Ten days ago, at a summer fair—fried dough, bouncy castle, corn dogs and crystals and soap—I ran into one of the members of Anti-Love. We are on hiatus for the summer—actually, we have finished the collection of essays on our syllabus, and we’ve been so careful about power sharing that everyone is reluctant to weigh in on what to read next. There was a tentative offering about prisons. One about communes. One about gray water and composting toilets, with several hands-on workdays figured in. (Were we finished with theory? We pinned black discs to our shirts, placeholders for the next protest. Some of us had read Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and been moved by its argument for localized practice, for methods named after processes themselves rather than after the men who’d thought them up.)

Or, what would it mean not to be finished with theory? We had found our members—including the one I saw at the fair and hugged through sweat and smiles—by stapling a flyer to a telephone pole.

The “we” is royal.

The flyer said: ARE YOU TIRED OF INVENTION, TIRED OF HISTORY, DO YOU FEEL THAT YOU’RE ALL OUT OF FIGHT? COME SIT AND READ ANGRY THINGS WITH OTHER ANGRY PEOPLE. MAYBE IT WILL FEEL LIKE LOVE. NO FASCISTS. BEER. COFFEE. FREE.

Who I am (cont’d): a person who can’t tell time, can’t tell it what to do, can’t figure anything; one who can’t stop looking out the window—currently, a window on a train, the same train on which I began, for the third time, The Guérillères, the same window, too, but a different date on the calendar, a different number on my ten-ride pass; a person who has swallowed so much rage over the years that anger has become conflated with food, seasoned by paralysis and grief (a person who suspects any extended metaphor out of hand); a person who is suspicious, even, of the word person and all it suggests (especially preceded by a definite or indefinite article) about the separation between entities or their separability, and one who tests this separation regularly by all the usual means: projection, depersonalization, a certain porousness that isn’t always safe to maintain, a certain obsession, an addiction to this simple act of looking (as out the window from a train); a person who is driven, in real time, to the subject at hand—to the composite Janus face of Love and Anti-Love (placeholders, we know, for forms that express themselves multiply, in corporate wireframes and in terribly tender flesh)—driven by a lifetime, a muddle, a lifetime of muddles on the way to a theory or an anti-theory (jury’s still out); an anarchic person, seeking solace and company and lust, possibly a restorative beating, figurative or not; and a person who is more interested, finally, in who you are.