mobius strip / everything comes full circle

part of this trip was to reconnect with the people and places of my past. when i was 19 i moved to new york, at 20 i moved to olympia, and then back to indiana. shortly after my 22nd birthday i moved to portland. i have been many places and met many people in between that time. i wanted to reconnect with as many people as possible from the places i have lived and been.

the one place that i wouldnt make it too is olympia. no big deal, really. i didnt have any friends from when i lived there that i could find again. and i have been there since i lived there to revisit the places were important to me. but, in this cyclical world everything comes full circle.

i was in fredicksburg, va yesterday it seemed like a nice place to stop on the way to richmond. it was about 50 miles south of dc, far enough away to be away from dc and close enough to give me the opportunity to span my dc to rva trip over two nights, like i had planned. i got to fredicksburg and it was dark, i walked around the historic downtown area and found a nice little coffee shop to spend some time in. eventually i found a place to park and slept.

in the morning i went back to the coffee shop and muna called me. muna is my good friend in rva, the one person that i had planned to see from the beginning of this trip. she had just gotten back to richmond from portland (ironic, i know) and was leaving the next day for the weekend in pennsylvania. she urged me to come to rva that night instead of the next day. then we parted ways on the phone.

i finished up in the coffee house, walked around the town in the daylight. i went down to the river and watched its slow movement for awhile and then up and down the historic streets reading the plaques on the roadside. now that i am in the south - officially (richmond is the capital of the confederacy) - i am going to be learning a whole lot about the civil war and the civil rights movement. i am game for that.

then i found a nice cafe that served breakfast, i was hungry and sat down for something to eat. while i was eating i realized that there was absolutely no reason for me to stay in fredicksburg another night or to drive somewhere in between the 60 miles to richmond from there. my friend will be in town this night and i should go make this happen. when i finished it was decided, i walked back toward my truck with the intention of driving straight to rva.

i was nervous, but not about seeing muna or the other folks here that i know. my nervousness was because the world ends after richmond. to me, right now, there is nothing south of here, no reason to go somewhere else, this is the place to be. and i knew that once i got here i would start to feel some anxiety about "what to do next." i decided that after richmond would be a turning point in the trip, much like i turned a corner once i left my folks house in indiana.

so, i drove. it took about an hour and i came into the city of richmond around 4:pm, and went straight to muna's workplace. we met and embraced and it was great. i dont know if i have enough words to describe how awesome i think muna is, i dont know if there are enough words in existence even if i knew them all. i met her the first time i was in rva, in 2004. rather randomly.

so, let me tell the story of the first time i was here. i have touched on it before, but as sure as life is cyclical, it is also redundant. it is like a safeguard. anyway.

i came here in the summer of 2004 to meet up with some food not bombs folks that i had been organizing with to try to pull off a national fnb convergence, in nyc just before the rnc (let me see if i can write more three letter acronyms...). the organizing (that i remember) was mostly coming from richmond, there were folks from boston, cleveland, and portland helping to pull this idea off. then there were the fnb folks from nyc that were doing all they could to stop such a convergence from happening. the reason that i have gathered is because they thought there would be too much happening in the city at once, it would stretch resources think and brring undue police attention to such a convergence.

i clashed with the nyc folks very strikingly. and at that time i was very active in the discussions for this, i was passionate about fnb and wanted to part of bringing the movement together. my specific goal stemmed from my desire to bring together the six different fnb groups in portland, and that catapulted into the idea of regional gatherings and a national gathering to meet and share ideas with different folks and to talk about a charter, some revisioning of the fnb movement and other things.

feel free to call me an idealist.

so, eventually the idea for the convergence timed just before the rnc was completely shot down and became a completely unrealistic endevour. it is not only impossible but just wrong to try to organize something in a city without the help and cooperation (desire) of the people involved in the local community. if you want some backup for this statement (of impossibility) feel free to read up about che guevaras attempts to instill communist revolution via guerilla warfare in the congo and bolivia.

but, i was headed east anyway and wanted to meet these folks that i had been discussing and organizing with over the internet. i considered them my friends. and i wanted to meet my new friends. the folks that i wanted to meet were jen lawhorne, another person called jen, a person called tex and some other folks. i made arrangements with tex to stay at her house when i got into town (i am quite unsure how i got to richmond).

so i arrived and met tex, she was busy but let me stay on her couch. then i met jlaw and i got a bicycle and we went all over the place. it was great. i was also heavily involved in the indymedia world and wanted to meet the rva imc folks while i was there. enter muna. she was working on the imc and i was taken to her office and we met. we became friends and hung out. went to a noise show and listened to some metal (which at the time i thought was just an ironic outlet, but she indeed loves metal). i spent maybe a week here and fell in love with the place and the people and have always wanted to come back.

one of the things that i fell in love with specifically was the james river and belle island. jlaw took me to the river and we waded and swam and had a great time. then we went to belle island which had this huge concrete structure on it. it has no roof and is often used for parties and such, but i decided then that when the rev comes, i want to be in the cofederate capital holding down belle island.

but then i left north for boston, to do other things that summer/fall. since i have already passed through those places, i am pretty sure i have exhausted the things that i was a part of there. no more of that.

