from these iron habitations

i belize in you

2011-02-01T09:39:00.000-08:00

After an Autumn of relative reclusion in Bowling Green, poring meticulously over graduate school applications, and then in November, writing my first novel as part of National Novel Writing Month, I got to escape the desolation of bedrooms and winter with an unplanned, somewhat impulsive trip to Belize. Kristen had decided her ongoing undergraduate thesis, cumbersome in its subject matter and geography, needed the perspective of an ocean habitat. Belize having the second largest barrier reef in the world, second only to Australia’s, seemed appropriate and affordably close. A ticket voucher for volunteering to take a latter flight when flying to Guatemala last year paid for my flight, and Kristen received a surprising amount of funding from her University. Our friend Colleen decided she could work on her thesis as well, it being Women in Agriculture. And so we went.

A week in Maryland for Christmas, old friends in town, the never changing boredom of home, and I flew to Cancun Airport to meet my two traveling companions. The first thing I observed was the hilarious contrast between me and everyone else on the plane. Many were headed for a week in Cancun in January—resorts, beaches, rum in coconuts, sunglasses, tans—while I on the other hand, with my always trusty sidekick Empty Pockets, sought jungles, farms, language barriers, chicken buses, border crossings, and wild animals.

I landed, headed for customs, and found that Colleen and Kristen had arrived but their luggage had not. No fear, they were told, simply supply us with the address of your hotel and your luggage will be delivered posthaste. With no hotel, not even a surety of which city we’d be sleeping in that night, we ended up walking from one end of the airport to the other, over and over again, warming our Spanish tongues, and waiting for the bags. That night we made it to Playa del Carmen, a miniature Cancun, to wade in the Caribbean and have an authentic Mexican meal.

In the morning we woke early and swam, met a beach bum from Vancouver, and jumped on the cheapest bus for Chetumal. The ride was longer than we had anticipated, and we had to sit on the floor for the majority of it. Starved, we bought jicama and oranges from a girl who jumped on the bus at a brief stop, and breaking our second rule of Safe International Travel As According to American Doctors (the first being going barefoot on the beach) by eating fresh cut fruit from a roadside vendor.

We found a room across from the ADO bus station in Chetumal with no running water but the right price at 150 pesos. Venturing towards town we bought veggies and tortillas and let the sun go down on us and the bugs invade.

Covered in itchy red dots we circled the station and surrounding streets trying to figure out how the hell to get across the border to Belize (taxi to the border, what bus, ferry?), Kristen stepped in dog poop, and we found a Hispanic couple from Dallas who asked at the ticket counter and informed us to get a taxi to the OTHER bus station. There we got another bus that was going all the way to Belize City.

At the border they made us toss our avocados (which we would unfortunately find to be sparse in Belizean markets) and shove the remainder of our bananas down our throats.

As we headed south the crowd jumping on and off the bus started to change. It went from being predominantly indigenous-looking, Spanish speaking, to the English-speaking African population we expected to encounter. It seemed that in Belize City a very definite line divided the two demographics, to the north being more Mayan and the south being more Garifuna.
Our first official stop was in Sandhill, Belize, where there was a woman who was to introduce us to a woman farmer that we’d spend a few days with as part of Colleen’s project. All we knew was her name and that her house was yellow with a ‘Poodles for Sale’ sign. We jumped off the bus along the Northern Highway, in the first place that someone else requested a stop, and looked to our left: a yellow house and poodles barking. No one was home so we stashed our stuff behind the car in the driveway and wandered out.

A rasta-ish man alongside the road named Vince immediately invited us to taste his homemade Tamarind, Cashew, Sorrel, and Blackberry wines. We tried every one, chatted about his business and the business of Belize, and then went across the street for a very satisfying plate of rice and beans. We hopped the bus for a buck the other way, drank our first Belikin beer as we walked back, and waited to our host.

First to come was her husband and son who invited us in, and put on the TV. The house was much nicer than I’d imagined, and much nicer than the rest of Sandhill—modest in comparison to the average American suburb, but riddled with minor amenities (including hot water, refrigerators, and washing machines) that we’d seldom encounter the rest of our time in Belize. And then Elyda came home—a powerful woman, involved in the politics of her country, determined—made us some more rice and beans, offered eggnog and black cake, and talked with us into the evening.

In the morning she and her boss picked us up—she worked for an organization that offered small business loans to socially and environmentally progressive endeavors, including the farmer we’d soon meet—and drove us 30 minutes off the highway, over beat up dirt and gravel roads, and into the bush. The farm was sixteen acres of vegetables, two green houses, a couple cows, bottle caps and rusty bikes, and two family homes of concrete and corrugated tin. The woman, Julia, was the oldest of six immigrant El Salvadorian sisters, who’d been farming the land they were on a number of years now. Due to a grant from BEST (Elyda’s organization) and her successful expansion, she’d recently been awarded by the Ministry of Agriculture Belize’s Woman Farmer of the Year 2010.

We toured, somewhat awkwardly, her land and her home, met her many family members, drank coconut water opened via machete, harvested cabbage and lettuce, and had a lunch of rice and beans (denying the chicken they ate). Some of the family members spoke a limited amount of English Creole, Julia spoke only Spanish. We communicated in a mixture of the two languages. Afterwards the whole group of us piled in Julia’s husband Chepe’s pickup and drove deeper into the jungle to one of the their favorite fishing spots to catch our dinner. The men carried rifles:

“For what?” I asked.

“Animals,” said Robert, the surprisingly educated brother-in-law.

“What kind?”

“Jaguars, or hogs. The hogs are wild and run fifty or so at a time.”

A few minutes walk through the jungle and the lake, a pond really, opened up. A crocodile surfaced and surveyed the humans wading into its waters. I was booted up and given fishing line, a hook, and a sliver of a tiny fish flesh as bait. Without rods to cast out, we tossed our hooks a limited number of feet in front of us and waited. For whatever reason, the women were the better fishers, catching around twenty tiny tilapia between them while I and the other men, fishing in the very same waters, caught none. A wire in the gills and out the mouth strung each fish together.

The fish were fried and the generator kicked on the electric lights and the TV. We ate homemade tortillas, rice, beans, and fried fish while watching with fervent attention Bring It On: Fight to the Finish. A strange cultural experience. I spent much of the movie in thought, watching the invasive geckos from Asia crawl around the wallpaper. We retired to set up our tent as the stars came out, brilliant and innumerable without the haze of a nearby city or nearby homes.
The night was colder than we’d expected, and with only my sleeping bag between the three of us, we shivered in wakefulness until Colleen left with Julia and her husband Chepe in the early hours of the morning to drive an hour for market in Belize City.

I woke before Kristen, had instant coffee with Julia’s son Miguel, a quiet and kind eighteen-year-old, and took slow walks around the farm watching the birds. While on the farm we saw parrots, hawks, egrets, a toucan, Kentucky’s own Cardinal wintering in Belize, and countless other colorful things they knew only the local names for. When Colleen returned and we had lunch, a group of us took a walk into the jungle, only a short way to the world famous Mayan ruins Altun-Ha. A trail leading literally from their driveway, ten minutes to a pond and a larger semi-paved ancient Mayan path, took us through the backdoor to this Belizean tourist destination. The entry fee was 20 USD, but going in with locals the Ministry of Archaeology guys let us in with friendly waves, and we climbed the tallest of the pyramids. Without enough time to fully appreciate the history and majesty of what we were standing on, we were bombarded by the first group of 15 tour buses coming in from the cruise ships.

On the way back we stopped at the pond for a little more fishing. We tossed large snail shells in the water to try and incite a large crocodile into coming a bit closer, but no luck.

Chepe picked up some beers from town and gave humbly throughout the night. He spoke of his time in the States, working at a Utah meat packing plant in the 80s, and how he hated his time there. Making it clear that we admired Belize, its people and its land, he told us how cheap land was (500 USD/acre) and offered to help me find some nearby land to farm. A few beers in, we had the best damn garnachos of my life (shredded cabbage!), and I was half tempted to find land and stay and half desperate to get out of the country immediately. I don’t know if I ever recovered from that feeling.

We stayed the next night at Elyda’s to get cleaned up, decided where we might want to go that next day, woke up still not completely sure, and caught a bus south for Hopkins village. Routing through Belize City, we thought we had a couple hours to kill before our bus so we walked around looking for lunch. Based on the looks, offers to come up to rooms and see ‘snakes’, and a torched car halfway blocking traffic that was being used as a trash can, we decided to get out as quick as possible. We took the next bus for Dangriga.

In Dangriga, a non-touristy coastal town, mostly Garifuna, we found a place, ate some shitty Chinese food, and watched the ocean go dark drinking a bottle of Vince’s wine.

The Hopkins bus didn’t come until 5pm the next day, so we took a cab the ten bumpy miles, and found a Drum Center that rented little shed-like holes in the walls with beds. The Hopkins beachside was cleaner, more picturesque, and the town was much smaller and manageable. We got heckled pretty immediately by a few of the locals while going around seeking out people to point Kristen in the right directions for her project.

Hopkins didn’t have much of anything except dilapidated buildings and businesses with irregular schedules. We rented some bikes and biked in the hot hot heat to the Sittee River, through the nearby savannah, and past all the mansions being built by exploitative Americans who found out Florida was booked. The grocery stores had little but processed junk food, and the restaurants were never open, so it was getting hard to eat. Kristen’s story was going nowhere, so we impulsively and frustratingly decided to catch another bus, further south, all the way to Punta Gorda.

Punta Gorda was the end of the road. If you wanted to go further south you had to catch a ferry to Guatemala. We heard tale that the road to Punta Gorda was less than ten years old. So ten years ago, if making the same trip that took us three hours, you’d have had to take the dirt road for nearly a day. And that was if the waters were low and you could cross the rivers. Just about everything in Belize, save the Mayan Ruins, seemed to be less than ten years old. Everything is changing quick. In the past year Chinese immigrants have bought up property and started every grocery store that exists—and there were a lot of identical Chinese groceries selling the same processed shit as the one two doors down.

Right off the bus we met a Rastafarian named King. King lived in a concrete house his grandfather built, without electricity or modern amenities, and covered in painted poetry and Rasta wisdom. He made jewelry out of found objects and lived on fruit, coconuts, and when he has money, rice and fish. He was tall, dark, deathly skinny, and had dreads down to his butt. He had two puppies, Dready and Irie, that followed on his barefoot strolls through town. King gave us a tour that ended at his self-proclaimed Coconut Park. We sat in a rotted out canoe, he smoked his herb, and we watched the sea. Then, by request, he climbed barefoot a thirty-foot coconut tree. He made it look simple, high above the half concrete rubble beachside, pricking off enough coconuts for everyone, plus one to leave for the earth. He acquired a machete from a nearby friend, and we drank the water, and ate the meat.

He came into the world with nothing, and he leaves with nothing.

We stayed in Punta Gorda almost a whole week. One day Colleen and I rented kayaks, put in right into the sea, and went up a nearby creek and into the mangrove forest. The sounds of the town went quiet, a sulfurous smell and wet cold surrounded us, the water was like a mirror. Before the trip, perusing the magazine aisle of Safeway, waiting for my malaria prescription to be filled, I saw a picture of a man kayaking in the mangroves of the Everglades and told myself I would do that. In a little over a week, without any expectation of such, I was living the picture I’d seen.

Heading out back towards sea, the tide was coming in and the swell was rough. The sun was starting to go down, and in the color of dusk I could see the not-so-far-off mountains of Honduras and Guatemala, just across the Gulf. Little to my understanding, the paddling got tougher, Colleen got way ahead of me, and I was starting to lose my balance. They were open air kayaks, so we were just sitting on top, without skirts or a hole in the middle. A plug had apparently popped on my back end and I was taking in water. Moments after I discovered this I lost my balance and flipped over. Tugging the kayak along I swam to a dock, lifted myself up, and waited for Colleen to go ashore and come back for me.

While in Punta Gorda Kristen found the office of SEA Belize, an ocean conservation group, and arranged going on a diving trip with them out to the cayes. Colleen and I found a man named Gordon who attested to being an organic farmer, who took us out of town to his land on the Garinagu people’s 1,000 acre estate. His project was a little shoddy as he was mostly abusing the funding he was apparently getting from an American organization Sustainable Harvest, but he was kind and giving nonetheless. Colleen and I rented bikes from a guy named Justin, a Belizean version of a fixie punk bike hipster, and we biked with Gordon out to his cousin’s farm. Together we hiked one of the two hills omnipresent from the town of Punta Gorda. We saw to the sea, and far into the jungle, a view from the sky.

We stayed our last night at a different hostel, because the woman running the original place told us we stank. The cockroaches and dogs never stopped barking the whole night through, but in the morning, standing outside of the room with Kristen, a little parrot waddled up to us. I fed him pineapple and sesame seed scraps from our food supply and he climbed onto my shoulder and didn’t want to get down. He was the pet of the family running the hotel, who flew into the daughters classroom one day, and just came home with her. Once I did pry him from me in order to pack my bag, we never saw him again.

Placencia is a peninsular town, cleaner and more touristy than the others, with a picture-perfect beachfront. Kristen was headed out in the morning with the research boat, and Colleen and I decided to kill time in town and wait for her to come back from the islands. I was getting antsy. I’d been mere miles from the cayes, the world’s second largest barrier reef, and that wondrous teal water of the Caribbean I’d only seen in pictures for almost two weeks now. But here we were, waiting, waiting, running out of money. We had made plans for Caye Caulker, a cheap ferry trip from Belize City, but it was getting hard to wait.

After a day on the beach, and a night drinking on the beach, Colleen and I decided to rent more kayaks. We got a double kayak cheap from a hotel and put in at the edge of town. The sea was calm, and we paddled easily to a near-shore caye. In the shallow water we’d float still and watch the sporadic coral and fish. In the distance were four or five islands, perhaps only a handful of miles from shore. We picked the one that looked closest, and made the decision to go for it. It was silence, all but the small waves hitting out boat, and the sun and clear sky on the sea made everything one bright shade of blue. We were really out on the open ocean on a little tiny piece of plastic that tipped over if we leaned over just the slightest bit. After 20 minutes the island didn’t get any closer, so we gave up and pulled onto the near-shore island so I could take a pee.

From there we started heading for the other side of the peninsula and its lagoon with the subtle hope that we’d come upon some manatees. But on our way, far off into the distance, I saw the brief emergence of a dorsal fin. It took Colleen a moment to catch onto to where I was pointing, but when she did, we paddled in absolute unison for the animals. It took us only a few minutes, out on silent water again, and we were 30-40 feet from a pair of small dolphins who were apparently fishing. I decided we shouldn’t get any closer—despite all the Dolphin Parks we’d passed on the Yucatan peninsula and all the Sea Worlds we got as children, these were still wild animals, and I wanted to subdue my flaming curiosity and be at least a little courteous to the creatures. They didn’t swim away at our approach, but they didn’t come closer either. We paddled lightly with them, and we both talked in soothing, hopeful voices. I don’t know what I expected, Flipper or a trick, or some cerebral dialogue. But just the soft noise of their spouting and the feeling of complete vulnerability, far at sea in a manpowered vehicle, was enough to satisfy. After about fifteen minutes they swam away and we went closer towards shore. We found a tiny island with white sand, sand bags to keep it from being washed away, a bunch of coconut starts, and a single bench. We went ashore, swam, and gawked at starfish before returning the boat.

Kristen returned the next day and we left for Caye Caulker. We were running late in the day, and didn’t know whether we’d get to Belize City in time for the last ferry at 5:30. Which would mean sleeping in the place we were warned by so many to stay the hell away from. We caught the water taxi to Mango Creek by less than a minute, caught the bus north by just a few minutes, and heading out of a stop in Dangriga, we got in a bus wreck. Nothing terrible, just two buses brushing against one another. I was sure we wouldn’t make it now, panicked and frustrated, American, I resigned myself in anger. But the Belizeans filed off the bus and onto another, without complaints. The bus we’d collided with was a school bus, and after the crash the kids just got off and started walking home. When we were moved to yet another bus, everyone just filed off and on, without pause or piss. It brought a little relief, and caused me to question my own impatience on the matter, and on many matters.

We made it to the ferry station with ten minutes to spare. Now we were tourists, with all the other Americans, on vacation from Iowa or Michigan or California, we were going to a tiny little island in the middle of the Caribbean with all the beach bars and restaurants and ATMs and internet cafes and gift shops a tourist could dream of. A little sickened, and questioning our decision, we watched the sun go down over the mainland as we arrived in dark.

We had made plans to camp on the grounds of a cat sanctuary, run by a woman I found on couchsurfing. The town small enough, we found it easily, and were shown the place. 72 cats, four dogs, and a duck named Melody. The cats were divided up into a labyrinth of cages, all strays from the island, and were cared for in hopes they’d one day find a home. Though there was of course little hope, considering Belizeans hardly consider cats much more than pests. We got some cheap Mexican food and made plans for a snorkeling trip the next day with all the volunteers from the cat sanctuary, and the fisherman brother of the owner.

The trip was going to be 50 USD each, 100 BZ, and that consisted of just about everything we had on hand. So we were skeptical, but damnit, we wanted to see the reef. So, the whole of us, about ten in total, set out at 10 AM for a couple different stops. The first was a nameless (to my knowledge) place on the barrier reef. We got off and were allowed to snorkel as far from the boat as we felt comfortable, to get used to our masks and the water. The teal water, the white sand bottom, and coral as far as I could see. My first mask was a bit broken, so after swallowing a few mouthfuls of salt water, I traded it for another that our driver, the fisherman brother, had on hand. We spent a good while wandering around the spot, no major fauna sightings to speak of, and got back in the boat headed for Shark and Ray Alley.

