Notes on Cultural Pattern Recognition1.5

'Be careful what you wish for...'
For as long as I remember, I've had a love of the Autumnal season-- the melancholy fade into earth of blazing foliage as harvest draws to a close under the various blankets of grey clouds, rain & wind...
Maybe it harks back to October of 1971 when at the age of seventeen I first experienced the seasonal shift in Galicia-- specifically, under the near-constant orballo, the fine drizzle misting the mediaeval alleys of Santiago de Compostela, where I'd been sent off to begin higher studies in a futile attempt to cut short my hanging out in bad company with musicians, theatre people & such. I've often idly wondered if being a child of Spring fueled the fascination with the end of the vegetative cycle as a projection of my generalized sense of displacement...
Well, this year I've marked (--not quite celebrated) my 54th birthday as a difficult, 'atypical' Summer ends in Mendoza with a chilly, overcast vengeance: in the Southern Hemisphere, I discover the experience of having my birthday fall at the gates of the Fall...

I'm not quite sure at what point I hit the downslope of diminishing returns-- sometime during the last month, between coming down with the lingering case of 'Pinochet's Revenge' from toxic salmon & reaching my birthday with the growing impression I'll have zero to show for these four months...

The whole notion of 'tourism' is fairly... unsavory to me, but on the other hand, I don't feel like much of an adventurer, either-- at least in my own eyes, as I'm not unaware that I somehow manage to come off as a fairly carefree, bohemian world-hopper--if one with a deeply melancholy streak, & a somewhat loaded agenda, as befits the stubbornly enduring, environmental anarcho-pacifistic ideals so visibly sown onto my worn-out sleeve...

The truth is a good deal more pedestrian. I am, to fully inhabit an oxymoron that's been circling my head for some time now, a wandering recluse: I merely resist setttling into the confinement of one particular cell & find little rooms for myself in places away from the land of my birth, to avoid the uncomfortable, longstanding lack of closure in some family issues I've partially disclosed here & there...

Of course, wherever you go, there you are-- & you can't ever, ever leave yourself behind-- except maybe by succumbing to some form of dementia, or simply (!) taking one's life (--now there's a phrase!) --but it does seem positive in many ways to drag these issues to where they may be confronted by a gratingly different cultural context, as a way of gaining perspective-- on oneself, &, with some caveats, on the culture testing the prejudices which that (--'naturalized' but culturally assembled) self brings to bear to the meeting...