I've been out of the country for nearly three weeks, and only woke up in the States this morning.  I'll be posting all sorts of crap here, momentarily.  Apologies.  In the meantime, I've posted as many photos as the Flickr quota for the month will allow.  So, have at that, hoss.

Also, Virb did some sort of overhaul of their system, which effectively made the videos here unavailable.  It's fixed, but I'm taking the opportunity to upload them in higher-quality formats than last year's Mexican internet connections would've allowed.  They should all be back up by the weekend.

My comrade, Harjit Singh Gill now has a website, where he's blogging quite regularly about all things badass.  I strongly encourage everyone give it a gander.  He and I will be doing a series of dialogs that will be posted here, in the near future.  So watch out for that.

Upon leaving Sicily in the summer of 1995, after some seven years living overseas,  something of an exile -- or at very least,  a chronic dislocation --  began weaving its way through my experience (though I was hardly aware of it, at the time).  Prior to leaving the US, I'd lived in a couple working-class pockets of central Pennsylvania, from which I'd been rather fundamentally uprooted, and to which I had no real cause or desire to return.  I had my sights on DC, by way of Baltimore -- neither of which had seen more than a week of me at a given time, up to that point -- and my mom promptly packed up the apartment in Acitrezza, finding her way to a significantly smaller flat in London.  Any semblance of the familiar was, by means of an awkward confluence of shifts, fully stripped from any of my available geographies, coming or going.

I didn't mourn it then, and don't know that I do now, either.  My referring to it is not to bring into relief some manner in which I was swindled out of conventional notions of home or whathaveyou.  But even in just observing my classmates that Fall, going "home" for this or that holiday -- it was well outside of what my circumstances allowed for.  When I flew to London that winter, I slept on a fold-out, in a neighborhood I didn't recognize, and with which I had no real relationship to speak of.  Granted, it was London, and I was unspeakably delighted to be there, at all.  That notwithstanding, I couldn't stake out any substantive refuge in the place, and DC ultimately was home.  I honestly had a hard time understanding why my peers hadn't similarly adopted it as such.  I could've called it an anxiety, even, around what was perhaps the fear I might be abandoned by shipmates with recourse to other places.

On our recent drive from the IAS board meeting in NYC, to Montpelier, Cindy and I got to talking (as we usually do) about books.  Her being a copyeditor by trade, and my being, well... Apparently always endeavoring to make up for the fact that I've never managed to complete any watermark academic regiment since kindergarten.  In our milieu, it's easy to forget what it means or what it feels like to be star-struck, but I noted that -- for the first time -- sitting in a room with Todd May that weekend, I was aware of the fact that he wasn't just the astute joker I know from our encounters and email banter.  Foregrounded for me was the fact that his work has actually had a rather fundamental impact on my politics, my emotional impulses around difference, and my thinking around precisely what it is we ought to be learning on the proverbial barricades.  Perhaps that had something to do with the nagging reality that he was leaving the board, and we'd thus have significantly less occasion to run into each other.  But it may just as well have been simple gratitude.  In the real world, circumstances in which individuals have the opportunity to collaborate with, or even develop a personal rapport with folks they'd have just as likely drawn or borrowed from at a distance are negligibly hard to come by.

In preparation for my impending return to Mexico, I opted to finally knuckle down and piece together my footage from last year's May Day goings-ons.  Big thanks to Indian Summer for the final inspirational shove.

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I remember some years ago, on the eve of his impending fatherhood, a friend of mine got a rather telling bit of wisdom from his father:  "You know those moments when you're just sitting around, and you suddenly notice that it's quiet... Like, for no particular reason?  Just quiet?  Yeah, those moments are officially gone.  Never to return."  Those words, particularly that theme of the irrevocable, came creeping back to me, skipping through the channels of a hotel TV in Mexico City.  By all reasonable estimations, I should've been reeling from the day's events -- having partaken in what is probably the Western Hemisphere's most off-the-wall May Day goings-ons, alongside sex workers in La Otra Campana, and probably several million other folks of varying (left) affiliation.  Instead, I was settling into The Departed for the sheer distraction (a really bad idea, I'll add).  I had a flight booked for the following afternoon, and I'd expended great effort -- for some two years -- trying to play down, shrug off, diffuse, and (in some instances) outright forget what was waiting for me on the other end.  The sensation was not terribly unlike being locked into your seat on a roller-coaster, knowing full well that you're fucking in for it; the bar's not coming back up until you've been dragged through whatever's between you and the full/complete stop.

I realize it's not the world's best-known fact, but Mexico can do a number on the digestive system of your average out-of-towner.  This out-of-towner, being vegan, lost about 15lbs after deciding that one less meal per day meant one less cycle of said meal being expelled from his body within an hour of its consumption, in rather unpleasant fits and spurts.  So, it shouldn't have been entirely shocking when I gambled and lost on what should've been a routine fart, during a wake-up piss my second morning in the Bay Area.  I was low on laundry, totally commando that day, and while handwashing my only pair of jeans in my host's bathtub with a handful of dry detergent while everyone slept, I pondered (perhaps for the first time) just how long it'd been since I'd last shit myself.  Probably well over two decades, but fuck knows. Inarguably the case:  Whatever had torn loose in my mid-section was altogether distinct from what had been going on in Mexico.  It was another beast entirely.  The fact that it returned as my red-eye to Atlanta touched down, leaving me horizontal and dehydrated during the layover to Memphis... Well, that just drew the curiosity of the whole ordeal into further relief.
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