Derrida, on signifier and the signified in "Self-Defense"

Note: Some of what's below is an account of events a week past. I had trouble uploading photos for a day or so, and thereafter I was tied up with things of the non-blog variety. Apologies for the lag.

So, following the collision and police report last Tuesday (the physical aftermath of which has been photo-documented in the previous post), Seager and I headed up to Bethesda to hit up the only Army surplus store we know of in the area. He wanted a pair of shorts he hadn't cut from pants, and I needed a pair of black Dickies to round out my "funeral" getup for the procession we'd organized to the Israeli Embassy. Mark had duct-taped a gauze wrap around my entire lower abdomen and back, to close off the glass wounds and keep me from bleeding into my clothes any further, as I was absolutely not going to let some ass-hat motorist keep me out of the game.

We parked the car he'd borrowed from his uncle near the convergence point for the procession, and changed into our dress clothes on the sidewalk (partly obscured by the car doors). Unifored Secret Service rolled by, but surprisingly didn't think anything of the barefoot white kid with no pants, opposite the UDC tennis courts. Seager opted to suit up in the rear of the vehicle, and managed to lock himself in. He waited no longer than my opening his door to fart audibly. I later pondered the potential guffaw I'd foregone by not promptly shutting him back in.

By the time we'd walked two blocks, Seager noticed I'd bled a solid red horizontal line into the lower part of my shirt. Apparently, the guaze and bandaging had reached capacity. When we grabbed our coffin, I had him let me take the front, to obscure the stain. I could overhear Lauren commenting to him that she was so proud I'd "finally become a woman."

The procession was incredible (I highly recommend viewing the video footage at the link above). Dizzyingly diverse turnout, beautiful imagery, vividly confrontational to all observers without being threatening, and virtually bulletproof from the usual racist characterizations lobbed at any gathering with a significant number of Arabs. Of all the action ideas I've ever pulled out of my ass in a 5-minute strategy meeting, this was by far the most seamless and powerful -- almost entirely due to legwork and outreach that I had exactly zero to do with. People really stepped up and made shit happen in a way I'm not sure I've experienced in prior organizing.





The media hade a field day with it, as well (international media especially). The Washington Post ran a particularly sympathetic piece, and the reliably borderline-fascist, looney Washington Times even ran something (somewhat less helpful). My friend Noura even wound up invited to duke it out on the O'Reilly Factor, accepted the invitation, and by at least one account handed O'Reilly his ass.

By the end, my shirt, slacks, and boxer briefs were saturated with blood, and I found my way to the ER, where I was told (were it not for the staff being absolutely slammed) I'd have been checked in as a "trauma." I'd walked in holding my wadded-up dress shirt against my lower back to stop the bleeding, and combined with my hunched-over hobble, I seemed to have given the the security guard the impression that I was experiencing some sort of sodomy-related injury. Inspired, I text-messaged Seager from my little ER room, saying: My undies look like a buggering gone wrong. To which he wrote back: Or very, very right.

And thus concluded yet another installment of the Seager-Stephens Ethically Questionable Humor Show, rounding out an otherwise less-than-comical day.



The next morning, I had my bike examined for damage. My front wheel was done for, the fork on my Kogswell was done for, and I wound up spending a good day or two scrambling to get a bike pieced together that I could use for the protest ride to the Israeli Embassy that I'd talked everyone into doing for Friday. Elliott (being his usual angel of a self) got me squared away just in time. The KHS frame was rebuilt, with a new substitute front wheel, and I joined the 20 or so folks who congregated in Dupont Circle at the tail end of rush hour.

In years past, I was fairly regular in Critical Mass rides, and quite enjoyed them. But in recent years, the rides had become less diverse, and more and more grew to resemble a circus sideshow of folks who -- were it not for them discovering the shallow refuge of a rather narrow "anarchism" -- would've likely gone straight to the carnie temp agency. The authentication of a given lifestyle aesthetic had taken the reins and displaced what of the activity could be translated into something broadly legible. It felt less like an opportunity to communicate something, and more a means of further marginalizing an already relatively marginal trend along with its perfectly reasonable demands/politics.

This ride, while not being a Critical Mass itself, was populated largely by really smart, sophisticated, and genuinely sweet folks. It's always one thing to feel some intellectual resonance with someone. It's another to collaboratively set bodies in motion and tangibly make something manifest; to create movement from that resonance; without jettisoning ethical and intellectual rigor in favor of a lifestyle clubhouse. For months, I've been conversing with a number of the folks who turned out, discussing political geography, behaviors that give space to difference, commitments that become our lives rather than dulling critical examination. Those conversations, while heartening, were still merely conversations. Pedaling up Connecticut Ave., I felt like we'd begun to put our bodies into making that critical space physical.

