chase something hard, Bro

The title above is a piece of advice I gave to Gavin in Oakland the other night, Tuesday I think, after I returned from a high-speed incredibly gnarly 40-mile ride from the kids, and was now – at the time of the advice-giving – wandering the dark neighborhood streets at the boundary of Golden Hill and South Park, primary lighting coming from the headlamp of every five-minute plane descending quickly for a landing at San Diego’s Lindberg Airport, which my neck doesn’t stretch enough to allow seeing over stuff like hills, houses, and eucalyptus trees, but roughly two miles away. Maybe it won’t cost a lot if I got to Uber there later.

Not often the case, during that particular phone converse I was the encourager, the kid in Oakland the encouragee, and how many times has that been the other way, opposite, turned around – oh, a thousand. Easy. And this was a situation – well, I like to repeat something I heard back in the early 80’s, it may have been Frenchie from Charlestown saying it, but it applies all over the place – “I didn’t know that I didn’t know.” Yeah, give that some meditative thought. So here I was like a robin’s feather blowing around in the wind, you go aimless street urchin, like, what direction home? – And letting my guru and mentor and best friend and life-saving 80’s punk wizard know that he didn’t know that he didn’t know, but he already knew what’s the way out of this deadfall, Rachel, and it’s we’ve got our answers and they’re right there in the description of the problems.

And Gavin don’t play and he’s helping to save the East Bay, every damn day, and my plugged-in, generous advice was “Chase something hard, Bro.”

Which I’ve been saying to myself since then, cause, why skip right past righteous counsel. Pretty much like when James Brown would say to his band – “Can we hit it and quit.”

It wasn’t a question.