Coke and hookers just made their first appearance on the Carrot Project Blog.

It's subtle, but they're there.

And, in the name of radical transparency (and maybe also for the love of all language and metaphor), they'll stay.

Until we find out that they've made someone feel uncomfortable.

And then we'll take them down. Because no joke should ever get in the way of being nice.

Apparently, the first thought that comes clear in Pooh's bleary blinking consciousness every morning is what's for breakfast?

I think I'm a little less regular.

But, just to make sure, I'm going to try to notice for the next little while. And take some notes. And possibly adhere to the radical transparency thing. Possibly.

June 13: Probably my first fully conscious thought this morning was wait, WHAT time is it? But there were plenty of in-between thoughts before that. I was dreaming as I woke up about running a marathon, partly under streetlights and a dusky sky, partly in the early morning, on a huge and dilapidated red and yellow rubber track. I swam part of the race, because the water, which was ankle high for most of the running, had risen to my chest, and I figured I could go faster that way. And speed was a problem the whole time. I never felt like I was running as fast as I could be. I wasn't tired at all. I wanted to sprint. But my legs were in slow motion. Quite possibly, I now realize, because of the ankle deep water. The one thing that actually helped me go faster was a simple green canvas harness (like a pair of suspenders kind of) that an old high school classmate of mine, who was also running the marathon, gave me when we stopped for a moment inside the crumbling and overgrown indoor track that sat in a building that filled much of the oval inside the outdoor track. He told me he'd used the harness in Desert Storm, which I realized made no sense, but which I thought was kind of funny, because what the hell could a green canvas harness do for anyone. Make us run faster, apparently. Anyway, the other thing I realized many times throughout the dream was that it was a dream and that I was waking up and should be thinking about my first thought. But I liked the dream and didn't want to end it (I thought it'd be fun to finish the race). So, come to think of it, my first thought this morning might have been I hope I can keep this dream going.

June 14: Should I wake up or go back to sl... Should I wake up or go ba... Should I wake up or go back to sleep?

June 15: Wait, WHAT time is it? And are they really going to have a mixed martial arts performance at their wedding? I don't anything about the dream that gave rise to that question, but it must have been a dream, because I have no idea what a mixed martial arts performance would look like.

June 16: Fireworks. Noise. Gunpowder smoke. Shreds of inky, toxic paper sprayed everywhere. Not my favorite. But I can help a man out. (I woke up to a text from one of my cousins. He's getting married over Fourth of July weekend, and he wants to know if I have any fireworks strategy advice for him.)

Maybe I'm extra special partial to this because I've fallen in love faster with Raul Ibanez than any other baseball player, and it's a little unsettling to see him react so angrily to what I consider to be an understandably suspicious, imperfectly presented, but ultimately harmless blog post, but maybe my rapture runs deeper. Maybe the debate really does provide a totally fascinating angle from which to look at press and rumor and the evolution of information flow...

Good for ESPN for hosting the discussion. Good for Jerod the blogger for participating with cool and humility. And good for Raul for offering stool samples if requested. Radical transparency, baby.

Rare to see three sentences play together so well.  Subtle (and at-first overlooked) proof that A is true.  Claim that A and B are true.  Less subtle (but potentially overlooked) proof that B is true.

Thank you for the compliment. I try to be grateful and also transparent in my finaglings. Had to look up the spelling of finagle.

Consider me finagled.  Gratefully finagled.

Until a couple of days ago, I thought The Carrot Project had the coolest business cards possible.

Then I saw this.

We still win on crunchiness, of course. But wow. Meat and lasers? Crazy. And, despite my electricity-conserving vegetarian tendencies, awesome.

Typed to my sister on The Chats of G yesterday:

Giuliana: how are you offline and typing to me?
me: i'm invisible
 it's an option
 a sneaky one
Giuliana: really?
 isn't that a bit untransparent?

It is untransparent.  And I'm sorry. 

But I'm going to keep on doing it.  Because I like it.  And because now that I've admitted to it, it's no longer untransparent.

Right?

Rest assured the moola you fork out will be used to finance our drinking habits, rendering us too stoned to bother you in case you have loud parties or hang your wet underwear on the windows.

Word is that today's the last day.  If you haven't done it already, register.  And if you want some silly people to tell you why and how to register, watch this video.

It's a good thing to tell people to vote, but I think it's a better thing to explain, honestly and humbly, why you're supporting the candidate(s) you're supporting. 

And I don't care who you are or what qualifications you have.  All of our reasons are probably flawed in some way.  But some of our reasons, flawed or not, are original and legitimate and reasons that other people should consider. 

So, if you want to take the video's advice and tell five friends to register to vote, I suggest that you buck conventional nondisclosure wisdom and tell those five people for whom you're voting and why.

I'm voting for Barack Obama.

