i just got back to vermont after a day of driving and a day on the edge of the tourist country of maine's midcoast.
see, my aunt has land up there; forty-ish acres and the beginnings of a house. she lives in santa monica, california, and the house needed to be boarded up for the winter, since noone will be staying there. noone could stay there, at least not comfortably, since the house only has a foundation, a frame, four exterior walls, floors and windows. (of course, that's enough for a place to live, but only very poorly through a maine winter.) so my dad and i drove the seven hours there to board up the place, take a look at the land, and assess the house and the next steps.
and i'm overawed by it. it's only fifteen miles from the coast, and the has one of those views that ends with a hazy gray band that signals the beginnings of the atlantic. the land stretches from the top of a ridge almost a third of a mile back, and is mostly birch and pine forest, much like the woods behind the house where i grew up. and it's just far enough from the coast that the tourists don't have a reason to be back there unless you give them one.
after we finished the board-up job, i went for a walk back there, tramping through leafless thickets of some sort of low-lying thorny bush (raspberry?), swampy stands of birch, and around the occasional red oak and elm. i found two springs, still trickling out from mossy rocks stuck in the loam, feeding into streams that run down the ridge and into the nearby pond. there are old stone walls, built completely by hand and without any mortar in a way you only find in new england (in the u.s., at least), still standing what must be nearly (at least?) a century after they were built. a steady, cold wind rattled dead leaves still on the trees, and rubbed naked branches against one another.
noone in the family seems to know quite what to do with this place. my parents only talk about it in terms of value, of appraisers, tenants, and tourists. i don't know what my aunt thinks of it, but given what she told us before we left, i get the idea she doesn't know *what* to do with it. i know that i want this place to stay in the family, or at the barest minimum to remain somewhere i can go whenever i can make my way to eastern maine. but i'm not trying to get my hands on this place... i don't want to keep it some secret of mine, or a vacation home, or a rental lodge for tourists.
i think i want it to become a collective, organic blueberry farm.
but i don't think i want to farm it or live there. see, my aunt owns this land because she wrested it away from greedy developers who got it, somehow, but no doubt sneakily, from a sick, pathetic, dying alcoholic. that would be (was) my mother's father. and i'm reluctant to know more about him than i do already. at the age of twenty-five, i've never met him, and since he died this year (last year?), i never will. i know him only through a few vague stories--all of them very unpleasant--and the scars he left on his children and all of my mother's family... a family he abandoned for a woman my mother's age many years ago.
i understand that my grandfather (i hesitate to call him that, since that implies a relationship, and i try to imagine we haven't got one) had a hard life, growing up as an orphan in a catholic orphanage where horrible but unspecified things were done to him by the priests and the other boys. but he was a very intelligent man as well, and excelled at school, so the orphanage sent him on scholarship to very prestigious schools--first boarding school, and then university. (harvard, maybe, though i might be making that up to fit the story.) as it was told to me, he always did well but felt completely out-classed by his upper-crust classmates, and resented them.
and then, at some point, he fought in world war ii.
he was one of those men with far too much pain who tried to black it out with whiskey. and when that failed to make the hurt go away, he spread it around, either in the hope that giving it away would lessen his sum or just because he know didn't any other way to treat human beings than horribly.
this is not my grandpa, just the father of my mother and her siblings and the former husband of my grandma. i didn't know him, and i never will, but between the ages of about 12 and 20--when i began to learn more about him and understand why so many of my relatives have had such difficulty living happy lives--if i thought about him at all, it was to fantasize about clocking the old drunk clean out of his walker. then i noticed that most of my family had gotten over him, or at least gotten on with their lives. then i did the same.
my grandfather never got to live in the house he started to build. instead, he lived in a decrepit, forty-year-old trailer parked between the road and the house. somewhen, he got too broke, or too drunk, or too sick to have the house finished, and it and the trailer are still there. i didn't go in the trailer; i had no interest in seeing the remnants of that man's life.
