I’ve been spending a lot of time on a well known genealogy website lately. Starting to build a family tree in as many directions as possible, for my daughter. She’s only 6 months old so by the time she starts wondering where she came from I should have some pretty solid work done.

Doing this work puts you in a different mindset. An ancestral frame; uncovering clues and trying to make educated guesses about who might or might not be your great great great great grandsomebody and how they fit with the other puzzle pieces of time and location and people.

Once, when I was in college, a woman called me and told me that her last name was Smack and that she had traced the name back to a Blackfoot Indian in the 1700s. I find this thrilling because it’s very different than the Swedish and various European lines I know of. We spoke for a few minutes and never caught back up. I tried to call her back but we never reconnected. I’m curious if any of my research will lead to anything supporting her assessments or what other discoveries I may be able to make.

Digging around on Instagram, while tripping out on my own creation, contemplating the thousands of people’s blood that runs in my veins I encountered a couple of Sioux, living in South Dakota. One of them posted a pic of Anker Frankoni’s Twitter profile and I clicked over and learned about his novel. A story about his own family history, Mexican Eskimo.

I followed the profile and then a day later I got an email from the author via the contact form on my website. Not the usual DM robot twitter spam but a commmunication initiated by a human being actually looking around on my site. I buried that email form in the navigation on purpose, curious if anyone would ever find it or use it so it sparked my intrigue on several levels to receive this greeting.

None of this ties back together in a concrete way it just overlaps and creates a lot of meaningful rhyme in my life. So now I’m reading a pre-released excerpt of Frankoni’s Mexican Eskimo and seeing my own ancestry through the author’s paradigm/lens. So far he identifies himself more as soul navigating lives, moving between one he’s anchored to and the next he might migrate to. His writing is visceral, honest and dark and I’m just beginning the read. I look forward to making a judgment on the novel but am going to resist doing so until I’ve read it completely. For now I’m intrigued enough to make this record and that’s a whole lot to spawn from a happenstantial twitter follow.

Riding a bike = freedom x happiness… Seeing bike skeletons ravaged and scavenged locked to some grave post has always hit me in the gut. In my mind, I hear myself whisper “that sucks” whether it’s audible or not. As of yet I have no idea who is behind this campaign/public art but it makes me just a little more proud of Richmond that this statement is being made here and that whoever came up with it lives here.

A whole lotta time elapsed, matter and energy shifted to form the physical history that unfolds itself to constitute my casual sense of humor about the essence of existence. I’m fascinated by our attempt to understand it through both the notions of spirit and science. The more you consider it from either side, science and spirituality are separated by an imaginary membrane: our capacity for understanding either.

Ironically, Eastwood fancies himself a Republican and the ad has inspired a groundswell of hypothetical pleas for him to run… against Obama.

Either way, it got past my cynical filter and my own marketing literacy, tapping into a very real, emotional fatigue around the economy and the state of the nation.

There’s an important lesson there. It’s an inhospitable Universe but the possibility, in time, is unlimited and we are the most certain evidence of that inextricable rarity. So no matter what the situation, the odds of any possibility are still infinitely favorable relative to the sum total of impossible outcomes. Embrace that.