Short summary of my time learning to teach: I love it, teaching feels like home to me, and it’s also some of the most emotionally and physically challenging stuff I’ve ever done. I’ve got just a few months left, and then the challenge is finding a job.

But I have much bigger news, which I’ve been sitting on for a long while, and which I want to explore in more depth if I can find the time later.

Are you ready?

You sure?

Okay…

…some time around June 9th…

…I’m gonna be a parent! That’s right, Glendi and I are having a baby! I’m so ecstatic.

Hi from an internet cafe in Colomba Costa Cuca, Guatemala…about 10 minutes drive from Glendi’s family’s house.

So, things truly have been as challenging as I speculated, but they are more stabilized now. Immediate dangers and hospitalizations seem to have been dealt with, and now is the longer-term struggle of supporting and re-orienting ourselves as a family which has lost one parent and which is in grave danger of losing the other…and in which all the older siblings are living and working away from the home. My main job in the house seems to be playing with the little ones and helping them with homework, but I try to be useful in other ways also. But I still don’t know how to chop firewood or wield a machete.

When I’m not doing family stuff, I’m reading all my pre-reading for the masters program, which starts 1 day after I get back. I’ve read 5 books in 1 week. Yesterday I read Sherman Alexie’s “Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” in two sittings…man, that book was really good. I also read this fantastic and deeply thought-provoking book of life stories of youth with learning disabilities, and that one really pushed me in some intense ways.

But things here are sad, for the most part. There are laughs and good stories, but it’s all tempered by grief, fear, and pain. Like I said, there is a lot more going on than just Glendi’s dad’s death.

But here’s a thing that I think about a lot. When I talk about our family in Guatemala as my “in-laws,” it feels so cheap. And I feel like the response that people give me is watered down. The word really implies a certain order of distance as compared to one’s blood family, but in my case, it’s pretty much the opposite. I’m much more intimately connected now with my Guatemalan in-laws than with my own family, because of the economic and emotional role that Glendi and I have in their lives. It feels weird, and it feels wrong at times, and often I want to bow out, but that isn’t a real option that the family wants for me at the moment…so instead I know all the dirty secrets, and I’m in those family meetings where huge things are decided.

Like I said to my friend a couple of weeks ago, I don’t feel like my previous life and background have prepared me for this. I still play with legos, I still talk to myself. In so many ways, I’m still a kid. Yet Glendi and I are also often put into the position of being heads of this huge and complex family…it’s a really weird mash-up, and it makes me feel insecure pretty much all the time. And I also have very few friends who share the situation or experience, so I sometimes I feel low on resources.

But with this intimate level of connection and responsibility, there is also that root idea…intimacy. And that is beautiful. I love my family–in both countries–so much, and I’m always learning so much, and even in deep struggle I find space for optimism. But like Sherman Alexie says in that book, hope might be something that’s for White people. Because I’m not sure if the rest of my family is feeling it right now.

If I could tell you all of the disparate, outrageous, terrible events happening to our family right now in Guatemala, you’d think that I was one of those kids. For now, I can’t tell you because things are really sensitive, but as I fly down to Guatemala right now, I’m steeling myself for some of the greatest challenges yet in my life. Things are really bad right now, and for reasons separate and beyond the painful loss of Glendi’s dad.

If you are reading this, please be thinking about us. When you eventually hear about some of this stuff, you really won’t believe it. It’s like the worst greek tragedy one could write.

However, in a brief distraction of positive news as I wait for my plane to board, I just finished and incredible month long intensive to become an English for Speakers of Other Languages teacher. It was super hard, but so fun! I forgot both how much I love everything to do with languages, and also how good I can be at school. I actually kind of shocked myself by how well I did in the program. But then again, I barely slept. It is also really weird how a month ago I was completely locked in the non-profit executive mindset, and now my mind-set–beyond the immediate crises–is now very, very oriented toward teaching. And I am really excited about being a teacher!

With all the love in the world for you who read this, and with trepidation in the face of the coming weeks…

I like to pretend sometimes
that this glow is a kiln,
I wipe my brow, and it makes no matter
that my hand comes away dry.
Because this feels like the work of a workman,
and I make like I’m adjusting my spectacles
and gripping my tweezers
as I deftly shift another syllable.

I like to pretend sometimes
that I’m just like that man I watched
crack firewood with ballet strokes,
cut grass finely with a dull machete,
coax coffeebeans to fall with massaging fingers,
like the spider spindling the fly.

I like to pretend sometimes,
because I’m good at it.
Because that is what carefree little boys do.

