One of the reasons that I had been thinking about Poland for these peregrinations is a very peculiar sense that I've picked up on, particularly in the city, and particularly among certain factions in the city, that the types of extraordinary adversity that I've encountered are somehow appropriate to large fellows of Polish ancestry.
But funding constraints dictated a southern route. Still, quite the extraordinary journey.
Things will likely get rather interesting in the coming weeks. I have set my intentions, as I explained at the end of the travel journals in the recent Balkans book, and I somehow need to reach that scenario -- right now, I'm thinking upper Midwest, a bare-bones apartment with access to a research library (Minnesota interlibrary loan is good for that -- the public libraries reach the universities). In the journal entry, I called it an internal exile, and given my degrees and recent experiences, that's not an exaggeration. Writing, reading, and separating myself from the culture. Not in a shack-in-the-woods way, but in the manner of a quiet fellow in the upstairs apartment who doesn't watch television or read the American papers.
It's certainly different from what I had been hoping to have, either in the theatre, or with the T1 law degree, or with the research doctorate, but precisely this difference is part of the present reality that I hope to explain, eventually. And I fully anticipate that I'll have to work in a sort of internal-exile type retail job, or something along those lines, possibly for the duration of these times, however long that might be.
The folks who have been tangling with me a bit over the years would likely gain some satisfaction from hearing that, but I was never fighting them on their ground. Frankly, I did the honest thing at each turn, knowing that my success if I had done the dishonest thing would have been worthless.
And this retrenchment isn't at all a sure thing. Times have been extraordinarily interesting, which is to say difficult, so even securing this foothold deep in the homeland will require a small miracle.
So. Next chapter.