Yesterday was 56 orbits celebrated by spending the day how it typically would be: though skipped the gym (an early start on the celebrations the night before as we watched Detroit leave the door open for Cleveland in the ALDS), then bike to work along the Charles River Basin, then a meetup with Andi at the newly opened Shawmut Inn for cocktails followed by pizza and beer with Natalie at the apartment. We smoked a little on the patio, lights through the trees, laughing and remarking how extraordinary this moment of living together in Boston is. David is solid in WI, his own man. I feel so incredibly lucky. When asked what my wish was when blowing out the candles last night, it was “more of the same.”

I’ve been working on equanimity for a few years now, more lately with the prospect of political unrest in the coming months. I’m enamored with AI even if I think it will do more harm than good. I’ve been biking and working out a lot this year, as fit as my drinking will allow. I’ve lost friends because of my introversion and self-centeredness and avoidance and I’m bummed out about it but somehow unable or unwilling to do anything to fix these things in myself. I have a super interesting job that gives me a close-up view of the very latest advancements in human genome editing. I fret and worry every day about the impact of climate change, and believe if there’s anything I might do for work in retirement, it would be to join up with some mitigation effort. I love Andi and the kids to the point where there doesn’t seem to be much of a point beyond them.

On the Amtrak from Boston to Portland, Maine on the day after what I believe will be the last celebration of true independence as we know it in this country. Last week’s disastrous presidential debate and Monday’s Supreme Court ruling portend a bleak future for American democracy. A second Trump presidency is inevitable at this point, and he will use his newly minted immunity to violently quell political dissent as he implements a white Christian nationalist agenda that will blame the ‘radical left’ for its excesses and predictable failures. Trumpist power will be taken with or without the consent of the people in November and it will never be ceded peacefully. As Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, put it on Tuesday, “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

I think January is starting to become my favorite month of the year. For as much as I used to hate the cold, the temperatures aren’t brutally low as they once were and there’s a calm that comes with the chill, especially when you’re not drinking. The past few Sundays I’ve been taking Phil on long walks in Middlesex Fells and yesterday we did a 6.7 mile loop around the Charles River basin as the sun set. We walked onto the MIT campus after dark, passing by the Simons and Maclauren buildings and I was uplifted by the sight of inscrutable math equations and drawings scrawled on the chalkboards of lecture rooms, small study groups of smart kids working to figure stuff out.

A couple of weeks ago on a walk through Franklin Park under grey skies and a light sleet, my attention drifted as always to the Catalog of My Worries. Except this time as I paged through job, finance, family, friends, health. . .. there weren’t any worries to find there. Factors outside my control, sure (see below), and lingering regrets, yes, especially about my fatherhood. But at least as far as projecting forward my personal circumstances, I couldn’t recall ever having felt so unconcerned. It was an astonishing realization and feeling grateful, I practiced walking without a hunch in my back.

There’s every worry still for the planet and all its species, but Ukraine is winning, and the Republican party’s batshit crazy is starting to feel fringy. In fact, three years out from COVID, I think we’re turning on a major transition away from the order of the past 30 years. It’s becoming cheaper to save the planet than destroy it, but the climate-driven migration of millions is already underway. Globalization is becoming increasingly politicized and centers of power are shifting as the west loses influence. Enter the accelerating effects of generative AI and the hope of viable fusion energy.

Thank goodness for smart kids everywhere working to figure stuff out.

Yesterday was three months since we first got our keys to the new place. Living here has felt tenuous (for me) because of an unshakeable sense that I didn’t deserve or was unqualified for the job I have. Like it would only be a matter of time before they figured me out and the bike rides to work across the Harvard Bridge, the endless interesting sidewalks, the light in our apartment would all come to an abrupt end. I think we’ll soon miss all those things, but now the reason for the tenuousness has changed.

Last Friday I was verbally threatened on my way to the gym in the early morning by a black guy who yelled in no uncertain terms that I was not supposed to be there: “What the FUCK you doin? Get the FUCK outta here CRACKER! You ain’t supposed to be here! Pow! Pow pow!!” He kept it going with the gunshot sounds till I was almost a block away. It was unnerving, but I get it. This is Roxbury after all, his neighborhood. Where Malcolm X lived for seven years after moving here from Michigan with his half-sister when he was 14. Where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached in the Twelfth Baptist Church right across the street through the windows of my gym. Where so many blacks moved from the South and again after displacement from Boston’s other neighborhoods, including (and especially) where we live in the South End. A Roxbury that still struggles against the legacy of enduring and systemic racism. Fucking crackers. Out of respect and a little fear, I’ll be taking a different way to the gym.

But if there’s a fear of things really going pear-shaped, it doesn’t come from my black neighbors. It comes from white followers of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and Fox News who are intent destroying their perceived enemy with no apparent idea of what should come next except wielding their corrupt and merciless power. Fuck those guys. The insurrection is already underway (hello Jan 6) and will only get stronger as the economy tanks and climate effects worsen. I don’t know what the coming civil war will look like, but I expect bombings and lots and lots of gunfire. Protests will turn bloodier after provocation, public officials will be assassinated, and no one will know how to stop the mounting tit-for-tat as our freedoms and rivers evaporate. It won’t be safe to walk about anywhere, let alone on Shawmut Ave in Roxbury.

So if I’m going to lose my job and everything goes to shit, it’ll be because science and people stopped thriving, not because my bosses found me out for being incompetent. In the meantime, how to best prepare? Volunteer maybe? Buy a refuge maybe? But not move. Being here still feels too good to be true.

