I Live.
I'm back and what a journey it's been. My longest sojourn from the internet since 1993 and now that I'm online I don't know what to do with myself.
Back to the journey, it was great to finally share SoDak with SoCal. Everyone that came was intrigued with the place. I watched while I saw them gorge themselves on photographs. There are around a thousand photos of the experience online. There are words too; it makes me smile to see the blog entries that were inspired by this place.
I once heard someone say that art is an attempt to freeze time, and if the pictures were any indication, we fought tirelessly in this effort.
It's funny how the experience of a place can wobble so much in relation to the people around you. The South Dakota that seemed at first to be a flat prison when I got here was an invigorating treasure trove once we experienced it together. They inhaled all the lessons of the place that took me years to learn.
In the days building to the wedding I kept thinking of Francis Fukuyama's Clash of Civilizations only for the title which seemed to so aptly describe what was happening between Beresford and Sioux Falls. My parents brought the Africa, my friends brought the California, and they descended on the rustic quiet of the American heartland and I wondered if the clash would be a cacophony or a rhythm.
It was a rhythm as people spoke to each other and worked together. What I would have imagined as a dissonance ended up being a big festivity. People speaking to each other over a meal, holding ladders for each other, laughing out loud, dividing into their geographic groups and then coming back together.
And maybe that's one part of marriage. It's so many things but in those moments it was a Clash of Civilizations. Even when the cultures don't span Europe, America, and Africa, each family and friend is a cosmos of their own.
Just before the wedding I finished Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy's rather morbid treatise of determinism in intellectual life and marriage. I wondered at the book's dark side and when I'd finished I felt like throwing it on the ground and stomping on it.
But time has passed and I can see that I'm not a determinist. I'm not caused into who I've become; the great American experience makes me a series of choices that I make. In my life I chose not to become an accountant, I chose to work in South Dakota and, most importantly, I chose to ask K to marry me. As I extract my perspective, however, I can see that the reason I'm not a determinist is because my life has afforded me choices that so many people never experience. I'm not a self-educated stone mason.
I'm not Jude.
The next series of choices presents itself. I change my pronouns to we, us, and our. The brown that everyone saw canvassing everything is slowly changing - I noticed some green in the grass near our apartment. I call my brother. I get my first phone call from G. Al comes over to hang out. I'm alive. We're alive.
8:56:10 AM 
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