but today, while i was measuring the southwesterly windows of the house he started to have built on this beautiful piece of land he found for himself in rural maine, i couldn't help but notice the box of papers just inside. there was old stationery, veterans' newsletters, what appeared to be a draft of a poem, and closest to the glass, a manuscript. it was about doctors, and god, and the first paragraph was about jack kevorkian. i didn't think i wanted to read it, but i started to read what i could--upside down and on the other side of a screwed-shut window.
until i read that, it could have been any sad, old drunk's property my aunt had acquired. until i saw his handwritten note to make a new paragraph, i could lay any imaginary scheme i wanted on the place. and maybe the most fitting fuck-you for a man who hurt his family so badly is to turn it into a new vision of living--like a collective, organic blueberry farm.
but i feel like maybe getting involved with this property means getting involved in the memory of my grandfather. and i don't want to. i don't want to be curious about him. i want to let him stay dead and unknown.
but that piece of land has so much potential in it, and so much beauty already. who in their right mind would that lose out on that over a dead man?
*****
on the drive back, we passed a gas station in montpelier, vermont. some kid doing tricks on his bmx in the parking lot caught my eye. and then, just before i couldn't turn my head to keep looking anymore, i noticed his companion's bike, leaned up against a concrete planter: it's fork was at least six feet long.
maybe i could live in rural new england again...
Current Mood: pensive Current Music:did you get so drunk you whispered, "i think i'm gonna die"?
the folk's basement is entirely painted, though let me just interject here that applying oil-based enamel (which has been mixed with portland cement so it will form a waterproof layer) with a roller SUCKS. especially because before you can paint concrete block, you have to scrub the hell out of it with a trisodium phosphate solution that has to be rinsed. by hand. but the basement looks damned good, my folks are happy with it, and i just made about seven-hundred dollars.
this weekend my dad and i'll be going up to maine, where my aunt managed to grab back the land some developers had grabbed from my grandfather. it's the rudiments of a small house on a twenty-acre lot about twenty miles from camden and, therefore, from the ocean. we'll be there to assess the necessary work and to board the place up for the winter, but hopefully i'll be able to swing over to the coast for a bit. it's always worth it to see the ocean.
and as dreary as painting a basement is, being in vermont has refreshed my spirit, if in weird ways. for one thing, being here has confirmed my growing conviction that small, local, and directly democratic is the way for folks to organize themselves. when you live in chicago, or visit new york, you can theorize endlessly about issues of scale and individual autonomy. you can even dream of workers' collectives and self-sufficient housing cooperatives. but the scale and size of the city remains a huge obstacle to seeing any of these things actually happen; even more, when they do happen they tend to happen only by and for a small number of like-minded radical folks.
but here in vermont, it's fifth-(or sixth- or seventh-)generation family farmers who are forming co-operatives. the folks who make a living on the sugarbushes* are the ones ranting about global warming. and when you call the secretary of the state's office, the secretary of the state answers. my mother brought me a copy of the catamount tavern news, the newsletter of the green mountain anarchist collective... and it's all about dairy farming. not "black bloc" tactics, or "personal revolutions," or the latest wheat-paste recipe, but the steps that small dairy farmers are taking to co-operatively process and distribute their milk so that they can all get a fair and liveable price for it.
the workers at the local homeless services and housing agency voted to unionize, and the board gave them the go ahead, without a fight.
there's still only one walmart in the entire state.
you can actually eat locally without having to try that hard or spend that much more than usual.
i still don't want to live here... i'm too addicted to the hustle and bustle of a major metropolis, and it kind of creeps me out that i've made three friends since landing back here, and it's already hard to go into town *without* seeing at least one of them. (but then again, i've only been into town three or four times, and i've already made three new friends, so maybe i should just quit my bitching.)
oh and speaking of vermont creeping me out, i went out for my morning (early afternoon, actually) cigarette in bare feet today. it's mid-november... there should be *at least* three inches acumulated snow on the ground. but it's sixty. and this is a pattern. that scares me. that house in maine could be beach-front a lot sooner than anyone imagined.
