My bus rolled lazily down the hill towards downtown with a crest of sunshine peeking over the city’s leering mountains gathering an unusually light crowd of early commuters and the usual mix of destitutes making their way to the intersection of Main and Hastings, effectively an open air flea market of drugs and addiction in full swing day and night.

The intersection is, quite frankly, total mayhem…no matter it be eight in morning or ten at night, and it serves as as stark reminder that the bottom is quite a lot further down the rabbit hole than anything I’ll ever experience.

It’s a useful reminder, actually.

The bus opened its doors at that corner and the addicts jumped off eagerly, as always. I gazed out at a decrepedly thin Asian man crouched against the building facing me, happily handing single cigarettes to two young men and a woman huddled around him. The two young men moved off and the women, in a loose yellow v-neck, torn jeans, and supported by one of those four-legged walkers, swayed back and forth while chatting and stashing her smoke in a back pocket.  She was war-torn, to the point at which you could almost believe that the walker wasn’t even medically related; it was simply that balance is a luxury no longer afforded to someone who has run that many chemicals through themselves.

When you see this section of town, you’ll understand that I thought very little of the scene.

My day was hectic, as a meeting-filled day tends to be.  When building a web product it’s hard to feel productive unless you’re nestled up to your computer.  For good or for bad I feel a deep sense of urgency about our website and product right now so my senses are probably heightened a bit, and I get tense when I’m not feeling as if I’m getting shit done.

As I moved from coffee with an exciting new prospective hire to strategy planning with Anthony  I felt as if the productive part of my day was rapidly escaping me.

It’s ludicrous, really, as we’re moving a lot of people and pieces towards our goals and improved product, but hey, it’s how I felt. I think anyone who’s faced important deadlines can relate to the way a priority list can loom in the corner pointing at you like the Evil Monkey in Chris’ closet.

I settled into the early evening catching up on email and Foodtree code development, hesitant to leave because it felt as if the day had just gotten started.  A poker game was beginning in the conference room next to our kitchen and entrepreneurs wandered the floor looking for a few more last minute players.  The sun, now setting, crawled at length across the floor, and a team building an application for the hockey community gathered around a whiteboard discussing revenue models.

This is the stuff of ideas in motion.

My focus was off and it was getting late, and I knew I should reengage my priority list at home.

I boarded my bus and sat with a blank stare out the window, mentally reshuffling work stuff with my jaw clenched tight.  Zoned, but still mentally locked into things that need doing.

Three busstops later I snapped into focus as a yellow streak caught my eye, and there she was.

The woman from twelve hours earlier was hobbling across the street out my window, a few blocks from where I’d noticed her before.  She was just moving down the sidewalk…her walker, then a step…deliberate.  Awkward and slow. She hunched forward and to the side…

The struggle of it…of a block-long stretch of sidewalk, seemed almost unfair.

What must her day have been like?

I imagined a day of detachment and pain, craving and confusion. Alleys and sidewalks. Bartering and hustling and a never-ending quest for self-destruction.

A city block transformed into a mile long  journey.

A day that seemed to have ended before it began suddenly became endless, right before my very eyes.

Earlier this week I had a dear friend ask me if I was depressed.

Word around town was of concern, and surprisingly informed by the tone of my blog posts this month, of which I think there are a grand total of two.

I laughed and immediately realized that I’d made a lot of the idea that I don’t have friends in Vancouver, which is both untrue and a sentiment that I now realize is hard to address flippantly, especially when you have people who actually use your blog to try and get some insight into what the hell your life is like on the other side of the continent.

Depressed?  No.

Not at all, actually.

It was almost funny and jolting to have that be one of the reasons he’d hoped to connect on Skype because I’d literally been walking home from work and thinking about how many amazing people I’ve met in this city, and how the way they are amazing is in the way some people go well beyond themselves to make others feel welcome.  The way people have the capacity to see beyond themselves and notice you.

People surprise you, and if you stop for a second you’ll realize it happens often.

Vancouver is gorgeous right now, like an island paradise that’s unaware of anything but a state of perfectness.  Warm, breezy air, clear turquoise skies draped over ragged mountains rising up in the glory of nature’s prowess.

You can see the world in a square mile here, between the water and the sky.

