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5 Speed DIES




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Petunia’s as old as I am. I push my finger into the broken speaker on her foam dash. It’s funny, I say, that plastic won’t decompose, but it will break down into smaller pieces. Petunia’s dash is split from the sun, like cracked skin. She wears a white garland of cloth tassels on her windshield.

“It’s like I have fake eyelashes on,” says B, “when I look out the windshield.”

Kristi just sort of quit her job. So we’re going camping. She’s got this huge knife on her belt, and I make fun of it, but only because I am jealous. I have no reason to wear a knife like that. I have a leatherman, which I keep in my backpack. The knife on my leatherman mostly slices cheese. I use the other tools for all sorts of things- cutting my fingernails, sunglasses repair. Once I used the “saw” tool to cut the bolt-lock on a freight container, when I was riding the highline in late October. I was cold, and being cold makes you restless. I wanted to see what was inside. I hoped it was something exciting, like cans of fruit cocktail or spam (kidding, don’t like spam). I sawed and sawed in the dark, as my train hurtled through North Dakota or some crap, and finally the bolt snapped in half. I opened the door. The contents of the freight container consisted of Styrofoam takeout containers. Boxes and boxes of plastic bags of Styrofoam takeout containers. Not exciting. But at least I got to use my tool for something butch.

Kristi’s knife is huge, and it hangs off her belt in a special case. Like, lookit my huge knife! Sort of like the ones worn by people who work in produce departments. It’s cool that produce workers get to carry nice knives in leather cases. If I had that job I would pretend the knife was for defense. I would tell people it was for the tarantulas that came in banana boxes.

It’s fucking hot, so we’re going to the mountains. I’m so lucky Kristi wants to go camping, and that she wants to drive Petunia. Petunia’s a little diesel Toyota pickup. She’s got a white campershell and her tailgate says ‘5-Speed DIES’. Hot stuff two years ago. Little diesel pickups disappearing off craigslist faster than free particle board bookshelves, running or no. Now, with the price of diesel and the scarcity of real recycled biodiesel, not so much.

“I could sell this thing,” says Kristi, “and get a much nicer gas truck.”

Why don’t you? I ask. Kristi shrugs. Selling a car is hard.

There’s no-one at the lake. It’s Monday, in the off-season, but the weather is hot, like July was supposed to be. It’s a great time to be unemployed, as long as you don’t feel like a big failure because you accidentally quit your job, like Kristi. Kristi’s an electrician’s apprentice. She got hooked up with the apprenticeship through the Oregon tradeswoman’s program, which gave her all sorts of idealistic encouragement. The program taught her what sort of work electricians do. The program taught her about safety- methane sinks. Don’t climb down into empty grain silos, don’t lock yourself in a closet with your own farts. The program did not prepare her for the shitty people she’d have to put up with on the job, the shitty people everyone had to put up with, now and then. The snappy co-workers, the verbally abusive journeymen. The program didn’t tell her that most everyone she worked with would refuse to wear respirators when they worked, exposing themselves to toxic dust and fumes, and because of this she would work without a respirator too, better that than ask for one and seem like a whiny william. And no-one in the program told her she would end up at a job in hood river, an hour east, and that she’d have to drive there every day, and that she wouldn’t be reimbursed for gas. And that there wasn’t shit she could do about it, there was no-one she could complain to, because she was just an apprentice, and if she had a problem with her job well then she could just quit, no matter she would lose the two years of the apprenticeship she’d already completed, two years towards the four she needed to become a journeyman, and once she was a journeyman she could say Fuck You and work wherever and with whomever she wanted.

But she couldn’t keep driving to Hood River. She’d go into debt, just from gas. So she did the only thing she knew to do- she asked to be laid off. She’d been told that it sometimes worked. And if it worked, she would be assigned to a different, closer job. But sometimes it just pissed everyone off.

The folks she was working for got pissed, and told the program that she’d quit.