Because what fun is it to recognize
that this squirming bad posture
comes from all the slouching,
as I remove a handful of Doritoes from the bag,
and gently wipe the orange dust on my bedsheets,
so as not to sully my controller?
What adventure is there in the truth
about all the books I never wrote,
all the marches and meetings I left early
because I didn’t want to miss my shows?
How do I look at Don Mario’s picture,
and remember wincing at the sunburn from swimming,
that day when he planted all day and then collapsed?

I like to pretend sometimes,
not because I feel guilty or inadequate,
but because this is what I know how to do.
Because, don’t you understand my part in this whole thing?
My actual craft, at which I excel?
My calling is to escape, over and over again,
Using all the fine instruments that more calloused people make for me.

My emotional resonance was tuned early to Skywalker,
my first loyalties were to the autobots.
And so all the grandeur and dedication of art and revolution,
gets tiresome after a half hour with no breaks.

However, my pretending didn’t prepare me
for marriage,
family,
and so much loss.
I didn’t expect the toll on my artisanship,
as the loom with which I textured my fantasies
broke apart in my arms.
All the posing and posturing feels awkward,
when the people next to you in the picture
are the real deal.

Now, at least for a moment,
this writer is not content with pretending.
I open this toolbox again,
and the glow this time feels like nothing more,
and nothing less,
than what it is.
I unearth old notes and plans and blueprints,
search for my sharpest and most effective verbal implements.
I hunch here and stare into these white spaces
and I feel driven to fill them.
Because now I don’t want to be a craftsman,
but instead, there’s something I need to craft.
These soft pink fingers need to come up with something,
that can stab and tear,
that can motivate and heal,
that can take on just a piece of the fighting work
that so often falls to more calloused hands.

Don’t think that I don’t know that. Don’t think for a second that I’m fooled by all those temptations you offer for us to blame ourselves, for me to blame them.

Well, okay, for a second I was fooled. But not now. This has you written all over it.

See, I can follow the money, I can follow the violence, I can follow the misinformation, there’s actually quite a number of trails I can follow back to you. The coffee trees, the dialysis bags, the gunshots, the distended bellies, the fucking casket that’s lying there in the living room right now…I know it’s you.

You made their homeland into an experiment in fractured, traumatized psychosis. That is what your counter-insurgency and your anti-communism boiled down to. You run the poor against each other just like those bored, twisted rich kids that pay homeless men to fight to the death. And now, you want me to actually believe that this is happening because my family just isn’t doing things right? That we just don’t work hard enough? Are you kidding me?

And you’re right. I can’t do shit about it right now. The powerlessness is palpable. This pain, this unimaginable frustration, has me gnawing at my own hands, has us sniping at each others’ jugulars. But I like to think that there are at least small parts of us that are saving up just a little bit of the rage that we’re not investing in self-hate, in circular attacks. And that little bit, we’re saving for you. Multiplied by 7 billion, that rage could count up to something big.

Hopefully it’ll be enough to topple you. Hopefully, I will get to see it. Hopefully, when we have taken it all back, and you are curled into your isolated little corner, you will just repeatedly tell yourself that you just didn’t work hard enough, that you just didn’t have the drive to succeed. That would be a good laugh.

I forgive many people for many things they do to me. I forgive easily, and I forgive in abundance. It fills me with dignity to do so.

But I don’t forgive you.

I want my father in law back, you pieces of shit.

Glendi and I just got back from my grandma’s memorial service in Redding, California. It was a powerful and difficult trip, seeing dear family, most of whom I haven’t seen in 20 years. I learned a ton about my dad (it was his mom that passed) and really got to see him in another light, acting as a big brother in such an engaged and beautiful way. I was really proud of my dad this weekend.
But I was also really self-critical, because I had made so little time to ever get to know my grandma, I almost never wrote or called, and I hadn’t even seen her since 2006. She never met Glendi. And I never got to ask her all the questions about her life that I always assured myself that I would have time to ask her. It’s one of those true cliches about not putting off time with family before it’s too late. I still can’t believe that she’s gone and that I just don’t get a chance to make this up. The chance has passed.
However, like I said, the trip was powerful, and I was really glad to have done it. It was especially greatfor Glendi to connect with that long lost side of my family, which is actually the Puerto Rican side…which is a whole other blog post about hidden family histories and the incredible damage that assimilation does.