Once the boat started moving I noticed that the salt water I swallowed wasn’t sitting well, and it was getting hard for me to stomach. It was a quick ride though, and we anchored the boat. The fisherman, Wilbur, starting tossing sardines into the water and within moments we were crowded by large schoolmasters that looked like yellow-fin tunas to me and a couple nurse sharks. The sharks were about four to seven feet, brown, and harmless looking. I never thought the first time I’d see a shark in the wild that my first instinct was to reach out and try and touch it, but well, it was and I did.

The nausea was increasing but everyone was getting in the water so I did too. The sharks had kind of scattered when the humans got in, but a bunch of sting rays, massive massive creatures, were swimming towards us. Wilbur would hold out his hand, like he had some bait, the stingray would swim towards him, and he would open his arms and fully embrace the animal. The stingrays seemed to enjoy it too, one after the other, swimming up to him and accepting the hug from this large and playful man. Before getting out of the water I saw, while underwater, the returning of a large shark—something hard to get out of my mind. Back on the boat, it took about a minute before I spewed my guts back into the water. The fish enjoyed it though, gobbling up the undigested bits of tomato and tortilla from that morning’s breakfast.

We had lunch in San Pedro on Ambergris Caye, the even larger and more touristy of the cayes. And then, back in the boat, we headed for Hol Chan Marine Reserve. Once in the water we got a good close look at a Green sea turtle, munching on some sea grass, and another not too far off. Here, at the edge of the reef, waves from the open sea were crashing against us and the teal water. I could feel two currents, the warm current from the shallow reef, and the cold and dark one from the deep plunge to our side. Wilbur led us through a narrow channel, thick fish nearly the size of me swam casually around us. I’d dive to try and caress their scales, but at the last moment, in soft cunning, they’d move just out of reach. This was the most surreal of the snorkeling experiences—like scenes from Planet Earth, it looked like something so fantastical, questionably real. To dive down into this other world, void of the loud clatter above, born into spectacular color, refracting light and fluid movement, is beyond explanation.

Our last night in Caye Caulker we experienced a tropical storm. Within moments of the first drops of rain, the island was flooded. We were out at a cheap Mexican place eating a dinner of rice and beans with the last of our Belizean currency we had scraped together. I took my shoes off and ran with joy through the ankle-deep streets, back home to discover with Colleen our things drenched and our tent in a foot of water. We spent much of the night shivering on the porch into the room of the other volunteers, watching our things dry in the post-monsoon wind.
The next day was a ferry back to Chetumal, immigration, a cab, an air-conditioned bus to Playa del Carmen, and a night in a hostel. Our last meal, from a Wal-Mart sized mega grocery, was freshly prepared mole, tortillas, guacamole, and pico de gallo. The next day, another bus, and two planes, and we were back in Louisville sticking our clothes in the washing machine.

And now here I am again, in Bowling Green, again with limited employment, wondering at the possibilities of the near future. Waiting on word from grad schools, maybe editing my novel, and wasting time on the internet, I’m getting impatient.

dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains

2010-09-01T16:11:00.000-07:00

Bowling Green, KY.

At program’s end in California, after a two night/three day solo in the Cache Creek wilderness of the coastal range, Kristen and I caught a ride into Sacramento with one of the student’s dad. We checked out his bees, his bear rug, his honey and his driving skills as he got us to the airport a few minutes before boarding for our flight to Louisville, KY.

Disoriented in the Highlands after a few months in the wilds. A day later I’m driving East with my Dad and all the stuff I’d left stranded in Kentucky. We stop in a town near Huntington, WV, on some land most of my dad’s people are from. The house his Dad grew up in. The land they hunted, raised livestock, farmed, and a graveyard with all the Peytons/Paytons I’d never heard of. Visited my dad’s cousin, Patsy, a self-proclaimed Tea Partier and novelist, friendly and suspicious of my time in suspicious Mexico, she gave me a signed copy of her self-published novel of frontier Wyoming. Though we may have come to different conclusions regarding race and religion, she was happy to see that there was a poet and farmer wannabe in the family.

A summer in DC. Worked sound on a film about DCPS kids going to China for two weeks, then babysat a little bit as my sole source of income. Gathered downed oak branches from a neighborhood church and inoculated them with shitaiki mushroom spore. (Check out this site: fungiperfecti.com. Super easy way to produce a lot of food.) Planted a fig tree, some unproductive vegetables, and did a whole bunch of cooking with my sister.

Thrice to Delaware beaches. Dolphins at two of the three visits. Second time, waiting up at sunrise for Jeff after leaving DC work at ten o’clock, we sit on porch overlooking Atlantic, we see pod of dolphins swimming in breaking daylight. We pray the oil does not come this far. Fishing trip in North Carolina with James and Smoot. Fire on beach, vegetables and flounder on the coals. Mosquitoes, but wildness inside, and the ocean.

August, 11, 2010 I meet Ellie Joon Wheatley daughter of Jeff and Mary, two wonderful and close friends, Jeff being my longtime and dear companion in many a crime, near-crime, or gift to the gods of travel and nature and poetry and love. She is fantastic little flesh of humanity; I see a love and care and tenderness in him I expected but never understood until then. They had planned a homebirth, in the Takoma Park MaitriHouse I’d lived in last year, but Ellie eager for the sun, came before the midwife could come over. Jeff had the pleasure of being able to deliver his daughter himself. Blood on his t-shirt, sheets in the wash, beautiful girl alive and healthy in wonderful home.

Kristen visiting with my family in DC, me unsure what was next for me in the job world, impulsively took off with her back to Louisville. With only space for two small bags I have a few t-shirts and shorts that's about it. (Need to wash some underwear in the sink now.) Completely dejected after a summer of applying and applying for jobs in Bowling Green, KY, I started relentlessly applying everywhere and anywhere. Planting trees in New York, administrative assistant in Portland, camp in Maine, kitchen manager in West Virginia, so on so on. Only to hear a position had opened up for me in a farm in Northern Virginia, I was now stuck back in Kentucky, again.

Then on to Bowling Green, where I’ve been for a little over a week. Job possibilities seem likely, café/bar and health foods store, and found a futon in a hallway to rent in a big beautiful historic home on Kentucky St. Started painting to great encouragement. Lynched animals, coyote sunset, buffalo agriculture'd. Here to read, apply to grad school.

But I have a hunger (pun) for food. I want to be in the garden, picking fruit from trees, raising chickens, growing mushrooms, building barns and hoop houses, sowing, seeding, on on on on. Urban farming is a new growing interest and field here. Thinking about future, starting urban garden/restaurant? Why grad school, self-aggrandizing justification for my continuation as writer? Just write and who cares.

New Arcade Fire is apocalyptic and magnificent. They sing about all the things I can’t stop thinking about. As always, the grimness of affairs is a hard cloud to see through.

Other day, floating down Green River outside Bowling Green, watching trees frame sky as I pass, feeling current control me, I know I can be happy anywhere. In this communion.

Next: year of working life, little money to retard debt, thinking about Belize this winter. Don’t know. I don’t know.

everybody come back some time

2010-04-27T12:48:00.000-07:00

So much has passed these past few months.

I work for a traveling semester program for high school students based in a mixed conifer forest in the watershed of the middle fork of the Yuba river in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California. People around here call it the Ridge. Home of beat poet and anthropologist Gary Snyder (Japhy Rider in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums), industrial size marijuana growers, back-to-the-land homesteaders, and ropes course outdoor education programs like the place I’m at.

We’re at the end of a dirt road, buried in pine and cedar. Animals still live out here – I might see coyote or deer through the window of the home-milled lumber lodge we cook our meals in, listen to owl at dusk and countless songbirds at dawn through my redwood window frame, or hear tell of mountain lion, black bear, and bald eagle prowling the edges of my life. I poop in a hole and lie in the dirt. I eat whatever wild plants we can forage.

I get scared in public now. After a few months of this, I stood incompetent at the photo-processing department of a Rite-Aid – spooked by traffic and parking lots, geometry and petroleum-based foods, I was slow speak and deaf ear to the teenager in front of me. America gives me culture shock.

I wrote of Guatemala, and that I was going to Baja California in Mexico. Having written of Mexico to many friends already, I have developed a prescribed language for describing my experiences. And I have little mind to rehash details; but, in short, 12 of us staff and students alike in a van and trailer seeking wilderness and teachers, we slept under desert stars nightly, lived in abandoned beach towns and government-preserved ecosystems. We met and interviewed fishermen, whale and turtle and bird and fish naturalists and experts, pet gray whales and snorkeled with sea lions, had emotional breakdowns and buildups, inspected ancient Indian cave paintings, spoke incessantly of revolution and biological catastrophe, and studied conservation and pondered our education and our culture.

My thoughts on many things developed and unfolded anew. Life goals reorienting, and perspectives shifting, I have spent much time in thought.
Back now in the spring rain of this forest, from a few days on Chaffing Family Orchards, a 2000-acre olive, stone fruit, and open pasture farmland. We learned of their permaculture systems, using goats and chickens to tend and fertilize their olive orchards, and cows to naturally maintain and promote grasslands. It was my first experience on meat farm; after the years of stories of horror industrial agriculture, this has enlightened my to the alternative.

In the orchards we picked red clover and chamomile for tea, sundried mission olives from the ground, grapefruit and oranges from the trees, wild miner’s lettuce and sorrel, and experimented with bitter almond and fig trees. We hiked Table Mountain through flat fields of wildflowers and into a canyon. I moved through water and rock towards the open mouth of a monstrous waterfall to sit open skin to the cliffs and canopies below, and studied the poppies and hyacinth climbing the volcanic faces and rattlesnakes that were in frequent sight.

Yesterday, while gutting a farmhouse for a coming workshop as a thank you to our host, a few rattlesnakes were discovered. One of our students killed one with a shovel. In lieu of our continued pursuance of connection with our land, he decided to not let the animal go to waste. Alone he skinned and gutted the snake, and we all watched the pea-sized heart beat long after separation from the body. While burying the unwanted guts, the boy ate the beating heart, and refused to wash the blood from his hands. The coiled white-meat frame was thanked for becoming part of our dinner later that night.

My diet has been healthier than ever. Much is local, all is organic, and I am almost entirely absent of processed foods. This has me questioning many of my long established values around my particular diet and wondering at my coming choices when I am away from the money that can provide such constant nutrition. I am thinking often of what it means to eat animal products, as opposed to my once morally “righteous” diet of industrial plants and 1,000-mile meals. For everything is eating or being eaten, whether what consumes you or you consume is giant or microscopic, plant or animal kingdom. Life is sacred, wild in the fields or acid in your gut.

I am also seeking to establish many skills that this current culture has not taught so many of its children. To grow and preserve food, protect and prepare my life and home. In what comes or does not, I have slowly realized I do not want to be a part of this kinking machine and plastic factory.

We must be what wilderness remains.

I am coming home East this summer. Maybe to work a farm in Virginia, or maybe to work for a nutrition program in DC, but mostly to reconnect with friends and family, and establish patterns for the time to come. For now, I believe my time of pilgrimage is coming to an end. I must seek my sanctuary.

don't drink the water, don't you breathe the air.

2010-01-25T21:55:00.000-08:00

Got a ride out of Louisville with a native Kentuckian heading out of Kentucky for the holidays and his 140 Lb Great Dane. Drove east through the calm after the blizzard on the mostly ploughed highways. Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia were rolling white hills and newly bared trees.

It was a free ride so we talked about what he wanted to talk about. His past days – he was late 20s – as a Porsche salesman. Working the system, wearing European cut suits, and talking hot he managed to make a small fortune off the commission from selling fast cars to old rich men in the DC suburbs. They sent him to Europe and let him drive new cars around the city, walking in and out of nice clubs.

He also told me the story of how he made 80 grand in a year as a Segway tour guide in DC. Job idea.

Maryland was stuck inside from snow and Christmas was cozy. My parents told me my cat Fuzzball had been out since the two-feet fell, somewhere in the Greenbelt Woods. We took her for dead, my childhood love. Then, eight days after the blizzard hit, the 13-year-old declawed indoor cat, crawls back haggard and dread-locked, and heads straight for the food bowls. The badass.

A week at home, then New York City for New Year’s Eve with the Bowling Green crew. Crowded in a Manhattan apartment, drunk, and in love with everyone around me. People were beautiful and why must I always move from things I’ll miss.

On the day after the first day of this new decade, Kristen and I woke with a morning snow, walked and waited in Penn Station for the first train to the Newark Airport. We sat with our packs and watched a guy in a Harvard Medical sweatshirt on coke or something else pick fights with the homeless.

Our flight to Guatemala City was overbooked so we volunteered to wait and got 500 dollar ticket vouchers and 50 bucks for airport food. We were kings with futures. Sort of. We had only 300 hundred dollars for the two of us for three weeks of travel in Guatemala. The dollar went far, but we were nervous.

After spending the night at an expensive hostel in Guatemala City that catered to Westerners, we caught a “chicken” bus for Lake Atitlan. Crowded, rickety, kids, women, men selling fruit snacks, miracle medicine, water in plastic bags and homemade tamales. In Panajachel, the town on Atitlan where the bus could go no closer to our final destination (to which we’d have to take a boat), we met an old Turkish man living in a shack who told us capitalism was falling apart and all the fish were dead. We agreed.

An evening boat ride across a polluted lake, disguised as a pristine blue crawling the foothills of several volcanoes, and we were in San Marcos La Laguna. In Takoma Park, MD, we’d been instructed by our housemate Daisy that to get to her house in San Marcos, one had to first take a chicken bus out of Guatemala City, then take a boat, then ask the kids hanging around the dock “Donde es Casa de Daisy?”

So these were the directions we operated on. So two kids, ten-ish, lead us into the town with the lie “Oh Daisy es mi amiga.” They instead led us to a hotel. So we pressed on. Enlisting the help of other children we eventually stumbled upon our friend in the town square. She set us up in her bed in her one room house/cabin/shack with a loft and a view of the volcano San Pedro.

San Marcos La Laguna is a haven for Western expats with a penchant for yoga and crystals, marijuana and saunas. Then, besides all the white people and their hotels, there’s a bunch of indigenous Mayan in native dress eating corn tortillas and eggs, living in one-room concrete houses with tin roofs. The streets are covered with fallen avocados and canopied by coffee and banana trees. Chickens and stray dogs roam freely. There’re only two roads and two paved footpaths. All the rest is like buildings stuck in the jungle. We did free yoga, free saunas, and ate lots of guacamole. We also jumped off a cliff into the beautiful lake with the algae problem. We met three Mayan sisters the last few days in San Marcos – we swam with them and bought some of the apparel they claimed to have “woven themselves.”

In our last two days in San Marcos, after Daisy has flown back to the States, we had to sleep in her bodega. In Guatemalan Spanish, bodega means spider and scorpion infested laundry shack with enough room to lay out a piece of sponge for a mattress and poop on old blender directions and toss it all into the bushes. It was invigorating.

Next was San Pedro La Laguna. This was the busier town with a full on market and chocolate covered pineapple. We ate the best cacao & orange juice chocolate of our lives, took incognito pictures at the market, and bought cheap presents. We met a Canadian who took us to his bar and showed us whale videos.

In the morning an El Salvadorian at our hotel sang beautiful songs and smoked weed. Waking up was slow and peaceful. Everyday we ate fresh pineapple, papaya, watermelon, avocado, banana, tomato and lime.

After two days we took a cab to San Juan La Laguna, just down the road, where we were to stay with a Mayan family and do a picture story – or some project. The space in between the towns was massive cleared areas to dry coffee and corn climbing the mountains. They sell most of their coffee to the Western world and eat little more than corn, fish, eggs, and a few prized vegetables or fruits. This was the mono-cropped third world.

In San Juan we lived with Daniel, his wife Elena, and their four children – three girls, 13, 10, and 7, and a boy about a year old. We slept on a box spring and we ate every meal with the family. Kristen and I, both being vegans, found we didn’t even have to mention the fact for a few meals. We ate the eggs. They were local, as in walked from chicken to market to home local, and they were fresh. But we couldn’t eat the tiny, sad looking fish from the dying lake. “La gente comen pescado aqui.” Oops.

Daniel, in his broken English and our broken Spanish, gave us a tour of the suffering San Juan. San Juan, a town of about 7,000, is drowning in plastic. Coke bottles, chip wrappers, just garbage. They don’t really have a waste management system there, so they take it all to a dump and burn it. Plastics, papers, organics and all. What they don’t burn stays on the ground and in the coffee fields. Some gets packed tight and used as a building material.

When the rains come in May, the trash, sewage, and all else finds its way to the lake.

Daniel talked about his childhood. Even though he’s only 40, when he was young there were no cars, no electricity, no plastic, and no tourists in San Juan. He could fish big bass out of the lake, grow a little garden, and pick wild fruits from the mountains. Now the tiny remnant of fish life is sold at a high price, and they’ve cut the wild fruits to grow coffee, and the staple of everyone’s diet is by necessity corn tortillas.

Atitlan, this paradise, has industrialized. And with the cars and the pollution, the suffering lake and the mono-crops, their dress and their language are disappearing, too. In San Juan, along with some other towns that are indigenous to the lake, the people speak Tzu’zujil. Others around the lake speak Ka’chikel – a language from the region Quiche, but brought to the lake when the colonizing Spanish displaced peoples to disorganize and subjugate resistances. But now the kids speak to each other in Spanish; the colonialist tongue that was before a second language.

This example of rapid cultural and environmental degradation has led me to see the connection between the two. It has also caused me to question the disappearance of my own culture, the culture of my people, and to wonder if I even have a people. What you may call our culture, us Americans, us Westerners, is mass-produced and consumed by millions. We have no local tongue, dress, cuisine. What we eat isn’t dependent on our local environments. Our stories are distributed globally, our religions are forced abroad and often ruinous of other cultures.

And from this experience we went to the ancient Spanish capital, La Antigua Guatemala. The town had been evacuated at some point because of a volcano, after which they moved the capital to Guatemala City. Since then people had trickled back in and turned the rubble’d city into a tourist hub. It was like some little European town had been marooned in Central America. We stayed with a fairly wealthy restaurant owner.

