and you may ask yourself, “how did I get here?”
and you say to yourself, “this is not my beautiful house!”
— Angelique Kidjo, from her album Remain In Light
I awake in a zone—
a time zone—six hours displaced
from where I first landed in this body
pass mindless feet
over the metal grind of an airport people mover,
a hotel carpet,
grubby tiles at Gare de Lyon,
in Brussels, i forget what,
the district with an African name,
esoteric mud of the Philosophenweg,
fish alleys of Hamburg, and
a street nearby named for a child
who died in the concentration camps—
they weren’t actually sure of his name,
they just thought he should be remembered,
so it was averaged from a list—
a bridge in Strasbourg,
a path in the Alps
where they warned not to eat the raspberries—
the foxes would piss on the raspberries,
something vague about worms or your liver,
no-one knew anymore if it was an old wives’ tale—
another hotel carpet,
another,
a people mover again,
and then cobbles of the streets in Estoril,
whose jagged recklessness speaks of lawyers
unlike any known in America,
but otherwise give me no indication of their provenance
“you like to travel,” a man asked at customs
well, i do travel
my passport is filling up with continents
but i meant to install myself on a farm
as a child i said i would grow potatoes,
but potatoes need to stay in the same place
long enough to ride out a summer
and it’s been years since i did
and i never had a hold on land
Estoril is filled with saudades—
red roof tiles, eucalyptus trees,
bandera española, bougainvillea,
palms, parrots, yucca, nopal—
for Pasadena, and yet
none of these call Pasadena
alone home
my feet move over the jagged white cobbles—
i see them move, and, startled,
wonder how they move—
i think the kids call this “dissociation,”
these days
Hi subscribers,
you may or may not have noticed that I’ve suspended payments for the time being. This is, obviously, because I haven’t been able to write as much this year, starting with teaching two courses on top of my research fellowship this past spring. I’m trying to learn a lot of new skills and accomplish some tricky organizing work with this fellowship, as well as applying for non-adjunct professorships (see something in digital or media literacy/tech and culture/information science/digital human rights? Say something!), so I’ve let the writing fall by the wayside. Though I’m also increasingly aware I have a book to write about the specific arc of history from my undergraduate thesis and college friends, through Indymedia, through txtmob and then Twitter from its founding through its current dilapidated state… and that may have to wait until we all have a breather from fighting industrialized weaponized disinformation in a couple of years? hopefully? Anyway, in the meantime, I’m not charging you, and I may write from time to time anyway. Hope you still enjoy. Miss you all, but then again, I actually really am enjoying Portugal.