I have two weeks now left in my job–hooray!–and I’m working hard to prepare for the transition. It looks like I don’t get any of that famed “short-timers syndrome” that let’s me just be lazy and unreliable for a month or two. I’m working on real stuff until the very last day. Ouch….but, probably how I would choose to leave anyway.
Though there are always stresses, worries, regrets, I’m feeling pretty satisfied about how/when I’m leaving Seattle Young People’s Project, and I’m excited about having somewhere to go next…which is looking to be teaching, though I reserve the right to change my mind between now and August 29th.

With all of this stuff, plus new difficulties in Guatemala and some relationship communication challenges, I haven’t had much time for political thinking or writing. I have been reading a gripping biography of Vladimir Lenin which is focused on his daily life in the years of his exile (it’s called Conspirator), and that’s making me think all sorts of things about the costs of political obsession, the skills that one needs to win political battles, the relationship between ends and means. In the end, the portrait that keeps getting painted of Lenin in book after book I read is that he’s someone who I probably would have enjoyed personally but hated politically if we were in a movement together…which is disturbing since his faction ended up winning–something anyway.

Hopefully as I get caught up in work after my California trip I’ll find more time to write. I really miss this blog, and the internal–and increasingly external–dialogues I’ve been opening up lately.

In general, I’m feeling optimistic about almost everything right now. Life is moving forward in interesting ways for me, and so I want to give a quick update about some things right here.

-Just 5 more weeks at my job of 3 1/2 years, and I last weekend I completed the hardest part of it! We had our annual spring fundraiser and for the first time in more than a decade, we decided to not do an auction (for anti-capitalist value reasons, not money reasons). This was really scary for us, and we were prepared to make way less money. But, in fact, we made almost double what I expected, and actually surpassed the donations from past auctions. It feels like such a positive way to transition out of my job.

-After long agonizing, I did decide to go to grad school to get my Master In Teaching. I begin in early July, and I’ll be in school for a year. That means that I’m going to be trying to chill during this last month or so of work. I am so eager to actually feel rested and calm for at least the next couple of weeks.

-Glendi’s family is still struggling so much. We’re sending all the money we can, and that’s still not enough, but at least they seem to be holding on for now. For now, what else can we do?

-Some old organizing friends and I are starting to talk about forming a new, open study group in the fall. We just had a meeting yesterday, which I came to thoroughly ambivalent, yet which I left feeling inspired. I think, after the hardship of the breakup of Common Action, I’m now ready for a new political project, and this one is feeling pretty good. Right now, we’re discussing it as a study group that will center around questions of revolutionary intersectional politics…that is, understanding how systems work in an intersectional way, and trying to ask what revolution actually looks like for those systems. Yes!

-I’m starting to work on game design again. This is part of my own real-life game (which I’m still rocking through, though I’m scoring myself less frequently than before as I’ve internalized a lot of the habits)…to be more creative again.

The board game I’m working on is a cooperative game, in which the players must work together to build a post-revolutionary economy. The game will have multiple phases in which players have different roles. For example, in one phase each player represents a different industry’s workers council, and in another phase each player represent a different region’s consumer council. The idea is that players need to discuss and negotiate where to invest the economy’s limited resources and labor to produce a better life for all. Of course there would mechanics representing reactionary opposition, which players would have to cooperatively deal with. This is so fun to design, but the trickiest thing is boiling the concept down to its most essential parts, so that it still fits the them but without being too complex or fiddly.

-I think I’m going to get a haircut. Like a serious haircut. Like maybe even a buzzcut. I think I’m just about tired of having longer hair.

I’m tired of watching this same car crash into the same wall dozens and dozens of times. I’m tired of seeing people I love hurt themselves like this, and so often so pointlessly. But when you love them, and you want to accompany them, what do you do? I’m not a tough love person, or a cold shoulder person. I have zero interest in losing more people from my life. But what are the other strategies? What do you when the survival strategies, the coping strategies, the defenses of people who you love go in strong contradiction to your own beliefs and values?

I feel like the answer from so many people in the activist community is distance. Space. Boundaries. Self-care. Because that’s my own cultural context, I tend to jump to these ideas first, too. But they are so wrapped up in individualism, detachment, entitlement, privilege, isolation…those solutions feel so incomplete to me. I’ve responded to so many issues in my life with detachment and distance, and lately I’ve found so much more hope and happiness with presence and engagement…but what do I do when my engagement get’s met with hostility one minute and warmth the next? What is the line between presence and accommodation or enabling?

I think I’ve said enough. I don’t know if this is even a useful post or just venting…but I think enough people have similar struggles that I hope you at least feel a little less alone with your own problems when you read it.

P.S. Don’t worry…I’ll be okay. Just frustrated right now.

