Well, I reached the Pacific Northwest yesterday, patched things up with the cats (who flew out five days ago) and am waiting for my library and computers to arrive. I had a chance to putter away at some translation of Bellegarigue’s second issue of Anarchy: A Journal of Order on the train. I dragged the paper files for LeftLiberty with me in an old salesman’s specimen case that serves as a mobile file cabinet, so I can get back to work on that today.
I’ve been rearranging a lot of projects, trimming some obsolete stuff, incorporating old efforts into new ones, and working on networking the whole mess a whole lot more efficiently. My hope is to get the basic structure of everything in its new form prepared for launch/relaunch by July 4. That includes: the wiki versions of the Libertarian Labyrinth and The Distributive Passions, a portal site on Mutualism at mutualism.info, a site for the 20-year-old Anarchy-List (which is set for a relaunch of sorts of its own), the first issue of LeftLiberty and a portal in the Labyrinth archive for that, the first educational material associated with mutualschool.org, and a new project related to “civil defense” in the contemporary context.
If that sounds like a lot, well, it pretty obviously is. But my situation is this: for the last three years I have been living the simplest of lives, going without lots of things (car, insurance, heat in the winter last year, etc) just to keep working at the things that are important to me. That has meant I’ve been relentless on the research side, and a bit spotty on the writing and publishing side. Nobody is more aware than I am of the number of projects left unfinished, or transformed into something else. I have now placed myself in a position to “go to work” on liberty-related projects as if it was my job. And that’s what I’ll be doing, in a variety of ways. It’s a matter of vocation for me (in a strong sense, that has more than just a little to do with my Christian upbringing). What I hope to explore is the extent to which it can also be made a career of the sort that requires fewer sacrifices. More about that anon. . .