I’m not depressed, and in fact I’m quite happy, and I’m overcome with an ambition…an urgency…and if I had a wish it would be that the inertia subside a bit and let me sit in the sun and compose my thoughts more regularly.

Things are good.  Things kind of kick ass, honestly.

How about you?

That’s not a rhetorical question.

This is funny.

I’m alone the other night, which isn’t all that weird, considering I’ve lived in this city for six months and we all know that once you hit thirty it’s different to make new friends. If you’re in Vancouver and I’ve met you please don’t take that to mean I don’t absolutely love you all. Everyone here is really, really incredible.

But in Chicago, with the lifelong network, I had way too many options every weekend night. I look back and thank myself for prioritizing my true friends, because I now appreciate how important they are.

So anyway, I’m alone.

I’m in my new apartment, and the walls are almost repainted…which is to say that they’re in that state between being done and having the edges done.

I’d bought myself a six pack of PBR, which in Canada seems to be extremely under-appreciated, by the way, considering PBR’s general level of greatness and the love you find for it in Chicago.  Anyway.

I decide I’ll finish the paint job.

An hour later, I’m celebrating the completion of half the kitchen out behind the apartment, in a residential alley that’s relatively secluded. I’m drinking a PBR, and I’m smoking a cigarette (I know, I know).

In Vancouver, the nights are long and the sky is pretty magical at 10pm; all kinds of blues and yellow.

Pinks and reds.

Sexy.

I totally zone out, and a plane flies low over the city as I watch its three yellow lights cut through the painting that is Vancouver’s post-sunset.

Zoned. Out.

I’m kind of lazily standing there, one knee cocked, looking kind of perplexed.

Up the alley comes a minivan, slowing cruising towards a house down the block. I barely notice.

As it rolls by I became aware of myself…I thought immediately about what the middle aged guy driving must have thought when he saw me.

Check out what I was wearing.

I’m standing there in flip flops and fucking swim trunks.

Drinking a PBR and smoking a cigarette.

Sunburned to a crisp. Bright red.

Oh, and those swim trunks? They’re bright florescent orange.

The t-shirt I’m wearing?

It’s brighter, more florescent orange.

You know what that t-shirt says?

BLOGGABLE.

It’s a funny thing, money.

I mean, I really wouldn’t know at the moment, as I’ve poured it into businesses for two years now with largely no tangible return, but that’s not really what this post is about.

A few years back I was making a lot of money.  Six figures…I didn’t even realize it until I got my tax statements at the end of the year.  It’d been a fun year, obviously, and I’d even paid down all my debt.

Yeah, all of it.

That lasted like a split second.

Having been there, though, isn’t something I’ll ever forget.

I always knew going into business for myself was risky, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the total collapse of our financial markets and the ensuing stagnation it brought the industry I was in (my LinkedIn is here).  Debt mounted, and here I am today with some very tight times.  Bootstrapping a tech startup to boot.

Point is, the last two years, financially, have really honestly been nothing but total disaster for me, and the reality is that something like that spills over into the lives of the people who care about you.

My family is truly amazing.  The support they’ve given me and continue to give me is nothing short of incredible, and as someone who’s not really built to ask for help, the definition of the word generosity has been redefined for me.  I’m very, very lucky.

It’s so beyond what I deserve or expect that it blow my mind, and probably deserves quite a lot more attention on this blog.

My friends, though, have proven in the most tangible ways that our relationships really transcend the realities of the world and have their foundation in the purest form of friendship and support.  They’ve literally stepped up for me.  Understood (without judgement, I might add) that I’d taken risks that weren’t working out.  Risks that in some ways affected them, which isn’t always a risk you have every right to take.

It’s funny, because a lot of people are writing about money this week, and the way friends have played a role in their spending or thoughts around finances.

I can’t think of anything beyond the way that money’s been largely a negative for me for more than two years straight, and my friends have all circled around me and lifted me up without even flinching.

You guys all know who you are, and I know it’s not easy to step up for friends when it’s inconvenient.  I know it’s fifty times harder when money’s involved.  I know I owe you, deeply and in ways I could probably never repay you.

I just hope you never doubt how much it’s meant to me.

How my well being is directly related to you…my friends and my family.

