Epilogue: Walk a Mile in my Shoe

This has to be a documentation of a gallery exhibit featuring stories of shoes, starting with the shoes I had in my trunk for so long. Perhaps it can include the literature from the gallery but make it hybrid. When I left Halifax it was partly over an argument about inviting a stranger to the condo. As we saw this led to many more stranger interactions that I would have dreamed. As I watched the faces in the cars stream by time and time again I imagined that they were looking out their spaceships upon an alien. When people picked me up I felt as if they must have looked out of their spaceships and recognized someone from their planet. Rarely did we kill the stranger slowly. In fact we usually delved deep straightaway. I stayed over at someone's house who I didn't know and hung out with his family the next day. Isn't that something friends do? I had older women pick me up who were worried about me. Isn't that what mother's do? I had scott offer me a ride for money, hand over the car, tell me made up stories, talk badly against me... I don't know who does that and it may be strange but how does strange get stranger? Don't talk to strangers. The kindness of strangers. The sexy stranger. Am i making that one up? The Mysterious Stranger. "It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!" –Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger. What does it really mean to "know" someone and how do categories get established by our habits of knowing that structure our world, I argue, in consequential ways? I'll start with these questions and from there treat play, risk, and, adding depth to that play by utilizing risk to dissolve the stranger, I'll do a little Meaning-Making with Freight Trains for some Deep Play in an Anarchist's Repertoire. The greatest irony of all is that my trip to the anthropology conference at UBC in Vancouver, which turned out to be the most valuable fieldwork for my thesis, simultaneously resulted in the deep conviction that I should drop out of graduate school. I was afraid of this conviction, however, and pushed it down again and again until it became buried by the most tumultuous and consequential years of my life. Only now am I acknowledging the bine always breaking forth thru the cracks beneath which the conviction has taken root so deeply. Only now am I pulling up what I have ignored as weeds to unearth the conviction and place it squarely before me. I used to say "avoidance is a lie" and this was in fact my most self-quoted line. I think it is time to hold myself accountable to my own policies which I have in many ways been avoiding for years now, knowing deep down that some things I believe to be most true have seemed inconvenient and therefore game for avoiding. So now it is that, for better or worst, with waning hesitation, I embrace irony within irony in standing face to face with the towering possibility that my own paradigm, hinging on the necessity of real psychological risk-taking, and resulting concurrently with the conviction that if I believe what I am saying I would drop out of graduate school- suggests that the most pertinent risk for me to take is, consequently, dropping out of graduate school. This is very inconvenient for me indeed. Many people would not dream of doing something as absurd or terrifying as jumping on freight trains alone and heading into the unknown. The risks that they have to take may be revealed by the application of the paradigm to my journey but actually totally different in nature. Deep Play, Risk, and the Stranger is a paradigm for everyone and therefor must be totally flexible for individualization. I can hop trains. I can hitch-hike. I can walk thru obscuring darkness to discover worlds I can only vaguely discern until I arrive at them. But dropping out of graduate school after all I have been through? -Scary shit. Full of doubt.