For those keeping count...

So, many of you know that in mid-May, my love of books and bikes collided at 8th and Pennsylvania SE, sending me over the bars of my bike, bringing the rear of the bike with me... Leaving me with a fractured collar bone and some rather dramatic road rash and tissue damage around my hip.

Many of you also know that about 6 weeks later, after being back on my bike for about a week, a van to my left turned right within 10ft. of signaling, leaving me no place to go. I pushed off its sidedoor and then tucked and rolled. The verdict: A sprained wrist, and some really nasty road rash on my knees and right shoulder (along with 30min of mild amnesia).

And now...

At the intersection of 3rd and E St. NE Tuesday, an oncoming car made a left turn in front of me, with no signal. I was kinda doomed from the outset. I yanked the bike right, to turn with her and avoid her, but to no avail. Within a split second, I knew we were going to meet. So, I opted to throw the fattiest, least vulnerable piece of myself at the car and hope for the best.

When my lower back met the rear of the passenger side, the window immediately blasted out from behind me, reversing my trajectory somewhat, and rolling me with the bike off the back foot or so of the car, into the street.

Within the next hour, the cops showed up and took a report, my front tire burst from the tension of a bent rim (my stem ripped out as soon as the bike made contact with the ground), a client of mine walked the 6 blocks from her office to clean out the cuts in my lower back, I bled a solid red into the white material that Dickies puts on the inside of the waistband of its work shorts, and I caught a ride home with my bike in tow.

The cop told me the police report would be available Friday. By 8am Wednesday, personal injury lawyers in the area had read it, determined it to be a slam dunk, and were lighting up my cell phone (I still haven't seen it). There's more to the story, but it'll have to come later.

Taking Refuge, Pt. 1

As a practicioner of the Dharma (Buddhism being a term assigned from the outside; one that has left me cringing more and more, the longer I spend reflecting on the practice), one generally takes on a few basic, routine practices. One, of course, is meditation; an element to which I'll return in the next entry. Another is what is called taking refuge. There are three refuges: The Buddha, The Dharma, and The Sangha. It all sounds a lot more metaphysically loaded than it really is, ultimately, and nearest I can tell, in keeping with other spiritual traditions, many have fixated on the most shallow aspects of these concepts, toward equally shallow ends.

Fortunately, there is quite an anti-authoritarian thread running through the Dharma. The historical Buddha (a regular guy who actually lived, and actually died - from eating bad pork, no less - just like you or I) seems to have given a number of sermons in which he challenged his listeners and monks not to adopt any belief or any practice merely at his recommendation. An individual's ability to empirically weigh evidence and directly experience any given "truth" was integral to the tradition, pretty much from the get-go. The Buddha often referred to the Dharma as a raft; a raft serving the exclusive function of getting one from one side of a river to the other. If said raft does not adequately serve that purpose, it should be abandoned. It's no different for the Dharma. On his deathbed, the Buddha refused to appoint a successor, and encouraged his followers to be "a light unto [themselves]."

In that spirit, I've been grappling some, as of late, with what taking refuge in the Sangha means (for me). The Sangha refered (initially) to the community of monks and nuns in a given community; taking refuge therein presumably meant seeking spiritual guidance, empathy, compassion, etc. from engaged community (in the form of a monastic order). Clearly, the laity has taken some creative license with that over the years, and rightly so. As one columnist noted in the latest issue of Tricycle (in a column challenging the Dharma's default to monogamy in sexual relationships), it makes little sense for any of us to be heeding sexual prescriptions from monastic adherents whose sexual experience is limited or non-existent (at best).

But it doesn't really change that there is something to the notion that great insights, growth, challenge, and comfort are to be found in community. There is something to be said for what we earn from humbling ourselves in the presence of those we trust, and accepting that we may not know exactly what to do, or how to resolve this or that; accepting that we're desperate, fallible... even mortal. Or maybe just that the world is bigger than any one of us. There's something to that.

The attacks on Lebanon have been an internal nightmare for me. When I came back from the West Bank three years ago, I staggered in the helplessness that consumed me during my stay for some months. And it wasn't really something I could even describe, much less talk about, with friends. A few of my Palestinian friends were acquainted enough with the trajectory one observes in the Territories that I could kinda exhale in conversations with them, but something about that felt inappropriate at times; given their own trauma, their own families, etc. what obligation did they have to burden themselves with this white boy's realization that history had swallowed him and everything that (up to his arrival in Tel Aviv) had kept him hopeful?