I work my ass off, every day, because of you.

I’m forever grateful.

A year ago today, forty bloggers got together in Chicago.

It was kind of a coming out party for 20 Something Bloggers.

Months and months earlier, the idea that bloggers who’d been hanging out together online should get together in real life surfaced and took hold.  I was in Chicago and we (along with a number of other major cities) began organizing meetups.  By June we all knew each other, and we made up a core for the Ultimate Meetup.

But the weekend involved a lot of newbies, and it involved people from numerous states, and it even involved one blogger flying in last minute on a whim.

That meetup was the reason I took the reins on 20 Something Bloggers, something I’ve never regretted.  It showed me the heart of a community that’s really changed people’s lives; something I’m proud to be involved in and continuously proud to talk about.

Here’s the crazy part.

That same weekend, Anthony Nicalo was gracious enough to host a wine tasting for the bloggers in town to promote his artisan wine company Farmstead Wines.

He hung out with us for the rest of that afternoon and evening, and at one point got a look in his eye and said, “so I’ve got a business idea”.

“Oh yeah?  Tell me.”

He told me, and when he was done I said, “wow…so how can I help?”

“Well…I need a co-founder.”

We had lunch forty eight hours late in River North, a block from my old office, shrouded in sunlight and talking tech and food.

That’s the day I got involved in what would become Foodtree.

Time is kind of nuts, right?

I’m not sure if I mentioned that Chalise is getting married.

I wrote this a while back while I was living in Wicker Park and I was running the neighborhood with Chalise (hat tip to Tankboy, who’s kind of the area’s OG).

Chalise is the most wonderful woman I know that I don’t technically share blood with.  The person who’s heart beats at the very same pace as mine.  The girl who set the bar for love in my life, because true love is mostly about friendship.

I watched her life of love firsthand.  I knew most of the men involved, and I saw her ride the roller coaster we all ride as we navigate the labrynth of our heart’s quest for a twin.  I saw the ups and downs.

In every way I always gave Chalise the room she needed to figure out who she wanted to be.  Our friendship was sort of about that…in college years would pass and we’d pick up like it was yesterday.

That was the thing; even when we were teenagers she was different.  She was edgy and confident and averse to anything but her will.  She is probably the reason I have ever felt the confidence to just trust my gut in the face of the most insane things it suggested.  Over and over and over again I’ve heard people say things like “everyone wishes they were Chalise” when what they meant was “everyone wishes they had an intimate relationship with ignoring their inhibition and plunging into life to see what actually happens”.

That kind of life is one wrought with uncertainty and challenges, and especially when it comes to falling in love with someone.  Men had the hardest time trusting their connection to her.  They wanted evidence of it, often, and as such found themselves devoid of the confidence that caught her eye in the first place.

Ironically, I saw men doubting her.  One of the most loyal and genuine people I have ever known in my life.

That may sound as if my best friend made boys of men, but those men took from her the one thing she needed; someone who could let her truly explore the world and her place in it.

Yeah, some decent guys lost a girl they thought they loved.  They probably did love, actually.

But I saw her as a victim too.

She loved hard and fast and she brings more passion to a conversation about nothing than world leaders bring to battle.  Hers was never a mission of exploitation, and she tried harder and harder to reason with the way relationships turned into less than they should have been.  She wanted them to work and she tried and tried and tried.

Until the day her sister got married, and she found him.

I think the day I met him, I knew it was over.

The girl is now everything she was meant to be.  Fully confident to be herself and stupidly in love with someone who knows it.

In love with someone who does his life too.  Someon who walks outside every day and does it his way.

This weekend is the joint bachelor/bachelorette party that Chalise and Ghasson are throwing in the mountains near Denver, Colorado, and if there was one place on Earth I could put myself right now, that’s where it would be.

I’m a huge soccer fan.

I’m moreso, admittedly, every four years when the Cup rolls around.

In between I have a hard time following leagues that aren’t on the continent I live on, and as such can’t claim to be a rabid supporter year round.

I kind of can’t think of much else during the Cup though; I feel a nested responsibility to witness the 20 or so World Cups that will occur during my lifetime (assuming I make it that long, obviously).  There simply isn’t another sporting event that comes even close to being what I want out of a sporting event.