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness," wrote Mark Twain. I'd add that it also tends to dissolve dogmas, break bad habits, and flush away sterile theories that haven't been tested by actual experience. These are all blessings I wish for you right now, Pisces. I hope that as you wander free of your familiar haunts, you'll have your mind completely blown, get shocked out of your limiting beliefs about yourself, and be so electrified by the world's beauty that you pretty much fall in love with everything and everyone. Halloween costume suggestion: a tourist, nomad, sherpa guide, shaman, Ferdinand Magellan, Sacagawea, Amelia Earhart.
first of all, i apologize now if my memory of the events is a little hazy; we were drinking almost from the moment we arrived. Hey, it's vacation, right? so thursday evening, thirteen rats, still a little surly from the 22-hour amtrak ride, unload and rebuild our bikes right in the middle of penn station. i don't know if there're any photos of this, but i sure as hell hope so, because i just don't think words can do justice to the absurdity of it. imagine harried new york business types, anxious to get on their commuter train back to connecticut or new jersey or d.c. or wherehaveyou, being confronted with thirteen dirty, spiky kids and the assorted and scattered bags and bike parts that is a bike club trip. now, i'm not gonna' brag about freaking any squares because this is nyc we're talking about, but i did get some good laughs watching these supposedly jaded and worldly folk trying to act as if nothing was out of the ordinary.
and then there was the ride to bed-stuy, which featured an encouraging meeting with an nyc pedicab driver ("i mean, blbc is cool and all, but secretly i'm rooting for you guys," and i quote.), the epic climb up the williamsburg bridge, the terrifying-if-you've-only-got-a-front-brake-running-on-a-wobbly-wheel-and-your-bike-weighs-sixty-ish-pounds-without-your-gear-on-it descent of the bridge's other side, and a several mile ride the wrong way down bedford in front of throngs of dumbstruck hasidim. finally, we arrived at the chicken hut, braved the abuse of the doorkeepers while we piled and locked the bikes, came upstairs, and promptly started drinking. a giant foam skull was being carved; the mechanism for a giant, foam, giz-spurting penis was being tweaked, reacquaintances were being made all around. the nashville rats rolled in at some point, with one klunk and one smut peddler in tow, and an impropmtu family gathering began. pretty soon, though, the rats were passing out in front of a movie, a tired, huddled mass.
friday was prep. the blbc was was putting the last touches on everything for saturday, cleaning the hut. i lent a hand as best i could, picking up beer cans, moving furniture, buying coffee with food stamps to keep the troops moving. and of course, the drinking continued throughout. i don't remember what happened friday night.
and then there was bikekill, a day full of stupid bikes (my personal favorites were the spin bikes, and my least favorite the goddamned bronco bike that threw me face first into the beer soaked asphalt), stupid races (blindskull! ride from one end of the block to the other, have a giant foam skull pushed down over your face, and race back, blinded), brawling (no matter what the event, it always ended in friends knocking friends off bikes, friends wrestling friends in the mud, friends pouring beer on friends), plaster-of-paris semen (see above), and whooping it up with bike club kidz from all over the country.
it would be idiotic to try to sum up the entire event, so my personal highlights were (1) during the six-pack attack--at which the rats failed miserably, being far too interested in actually drinking the beer to empty the cans in any kind of placing finish--the skidmarks (from texas) chucked their empty sixer into the crowd. in the spirit of good, clean, bruising fun, i chucked it back, unintentionally nailing one of their ladies square in the forehead. this occasioned her boyfriend and co-pilot to leap up, rush over, and spit in my face... and she, following quickly, to apply knuckle to forehead. then he wiped my face off, shook my hand, and said something to the effect of "good show!" skidmarks, i like the way you play. and (2) determining that upwards of a thousand pounds is well beyond the structural endurance of a cheap, steel front wheel. two-wheeled orgy: as many people on one bike as possible. the protest warrior gamely went fifteen feet with seven people on it before the front wheel sighed, gave one last shudder, and promptly folded at a ninety degree angle to the hub. bike killed!
more drinking, more wrastling, jousting (from which i abstained, being at this point already plenty drunk and plenty bruised), after-party. *huge* after party. one guy stole a forty from evil ed the smut peddler, was asked to return it, pulled a knife, and got rolled right out the door (and dragged down the sidewalk) by five large and angry bike clubs dudes. there was still blood on the sidewalk when i left nyc two days ago. i passed out around six a.m.