We climb out of Kristi’s truck and look at the lake. The lake is still, and ringed in hemlocks. The earth beneath our pale feet is soft, brown needles and loose dirt. The sky is bare and blue, and for once in these high mountains, it’s Hot. This lake, this forest, any other time of the year might be too cold, to rainy, too buggy, too something. But right now, we are in paradise. We are in paradise, and there is no-one here to ruin it. The sun is bright and this lake belongs to us, and this is the way it’s always been, cool and still and ringed in huckleberries, waiting for us.

We strip off our clothes and jump into the lake, splashing our arms and gasping for breath, dog-paddling in a circle. Kristi and B have floaties, a giant vinyl cherrio painted like a truck tire and a red vinyl mat, respectively, and they paddle slowly on these floaties, naked in the sun. A little out from the shore we find a raft, some floating logs tied together with twine. We climb onto it and dive off, scattering the lazy newts that paddle just under the surface, tiny arms moving like human babies. The water is clear and glorious, rays of sunlight bounce off the floor of the lake, where our shadows lie like sea monsters.

That night, the silence is so complete it hurts my ears. It’s a full moon. I lie in my tent and feel as if I am already dreaming. Such a silence does not exist, anywhere. The moon rises like a spotlight, and then sets again.

The next day we walk to a different lake, and swim, and then lie out on rocks in the sun. The slope behind us is tumbled rocks, and pikas beep out alarm. All around us the lake is ringed in grasses, and below us we watch newts paddle about aimlessly, drifting on the warm surface of the water, or resting on the soft blue lakebottom. I decide to swim across the lake, and then change my mind. We walk back to our lake on the soft forest path, and swim again. We argue over which lake is better. I lie on the floaty and paddle across, pretending I am going to the open sea. This is not a seaworthy craft! I cry. I turn back when I notice some hikers on the far shore. My back becomes sunburnt.

“Why,” says Kristi, towards the shore in her vinyl tire, “isn’t the whole purpose of my life to be out here?” She’s speaking in a normal voice but I can hear her, across the lake, because there is not a sound, anywhere. We are in a dream.

We make brown rice pasta with pesto on it, also prosciutto from the store and tomatoes from B’s garden. There’s a forest fire nearby, and a haze of smoke has fallen over the sun, making the light orange, like sunset. As we are packing up, a family pulls up to camp. Just in time.

The drive back is hot, shin to shin in the cab of Kristi’s truck. I hit the preset buttons on Petunia’s old radio- a squawk, and then nothing. Radio doesn’t work, says Kristi. I imagine that if the old radio did work, it would only play sad country songs from the eighties, tinny like an aluminum can. Which is of course why the radio does not work. Kristi’s staring into the sun, but she’s not even squinting. She’s got big brown eyes and she’s still got that knife strapped to her belt. I can tell she’s thinking about her job, about how she tried and tried and in the end, it was all for naught. I want to tell her that she’s better than that, that we’re all better than that. But sometimes when the only choices you have turn out to be not good enough, there aren’t even any words left to talk about it.

On 205, Petunia’s clutch stops working. Kristi pulls the truck over and reaches behind the seat for a bottle of brake fluid. Which is also clutch fluid. She pours some in a pumps the clutch. It works again. We get back into town and we’re all hot and tired. My chest feels sunburnt. I say goodbye to Kristi and her friend. I’ll see you when I get back, I say. Kristi’s going fishing for a week, north of here somewhere in BC. I give her a hug and imagine her with her huge knife, cutting open fish and staring at the water, not saying a thing.











We're Taking This Show On The Road.






Portland, can be so good good good sometimes. Especially when it's hot and September is the July you never had, and there's fruit all over the sidewalks (in spite of freezing frost-spring) and vaux's swifts make dragon-shapes in the sky and then smoothie into a chimney that's the only standing hollow old-growth left, at this elevation, anywhere. We built an elementary school of brick and we built a tree. And the swifts were happy, because they had no-where else to go. And my life is a bike trip, I'm cat-sitting farther east than the edges of the known universe, and every day I bike so far and the streets are so cool and there's a little wind.

