Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

Concoct and carry out your own rites of passage. Invent a series of games to play with your friends, and announce a month during which you will change your own lives in preparation for the following years of changing the world. You could begin with elaborate scavenger hunts, and conclude with a sequence of challenges: Starting at noon Friday at Danielle's house in the placid suburbs, who can get arrested first? {This particular example is tailored for the privileged children of the bourgeoisie; there are other equivalents.) Who can write the most fantastic novel? (This is how Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was written?it was her first.) If the world were to end tomorrow, what would you do today? OK, on the count of three, go do it. What do you fear most of all? For the final exam, confront it, live through it. The ones who survive will be ready for anything.

Schwabisch Hall, Germany was a world away, but when we left home we brought along our clothes. We packed our language, and friends with whom to speak it; and since we brought all that, we couldn't forget our habits, personalities, and histories. We dragged along grudges, we smuggled in crushes. On the runway, the airplane fought to gain speed, its belly stuffed with our baggage.

As I stared out of the window, the trip began to seem less like an unimaginable voyage and more like a visit to the ocean floor in a little submarine. It seemed dear that for

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the ftiU promise of travel to unfold, we needed more than an unimaginable place like the small town in Germany for which we were headed; we needed to be unimaginable ourselves. After some dehberation, it struck me: "In Germany, I am a runner." Selma thought it was a good plan?and like me, she had the qualification of not being a runner anywhere else. So we made a pact to behave as though we were runners from the day we arrived until the day we left, a full two weeks.

The next morning, for the first time in our lives, we woke up at a quarter to eight and embarked on an hour-long run. Afterwards, exhausted, we sat down with pen and paper to make maps. Though our two maps were of the same path, they bore little resemblance, but both showed the waterfall. We had taken a long and overgrown trail to the west of town. Just as I was aching to turn around, the air had become mysteriously cool; the sound of rushing water pulled my mind from my suffering and my eyes from my toes. The waterfall was luminous and green, thick with moss that guided the falling water and made the face of the little cliff look like the bearded face of a gnome. Too vidnded to speak, we let the scene wash away the words and the pain. Yes! We had traveled.

To be in an unknown place is to be disoriented, inspired, exalted by the unknovrai. But being receptive to the unknown means becoming unknown. Traveling to Germany presented an opportunity to be free of inertia, free of the part of myself that only notices what I expect to notice and only does the things I know myself to do. What I searched for there was a possible me, a version of myself who, in that case, ran every morning. In that foreign space I noticed what he noticed and thought his thoughts. I found a waterfall on a tangled path, an abandoned tunnel covered with vines and graffiti, the ruins of a castle, and a foggy morning on which, at the peak of our run, the mountaintops looked like islands. I found my body reinventing itself for new challenges.

In going to Germany, I could have stopped speaking, I could have decided to dance in the streets without reservation, I could have confined myself to a wheelchair, I coxild

have become a poet or a stand-up comic. I can only imagine the places where those experiments woiold have brought me. I do know that there are people who will live and die in Schwabisch Hall without ever seeing the things we've seen. I am also reminded that there are just as many waterfalls, sanctuaries, and castles in Pittsburgh?I've simply not yet been the runner to find them.

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Bicycle Collectives

Ingredients Some dedicated and selfless volunteers Decent mechanical skills ? and the will to learn and perfect more

A supply of bicycles Tools for bicycle repair

Space ? adequate, dependable space The kindness of strangers ? which will ofien provide one or more of the above