, I left town and headed north.

Quickly on that note, I definitely owed Christian a huge debt for allowing me to rent a room in his house all winter.

Returning to Maine, honestly I was a mess. My sleep schedule flipped upside down, and I admit I spent the first two weeks up all night playing video games. Eventually I stabilized a little bit and began the process of returning my life to order. In early May, I’d spoken with Nick Kimbrell, and we’d discussed the possibility of my moving to Beirut to pursue work at the Daily Star. I didn’t quite know what the path would be to get from here to there, but I knew that the first step was to start paying down my debt and living a more relaxed and balanced life than the one I’d been living in DC. I knew I’d lost a lot of perspective and honesty with myself and others, and so I knew I had to set out to find some honest hard work.

And just when I need to find that work, that work seemed to find me. In late May, after two weeks back in Maine, I searched on Craigslist and found this little post:

This is both a full time and part time independent contractor position, which means you pick when and where you want to work. We are collecting petitions to repeal a state tax on beverages and should be here for about 6 weeks. To start I would be matching you up with a pro who would be showing you how to circulate. During the witness period you would be paid $50 a day plus any petitions you collect. $10-20 an hour should be very reachable. Pay will be at least once a week.

Well I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but $10-20 an hour seemed attractive, so I met up with this guy Zane the next day and discovered that he was head of an outfit that had been contracted by an anti-tax Political Action Committee here in Maine called “Fed Up With Taxes” that was collecting signatures to repeal a new tax on beer, wine, liquor and soda in order to fund the states public healthcare plan called Dirigo Health. Here’s a cartoon making fun of us:

As a side note, Dirigo is a ridiculous healthcare program that’s designed to essentially make healthcare cheaper for those who can already afford it, while making prices more expensive for everyone else. It was signed into law during a mid-night session of Maine’s congress and its coverage is so bad that the legislators themselves won’t give up their cushy all-inclusive state healthcare plan “MaineCare” and switch to Dirigo.

Needless to say, the beverage industry’s got deep pockets, and was shelling out big bucks to get the signatures needed to put a repeal on the ballot. That’s where I came in. It turns out that there’s an entire industry of signature collecting, and these teams of petitioners go around the country collecting “sigs” – these guys are essentially political hired guns, covered in tattoos and with lots of stories of past lives as gangsters, car dealers, hustlers, rednecks, and the like. They were great. I got hooked up with one of the guys, Julius, and he showed me the ropes of petitioning. Zane’s out fit was paying $2 a signature, and we weren’t exactly selling ketchup popsicles. Let me say that again:

We were getting paid $2 a signature to get people to sign something they desperately wanted to sign.

Ned's Graduation

Because EVERYONE hated the idea of their beer and soda prices going up. Needless to say, I was making about $700 a week at a job that lasted about 3 weeks. It finished out my May in style, working 70 hours a week and hanging out with pirates, and it was a job I’ll never forget. It also got me through the beginning of June.

At the end of May, Ned put on his amazing play, “The Last Five Years,” and then graduated (can’t remember of graduation was at the end of May or the beginning of June). The play was extraordinary. There’s no other way to put it. Ned directed, started, and produced the show. My jaw was dropped for at least 80% of the time. Here’s some pictures:

June

June was not nearly as crazy as May, but it certainly was eventful.

Ned’s graduation was followed by the realization that, since his leg was healing fast (he blew it out in early spring playing lacrosse), he’d be able to drive his car soon. Yeah, so obviously I was happy for him, but that meant I needed a set of wheels! Knowing I might be leaving the country at the end of the summer, and knowing that I only had so much cash on hand (the life of a petitioner is ‘easy come, easy go’) I figured,

Why not buy a moped?