Pushing forth, past the reaches of the map in my mind. Paula and I cross the dark unmarked intersections, in the empty night, exhausted from dancing. We've got to make it east! I cry, as the road turns unimproved and potholes threaten to smash the tomatoes in my pannier. We've got to make it east before dawn! We've got to make it over these potholes without hurting the horses! Onward, steel horses! To the New World!

The New World is an apartment with a cat. The cat has two sides. One half of the cat's face is grey, the other half is orange. The grey half is nice, the orange half is mean. The two cat-halves battle for your attention. The cat's coat is mottled orange and grey, and as you pet her she twitches, frantic with rage and pleasure, purring and yowling and swiping at your irises, as you rub your hand over her nice grey spots and fierce orange spots simultaneously.

New friends are wonderful. Decadant foodstamp picnics. Dancing even though I'm sleepy, and feeling drunk because of it. Feeling grounded and like I can finally be there for other people again, and remembering how good it feels to pay it all back, to be able to listen, to be the solid one. We all go round and round, we are a swifts blender and gravity is the chimney.

Sleeping late. Eating roast chicken. Reading too much Augusten Burroughs. So much Augusten Burroughs, I feel like I know him. Know him better than I know most people. I am obsessed with him. Reading him so much, absorbing his fearless exhibitionism through my skin, like writing your scandalous tell-all biography before anyone else gets the chance, before anyone wants to, before you’re even dead. Writing ten of them.

And I just wish I had a dehydrator for plums, and I just wish my car didn't burn oil, and I just wish I had a little more time, and I just wish I could live here in the winter and know that I would still be happy.

I’m taking this show on the road. I’ve bought a cheap digital camera, and as soon as it gets here I’m riding the highline (freight train route across the cold top of the country) towards New York city, to see my dear friend Lark in her Brooklyn home where she makes blown-glass insects and attempts to sculpture the soul of her very being into art made of feathers and apocalyptic pen drawings and bright red, toxic paint. I’m going to take a lot of pictures on my cheap camera and I’m going to write in my 29 cent college-rule notebook I got on back-to-school special while the train rumbles around and I eat almond butter off a dirty spoon. (just kidding. A clean spoon.) I’ll be back in three weeks approximately. I’m actually only doing this so I will have something to write about. Big secret. Not so big.

I used to think that May was my favorite month but now I think it's September.

Once I quit everything
to walk in the rain
where I met someone else
who had also just quit everything

we found a cave in an oak tree
we found a zucchini growing in an alley, and ate it
And I thought- of course this is how things are

of course














HA HA HA





Young adult novels, here I come!

Movie Reviews

Not Crazy






My mom is schizophrenic. This is a fact that usually comes up in conversation with new crushes, on about the second or third date. It’s not that I go out of my way to tell people, it just naturally comes up. Right about the time you realize the person you’re getting to know didn’t just fall out of the sky, and that they have a whole history, complete with people and towns and epic events, and you might start asking questions like-

“So, where are you from?” and, “Where does your family live?” and then, of course, “Do you talk to your parents? What’s your relationship like?”

And that’s about when I tell people my mom is schizophrenic.

It’s not a big deal. Except for once, when a date accused me of being a big downer, as if I was deliberately trying to sabotage the date and keep us from having any fun, it’s never really bothered anyone that my mom thinks she’s the Virgin Mary and lives in a halfway house in Alaska. The part I hate, that part comes after the part where I tell my date my mom is schizophrenic and they shrug their shoulders like it’s no big deal.

I know it’s coming, and I hate it. I tell them my mom is schizophrenic, and if it seems like they’re still interested, I tell them that my aunt is schizophrenic, and that my grandpa’s mom and brother were schizophrenic too. You know, just to make small talk. And after I finish talking, I see this look pass over their face, as if they’ve just realized where the keys to their bike lock are, the keys they’ve been missing for days.

And then, they ask-

“So, since your mom is schizophrenic, do you ever worry that you might one day, you know, be schizophrenic too?”

The last time a date asked me this was earlier this year, in the spring. She said it with such naivety, and such good intentions, like she was doing me a huge favor by finally putting this piece of the puzzle together for me, that it made me want to scream. What logic!