Edward Said's 1993 Reith Lectures on the BBC provide an unlikely analogy for the mechanisms by which I've perhaps coped with the knowledge I cannot undo:

The exile... exists in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting, nor fully disemcumbered of the old, beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another.

It seems quite clear that a mere example (The Buddha) and a personal practice (The Dharma) are, on their own, woefully inadequate in the face of exile - be that exile literal, or manifest in finding oneself permanently cut off from the stability of one's assumptions and/or naivete. Going it alone (regardless of examples or practices) is woefully inadequate when it's quite possible there are no answers, no solutions (to speak nothing of easy answers). Right now, some half a million people are internally displaced in Lebanon. Hundreds are already dead. And the weapons that made it all possible were financed, manufactured, and provided on my dime. Sure, we've all acknowledged that, in the abstract. It's another sport entirely to know exactly what that looks like, and exactly what it means when the US Ambassador to the UN goes on record with the same colonialist, apartheid logic that animated virtually every Israeli you ever met; the logic that crushed you, silenced you, and terrified you every time you encountered it three years ago.

So... Rami, Zein, Noura, Jake, Jamilah, Jeff, Mark, Ehmad, Matt, Mary Kate...Thanks for allowing me some refuge in being able to struggle alongside you. And to Hugh, thanks for having the heart to speak of struggling with the "unconscionable", and giving that space in your practice alongside the immanent struggles of your loved ones.

Between waking and finding my way to meditation in Woodley Park this morning, I found my way to the west side of Capitol Hill, hoping to greet John Bolton before his appearance on Fox News, to confront him for stopping just shy of publicly declaring that brown bodies don't matter. We didn't meet, but the voices of a handful of sane people reverberated off the facade of the Fox News building during his visit. Stay tuned.








For those interested, Anthony Shadid's reporting (in The Washington Post) from Lebanon has been a real bright spot in mainstream news coverage. His most recent pieces are below.

No Haven in a City Paralyzed by Dread

Residents of Besieged City Feel 'Just Left Here to Die'

TYRE, Lebanon, July 20 -- The warning came...

Road Through a Landscape of Death

I also highly recommend bookmarking, and keeping up with Electronic Lebanon.

You're not the chosen one. I'm not the chosen one. We don't need anyone. Let's not choose anyone.

So, before I headed up to Boston, I cracked open SoulSeek for the first time in a few months, and trolled around looking for a couple records. Shockingly, I came across more than a few users holding the new Cursive album, Happy Hollow. And yeah, I totally downloaded it, even though it's got a street date of August 22nd.

And I gotta say, I was a fan of the band before, but HOLY FUCKING SHIT this record is good. As I noted to a few friends, someone kept Mike Mogis sober for the production of this record, cause he seems to have actually figured out how to make a band sound tight, for once. Much of what he's touched as a producer is the sort of thing you hear and think, "This probably sounds incredible....live.", but this sounds fucking flawless, and is helped along considerably by the band finding their way out of attempting to continously mine bad judgment and emotional paralysis for the sake of "art"; instead going straight for the jugular with classical American small-town fundamentalism. Meanwhile, there's a sarcasm and lightheartedness to it that even go so far as to produce (dare I say) dancey moments.

I rarely get excited about music anymore, unless someone I know personally is involved. But this record made me want to listen to music more often, and made me want to give a shit about what's being produced these days. Let's see if it lasts.

In other news... after flipping my KHS frame and bouncing it off the side of a van (both requiring ER visits, both within six weeks of each other), I opted to hang it up and rebuild the Kogswell frame, until ol' trusty can be confirmed as true, blasted, and re-painted. And by the looks of the Kogswell site, I might have in my posession a now quite limited frame; looks as though they've discontinued their single-speed/reverse-dropout model. Hm.

Anyhoo, I built it up with most of the components I'd built onto the KHS, plus a fucking fierce Connex BMX chain. Actually, it's two chains (for which I dropped a grand total of $120), due to BMX chains being sized for the shorter chaindrive of an actual BMX bike. As you can see below, this thing is freakin' apocalypse-proof.