Soccer’s a game that people have a hard time with, especially in America.

Okay, only in America.

Everyone else seems to get it.

Anyway, I don’t have a problem with that.  I kind of loved being a soccer player because it was like being in on something that everyone else might eventually realize.  Growing up the football team and the basketball team competed over who was cooler.  The baseball team just loved themselves enough for all of us.

The soccer guys didn’t really care; in the Midwest you’re in the world that got soccer last.  They grew up on baseball.  They go nuts for college football.

Then every four years the World Cup happened and everyone talked about soccer for four weeks.  It even rolled through the US and everyone wondered if the sport would take over.

At which point the professional league in this country expanded enough to nearly kill itself.

Because I was playing, I saw what everyone around the world sees when they live and breath and dream soccer year in a year out.

A game anyone could play.  A game happening in ghettos in Brazil with bare feet and balls of cloth, which fueled one of the most beautiful versions of the game ever known.

A game so demanding of body and mind that a goal matter enough to be remembered forever.

Forever.

A game that’s spawned war and stopped wars.  A game that entertains and influences…draws loyalty lines and brings enemies across them.

A legion of support that so rarely happens in other sports; something so far from entertainment that you almost wouldn’t recognize it as even fun.  Support for corners of the soccer world looks more a lifestyle than anything else.

And  then you get the World Cup; the largest athletic stage this planet has ever known.

Everything truly beautiful, ugly, friendly and hateful about a game I consider at its core to be the closest competition gets to illustrating humanity.

Today was one of those days that makes the three and half years I spend waiting for the next World Cup worth it.

As a lot of you know music inspires me.

It does that in the same way that writing, for me, is inspiring.

There’s a shared experience when you really sit down and read something that someone else wrote.  That someone else wrote thinking you’d be out there reading it.  Not knowing much about you, but trying to share an experience with you or to share an emotion with you.

Music lyrics work the same way, and I think a lot of great music is as much about the lyrics and their delivery as it is the playing of an instrument.  The greatest songs sound like an amazingly deep conversation.  The connection is everything.

These past two years I’ve really tried to notice music, and that was obviously inspired by the mixtapes and now the daily tunes.  I’m hunting music that I think is worth listening to, and sharing it to whomever’s interested in the songs that pass through my weird and admittedly undefined fiter.

When you’re always out there looking for music, you really start to appreciate how hard it is to get your music heard in this world.

How much really great music never makes it out of the bedroom, essentially.

And how sometimes really great music made in bedrooms can instantly change people’s l ives.

Graffiti6 Made A Shout Out Video For Me! from dshan on Vimeo.

Some of the stuff I’ve heard lately, really stands out.  I think The National’s new album will win more than one Grammy.  I’m less confident about this, but I think Eminem’s new release could restore his spot at the top of the rap game, and get a Grammy nomination.

Who really knows, I suppose.

But I do think the band in that video, Graffiti6, has the potential to blow up in a major way.

Yeah, they made that for me to thank me for sharing their totally sweet track, Staring At The Sun.  I felt that way before they made the video.  Promise.

How cool is that?

This makes me very, very happy.

If you’re anything like me you love ideas.

You have them all the time and you have friends that you spend a ton of time just talking about ideas with.  It’s like the foundation of your friendship, this common crush on exciting and new ideas.

At some point you reach this mode of fleshing out ideas pretty quickly, and finding the fatality in them.  In short time you’ve dismissed the real viability of your idea, sometimes only because you know yourself well enough to know that someone else would be far better at nailing your great idea than you would.  It just wouldn’t claim you the way other ideas do.

Then you are walking home from a coffee shop and your favorite hockey team is sitting in a locker room in your home town just one game away from claiming the Stanley Cup for the first time since 1961 and you’re just kind of staring at the top edge of the mountains just North of the city and you think something that starts to make you shake.

Like, you starting fleshing out this little idea for a little project and you love it so much you can’t find a reason not to do it and you want to be doing it RIGHT THAT MOMENT.

You’re now walk running, and you’re still trying to figure out what sucks about the idea.

Just kind of vibrating with impatience.

With those ideas, those ideas that make you shake a little bit….with those ideas you get on the dance floor and you dance.