“You know,” I said, with just a bit of angry sarcasm, “I’ve never thought of that!” Although it might have been more helpful, I did not tell her that asking me if I had ever thought I might go crazy one day was a lot like having someone tell you their mom had died of breast cancer and then asking them, sort of casually and with as much naivety as you can muster, if they, you know, ever thought about how they might one day die of breast cancer, too.

My date eyed me suspiciously. “Are you being sarcastic?”

“Do I think about how I might go crazy one day?” I cried. “Only every day of my fucking life! Only every minute of every day of my fucking life!”

And then, more recently, I was on a date with a new friend. Our second, I guess. We were talking about all sorts of things, family and whatnot, and then I told her my mom was schizophrenic. I told her all these other people were schizophrenic too, that were, you know, related to me. She nodded like, oh that’s sort of interesting. And then nothing.

I felt a wave of relief the likes of which I had never known. It was like I’d been trapped in the movie Groundhog Day, and had been suddenly set free, at the moment I’d least expected it. I was suddenly allowed to be myself, with no genetic mental illness bullshit dark cloud hanging over my head, a cloud that I didn’t see but that my date couldn’t help but point out every time I brought up my family history.

Of course I wasn’t going to be crazy. “I have like five-hundred cousins,” I said to my date, “and none of us are crazy yet. The oldest generation, we used to all secretly wonder- who’s next? Who’s next? But we’re all fine. None of us are ranting and delusional. And my oldest cousin, he’s like thirty,” I added for weight, because most people have heard of the popular theory that if you haven’t gone crazy by the time your twenties are over, you’re probably fine.

My date sort of shrugged her shoulders, and looked half-interested. Of course, she seemed to be saying. Why would you go crazy?

Thank you.











Dirt & Gossip on Sarah Palin






An incredible amount of information on why Sarah Palin is a douchebag, from the Anchorage Daily News- read it here

McCain, you're going down.













The Ultimate Bitch






So in a little over a week, I’m riding a freight train to New York City. I’m going to visit my friend Lark. New York is her new home, and I have never once visited her there. I’m sort of excited but also sort of apprehensive, because I do not love cities and because Portland is about as big of a city as I can handle, and I only come here because this is where my friends are, and because no-one really lives in the woods anymore. but I do love Lark and I want to see her, and also I’m curious. I’m also excited because I’ve ridden a freight train from here to Chicago but never from Chicago to New York, and Lark, who once taught me everything I know about trains, like what sorts of beans to bring and how handy a monocular can be, is going to tell me how to get the train for that last leg of the trip. I’m going to get a digital camera before I go, if I can, because I think this blog need pictures; pictures of trains, and pictures of the incredible people I know/meet. And thinking about this trip I’m taking to New York has got me remembering the last time I was in New York. And so here is a story for you, of old buildings and mummified cats, and about how I became the Ultimate Bitch.

The only time I have ever been to New York is in August of 2004 for the republican national convention. I drove across the country with some friends, listening to Eastern-European fiddle music, our bikes strapped on the back of the car in a jumble, pulling the car down on its axle. I was just recently ex-vegan wild-salmon-eater (I had been working in a cannery) turned cheap-meat lover on an all fried-chicken and pizza diet, and we stopped frequently along the way to ironically eat chicken thighs and sausage. We ran out of gas once and slept in a field under the stars, but other than that nothing really out of the ordinary happened.

There was a big protest going on in New York, but I didn’t want to be in it, because I’d already been in some big protests and it was kind of like the ferris wheel- only fun a few times around. Instead I did legal support, sitting in a big glass building with other volunteers and feeling important, answering phone calls from parents who’s children had been arrested.