...and the fourth day resting, nursing the hangover, and cleaning up from the party. the next day, i went to the movies with xhuglifex, lakenaiad, c. cherry, jp, and monkey. after the movie we wandered the east village as lakenaiad got wistful for the punk history of the now clean and commerce-friendly neighborhood. we stopped at a coffee-shop called alt.coffee whose name dates back to when that was actually meaningful and which has a pile (yes, pile) to the ceiling of ancient electronic hardware in a tub in the bathroom. here we met a boy named billy, who'd stayed at the bridge house in chicago, received massive burns in an incident involving a candle and several forties, and been nursed back to health at jpusa by the chicago scallys. that night we had a sleep over on park ave. swank!
then there was hallowmass, on a boat on the west river. himmler was there, drinking with zappa while anne bonnie traded stories with eric harris. and once the music started, the dance floor turned into a sea of crushed and ecstatic kids, attempting to tango and waltz through mosh pit, singing along with every lyric--or just shouting the tune if we didn't know the words, and generally doing everything we could to have just the best party. then jack terrycloth asked us all to grab a dance partner and world/inferno began the heart attack waltz... i found myself dancing with a comely young woman whose name i never got. two songs later, we were still dancing, and kissing as well, and finding time in there somehow to throw ourselves around the pit and shout along with every song. when the set ended, i slipped away. i'll probably never see her again, and never know her name, but somehow, that seems likes it's the way halloween ought to be.
and wednesday I saw the last of the crew back to chicago and spent the night drinking cocktails at a house in the hamptons before getting high, riding to the shore, getting higher, hanging out at a 7-11 (in the fucking hamptons!), then promptly passing out in a chair in front of the roaring fireplace.
friday I set out to ride my tall bike to burlington... but changed plans b/c my dad wanted to see me before he left on a business trip, so we planned to meet 40 miles north of the city. i *knew* i could make it... what's fifty miles after the ride to rockford? well, the terrain out here is "rolling hills" in a way that even nw ill can't pretend to be, and with a ten-ish mph headwind and a bike that weighs ~60 lbs. *unloaded*, i was dying by mile 35. luckily that's right about when my dad showed up in the pickup.
so now i'm in vermont, relaxing and getting ready to make my bill-roll doing work around the parental manse. then south to warmer climes.
i lost my cell phone last weekend. last time that happened, i promised myself i'd start taking down *all* contact info on paper before adding it to my phone. but, predictably, short-term convenience won out time and again over long-term maintenance, and now i'm out any number of numbers. so if you read this, and you think i had/ought to have your number, email me: buckley2004 (AT) earthlink (DOT) net.
La Plus Ca Change... I captained last year, but guess what, not this year. Why? Because I need to *not* be in a position of authority, even sacrificial, organizational authority. I need to become just another rhizome, another *member* of our *community*. Because otherwise, I'm a factotum, an *effector* of a *collectivity*. The beauty and raison d'etre of the F.I.S.T. is to be a community organized around mutual interest in hunting on the ideal terms of the hunt, defined over and against the hierarchical collectivities organized around artificial groupings that are the dorm teams. We are the F.I.S.T. because we all love the Scavenger Hunt; Palevsky is Palevsky because the housing office pulled some motherfucking names out of a motherfucking hat.
