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.

If I can say little else about my leanings, without much equivocation, it's that I operate from an emphatically materialist ontology.  Not only do I not buy opaque, superstitious, or metaphysical interpretations of life (much less prescriptions), I don't have a hell of a lot of patience for them, either.  As far as I'm concerned, if you're going to cull meaning from a particular set of circumstances or course of events, you'd better be ready to take ownership of that; it's not enough to simply kick the can down to some essentialist category or grand narrative.  We're not born into meaning.  The concept itself is an effect of our consciousness.  Meaning is selection, it's projection.  Which isn't to invalidate it.  We just ought to take responsibility for the stories we tell about phenomena.

Which makes for a certain opportune digression:  My conspicuous absence, here.  On this site.  It's perfectly true that I've been busy as fuck.  November saw Brighter Days open an office in Dupont, upstairs from the legendary Kramerbooks and Afterwards Cafe.  And that transition -- from a kitchen table operation sprung from the imagination of two clowns with few better things to do, to a professional instantiation of the oft-invoked imperative to make politics prefigurative -- has been no small preoccupation.  While the American (or for that matter, global) economy shits the bed, we're looking at possibly filing 2008 returns on a quarter of a million bucks in gross revenue (don't get too excited; that's split 7 ways, after overhead), and a model of worker self-management raising eyebrows as far away as the west coast.  There are days when I feel like I never stop working, and most days my gears are going well into the night, creatively immersed in the minutiae of the enterprise.  Recent events in Gaza haven't done much for my free time, either. 

There are two ironies at play, here, however.  One is that none of the aforementioned really has dick to do with my lack of written output.  The other is that... Well, I often play host to a virulent strain of second-guessing; one that borders on paralysis a good deal of the time.  One that I've written about before, when the back-end of that flight out of Mexico City (and what I was terrified of leaving behind, on the flight to Atlanta) was just a snarky correspondence and a spark I had a better mind to play down.  As it turns out, that spark has upended just about everything for me in the most beautiful and unpredictable of ways (replete with emotions-turned-shit-britches) and landed squarely in the middle of all my plans.  All at once, everything about it makes perfect sense while catching me so off guard that nothing else can be nailed to the floor long enough for me to language it.  Including all that materialist ontology stuff.  The odds that a name on a grant proposal, a face in a colleague's Google results, might come to both call bullshit on my most daily of ruses and intuit the grainiest nuances of how I know myself... If I could finger a moment at which everything I thought I understood went blurry, that would be it.  There's a bastard cherub somewhere, laughing his ass off.

And I'm headed back to Mexico.  This time, with the punctuation of the last visit playing co-pilot.  Fancy that.

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