That was yesterday’s unbidden. I woke up at about 5:50, and I lay in bed listening intently for any sound. It was still dark out and aside from the shoosh of a car or two on Clarksville, it was silent save the birdsong that grew in variety and number. We’d seen them all at our bird feeder: bluebirds, chickadees, mourning doves, red-winged blackbirds, woodpeckers of all sorts, thrushes, cardinals big and small, robins, grackles. A chorus of joy even with heavy clouds and a cold rain that would last the whole day as the movers came and packed our things one by one. I hope I will always remember what it was like, the times last fall when there were even owls hooting in the early morning. The sounds of dozens of geese, but mostly the quiet. It never got fully silent of course, because there was water always cascading over the dam at Grover’s Mill. And I hope the memory left here of Bruno’s happy barking will echo across the pond forever.

If there was a song in my head when I woke up this morning, I don’t remember it. We’d been out the day and night before, five horses, the banshee and MIDA, and I had to be back to the banshee by 7 am to see Celtic beat Rangers in an old firm derby. By the time I got Andi a smoothie at Jugos, it was time to get takeaway lunch at Render and head to the airport. The thanks to Andi for listening patiently and the conversation in the car about attachment and fear and how those things dissolve in the face of mindful interrogation about the present moment, even if “aging is a process of loss.”

As it to make the point, I rode home from a brief stay in the office tonight, laughing out loud as I rode through Cambridge on my way back to our new apartment in the South End of Boston. It was quiet when I got there, not even memories. Yet.

In my room at the Kimpton Marlowe on the Charles River in Cambridge, MA just steps away from the future offices of Prime Medicine, my new employer. When I start tomorrow as Prime’s head of quality, I will be responsible for compliance with regulations to ensure the safety, quality, identity, purity and potency of novel gene editing technologies developed in the last year by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. It’s a long way from Coon Valley to Cambridge.

In the past two months, as I’ve interviewed with Prime and another gene editing company, negotiated offers from both, and stepped down from my current role, I’ve been gratified and humbled to hear the appreciation for the work I do. I’ve always walked a fine line between confidence and self-doubt, inviting self-sabotage to prove I wasn’t up to the task. Luckily, I’ve had people I could share with, Andi and the kids especially, and somehow it’s come to this, my next and hopefully last career adventure.

I heard on BBC Minute this morning that the third Monday in January is being called Blue Monday, because it’s apparently the saddest day of the year. First I’d heard of that, and while it may be true for some, it’s a lot less sad when you’re not drinking. In fact, I got up this morning, thankful for not having a hangover and thought of how happy I was as I did my workout in the back room. And I was happier still, under grey skies and flurries, to go to Andi’s rescue farm and also help make some animals happy.

Last week I finished my interviews, with one company on Tuesday and the second (with their CEO and CSO) on Wednesday. I heard back from the first company on Thursday with news of an offer in the offing and it became clear that we’d most likely be moving again.

These developments didn’t have me jumping up and down, feeling like I’d won something. It felt instead like the next step was somehow compulsory, even if we’ve grown to love it here in central Jersey, with our place on the pond and its bucolic-in-middle-of-everything vibe. As I drove back from the gym with coffee on Friday morning, I was listening to Mastersystem’s “Bird is Bored of Flying” where Scott Hutchinson sings,

There’s such a place as too far
There’s such a thing as too much
And we all want fire until it burns
And we all want more until it starts to hurt

I took the picture below looking out past biked-passed farm fields, and as I turned onto Cranbury Neck road, I could see the Sourlands rising up on the horizon beyond Princeton. What in the world is all the striving meant for if it means you can’t enjoy what you have? At work, people I care about will feel abandoned when they hear of my leaving. Friends and family who thought we’d be returning next year are going to be disappointed as we are that we won’t be resuming our lives with them as planned. And I’m feeling tired of always starting over again in my life.

But on the other hand, adventure awaits, with new opportunities for learning and discovery. With Andi, I’m ready for whatever happens next.

The Boox Note Air 2 I got last month had been serving as my new journal until I woke up on Jan 4 to find all my notes gone, completely. Not only the notes I’d taken to prepare for job interviews, but also those reflecting on my state of mind at year’s end. To recap the latter, I’d been upset that COVID had upended our plans to hang with the kids, recognizing now the precious relatively few days we’ll have together before I assume room temperature one day. And the recognition that alcohol was taking from me more than I was comfortable with, leading to the handshake with Andi in Room #2 of Hotel Kostrzewa to forego drinking in 2022. (Post-agreement update: on the advice of Wharton’s Katy Milkman, we’re giving ourselves two mulligans, so we can be more resilient if we fall off the wagon).

So that brings us to this weekend. What a magnificent thing it is to not struggle with hangovers or the temptation to drink on the weekend. We went on a hike in Buck’s County, PA on Saturday and got an alcohol-free dinner (Mexican) in Frenchtown, NJ afterwards. Back home that night, I conspired with Dan K to make music. And today, light rain falling on melting pond ice, I went to the gym, hung out with Andi, practiced drums, heard from Natalie and David, wrote letters to people I love, and now this journal entry. I am so grateful.

This cold and rainy memorial day weekend had us staying home. Taking down the potting table, putting up screens, watching the Tigers sweep the Yankees. Finished Mare of East town, biked in the Sourlands for the first time and did very little work. Yesterday afternoon, after the sun finally came out, Andi took me to the neighborhood across the street to hear the thrumming drone of so many cicadas.

When we first met, Andi and I would make a habit of going every Memorial Day to a cemetery to get closer to the ones who sacrificed everything and thank them. Many of the graves were from WWII. I wonder what the dead would think of so many today who are considering violence to achieve minority rule over others who they view as not like them, less American than them. Would they see the insurrectionist’s actions as patriotic?