QUINCEAÑERA!

fifteen F*ing years of this woodsly goodsly world around me.
groundhog day, punxsutawney phil, the works.
today is that day.
the anniversary of choosing this adverse microverse.
uh-huh.
over and over and over and over,
february has done it's best to remind me that it's not exactly awesome up here
in wintertime, especially if you're completely disinterested in outdoorsy diversions.
ugh.
i'm not gonna sit in an outhouse on ice, trying to poke holes in fishfaces,
as a duck-and-coverstory for getting drunk in close quarters with other dudes.
nope.
and i'm definitely not gonna go up a hill to try and get down much faster on slippery sticks.
no way.
and there's a zero percent chance that i'll be snowmobile sled-machining,
not once, not never, mostly because that sh!t is super dumb.
jeez.
well, then why am i here?
i mean, i'm here to make things.
like, that's my purpose.
and in the broader sense:
i am a creator, and i create, and that would happen anywhere i happen to be.
but, specifically, though- why am i here?
because where you're AT isn't exclusively location-based.
where you are, physically, is far less important than what you're all about, philosophically.
a good time is all in how you make it.
and honestly, as i'm typing and look out the window
at the sunlight barely breaking over the treeline
and washing the white mountains of northern new hampshire in gold and red?
where i'm at feels pretty flippin' good right about now, anyway.
home is where the house is.
and spreading out from there, the world i live in is independent of what other dudes are into.
sure,
the political vegan liberal progressive art scene isn't thriving in this corner of the world.
but that's not really what in need to feel fulfilled.
my life is smaller and more focused than that.

the Folk Life & Liberty Fortress is warmer than the repetitive windy winter outdoors;
AMPERSAND TATTOO is a luxurious epicenter of artistic expression
and competent conversational complexity;
the oven is roaring;
the bread is baking;
the plants are growing;
the dog is happy....
really, with all of that, and a sense of purpose,
where else could be any better?
i've created a concentric ring of real Folk Life-
fresh, loud, hard-styled hottness without the helping hands of an overly-receptive populace,
and turned it into something special.
that's the truth.
i've built an environment of my own design,
nestled snugly in the marginally inhospitable mountains of the northeast.
if i was anywhere else, i'd honestly be doing the same things.
that's incredibly accurate,
and impossibly fortunate.
i do what i do,
and it cycles and recycles a symbolically symbiotic set of circumstances every damned day.
i'm a self-contained biosphere, bro.
a terrarium of harmonized causes-and effects in F*ing full effect.
and that's here, there, and everywhere.
fifteen years of northern new hampshire,
through feast and famine, love and loss, joy, despair, and eveything else.
fifteen years, man.
in a row.
and i'm still going strong.
i don't know where i'll be in fifteen more,
but i know where i'm headed- and it's inward and it's upward and it's onward.
i may not be moving away,
but i'm always moving forward;
never quiet, never soft.....