In Antigua the amoebas of Atitlan got to me. Wrought in bed for a few days, watching HBO and eating Alka-Seltzer, we passed our remaining time in Guatemala. I’d work up enough strength each day to make it to their massive market. For about four bucks a day we lived off a bounty of fresh vegetables and fruits. How amazing it is in a country of such natural wealth, the people eat such little of that bounty.

Our time came to a close, and in some flurry we took a shuttle to the airport, a plane to Houston, a plane to New York, a bus and the subway and a bus to DC, spent a day at home in Maryland, before another plane to Sacramento. Now, here we are, about 30 minutes out of Nevada City, California, nestled in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Here we’re staff on what is a sort of camp for a few high school kids. This week I’m building a cabin with the wood we mill here. Later I’ll teach filmmaking to the kids, and travel with the whole group down California and to Baja California, Mexico. There we’ll film gray whales, harbor seals, and green turtles. We’ll camp in desert lagoons far off the reach of roads.

And so on, and so on.

i've lived on nothing but dreams and train smoke

2009-12-12T00:18:00.000-08:00

I’ve decided, with near certainty, that next “semester” I’ll be taking an internship with a program called Finding The Good in Northern California. After months of a discouraging hunt for jobs in the thriving Bowling Green, KY economy, I looked elsewhere. I’ve been teaching, but so far the paycheck is little more than paying the passed dues. This internship will put me and a few other interns, one of which likely being Kristen, with a group of high school students traveling the region documenting, and studying different communities and their efforts at sustainability.

Our first trip will be a month long journey to the Baja California peninsula in Mexico. There we will document human relationships to marine life – grey whales, sea turtles, harbor seals. We’ll sleep on the beach, live in fishing villages on the sea, and explore life on the peninsula. The whales are giving birth right around now (December), and by the time we are down there (February) the calves will be exploring, and are apparently very friendly with observers. The Gulf of California and that part of the Pacific is home to grey whales, orcas, dolphins, sperm whales, fin whales, and the blue whale. In the phone interview, the director of the program told Kristen about camping out on the beach one night and hearing the blue whale’s breath close to shore. Awe.

Then we’ll head back to California, live in relative seclusion in the Sierra Nevada, learning sustainable forestry, organic farming, and different life-skills completely ignored in modern culture. Oh, and Gary Snyder lives down the road.

This is going to be a great opportunity to get back into filmmaking. They’ve got a couple new HD cameras, and want to make documentaries on various environmental issues – like the relationship between the dams and suffering salmon populations.

Getting further and further into, gruesome detail after gruesome detail, the terrible prospects of our economic, social, and environmental future, is overwhelming. The whole ‘heading for the hills’ scenario is getting more and more appealing – and seemingly, necessary. Many in our subculture think of this as some ultimate back-up plan. But the fact is, our country is incredibly over-populated. (As is the whole planet.) And in the case of collapse, the rural areas of practically everything east of the Mississippi are scant and armed. When we get to this fabled countryside we won’t have the seeds or skills to make it through a season. Just because we have foresight doesn’t mean we’ll be any more advantaged than the rest in the breadline.

So in these next few years, if I’m smart, I’ll continue gathering skills and knowledge. And eventually, hopefully, I’ll ready some land, and relieve myself from dependence on a system doomed to implosion.

This impending deterioration is probably why my foray into activism was short-lived. I have no faith, whatsoever, in improvement through government. Our democracy is convoluted with capitalism and the inherent corruption of such convolution. We can beat ourselves silly, running and punching at brick walls that won’t budge, for recycling, or meager awareness – nipping at the ankles of a blunt giant. But when we live in a society that willingly blows the tops off ancient mountains for a finite energy source, knowingly wars innocent people, ignorantly wastes perfectly good food and resources, and systematically subjugates while lauding its own cultural diversity, we have little hope of making the leaps forward that are urgently needed. We can throw ourselves in front of only so many machines. There are not that many of us.

I only wait for the collapse of system, which in turn will collapse our population, to return us to some sustainable stasis.

* * *

So the next few months are going to be hectic, and broke. From here, I’m going to the wedding of Kristen’s best friend in Louisville, home to DC for Christmas, New York for New Years, Guatemala for January, New York to DC to Louisville to Sacramento in just a few days, then the internship.

Then, the future.

there's no room in my life for you or your howling

2009-11-17T10:11:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I began a position at Kaleidoscope: Youth in Arts in Bowling Green, Kentucky. As of now, I am teaching Creative Writing to at-risk K-5 students in a local elementary school. There is a sense of value in the job – helping the kids find their creativity, being a positive influence – but it can be a very challenging job as well. Close friends of mine (Ashlea) have degrees and four years of training and experience working with kids these ages, and I was just sort of tossed into it with a pep talk. The program is after-school, so the kids have had all day to grow restless, then I’m to sit them down for two hours and talk to them about writing poems or telling stories. Certainly the more challenging group is the K-2; hardly able to write, getting the entire group to focus is nearly impossible. By the end of the session it has devolved into them running circles around me begging them to stop gluing pages of the books together.

And the job is only six hours a week. So, financially, I’m still in the hole. I have applied and failed to many other positions. I meant to justify this time by steadily working, chopping away at my debt and saving for coming adventure. But alas, later.

I have started a poetry group with another poet in town. We’re meeting weekly for workshops and discussions. It’s good to keep the mind flexible and current.

But, in less than two months, Kristen and I are going to Guatemala for a few weeks. Depending on potential work schedules, I will find a ride back to DC right before Christmas. I am Gaffing on a friend’s short film in NoVA between Christmas and New Years, and then heading up to New York for New Years. Flying out of Newark, NJ on the for Guatemala City. The plans as far as what to do in Guatemala are sparse. A friend Daisy may or may not be living in San Marcos La Laguna, so there’s that. We want to see Antigua, Lago de Atitlan, the Ixil Triangle towns, and the sea.

It will be my first time out of the “Western” world. I am not entirely prepared for the shock of it. We will go there open, and looking. The Spanish I learned in high school has dissipated to a very rudimentary comfort.

And though I have absolutely no money for the trip, I feel confident on it working somehow. There is still time to make some money.

Buying the tickets was an impulse. We began to understand that if we don’t make things happen for ourselves, they are never going to happen. Experiences don’t always fall upon you; often you must actively seek them out. And I have no reservations spending my last dollars frivolously on a trip abroad. The money will vanish somehow, might as well see me off to new lands. (This mentality is probably what puts me to bed in the various ditches of my life, figurative and literal.)

And then, we have become very serious about spending the summer in Alaska by the sea. Preferably near Glacier Bay. It has become an imperative that we start documenting the whales.

I need more time in nature.

tired of fighting, fighting for a lost cause

2009-10-27T17:02:00.000-07:00

Left Richard Brautigan by the toilet and read another chapter of “Trout Fishing in America” every time I take a shit. Often in this time of digestive unrest. I drink expensive beer that I didn’t pay for; Bluegrass Brewing Company Bourbon Barrel Stout. I tried liking Stanley Kunitz but I couldn’t. I want to turn the lights on – rainy day and pressing autumn got the sun hiding early this evening – but this is not my house, I am not paying rent, and I want to go unnoticed and undisturbed. So I read by light of cloud. I am still living off of the bagels we rescued from the trashcan last week, and I think they have something to do with the turning of my guts. Carbohydrates, carbohydrates, and I finished the last of those apples we gleaned last night. I was high and I couldn’t afford to think of rations any longer. I go to bed early and wake late as to be bothered less by this cold, this cold house.

Oh, these times. Not a job in this town, thinking of leaving my baby in Bowling Green, Kentucky and hitching West for brighter tomorrows. We don’t know when the money will come. Feeling like the immigrant, braving winters up North. His family behind. Or the Joads. Feel like the Joads. System’s broken and we know it but we don’t know we know it or don’t want to know it so we don’t. I don’t know. It’s something.

And we are hearing the rattle of the pitchforks, or maybe, the coming rattle. That and the spade dug and earth loosed, again. We are white, “fortunate”, suburban without a lick of dirt to our brow or blood on our palm. And we are hearing the rattle of the pitchforks. My grandpa’s gonna keel, and he’s got a little patch north of Baltimore where the deer still run and the grass still grows. Or I know this place in California where we could live off fish and cactus fruit and most nobody’d bother hiking into the canyon or crossing that desert. I guess we could bike there. That’d mean crossing Texas.

Oh, and your dad’s got canned food and preserves, so at least there’s that. And in worst of worst, we can walk to Louisville from here. But why’d we want to walk towards the city. And why’d we want to take The Road.

if i die in raleigh at least i will die free

2009-10-17T08:33:00.000-07:00

(This post is much longer and more personal than others, but partly for sake of documentation, partly to avoid an incomplete picture, it must be this way.)

So since last writing here, it would be fair to say my life has been a bit tumultuous. I’ll go chronologically:

The bike trip went without much of a hitch (and only one literal hitched ride with a Rebel Flag tatooed family man). As I sent my failing knees up, down, up those hills, I seemed to lose will in the trip. Certainly the splendor of the vistas, and the revelation that I had made it so far by my own physical might was quite worth the journey so far. The original intent was to end up in Asheville, NC. But short of that, after crossing the border into North Carolina, I decided my purpose had been fulfilled; I biked nearly 400 miles, had sufficiently seen Jeff off on his journey West, and had gotten my first taste of bike touring. I was picked up by Heather in NC, and drove east to spend the weekend in Greenville at my old Towson roommate’s new place. The next day we all drove to the ocean; floating in the triumph of the Atlantic, I pondered the journey that would in just a month send me across.

So without delving significantly into the personal upheavel upon my return to Maryland, I ended a four-year-relationship rather unexpectedly, and embarked with passion into a new one, also rather unexpectedly. Kristen, a photojournalist from Louisville, Kentucky. A summer subletter at my intentional community. Mind you, all within the month before my planned move to Dublin. Aside from this turmoil, at once beautiful and unsettling, I spent my remaining days in the States synging loose ends and collecting rain gear.

Despite all this I felt a sudden freedom this summer past. I spent much of the sticky day shirtless and in tattered shorts perusing the swelling garden. Tomatoes, kale, greenbeans straight from the ground. One day, I remember lying in the grass under a summer rain, feeling mortal and feeling alive. Then joined by others, I remember taking Noah, a three-year-old, onto my shoulder, him naked and me barely clad in some borrowed shorts, and running and jumping into the puddles in the yard. The sky ending that MidAtlantic humidity so we could drink, so our garden could drink, so we could know that we would make it.

I left the MaitriHouse in Takoma Park with a bit of sadness and also a sigh of exhausted relief. Since June I had been essentially couchsurfing the house of my former residence, stepping somewhat unsure through the halls, knowing the 20 other formal residents were never quite sure of my resident status. I’d bartered much of my rent away by building a shed, and bartered away living expenses by taking extra runs to the dumpster for the community food. So I felt like a bit of a freeloader. And the trials of group living were wearing on me. But now I was making a firm decision: I was moving away, far away to Ireland. We stood amongst the sprawling pumpkin vines and plastic kid toys and cried our goodbyes.

Back at my parent’s house there was an eerie feeling of absolute end. In October my 20-year-old brother would leave for AmeriCorps in California, and my sister had just begun her senior year in high school – after which she intended to leave, either for college or a gap year working in India. This would be the last time my entire nuclear family would be together, living in the place that saw us age. For better or worse, my childhood had ended.

I flew direct out of Philadelphia to Dublin, a recently deceased love alive in the armrest between me and the one who was to be my fellow European adventurer. She would soon be off for Germany, but I would remain in Dublin to settle down for the semester.

My first experience of note, fresly abroad, was at immigration. I showed my passport and told the officer I meant to study – showed him my offer letter from UCD. This led to a barrage of questions. Did I have proof of paying my fees? No. Did I have proof of receiving a loan? No. Did I have a return flight? No. Did I have health insurance? No. Well, Andrew, I’m sorry, but there’s a flight headed back to Philadelphia in two hours and you’re going to be on it.

I didn’t even know how to beg. I stood there, dejected. Thinking, I’m not coming back. Maybe I won’t even tell anyone I’m back in the States and maybe I can disappear. Mexico. Canada. More questions. He ran my credit card, passport, bank account; the pulses of my social status.

And finally, Welcome to Ireland. You’ve got a month.

And when the airport bus arrived on at O’Connell Street, wrought in indecision, without sleep or substantial food for days, I pounded wet streets with all my belongings slung over my shoulder. I took a bus to Rathmines, where I was to be staying and possibly living. My host was at work, so I stood awkwardly outside of Murphy’s Bar, looking longingly at the flat above in hopes of unburdening myself after wearing travels. The bartender noticed me and my luggage, and knowing the place to be frequented by vagabonds and world travelers, let me in.

After a fit of writing, near desperation, a few pints with a friend of a friend and the girlfriend I had meant to avoid, I walked sideways home from Grafton Street. I lived here now.

The next day I bought a bicycle and a phone, biked to the Irish Sea, tried to find the beauty in this new loneliness. Gone from me was any stability I had known, and love waited anxiously four thousand miles away. I then went on in an effort to obtain a student visa, so I didn’t get actually deported. Wading in the bureaucratic bullshit of immigration, even temporary immingration, I discovered to obtain a visa, one needed health insurance. To get Irish health insurance, one needed a bank account. To get a bank account, one needed a PPC number – something like a Social Security number. And alas, to get a PPC, one needed a visa. You needed to be legitimate to get legitimate. So there I was, a few short weeks from school, a month from being an illegal resident, with little hope of squirming out of the quagmire of borders and governments.

The flat I lived in was my saving grace. Hal, a writer and Physics student at Trinity College, my host, and his roommate Joe, were filling the place with couchsurfers throughout the summer to occupy the time and rooms left vacant by the roommates gone home elsewhere in Ireland when the chance of finding summer jobs in Dublin had become unlikely. Surrounded by world travelers, holed up in my new abode – what was once a sitting room with a fireplace, divided into a smaller room by an incomplete wall, no outlets, off-kilter paintings, a window to the roof of the pub below, an 8 AM wakeup alarm of music from the pub kitchen beneath, and an unreasonably large bed stuck in the middle.

The prospect of my massive loan hung like the clouds of every piss Irish day. 25 thousand dollars of debt for a degree in creative writing – what the hell was I thinking? How did I get this far into this mess? Moving further and further from mainstream culture, cutting ties along the way, and dreaming of some sort of vagabondism, and here I was chaining myself to the federal government. I had been swindled. Tricked into thinking this would make me important. My BA hadn’t yet mattered. Why would an MA? This debt, this would make me a writer… Writing makes you a writer. But without school, what did I have? I was broke, heartbroken, and far from home.

Seriously considering my options, life had boiled down to this: grad school and debt in Dublin, or misdirection and love in Kentucky. One night, alone in my room, the noise of the omnipresent international party grew in the other room and I went out to try socialization. I had already grown a reputation as the strange-haired vegan who went abroad and holed himself up with poetry books, spouting stories of eating trash and hitchhiking. A girl named Kira, originally from Connecticutt, but seperated for the past three years, had just arrived from Galway. We met and swapped stories. In the past three years since her graduation she had biked across America, backpacked Israel, lived in Seattle and Boston, farmed and hitchhiked across New Zealand for 10 months, flew from there to Europe where she hitched, farmed, biked from Switzerland to Paris, and finally arrived here. She was the first person not directly involved or well-acquainted with me and my situation that I talked to about it all. And she said simply, do it.

The next morning I woke and walked to the canal. I forced myself open to the world. The water, still as it was, dirty as it was, was making its way slowly to the Irish Sea, then to the Atlantic. It was meeting with the Potomac, to the Chesapeake, to the Atlantic. The ducks, harvesting the pond, didn’t care that they were in some unnamed canal (for all I know) in Dublin, Ireland – they were with their hearts and they were together. A heron passed. And I knew I had to be with what I felt I needed and not what would make me important in the eyes of others. I booked a flight to Nashville – an hour south of Bowling Green, KY – the place that was to be my home. Later that day Kira, Joe, and I busked with guitars and bongos on Grafton Street and in Temple Bar. A few euros richer, two days before her flight home and still wanting to see the Cliffs of Moher, we decided to hitch out for the West of Ireland.

We got a tent from a group of four girls and one guy from Lyons, France that night and I made plans to meet back up with them in Galway to return it. Our first ride out the next day, which we got after about fifteen minutes, was an older couple from Dublin who told us of a Fleadh Cheoil in Tullamore (a sort of Irish music festival) – about halfway across the country. So instead of continuing for the coast, we made it to our new destination by noon, stashed our bags behind a church, and set out to enjoy the festival. 20 euros forced into Kira’s palm by the woman who’d given us the ride bought us an Indian food dinner. Then kiely dancing, Guinness, high school marching bands, velocipedes, banjos and fiddles everywhere, the Guinness world record for most musicians simultaneously playing the same song the longest was broken on the streets that night, and a beautiful sleep in a splash of trees behind the church.

The next morning and a few rides brought us to the Cliffs in the early afternoon. They looked like postcards. Tourists dotted the landscape and it was time to leave. Worried about her flight the next morning, Kira was thinking of taking a bus back. But the earth spins well and ten minutes with our thumbs out beside the exit of the parking lot we get picked up by three French tourists on a business/travel trip going through Galway (where they drop me off a few blocks from the city center) and finally to Dublin (where Kira had to return). I met the French group in Galway – Amandine, Jo, Violette, Julia, Morgane – and took a bus to Galway Bay to spend two nights camping and drinking the city’s pubs.

