on hanging out and bumming around

warning : linkedin kryptonite

some of my favourite memories of my time as a berkeley undergraduate manifested my last year (senior year in Americanese) on tuesday evenings at la val’s pizza, right at the periphery of northside of campus, a stroll away from the hulking concrete-glass masses of soda and etchverry where silicon sorcerers and apprentices were busy at play. tuesday evenings had become ritualized hangs for the motley berkeley psychedelic science group (or psysci for short, in what was the kind of great coinage that seems obvious in hindsight), a ritual that had commenced at the start of fall by a group of 7 consciousness aficionados who went into the forested redwoods to Figure Things Out about how to go about running an ~official~, university sponsored, student psychedelic group, with tuesdays@7 being the primary realization made.

in the fantastic review of Sheila Liming’s book Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, resonant observations are offered about how we, sapiens a sprint into the 2nd millennium, are forgetting how to Hang Out. unlike the tiresome albeit hitting-close-to-home narrative of young people losing their minds to phones, the subject here is all of us, not just the young un’s with their new fangled toys.

i write this at a cafe in tel aviv overlooking dizengoff square with its subdued fountains and pigeon-brimming palm trees. tel aviv is not a city you would accuse his denizens of not hanging out, indeed, the avivians don’t seem to do much else in the plethora of cafe-bars spilling out on the street, the white sand crystal blue beaches, and the dog and child filled parks and squares that dot the pulsing heart of israel. last night, while in pursuit of thai food, i stumbled upon a river of white and blue flags that lead to a sea of a massive rally. boisterous cries of de-mo-kra-cia reverberated across the thoroughfare, drummers vigorously rendered defiant beats attracting caravans of the young and the old, who added in an ensemble of trumpet-types, whistles, car horns and old-fashioned hoots and yells, in an orchestra of the human spirit’s unwillingness to be quiet.

the previous night i had been invited to a shabbat, my first, by a good friend’s friend’s roommate. expecting a solemn candlelit roundtable, perhaps with a wizened jewish man with a kippah and a great grey beard directing the proceedings, i was instead met with a young group of mostly americans, with a smattering of israelis and chileans for good measure, drinking wine and having a good time - essentially a wholesome version of your american house party. having being told this was a potluck, i had nabbed a bottle of wine (for a discount, as apparently the wine company had been racist a couple of years back and never been completely forgiven), an act that solidified the feeling of being an Adult, complete with the slight worry of not buying a wine that was Good Enough, aka expensive enough, and making sure to take the price tag off. i knew no one at the wholesome shabbat party, indeed, the person who invited me i had met half an hour prior, but there was no cause for angst, as i realized i was not alone. such shabbats, it turns out, typical have a three layer structure - the Inner Circle, the Outer Circle, and the Periphery - with the lattermost being represented this time by me and a couple more people, visitors to this strange beautiful paradoxical country looking for community and to Hang Out.

tuesdays@7 in la vals, rallies to keep democracy alive, shabbats, spaces carved out of our schedules with no need to be fit on the google calendar, where the sometimes awkward, the sometimes effortful, brownian motion of people and worlds colliding and changing, however slightly or subtlety, our trajectories, leaving stories to be revived in future Hangs, the butterfly fission effect where past meets future through the interconnected mosaic of our lives with strangers and Inner Circle alike.

this is perhaps what i resent about LinkedIn culture the most. for all its utility as a tool for allowing one to connect with other people, and as a visitor on a mission to another country i do not take this utility lightly, the connections it brokers is one of utility itself. networking, working the room, ‘making’ connections - the peculiar activeness of the verb - gives me pause.

some of my favourite memories of my time as a berkeley undergraduate were on psysci tuesdays at la val’s pizza. these were also, by conventional terms, my most unproductive moments. hung out with the homies every week shooting the shit about consciousness and the nature of reality is not a line on my resume. it is, however, a line etched in the creases of my stories and the crevices of my being.