It's been three days since my last (mediated) confession.
I'm now in Asheville, NC, with Wallace, recuperating from his mother's funeral yesterday. We had to deal with some homophobic, macho cousins leading up to and right before the funeral, but we came out of it OK. It was an instructive experience, actually, to experience the discrimination that many rural gay people face day-to-day. It also makes me grateful for the bravery and sacrifice of gay folks in urban areas, the "out pioneers," who have managed to carve out gay-friendly neighborhoods in many urban areas. Like Asheville, for instance: we've been walking all around town, a white man and a black man, hand-in-hand, and have received nothing but smiles.
And now Wallace and I are holed in in Malaprops Books, on Haywood St., doing our respective blogging.
We're on our third table. The first one we had while a woman was doing a reading on her book on globalization, which was in effect how best to make anti-globalization seem dry and academic. This woman needs to go live in a tree for awhile, to get her activist mojo on!
I eventually relinquished that table because folks were looking around for a table, and it was just me because Wallace, with the lap top, needed to move to an old wooden school desk right next to the door, right by one of the few available outlets, because my laptop only has battery for an hour.
Now I've scored a third table, by another outlet, so I don't have to blog in the old wooden school desk. I can eat my cheese and pesto croissant and drink my chai while blogging.
I thought I was in heaven when, after sitting down and searching for wireless connections, I found eight or nine choices (some of them not open, I'll guess, but still). I overheard a conversation where a guy said Asheville was like that: you could drive up Haywood Street and, because there are so many cafes with wireless connections, you would have all internet access you needed.
It's kind of interesting, spending all this time in a bookstore, trading off the laptop, so we can both do our respective blogging. It's interesting that blogging was the first thing on our mind coming out of the hostel. Interesting that we guard our electronic access like territorial animals. Interesting also that we have no problems staying in a hippie hostel with all the small privations that entails, as long as we can get hooked up somewhere, because that takes priority (actually, the hostel had wireless, showing the same dynamic: hippies want wireless too; maybe moreso, since it's largely free and mobile, ideal for folks without a lot of cash).
Which shows again for me the fact that you don't have to be a luddite to be earth-friendly and hippie-inclinded. There are plenty of such folks who blog regularly, or send out email to lists (like my friend Michael, who's sending out missives as he walks the Appalachian trail). The fact that he could and would do so says a lot about the relationship between outdoor recreation and the digital in the present time.
Posted by jeb at August 7, 2005 4:15 PM | TrackBack