This weekend, I'll be trading out the Bianchi Pista drops for a set of Nitto time trial bars, and shortly thereafter upgrading my rear tire to match the front. Ultimately, I'd like to build up a different wheelset for this bike, with a front brake for a lever I got years ago that mounts into the end of proper time trial bars. When they were still making this frame, Kogswell (for some reason entirely in conflict with commonsense aesthetics and weight considerations) brazed every conceiveable mount onto it. Front and rear rack mounts, two water bottle mounts, lugs, mounts for running a rear brake cable through the top-tube, etc. It's a lot of dead weight that makes for a less-than-ideal commuter. But it'd make for a perfect hauling bike -- getting gear to demos, getting a dish to a potluck intact, possibly even getting one of the cats to the vet.

For now, the idea is to have a sturdy, powerful, and reliable ride for my forthcoming two month working "vacay" in Montpelier, VT. I've secured a room in a 3BR "luxury condo" with several other anarchists, on the outer edge of the town, allegedly at the top of quite a hill. So, with less than three weeks to go, it seemed time to start getting shit together, rather than have my ride falling apart or blowing a chain while crawling down into town one morning.

Speaking of bike dorkdom, I've spent part of my weekend reading Travis Hugh Culley's The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power. Initially, I found it a bit silly and pretensious, but after the first chapter or so, I fell in love with it. I highly recommend it, even to folks who aren't particularly privy to courier culture, or even bike culture. It's a quite accessible and catchy read, and has a roundabout way of touching on some fairly serious subjects (both political and existential). I generally don't pick up stuff like this, but I'm glad I did. I'd frankly like to shake the guy's hand, and thank him.

In closing, there's a demo outside the White House tomorrow afternoon, regarding Israel's recent insistence on bombing half its neighbors into the Stone Age, over an explicitly military action, for which they've now sacrificed probably 150 civillian lives. Any of you local yokels are cordially invited to join us. We'll be meeting afterward, to begin strategizing further action around this, and it's fair to say that the DC Palestine-Solidarity community has stirred from its slumber over all this - a community I would argue has a great deal to offer folks interested in engaging, community-based, direct action, organizing with diverse folks who boast (gasp!) reasonable social skills and a healthy sense of humor. It's perhaps sad that it took this insanity to stir us all out of a dormant year or two, but it's not like you were doing anything exciting with your summer anyway [wink].

Nighty-night.

OK, so no belly laughs, but...

I did in fact attend the Why the Green Scare is the new Red Scare workshop in Providence. And while the speakers took up way too much time (in some cases saying very little of substantial use), thus displacing any time for Q&A... I did approach two of them afterward, to (as the kids say) "chat." One of them was a woman I'd seen present at Renewing the Anarchist Tradition last year, on a panel examining how communities (particularly communities of resistance) can exact and maintain accountability for transgressions of one shade or another. Her area of focus was how (in some cases staggering) patriarchal behavior and sexual assault have been grappled with in eco-defense communities, so it wasn't all that surprising to find her speaking on State repression of eco-defense activists, and having met before made being candid about the racially-loaded issues drawn into relief by the mere existence of a "Green Scare" discourse that much easier.

The other fella I spoke with was actually quite serious about our collective obligation to support those struggling against State repression of Muslims and Arabs (and for that matter, communites of color generally). So, again, being candid about things was quite easy. And the conversation that followed was (in my view) quite productive.

Ultimately, as the first gal put it, their position is that whether or not the anarchist community dropped the ball when it came to dealing with State repression of Muslims and Arabs in the wake of 9/11, repression of eco-defense activists is targetting their community and they can't not support and defend those people. Fine, fair enough. So, they're conscious of what's drawn into relief by invoking the spectre of McCarthyism, but feel compelled to nonetheless. Granted. The problem is: If one acknowledges that there is some semblance of shared experience between these communities given their respective relationships to the US government, and if one can also acknowledge that it is likely that Muslims and Arabs have faced far more pervasive and vicious tactics at the hands of the State... Why is it that these panels, this discussion, and the proverbial talking heads of this discourse are almost exclusively white? Is the assumption that lawyers supporting Guantanamo detainees, Arab professors, or a host of others on the shit end of the post-9/11 world order couldn't possibly have any perspective whatsoever useful to the eco-defense community? On one hand, I suppose there's an answer to that question that isn't totally ethically compromised. On the other hand, the possibility of said answer or not, the discourse as it currently exists and plays out lines right up with the tried and true tendency of (white) anarchists to work from the tacit assumption that ours is the only game in town.

So, here's the big shocker for the weekend: Yours truly as a bridge-builder (no shit).

