Now for my bi-yearly contribution...

A stream of consciousness writing that was spurred by a class in Environmental Education. It's a challenging space for me to be in. It'll be good eventually, but its definitely me rubbing up against some former boundaries...

...This strange and fascinating experience of being on the other side. once told to quit school to avoid the hegemony of higher education, by people who then went on to do their masters and doctorates and law school, now I am facing these same people in their privileged ivory towers and claiming myself the same title of privilege that I once eschewed. You live long enough and you do play all the parts but Bookchin was someone I thought was long dead in my past (I hated the old bastard anyways). The anger that comes up when looking at a 6 page article infused with crap language that makes it inaccessible and therefore irrelevant to so many people and seeing for the first time that it was a pride of understanding and not an elitist attitude that I encountered so many times. Counter hegemony. I still don't understand exactly what that word means, and I wonder what happened to that guy that formed my first embryonic class analysis by making fun of the cop for not understanding his chalk graffiti in Kingston. My experience is steeped in, well, experience. I am a natural story teller, it is how I negotiate the world. I get it from my father who always, for every situation, “had a friend” when I was growing up, usually to convey precautionary tales of what I should and should not do. I believe in the concrete and the ordinary, things I can touch, I can see, smell, taste and hear. The privilege of directional hearing, being so easily able to identify and label sounds as if it were nothing, because it is nothing, absolutely nothing to us, something that takes the entirety of his concentration and fatigues him greatly we can do without thinking twice about. My cyborg, my man machine my reason to finally come to terms with technology and embrace rather than despise it. The reason why in my mind the answer to a technocratic society has to be a rather sheepish but emphatic yes. We need the computer, the phone, the screen to interface. The texting must go on, our relationship would be non existent but for IM. There is a reason to embrace or at least make peace with it.