more thoughts on home from the vaults

may 6th:

well i grew up in chicago
and around the southern parts of
this great lake. but am i FROM here?

my lens on truth was the lens
of hyde park racial tension
of bare muscley oaks in winter
of freezing, thawing, boiling
of mourning dove and big skies
of friendly neighbors whom you don't love
of folks makin their life for their family

but is this as removeable, as workable
as the capitalistic/patriarchal/white supremacist/sexist
world&structures that i grew up in? those were also the lenses i was raised in and am livin it and i don't have to be attached just because theyre what i know.
...and that's it. what/where do i really know? no where. my body knows and loves many places, seasons, sensations. i don't know this land.

so should i decide to move to wisconsin, it could/should be out of desire to learn here,
not to "live where I'm from"
yes, similar weather patterns to my youth, similar trees.
but those were the only things i paid attention to.

live in a place that calls to you.
calls to you where you are at.

a short note on people and animals

so im one of those lucky people who never gets a hang over, or jet lag, and apparently i don't reallly get culture shock either. maybe I will when i get back to the states. who knows.

i've been in britain, oh, 2 or 3 days now and i have a funny feeling similar to one I had on the farm. we had two cows there, and every day they were to be milked twice. sometimes I helped out in the evening milking. after a couple of days it sort of hit me that i don't get cows...after years of working with horses, I acted the same way with the cows as I do with horses, (an animal whose instincts and perspectives on the world i more or less understand) and it just wasn't sort of..fitting.

so I asked daniel (another wwoofer who'd grown up on a dairy farm) millions of questions: are they social? if you put one alone does it moo to the other cows? is there a noise which you can make to calm them down? what do they want? do they consider humans as reasonable companions or do they just ignore us?

and so on.

so now after 4 months of getting accustomed to horses, suddenly being surrounded by cows is just confusing ("where are they going? why are they going there? why are they in this place at this time? i don't understand the trajectory of your life!!")

life seems just vaguely emptier here, more machinated(?), more routine, or less fluid...i dunno. hm.

i leave india in 8 days

i cant believe it; that is wild to me
i am on ze frenchmans computer and i am typing so slowww all the keys are trés trés different but i also have my pick of transliteration into one of five indic scripts.
also SHABASH tamara-ji shabash on an amazing post i will be thinking about for a while. (also your name on this keyboard is "tq,qrq" if i dont pay attention.)

anyway i thought to write because a few nights ago i baoed to the multitude late at night and it had been, oh, so many months, at least five! i explored the range of possible baos for mmaybe ten minutes and petered out and went to sleep inside. that morning i had met a british woman going into retreat for four years. that means no leaving the monestary or talking or communication with loved ones for four years. no baoing for four years... bao is a social thing for me; privately i know that i prefer LA and often BLAH is perfect. it surprises me that hinduism and buddhism have this om as the sound that is everything, for everyone, but maybe thats what the belief in an absolute truth is.
that same day i was reading the teachings of don juan out in the yard and an old family friend walked in for lunch. he asked me what i was reading and i began to explain to him vaguely with difficulty what it was about. apparently he had read all four in the series when they first came out.

----

this post has been a draft (btw I love reading other people's drafts) for 2 days, when it was 10 days until i leave the country. it's still a little half-baked but i'm going to put it out here anyway. see some of you relatively soon.
-zed out

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

the sun rises at a different angle

not that i can see the sun.. i can see bicycles and palm trees and a cement building with bars on its windows from my window. also a pile of gravel/dark rocks. also a beautiful sleeping hannah manshel. she and i are roommates, by happy happenstance.
thoughts i have been thinking are...
i dont like being waited upon, but i live in a hotel so i will have to figure out a way to make it tolerable/have real human interactions with these guys.
also i miss the farm, and the way time functions there. here i am either in my room being an asocial dope, or "out" socializing, talking mostly about nothing (dont worry i'm not being too judgmental right off the bat-- except some of these kids i swear are toolstoolstools (in a generic sense)) so i miss the days of not having to talk unless i want to, and living with people where all of us had some sort of higher purpose than just being together, we were working on something, and being togehter was a nice plus. i like the kind of conversations that happen when picking beans, or planting garlic, or harvesting carrots, or walking out to the potatoes. but oh well. i'll wait 10 weeks here in pune and then go off again.

