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Click edit to submit your article. By submitting you agree that your work may be edited to improve style or grammar.Articles here will eventually also moved to a location in the wiki where they are a good fit. ==We never shared names==It costs 29 Euros to take the train from [[Heerlen]] to [[Amsterdam]] which seems accessible, especially since we want to support the efficient, comfortable, comprehensive Dutch mass transit system. But it misses the point - the point which is about radical sharing. And about story telling. And about dropping social barriers. And about taking useful risks. And about modeling behaviors for a more sustainable future. I am talking about hitchhiking. The Dutch weather is perfect today - it is cloudy and threatening. So even if i am not now wet, i could be in moments. You get to be a hero for picking up someone at the edge of a storm. Many people wave, some indicate that they are only going a short distance or that their vehicles are filled with family or junk. One woman gives me a thumbs down, but she is the exception. After perhaps 45 minutes (i am without cell phone these days, so my clock is gone), a car stops on the wide breakdown lane entering the highway to the north. He is going to [[Eindhoven]] and on to [[Tilburg]] - this is far enough along my way to give up my good spot, for what might be a poor one further on. He is totally charming. Speaks good English. He is an art lecturer, who amazingly makes his money from the entry fees to his lectures. He rents out auditorium space, self promotes and makes enough to live relatively comfortably. I can't conceive of someone doing this in the US, unless they had a huge name - and then thy would not do their own promotion. We talk about Jackson Pollack who I have never understood (my lover Caroline, now in art school in Barcelona, has offered to explain him, but i wanted to do this face to face). And Andy Warhol (who he respects the intellect of, but is not impressed with his art). I ask him about Rembrandt and the Night Watch and why it is so important. He talks about artists as revolutionaries, as challenging our perceptions of the world. In Pollacks case, he talks about revolutionizing the tools artists use- throwing out the brush and the easel. I tell him stories, talk about the commune and of course memetics. He is enchanted, very glad he took the risk of picking up a hitchhiker. And I'm glad i skipped the train. We part in [[Tilburg]]. We never shared names - often it is part of the culture of hitching - to be vulnerable and nearly intimate with someone and never know this label on their identity. --[[User:Paxus|Paxus]] 6:08, 20 October 2008 (CEST)