Things done changed
Biggie was the oracle of False Dichotomies’ demise; it seems only fitting that he be the prophet of its resurrection. “The key to staying on top of things,” he argued, “is [to] treat everything like it’s your first project…like it’s your first day back when you was an intern. Like, that’s how you try to treat things like, just stay hungry.” By the time I took Falsedi offline eighteen months ago, that passion just wasn’t there anymore. The constant grind of writing about the most overwritten subject in the world – the Arab-Israeli conflict – had taken its inevitable toll. There was nothing more to say.
Things got worse before they got better. My time in the IDF, although in many ways personally beneficial, increased my apathy. That elemental desire, the fundamental drive that propelled me to the table to sit and write, was no longer there. I watched from the sidelines, disinterestedly.
But I also fell in love: with the novel. How could I have lived twenty-five years on this planet without realising that this was the ideal form of expression, the closest our dubious civilisation has come to producing a canonical repository of truth? I read voraciously, like a starving peasant at a king’s banquet, leaving all non-fiction to the side. Wisdom was found – to borrow Philip Roth’s words - in the not so that’s so. Then came India, a country that can enliven the most comatose of patients, the muse, the place that made me pick up the pen again. Wandering Satlan was in full effect, inspiration had been found.
Now I’m back in Zion, demobbed and open to possibilities. Optimistic, despite everything, finally ready to begin. Since I’ve been away, the blogosphere got bloated on its own hubris, in the process losing the anarchic spirit that made it was it was in the first place. But it’s still free and vibrant; no structures to follow, no rules to abide by.
On Falsedi 2.0 you will read reflections on a life lived honestly, in Zion, in the twenty-first century. You will read pieces on literature, cinema, hip-hop, football, religion and sex. History, politics. Yes, even Middle Eastern politics. Doctor Who. There will be talkback: questions will be answered, queries followed up. Plus there will be pictures. I like pictures.
Most of all, though, there will be hope, for that is the fuel that powers are lives, that lightens our torch. It’s broken out once more. False Dichotomies is back in full effect. Y’all been warned.
