Wheeling and Dealings, part 4 of 7

Wheeling and Dealings
5/20/2010

Once we broke out of the Pittsburgh traffic, our ramblings really ramped up. “Ninety miles an hour, girl, is the speed I drive...”

Josh, he's mapping out South Central Asia by language, politics, history, and culture, Caucasus overlapped in Aryan migration and Tartar conflicts, inexplicable compatibilities, mixed into Josh's own inexplicable incompatibilities, and his compulsion to see and record the grammars and grammothers of the region.

Now that he's warmed up, Josh powers on in high gear,

you see, there's personal folklore in every moment, but especially life cycle events, and the recording of people’s narratives, as strangely coincident, Rach falls out of her dream of photo journalism as a career in empathy and relationship, realizing it's a life of move-in – shoot – forget 'em – blow your horn, as she wakes up disillusioned, and takes a game-changing move towards recording personal stories for the sake of healing; not quite folklore, but close – examples: a journey thru addiction; the death of a sibling; surviving cancer; recording the last days and weeks of a patient in hospice – and from there to the virtue, the value, the need for families and individuals to record their histories in regular intervals, and construct extended genealogies built from images and recorded statements, talking not just about favorite foods and favorite colors, but rather, moments of change, success and failures, where we are going, where we have been, what we want and what we avoid, and in other words the perception of forces that have shaped both our interior and exterior lives, and what kinds of tools and software and professional guidance is necessary and possible to produce this (now that's folklore, by the way),

and from there after a long moment’s silence considering wide fields of bright flowering yellow clover and the verdant rolling landscapes of scrub-lined fields and second growth woodlands, such a contrast to the parched straw and washed-out olive shades of SoCal and Yemen, I hesitate and dive into my recurrent discontents and thoughts to drop out of my safe and affluent life, to live in an Airstream (I found a nice one online for 5000 bucks) as an old bohemian/hippy recluse, with limited need of money, it's so easy to take that mental step, but the next step is all bramble: wanting to be local to a vibrant culture, especially Jewish, searching the country and the world to find such a place and realizing that if it exists I don't know where, even or especially in Israel; which led to Josh asking, 'why my discontent?,' and without much delay – should I talk about it?, how should I tell it?, is this the truth or just a layer on something deeper and truer? – my answer that I am not fulfilling my contract, and he, 'the contract with yourself?,' and me, 'yes, that one.'

And a fourth breath.