today I looked down at my hands while sifting dried cow manuer to make seedbags, and lo woah ahhh ho ho inhale pffffffoooooooooohhhhhhh did I behold they were covered with

GLITTER.

dive into a cold waterfall and air-drying between growing a strong affection for the various phases of cow shit and for pain: (Seven blisters of different ages on my hands and a concrete piercing through my foot: they never tell you how weak you are in a city)

hard hard work and billions of joints. bananas eaten in every form imaginable.

they mine black gold in this region of brazil. a fool here mining for fool´s gold and if you´re lucky i´ll bring some back, melted down and woven into moments of meditation, thanks, and the color green.

repurposing my pen, my nosehairs, my skin

picture this: an eliot pokes its head out of a hole in the ground. the earth shakes a little (remniscent of a faraway quake in chicagoland near eliot's fellow creatures). at once, the eliot leaps out of the hole bearing a huge machete (all-purpose tool) and dirt flies everywhere, spattering blisters and waterfalls and guavas as it races into the bamboo trees. "i live in your dreams!" it screams with delight.

got through rio de janeiro safely, albeit a slight delay because we missed our bus...
now we're in rio pomba!
picked up from the bus station at 2a.m. by a man with a beau-ti-ful head of dreadlocks (you know wwoofing has turned out well when-) and a smaller man, both of them thin and tightly muscled. when you drive the 12km out to the farm, there are lots of monoculture fields of sugarcane, corn, coffee. and then once we arrived (the '86 volkswagen fixed with a pebble, the sky held up with a twig, the mountains eroding because there are no trees anymore to hold up the ground), we were met with something remniscent of a baohaus, rural-ized, in progress, partially roofed, made of cement blocks with ambitions of bioconstruction...the bath is a waterfall and the water, for once, is infinite.

cycles cycles which fit together as cleanly as wet adobe on a wall:
- humans eat fruit and vegetables, goats eat peels and compost, remains are perfect for plants; everyone is nourished.
- tree is cut for building, small pieces used for fire, dust and chips are used for compost toilet; forest thrives with increased light.
- cows eat grass, cow manure is sifted for soil to germinate delicate seeds, remains are used for plants; perhaps the cows are glad.
and in this light, everything begins to fit together: reverse or ignore the crumbling institutions which struggle to salvage ethical ways of living in this world and instead, instead, take a word from the permaculturists and anarchoprimitivists (ritual fits in to, comes easily in a place where the ground, i, and all inbetween are connected somehow).

the first day we were here, we mixed adobe and sand and dirt and grass and some sugar and made adobe, covered a wall of the house. since, az and i have continued to do work on the land (digging huge holes for banana circles, cutting bamboo forest and cleaning long stalks, sifting manure, cleaning found roof tiles) as well as having time-space to draw, paint, designar. my fingers are blistering and callusing but also rememememembering agility and i've been drawing yogic poses, psychedlic plants (oohhh! apparently mushies grow on cow pats here! pray for rain for me plzzz), designs, some rolling hills. artur asked if we could paint the side of the house, not sure i'm ready for that but working up to it.

saving saving saving my sexual energy, the one functionality of my body that, it seems, isn't in use these days.

this morning, i woke up and made a fire to make oatmeal
tonight, we go by bus back to the city
the cars, the smoke, the cops, the corruption and the favelas falling falling like shoeboxes from the top of your closet (or my glasses from my chicagobed)
i've harvested a few choice things from the forest for a carnaval costume...we'll see
i asked az if i should wear my strapon and she said "better not attract undue attention"
unlikely to become a guiding principle in my life, though it is something i am learning and navigating amidst my slowly slowly improving portuguese. (sometimes these moments of invisibility, along with the moments of sprawling distinct euphoria, make me long for the bao.)

oh also! i am sublimating my desire to pick scabs/bugbites into a habit of picking my nose (more). i think it's working!

love to all,
remember your dreams.

free glitter for all

phew...i tried to talk to my sister today about paying for glitter at a huge chain (or anything, really) is dumb.

she kept asking: if everyone stole, wouldn’t they shut down the store and then the people who worked there would be worse off? she said she could get on board with liberating bread/food (the necessaries) but not glitter since i make well enough money to buy glitter.
(of course, this isn’t quite the point...nobody should be paying $5 for glitter, unless they want to.) she was into the idea of gift economies, freestores, how dumb it is that all of the excess of clothes/craft supplies/etc. in peoples’ basements can’t somehow be put back into a free exchange system...but the idea of liberating glitter “made her stomach turn.”

any tips on sharing the pleasure of freeshopping? connecting these liberal-altruistic principles to a sense of injustice/outrage/subversion? or even just talking about “liberation” and getting past the stigma/fear/shame...? (do you see it as a way of coping in a shitty capitalist world and/or a strike against the chain itself?)

i imagine this is something many of you have talked/worked through in your own thinking or with others...any advice or zine/reading recs i could pass along, by comment or email, would be much much appreciated.

i can tell that we are gonna be friieieieieinds

I go to the FRAK EASY last night. I sleep first and then I wake up and it's time to go but the crew is asleep at the helm and we are veering off course. far, far off course. but then I know that the car can keep me company on the road and I glitter up and head off, always 2 lanes ahead of the sunrise. Old Unreliable makes it over the freeway.
The FRAK EASY is definitely best between 4 and 9 in the morning.
This is it - we finally come to a moment that I wait for all my life.
Now I can finally be the life of the party and get my sleep.

there is a beautiful kid who I recognize - otter's zombie buddy from halloween FRAK EASY - all pierced and tattoooood.
we dance and then dance. I feel groovy.
we sit and cuddle. I feel yummy.
We dance more.
Everybody beams and eats pie and pancakes and scrambled eggs that xenon makes. All my friends smile like upsidedown rainbows.
and then Old Unreliable makes it back over the freeway and I read anthropology book by david graeber, "possibilities - essays on hierarchy, rebellion, and desire".
the FRAK EASY is more interesting and I don't like the "comma-and" construction in the title.