When it was time to leave Galway, the group prepared to take a bus to the Connemarra area, and me counting my pennies, plans get mashed together and the six of us split into groups of two to race hitch to Letterfrack. Takes maybe three to four hours all together but ends with us all in a van full of luggage and bicycles with a French father and son. Never really figured out the story because I couldn’t understand most of the words spoken around me those few days – but the two drove us to a hostel rumored of great fun. Getting out of the van I swore I saw Eamon Grennan getting in a car – but alas, none besides me had heard of or ever seen his face to verify. Then to the Old Monastery Hostel: place of wild kittens, scattered Europeans with many tongues, old bicycles and broken pianos, dinners of fresh caught trout, and rain, rain, rain.

Connemarra proved to be, up to this day, one of my favorite spots on earth. A lot like the Lake District in England, it was a drenched nothing. We set out, through a muddy, sheep-turded scape, over unnamed farms and unmarked properties to a trailess top. My shoes, jeans, jacket soaked, my camera muddied, I stood at some unimpresive peak with no evidence of mankind. Islands whimpered into the Atlantic at my left and grew into a mountain range at my right, countless lakes at my feet and some doomed sky blanketing everything. I was hiking with two Swiss guys and some of the French group – more language I could not understand. Though occasionally catching the words vegeterienne or americain paired with cheerful snickers, I slept the moments in thoughts of my escape from this sopping sobbing place.

I thought a lot about trees. And how Ireland, once forrested, now had a completely new and devasted yet beautiful environment. How there must be something in the soul of whites hungry for the bones of the land. How the pattern always was…

Hitchhiking in Ireland is easy. I never waited more than 45 minutes for a ride, usually getting one in less than 15. And I never felt threatened by my rides or the spots I was in. The demographic of those who’d pick you up is much larger than in the US. One of the rides out of Galway, a man in the refridgerator business, fascinated with my ways, invited me in for dinner with his wife and one-year-old son. When we parted he told me never to go to Alaska alone. Referencing Chris McCandless of Into the Wild fame, he was actually one of about three people who independently referenced this life in comparison to mine.

Wet and sick, I hitched back to Dublin. I spent the remainder of my time, about two weeks, mostly hanging around the hostel of a flat. I read and I wrote. I refused to spend much money, would buy cheap bread and shoplift vegetables. Beer was a luxury. Though occasionally I’d drift amongst the broken bottle’d Dublin nights or brisk the café mornings and markets.

I began to fear my inevitable return to Maryland. A beaten dog, wet with rain and starved, eyes down and tail between my legs. This was the place I fled, partly in disdain, with an exasperated huff – I had left my home, I’d gotten out of the trap, I wasn’t going to be one of those people that stuck around forever because they didn’t know how to navigate the world. I was one of those people who did stuff. But now all I had was some shabby ‘trip’ to Ireland. And I was going to Kentucky? Some wildnerness rumored to me. Stuck in the gut of America. Strange for sure but hardly an impressive leap.

Parts of me wanted the plane ticket to go the other way. Maybe I could get a one way to Portugal, start there. The collapse of reason and plan. I’d head always East, always towards the newer day, never chasing West at what was. But this was for the detail, to write the more shocking script. Love was my compass, and it set me towards some nowhere zone between the Midwest, the South, and Appalachia. Sitting alone outside the Nashville airport, waiting on some hardly familiar lover, I knew I had made some feat: I crossed an ocean for love. I arrived in Bowling Green wrung in exasperation of this passion and the tumult of a quickly decaying social stature.

I stayed for two weeks, met the community of activists and artists that will continue to become my friends and cohabitants, before catching a ride back East. I tiptoed an art museum in Cincinnati, got drunk on the waitress’ dime in Cleveland, and finally ended up in Pittsburgh during the G20 summit. My bag was a dead giveaway – stopped, my books and clothes thrown to the curb, in search of some weapon I was sure to have. Dirty with a hiking backpack, flannel, hair atoss, I fit your description, Officer. Feeling a lot less of the anger I felt a year ago at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, I was even more of an outsider. I have given up on the revolution, I am now a mere witness of the collapse. Accomodating grandmothers of Elyria, OH for breakfast, police intimidation for lunch, and a frat party for supper.

Then the Greyhound to Maryland. The womb was cold and stagnant. Nothing changes.

For two weeks I slid back into the life I thought I had left to fall away. I saw the same friends, the same streets, I drove my father’s car again. My brother and I hiked Old Rag and I took my sister to New York to tour NYU – the same tour I’d been on six years ago. My path led from New York and it will always stand jagged and high, some boil eyesore in the landscape of my past. This city had rejected me several times. This would never be my home, rungs too hard to climb.

The plan was for Jeff and I to get a ride with a friend back to Bowling Green. Spend a few days in Kentucky, then hitch north for friends in Bloomington, IN, then Chicago, then Madison, WI. Two days before we were meant to leave we found our ride had fallen through because of the death of someone close to our friend. My heart in Kentucky, and desperate, we turned without much hesitation to our thumbs. But this meant I’d have to leave my bicycle and anything important in Maryland. So I-81 South, turn West in Knoxville onto I-40 and on to Nashville.

Two friends drove us west out of the swarming organism of Washington traffic. Then, we hitched. A few rides, mostly from former hitchhikers, brought us to Roanoke – a city we’d stopped in on our bike trip three months before. We found some strange deserted field between the highway and some hotels and made camp. My stomach turned all night. Some things digested, some things didn’t. Nearly passing out in the bathroom of a Mexican restaurant. Knowing gas stations too well.

In the early dawn I was feeling hopeless, I needed to reach Bowling Green that night but I feared it was impossible. We’d only gone a third of the distance and I didn’t want to wait any longer. But when the sun woke, spilling and vomiting brilliant oranges and purples I felt my bones ease. I tried to take a picture but found I’d snapped some simple plastic piece of my camera while in my bag. So my soul took the picture instead.

Usually, at a decent exit, Jeff and I would stand on the onramp before the “PEDESTRIANS PROHIBITED” sign. But when stranded somewhere with hardly any traffic, we’d wander past the sign and try our luck where the interstate cars could see us. First thing that day a cop told us to head back behind the sign. But after a few rides, waiting and waiting somewhere on I-81 where the Appalachian Trail crosses, we had stood anxious for two hours when a Virginia State Police vehicle eased in front of us.

IDs taken, run. Did you see the sign back there? Yes. You boys got driver’s liscenses, but no cars? No. Where you headed? Near Nashville. What’s in Nashville? My girlfriend. She don’t got a car either? No.

Back to his car, behind his sunglasses, and simple like that we each got a 90 dollar ticket for failure to obey the traffic sign. So, in this world, one is punished for traveling by the most primitive form of transportation. Our feet are unlawful.

So off the highway, drudging miles through the nowhere to the next, more populated exit. Sunburnt, half-starved and thirsty. Another two rides brought us to Bristol, VA/TN. Sun going down, weary of nights in the brush, afraid to get back on the highway for fear of possibly being jailed, and stuck at a terrible exit, we decided despite all our ill-feelings, we’d take the Greyhound. So walking the few miles to Bristol, we were stopped two more times by officers telling us to get off the road. Once again, IDs run, names checked, illegal feet, illegal bags.

Soon enough, I ended where I am – Bowling Green, KY. Jobless, no official address, completely broke, no transportation, and a little food between Kristen and I. But my prospects are good, my hopes are high. I’ve decided I’d bide my time here, between existences, but aware of every day. This time I have dedicated to myself, not to the pursuits of weary careers. I will write here, I will improve here. Ride bicycles, write poetry, paint, spend my time outside, be in love. And then I will go back to school, without the debt, wizened and with tattered notebooks in tow.

because i took my own insides out

2009-07-09T15:25:00.000-07:00

In the Floyd, VA library right now, which feels very like last summer. Jeff and I set off by bicycle last week from the house in TKPK. The first day we biked 60 miles through the hell suburbia of Northern VA. We spent the night camped behind a strip mall. The next day, headed for Stanardsville, VA to hang out with Kenny Melville for the fourth of July, we went 75 miles. When we got to his house around 8 pm, we both pretty much said hello, ate some food, and slept for 12 hours. Took a couple hikes around his house, saw fireworks in Charlottesville. And since then we've been taking the Blue Ridge Parkway. Our bikes are heavy, our stomachs are often empty, but the sky is full of mountains.

The other night, coming off of Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, the air was shrouded in a fog from a day of rain. It was late in the day, so instead of getting onto the BR PKWY we took signs for a visitor center. When we got there, through the heavy mist, building by building we discovered an abandoned rest stop. There was a restaurant with trees growing through it, busted up lodges, an emptied gas station, and a three room general store. Looked like the apocalyspe. We ended spending the night on the floor of the general store. We found what seemed to be a piece of metal cabinet, and used it to burn some wood debris to cook our dinner. I felt like a true hobo.

Since then it's been camping and couchsurfing along the parkway. We've seen two bear cubs and our fair share of roadkill. Tomorrow or the next day we're going to make it across the border into North Carolina.

In a few days from now I'll be home for Peter and Ashlea's wedding, a few more days at the Folger, and preparation for the move to Ireland and travels in Deutschland.

Library internet time has ended.

are birds free from the chains of the skyway?

2009-04-27T20:28:00.000-07:00

The news: I got accepted to University College Dublin.

I've yet to receive an official acceptance letter, but due to my obsessive checking of the application status page, I found out my status had switched from "In Progress" to "Offer." And I clicked "Accept."

So this fall, Heather and I are moving to Dublin. We're both very excited about the prospects of living abroad but terrified about the financial ramifications. She's probably going to be able to get a working holiday visa, meaning she'll be able to work for up to a year. And my student visa will allow me to work up to 20 hours.

Things have been going swimmingly as of late. I think what I really need was to get out of the house. Strolling the yard, pissing on the compost, checking out the sprouts in the garden beds we recently planted, studying the shed-in-progress, has brought me immense happiness these past few days. As well as finally being able to comfortably (minus allergies) bike to work again.

Jeff and I were talking tonight about our bike trip this summer. We were discussing possible destinations and routes. Originally we were going to bike to Asheville, NC. But now we're thinking farther. Maybe Toronto, maybe New Orleans! Jeff is gonna do a month of hitching in the North East and hiking the AT, then come back as my work at the Folger comes to a close, and the two of us will ride off.

I'm probably leaving for Ireland mid-August. We'll likely spend a week or so visiting our friend Lea in Germany before settling down in Dublin. We're looking to get a studio apartment in between the city center and the UCD campus. Close enough for me to bike to school and Heather to have easy bus transport to wherever she works.

It will be very strange moving from such a bustling and lively homestead to a small, quiet apartment in the city. That might be the biggest change of all. These months I've spent here have made the idea of living relatively alone very foreign. There are nearly 20 people in my house at all times. At most times of the day I can go down to the living room and find someone to have a conversation with, if I'm needing it.

Though on the positive side, the loneliness may afford me time to write. Since I will be going to grad school for writing, it's going to be very important to not have a ton of distractions around. This house is full of distractions. There's always a kid to play with, a person to talk to, a yard to tend or chore to stop ignoring. And the loss of the emotional support will be shocking as well. I basically have a dozen close friends at arm's length to grab at if I should call for such a thing.

But alas, since I doubt I could easily find such a wonderful living circumstance in Ireland, and because it may not be most conducive to my studies, I leave behind this wonderful place for now.

[joys & concerns]

2009-03-16T07:42:00.000-07:00

I’ve gotten the You Suck letters from six out of the ten schools now. UW only sent an e-mail (cheap!). I may write to them asking for an official letterhead snail mail rejection, because it will fit much better in my upcoming art project. Only schools left to hear from, though all are implied rejections: University of Oregon, UNC-Greensboro, Penn State, and UC-Irvine. But also! exciting news, I applied to University College Dublin because their deadline for international students wasn’t until March 31st. I sent them a better manuscript; so here’s hoping a few “I get depressed during winter” poems thrown into the mix increase my chances.

As of late I’ve been teaching a class on filmmaking at Bladensburg High School. It’s all the glory you would think. The whole thing is disorganized, but there are some cool kids with actual interest, and it’s good teaching experience. We’re making a film on bullying prevention. So, there you go.

Things I’m excited about: getting our garden into swing as spring breaks, continuing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, going to the Smokey Mountains with Heather for (or around) my birthday, starting Arcadia at the Folger, being outside more.

Because Peter did this, and because I’ve always liked lists, and because my birthday is approaching, I will make the accomplishments of 22 and hopes for 23 list.

While 22 I:

- graduated college Summa Cum Laude
- hitchhiked across the country (Washington to New York)
- got teargassed for the first time, hiked naked, worked organic farms
- visited about half the states in the US (24)
- lost my glasses
- landed my first job at a world-recognized place of employment (Folger)
- lived in an intentional community in Takoma Park
- learned to live entirely off of dumpster diving
- was published in my first legit lit mag
- (hopefully) got accepted to grad school (there’s still time, Dublin!)

While 23 I hope to:

- begin & finish my first film (documentary?) in quite a while
- finish writing Nineteen; the final script that will amalgamate the best parts of all the old versions, become a super version able to push past 40 pages, and become a complete and comprehensive screenplay
- attend a grad program (or reapply and be accepted next time)
- move out of Maryland for the first time in my life!
- live or prepare to live outside of the US for awhile (Ireland or Korea are the most realistic bets)
- go hiking more
- travel to (some of) the following places: Canada (Newfoundland, Montreal, Nova Scotia, etc.), Spain, Germany, South America (Peru, Argentina, Chile), and of course the whole world, but these are most likely
- take a long distance bike ride (if most of the other hopes don’t work out, maybe it will go coast to coast?)
- get some writing published!

Off to homely duties.

must you always kill with burn and burn with guns and kill with guns and burn

2009-02-18T08:17:00.000-08:00

Only news is no news on grad schools. A few acceptances here and there have come out from a few of my programs, none directed towards me of course.

So I'm planning on. Heather, Jeff, and Deirdre are planning a summer abroad in Europe. This is still in its preliminary stages. We're thinking biking around small town Ireland, a stint in Paris, perhaps Spain, visiting Lea in Cologne and seeing Berlin for the first time. Perhaps Prague, perhaps Switzerland.

This would lead right into Heather and I's potential South Korean adventure. Teaching English there is a pretty sweet deal. You get free housing and a free flight, 2 million won a month (around 15 hundred USD), a month of vacation and a month's pay at the end. This means money to pay loans and travel! All of Asia a short expedition away.

I've started a list for schools to apply to next year. The program I've gotten most excited about so far is Iowa State's MFA in Writing and Environment. The program includes poetry workshops, wilderness field trips, classes in environmental ethics, Native American art, and a potential study abroad workshop in Trinidad and Tobago or Ireland. Sounds like something I made up for myself.

Went to the Chippewa sweat lodge. It turned out being on a Veteran recovery clinic, and just lead in the Chippewa tradition. Was pretty cool, would like the experience of doing it on a reservation with Native Americans practicing their own rituals though. Though I have respect for white veterans waving flags taking a bit of an alternative route to health.

Expressionfest was grand. I read my new poem "Weeds," which people seem to be digging. We've decided on monthly open-mics at the house. Also hiked Old Rag in the Shenandoah this weekend. Old Rag is a great and beautiful day hike that I definitely plan on revisiting come spring. After that we went down to Harrisonburg, VA. Jeff had messaged someone on couchsurfing for us to stay with. When I took a look at who it was, I discovered it was Alyssa, a girl I had briefly met on Rahane Farm in Oregon. Alyssa was traveling with Annie and Paul (two I worked with on Rahane), all from JMU. So we ended up hanging around JMU with these three from my summer adventures, and having grand times.

Bob Hicok read at the Folger last night. Grand stuff, believe he's my new poet-guru. Will be trying to attain copies of his books.

Next weekend is the Flying Dog brewery in Frederick, followed by Power Shift the next weekend. We have 10-15 people couchsurfing with us for Power Shift.

Keep it exciting, keep it fresh.

then I'd sing 'cause I know how it feels to be free

2009-01-26T19:19:00.000-08:00

So for the inauguration last week, via couchsurfing.com, we turned our home into an impromptu hostel, with about 35 people sleeping under our roof. It was an exhaustive blast. The Sunday night leading up we had a musical hootenanny in occasion of the oh-so-celebrated regime change. I ended up playing some bongo drums for an hour or so to some folk jamming (and I got to play a stand up bass!). Got to play host to some great folks, from various cities and countries.

I've decided the only effective method of avoiding insanity is filling my time with frequent and varied adventure. Soon we'll be having another poetry/music shindig, on the heels of the very successful "Bad Manor Sing Along," called "Expressionfest." Also probably hosting a permaculture workshop at the house, and going to a sweat lodge hosted by (from my understanding) a Chippewa tribal leader.

Things have been keeping along. The jury comes back on grad school in the next few weeks. I'm trying to work it out so I'm prepared, mentally and logistically, for failure. Heather and I shared a terrorist-fist-jab over the proposition of teaching English in Seoul - so I'd say it's pretty official.

singing 'hallelujah' with the fear in your heart

2008-12-27T13:45:00.000-08:00

Christmas is not exciting anymore. I guess it hasn't been since I was probably 15 or so; but it's still hard to get used to not caring about something that use to define an entire season.

Just got back from visiting both sets of grandparents. My father's parents near Baltimore are quite depressing to visit. My grandmother is so near death it's nauseating, and my grandfather is, as always, full blown in his sexism and racism. He, as he has for their entire marriage, was being a derisive, abusive ass to my grandmother. She recently had a series of strokes and subsequently lost a lot of weight; went down to maybe 90 pounds. Yet anytime she eats anything he calls her fat. He commands her around, though she can barely walk. There was a time about a year ago that my uncle had to stay with them in the legitimate fear that my grandmother would murder her husband.

The man sits in his rocking chair by the window, his shotgun loaded and near, waiting for an animal to shoot. In his opinion, if we don't kill animals every chance we get, they'll take over the world. He started talking about the news, and I was surprised not to hear any death threats towards Obama. He was talking about the economy and what he remembered of the Great Depression; families walking the streets, dogs and cats gone stray, trains bearing children out of the poor cities, away from their parents. He said it's all coming again.