Why not? So I began looking on Craigslist, and initially found a listing for a “125 CC” moped, which was just a little too much because that meant I’d have to get a motorcycle license. In Maine, you can only have up to 49.9 CC’s with a normal license. I called the guy up and told him unfortunately I wasn’t going to buy his moped, he asked me why, I said I wanted something smaller, and he said he had one of those too! Sweet, so I shelled out $650, and was now the proud owner of what my mother affectionately calls the “putt putt:”

Moped aka "Putt Putt"

The moped was a God Send. Perfectly sized to get around town, with a top-speed of 40 mph and as far as I could tell getting about 100 miles to the gallon, it was the perfect vehicle for Portland, and also allowed me to relinquish Ned’s car without attempting to go Tanya Harding on his other knee. Shortly thereafter I spent a weekend in DC with Leigh.

It was about that time that I was starting to get some heat from Mom about moving out of the house, so I promptly returned to Craigslist where I found a listing for a house on the Western Prom where I could rent a room for the summer. Looking at the address, I realized, to my surprise,

It was Malcolm Coates’ House!

Another God Send – This house was perfect. Just around the corner from Mom’s so that I could raid the fridge if need be (I ended up doing that rarely) but with a huge room with a balcony and private bed room and a pair of great room mates, Adam and Kyle Horan. Adam had a crew of guys he worked with at a restaurant on Pine Point in Scarborough, and we spent the first week in the house playing poker and drinking cheap beer.

I also was able to pick up a job at the restaurant I worked at right after high school, the Portland Lobster Company. The kitchen had a great staff and the place was under new ownership, but at the same time a few of the folks from way back were still working there as managers, and the restaurant basically ran itself. A lot of the little annoying things from the past were gone, and there was live music and free food and the whole Old Port to enjoy after work. And enjoy it I did. Many nights at the bars with staff or with Adam and his friend led to an almost perpetually empty bank account, but lots of fun and relaxation. I was also working a content gig with John Herrigel and was beginning my job as a tutor for a few students at Waynflete.

Johnathan Sherman was my student for most of the summer, and I’ll just remark that I was amazed at his progress. John, if you’re reading this, let me know how things are going in New York! I hope you’re parents still think I was worth the money…

June ended far differently than it began: Work at the Lobster company had begun, I had new digs, new friends, and the whole summer to look forward to, and I hadn’t even been up to Small Point!

July

July is when things start getting a blurry… I know there was quite a lot of Small Point, including several trips up there on the moped (yikes…!) – Spent a lot of time on the Short-Lee basement futon, and was lucky enough to get to know Emma Short-Lee much better, a Small Point friendship that had always seemed to be put off in the past. Also a cool development was Nicole’s and Barret’s wedding, which was the weekend I met Yurian, Sara Tierce-Hazard’s awesome boyfriend who I have a feeling was my arch-enemy in a past life. This is Sara and Juriaan:

Sara and Juriaan

I credit these two wonderful people with really making my summer. Whether it was lounging around Sara’s beautiful house (from which I took a picture that is below):

Getting amped up for one of the dozens of killer beach parties, drinking copious amounts of cheap beer, talking about the future, or reminiscing about the past, it was always Yurian and Sara who would stay the latest, arrive the earliest, and wear the best sun glasses. Except for me, of course.

Although we hung out in July, it would be August that we saw each other almost every day.

August

August began with my birthday (the 4th), which was awesome by any standard. Staying at cliff cottage, drinking gin and tonics all day long, hanging out with Emma on her awesome porch, and ended as always with a fire on the beach. The weather had been horrible for days before and would be horrible days after, but for some reason the weather gods shined on me brightly that day.

August was a lazy and wonderful month this year, full of parties and friends and parties and just enough work to pay for it all. There seemed to always be something going on, whether it was sailing on the Audex with John, being a guest-counselor at Arts and Nature with super-counsleors Charlotte and Camilla, lighting fires on the beach with no wood/paper/matches, beer runs to the Center Store, picnics on Shell Beach with firecrackers to boot, and always the comings and going of Small Point people, some in for a few days, some in for a few weeks.

