DAY 29
I’m still thinking about that shit from yesterday. I’m doing what I call ruminating, just thinking so hard about past shit since thinking about the shit in front of my face is too overwhelming.
Working at the club is a shitshow when I feel this way. Everyone I talk to looks haunted to me, and there’s this terrible clarity to my sadness: I can see that we are walking wounded. I miss the people I used to reach out to when I was feeling fucked up. There was such a crew for me at home. Then I remember it wasn’t so perfect even though I loved it perfectly.
The ways people just do what they want regardless of negative outcomes is interpersonal too. We can’t think we act so fucking different from the cultures around us, or at least I can’t think that way, looking around, looking over my life. People steal crap from other people, even though it harms the people who get things taken from them. People act fucked up to other people, to folks they are strangers to and to folks they love, cuz they’re trying to get something they maybe don’t know how to ask for or get otherwise. People do shit that’s racist, that’s body-phobic, that’s just mean. They should know better – they DO know better — and they, I mean, WE, do it anyway.
I’m not immune to this way of being. If someone I knew was hurt or changed forever by something they saw or did or that I saw or did, I might give a shit, and I might not. It probably depends if it helped me get something I want or not to care. I might just hear them tell me and move on. That’s life. If you get too upset about it, it just hurts you more.
I one had this job where I learned that ultimately people are just trying to get their needs met but do it in shitty and fucked up ways, which are about them, and unfortunately which often disregard folks or the environment around them. That’s why this world is so fucked and just might remain fucked. I have no idea if there are or will be enough non fucked actions to counteract all the harm. Isn’t that a letdown? Maybe I shouldn’t even try to do anything besides invest in Rescue Remedy stock.
It was good to talk to folks and hang out by the fire in the back yard and think about starting something. But, maybe the girl gang I want to be part of and joining forces with the Rhizome crew is just a diversion. Maybe it’s junky self-soothing liberalism? I’m not actually convinced it’s even worth it. Even though I can’t stop thinking about ending the Oil War and slowing down the progress of the Faithbased orgs that are all that seem to be prospering anymore, if we can’t even take care of each other what the fuck chances are there of changing the world?
I’m ready for something meaningful, but I think I need to do it with folks who see things at least a little but the way I do. Others who have made it through something awful to be here in this moment. I guess with the way things are, that shouldn’t be hard to find.
DAY 30
Four weeks is enough time to get really fucking bored. Bored enough to attempt another city break in. This time, it was a direct route to the hardware store, in search of items to bolster the homefront. What – even tank girl decorated.
I went off in search of the Great American Fake – Astroturf. That shit is so hard to find, I am certain there will not be any around, but its green dyed fakeness is like a god to me, plastic holiness. Whatever hadn’t been scavenged for money is hard to imagine, but someone had to forget about the showrooms and fake fancy floors of model homes, reconstruction stores and childrens’ waterplay arenas. Some warehouse somewhere would provide. The Big A – Astroturf. Covering my concrete with it seems like a good idea as long as no one can see it and try to break in. Why must I love something so weirdly valuable? Crawling upon it drunk will rule. Sunbathing on it – plastic porn. Fucking on it will smell warm and fake and leave good red marks on my knees. I’ll have to wear kneepads? I wonder if a bikini made of it had “been done” and made a note to research that at the library next time I swing by.
Is plastic my best husband? My last? Maybe we’re common-law and therefore I owe it inheritance rights on my life insurance, it owes me healthcare and a weekly bang that is a little shitty but overall comforts.
I spot the color in the distance. Kelly green is the new black. Are you good at kissing in color?
DAY 31
I’m not sure that I know anything that will help me. I think of pregnant women who are so sick right now and I think of how weak I am in comparison. Should I be “doing better” or is that some messed up joke made up of protestant work ethics and a dead society’s rules of engagement? Moms get to be crazy, they earn it. Though getting to enact it and act out now is so dangerous. Is the way I see the world peculiar? I can’t tell anymore, everyone all around is basically as fucked as I am and we collectively act out bizzare self soothing rituals that no one talks about: lights on, light off, talking about how the electricity will be steady again soon, trying out new tech tools.
I think I’m graying, or maybe my greys are reversing. I guess I don’t know the difference. There’s an unfamiliar tingling and a feeling of refreshment. Nothing is as it was and I resent that.
Walking down the street I’m kissing tiny pieces of plastic toys again today. It’s the little fetishes I keep in my pocket which distract me to the point I was today – and it was almost a giant fucking disaster. You’re not supposed to look happy though that’s not criminal, but walking out of a checkpoint and trying to return without your cards is. I’m so lucky I look like I do when I work. Normal Drag on top of a revolutionary brain that still somehow works. After I talked my way out of the DMZ, I put the plastic bit all the way back in my molars and chewed until it felt like a bit of my tooth was dislodging.
Many corners of the world smell like piss. It’s sweet like the promise of sickness after a binge.
