i put down the old ways, again. this time i let it go back home. maybe i'm just not in the mood, it's too romantic, nostalgic, trying too hard. i was trying too hard to like it. i'll like it from afar, in spirit. 
i did try, so it's ok- (i have guilt over rejected books, like people, like my own rejections). 
now i open brothers of the gun: a memoir of the syrian war, by marwan hisham and molly crabapple. it feels rooted in personal life as well as about the brutal external realities of soul and life crushing regimes, like our own. it doesn't feel foreign. 
i think one thing to come from the horror of all these wars we make is that we learn about other cultures as well as our own (as they disintegrate). the corporate media can't control the narrative. where media propagandizes its own corrupt corporate ends art comes in. it may be the only way we can learn now. media taught us to be skeptical, (at least the skeptics and the educable) and to learn by our own instinct. governments of lies taught us to learn the art of life, and condemn political expedients and genocide by policy.

well, i just started, i don't know how i'll read it by the end, but i want to record my first impressions.