But we're flexible. Some folk have mistakenly taken us for an excuse for Mathews house to keep running its own team even without the personnel or materiel to pull it off. They forget about the "F" for Federation and the "s" on the end of teams. We are many and contain multitudes. The Lush Puppies are one component of the F.I.S.T. Mathews House is another. For the past couple of years, McLean has played an essential role. We bring out affiliations and extant social collections to the table, certainly, but we are brought together under the banner of the hunt. To get fancy, the F.I.S.T. is an experiment in anarchist political organization operating in a milieu in which the stakes are *so* *low* that it actually works.
In light of a recent post, I was tickled to rediscover this. I wrote it three years ago.
Maybe. But if so, then I'm pretty newly minted in these roles. I don't claim to actually have much of an idea of what i'm doing in these capacities. So if you hear me spouting slogans, rest assured I know they're only slogans, but they're slogans that feel right and carry all the truth and weight that any cliche must before it becomes a cliche.
May Day was a watershed, for me if for noone else. As much as I can talk myself blue in the face about people's movements and mass uprisings, there all around me, were ~600,000 people demanding the freedom to try for a decent life, and it had very little to do with me. What, after all, is going to change for the better about my material circumstances if illegal immigrants are granted amnesty, or even guest worker status? But this privileged white boy, directly by way of that privelege, understands concepts like "propaganda of the deed" and "leaderless organizing." And one week ago today, I had the opportunity to see some this in the flesh. I helped initiate the push to take back the streets the authorities had denied to the people; when I looked back, there were thousands behind me. And suddenly I felt a lot less self-conscious shouting my slogans and talking about "autonomous communities" and "revolution."
Sure, part of the appeal of the circled 'a' is the opportunity to run amuck behind a mask. Yeah, I have issues with authority, and enjoy picking fights with cops. And my political committments are definitely tied to the tides of my circle of friends. What have I got to fight for after all? If I'd only quit slumming, my life would be grand and easy. Well, accounts like the two previous posts prove to me that there are fights worth fighting. Even if the ones in my communit(y/ies) aren't quite so dramatic and filled with blood, sweat and tears, there's a lot to be done if I want to live in a world that doesn't disgust me on at least a daily basis. Like the Spaniard writes, these fights are "the cost of our comfort." If we don't shake up our comfort and start fighting these and related fights where we can, we're getting a free ride on other people's backs.
So, even if I don't have the clearest and sharpest idea what I'm screaming about, I know I'm screaming for good reasons.
I first arrived in Daechuri out of curiosity. The man I was dating at the time had a friend who was working against the Humphreys base expansion who he wanted to visit before leaving on a trip. When I arrived that day, I was overwhelmed no only by the beauty of the fields and serenity of the village, but also by the murals that literally covered every available square meter of wall space. The murals were of peace, of people living in harmony with the Earth. They were messages of hope and community. The Daechuri primary school had been painted with the portraits of the villagers. Every window sang with the precious smiles of the elderly, of the children, of the hard laboring farmers who had built this village, literally with the sweat of their backs, after they had been forcibly evicted from their village by Camp Humphreys in 1953. Children were running around the yard, with balls and bikes. two boys were sharing one pair of skates - each wore one on his outside foot while pushing with the inside feet in tandom and grasping hands.
Things That Keep Me Fighting... “Enough!”: Letter from a Spanish Citizen Forced to Leave Caracol Roberto Barrios by the Zapatista Red Alert “Please get out in the world and see, with your own eyes, the cost of our comfort”
My goodbye letter… in other words, my heart will speak louder than ever, the music sounds like it has never sounded, all to break the silence of this social and political center that is Caracol 5, “Roberto Barrios.”
It is 4:15 PM, in God’s time zone. The devil’s time zone is one hour later, if we are talking about the same devil who, a few days ago, ordered the massacre in San Salvador de Atenco. But I won’t talk about that today. The independent media compañeros are already doing that quite well, and I congratulate them, from this rebellious land of Southeastern Mexico.
on… Saturday, April 22nd from… 12 pm – 7 pm at… West Town Bikes (2418 West North Avenue)
Got a bike?