I stayed in New York for three months. I lived in a squat in the South Bronx, a five-story apartment building with empty holes in the brick where much of the window glass had been. These square spaces let in light and air and all of the city that blew on the wind, light and air that filled the still, dusty rooms, which smelled of old linoleum and mummified air-jordans and led one into the other like a sort of treehouse labyrinth, sometimes ending darkly in an unlit cavity boarded up with sheets of plywood that had been spray-painted all over with strange symbols, leftover from the eighties when the first squatters had taken peyote and had vision quests, painted whatever they could with seeing-eye triangles and then crashed in the teepee they’d erected in the garden. Now the place had been re-occupied with good industrious punks, most of us, and we pulled off the plywood wherever we found it, to let in our friends Light and Air, and if we had a little money or a window we put in some new glass, made a wall on the bare studs, brought in an armchair and called it ours. The place was called Casa Del Sol.


I made some great new friends, and they showed me around the city after dark- we’d bike the streets of Manhattan on those steamy, August nights, sitting to eat steamed bean-paste buns, from black trash bags on the sidewalk in SoHo, biking back to Casa Del Sol to sing pop songs and teach each other step routines, finally falling asleep at dawn in a sort of wood-floored ballroom on the highest floor, big and open with windows that looked out at the Manhattan skyline.

This was also the time I got in my first bike accident. I was biking up one of those big one-way streets in Manhattan, on my little blue road bike, in the bike lane of course, which is also the door-opening lane. Everyone I knew was always getting doored, or almost getting doored, in these horribly-designed bike lanes/door-opening lanes. I was biking along fairly quickly without a helmet, and I got doored. I got doored by a slick black cab-thing, and this door was the type that didn’t have a window frame, just a window that rolled down into the door. This door opened and I ran straight into it and I flew off my bike, went over the door, and landed in the street on my side. I was wearing a green tennis skirt and shimmery gold leggings with the feet cut off, and a pair of those cheap cloth mary-janes everyone used to wear, the kind with the buckle that was like a soda-can tab, thin and sharp enough to cut your fingers, and the shoes cost four dollars, and sometimes you could find them with dragons embroidered on the toes. I landed in the street and the skirt went over my head and the wind had been knocked out of me, and I couldn’t breathe. The man who had been driving the car grabbed me by my shoulder and said, Get up! Get up! But I couldn’t say anything, because I couldn’t breathe yet. And then I got my lungs back and I stood up, and boy was I sore. Turns out I’d bruised a couple ribs, and I was sore for almost two months, but I never went to the doctor so I never had any bills to make that guy pay, and my bike was alright. I just took the subway back to the squat and cleaned the pieces of rock out of my hands, and I haven’t been in a bike accident since. But I am afraid of car doors.

At Casa Del Sol, there were thirty of us. The building as a whole contained maybe fifty apartments, but many of them were still locked and boarded, and mostly we lived on one or two floors. Now and then a new apartment would be opened, and we would find all sorts of treasure, wonderful and sad- it was like a time capsule straight from the eighties. We would find a suitcase, some photographs, a letter in Spanish, a doll- what was left behind when some long-ago occupants of the building had been forced to leave, to who-knows where. We found old furniture, mummified cats, and once I found a triangular leather jacket exactly like the one Michael Jackson wore in Thriller, only instead of red it was a glossy, silverish grey.

We had a kitchen in the basement of the building, the only place on the property where there was any electricity or running water. The kitchen was lit with Christmas lights and stocked with wax-boxes of dumpstered food, and opened onto a dirt yard where we kept our bikes and the bikes we planned to fix up, dozens of them in total, all leaning one against the other in a great tangle. The yard was surrounded by a fairly high chain-link fence, but the gate was loosely chained and locked with a padlock, and one could simply push the two sides apart and step over the padlock, which we often did. Our building was surrounded by the Projects on three sides and an overpass on the other, and we were supposedly in a “real bad neighborhood”, but no-one ever stole our bikes, ever, or harassed us when we walked from the subway at two a.m., because they liked us, and we actually felt really safe. Everyone knew who we were and why we were there, and also the squat had been there for decades, and had a long-standing relationship with the neighborhood. The FBI would watch us from the roof of the Projects and then the residents would tell us about it, and laugh. Not that we ever did anything but eat and have meetings and go on late-night dumpster missions so we could eat some more, and some of the more un-savory among us, the seventeen year-old scumfucks with something to prove, would sit in the courtyard and drink forties, even though we had asked them not to.