fast forward to 2005. i am in austin, texas at a national indymedia gathering. i am stoked. again, i get to meet many folks that i have only discoursed online with and now we get a chance to actually see each other and discuss ideas and grow. i will elaborate on this conference and my expereince there when i am closer to austin, tx. however, i mention it becasue i met muna again there. she didnt know anyone else at the conference but me.

at one point in the conference, at a seminar, she was very emotionally hit by what was being said and had to leave the place. i was at the same seminar and stayed behind. i thought about going to comfort her, but i just wasnt confidant enough that was something she needed. she is such a strong person, but later we met up and she was upset with me, her only friend at the place, for not reaching out to her and helping. i felt pretty bad about that and thought for a long time about the way i interact with people.

like, if i just wanted people to like me superficially or if i actually wanted to create strong and lasting bonds with people, be a real person, share emotion and create solidarity and love and all the things that my actions would suggest. my actions and my mind werent on the same page, but i rethought that, i am still thinking about that, i want to be a better person to people and treat them with as much respect and love as if we were all a family.

because in this fight, we have to be a family, or we fall apart. i fell apart. (right now, because this paragraph was going to end here and because some of these words may be hard to swallow, i want to say that i really do beleive these things. i think i always have, but it is that gap where i have to get my body and mind and voice on the same page as my heart and soul that prevents me from expressing these things as well as i'd like. i am working on it. always.)

fast forward again to portland, circa 2006-ish. muna is in las vegas doing union organizing with the seiu. i am in portland. she calls and says she wants to visit portland, to celebrate her birthday! how awesome is that. she comes and visits emily and i, stays in the guest bedroom of the mississippi house, meets my friends, housemates, and other people. we go to a bar and sing karaoke (the default way to spend a birthday). and everything is great, we are just good friends that have a couple years of knowing each other under our belts. how wonderful.

then, of course, i started my meltdown and in 2009 we started to reconnect. and all i wanted to do was come to richmond to visit her. and here i am.

i got to her work and met her mom, then the two of us went to the farmers market. i met some more people, we ate at the farmers market potluck, talked. then she had to do an orientation type thing for work. she works with a nonprofit that helps mayan women in guatemala. i wish i could explain more. we sat a coffee shop where she was doing her orientation and i was just off to the side using the computer.

when that finished we got my truck and drove back to her house. prepare to enter the cyclical world. (not just yet, but prepare.) first off, the house she lives in is absolutely amazing. it is two stories and a basement, muna lives in the basement with her own entrance and bathroom. it is nice down here, then we went upstairs and i met one of her housemates, r.j. he was making dinner, that looked amazing, and the house upstairs was very clean yet well lived in. there had been a fire in the house and was then redone completely by the other housemate and her dad.

there are two lofts and like four flights of stairs. three bathrooms, kind of like a maze getting through it but just so fucking cozy. it is the type of place i would forever want to live in. in the backyard is a clubhouse and garden. there are four cats and a dog, and they are all nice animals. i was loving it. muna and i took the dog for a walk while r.j. was finishing up dinner. we walked in the rain to an overlook and it was nice.

we got back and walked in a different door. her other housemate, bree, was sitting there. as soon as i saw here i knew that i had met/seen her before. my face probably had some wierd look that people make when their brains are working much harder than they are capable of. but we only met for a moment and then we went back downstairs. i took a shower and then went back upstairs to join everyone.

in a state of bluntness that i dont think is characteristic of me, i was standing across the counter from bree and said "bree, you look so familiar to me, how do i know you?" and then we figured it out. (ready for the cyclic thing?) she lived in olympia at the same time i was there, and was a server at le voyeur, a paradox palace like vegan diner. i used to go to the voyeur about 4 times a week and really liked her as a server. if i were ever to meet people in olympia and be part of the "community" there i would want her to be one of my friends.

she is short and small, but with very long hair which she often wore in braids and she frequently wore a cowboy hat. i liked her style and the disaffected sass that is very attractive to me. this encounter was not unlike a similar one that i had experienced before in portland.

the paradox palace was a place that i would go *almost* everyday in portland for the first year or so that i lived there. steve would often accompany me or go by himself. there were two servers there that we had crushes on. of course, we never did anything about that. the person that i liked was cira, of course i didnt know her name at the time. i dont know how to make this a short story, so i will do a hack job of it. while i was traveling in 2004, some new people moved into the mississippi house that i had to approve of over email.

they were a married couple and seemed like great people, cira and ben. when i got back from my travels to meet them i was dumbstruck to find that it was the same server that i had crushed on just two years earlier, when i was a completely different person. i cant say that we hit it off, i was certainly unsure how to approach the living situation, but when emily came to visit we all became good friends and...and i just love the way life works things out. i want to think of it like emergence theory or something, but i have no way to actually tie this together as the best most logical way for life to work.

it just is.

so we had a nice dinner, sweet potato quesadillas, and the four of us talked at the table. eventually, i think, we all fell into a nice groove and got along well. after dinner bree, muna and i went to have cigarettes and drink a beer. then muna and i sat downstairs talking for awhile while she packed for her trip this weekend, bree made up one of the loft beds for me and we called it a night. a very good first night in richmond. i can only hope for more like this one!