And maybe Bolivia is about being stuck in context.

I've survived other contexts. They haven't taken me - I'm still myself. And moving to Bolivia, if I do it, won't be a choice. Like all of the best and biggest decisions I've ever made, it will just be. The desire for Bolivia will go from non-existence to absolute self-evidence without a whisper, and I will follow with absolute faith that it is right. I haven't chosen anything I have that's meaningful; I haven't chosen any of my lovers, my travel plans, or my cities, and I won't choose to go to Bolivia. Instead, that thing will stir up silently inside me, that thing that straightens my back and relaxes my shoulders. A certainty that the outcome has already been determined. This is the next thing we will do, it says, and I trust it. I trust it because it's the same thing that takes me over and pulls me through the worst of circumstances. It knows.

So either that thing will happen or it won't. And that's how I'll know, and how I will never need to call it a choice.


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Pilot's note:  this has been sitting in my drafts folder since 2010.  Why?  Was there something more I wanted to say?

And it's led me to do a 180 on today, for the worse. Elections with ugly outcomes are one of those things that bring up a lot of stuff for me. Like why I bother.

I don't mean this melodramatically. The point of all of my braining, for me, has always been to push things in a better direction... for the community, for the country, for the world and the people I love who live in it. And when I see that the vast, vast majority of people in my very own city want a leader whose qualities and values are almost exactly the opposite of mine, who don't want the things that I want to give them, then my dreams begin to feel very small and very lonely.

And this feels just awful, because the work I want takes a lot out of me. It's a much, much duller version of the same pain I felt after G20, when everyone was talking about thugs and anarchists getting their just desserts. "You don't even want them to have their civil liberties? You don't even want yours?" Peoples were so quick to embrace a factually inaccurate narrative that I began to feel that the obstacles to a just world weren't the big external things we struggle against - the corporations! the corrupt and stupid government! the bigots! - but the people who sit beside me in the subway. Like I'm a submarine and I spend all my time firing on enemy aircraft carriers from under the waves, and then I find out that the enemy is the sea.

Because then, if everyone else is on the same page and I (and a small handful of others) are the only ones who want the things we want, then maybe we're not really doing what's right. Maybe we're just another tiny group trying to force our own preferences down everybody's throat. And that makes me just crushingly, achingly sad. Because I still, no matter what, believe that the worst we envision is more just, and more safe, and more honest.

I've come around recently that I may need to find a way to practice braining in a way that's less coercive and involves less force. And that might take me a long time to find. But in the same way I've said to myself, I will stay with you until this is right, I've also made the commitment not to stop looking until I can find a way to brain that sustains me, with my physical and emotional health in tact. And if I can't find it, I'll find something new to do.

But in the meantime, what to do about Mayor DoubleDown and the everyday agony of wondering if your neighbours wish death to cyclists?

What else can we do? Take a deep breath, steady yourself, and remind yourself of the chaos and utter unpredictability of life... that we're in the stream together, and that means washing up on this shore and that shore, and some of those shores are painful indeed.

And then we're humbled by the hard, uncertain, ever-changing world we've made, and see at last that this feeling can be released as joy. And we turn the volume waaaaaay up, and get ready to make the biggest fucking noise in the whole wide world.