Earlywood: Planting the Flag

Publisher’s note: It’s that time again, to salute Earlywood. Every Saturday, we publish a free excerpt from one of the thousands of pieces I’ve written since 1996. Sometimes it’s from a magazine article. Or a blog post. Or (in this case) a book. This one is from The Anarchist’s Workbench. Each entry has been updated or annotated with some modern context or point of view. We hope you enjoy it.

I dragged my workbench into the 1896 German barroom and dropped it in front of the building’s giant built-in cabinet – called the back bar – where the establishment’s bottles of hard liquor were once arrayed in front of a 4' x 10' mirror.

God, I hate mirrors. But I turned to face it anyway.

Some days I wonder what brought me to that moment. I’d left a prestigious and well-paying job in publishing. A house in the suburbs. Four weeks of vacation. And I traded that for a worn-out bar in a redlight district in Covington, Ky. Why?

That day I raised my phone and took a self-portrait: the bench, the mirror …