Casa Del Soul is where I developed the reputation of Ultimate Bitch.

We were not all good and industrious. The scumfucks, for example, cared nothing for the hopeful, sober work of scrap-plywood building renovation, or for the endless stripped-bolt surgery that is vintage bike repair. All they wanted to do was drink. And drink in the courtyard, specifically, because it was the one place we had told them they COULD NOT drink, because they were underage, and because we were living illegally in a squatted building, and because the cops were watching us already. But did they care? No. And not only did they drink, but they told rape jokes.

Rape jokes. (sound of record screeching to a halt.)

I mean, I could tolerate the fact that these people even existed, and I could sort of stand the fact that they were living in the building with us- I mean, they were punks, right? And it was a squat, right? They had sort of come in with the initial rush for housing during they RNC, and afterward, they had stayed. It’s not like we could just kick them out, right? That, at least, was the general attitude. And I went along with it, up to a point. The building was big, and I could just ignore them. Until they started telling rape jokes.

I mean, it may seem simple, among activist communities nowadays. You just don't do that. But at Casa Del Sol, the collective cry of outrage never came. There was a lot of shoulder-shrugging. Among the Scumfucks, a lot of straight-up denial. Or bitter, devil-may-care defensiveness. So what if I told that joke. Fuck you! Or a sort of oscillation between the two.

I was pretty much the only one who took up the battle cry. And once I had done it, other collective members had to admit that, yeah, I was probably right, the scumfucks did kind of, now and then, cross the line, and some of them took up the battle cry too. And we went to battle the way all good activists go to battle- we had meetings. Long, maddening, directionless meetings, which effectively split the whole squat into two vehemently opposed camps, one side being mine, zero tolerance for scumfucks, and the other side being theirs, scumfuck support because scumfucks are people too.

In the end, the scumfucks lost, and the worst among them were driven out of the squat, to hitch-hike and train-hop away to their destinies. By this time the sort of ring-leader and I had developed a deep, personal grudge against each other, and I told him if I ever saw him in Portland, that I would stab him with a spoon, or something. He ended up, oddly enough, in Santa Cruz. And every few years a young person will blow up on the wind, and we will meet in a living room or coffeeshop somewhere, and I will introduce myself to them, and a look of recognition will come to this person’s eyes and they will say-

“Carrot- I’ve heard about you! You’re the Ultimate Bitch!” And then we’ll laugh.











Sleeping Dogs





-

My grandparents adopted me when I was fourteen, after my mother was too crazy to keep an apartment anymore. She gave up her parental rights and I flew to Colorado, it was the last part of my freshman year of high school.

I never knew my dad. My parents were divorced when I was three years old, and he disappeared. I didn’t know if he was in jail, dead, anything. I didn’t know what he looked like. I didn’t know where he lived. He never paid child support. I never met any of his relatives.

My mother’s parents didn’t like me, and adopted me out of obligation. They didn’t much like my mother, either, but then, no-one did. I moved out of my Grandparent’s house when I was seventeen, and shacked up with a nice boyfriend for a year until I could live on my own. My boyfriend was 22 and worked at outback steakhouse. He wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box, but he loved me, and would do anything for me. I graduated high school with a partial scholarship to a local state college, but when I asked my grandparents, as my legal guardians, to fill out the necessary paperwork for my FAFSA application so I could get financial aid to pay for the rest of the tuition, they refused. They didn’t believe women should go to college.

“College ruins women,” my Grandpa said.

They were also mad at me for moving in with my boyfriend, for “shacking up”, and that was part of the reason they refused. They thought I was a worthless whore, and a drug addict, because why else would I have such wild behavior? They didn’t know that I was terrified of drugs, that I thought they would make me crazy like my mom, and that all I wanted to do was read books and be left alone. I had sex with boys because it was the only way I knew of to get any affection, and validation. But it’s not even like I was a big whore. I just always had a boyfriend.

