Rio / San Francisco

Got in from Rio via Miami this afternoon. Good to be stateside with the stateside peeps. Some pell mell:
Flying somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico heard Dylan's "Blowin in the Wind" or whatever the title of that song is. There was match-spark lightning all around. Little oil super tankers spotted the gulf. This was the second time in two return trips from foreign lands that I heard a Dylan song and it just moved the hell out of me. Felt this really strong evocation of Hope, the ability to really hope (and implicitly work and search) for good, whether it be personal or global, and however illusive or ephemeral.

The slog of cynical, jaded times obscures the value of small good things. It's a load of crap that we are all bogged down with too much information and media. We suck up the simple little packages of information/image with greed and yearn to Name and Categorize and draw and cozy up to CONCLUSIONS.
Hope requires imagination. How ugly, huh, a POLEMIC.
=> A lit theory teaching prof I had once came down hard on me in a paper for being too much of a polemicist. There should be, he said, a kinda diplomacy and cooperation and respect among ideas, even if you found most of them pernicious. Disgusting.
Next up from Zizek might me "Paradox and Polemic; Two Sides of the Same Coin." (word to
The King for Zizek recom)
In the Miami Airport a Cuban lunch and coffee counter was the only thing open this morning...and it was Hopping. That great feeling of a precious oasis humming with chatter and light while most else is shuttered and dark. Got myself the Papa Rellanas which were large hush puppies filled with hamburger and mashed potatoes. This plus hot sauce (Chilly Willy Sauce) was superb and not too too far from the street food sampled in Salvador, only those giant hush puppies were cut in two slathered with a sort of bean paste and topped with very slimy okra and something else that was sorta slimy. It was delicious but had consequences.