Apparently, there was some hope among these folks of setting up a panel for this year's RAT, and the aforementioned "chat" resulted in my being asked if I would be willing to speak on said panel regarding the relationships that need to be built between communities facing State repression. Of course, the last thing any such panel needs is one more paleface motor-mouth. So, I declined, and instead offered to pass along the names of folks working on post-9/11 civil liberties cases, who might offer fresh perspective to current conversations in eco-defense communities. This could be a really kickass development... except that anyone who's been to RAT would likely agree that it's hardly the audience that needs to hear this shit. Eco-defense activists don't tend to scramble for gatherings of those biased toward the intellectual, and the demographic that does tends to be a few steps ahead of the larger anarchist community on these sorts of questions. It would however be really kickass to have such a panel at next year's National Conference on Organized Resistance (which is now nortorious for drawing every shade of leftist anti-intellectual, some of whom fancy themselves eco-defenders). Perahps such a panel at RAT could be a worthwhile test-run. We'll see. Either way, I'd be game to help make it happen.

Perk #3,406 of Being Self-Employed

Early last week, I was tapped to support a group of Canadians from various indigenous tribes in coordinating an action at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Alberta was one of the featured regions, and (counterintuitive as one might think, given current popular discourse) they opted to make oil exploration a major theme of the region's "cultural contributions" (sarcasm should be noted). A report on the action can be read here.

Nothing particularly dramatic went into the action itself. Given the ethnic makeup of the group, we had no "arrestables" involved, and only about 48hrs of planning time to speak of. However, pretty much from the time people began boarding their flights from their respective cities, it was clear the industry had caught wind of what was taking shape, and had (in some cases) alerted US Customs, etc. A random phone call to the main indigenous organizer was traced to Corporate Risk International, and another organizer was asked point blank whether or not she would be "protesting the Alberta Days", at Passport Control. All that shit about the petroleum industry tripping over itself to phase out oil... Yeah, forget it. They're holding on for their lives.

Perhaps most instructive was the way in which mainstream NGO's like Oil Change totally sidelined, manipulated, and abandoned indigenous groups on this issue. It sort of brought home for me exactly what Left Turn folks have been taking to task in conversations around the NGO Industrial Complex, and both myself and the other local brought in on this action were left speechless by how brazen and indifferent our "allies" had proven themselves. Well done.

Alas, I'm nearly out the door to catch a flight up to Boston to attend the Providence Anarchist Bookfair and the summer board meeting for the IAS.

Tune in next week to hear the "Why the Green Scare is the New Red Scare" workshop's response, when I ask them how they missed the Brown Scare (you know... those planes that hit the towers, our little Dachau on the Caribbean, Sami Al-Arian, the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, summary Muslim detentions in the US, etc). Sure to provide a belly laugh or two.

Toodles.

Flemglobbin'

Best Compliment I've Ever Received: "Yeah, I pretty much decided I was going to sleep with you after seeing your library."

Unfortunately, it resulted in a cold.

I'm learning to trust you enough to take from you. You can trust me, too.

A few small miracles from the last 24hrs:

*Sitting across from Sommers during dinner, and being witness to the moment at which he began processing that the woman he has settled into this year really went out of her way to help him earlier in the day, and that it was ok to accept that help; or rather, that he was worth that such that she might've taken some joy in being that support.

*Watching a woman who abruptly lost her father just weeks ago, prancing about on her roof, lighting fireworks, and answering with a confident "Oh, nothing really." when I asked what was new in her life.

*Acquiring The End of the Peace Process (Said), Representations of the Intellectual (also by Said), and The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 3: Power -- all for a whopping total of about $12.

*Slipping on the wet porch stairs of a client's house, re-spraining my wrist.

*Discovering that I feel irreparably useless to a particular local organization. My orientation to it is such that I must've hoped that one or more of my skillsets would be necessary in one or more projects initiated by other members. However, of the few (nearest I can tell, one) projects that have actually evolved beyond mere discussion, I've had very little to offer. As I walked away from the meeting tonight, I thought to myself: Maybe the problem is that you're not taking any initiative; just waiting to offer support to those that do. Of course, it then dawned on me that this was absolutely consistent with my deathgrip on my own safety. If I forumlate or initiate some undertaking, I'm culpable, and bound to whatever (in my mind, always abusive) response that may inspire. If I confine myself to meeting the needs of those who accept those risks, I'm helpful. I haven't yet decided whether it's a commentary on my own cynicism, or that of the sea in which I swim.