So instead of going to college I worked graveyard shifts at Denny’s, and then when I was 19, I moved to Portland. And then when I was 20 I decided to find this man who had been my dad. I paid a website three dollars to dig his address out of public records, and I hitchhiked to Alaska and showed up on his doorstep. It turns out he lives in Alaska, in Anchorage, the town I grew up in. He’s lived there my whole life. Right. Down. The street.

It was horribly awkward. For all I know, he thought I was some junkie off the street come to hit him up for cash. He seemed well-off. He seemed to regret the fact that I had looked him up. Oh well. I hadn’t had any expectations. It was no surprise, to me, to turn over this long-forgotten rock, and just find more of the world the way it was. It seemed I had crazy relatives, and I had boring “sane” relatives who thought I was a freak. Where were the relatives like me? Where the fuck did I come from? Who the fuck was I?

I forgot about my dad, and he had no problem forgetting about me. If we ever talked, it was through email, a line here or there, and his were always guarded and hesitant. He was just some guy. Whatever.

Then, last year, for the first time in my adult life, I needed a car. As long as I’ve lived in Portland, I’ve been anti-car. I am going to ride my bike, I said, for as long as I can, so help me god. Portland is one of the few cities in the country set up for bikes as well as cars, and I took advantage of that as much as possible. I know that some folks in Portland need cars for their jobs, or to carry shit, or because riding a bike hurts them, or because they get depressed in the winter and only having a bike keeps them from leaving the house at all. But I also think that a lot of folks get a car and just get lazy. It’s true. And I didn’t want to be one of those people, so I put off having a car, even though it would have been nice to go hiking sometimes, or camping, or to be able to buy furniture at garage sales.

But then I wanted to live in the country for a year, and suddenly I needed a car. I’d just gotten back from Alaska, and I had no savings. I did, however, have a harebrained scheme. I would ask my “dad” for money!

I didn’t think he would actually give me any money. The whole idea started off as a joke. Why would he give me money? He didn’t want anything to do with me. I didn’t know anything about him. He didn’t even exist! But I had friends who got money from their parents, now and then, and I thought it would be funny to ask this person who was supposed to be my parent, for money to buy a car. Why not? No one in my family had ever given me money. My grandparents once gave me an old car, and then they took it back. And then I gave them some money for it, and then I drove it to Portland, and then it died. That was about it.

I wrote my “dad” an email. It was hilarious. I invited him to participate in the “sponsor a distant offspring” program. I told him I wanted money to buy a car so I could live in the country. I gave him a list of possible responses to my email he could give, including,

-No. What? Why would I give you money?
-I’m sorry, I can’t give you money at this time.
And
-Who are you?

The email bounced back. It’d been so long since we talked, I’d lost his email, and when I tried to remember it, I’d gotten it wrong.

So I called him.

He was so relieved to hear from me, he sent me a thousand dollars. I bought a 78 diesel Mercedes that burned oil, and spent the winter in a yurt on an organic farm. I had two hundred kale plants. It was amazing.

The great part of the whole deal is that when I'd talked to my dad on the phone this time, he'd shown a genuine interest in me. After all these years! It made me curious about his potential parents and siblings- did I have a whole family out there, waiting to meet me? I decided to ask this man some questions about my other relatives. Who were they? What were they like? Did they want to meet me?

He said they did. He said I had a grandma living in San Francisco. She had been an editor at Ten Speed Press in the eighties. Her name was E. I also had an Aunt- his sister. Oh yes, he said. I can give you their contact info. They would love to meet you.

I could go to San Francisco! I said. I could meet them!

I’ll get you that contact info, he said.

You do that, I said.

The email never came. Finally I wrote him and asked what had happened. He wrote back and said,

“Our relatives are currently unwilling to have contact with you, because of the pain that B. (that’s my mom) caused.”

I got so mad I wanted to punch the computer. None of these people had had any contact with my mother in over twenty years. I wrote him back. If all this time had past, I said, and they were still so upset by things my mother had done that they weren’t even willing to have any sort of communication with me, then most likely they weren’t the sort of people I wanted anything to do with.

So there.

