the midwest begins again from a ( ) point of entry. they are putting the snow barricades up and there is space. and lack but not that kind of material lack, if you permit me or if i permit myself to dichotomize between the spiritual/ethereal and the material. but i don't want to wander around in those tunnels right now....

i've been on campus since around monday morning, 9:00. now it's tuesday, almost 9. papers and movement and things. hi, my name is zach campbell and i go to calvin college. various points of entry.

i had a good thanksgiving weekend. w/family and friends. now the trip back blurs it all, the memory of travel organizes itself into a singular fiction, condensed. condensed movement and condensed space with seat-back table trays and drifting in and out of consciousness in the seat on the plane and wandering through airports heeding the signs that lead me "HOME".

about the only thing that stands out in fact is the bar and smoking lounge in cincinnatti, a congenial asshole from minnesota, a middle-aged kansas citian with a broad hat and a bible, taking chances, an indian IT techie who is movement: from california to D.C. to milwaukee....

wait, funny that memory thing. i was never fucking in cincinnatti. i haven't been to cincinnati in a long time. (it's near kentucky). i went to milwaukee. chris filipini did go to cincinnati and i talked to him in grand rapids before he left. bored and is?lated midwest cities exchanging names amongst my synapses.

at some point late last week or last week-end my friend andy hill told me that for buddhists, the separation of the all into parts, or rather, distinctions, categories, the grid, or whatever you want to call it, only serves to separate us from the whole, or God, and it is the source of man's sorrow. later that night we drove around downtown and tried to find the projects, we came close like every thing; we really shouldn't have been driving anyway.

[you know i couldn't remember if that whole thing with the guys in the cincinnati/milwaukee smoking lounge happened on the way there or on the way back. if you let yourself think a certain way you can skim over those sort of more factual types of details.]*

i like the image of a door half open. we can see inside, but we're still restricted. our position is in between. neither in nor out, really - or a foot in the door. just one leg and a shoe around a sock around a mass of bones and blood and tissue and muscle and fat around dna and cytoplasm, just firm on the ground. always putting another foot in the fucking door.

i'm leaving grand rapids in 3 weeks. i'll be in ecuador for a bit less than two. then to kansas city to work? i hope i won't get stuck there. i'm firmly pleased by it all, but still don't want to be the one w/o a home. don't think of it as a conclusion. or maybe not even an ending or beginning in fact. this is not a beginning.