Q: What are you doing for the revolution?

A: driftbicycling, wanderwalking, gravestonelooping, furnituresquatting, eyeopening

t-rex and I wandered around chicago by bike today 10:00 am to 12:00 am without direction, observing city fabrics and stitches, car lots and cigarette stores, garage sales, vine-covered duplexes and block parties. an august afternoon, not too hot and chicago is celebrating.

my eyes, feet, butt, and thighs are exhausted.

this city is a place that I will miss.

oh oh starlight compost how will we drift through the california foothills? will there be mariachi music? will there be revolution?

a fragment, half-smoked

recently i have been wincing more upon recollection of recently laid-out misspeaks
also, i have been stuck in a cycle something like this: yeah, i do feel like a woman/ali; then not.
flirting with ideas of gender revolution, of harmonica beatboxing and how my voice saves and betrays me.

(then i lifted a lighter to my lips and flicked it, and upon realizing that i did not have anything in my mouth to smoke, slowly lowered the lighter)
(how did i get ash all over my lips?)
(my eye stings as i inhale and my tired throat gets a little flatter, losing a tiny bit of air)
(the butttray is about 1/2 Cigarettes and 1/2 rollies, an interesting mark of something.)

the marked hen

this is not a story for the faint of heart

here on west wind farm there live about 25 mature hens who lay about 25 eggs every single day. in a separate coop there reside about the same number of 3-month old chicks (who are black and blue and slightly brown and haven't grown their red gobble gobbles on their heads), who will replace the others when they become too old (they're near the end of their lives).
russell, the 22 year old from seattle who came to these lands 4 months ago and has decided he will never leave, is the master of the hens. he feeds them, collects their eggs, and spends good time with the chicks, allowing them to become accustomed to the human touch.
about two weeks ago, russell began noticing queer occurences in the coop. at least one, if not as many as 3, eggs were broken each dusk as he went in to collect them. who was the culprit? the mystery continued...
until last week, russell walked into the coop and saw a hen run out of the wall of nests, with a shell and bit of yolk on her beak. she was caught red handed.

quickly she was moved out of the mature hens coop and into the pen with the younger hens where she could not eat any more eggs. but she kept getting back into her old coop, the wily one. she was then splattered in blue paint, for us to more easily identify the disrupter of order on the farm. since then she has remained with the younger ones.

and there are still more gruesome facts... it seems she is teaching the young chicks of her ways; by laying eggs and pecking at them. the young chicks have never seen eggs before and now, it is feared, all they know is to peck at them until they break.

something must be done about the marked hen. it is russell's mission (a directive from peter, master of the lands) to get rid of her. most likely by outsourcing her death to a neighbor who will find some unsavory use for her tough body.

she will be remembered by the few as a boundary-breaking, devil-may-care, rebel with an unknown cause who was murdered for her beliefs.

rest in peace, marked hen.


----
edit at 3:07pm:
russell dutifully placed the hen in a dog crate and about 10 minutes ago coleman (the neighbor) came by with his dogs in the bed of his truck, placed the hen in with them, and rode away. her body will be too tough to eat plain-- she will have to be boiled or put in a stew in order to be tasty. i told peter i hoped i wouldn't get carted away if i started drinking my menstrual blood and he said if people found out, i just might. but then again no one harvests my blood to sell at saturday markets for $4/dozen. this is so fucked up... she is being killed for eating her own eggs (she laid and ate another one today). apparently with chickens these days it's actually bred out of them to fuck. there is a rooster here who lives with 25 hens and only rarely does one of them actually guard her egg and take care of it (it's called brooding) because she knows it's fertilized.
maybe we will have a little ceremony tonight for her by the fire.

if you give a brain some ice cream, and then take it away

yes i will second rolly in describing saturday night's rave as a lake. i swam as a dance-filled genderconfused body through all the high school girls and the shirtless bros. everything was seeping with sex and straight at that but i forgot being uncomfortable and danced and danced. and then oh! the wonders of hyde park that i had not seen before. we do live in a [sometimes] beautiful place.

in other wise,
when so many of my days seem the same, i'm trying to gather little pieces that are maybe something other than chemically influenced moments.

inspired by the garden at 55 & woodlawn, which is full of tomatoes and cucumbers, jalapenos and marigolds (sometimes people on the street stop and wonder at the garden and once i gave some people some tomatoes and they were so confused and surprised, as if the lack of a cash register in proximity to vegetables was a syllogism or a logical gap)...tmo and i cut down a path through the weeds in a lot next to our house and i dug up the earth and it's going to be a garden. so far, only mint, but we're sprouting tiny seeds on the top of the fridge and there will be leafy greens and life. we're also starting a compost pile, hopefully. my interest in gardening is confusing to my mother.

also, i got a job at istra-under-the-train-tracks making coffee and putting gelato in little little plastic bowls. i haven't started yet, not till the 24th or so. at my "interview" he asked me to describe the flavors of the coffee and i said "bark" and he said "vegetal" so i got the job.

and at the character party on friday night, rolly and i went as a sibling-pair of runaways, trevor (8) and daisy (6) with stuffed animal friends (trevor and alfonso) and swedish fish. i remembered that parties are boring for kids even though everything is potentially interesting. we were on a hunt for monsters who eat children, but no one seemed to know where they were, or offered us roundabout ways to fix the problem--a unicorn, joining Jews for Allah, voting for a particular serbian candidate. in the end a woman from the future won the staged election; revolution was a close second.

and maybe that's it, for now.

update:
oh, also, tmo and i decided to get married so i can work in the EU and also to validate our sacred religious commitment to each other and so we can become a social unit of reproductive machinery. the first part is true.

this is not a blog post

blue day,

rue day,

i-want-to-moo day.

i've been meaning to post about camp trans but i don't quite know how, yet.

cats shedding,

vodka in the afternoon.

humid air and

sidewalk stares.

even when the bathrooms at work are always empty, choosing between the one down the hall and the one further down the hall is still an existential conflict.

sometimes revolution makes me happy

and sometimes my bone marrow aches with sadness for everything that is wrong.

(today is among the latter days.)

and yet

my garden flourishes

gabe and vlad have been sleeping with me

the lake is cold and bright with just a bit of a vomit-like skin

and i got free condoms from 5710.

anyone interested in going to pittsburgh with me for the G20 protest, september 24 & 25?

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.