"Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."

- Goethe


"I look at everybody else, and. . . they got the Cristals and they got the pretty girls, and they got the Benzes and everything. So that's kind of like the mediocre stage for everything right now. You want to take it to that next level. That's what I wanna do."

- The Notorious B.I.G., interview, 1997


Ambling into my old local watering hole, the Black Horse London Deli, I mentioned the above quote from Goethe to James, the publican. Now James, like all good bartenders, has a degree in English literature, reads Latin, and has translated Goethe from the original German. "Sunset," he began, "Goethe is considered the last of the Scholastics; the last man to truly possess all of the accumulated human knowledge of the time."

Good man, Goethe. Well, the Notorious B.I.G., along with his erstwhile-friend-turned-nemesis Tupac Shakur, represented the last of rap's Golden Age. Again, a man worth listening to.

And so, 2007 is jointly dedicated to Boldness and to the Next Level. Life in San Francisco has been entertaining and memorable, but over the last few years I have been increasingly conscious of lingering in a "mediocre stage" where I'm accomplishing very little that is meaningful and lasting. Too comfortable, this cozy West Coast lifestyle. Therefore, I have elected to shake things up a bit, introduce some new stresses with the view that comfort leads to mediocrity whereas stress, correctly applied, tends to bring out one's best.