The struggles of a middle-class white man: Part 1

I live what is by most standards, including my own, a pretty nice life. I make enough money to meet the cost of living in Silicon Valley, and still squirrel some away for my fantasy retirement (fantasy in the sense of it actually materializing some day). I have a smart, healthy daughter. A wife who loves her family.

It's been years since I've felt like one of those Jack-London characters who's caught out in the wilderness with his last match.

It hasn't been one of those lives imbued with tragedy and drama, like getting conscripted into a terrorist army as a child, or having to smuggle my family out of a country where government agents are determined to imprison or execute the lot of us.

In many ways, it's been the routine life that so many American are fortunate enough to live.

It's my life, and it's the place where I find the things from which I make my art.

I've recently finished a book about my present tense:

health, happiness, love, longevity, peace, prosperity, and safety

Well, my present tense, and how it's the manifestation of my recent past, my childhood and young adulthood, my parents' lives, their parents' lives.

A lot of it is about becoming a parent, the evolution you experience when you're trying to figure out not only how to just keep her alive, but also cultivate a full life for her while still trying to figure out your own. How a marriage evolves from the inebriation of two people falling in love to the sobriety of 24/7 child care and making the mortgage.

And it's about the unintended migration from art to science, from fringe employment to corporate life, from endless opportunity to operating only in the narrow range that ensures the status quo.

There are stories everywhere, even in the enviable lives of guys inching along the 85 at rush hour.