The light rain has stopped. Kim and Fiona have gone out shopping and I am resting at the trailer. There is so much I want to write, right now that I'm not sure where best to start. Several blog posts are half composed in my mind but may never make it online.

So before I start writing about my experiences, I figure it is good to set some context. We have been coming out to the same campground in North Truro since 2008. The first year, we camped in tents, but that was hard on Kim and she found that there were camping trailers for rent, and we've been camping in them ever since.

When we first started coming, I was mostly working as a freelance consultant. Money was very tight and I worried a lot. Then, there were years that I came out when there were conflicts at work, making it hard for me to relax. I've always struggled with how much should I stop and enjoy the world, and how much I should work on improving the world. As E.B. White said,

“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

This past year has been very hard for me. I will not call my mother and tell her about camping on Cape Cod when I get home. She died last October in one of those storms that also ravaged the dunes of the Cape. There is so much improving the world yet to be done. I am getting more and more involved in issues around health disparities in our country and I'm disappointed to have miss a training about racism this week. I ran for State Representative last year, which took a lot of out me.

So, this is the first year that I really feel I have the right and need to relax. Yet still, I suffer from aspirations of grandeur. I try to find things to read that will engage my mind, and yet still be enjoyable. I try to take the swirling thoughts in my mind and organize and express them.

Besides carrying with me memories of all the challenges of the past year, I am carrying other thoughts. I come back to Thoreau as he walked on the dunes of Cape Cod and ponder transcendentalism in the twenty-first century.

I wear my Google Glasses and think about the Middletown Remix project; how can I look at the world differently? How can I get others to try and look at the world differently?

I think about social constructs and tried to determine books to bring. Mairead got me The Post Modern Bible for Christmas. I looked through that, through books by S.H.Foulkes about Group Analysis, by Wilhelm Reich about Character Analysis. I ended up with those two books, a collection of poems by H.D. and Orlando by Virginia Woolf.

I ponder writing a story about a person choosing to select different characters, social constructs for online interaction, as part of a performance art project. S/he recreates him/herself with different genders, sexual orientations, races, ethnicities, and belief structures as a basis for interaction with people from online dating sites and invites all of them, ultimately to a big unveiling where they confront the social constructs they've surrounded themselves with.

Mostly, I've been reading Foulkes and thinking about an online priest and group analyst interacting on Facebook.

Think differently, reconsider social constructs, reconsider social contracts based on these constructs.

And then, there is all the news from the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington to Antoinette Tuff to slut shaming and Miley Cyrus's twenty-first century mashup of burlesque and minstrel shows. Tying all that together, perhaps with a little Nikki Gionvanni's Ego Tripping and Bob Marley's Redemption song. That is a blog post waiting to be written.

So, here I sit in the camp trailer, cold and a little damp. My morning walks to the beach are also great blog material. Perhaps, I'll read a little more, walk a little more, write a little more, and relax in my own special way.