PRE-ASPIRATION INSTRUCTIONS

4. Please try to have a bowel movement the evening before or the morning of your procedure.



...and here I fail. I only have 7 hours left to prove myself.

bug-eyes, holes in the ground, peeing on lawns

yesterday i fed the bunnies alfalfa pellets and hugged ruben from behind as he stirred mikey-the-goat-meat chili for lunch,

today i woke up in a mummybag on a white carpet of a floor of a house in columbia city in seattle in a different world.

i have not been posting much recently, though i've been reading avidly and thinking about it,

guess because relationships in my world were moving and shifting,

reading about the diggers in california in the 60s, the san francisco mime troupe and the free family setting up explosive cultural-overhaul communes left and right,

and what do i think? in any moment? and what am i doing, what are we doing?

i am full of vivid images...a winter picnic at the edge of the plateau we lived on, andrew communing with a twisting oak that leaned out over the edge. sarah and i dancing with finger puppets performing a drama of interspecial romance in high british accents as walt watched and smiled and occasionally muttered puns. the front stoop of my trailer. hands twisting in the dark, our last slumber party at windward, and where is the line between sensual and sexual. the feeling of the kitchen at night after everyone had gone to bed and i sat alone with a notebook.

driving into seattle was something

at first the lights were exciting

then i realized i couldn't look at things fast enough,

too much too fast,

so i closed my eyes and played seven with ethan.

the world is big! the universe is loving! all people are beautiful!

i am excited to set out soon (wednesday i think?) on my way down south, traversing new worlds and unknown territories, seeing how my life looks when i offer it in stories. i am excited to see my family-friends-community, thread together different worlds we live in. i am excited to walk outside and smoke a cigarette.

so hello and hello and hello...

"different enough to make a difference?"

or, "notes from the land of goat cheese."

today i woke up in my trailer and fell promptly back to sleep.
when i reawoke, the blue lace-edged curtains and the billion bandannas were swaying and my toes were cold and the world smelled different than yesterday's world.

it's been awhile--four squids on a trip across eight states in a car smelling of bodies and tea tree oil and endless toast and warmth, camping in the rain, dreaming of burritos and kitchens, marmot humor, building a compost toilet, looking at each other in mirrors and reflections and eyeballs again and again. things becoming beautiful and every day entering someone else's little world for a little while and leaving a small trace (a wine bottle? a whiff of body? artificial toeprints?)

traveling through so many worlds, remembering the feeling of explaining myself and being alone in a new place, pulling in and reminding myself to stay open and not to hoard my memories and histories...it's been hard to write honestly for me, hard to parse out the emotional-intuitive-rush from the practical-factual-blurs. so now i find myself in a new kitchen, a new heart, and i'm a little lost without my handsaw and flogger but excited. and i feel far away but not so different.

this morning i held a day-old chick...there are a couple of them trying to break out of their eggs, and some don't make it--still eggs with a couple cracks. there are also guineas and peahens and quails i think, and a couple goats and sheep and two cats and 10 humans and a small garden with a big sign that says "rhubarb." my first job here was to make bread; then walt pulled me aside and told me the focus of my internship here will be bread-making...experimenting, researching, compiling a log for future windward breadmakers of how to make really good bread with the soft white wheat and other stuff growing locally. apparently a working person needs about a million calories a year to survive and people can eat about 4 pounds a day (which is why you couldn't survive on asparagus); 200 pounds of apples a year, he said. i think apples and bread sounds better than apples alone.

this is a funny place, a mix of old and young and influences ranging from philosophy degrees to years of polyamory to something about the military (seems like a community fetish) and something about the Six Nations and something realistic. their up-front intellectualism has kept it pretty much white. it's really research-oriented, as opposed to primarily producing for farmers' markets or being a leisure sideproject...it's an investment for the people who live here in surviving past a collapse and an opensource project in creating not only an environmentally sustainable homestead but a sustainable community structure. the care and love is scattered over a half-mile of little trailers and projects, fences and gardens, greenhouses and ramshackle somethings-that-once-were.

there's a little music; not much art around; i am the only tranny with a handsaw (though i haven't held a handsaw here yet.) but the people seem good (this kid andrew is into wildcrafting and medicinal forest-gardening/agroforesting and sarah & lindsey are thinning the forest...opalyn is working on gasification and they've got some wormies trying hard to compost...lots of building stuff and slow projects taking form) and i'm sure i'll learn a lot.

and there's so much goat milk-cheese-yogurt! more insight and maybe a picture promised with my next post; my heart is still weighing and swaying in my chest.