i have been relying bahut on faith in humankind ... it has been most rewarding. my ride from seattle to san francisco was great... we went down the coast, saw the redwoods, stayed at her son's house and ate the most deliciousest food, we went to hot springs and slept under stars...
actually my first night, last night i guess, sleeping at the ywca in mumbai i woke up in the middle of the night and thought i was sleeping on a hill in northern california. that the fans were the chilly night breeze, that the ceiling was an overcast sky, that the light on the tv screen was a star...oh wait, stars arent green, oh wait, this is a bed, oh wait, i am in mumbai,
spinned my mental globe around and zoomed in to the west side of this subcontinent.

anyway. maybe sometime i will write about airtravel and how fucked up it makes me feel. not just because my share was 10,434 pounds of carbon (and it only costs $65 to erase that from my conscience), but because of anonymity and proximity, privacy in public, how much it costs for planes to fly over iran. seeing the stars at eye-level. actually i think that's all i have to say.
have a good first day at school kids

i think the gay rodeo is this weekend

on saturday justin and i took the 8:10 ferry from port angeles across the strait of juan de fuca to victoria, the capitol of british columbia. 
where we didn't get any stamps in our passports, so we might have not gone at all.
we intended it to be a day trip-- most of the time we walked around looking for food. we found a vegan buffet called "green cuisine" which charges you by the kilogram! i ate 5 kilograms of food once. we bought yummy beer and wine and drank it, and then stole magnetic hematite from the royal museum of britsh columbia (which wanted to charge us $18.50  piece to get in). we have this new code of ethics where if you want something and it costs too much then you take it... i think i've only paid for chocolate once or twice on this trip. there was this AMAZING chocolate company called organicfair which we got a TON of different flavors. also got a baseball cap and beauty and the beast. basically the day was spent feeling bored and illegitimate beausewe didn't want to spend money and yet we spent a lot of it. 
we went to catch the 6:15 ferry but it was full! we decided not to take the 7:30 (and have to get picked up begrudgingly at 9pm) and just stay the night. immediately we began approaching moderately hip young people to ask what was going on that night. we got varied responses and decided to hit up the vegan buffet again before it closed at 8. we asked the cashier with platinum blond hair shabed on one side and 8 inches long on the other...she told us some new places and then we asked her the real question "sorry to ruin this pure exchange, but where can we get drugs?" "look, this is not a pure exchange, this is victoria." and she ran out to get a buddy of hers who had just left. after dinner we hung out with this buddy and 2 others behind a dumpster, drinking beer, smoking spliffs, and talking about rocks and breakups until it was time to buy acid from the bouncer of a nearby metal club. i have never so obviously bought drugs in my life... amazing. about 7 US$ for a hit, pas mal. then we followed colin and john (i'll call him john, i never learned his name the whole night!) to colin's house where a party was growing. colin lives in a magical relic from the 19th century-- used to be the mayor's house. wood paneled with a cozy kitchen, a co-op full of seemingly interesting hip indie mid to late 20s types. colin was growing kombucha in his room which was delicious. and then the DJ started. i danced and took breaks all night, learning so many names (mine was elliot- which i've used before i knew ali used it too. after all, our real names are similar), eating fresh mulberry cheesecake, talking about permaculture, dancing, not getting high (bogus acid grr), feeling not at home and out of place, being worried, turning down an offer to dance with megan who had just complimented my dancing because i dont think i actually know how to dance with someone. and realizing that no one there was actually that interesting to me...  that was strange. it was like everyone had died sort of. i would never want to live in victoria...
so at about 2:30 j and i approached colin and asked to sleep on his balcony. he made a nest of blankets and it was cold outside but we were very warm, burritoed in by our sweaters and comforters. we pretended we were on a ship, sleeping under the stars with sheets as sails and the badly played clarinet (somewhere in the distance) as seagulls.
woke up 5 hours later to creep out and catch the ferry, and uneventful and nappy ride. we weren't looking forward to hitching the 10 mile ride back to the farm (buses dont run on sundays), but we met a guy in country aire (the health food store) who drove us all the way home! he lives right in town and he drove us out to the farm... wow. people like him are great to find when you are tired of being errant and just want to sleep. his name is bill, he used to work for 20 years for the rock division of warner brothers records, in artist relations. he says john fogerty is a jerk and the barenaked ladies are nice guys. we gave him one of our many stolen chocolates.
it's nearly noon here and i haven't done any work yet. bean picking? uprooting canadian thistle? i hate working here. i just want to eat and play and hike. and find psychedelic mushrooms.
so that was my 26 hours in canada. a little alienating and a lot of chocolate.