So probably not much writing here until at least Sunday. However, I have so much I want to talk about! Here’s just a preview of what I’m thinking about:

-A new series of pieces I’m thinking of calling, “Transformation Is A Spiral,” or something like that. These are pieces that acknowledge the cyclical and spiral like nature of radical politics, and how, after experience, we often come back to previously rejected positions, but with new insights. For example, how my ideas about dropping out and abolishing the school system have changed…or my recent troubles with approaches to community accountability that are based solely on the wishes of the survivor. Tough changes in my thinking that I want to make time for.

-Reflections on this last weekend visiting with my old friend Chris Dixon, and my new friends Andy Cornell and Harjit Singh Gill, who were on tour for the book, “Oppose and Propose.” There were plenty of moments that caught me off guard with exciting thoughts and I’d like to capture them.

-A fifth part to my Revolutionary Congregations piece, focused on ideas for how such formations could be started from the ground up…since that’s the biggest criticism of the idea I’ve heard expressed to me so far.

-Thinking through all of the exhilarating ways that I’m feeling challenged by Marxist and insurrectionist positions on political questions, and the positive effects that it’s having on my thinking.

-Some fun and interesting pieces on fluid dynamics and revolutionary strategy, as well as the power of crowd-sourcing for building accessible mass movements.

-Some writing about love, loneliness, and trust…because these are feelings that I’m feeling and thinking about a lot lately.

As always, there’s the caveat that I might write more than this or none of it, but at least I’ve got something in writing to keep me honest.

With all my heart to the few (but growing few, for sure!) who read this thing.

They have signed themselves up for years of debt with monthly 10%+ interest accruing, offering whatever possessions, or even family members, they have as collateral…so that they can come here to do exploitative, under-the-table work.

Right now there are people, perhaps millions or even hundreds of millions of people, who would trade torturous pain for the possibility of even half the opportunities and comfort that I have. And there are hundreds of thousands who are actively trying to make that trade…right now.

This is an indisputable reality of this world. These are the raw facts of daily life within global economic apartheid. Over here we can go days or lifetimes without thinking about it, but those millions of people remain whether we acknowledge them for a moment or not. This is real.

But here is the thing that confuses me (beyond the sheer injustice of it all, of course): if I know how unbelievably fortunate I am, and how many people–including my own family members–would suffer so much to experience a fraction of what my life offers, why is it that my own stress and pain feel so strong, so all-consuming? Why is it that the worries that I have this morning, all the anxieties about my never ending to-do list, always feel like they are near the top of the 1-10 scale, even though I’ve actually experienced far worse moments in my life in the past…even in this same year?

I think this is how pain and stress work, and I think it’s why empathy and lasting solidarity are so hard to maintain for so many. Pain and stress have a way of filling up whatever spaces they are given, whether those spaces are substantial and complex, or small and trivial. The way they fill the body, the alerts they send out to the mind and gut, they often ring out in the same tone, regardless of their urgency. Rather than being a substance like a liquid that you can measure and see how close it is to filling up your capacity to handle it, pain and stress are gases that fill up all measuring devices; so hard to quantify, so confusing in the way they haze over your perspective.

By any intellectual calculation, I have so many hundreds of reasons to be happy on this Monday morning, and to be excited about the privilege of doing the kinds of tasks that I get to do this week. The things that I will get paid for, and the amount that I will get paid for them, would feel like both a dream and a cruel joke to so many millions of people. Yet I am here in bed at 8:30am right now (once again, a privilege to not work until 10am) and my stomach is churning with so much acid, I feel so uncomfortable in my body, so uncomfortable in my being. I feel like I’m screwing everything up, like things can’t possibly go right even though my last 30 years show me that, for me, so much ends up going right.

The pain of insecurity, the fear of failure, and then the self-hatred for feeling these things despite my privilege…
How is it that these feelings can be so strong while having so little basis? It’s gotta be physiological, right? It’s gotta be the brain and body chemistry, no? The simple fact that our evolutionary toolbox only contains so many gradations of stress and alarm chemicals, and that we were never meant to use them for things like event planning and campaign organizing?

If we pull back and just look at ourselves and each other across this planet, it’s really pretty sick and fascinating. While one person can’t handle the stress of figuring out which new car to buy, another is struggling to figure out how to keep the electricity on…yet the actual physical sensations and cerebral signals they are both experiencing actually give them a lot in common.

While I fret and groan and come close to crying about how I’m going to possibly finish this week of work productively, I know on so many levels how I should have more perspective and a much more tranquil response…but I’m still a mess anyways.