Oh, how you are as petty as the post punk kids you pity.
And how you swear by the myth that you're not beautiful.
- Kind of Like Spitting

Bakunin: Pitcher or Catcher?

Reprinted from an email I sent to a group of friends and academics last week...

This demonstrates, perhaps, the heights of dorkdom I conquer, up late reading.

While George Woodcock's chapter on Bakunin (in Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements -- a fabulous text, by the way) begins with giving explicit exception to "the sexual" when discussing The Big Guy's enormous appetites... It does go on to say the following (in reference to Bakunin's relationship with Sergio Nachayev):


"The fascination that Nachayev wielded over Bakunin reminds one of other disastrous relationships between men of widely differing ages: Rimbaud and Verlaine, or Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde. There certainly seems to have been a touch of submerged homosexuality; indeed, it is hard to find any other explanation for the temporary submissiveness of the usually autocratic Bakunin to this sinister youth."


BOOYAAAA! Gay as a picnic basket. I rest my case. Anthony Masters's biography tapdances around it, while depicting a life straight out of Brokeback (replete with Bakunin's final years spent in the guest room of a house he shared with his wife, her live-in lover, and the 3 kids the latters' extracurricular activities produced), and Paul Avrich's Anarchist Portraits more or less has our oh-so-bearish "asexual" Uncle Micky pouring out his heart-wrenching disillusionment in letters with Nachayev; signing off with what could fairly be referred to as the late 1800's version of "I wish I knew how to quit you." Look it up for yourself.

That is all. Good night.
:::cue disco music outro:::

Why You Would Want to Live Here...

The benefits of renting one's living quarters from one's nextdoor neighbors, who moonlight as one's near, dear friends are many. Some are obvious: Cheap rent, shared wireless internet, access to each other's extensive and electic iTunes libraries, the cup of laundry detergent when you discover you're out, and the assurance your cats will be fed with little more than a phone call when you can't make it home on time.

Others are less so. Like homemade, organic, vegan pesto from the basil in the backyard.

This is only a month or so old. Last summer, we had a veritable cash crop by August.


This designer blender brought to you courtesy of the free section of Craig's List.


Penne with soysage and pesto. Badass. My crapass camera seemed to think the chair was more interesting.

Days Like Blank Pages...

I don't feel that it's necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we do not know what will be the end. - Michel Foucault

During recent conversations with friends, I've used a certain metaphor to describe the life I find myself waking up to each day; the life I've been waking up to for well over a year, now. It goes something like, "It's as though I spent seven years training as an Olympic skier, only to wake up one day and find I've been traded to the swim team; I'm not going to drown, but I'm not likely to excel in my current arrangement any time soon."

The metaphor refers to more than just what might be obvious to some readers. And in all honesty, it would be excessively self-indulgent, trite, cliche, and unproductive to linger in that most obvious of passings through a medium such as this. Certainly, there are enough short-sighted and short-lived impulses that do not survive the traversal of this or that synapse and to which no one deserves to be subjected, here.

Time sees fewer of such residual impulses anyway, giving way to a (hopefully friendly) acceptance of the fact that one cannot be what one was; whether that's a partner, a member of a community, a believer in or lukewarm apologist for this or that, a resident of a particular (and thus far, familiar) stage of one's life, or a loyal servant of whatever one's onlookers perceive. But such truths are fairly constrained, their numbers finite. Accepting them (insurmountable as that often proves for many, I suppose) is far less daunting than what follows - what some have deemed the quintessential question in Deleuze's work: How might one live?

And I mean that very seriously. Bill Murray's character in Groundhog Day offers an unlikely exploration of that question, and my own daily sense of being the unlikely swimmer treading water (waiting for something to find traction) finds a bit of resonance there. In the absence of the larger narratives to which one affords the lion's share of one's daily gaze, the mundane comes into focus and becomes the foreground in which one resides; a foreground comprised less of (if we are to be honest, speculative) what-has-been's and what-will-be's, and almost entirely the moment to moment observation of what is.

Amidst all this, of course, time is passing. A full year has gone by in which I've done precious little beyond keeping afloat and cursing myself for my own inability to adjust. Perhaps here, in whatever spontaneous arrangements of image and text result, I or someone else can piece together something coherent beyond that. And if not, there's always that vicarity of reading novelty into the mundane, from afar.

Either way, I'm not going to drown. The stakes are relatively low.

Hey you. Wake up, wake up.
This is the final and last boarding call...
... From it all.
- Tiger Lou