I been careless.

White limo, old old old, on the corner of Kenmore and Thorndale, painted in red on the sides and back, "Stop the killing, be kind to each other." I am surrounded by white people who find the "war" between the "Wilson" and "Thorndale" gangs an amusing urban anecdote, a place to claim faux ownership over our neighborhood, joking, "We'll come out on top, of course." We will, because it won't touch us. Oh, you mean the gang you've claimed as yours! The gangs filled with faces of kids you've never met with problems you don't understand.

Well, shit. Whence the moral superiority, T'mo? You been just as careless, stamping across the landscape with feet just as light and unburdened as these false claimants. Been careless with your money, time, dreams, friendships, drinking, smoking, possessions, food, breathing, sleeping, electricity, windows and doors, locks, keys, tobacco, communication, plans, dates, words. Think yourself into a tizzy. Dream of the devil retiring to an old mansion, the pale blue paper house that appears over and over, burning it to a crisp brown and dressing up your friends as ghouls. Think yourself in circles, go ahead. But that's it, no more.

What money?

Dear David Casner, VP, UChicago Alumni Board of Govenors,

I don't have a penny to spare to donate to your fund. Not for your university, not for pumping up prestige, not for helping to create unquantifiable numbers to go in brochures, not show other people how much your institution is loooooved by its young alums, not to support a place that shuffles along and pokes and prods the kids who don't want to learn your way, not to put extra shine on the windows of your new arts center, not to attach my name ever more to place that does not represent who I am in totality.

In short, I am other things before I am a UofC graduate. Sometimes I have a hard time figuring out what those things are, but this week I am a reader of Nabokov (Transparent Things, Lolita, whatever's in the house) and swimmer without goggles because I like the sting of chlorine in my eyes. This week I am busy shaking of a creepy cab driver on a drenched Saturday night who insists that I sit up front with him, have a cigarette with him before I head home, who grabs my hand and makes me employ not my social graces but my ability to tell someone to fuck off. I am busy shaking off bullshit and buying curtains.

So, it's awful presumptuous of you to ask me for money. If you think you know where my loyalties lie because you gave me an embossed piece of paper in maroon envelope, you, sir, are sorely mistaken.

T'mo

Further Experiments in Living

Here at The Warren things work a little differently than I have become accustomed to. Here following is account of a new systems, mores, and design statements.

Today we have our first house meeting and we decide:

- meetings will be held biweekly instead of weekly
- check-ins remain intact!
- each meeting will be led by a different person (both the agenda and scheduling - which pleases me greatly and hopefully everyone will feel equally responsible for meetings)
- we won't have chore rotation but we will have a point person (on a rotating basis) to cover basic groceries, hoping that people can be fairly responsible for general upkeep
- one person is in charge of the bills

I make banana bread! But it's super dense because I use baking powder instead of soda. Oops.

I miss: cunts on the walls and a general collect-all-keep-all-find-it-all beautiful style, dance parties, a belief in home made remedies, a love of cleaning products that aren't meant to kill everything.

But -

It's nice and cozy and keeps me on my toes. I have to explain myself sometimes and that can be good for a body. The light tickles every corner of the house and there is always a slight smell of crisp leaves floating at the edges of things. And we still smoke cigarettes on the porch and talk about our days. People sing as they stir pots on the stove and we steal other people's internet (oops). Risto and I make fools of ourselves often and lustily. I am getting used to what seems upfront and on the outside and on the surface and in the pictures on the walls a slight boug factor. I like to think of us as secret agents out in the world, looking and acting normative, but sweetly, quietly thinking/talking/being radical slyly spreading our ways with mere suggestive and example.

It's different. We're different. That's funny but quite alright.