The other side, just west of Philadelphia, is a little less... um, conservative. Blacks and gays are to be ignored, not shot. But Arabs, yes, shoot the Arabs. Jesus was born on December 25th and Global Warming is a liberal conspiracy. So my uncle gave my grandmother a handgun for Christmas. I guess my grandfather sleeping with a loaded pistol by his bed isn't enough - the other side of the bed is unprotected. He had given it to her before we arrived, and my grandmother brought it out, rewrapped, to show my mom. I wasn't paying attention until I saw her unwrapping what I thought was a gift to her. As she unfolded the tissue paper, and the gun came into view, my heart sank. I cannot imagine my parent's house with a gun. When I was in high school, and the family turmoil was violent and constant, the presence of a gun would have been most certainly tragic. My dad knows this, and that's why he says he doesn't want a gun in the house. But my mom (and everyone on both sides of the family) is of the mindset that the world is a place full of villains, armed villains. "If you unlegalized guns, only criminals will have them." So let's arm the nation. And tell the whites the blacks have it out for them, the mexicans know the whites hate them, and everybody hates fags & muslims.

Fell the nation in a cloud of gun smoke.

i've been dodging lamps and vegetables

2008-12-19T08:48:00.000-08:00

I'm getting that itch in my brain. The kind of itch that makes me want to walk to the end of my street and stick my thumb out.

Last night I went to Franklin's in Hyattsville after work. After losing my wallet at some point yesterday (perhaps on the work to metro bike ride), I found myself begging for change to get to Hyattsville. Half the bar were kids from Roosevelt. We wear beards and can drink now but we're not doing much different; just doing nothing in PG county. I am flushed with a need for escape. I have to get out of Maryland, soon.

I can't seem to find anything to do with my time. Perhaps I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'm kind of a lazy person. Or maybe my time is just spent so much differently than it was last year. I was taking 15 credits of tough lit classes, working 20+ hours a week at a record store, making a short film, and practicing/performing bass in a band all at the same time. School is over, the band is done, and I can't foresee a film anywhere in my near future. Now I'm working 20+ hours a week at the Folger, and occasionally doing house related things. But I can't seem to figure out what I'm doing with the rest of my time; sleeping 10+ hours a day for one. I've got to wake up and do something. I need to write more. Why am I applying for an MFA if I can't even make myself write in my free time?

So it seems the Spanish island is out. In are ideas of biking across Ireland & hitching around France/Spain, hitchhiking up to Northern Canada to look at mountains, and traveling Peru/Argentina/Chile.

Got in a bike accident the other day. My tire got caught in a trolley-like track coming down 9th street and I went sprawling head first into the pavement. I kicked my nail perpetrated foot into the ground and my leg went numb for a bit. Hobbling to the curb, my bike tire spun parallel to the handlebars, the cars having just witnessed my fall, just waited for me to get off then pulled up to the red light and averted eye contact. Humanity is cold.

Reading Native Son by Richard Wright; intense.

2008-12-11T07:03:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday I stepped on a nail. Two nails to be exact. I was at work disassembling remaining parts of the Henry IV, Pt. 1 set, and carelessly I sank a nail maybe an inch and a half into the ball of my foot. My boss tossed my bike in his truck and drove me home. At first I thought it was a silly thing, just something to be embarrassed about. But then, muscles in my foot seized up, it became impossible to walk, and me and everyone at my house was wondering about my need for a tetanus shot (as I wasn't updated) and a possible deep infection.

Deirdre and Jeff rushed me to the Bethesda CVS for an emergency Tetanus shot. It was maybe the first time I felt legitimately poor. Thinking about a $45 shot from CVS being my only option was terrifying. So the lady wouldn't see me, said it was too serious. So we were at the Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park, and all I could think of was the bill. So we left, I came home, and just decided to wait it out. The next day I came into CVS less hobbily and got the shot. Now I'm just waiting to find out if it's infected.

This has brought to attention my need for health insurance and my disgust at our health care system. It really is insane how many people in this country have no access, or at least limited access to necessary resources. Of course you can go to the emergency room, and regardless of insurance, they will take care of you. And then they stick you with a big bill you can't pay. So I'm sure tons of people just sit at home bleeding, waiting it out. We're treated, even in poor health, as merely the worth of our dollars.

I found out that Workman's Comp will pay for anything I have done. So luckily I did this at work. So if I decide to do something about the possible infection, it'll be covered. But I feel incredibly stupid. I feel I'm detracting more from my new job than actually bringing them. I've made a few sound-related mistakes lately and now I've stepped on a nail. I feel like a fool.

i am nothing of a builder, but here i dreamt i was an architect

2008-12-03T13:08:00.000-08:00

Nothing much going on lately, sadly. Just the ennui of working days. I am 100% done with all my applications, now I am searching for other things to obsess over.

Jeff and I decided to make a zine. We posted on craigslist and have been getting tons of submissions. Flyers have been made to disperse to cafes and such. Most of the submissions are terribly horrible. The plan is to do an online webzine, then an inexpensive DIY print version of the better stuff. Maybe it's just a self-indulged pursuit to see our own stuff 'in print.' But isn't that what Ferlinghetti did? Publish himself and friends?

Remember in high school, when we took the SATs and subsequently got a slew of college mail? Well I've gotten solicitations from UMichigan and Notre Dame. It's a bit more individual specific, and because of that it almost makes me want to drop all else and apply there. The mere suggestion in a chain e-mail, knowing my statistics are qualified enough, makes me feel wanted somewhere.

The other night Jeff and I got caught dumpstering at Trader Joe's. An employee spotted us, chastised us for picking through rotten food, and told the manager. As we were packing the car with our goods the manager started taking down our licence plate and told us he would call the police if we came back. So I told him we worked for a charity. He was like, 'Oh. Cool.' Moments later, as we were preparing to leave, he returned and asked if we had anymore space in our car. At that we were at the back entrance of the store bagging up bread and vegetables and he was helping us cart food to our car. It was probably the best run we'd had in a long time.

I felt a little guilty claiming to work for a charity. But we have, in the past, donated excess goods to shelters. Tarek, a roommate, hands out surplus to homeless at a park by his work. And in eating it ourselves and giving it to friends, we can say that we are helping to feed low-income families.

I have redecided to write a screenplay I've been continuously writing/not writing for about two years. This time I will attack it with a plan, precision, and have the end in mind when writing the beginning. No more stream of conscience screenplays.

making all my nowhere plans for nobody

2008-11-13T10:43:00.000-08:00

Now comes the time when I start freaking out over the little things in my applications. Seems half the schools didn't receive letters from one of my professors. So I'm doing them again and feeling very guilty about hassling my professor so much late in the semester like this. After re-reading my statement of purpose I found a pretty obvious typo - so about half the schools might think I feel verbs are optional. I'm getting fairly certain I won't be getting in to grad school. This opens wide the possibilities for next year.

On Saturday night I went with Jeff and Deirdre to Brian Ward's house in College Park for an open mic. I read a new poem called "Open Finger Potato Chip Man" with Muscle Matt playing guitar in the background. Then I switched with Jeff and he read. Drunk, it felt very picturesque and momentous. Switching up with singers/songwriters/a guy writing a novel. This one guy, Geoff, who played beautifully some folk traditionals, spoke about his ambitions of walking across the country picking up trash.

Makes me remember I have to bike across the country. I have several routes in mind. I kind of want to head up into Canada, go across the continent there, then bend South on the West Coast. That way I'd spend some time in the Northwest and get to finish the trip in California. Jeff says we need to do this before we're 25.

Heather's roommate/Dirty Mike's girlfriend Johanna's dad apparently has a mansionish house on an island in Spain that needs some fixin' up. Possibly spending some time there this summer and doing some house repair in exchange. It's in the works. Sounds very Hemmingway; a couple expatriates drinking/disrespecting the Mediterranean.

That would open the summer up to a European trip. Heather's dying to go to Paris and I want to visit/revisit Northern Europe.

and the check when it arrived, it went bounce, bounce, bounce

2008-11-03T16:45:00.000-08:00

We elected Obama. When is the last time there was parades and celebrations in the street because of elation due to election results? Perhaps, never?

Now that I'm finished my grad applications it seems I'll be doing a bunch of not much for awhile. The house worked out a plan with Jeff and I to barter dumpstering with some living-fees. This lessens my need for official "work." The Folger offered me a more actualized position. I'll be doing the same thing, just have a little bit more assurance on hours and schedule and such.

I've been trying to do some writing with my free time. I'm partially successful some of the time, and wholly unsuccessful most of the time. Wrote a short story and a couple of poems. When I get a couple more poems I'll do another round of submissions. Right now I have about 15 submissions out there, waiting to hear back from them now. I submitted some of Jeff's stuff the other day because he is a perfectionist when it comes to writing and lazy when it comes to business. So far I have a rejection letter from the Colorado Review. I'm going to make a collage of rejection letters; I've been saving. Soon the school rejection letters will come, and those will look real pretty pasted together.

Talked to a new roommate of mine last night, Jason. Seems he's been a bit of a vagabond for more than a decade. Hitchhiking around the country, keeping various homes and jobs. He's now teaching a yoga class at a homeless shelter in DC. Before that he was helping run a cleaning business in North Carolina, right after being a firefighter in Ithaca, NY, and even before that he was doing theater acting in Seattle. Sounds a bit like what my life might become in the foreseeable future.

The other day I was helping my uncle, dad, and cousin-type relatives tear off the old roof on my uncle's house. I discovered my mid-20s cousin just joined the army after a long career at Rite-Aide, and my 21-year-old cousin works at a gun store. My dad and I realized that he and I were the only people in the family with college degrees. We're a bit of the black sheep, city folk, who don't do electrical/construction work.

Anyway...

collapsing sands and rising tides

2008-10-25T17:22:00.000-07:00

Watching that Goosebumps TV show from the 90s. Terrible child acting and atrocious scripts; pretty awfully wonderful.

I was the judge in the Grub Street High School Poetry competition. I was introduced by Clarinda Harriss, somewhat incorrectly, as the poet who'd move on from Grub Street to get a rejected poem published in the Georgetown Review. It was the GW Review and I never submitted it. Oh, well. It made high school kids go 'oooh.'

Took the GREs on Thursday. Didn't do so hot. 520 on Verbal and 650 on Quantitative. I'm pretty sure my scores won't matter, based on this blog I've been obsessing over:

MFA Creative Writing blog

But it's still a little worrying to know that I did a lot worse comparable to SAT score coming out of high school. Though I guess no studying will do that to you.

Also added three schools to my 'apply to' list. Vanderbilt in Nashville, Washington in St. Louis, and Penn State. They all offer full funding and stipends. So again, wherever I'd go, getting paid to write would be prrretty sweet. Applying to ten grad programs is some serious work.

Also a drink with a former teacher this week. We talked about schools I was applying to, the usefulness of my degree, etc. When I say drinks I mean she got a Coke and I got a beer.

My housemates seemed kind of bummed when I told them I was applying to grad schools. I've really started to love the environment and sense of community there. But I never planned on being in DC long term, and if I stayed around town working odd jobs, I'd probably languish in this PGSD (Post-Graduation Stress Disorder) forever.

Decided with Heather that we're going to do a Germany/Scandinavia trip this summer. Better start collecting the funds now. Of course there are a slew of other countries I should probably go to (India, Argentina, New Zealand top the list) before revisiting one I've been to, but Heather wants to see her old roommate Lea and I want to speak some Deutsch.

Also, pretty sure that the Folger might give me some more hours. So perhaps I'll rise slightly closer to the poverty line.

i'm going back to new york city, i do believe i've had enough

2008-10-15T17:08:00.001-07:00

Pretty much finished my grad applications today. Just have to get pick up some letters from my professors and take the GREs on Thursday and I'm done. Now I can think about something else. Like how I have no money. It's cool in some ways. I don't really need money for much except paying rent, which I haven't really done yet. It's not tight deadlines here, but I'm hurting them financially. So today my mom and I talked about dropping me from the car insurance, which since I haven't been paying it for awhile would save them a lot of money. My car no longer starts, it's getting donated, and I have no plans of getting a new one. No car insurance, no health insurance; I'm kind of ceasing to exist.

No work at the Folger for awhile, back on the job hunt. And I think my student loans start up come November. Awesome. Now I don't really have my parents to back me up anymore. They've lost the entire college fund for my sister in this economic ka-boom-boom. Not that I haven't been supporting myself, but they've been the only thing keeping me from actual of poverty. Not to mention racking up some debt for application fees. And they're really feeling it lately. My mom basically got fired. They're in tens of thousands of dollars of debt.

But I guess if I had a landlord I'd of already been kicked out, and it's not like I can't afford all the free food I dumpster.

Velocipede is being resent to Woody Harrelson. His office in LA contacted Deirdre (our celebrity liason) saying they haven't received it yet. And since he'll be back in LA from Europe soon, he'll have a chance to watch it. We found out he actually has a production company called Children at Play Productions. So maybe that is some sort of financial backing. Now we have to come up with a proposal and figure out who would do the talking if we end up talking to him or his people.

To summarize, graduating sucks, the economy sucks, there's no reason to get an MFA in Creative Writing in an economy that can't support the arts, and having your future be pending decision by a celebrity sucks.

But I saw these jobs with the North West Service Association (or something like that), that are basically about keeping track of pollution in the Columbia Gorge, teaching fire safety on Mt. Adams, or helping to develop environmental programs in Seattle. It's all through AmeriCorps. That stuff is looking pretty good. No movie, no grad school, I'm there. Or moving to England with Heather - one or the other.

i got some groceries, some peanut butter to last a couple of days

2008-10-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

So things have been pretty much the same. I just got done working tech for Henry IV, Part I at the Folger. Now I'm out of work for awhile I guess. So I'm going to be spending my time working on my grad school apps. I've decided on applying to these schools: UC - Irvine, University of Washington, University of Oregon, UNC - Greensboro, UMass-Amherst, Cornell, and UIowa. Grad school apps are so much more involved than I remember college apps being. I've got to send a million different things to different places. I'm taking my GREs on the 23rd. Which I won't study for.

The house has been going well. Jeff and I have become the resident dumpster divers. The other night we got about 12 bags of food. Mostly strawberries, bananas and baguettes. We got about 100 bananas. We have a deep freezer to keep all our dumpstered goods. We will never buy bread in that house, ever. One of our housemates Megan, took some food to a food bank/shelter in DC. I'm thinking if we up our anty with the dumpstering we can make donating a regular thing. It is horrible the amount of perfectly good food that gets thrown away for whatever bizarre reason.

So worldwide economic collapse, huh? Buckets of rain water and urban gardening are getting a little less crazy. Better put aside some beans and figure out what to do with your poop once the water stops running.

as the day grows dim

2008-09-24T14:42:00.000-07:00

Here's to restlessly searching the internet for some sort of answer to your restlessness. I didn't get the job with the documentary filmmaker - I don't really know why. And I found I can't really get that many hours at the Shakespeare Folger Library. I'm going to work there, but it won't get me by. So back to the job search. I can't pay rent and haven't been able to buy groceries since I've gotten back.

But here's this!

Velocipede at Tacoma Film Festival!

So if you're in Tacoma, WA, go see Velocipede! Or just rate it on the film festival site.

We haven't made any progress on the bike doc/tv show yet. We're waiting to hear back from a celebrity, how funny. What we need to do now is just move forward and seek financing to produce it ourselves. I need a project or I'm going to go crazy.

i was surprised, i was happy for a day in 1975

2008-09-19T14:12:00.000-07:00

Today I got a job doing sound and tech work for the Folger Shakespeare Library. I don't know how many hours or how much I'll get paid, but it seems like a good job in a fun/educational environment with a mixed basket of tasks so I don't get bored. It seems like a respectful job to have in this transitional life period. I also have an interview with this Australian documentary filmmaker to be his personal assistant. He basically needs me to post-production on a doc he just finished so he can get time to write a script. I talked to him on the phone the other day and it sounds like he wants to hire me, just wants to meet first.

So two jobs now, and they have nothing to do with food service! I'm actually building a resume, woo! (?) I'm sure my financial situation will still be sketchy though. I've spent under 10 dollars in the past week, mostly on metro and the falafel sandwich I ate today. Of course Heather, Deirdre, and my housemates have been feeding me. The only providing I've done for this household is from the dumpster - which I need to do again soon.

It's funny that it seemed a lot easier just hitchhiking around to get by. You don't have know anyone long enough that they don't feel like helping you anymore. Jeff and I got offered two short term jobs while we were on the road. One helping run these concerts and one working on a farm in Idaho. I'm sure that stuff would come up randomly enough that you could get just enough money to get by. I wonder how many nomads are out there running around.

2008-09-16T07:41:00.001-07:00

So yesterday, midday, Jeff, Deirdre and I went to Bethesda for various job shopping. I don't know if I can explain the terror I felt standing, staring at a storefront with the "now hiring" sign, absolutely incapable of entering. I did eventually enter Spring Mill Bakery - a bread bakery - and fill out an application. The wonders of coming full circle. When I was 14, before I even entered high school, I got a job working weekends at Raulin's Bakery. Now, 22, a high school and college graduate, I find myself with nothing to do but apply for that same career I started at 14. Oh, cruel world.

So then I meandered around with Jeff and into Trader Joe's. My interview is on Thursday. The best part about it all is that that evening, Jeff, Heather and I returned to Bethesda and dumpstered Trader Joe's and Spring Mill and brought home a box of gourmet and a box of produce. Our roommate Tarek returned with two huge containers of frozen yogurt. We plan to get most of our food at this house from dumpstering. Tarek and Holly said they've been feeding their family, a two-year-old named Tave, and a new born infant with about 75% dumpstered items.

Now, to bike around looking for jobs.

how many years can some people exist before there allowed to free?