DAY 32
“All the money I’ve already spent is gone for good. That’s a fact. There’s no recouping the cashed checks, there’s just the future to try to make it right.”
He looked at me cockeyed, like my little overrehearsed schpiel was going nowhere with him. I tried to imagine giving him a blowjob would be like, perhaps that would have an effect.
DAY 33
I’m not excited to be working but I am into having a purpose. I’m ready to emerge from my hideout and become a little more respectable, an economic force. If I can amass a stack, maybe I can get out of here, somewhere calm and settled instead of hectic and upsetting.
The current state of affairs:
- Its all wood and steel, iron and corn oil polymers. Yeah biodiesel helps but its not enough and its not the same.
- There are a few cities left in the East but theyre busted and struggling and not equipped for the influx of fallout survivors. Baltimore was a secret mecca that is so overpopulated now, the wide yards house tents. Philly survived partially, Boston is so underwater its not even a joke.
- Its still class war. We are tragically not all in this together. Some people have most everything and the rest of us…those who are in between, wanting to avoid the struggle of achievement that’ll never happen, who wants to be indoors and have to be fed somehow – we are the black market, we are the new paper underground.
- Since so many banks crashed, the fictional/digital money economy is suspect and suddenly cash is looking better and better. People keep it, people use it. If you hoarded it before the war, you are really glad. If you trusted someones’ banking system, you’re really sorry.
DAY 34
Out at the Rhizome café tonight, I cruised the styles of the folks around me. Fashion is symbiotic with everything else in life. Pants instead of skirts, the development of the suit, new fabrics: we don’t dress in a vacuum.
Is this supposed to be the beginning of a style? Its become nothing but a joke, style made into a series of $3.99 repercussions of remake culture. Sure, everybody has a starting point but don’t you think there’s a disaster closer than they expected? I got tired and burned from “normal style rules” and then I got over being mad about that and THEN I got some cute earrings that made me happy to look at and wear.
Air quality: tolerable to mediocre. But at least I’m strong and I can breathe. I always thought I should breed based solely on my superior DNA. Tough shit, girl – guess that isn’t going to happen, now. Unless I do some serious soul swapping or switch up my hustle a LOT. Some of us aren’t made to succeed in civilization.
[when girls smelled like shampoo I used to be envious because I never used to smell so nice. Sigh, what you remember is meaningless, and often not even true. I remember hearing gay man say “I haven’t touched a vagina since I came out of one!” and I thought he said “vagina,” a word traditionally not easy to throw into a conversation – in a very sweet way.]
At the End it was harder to get along then now. We were all freaked out, terrified, confused. I read once that the hardest part of change is when you don’t know what will happen; the decision make process is the most stressful because you cant prepare for an outcome that does not yet exist. Weighing options, making shit work.
DAY 35
The more I hang at Rhizome the more I like it. I see how things are structured and I respect it which I didn’t necessarily expect would happen. I mean, who knows what kind of spaces you’ll end up in when you hang hard with anarchists and punks, radicals and activists. I don’t mean danger or loud music as a problem, I mean assholes. Well meaning assholes who take alot of space and are a bit loud and doofy and rude and overbearing. You know.
But at Rspace they have a feminist work model I’m really down with. Never take a tool out of someone’s hand. Anyone can learn how to use a tool. Everyone will do dishes. I mean, I try to get out of the last one so its not so gendered who’s skipping out. Im a lady creature through and through and I just hate fucking up my nails with scrubbing. I’ll do it but damn. Is that sexworker-phobic? Just kidding.
They have community agreements that are meant to mitigate trouble, to make things smoother, to have a plan for when assholes become too publicly assholish or make life hard for someone in a way that interferes with their participation. You know what I mean, sometimes dudes try to stick it in or stick their opinion in and either way its not wanted. We’ve all been there. Right? I like the Agreements. Its not that rules are some kind of problem, it’s who makes the rules and who enforces them. Duh. I don’t know if there’s a council or an accountability circle or what. I know there are some people bottom lining and as an organizer I also respect that. Leadership is a gift, people. I think there are meetings, I mean obviously there are meetings…
Should I GO to the meetings? Time for a list:
PROS
- – making friends
- – building closer ties to this spot that’s rad
- – contributing instead of middle-class oogling
- – somewhere to be opinionated
CONS
- – in my fragile state, can I commit to meetings?
- – Is it gonna be wack if I have to leave the space when someone mentions Brooklyn and I start to feel shaky and sick? Can I still participate?
- – Will there be manarchists, and if so what kind?
Leaving my queer bubble for the wide world is something I crave and also worry about. Me and my friends, and their friends, we tried to build something different. Something where we can pick our names and our genders and our paths and our passions without attachment to what we had been assigned. Something that might hold us a little more comfortably, or safely, with less worry about getting fucked with or told we didn’t exist. I’m used to the wide world looking down upon me; is it so much to ask for alternative communities not to? Of course not…and that’s why I’ll probably go to the fucking meeting…