Slide past Toledo and Boston, straight on to Meredith, New Hampshire

funny funny - i see that everyone has demons as everyone gets chewed up by mosquitoes to varying degrees, as everyone gets tickled and cooked by the sunlight to varying degrees (does my skin itch because of bite or because of burn?), so i see when i look them over

we've been intoxicated for days, on a bender incommensurate to our actual needs or so they say, because apparently everything is alright, beautiful, good even. but i wonder what joke is being played on us that we are so delightfully tragic, so erotically bored, needing so much to stretch out our arms and grab. we're out here getting bruised up and crispy, stewing in juices we have injected into our brains.

groups, conflagrations, gatherings. we're in the middle of the burning man of the motorcycle community and i wonder how we all (not just us but anyone joined up for moments unforgettable) manage not to tear each other apart, how we keep things copacetic, how we manage to ignore the simmering ailments below our surfaces. POOR BABY, i say, what ails you? i really want to know. maybe we can make sense of this. we seem to me to be storms brewing within delicate webs of skin and hair. how do we manage? how do we not let the storm pour out of our insides through our nostrils and belly buttons or spit it up in a ball of bile-colored mucus?

but of course in the mornings the lake is cool and you can see straight to the bottom in the shallows. two swallows dip and dive overhead, looking as if they are trying to kiss in mid-air. my skin smells good. i find a fuzzed-over anchor and some empty mussel shells in the water. everything is delicious and the drinks are cold. i look at insects i've never seen before. i feel fantastic and more alert and ready than i have in a while even though i am sleeping far less. we all laugh until our stomachs hurt and we spill things and break things and clean up and take the recycling out and make plans for when we ride further down the coast. we play endless games of cards and we cook in the sun.

i say goodnight. get out of here. you're ridiculous.

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.

fuck all states

i cant, i wont, i dont have time. im supposed to be writing, or thinking, or sleeping, or buying a plane ticket to singapore, or dancing,  or or orrr or

my visa expires in six weeks. i dont want to leave. i have to leave and spendspend spend sending my money to jetairways or kingfisher so they can buy petrol and shoot me over to the land of fast bureaucracy where visas are fast and plentiful, 

if i can

if they allow foreigners to put their life and lineage and intentions on a PDF and pay $150 and get a stamp in a book and get punted back across the bay, sea, ocean to the land of slow bureaucracy and classical dance festivals and trains to the mountains

at this point it's just cheaper to come home in six weeks

fuck everything

i have a 10 page paper due about ________ by sunday morning (it's friday night). i have one paragraph written. all my friends are leaving tomorrow by 7pm. alex and chloe are ready to go, samantha never wants to leave, hannah is going to delhi to meet her parents and "do" rajasthan. i'll see her in chennai later. then pondicherry, ooty, and back to delhi? names names names and places i've seen so many places. im writing about temples... when they are sacred and when they are not. ive been in 9 active temples, 9 places of ambiguous or informal worship, and 18 abandoned temples. if there is no image in the center shrine, and if the image is not bathed and fed and adorned daily by a brahmin, there is no normatively sacred space but i still take my shoes off and stay quiet like a museum. why are ruins museums? 

hannah has returned to use her computer

now my room is hoppin

life is complicated

i hate a lot of things

but am confused and feeling so many thingswordswordswordsss

we will bare our toes for the revolution

great post, nautilus--i like imagining myself hanging from the inside of your eyelid, too.

i returned yesterday from a michigonian woodlands adventure--a mobilizing weekend hosted by the transformative justice law project talking about prison abolition and transformative justice as well as workshops on privilege, trans prisoners, the prison-industrial complex, great squid hotspots in the midwest...

most of those things, though. (+ a horse and some geese and a cat named carlisle.)

imagine these words squirted by a great great squid: improving prisons is not enough! down with the prison-industrial complex! no more corrupt judges and money-driven manipulation of truth! the state does not have the right to pass out arbitrary and cruel punishments! prisons are poisonous loci of social control and abuse! and then that squid divides into a thousand tiny squids and they crawl through ideological cracks and seep ink and fight the arm of bioluminescent crabs that crawl and oppress....

i did a lot of thinking about class privilege (how to be "poor" and a student and in hyde park and all of these things) and how relative privilege is--for instance, i think being female-born makes it easier for me to dress genderfluidly than if i had been born a man. and for the identities that are not granted privileged access in/to the mainstream (like trans people to safe bathrooms), there are often amazing communities of support that form--like queer community, which operates on a plane of privilege itself. or voguing....mmm mmm.

so my brain did some flips, learned some shit, and mostly i met these 10 people who are doing cool shit in the midwest and many of them have love affairs with chicago, which was intriguing. and also i did not wear shoes all weekend. that was a plus.

upon my return i showered (oh did i shower) and mixed up some sea salt and a little olive oil and lavender oil and rubbed it all over myself and now i think i will shower all the time because it was so so good.