2008-09-11T11:20:00.000-07:00

After getting home an immediate fear of ennui arose. Though I have been fairly busy - moving into my new place in Takoma Park, looking for jobs, etc. - something about being home (or in the same place for more than a week) makes me feel as if I need to do "something." So I've decided to start pursuing grad school applications. I guess I want to study poetry. I don't know if I actually want to be a poet, professionally that is, but I do want to study poetry. I'm done studying film. Not done making film, just done studying it.

So far I've looked somewhat seriously into the following schools: UC-Davis, UC - Irvine, UVA, Johns Hopkins, Boston University, Cornell, and the University of Oregon. Applying for Fall 2009 means I have to take the GREs now, basically. SUCK! Hopefully being a Creative Writing student means GREs count for shit.

So my car won't start. This is a very convenient way to dump automobiles from my possession permanently. I've used my mom's car a few times for transporting things to my new house, but after that I shouldn't really need cars too much. I'm in Towson right now, and took the Marc train here. It's 7 bucks and takes 2-3 hours altogether, which isn't too bad. Takoma Park is bikable to the city, so I should be able to get by with that and metro.

The jobs I've applied to vary greatly. So far I've sent applications for the following: Production Assistant with National Geographic in Silver Spring; Administrative Assistant at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Foreign Policy Magazine; Editorial Assistant for Congressional Quarterly Magazine; Capitol Hill Bike Courier Services; the DC Hosteling International hostel; and so on, I forget a few.

Hopefully I get one of the first few, make some bank, quickly pay off all my debts and quit to travel or go to Grad school. But really I'd much rather split my time working at the DC hostel and working as a bike courier.

the RNC

2008-09-08T12:11:00.001-07:00

I'm home. Well, I'm at the New Carrolton public library because my parents no longer have the internet.

So the last leg of my trip was ridiculous. St. Paul and the RNC were terrible in many ways. I don't really feel like talking about it too much.

We got the van in Morrison, CO, drove three other guys - Oz, Dylan, Brian and all his art - to St. Paul. When we got there we hussled around for a place to sleep and found this girl Tiane who let us stay on her floor in Minneapolis.

St. Paul is a ghost town that got turned into a police state. So many horrible things happened. Tuesday I got teargassed for standing in crowd throwing up the peace sign. I lost my glasses when the police started running after us shooting rubber bullets at us.

http://www.startribune.com/local/27971239.html?page=1&c=y

I suppose that's a decent article to read. I doubt there's any in depth mainstream coverage anywhere. The media doesn't want you to know what took place in St. Paul. Maybe look up some youtube videos?

Overall the RNC was extremely disheartening. It was scary to see how quickly an American city could become a police state. There were clear sides, in simple terms it was the anarchists versus the police. There were reports of torture in jail (I saw this kid beaten and limping after being tortured by the police in jail), almost 1,000 arrests, police barricades everywhere, riot gear, pepper spray, teargas, concussion grenades, and rubber bullets every single day. All the permitted marches had to march into the freedom cage (yes, the freedom cage). It was awful. What a demoralizing four days.

Now, as much as anytime in history, there is cause for upheaval; reason for a new system and a new method of thought. But while 90% of the country is lulled to sleep in the false sense of American comfort amidst worldwide cultural and environmental turmoil, the other 10% is thrown into an injudicious police state whenever they seek to open their mouths. And not only does the government crackdown on dissent, the dominant culture believes individual thought and expression to be (generally) outrageous.

Good luck, revolution.

jeff shot a man in reno just to watch him die

2008-08-29T20:59:00.000-07:00

Today Jeff and I left Antonio's house in Denver for Longmont. We met Kate at her house, made some tofu scramble, found some bikes in the basement, then biked into the rockies. We took peanuts and some beer, found a creek, sat in it, and ate peanuts and beer.

Then we went to a saloon, fully expecting swinging doors and shoot-outs, but got small-town talk and PBRs instead.

But the exciting news is that Jeff and I are picking up a van tomorrow outside of Denver and driving it all the way to Long Island, NY. This guy needs a minivan transported, and is paying for the gas, and doesn't care how long we take. So our stops will include the RNC in St. Paul and Chicago. We are driving two guys we met in Denver to St. Paul and picking up as many hitchhikers as physically possible.

Jeff has pretty eyes.

2008-08-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

In the Denver Public Library right now trying to figure out how the hell we're getting to St. Paul. We might end up hitchhiking, but 1000 miles is a long way to hitch in 3 days. We found a fellow protestor going that way, but he bailed on us last night. I found a guy on craigslist that needs his car driven to New York. Maybe we'll do that?

Yesterday Jeff and I found some more free bikes, a bikeshare project started in Denver for the DNC. We took them to Food Not Bombs, where we've been getting 75% of our food this week. After that, cruising around, we ran into a green anarchy protest against companies who greenwash. We joined, and it seemed how most people joined was in the same sort of snowballing effect. It was pretty tame, some yelling matches with cops, panicked pro-bono lawyers, but nothing too intense. Then at night, we participated in a massive critical mass. Maybe 1,000 bikes. There were so many the cops didn't really try to break it up. There were some cops who actually seemed to be riding with us! Quote from one cop: "You know if you slow down and group together, you can stop more of the cars that way. Isn't that what you want?" Of course all the war-prepared cops in Denver haven't been so nice. There was a huge crowd beat and tear-gassed the other night. 100 people were arrested and I've really only heard secondhand what happenned.

So less than two weeks until I'm home. Then I immeadiately move to Takoma Park and start my job search. I'm thinking I might actually apply to Voice of America (fuck me!) because my internship coordinator suggested I do so. That way I can make a little bank as a contractor working in the studio until I move or get a chance to do something else. If the bike doc/tv show takes off, and I'm getting living wages from it, then I will quit in an instant. But VOA might be an alright temporary gig - fuck, I might work for the government.

i know if they could they'd sell the air

2008-08-24T06:55:00.000-07:00

So right now we are in Denver. Jacob (the guy who took us to Portland), his roommate Ben, told us of a friend of his living in Colorado, Kate. We are crashing at her friend Taylor's place in Denver right now, and might be continuing to do so for the DNC.

Trying to hitch out of Portland was hard. We waited for about four hours trying to flag down truckers. Instead of rides they kept offering us leftover fast food. We took some chicken and gave it to this fellow hitchhiker kid. If Jeff and I ate meat, or didn't care at all what kind of junk it was, we would never have to buy food on the road. We have been getting offered so much food it is ridiculous. Dumpstering when we can, occasionally stealing from a Safeway or something, we've hardly been spending any money at all. Eventually we got a ride from this guy in a beat-up pick-up that only took us to Hood River. However, he was the quality manager of the Turtle Island food factory there, and after dropping us off went inside the factory and brought us an enormous bag of tofurkey, tempeh, veggie sausage, etc. Finally, food we could gladly accept.

A quick ride out of Hood River with this awesome Mom-Daughter duet in different cars took us to Boardman, OR. During the ride I talked to the daughter about how she lived and is going back to work in Antarctica as a dining attendant for the scientists down there.

In Boardman we got hassled by the po-po, turned down a few rides from sketchballs, then eventually got a ride from this medicinal marijuana lawyer all the way to Baker City, OR. We walked around a bit, spent the night in some brush until it started to rain, and got an early start on the road. Instead of that early start mattering, we waited six hours for a ride. Standing on the road waving frantically with your thumb out, dancing, being turned down, singing to yourself, well, you go a little crazy - until you actually are the nutball people think you might be.

We got a ride to Boise from crazybeard Marv, who didn't cut his fingernails or hair. In Boise we met a bum who hitched after us for the rest of the day. It was a little terrifying how he kept finding us. Spent the night in Mountain Home, Idaho in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart behind the RV of a swindler, who pretends he's out of gas to get money from people coming out of the Wal-Mart. He was a fat sexist and racist who beat his dog a little bit. It was the best sleep we'd have in days.

Next morning was really successful hitchhiking, didn't spend much more than an hour anywhere. Got a couple quick rides and ended up in Burley, Idaho. Sticking our thumbs out on the highway there, this truck driver, probably going 70, slams on his breaks when he sees us. He stops maybe a quarter mile down the road, and walks all the way over to us to offer a ride. At this point we had completely given up on truckers because of all the dirty looks we had been getting at truck stops. But this trucker was different, he was sad, lonely Mick.

So even though we were flying a sign for Salt Lake City, even had a place to stay there, Mick was going all the way to Denver. We hopped in and spent the next 10ish hours with this man. Jeff mostly slept in the back. Mick really needed to talk. Mick is a contract truck driver in Iraq, has been doing it basically since the war started, and on his last trip over there his wife started cheating on him. Now, going through a messy break-up and divorce, he sold all his stuff and moved from Boise, Idaho to Wichita, Kansas. Mick talked about his wife, told us awful stories. But what was really getting to me was his Iraq stories. Driving through the beautiful Wyoming countryside, we listened to his war horror stories. He told us about how he was forced to run over a little Iraqi girl because he was driving a fuel truck and couldn't stop. He told us how he watched his best friend be blown to pieces by a small rocket. He told us how, in some gunfire, he flipped over his truck onto an American soldier hiding in a ditch, flattening him. He told us how he watched American soldiers murder completely innocent Iraqis for the hell of it, pull them out of their cars and just shoot them, all of them, women and children and men and old people. And he had to pretend, tell the soldiers he saw none of it.

So, we both kind of fell asleep towards the end of the ride. And Mick, a little bitter about that I think, instead of dropping us off outside of Boulder like we had thought he would, dropped us right in the middle of Fort Collins, Colorado. We wondered around a bit, not knowing we were in Fort Collins, until we started seeing signs reading Fort Collins. This was a fortunate mistake, however, because after an hour or two of sleep on the Colorado State campus we discovered Fort Collins was an awesome little alternative town.

We found a place called a bike library, that rents bikes for FREE to people. Jeff and I got bikes, found a girl named Victoria through couchsurfing who let us drop our bags and take showers at her place, and started biking to the rocky mountains to meet Kate and Taylor for some hiking. We biked maybe 30 miles before they picked us up. Biking up mountains on an hour of sleep is very nauseating. So they scooped us up and we came to Denver where we've been since.

Today Jeff and I are taking a bus to Longmont, about 30 minutes away, then biking to Fort Collins, about 30 miles away. We'll spend the night there, and then come back to Denver for the DNC protests. On that note, biking around downtown Denver yesterday, we saw police officers from all over the state of Colorado completely decked out in riot gear and weaponry. They are clearly preparing for war. There are vehicles riding around with dozens of cops carrying AK-47's and shit. There are helicopters constantly. They were planning routes, scoping out the people, and straight out preparing for battle. The craziest thing is that they are battling us. There are already protesters locked away in a warehouse somewhere.

So, we'll see how it goes tomorrow.

2008-08-18T20:35:00.000-07:00

Been on the road a bit now. Right now we're staying at this guy's house in Portland. We spent the weekend on a farm outside of Olympia, WA at this music festival called Helsing Junction Sleepover put on by K Records - Mirah, Karl Blau, Lake, and some others played. Jeff and I volunteered in exchange for free camping and food. Sweet deal.

We stayed with this girl from couchsurfing in Olympia, then hitchhiked out today. It was looking like a bad day, especially since it started raining. A ride from these Jesus guys brought us to this town Kelso, WA, where, on our way to Olympia Jeff and I had to spend an impromptu night sleeping behind this church in the grass. We waited for about 30 minutes and got a ride from this guy Jacob, taking us all the way to Portland. Since it was getting late he invited us to stay at his place, where we have been offered couches, food, beer, computers, and all the wonderfulness of the world. His roommate is bottling beer he brewed tonight and told us about his cross-country bike trip to move from New York to Portland.

The world is wonderful sometimes. Tomorrow we hitch out of Portland towards Colorado.

we been drinking, we been drinking

2008-08-13T15:22:00.000-07:00

So Jeff and I are now in the Manzanita, OR public library. After a few days in Portland, walking around, eating at the wonderful vegan restaurants, and having an amazing bike ride, we decided to hitch for the coast on Tuesday.

First we took the bus to far west part of Portland. However the first thing that happened was we ended up walking highway 26 for a couple miles looking for a good spot to hitch from. After an unsuccessful few hours, we started walking further. This happened a few times until we started getting worried about our night's sleep. We found some blackberries growing, harvested the shit out of a couple of bushes, and had our lunch. We had been walking all day and still near Beaverton, the suburb/town bordering Portland.

Eventually this dude in a pick-up truck told us to get in even though he wasn't going far. Jeff got in the back, gripped on for dear life, and we took a 20-minute ride, did some more walking, and ended up in North Plains, OR. We dumpstered/stole some stale bread and bagels from a senior center and decided to head for a place called "Horning's Hideout" campground to spend the night. We got a ride from this insane man named Tony. He picked us up, listened to our story, threw his head back and cackled as he pulled his turqoise 1950s-ish convertible onto the windy road. He called us hoodlums. The campground was an odd nook of the world. The lady who greeted us debated for a few minutes whether we better sleep at tent site #1 or #2, for one surely had a better view - they ended up being about 10 feet apart.

So after a cold night's sleep (Jeff is in dire need of a sleeping bag) we hitched back into North Plains. After jumping out of this guy's pick-up, we headed straight for a dumpster to get some cardboard for a sign. The guy who drove us saw us picking around the dumpster, and gave us ten bucks and told us to get some food. It felt a little weird accepting the money, but Jeff and I did buy food.

Then we got on 26 and in about 15 minutes we got a girl who said she'd take us all the way to Manzanita (where we originally had wanted to go). On the way we talked about politics, clear cutting in Oregon, and India. It was a sweet deal. She stopped along 101 and we gazed at a beautiful vista. The tiny town here is cute, natural foods store, eco-clothing shop, etc.

Tonight we drink beer, watch the sun set over the Pacific, and sleep, maybe in the Nehalem Bay State Park. Tomorrow we hitch for Olympia.

little rooster crowin', must be something on his mind...

2008-08-07T16:28:00.000-07:00

Ah, the internet. Again I am missing the farmer's market to do the computer thing.

So I am leaving this farm on Saturday, headed for Portland to meet up with Jeff, then leaving off from there. We're thinking Oregon coast, Olympia, WA, and east to Boulder, CO on the way home. We might go to Astoria - which is where they filmed The Goonies.

It's been much of the same. I've been mainly digging a giant hole and getting pretty tired of the manual labor. And I'm so ridiculously dirty that getting back to the city doesn't sound so bad. Of course I got some cross-country hitchhiking in my near prospects, and that don't seem too clean.

So the two other WWOOFrs from Virginia left this week. But briefly, mid-week, they came back to claim a left guitar, and they had picked up a guy from a rideshare on craigslist. He was a 22-year-old Michigan native, just graduated from the University of Hawaii, and had just completed a two month cross-county bike trip. He started in York(something), VA and exactly two months later was in Astoria, OR. The journey took him through some national parks, the Rockies, and wherever one might see water buffalo. Because he saw some water buffalo. He was this short guy with a pretty normal looking bike. He said he didn't train at all for it, didn't even have a proper bike until the trip. Though he was in decent shape because he is in the air force, it seems amazing that he could go that quick (80 miles a day!) without excessive training. That was an inspiration. And I believe I will soon do that. A girl on the farm, also 22, spent the last year biking around New Zealand. So look at me, getting in cars and shit. I will stop that at the next best opportunity. Jeff will come.

So Hood River has it's own currency! Fuck yeah trying to secede from the union. And Juliet was telling me about Cascadia, a proposed Northwestern country, wanting to secede and printing their own money too. It's only a matter of time. Go Lakotah!

Woniya is making a tuxedo for her soon to be married friend out of buck-skin - a buxedo. She makes most of her clothes out of roadkill'd deer hides and now this dude is gonna get married in it. Today we smoked a hide. She uses some sticks, some rotten logs, and some twine stuff - no schmancy tools. She also makes all her own baskets from willow bark. And this other dude on the farm, O'Ryan, the most stoic fellow I'll ever meet, makes his own tools. We're building a solar shower right now and all the lumber either came from trees left behind by clear-cutters or stuff O'Ryan chopped down himself. The farm is a second generation forest, and the people there are into sustainable forestry. Which means cutting down at-risk trees, unhealthy trees, or fire hazards - which is pretty awesome.

Sleeping alone in the woods is, I must admit, somewhat nerve-wrecking at times. I wake up in the middle of the night, grab the hunting knife I acquired and hold it tight to my chest. My first thought is, cougar! - I then calm down a bit and reason it to be mere coyotes, I can probably stab a few of those. Or maybe a bobcat, I could do a bobcat. Little by little I relax and watch little nocturnal rodent things try to burrow underneath my tent. I'm a little pussy suburban boy sometimes.

West coast squirrels are different from east coast squirrels. On the east coast, squirrels aren't up at the crack of dawn throwing shit at you and screaming murder. They have this crazy high-pitched squeal and they are aggressive little fuckers. I'll wake up after my tent has been squirrel-bombed a few times, zip open the tent, throw some rocks at them or something. They get to the nearest tree, look me and the face, and let out this war cry as dozens of pine combs come rocketing down on my tent.

Anyway, the internet.

2008-07-31T15:41:00.000-07:00

So right now I'm playing hookie from the farmer's market to get my society fix. This week has furthered the greatness/craziness of my time on the farm.

Right now we're digging a giant hole to build a root cellar so Woniya has something to eat in the winter. I've also been learning how to preserve and pickle things. Made some pickles and some Kim-Chi. Met the guy that lives in the woods - his name is Perrigrin. Kind of like Thoreau in that he's an anarchist, different in that he believes in faeries.

As I've been digging and moving around the farm I've found a hilarious amount of bones. Real-life animal bones. I've also heard the stories of bobcats, bears, and cougars. After hearing of these things I was posthaste made to walk alone through the woods and stay up quite a bit listening to the rustle in the bushes. That's OK.