We've got tools, stands, and know-how that we'd love to share with you. Hell, we'd even love to learn a lesson or two ourselves. So bring your ride, your tools, your questions, your answers, and...
on… Saturday, April 22nd from… 12 pm – 7 pm at… West Town Bikes (2418 West North Avenue)
Got a bike?
We've got tools, stands, and know-how that we'd love to share with you. Hell, we'd even love to learn a lesson or two ourselves. So bring your ride, your tools, your questions, your answers, and...
I mean, c'mon, what else have you got to do on a Thursday night? Seriously, I would love to see you all there.
Please feel free to post this flyer elsewhere. If you want to be a superhero, I have a print version (~6 mb). Ask me and I'll get it to you so you can help me spread the word.
Sunday, March 26th 11 AM – 5 PM West Town Bikes (2418 W. North Ave)
You don't need to know thing one about wrenching. Just bring a bike and some questions, and we'll do everything we can to give you answers. And tools. Maybe even parts.
If you do know a thing (or two, three, and four) about fixing bicycles, fantastic! Bring your tools, and a stand if you got one, maybe some extra parts. Above all, bring what you know and share it around.
Bikes make life better. Doing it yourself makes bikes better.
(X-posted to [Bad username: bikepirates> and <lj user=].)
Recent Developments I learned a new phrase today: "Louisiana Space Heater." I need one.
Speaking of which, I'll be in Louisiana over the long Thanksgiving weekend, delivery and repairing bikes from our very own Working Bikes Cooperative to NOLA's Plan B Bike Project. Plan B is selling them, $15/ea., a pretty damned nominal fee, to help the folx of New Orleans get mobile again. I'm thankful for the opportunity to help.
Was out real damned late last night; the sun was well up by the time I went to sleep and I'd received a new tattoo, a hang-over, and a punch in the neck by then. Now I will pass out.
Current Mood: exhausted Current Music:squarepusher/selection sixteen
Edge of Burn Out What a fucking week. I was thrown around by cops on three separate occasions, and once a by Veteran Marine, all before Thursday.
And then last night, there was the monthly meeting for one of my volunteer projects, and, man, did I get pissed. I'm *still* pissed about some of the attitudes I ran into, but I think I'm starting to cool off a little.
The issue I'm having is really not with the compromise decision that was finally reached. What pisses me off is the attitude of paternalism that I caught coming off some of the other folx at the meeting. At issue was whether or not to help out an organization in New Orleans with a little (for my organization) lump of cash so that the NOLA folx can pay rent without having to get jobs. They're working full-time right now, doing amazing thigns to help get people back on their feet within New Orleans, but without this outside assistance, they'll have to scale back their volunteer hours, if not stop entirely. And some of my fellows want them to produce a budget and a sustainability plan--that we'd be *happy* to help with--before they can get the money.
If the organization in question didn't have a five-year track record of self-sustainability, and if they weren't in a freaking disaster area, I'd understand that. But instead, we've got a golden opportunity to give disaster aid, red-tape-free, and we're talking about making their lives more difficult than they already are. I'm willing to compromise, but I'm unwilling to sit there and listen to paternalist condescension. Hopefully when our two brave vols--who jumped on a train to go down there to help with no guarantee of compensation--come back, their testimony will win people over, but still...our sister org down there didn't ask for advice, or consulting, just money... money which we have lying around, gathering dust.
Granted, I do have an emotional investment in the debate. See, I'd love to be able to just jump up and head down there. I'd feel so much more immediately useful than I do here. Not that I'm not doing/trying to do good work right here at home, but, it makes my sking crawl that someone, anyone, would put conditions on giving something they don't need to keep. Especially something like money between organizations that ought to be thought of as friends. We shouldn't have that money just lying around; it should be turned over into more and better programs. But as long as it's there, why the fuck *can't* we just give it away to people doing essential work in a fucking disaster area? How can we justify *not* throwing them all they ask for, and then some?!?
*deep breath*
Sigh. I'm spending the night in, sober. I really need a low stress evening.
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drkludge's journal
pensive![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
exhausted
fuming, a common mood lately