Balkan Memories

I'm changing my blip from a nice skyline shot to this, because this will stand higher in my memories, whereas the city changes a bit more slowly.

Shon Meckfessel, an old friend who lived in my neighborhood back in the 1990s, is giving a reading of his memoir Suffled How It Gush: A North American Anarchist In The Balkans. Shon traveled all over the former Yogoslavia, Macedonia, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, getting close to local activists and spontaneouos acts of resistance (big ones in many cases). The tales were of very serious matters, but Shon is such a natural comedian and has such optimism that one hikes through his stories easily. I learned a lot about a region I've never visited and know too little about.

I and the legendary Ceridwen enjoyed the event, which was happily small --happily because the speaker has close friends in the international Media just now and he didn't want to speak to reporters. The big news is extremely good, but best to tell about it a few days from now.

In the morning we came across some "dog stink-horn" fungi and took pictures of it, but I'm no nature photographer. After Shon's talk, we took a lovely "bike hike" home and I took a shot of the city's skyline from the South Street Bridge. It probably was the clearest and prettiest picture I've ever taken of that same view, probably numbering in the thousands after all these years. But after some hours I decided that it was too strange not to blip the reading.