The land that we're on is in some kind of legal battle right now with the family that used to own it. The guy that always lived there, Don, died in December and left the community living there ownership of the land in his will. Now the family is contesting the will. There is kind of a hippie-commune-roadkill-eating-farmer bunch versus rich-sell-the-land-to-logging peoples battle going on. We all know who the world favors.

So I might go to this music festival on this other farm outside of Portland this weekend. But I also might hang out alone on the farm, read books, and galavant through the wilderness eating raspberries. We'll see.

hood river public library

2008-07-28T16:21:00.001-07:00

So much to tell. I haven't had the internet for a week. I'm at the public library in Hood River, OR right now.

The ride to Portland worked out, got to Juliet's late Monday night. While leaving Mount Shasta with Ellen I got a citation from the police for taking off my seatbelt before coming to a complete stop. It was complete bullshit. I have a courtdate Aug. 12th that I'm not going to go to. Oh well. When the cop saw my Maryland I.D. he threatened to arrest me. He was very quizzical about what I was doing in California. Ellen got a ticket for "parking" in a fire zone, even though the only reason she parked there was because the cop told her if she moved any further he would arrest her.

Anyway, so Portland was awesome. Amazing local beers, great bike-friendliness, and (apparently, based on my experience) impromtu bluegrass performances on porches, often including members who live in yurts in the backyard and play basses made out of washtubs. I'll tell more of Portland later.

So I hitchhiked out of Portland to Hood River to work on the farm I'm at now. I went to the far Northeast corner of the city, found the exit for Hood River, and flew a sign. In about 5 minutes this Iranian guy picked me up and took me to what he said was a better spot to hitch from. In our brief time together he reccommended I "get the fuck out of this stupid country" and "go teach English in Europe or something, you know how to speak that." He took me to a gas station/truck stop. After about 10 minutes, I got picked up by a Romanian truck driver who dropped me off on the highway by the Hood River exit. He was a pretty cool guy, not the best English speaker, but nice - it seemed he would have driven me wherever I wanted to go on his journey to New Jersey. Odd how Americans seem so afraid of hitchhiking, so the only people to pick me up are foreigners. It was funny looking a big hippie VW vans with long-haired, flowy clothed travellers in them, giving me weird looks, like "what the hell are you doing, don't you have a car?"

So anyway, Rahane farm, where I'm staying, is pretty amazing. I've learned such a ridiculous amount in a few days that I can't say it all here. The farm is a small community, everyone tending to their own gardens. Woniya, the lady I'm working with, grows a bunch of different vegetables and fruits - some I've never even heard of. I've been walking around the farm just feasting these past couple days. The farm is off the grid, no electricity except one solar panel which people seem to use just to charge their cell phones. They compost their own poop and use it as a fertilizer - it takes three years before it's safe to use. I'm staying in my tent in the woods with two other WWOOFrs - Paul and Annie from JMU. On Saturday the three of us hiked up Mount Hood until we got to the beginning of the glaciers. From this one vista we could see Mount Hood, Mount Adams, and Mount St. Helens - the latter two in Washington. Which means we must have been able to see quite a few miles away. After coming down we went to this local pub, where this girl living on the farm works - free beer! Lots of free beer!

The view from the farm is incredible. A straight shot view of Mount Hood, the tallest mountain in Oregon.

Today I learned about brewing mead, which Woniya does in her small cottage/shack/house thing. I also had some of her homebrewed kombucha, which it seems everyone on the farm grows. My meals have come primarily from her garden with some outside staples (rice, bread, oats, etc - some of which were dumpstered). Then we went to this other farm, Riversong, where we harvested different herbs and some berries.

Woniya is into all these different primitive living skills. I've met so many people through this journey and found out so many different ways to live. There are totally people living outside this system. There's the 26-year-old hermit living in the woods somewhere near my tent. There's Woniya, who picks up road-killed deer from the interstate, eats the meat and uses the hide for clothing and backpacks. There's Scottie from Mount Shasta, who Ellen and I crossed paths with as he descended the mountain. 22-years-old, bearded, tanned, and completely naked. He was smiling and apparently high from singing on the mountain top for a month and watching butterflies.

I've also met alot of people recently into alternative kinds of healing. I'm really only understanding bits of what they're talking about, as I'm a complete novice in a lot of Asian philosophies and astrology.

In other news, Woody Harrellson was interested in seeing Velocipede so Justin and Jeff are sending him a copy. This is pretty cool news, I hope he backs or supports us in any way possible.

I've found that a lot of my fears are dissipating. I used to be afraid of nature, basically. Scared of the dark, scared of animals and bugs. Now I'm camping basically alone, I've spent a few nights sleeping out under the stars and I'm running around unchartered brush pretty comfortably. I'm dirty and smelly as hell and I haven't seen my reflection in a few days.

So from here, in a few weeks I meet Jeff in Portland and the third part of my journey commenses - the gradual return home. I've had a few more places reccommended to me. I hope Jeff is alright with hitchhiking.

Anyway, later.

2008-07-22T11:45:00.000-07:00

So I got to Juliet's place in Portland last night. The lady who gave me a ride from Berkeley was crazy. Very nice, but crazy.

So Sunday morning I find out she's picking up these two Irish girls from this frat house near UC-Berkeley and I go there to wait for her. She is extremely later than she had promised. So as we're about to leave we discover a tree sit down the road. So we meander down there where these kids have been in a tree for 597 days to protest further development of this sports complex. Pretty awesome. Ellen, the woman, and I then participate in a prayer circle - all the while the two Irish girls waiting in the car anxiously. So we make it out of Berkeley, heading for Redding, and after about 20 minutes she wants me to drive. So I do. When we get to this place, near Redding, this guy Ryan who was hosting these 7 Irish dancers in the Berkeley frat house is having a BBQ at his place. So I get a free meal.

Then Ellen and I head for Mount Shasta where we spend the night. So Ellen, despite being a really cool, progressive hippie lady, takes forever to do absolutely everything. The past two days have been mostly me waiting for her to do things. More later.

We sleep out under the stars by Mount Shasta - after me having to push her Volvo out of a ditch. In the morning we go for a hike. But first she has to talk to every person she meets on the campground. The funniest encounter goes on between her and this lady from North Dakota named Tyla.

Ellen: Do you know Alexander? I call him Barry because that's how I met him. He's the drum man.

Tyla: Yeah, he was here the other night and I was going to see him at the market in town.

E: Yeah I know Barry from way back, in the 80s, I used to love coming up here. We'd all hike up to Squah meadows and Barry would host these drum circle. One time I was in a parking lot in town and he came up behind me, put his hands over my eyes, and did a guess who thing....(longer)

Tyla: You should spend more time in the mountains. Your energy is really high.

E: Oh I'm always like this.

T: Well, the mountain can do great things.

E: Oh, I'm just a libra (or whatever sign makes sense).

T: But see, that story you just told me, I didn't really want to hear that. I think you need to be more considerate of the people around you.

(never finished this post...)

know what you go crazy

2008-07-20T08:32:00.000-07:00

So yesterday I got dropped off in Berkeley. First thing I discovered was a farmer's market, so I bought some fruit and took a nap in the park. Walking around Shattuck St there is about a vegan place per block - so I got some lunch. I tried to couchsurf in SF, but didn't have enough time to find someone, so it seems I found the last bed in a hostel in town. I called every hostel in this handbook Gordon gave me, all booked up.

So then, in response to a post I put on craigslist, this 50-year-old woman calls and offers me a ride to Portland. But first we're going with a group of Irish travelers to Redding, CA for a BBQ or something. And then! Her, someone else, and I are going to Mount Shasta to spend the night on the mountain. Then I'll probably get to Portland Tuesday or so.

I love San Francisco and I love hostels. I missed getting drunk with Europeans.

looking for a magic carpet ride

2008-07-18T21:36:00.001-07:00

Today I dropped Pete off at the Bob Hope airport. Came back to his place, applied for some jobs in DC, talked things over with Justin about our bike doc. He's got a hook up at Planet Green, so we should be able to get a meeting with them, and we may be pitching a several part series to them? Interesting. I still like the idea of the documentary, and I'm afraid Planet Green might quell anything we want to say that's "too radical" or "not marketable." But I'm 22 and if we have a chance at this I'm not going to turn it down.

Later I walked to this vegan place around the corner, had lunch all by my lonesome, then hopped the bus (it took 75 minutes to go 3 miles! Fuck LA transit!), and saw some Dark Knight. My god it was awesome. Heath Ledger was creepy, Aaron Eckhart was pretty good - and his Two-Face look, sccccaaarrryyy! Anywho.

Also, quick funny embarrassing story. Right before I caught the first bus, I sharted.

So my ride fell through for today. I already said that. But then the girls that we're going to give me a ride on Monday, moved it to Tuesday. So I decided screw that, I'm getting out of LA. I found a ride for tomorrow morning to San Francisco. Initially I was getting a ride to Sacramento, which is a tad farther. But I've been to SF before, I have a list of dozens of hostels if I get in deep, and I figure it won't be too hard to hitch along the 101 all the way to Portland. I can already think of a decent spot to stand, right before the Golden Gate bridge. SF is a more alternative city, so it probably won't be too hard.

So tomorrow around noon I'll be homeless in San Francisco! A year ago my circumstance, in the same town, was quite different. If anybody knows anyone in Frisco - hit me up!! I might try and couchsurf. Shouldn't be too hard.

So I think after I eat these here orzo pasta, I'm gonna walk around the corner and treat myself to a couple cold ones in preparation for a bit of a shaky weekend.

Something I haven't mentioned about my trip: When Heather, Ashlea, Peter and I were all in LA, one night we went out to the Upright Citizen's Brigade Comedy Club. There we saw the stand up of the man, Judd Apatow (Knocked Up, 40 Year Old Virgin, Freaks and Geeks, etc). Before the show I ran into him in the hallway; the exchange was, well, a little awkward. He gave me a "you probably know who I am so I'm going to smile awkwardly and try to squeeze quickly past you in this narrow passage" glance and I gave him a "what's with the flirty eyes old man oh crap I think that's Judd Apatow" look. His stand-up was pretty funny, but then, as a special guest, he brought out Jonah Hill (Superbad). He was awesome, hilarious, and wonderfully shaped. Also heard Jason Schwarzman was prowling the area. So that has been the extent of my Hollywood sightings.

The end.

serenity

2008-07-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

This is the (very) low-quality video I made of the farm/mountains. Everything is about three million times more beautiful than it looks in this video. I also threw it together in about 2 hours - not really a piece of art. This is the best I could get with a small file using Peter's computer. I'll make the prettier version on DVD.

you're shaking my confidence daily

2008-07-16T16:03:00.000-07:00

So a little change in plans. I've just gotten back to Peter's apartment in LA after a confusing ride aboard the Crucero (the Mexican version of Greyhound). Pastor Jones: Preachin' to the Choir - the film Peter was going to make - is a no go. The producer quit. But Peter got paid for the script he wrote and has been hired to write another, called "Johnson Family Christmas." So tonight we're going to watch the prequel and throw out some story ideas. I'll probably get a 'Story by...' credit.

Also, Peter is flying to Maryland on Friday to drive cross-country with Ashlea and all her stuff. (She got the teaching job in LA and is moving out here. Congrats Ash!). Anyway, so I have to get out of LA. I found a ride on Craigslist to Portland on Friday. So I'll be going up there in just two days!

So more about the hiking trip I just embarked on. So Gordon took us (me and this girl Liz, a 23-year-old wanderer, formerly from Colorado) to San Jaquinto Mountains where he spent much of his youth and told us countless stories about living in the mountains. He spent a year and a half living the primitive life in the mountains. He was in his early 20s and it was the 70s - a time when there were many hippies living naked up in the canyon.

Friday night we parked our car in Palm Springs, jumped a few gates, and hiked through the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation in sheer darkness. We went along an ancient Indian trail that apparently no one but Gordon and his guests use anymore. He owns a bit of land in the middle of the canyon, and it's the only way to get there. When I say trail, I hardly mean trail. There were no blazes, sometimes no stamped down dirt, and sometimes nowhere to walk. Most of it was climbing straight up. And some of it was tiptoeing along a ledge, sticking your nails into the rock wall in front of you, and hoping you don't step on any loose rocks.

We made it in a few hours to where we were going to spend the night. I slept on a little bed of sand under a giant boulder, overlooking the canyon, Tahquitz Creek and Palm Springs in the distance. There were Kangaroo rats crawling around us in the night. Our packs drew rats, rats draw rattlesnakes, you get the idea. Anyway, I spent the four hours Gordon allowed us four sleep staying up with Liz kicking at rats and shining my flashlight every time I heard a rustle in the bushes.

We got up at six, climbed to the peak, then back down into the canyon. Once we got deep into the mountains it was a different world. It stopped looking like the desert. The temperature dropped, there was vegetation, waterfalls, and a river raging through the rocks. Every time we came across any pool more than a few feet deep, Gordon stripped his clothes and hopped in. Liz and I were a bit more modest. But after a day of hiking, when we finally reached our camp - a cave right beside a waterfall - we stripped our clothes and went swimming naked. Our accommodations were sand and some sleeping bags. I came out of the water and took a nap in the shade of a rock.

Gordon, again, was a wealth of knowledge. He took us to Indian grinding stones, a painting done by the Cahuilla Indians on a rock, and told us how people got by without society or society's tools up there. He said when he was living in the mountains, he would mostly run around naked, along with the others he lived with. He survived on a diet of sprouts - lentils, alfalfa, sunflower, azuki - soaked millet, and whatever cactus fruit, wild grapes, etc that he could forage. He told us how he would sprout these legumes, grind the sprouts in a rock (the same the Indians used for hundred or thousands of years), mix in onions he grew outside the cave, add in whatever else he had, let the mixture cook on a rock in the desert sun, and have himself some sort of raw vegan veggie burger.

Occasionally he would hike back towards Palm Springs where grapefruit and carob grew and collect them. He told us how a couple that lived in another canyon had their child in the caves and raised it for the first few years up there. He said sometimes people would kill a wild ram, and share. Him, a vegetarian, lived on a few staples he would buy in bulk in town and would scavenge the rest.

After awhile of seeing him skip around the rocks, diving in the pools, completely naked, Liz and I started taking off our clothes and running around too. On the third day we went for a hike deeper into the canyon. After going for a swim, us all swimming naked, we started exploring. So for a couple of hours I was swimming in this stream, jumping from boulder to boulder, and climbing ledges completely naked with two people I had just met. It was a liberating experience.

The hike back was difficult. Again in the dark with all my muscles aching, it was sometimes terrifying to be edging across a ledge, with nearly a mile plunge to the creek beneath me. I'm still pretty sore.

in the desert

2008-07-11T21:47:00.000-07:00

So I'm not going to go into too much detail. I will write more later as I am sure I will have tons more to say.

But I'm in Southeastern California right now. Near Bombay Beach, east of the Salton Sea, in the foothills of the Chocolate Mountains. I arrived today by Greyhound, stopping in Indio, CA - the closest bus stop. I'm staying with a man named Gordon. He was a farmer in Ojai, CA for 30 years and has moved to the desert where it seems he has spent much of his time especially in his younger days.

First thing we did when I got here was take a tour of his land. He has several date palms, a few olive trees, and a sweet lime. He is using salt water pumped from a well so some of the plants are trying to get used to the salinity. I learned a lot about dates immeadiately - hopefully I retain a lot of it.

In the evening we took a hike a mile down the hill to a lake. The lake is from an artesian well - from what I get, kind of like a regular well, except you don't have to pump it. So it is sending water from beneath the mountain down a stream into a lake. The high salinity made for quite interesting deposits everywhere. I ate some salt straight from the pipe. Then we walked around the lake. Gordon got naked and went for a swim. I sat down and watched some fish.

Walking around, I found Gordon to be a wealth of knowledge about the local plant and animal life. He showed me some mesquite, a staple food of the local Indian tribe, which we started munching on for the hike back. It is a legume, really sweet, and growing in abundance - all naturally. He also pointed out some invasive species of an Asian plant - I can't remember the name. He said were going to spend some time trying to eradicate that.

Tomorrow we are going up into the San Jacquinto (maybe spelling that right) mountains. He has a cave he has stashed some sleeping bags and provisions in. We are going to swim, film, explore, etc. I brought Peter's Mini-DV video camera which I've already put to great use.

I am seeing things (already!) I have never seen before in my life. I am in the desert in the middle of nowhere.

There is a strange feeling inside of me. I am scared. Everything I know is very far away. The cities are very far away. If I shout, civilization can't hear me. There is no paved road leading up to his house - I don't know if I've ever seen that before. The East Coast is ruined, man inhabits all. There is a weird freedom out here.

fireworks at lake michigan

2008-07-08T17:19:00.000-07:00

Today, as Ashlea was interviewing for a teaching job here in LA, I plucked an orange from an orange grove adjacent to the school. It was delicious.

I also ate some palm fruit I found on the ground.

To add to the earlier post, the seaweed, taken straight from the Pacific, tasted like pickles.

how long would it take me to walk across the united states all alone?

2008-07-08T09:06:00.000-07:00

So I'm in Los Angeles right now staying with Peter at his place in North Hollywood. I was coming to LA kind of expecting to not like the city. Smog, lots of cars and highways, bad for bikes. But I think I could live here despite that. I'd probably just get a bike and rough it until things got better. There aren't really any bike lanes here, but the roads are big enough that it doesn't look too dangerous.

Yesterday I went to Santa Monica beach. I ate some seaweed/sea vegetables I pulled out of the ocean. I also found some limes growing behind Peter's apartment that I'm going to pick when I'm here later in July - they're not quite ripe yet. Also, while I was in Las Vegas I found an apricot tree on the side of Corey's house that I don't think any of the roommates knew about. Picking things right from the tree and eating for free is delicious. I can't wait to have a yard and a tree with the fruit of my choice.

