I’m on my third day as a San Fran­cisco res­i­dent. I thought about writ­ing a thing before leav­ing, in the generic-life-update-for-a-blog cat­e­gory, but I fig­ure the only peo­ple who look at this thing (well, who might look at it if it ever had any­thing new) are peo­ple who already knew I was mov­ing to SF, so no point in doing that.

The gen­eral feel­ing right now is that I don’t know what I’m feel­ing. It feels melo­dra­matic to say this, but I feel very personality-less here. It is a com­pletely for­eign cul­ture that I have no attach­ment to, other than believ­ing that I will be quite happy. For the first time, I have been given the oppor­tu­nity to cre­ate a life for myself wholly unat­tached to my past, and it’s going to take me a long time to get a han­dle on that. It even took me two weeks to fig­ure out that being able to do what I want with my life is a good thing. There is, of course, the fear of change that peo­ple have. I am more prone to fear­ing change than oth­ers, but I rec­og­nize it is nearly always for the bet­ter, so I per­haps crave it more than oth­ers. Fear of the unknown, though, is always some­thing to con­front — espe­cially when it involves moving!

Lo, here I am. The view from my office is gor­geous, you have to put effort into find­ing a bad meal here, and every­thing just smells so good. Here I am, here I begin.

The trip out here, though, was something…how could it not be? You’d be hard-pressed to find some­one more in love with long stretches of dri­ving in the mid­dle of nowhere than me. Dri­ving alone (with good music) is pretty much my panacea. I work out a lot behind the wheel. I came to terms with the crux of a few things that had been haunt­ing me for months, years. I’m not forc­ing an anal­ogy by say­ing that dri­ving helps me see the roadmap through my issues, and I’ll be able to work on them while I am here and really refine myself.

It took me 11 days to get here. (The above hourly total is only time spent dri­ving.) I killed a week in Denver/Boulder with a good friend and took in an enjoy­able music fes­ti­val. Prob­a­bly fit­ting that I memo­ri­al­ize the trip itself with a lit­tle com­pi­la­tion. Here are the songs that ended up affect­ing me the most the past few weeks. They’re fairly chrono­log­i­cal in the order I played them, so they’re a lit­tle dis­jointed from each other (as they reflect the high­lights of my trip). That also means that they’re fairly geo­graph­i­cal. You’re going through the plains, over the Rock­ies, across the desert, and over the moun­tains again into Cal­i­for­nia. Enjoy…

The Church “Des­ti­na­tion” Starfish
And One “Enjoy The Unknown” Body­pop
The Rose­buds “Night of the Furies” Night of the Furies
The xx “Basic Space” xx
Ultra­vox “When the Time Comes” Lament
Peter Gabriel “Sig­nal to Noise” Up
Under­world “Juanita : Kite­less : to Dream of Love” Sec­ond Tough­est in the Infants
Kei­ichi Suzuki “Satel­lite Ser­e­nade (Trans-Asian Express Mix)” Aun­tie Aubrey’s Excur­sions Beyond the Call of Duty Part 1
The Shamen “Con­quis­ta­dor” Axis Mutatis
808 State “Nim­bus” Gor­geous
Cos­mic­ity “Today Is Bet­ter Than It Seems” The Binary Lan­guage of Love
a-ha “Out of Blue Comes Green” Stay on These Roads
U2 “Acro­bat” Achtung Baby
Mas­sive Attack “Safe From Harm” Blue Lines
Mas­sive Attack “Three” Pro­tec­tion
Steve Roach & Roger King “A Big­ger Sky” Dust to Dust
Depeche Mode “Walk­ing in My Shoes (Grungy Gonads Mix)” Walk­ing in My Shoes
Depeche Mode “Sacred” 101

http://benthic.cc/3170.zip
There’s a playlist in there, unless you’re an iTunes user. Sorry, you’ll have to recre­ate it on your own. I’m not sup­port­ing that piece of shit soft­ware anymore.

Like I said, this is only high­lights. Other good audio was BBC World Ser­vice, Marc Maron’s WTF, and phone calls to my bestest peo­ples. I also have pics com­ing from the trip (more than I was tweet­ing through­out), but I’ll save those for another post.