August also is host to the annual Yetti’s Pig Roast in Booth Bay Harbor, where I got to see Greg, Gus, Grady, Denny, Kai, and a whole slew of their friends. Here’s a few of the many pictures I took while I was in Booth Bay:

At the same time, my attention began turning to the fall. In mid-August, I began contact Marc Sirot relatively frequently, and interfacing as well with Nick, to begin working out details about possibly going to Lebanon to intern with the Daily Star. The idea had always been to try out the track Nick took this past year, interning with the hope that I might find a niche at the newspaper and work full time. By the end of August, Marc and I had agreed on a time-table for me to fly to Lebanon and I booked my (one-way!?) flight into Beirut on November 2nd.

August saw the re-introduction of the Curtis Big House, or “Ropes End” into my life. Though I grew up in Small Point, I always spent a lot of time at the Club. It was amazing to be able to stay a full three weeks at my family’s real home in Small Point. We even got to have a couple decent-sized parties there after we’d had enough of shaking beach-sand and camp-fire smoke out of our sheets every morning.

Mom and Stacey Coates also enlisted me to handle the multi-media elements of the Summer School’s musical 50-Year-Anniversary Review. As mom and Sumner like to say, the show was C-Work with A-Level heart. I myself thought it was fantatsic, and was extremely proud of the campers who threw the thing together in 10 days.

The summer wasn’t complete without spending a heck of a lot of time with my very old friend John Herrigel, who’s just returned from a whirlwind sailing trip to the Caribbean on his yacht the Audex. Here are some pictures from one of our sun-set cruises. Folks on board included John, Bryn, Isaiah, Tim, Julian Herrigel and Peggy Peacock, and Malcome and Tiffany Coates.

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As the summer drew to a close, Tim, myself, Emma, Sara, Yurian and Isaiah all managed to get ourselves into trouble in Portland. Won’t get into the details, needless to say everyone seemed to be into the get-into-trouble mood that night.

By that time, I had already signaled to the Lobster Company that I was ready to start taking twice the hours I had normally. Life was about to get really straightforward as I transitioned from sunny days and long nights to working 60 hours a week.

September

The past four weeks of September have been marked by several key themes. Namely, working all the time, sobriety as I try to air out a little after the summer, and getting things sorted out for Lebanon.

I built several websites, including one for David Fernald at http://fernald4portland.com – I also have been collaborating with a few friends in New York to build a sophisticated B2B marketing software platform. We’ll see what happens there. I built this website and I’m very proud of it. I also have a few projects coming up before I leave.

In October, I know things are going to start moving very quickly – November 2nd will definitely come up fast. I’m going out to Oregon to see a friend at the end of the month, but primarily life will revolve around the Lobster Company and Tom Tanner’s painting outfit in Falmouth, which I’ve hooked up with to paint a mansion on the Foreside.

So I pretty much either come home smelling like Lobster or covered in Paint.

Such is life…

So anyways, the summer’s been a BLAST – Saw so many fun people who I haven’t even been able to name here, met lots of new folks and had lots of R-Rated fun downtown and up the coast. I forgot to mention partying at Alliquipa with Karin and and T.C. Ostrander, seeing Brady for the first time in a while, being a beer-pong champion, seeing Sam, Oliver and Eli Utne way more than usual which was great, tutoring Robin Wajner, seeing Camilla Lee and her very cool boyfriend, lounging around talking about history with my grandfather, having lunch with my grandmother and uncle, meeting an angel, scrubbing the deck, bar tending at the Club, making gin and tonics on the Club Porch at midnight, reading John Dies in the End, or really a million other things, but what can I do?

Stay posted on my future life in Lebanon but I don’t think I’ll be writing too much between now and then…

The Dao that can be experienced is not true;
The world that can be constructed is not true.
The Dao manifests all that happens and may happen;
The world represents all that exists and may exist.
-Dao De Jing