I'm voting for him for many reasons, and here's one that might feel a little unusual:

I don't think Barack Obama believes in absolute good and absolute evil. 

I think he understands that the world is complicated.  I think he understands that there are legitimate (though sometimes misguided) reasons that people and governments and businesses do the things they do.  And I think he understands that, in order to solve the big problems we face, we're going to have to be a lot more creative and introspective than we ever have been before.

I sense that understanding in his willingness to try different things diplomatically with Iran.  I sense it in his relationships with Reverend Wright and William Ayers.  I sense it in his thoughts on race and culture in the United States. 

I want a President with an open mind, and I think Barack Obama will be that President.

Vote.

Casey Wilson might be my favorite blogger ever. 

For one simple reason.

She is not afraid to lay it all out there. 

Thoughts about quitting.  A story about tropical heat, girly pushups, and the accidental perpetuation of some microfinance industry infighting.  And, just hours ago, the fact that all her colleagues are way cooler than her.

Radical transparency.  Pure, innocent, radical transparency.

Far better than anything I've ever done. 

Raw.  Unproduced.  Honest.

And I love it.  And admire it.  And wish I wasn't afraid to do more of it myself.  Conventional wisdom holding me back.  Pain in the ass.

Senior year in high school, someone got ahold of a Twin Peaks box set.  Every episode.  From the pilot right down to the end of the second season, when everyone knew the axe was falling, and things took a turn for the unintelligible. 

For a month, a handful of us watched every night we could, sometimes multiple episodes at a time.

I remember it being a brilliantly strange and addictively terrifying show, the cause of both uncontrollable laughter and recurring nightmares.

And I remember deciding that if Agent Cooper used a voice recorder to take notes, so should I.

Almost ten years later, last week, before I drove north to be best man for one of those high school classmates, Micaela the intern delivered the machinery I'd ordered.  I admired it for a moment, loaded it with two AAA batteries, fiddled with the buttons to make sure I understood the controls, and decided I was about to have the most productive weekend of my life.  I'd help one of my very favorite people keep his almost mother in law sane, and I'd pour into the recorder enough important work related thoughts to let me vault back into action as soon as I stepped back in the office.

Well, I am back in action, and, as far as I can tell, I'm still on my feet and scrambling steadily, but I can't say I owe many thanks to my voice recording skills. 

Go ahead and judge for yourself, but I think I have quite a bit to learn about using the recorder professionally and not just as a toy.

Here's a sampling:

-If I get pulled over, and I'm suspected for having been talking on my cell phone, are the cops allowed to look at my cell phone records and be like: dude you were fucking talking on your phone the last two hours!?  Or is that sort of illegal?  Because I would be in trouble if it was legal.  I am a problem when it comes to talking on the cell phone, which means I need to get that thing, that little earbud thing.  And I wonder what happened to the one I got before.  Anyway, I wonder.  About the law.

-Why is it that dreams, even sometimes when they're super intense and you feel the intensity, why is it so difficult to bring back the memory? Maybe because the thought is something not actually experienced but only imagined?

-When a clock says it's 11:11, but it's wrong, is it still good luck to kiss that clock?  My sense is yes, but maybe not as good as the 11:11 that is on time or at least approximately on time.  I'm thinking about this car clock right now, which I think is about 18 minutes slow, which is a pretty silly clock situation if you ask me.

-Sitting here listening to extra innings in the Phillies' game, which is a total bonus on my car ride home.  We're going into the bottom of the 11th, and I'm listening here to the ads, and I'm getting excited and feeling my muscles tense up in this ridiculous baseball situation and screaming, to no one, and pumping my fist, COME ON PHILS!  Ridiculous.  But.  I love the Phils.  What can I say.

-I should, I think, maybe, in my weird craziness, write down, in my Posterous blog or wherever, the fact that I recognize that everything I'm writing or everything I'm putting out there might be totally crazy.  I recognize that there's a possibility that I am full of shit.  But I'm doing it anyway, despite that recognition, out of the possibility, A, that I'm not full of shit, and, B, that, even if I'm full of shit, there are probably some nuggets in my full of shitness...and nuggets and shit become a very dangerous metaphor...anyway, maybe despite our craziness, or potentially because of our craziness, we are able to offer these other things to the world.  And I want to say this.  I want to throw it out there and say: Maybe I'm nuts.  Maybe I am totally totally nuts.  But.  Maybe not, and, maybe, even if I am, it's still kind of good to get these thoughts out there, because there might be something in here that's good, thats useful, that's not crazy.  And so I'm doing it.  Because I want to.  Or because I want to preserve that. 

So.  There you go. Figured it'd be appropriate to end with that last one.  A window into a mind that had been driving all day with a tape recorder sitting in the passenger seat. 

A little embarrassing.  But that's cool.  Radical transparency.  And an illustration of the fact that I haven't come anywhere close to achieving Agent Cooper style tape recorder productivity.