Tempe, AZ: Return from a two-month hiatus

Welcome back after a two-month hiatus.

To update you, I left off in Laredo, Texas. After six weeks on the road, I stowed my bike with a friend and packed up for a fundraiser in Tempe, Arizona. To my own surprise, I ended up staying for two months. Between fundraisers, holidays, writing, reading and spending time with family and friends, I've been doing a lot of retooling and rethinking.

To be both blunt and brief about it, it took six weeks to cycle from Brownsville to Laredo, and it took another two months to figure out what I learned, what I didn't, and what I needed to in the future. Stated another way, I understand now that there are better ways to go about this project.

The first few weeks of the trip were more or less exhausting. Moving from town to town, home to home, conversation to conversation, I didn't really give myself any time to digest the experience. I hadn't had a clear, coherent thought about what I was doing the entire time I spent on my bike. Why was I going where I was going? Why so fast? How did these conversations and interactions fit together? What needs to come next?

It's goddamn scary, those first few weeks of a project like this. You have all these ambitions, all these plans, and nothing quite works at first. It's like you're trying to pound the square peg through the circular hole. You know that everything has its place, and you want to make the nebulous "it" work, but you just can't. Pound, pound, pound, try, try, try, you just can't--at least not as smoothly as you might by easing of the pedal, per se.

So that's exactly what I did: I eased off the pedal. By ditching the bicycle for two months, I exchanged one harrowing journey for another: I moved back home into my parents' house, however temporarily.

Mom's and Dad's is so frightening because it is so utterly cozy. At home, I have no real expectations. I come, I go, I read books, I work on a blog. I literally become the armchair academic, pondering about the great beyond of the border. Home is insulated. Home is insulating.

In any case, my time at home was well spent. I can't say that I expected to be there as long as I was, but the time passed in almost forced reflection was invaluable. I have a body of literature behind me (Luis Alberto Urrea, I've now read most of your books), a greater understanding of border policy and current events and news and, maybe most importantly, I've set up the structure I need to better facilitate this project in the future. I've reoriented my priorities. The blog is better, I have more funding, I've done more planning, and I'm extending the venture through 2006. By easing up on time constraints, this project becomes less of a project and more of a lifestyle. That's crucial.

That's about it. Check out the backlog of the archived posts that I've updated and expanded upon. The story of my life, a story of the border. It's worth reading.