Evasion :: travelogue of thievery and trespassing

"We fell in love in the wreckage, shouted out songs in the uproar, danced joyfully in the heaviest shackles they could forge; we smuggled our stories through the gauntlets of silence, starvation, and subjugation, to bring them back to life again and again as bombs and beating hearts; we built castles in the sky from the ruins of hell on earth".

Yeah, that sounds very much like something I would write after a typical, everyday weekend. But in fact I'm quoting the introduction of the US-based CrimethInc. Worker's Collective. I found myself on that website after having read their book Evasion:

"A 288 page novel-like narrative, Evasion is one person's travelogue of thievery and trespassing across the country, evading not only arrest, but also the 40-hour workweek and hopeless boredom of modern life. The journey documents a literal and metaphorical reclamation of an individual's life and the spaces surrounding them—scamming, squatting, dumpstering, train hopping and shoplifting a life worth living and a world worth the fighting for."

Some fifteen months ago I toyed with the idea of publishing an anthology entitled The Anti-Travel Files. It is yet to happen, containing some of my own stories as well as anonymous and known contributors - from harassment at Israeli checkpoints to strip-searches by Japanese customs; spending the day with English homeless to hijacking Mexico City buses. Interesting stuff not PC, and not found in the average travel-book section. Inevitably this anthology will be published though, perhaps as the second ChaleChole title?

Evasion partly motivated me to do this blog, before I've got the cash to publish The Anti-Travel Files, and this morning I just found a bookmark with some of my notes in Evasion with these ideas for a blog:

How much do I shape culture as opposed to being shaped by it? Is submitting to instinctual compulsive behaviour more influential than a well thought-through structuralist approach? Which poetry is most real? Do seeds of destruction or the ashes of construction bear richer fruit? Is freedom destructive? Why don't you trust to listen to the talk of a trumpet or the whisper of wind as much as words on a page? Have you ever felt good AFTER eating Maccas? [An idea for some writers with cans at selected establishments?]