On Thursday Heather flies back home. On Friday Ashlea flies back home (she decided last minute to come out here to see Peter and hang out with us in Vegas and LA). And on Friday I leave for the first farm. I'm taking a Greyhound to Indio, CA. The farm is about an hour from that. But that is the closest bus stop/town to the farm. I'm literally going to be in the middle of nowhere.

I hope when I get there I can walk up to some fig or date trees and just have a feast. I'm going to take Peter's camera and get some footage of the desert mountains and caves we're going to be exploring. In less than a week from now, I'll be sleeping in caves.

New exciting plan for the bike documentary: once it is finished we want to set up a Q&A tour at different places around the country, like college campuses and stuff. But the best part, we'll be biking to all of them! If that can work out, amazing. Even if it's just a couple spots on the East Coast. Jeff said he heard of a coast to coast bike trail.

Right now Jeff and Justin are working on getting their short exposure (festivals, etc.) and when I get back we're going to try and get funding for the feature. We're going to try for some grants, maybe make it through PBS, talk to different doc companies, etc. The places where Justin works, TEAM, an awesome post-production/production house has said they would help us out. Plus, there's some people there who could probably be a lot of help with advice on getting grants.

2008-07-02T09:58:00.000-07:00

In Las Vegas now staying with my friend from high school/middle school. This city seems to be the pinnacle of waste in America. It's a city in the desert that can't really produce anything for itself. Besides that it is one enormous suburb. The old downtown is the only bit that slightly resembles a city. The strip is just a themepark. There are air-conditioned, outside parts. Considering it was 112 yesterday, a/c outside must be quite a bit of expended energy.

There's also no citywide recycling program because you pay no city taxes living in Vegas, every 'public' thing is paid for by the casinos. If you need more proof that gambling is a ridiculously lucrative venture, go to the Venetian hotel and see that fake San Marco plaza - equipped with a canal and gondolas, fake Italian buildings and a fake Italian evening sky. And of course shops to purchase real Italian merchandise.

That said, I'm having a good time. Heather and I are about 13 bucks down in gambling. Vegas is winning.

Also, even Las Vegas has more bike lanes than Baltimore.

On the Greyhound to Chicago (which took 21 hour altogether, when you count the 4 hours spent in Pittsburgh in the middle of the night because they overbook their buses) I met some interesting people. On the Cleveland to Chicago ride we sat next two some self-described 'thugs.' One was a black 20-year-old who grew up in Chicago. He was a traveling salesman, selling magazines. From what I got from his story he was in Massachusetts and got spit on after going to someone's door. So he got a brick, smashed through their back window and beat him up. He then got arrested, paid his bail, and instead of waiting around for his court date, caught the next bus back to Chicago.

Another guy, named James, was a 22-year-old white guy from rural Pennsylvania. He was the father of two small children, and on his way to see them in their new Iowa home in an attempt to get back with his 'baby's mama.' He had skipped out on her and gone to Camden, NJ where he got 11 months in prison for something he wouldn't say. Nestled up next to him, was a 'ho [he] just met' - 26-year-old Liz, also just out of jail in Salisbury, MD on her way to St. Paul, MN to pick up her daughter who'd been living with her crackhead mother. She also was going to see her girlfriend, say her last goodbyes, and take her daughter to live with her boyfriend in Salisbury. Meanwhile, on the bus, she was wacking off James under an awkwardly placed hoodie.

The last one of this bunch, Rick, was probably the most annoying guy I will ever meet in my life. He had a fitted baseball cap, with 'Hustle King' written across it. He was a white guy, about 30, and said he had spent 13 years of his life in prison. He was the guy who plays rap really loud on his cellphone on a quiet 7am Greyhound bus just so people know he's there. He was, apparently, the 'master of fucking bitches' and he could get more 'ho's' in an hour than any of the surrounding 'thugs.' He told us often of this talent.

James, after awhile in the trip, started talking to me and asking me about myself. He called me one of those 'computer guys' who probably sits in front of a computer making more than a guy like James could ever hope to make. He gave me a bunch of scenarios and wanted to know how I would react. I come home from a trip and find 'my bitch with another dude' or I'm at a bar and somebody spits on me. When I didn't go into detail about all the people I would murder, he said I was the most dangerous kind of people. "It's the quiet guys, who look all peaceful, they're the ones who build the bombs, not us thugs, we just take a few people out by ourselves."

Though it was at times very annoying to hear them boast who'd served more time, fucked more bitches, done more drugs, or been the most violent, it was also interesting to hear some of the ridiculous stories they had. Crazy people.

pull over there's a reason why my soul's unsound

2008-06-29T22:31:00.000-07:00

I'm couch surfing in Chicago right now. Woke up this morning spooning with a pitbull. Walked through a gay pride parage. Saw some museum.

The girl we're staying with, Leah, she knows the revolution's coming.

A little drunk, just saw some sweet blues at The Green Mill. There was an old blind man on the organ. Yes.

until the shiver in the river is gone

2008-06-23T07:53:00.000-07:00

Today is the end of my lease on my apartment, tomorrow is my last day of work, and I leave for Chicago on Friday. So with all things to prepare for and do, I went to New York on Saturday and got a tattoo.

New York is insane. So many people, all so crazy, all doing crazy things. I think I have got to live there for at least a year or two sometime in my twenties. By far the best thing that happened while we were in New York was stumble across a massive skateboard critical mass. There was maybe a couple thousand (it's hard to judge masses of people all spread out) skaters, A LOT of little kids. It was great to see these kids take the streets.

For the tattoos (Jeff also got one) we went to this place that used vegan ink – though the artist didn't know it was vegan ink. I wanted something pretty complicated and awesome on my forearm that my two artist roommates and I designed. But it was going to take forever, not keep the best, and be probably very expensive – so I'm holding that off for later. Instead, on an impulse, I got this:

It's kind of Kurt Vonnegut (as my friend Brian pointed out). It's like, "Life – check!" I like it on my upper arm because I'll never have a problem covering it up – I'm still afraid what of people think. I need to fix that. Note: I already had my shirt off when I took this picture. I'm not trying to show off my sweet chest hair.

So it's likely the next, or near next post, will be from the road.

ain't it everybody's sun to wake to in the morning when we rise

2008-06-16T10:26:00.000-07:00

I did a rehearsal packing of my bag last night. My roommate Smoot and I deliberated over placing and positioning. I’ve got my tent, a sleeping bag, some clothes and other things in there right now. Of course it will fill up with some random things. But it’s looking good right now.

I also got a response from someone in Chicago through the website Couchsurfing.com. They said Heather and I could stay at her place while we are in Chicago. So far I’ve finagled it as to not have to pay to sleep anywhere. I’ve got places in Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Portland, and of course the farms in California and Oregon.

I think while I’m in LA I’ll be helping Peter make a film for Nu-Lite Productions. Should be a great experience. Spending a week or so running around Los Angeles in production.

I moved most of my stuff out of my apartment last night back to my parent’s house. It’s nice to see my room with only a bike, a backpack, a basket of clothes, and my laptop sitting on the floor. Hopefully future dwellings will resemble this. When I get back I want to go through all of my stuff at home. Get rid of even more. The only thing I’ve successfully shed myself of in the past month is a lot of clothing. I have so much excess crap. After sorting my possessions out I can move into wherever I’m going to move, near wherever I’m going to work, in whatever city that is.

But you know, last night we were all sitting around talking about the coming economic crash/social revolution/oil depletion/environmental crises that we’re about to face. So whatever on that job thing. Instead of trying to swim backwards into the madness, I’m gonna ride the wave of society until it comes crashing down.

I finished Ishmael by Daniel Quinn the other day. There are a lot of thoughts in that book about the place of society and it’s sustainability. There were a lot of thoughts I liked in his book and a lot I didn’t. It talks a lot about the rules of nature – not taking more than you need, respecting other species’ right to exist – and I like that. I think it’s imperative we view ourselves as part of a larger functioning system. Too often things like religion and culture allow us to view ourselves as the pinnacle of existence and the reason for the existence of the earth, the solar system, and the entire galaxy. This enables us to use the environment and animals destructively and cruelly. If we saw ourselves as playing an equally important role in a large delicate system, we might think to extend passion to the non-human earthlings (not that we always extend passion to other humans).

However I feel Quinn fails to recognize Western/modern society does not operate separate from nature. We did not get to this place out of malicious towards or hatred for our surroundings. We have simply possessed a physical power greater than our intellect. Mankind is Lennie Small from Of Mice and Men – we didn’t really mean to crush the rabbit.

they're selling postcards of the hanging

2008-06-09T10:25:00.001-07:00

So I was perusing the internet earlier this morning, as to avoid the things that I should be doing in preparation of my trip. And I stumbled across information about the Republic of Lakotah. This image should shock you a little bit:

So the Lakotah people have decided, in their own words, to “formally and unilaterally withdraw from all agreements and treaties imposed by the United States Government on the Lakotah People.”

You can look it up on wikipedia for some, always reliable, information. But basically it’s like this, last December a couple tribal leaders headed to DC, relinquished their US citizenship and reclaimed the sovereignty promised to them by the government during Western settlement.

I think this is awesome. All the power to them. Also, the borders they’ve set up for Lakotah encompass Omaha, Nebraska – a pretty big city. They’ve also said they would accept refugees from the United States. They’ve sent word to foreign embassies seeking to get recognition.

Basically the US government is ignoring them. No chance in hell would they give up that chunk of land. And as soon as they do something by way of direct action, or if it’s anything like American Indian Movement stuff of the 70s, they’ll be labeled domestic terrorist and sent to jail.

I also read about the Second Vermont Republic - a group of secessionists in Vermont. Yep.

I’m reading Ishmael right now by Daniel Quinn – which is definitely putting me in the right mood to receive information like this. We’re a failed culture ravaging a stolen land. Western Civilization, and those who imitate it, is an invasive species devouring one land after the next, consuming resource after resource. And now we’re mapping out space, planning our invasion.

you can drive out nature with a pitchfork but it always comes roaring back again

2008-06-04T08:52:00.000-07:00

"A war against earth.
-When it's done there'll be
====no place

-A Coyote could hide.

==================envoy

==============I would like to say
==============Coyote is forever
==============Inside you.

==============But it's not true."

-from "The Call of The Wild"
by Gary Snyder

Yesterday I made my first trip by bike into the city. It’s only about ten miles, but I had as of yesterday never made the trek. It was liberating to know I could reach one of my typical destinations fairly easily by bike. Since I plan on getting rid of my car for good before I leave (in about 3 weeks), it is nice to know I have that range now.

I probably won’t be moving back to Towson/Baltimore though. It might be nice to get a place in Hampden or Charles Village, but I don’t really know what I would do in Baltimore. Of course I don’t really know what I would do anywhere. We’ll see.

Another plan, I was talking over with Jeff the other night, is this: his documentary, Velocipede, now the Emmy-award-winning documentary Velocipede, is something we believe could be taken further. The film is a short Jeff and Justin, friend and editor, made for a class. Jeff and I were talking about pitching the idea of feature-length project to some small doc-studios and elsewhere. It would be about urban bike culture, and building community through bicycles. If we could get some money, and spend maybe a year researching and filming a movie about bikes, I’d be more than happy. We’ll see.

Life is so slow since school ended.

take me as i am or let me go

2008-06-02T10:16:00.000-07:00

“The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water…

…she cast her unpleasant, pricking garments from her, and for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her.

How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! how delicious! She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known.”

-from The Awakening, Kate Chopin

I had my graduation party this weekend. There was nothing to tell people.

“I hear you’re going to California!”

“For maybe a month?”

Should I tell people that I believe the economy is crashing and the best thing to do is try and hold on? Don’t build a house when you know the hurricane’s coming.

There was such a hopeless sense of ennui sweeping over me this weekend. As I was opening the last of my graduation cards, picking out the last of the 20 dollar bills, I felt as if this was somehow it. The celebration is over. I see no hand reaching out to help me cross this bridge away from my youth. Standing on the other side is a sad and struggling middle class; in face of their own problems, they are ignorant of the mess their whole generation stands amongst.

So listen to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjwE-kJpyts

then this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbjOrdojVOo&feature=related

How is this guy an authority on anything? It’s funny that he suggest Republicans don’t have problems nominating their candidates (see the 1976 RNC in Kansas City), or that there aren’t protests (see the 2004 RNC in New York). Odd also that he feels this year’s protests will stop in Denver – I’d like to see him on the streets of St. Paul in September.

I’m planning on going to both Denver and St. Paul. I have nothing else to do, so, why not? Also, I have feeling that they may be something of monumental events, and I’d like to see it all go down. It’s also a way to be a part of the uprisings masses that the world doesn’t know exist yet.

I have no plan on how I’m getting there, where I’m sleeping, how I’ll pay for stuff. I’m expecting chaotic streets, and I’ll have a tent. Maybe there will be a bunch of tents set up in the park. At that point I should be sufficiently out of money. I heard Food Not Bombs is doing free feedings in Denver - I'll depend on that.

I almost hope McCain gets elected this November. Bush will bomb Iran sometime this summer, McCain will win on his pro-war military experience, and the revolution will come sooner. Vote McCain, Bring the Revolution.

This crumbling economy is going to disenchant a lot of young people. Disenchanted youth don’t like to listlessly obey the bumbling authority system. Living under the poverty line even after getting college degrees isn’t going to make us too happy.

i cried a river over you

2008-05-29T10:47:00.000-07:00

“Philadelphia smoking in Gold Sunlight, pink blue

====green Cyanide tanks sitting on hell’s floor,

Many chimneys smoldering, city flats virus-linked

====along Delaware bays under horizon-smog –

airplane drifting black vapor-filaments

====above Wilmington - - The iron habitations

====endless from Manhattan to the Capital.

Poe! D’jya prophesy this Smogland, this Inferno,

Didja Dream Baltimore’d Be Seen From Heaven

====by man Poet’s eyes Astounded in the Fire Haze,

=======================carbon Gas aghast!

Poe! D’jya know yr prophecies’ RED DEATH

would pour thru Philly’s sky like Sulfurous Dreams?

Walled into Amontillado’s Basement! Man

====kind led weeping drunk into the Bomb

====Shelter by Mad Secretaries of Defense!”

-Allen Ginsberg,

from “To Poe: Over the Planet,

Air Albany-Baltimore"

A week ago yesterday I graduated college. Though I abstained from the ceremony I hear my name was in the program. And so it begins.

I intend this blog to be a collection of my verbose ramblings/brief thoughts about the state of the world and the state of my life. We’ll see how successful I am with updating and keeping focus.

The more immediate purpose of this blog is to give a report of my upcoming travels. This summer, because there’s nothing else to do with a BA in Film & English, I will have a mini-journey. For about three or so months I’ll do various things, visit various cities, work on various farms, and protest various things. First with my girlfriend Heather, then alone, then with a like-minded, similarly situated, poet friend Jeff.

In a month I move out of this suburban Baltimore apartment, drop the stuff that doesn’t get sold or given away (hopefully I keep less than I probably will) at my parents suburban DC house, and head out West for some adventures. It is my goal, even if I happen to run out of money, which is extremely likely since I have none to begin with, not to call home and cry for a sandwich and a bus ticket back to Maryland.

I’ve never done anything like this. Having lived a relatively sheltered and pampered life it took a couple Jack Kerouac books to realize the potential for any different.

I won’t boast this trip to be some monument of exploration – I’m afraid of the inner city almost as much as being in the dark in the middle of the woods – but it’s a start. In my slow recognition of the nature of myself and my environment, I’ve lost much of my societal ambition in the past year or so. When I enrolled in Towson University in the Fall of 2004, I was putting Imdb.com to memory and setting my eyes on Academy Awards. Now, well, I don’t care so much.

This trip is in order to postpone the decisions everyone is telling me to make. Some examples of the mounting pressures include: the calls from my parents and my girlfriend’s parents to consider marriage, solving my lack of healthcare situation, the offers from my record store boss to stay in the doldrums and sell shitty rap CDs to the Towson suburbs indefinitely, the soon to begin college loans, the recent successes of my peers (NYU grad school, job propositions in LA, an Emmy!), and of course my own desire not to step on any toes when creating my future. I’ve never been one to want to step out of line. Now it seems I’ve developed some values – you know, caring about health/humans/animals/the environment – and all it seems to do is step on toes.

This is what is I should do: apply to work for Voice of America (as I had a successful internship there last summer) or some local TV station, pull in maybe 40-50 grand to start out with, get a nice place near the DC metro, and buy a diamond engagement ring for my girlfriend. That’s what my mom wants, that’s what the TV wants. And I’ve always done what I’ve been told.

But instead I’ve got visions of walking around the deserts of Eastern California, sleeping in caves and seeing stars for the first time in awhile, and eating figs and olives from an organic farm I’ll do some work on. Or walking around and growing vegetables in the Cascades, sleeping amongst the trees and swimming in the Columbia river. Or hitchhiking up & down the West coast, sleeping wherever, meeting whomever, and eating whatever. I could write some poems, eat some apples, and just hang out. Or, you know, other stuff.

Maybe I could do the latter, then the former. Get it out of my system. But what if I don’t want a job, I don’t want to pay taxes, I don’t want to fund sonar bomb blasts in the Oceans that leave whales dead ashore, or donate a good chunk of my income to bombing the shit out of the Middle East so we can keep burning oil and fucking our planet to death, or you know, all the other terrible shit that is going on. What if I don’t want to be included?

So as I write here, for whomever happens to read this, I hope I entertain/inform/inspire/anger/disenchant/re-enchant/or move your emotions in at least the slightest bit. And I hope I don’t sound too pretentious/arrogant/ignorant doing so.

I’ll leave you with this article.

http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/musings-inspired-by-a-quagga/index.html?scp=1-b&sq=musings&st=nyt

P.S. – We’re all gonna die!

READ THIS POEM: Diane di Prima – Revolutionary Letter #37

HEAR THIS SONG: Sam Cooke – Nothing Can Change This Love