Duder never replied to my email. And yet, part of me believed he was lying. Why wouldn’t my long-lost relatives be curious to meet me? He was probably just covering up for some shady shit he had done, like forgetting to tell them I existed at all. I threw all hope of having any sort of relationship with him out the window. And anyway, he wasn’t the relatives I was looking for. He was nothing like me. The only creative thing he had ever done was write a guide to carrying concealed weapons. How very Alaskan of him. The book had been published by his mother, the editor in San Francisco. The book is available on Amazon, and contains such charming passages as,

“If you’re stuck in traffic after a long day at work, and you see a young girl setting fire to an empty elementary school, do you shoot?”

I haven’t talked to him since. But always the thought has nagged at me- What if he was lying? What if they're dying to meet me? What if they look out the window and think of me, and wonder where I am? Isn't my dad's mom really old? What if she dies before I get to meet her? What if she's just like me, and I meet her and everything suddenly makes sense?

This month has been an intense month for me. My life is open, completely open. I’m suddenly freer than a box of day-old bread in the rain. If I was going to do anything totally brave and reckless, like contact my relatives in California and then go meet them, now would be the time to do it.

And so last week I went to the same site I used to find my dad, and paid it three dollars, and there was my grandmother’s phone number and address. And my aunt’s, too. It was so easy I couldn’t believe it. Why had I waited this long? I wrote down the numbers they gave me, two or three for each relative. I would have to call them all, and find the right one.

This morning I decided to do it. I’m house-sitting for a friend, and my friend Paula is staying here too, just back from the east coast, nursing some heartbreak. This morning she was sitting on the floor in her striped pajamas, making plans in her journal.

“I’m going to call my Grandma,” I said, on the couch with my new cellphone. “I’ve never met her. Watch!”

“Whoah, that’s intense!” said Paula.

I called the first number, and a voicemail picked up. No good. I called the second. An old woman answered the phone. I could hear TV in the background.

“Yes?”

“Hi, could I speak with E.?”

“Speaking.” She sounded impatient. Crotchety, even.

“This is kind of an awkward call. I’m ____, and I think we might be related.”

There was a pause, but not for very long. Actually, there wasn’t really much of a pause at all.

“We’re no longer related. And please don’t call this number again.”

Click.

I hung up the phone. I felt a little crushed, but then I was over it. So my dad hadn’t been lying after all. Maybe I should call my Aunt? I realized that, most likely, I would get the same response. And what was that old saying, something about sleeping dogs?

Fuck sleeping dogs.

I called her back. My number had been blocked. So I called the first number, the one with the voicemail. I left a message. I told her that I wasn’t a creep, I’d found her number in public records, and that she didn’t need to call me, but if she wanted to learn more about me, there was a way she could do that.

“Carrot Quinn dot blogspot dot com. That’s Carrot like the vegetable, Quinn, which is my last name, blogspot, spelled b-l-o-g-s-p-o-t, dot com. Bye.”














A Few Zine Reviews





How I Spent My Summer Vacation 2008
by G-jet gjetwriteszines(at)gmail(dot)com

You know what I like? I like brutal honesty. I like it when people write about their personal experiences the way G-jet writes about depression, Portland winter, the quest for happiness- because you know what? We’re all fucking human. And someone, somewhere, can relate to your story. And hearing that story will most likely make them feel better about whatever shit they happen to be dealing with. Which is exactly what happened to me, when I read G-jet’s zine. I felt better. About everything. And not only did I feel better, but I also learned about the emotional implications of Jam, teaching, and being a Grown Up. (cover illustration is a drawing of G-jet done by one of G-jet’s students.)


When Language Runs Dry
a zine for people with chronic pain and their allies.
nevertwice(at)yahoo(dot)com

I knew nothing about chronic pain before I read this zine. Now I have been educated. Eight authors from the DIY community write beautiful essays about their experiences with chronic pain. They write about the difficulty in communicating the physical sensations they experience, the inaccessibility of spaces they once felt welcome in, the harsh reality of paying for a lifetime of treatment and drugs with or without health insurance, and the very real impact an invisible dis/ability can have on your mental health.

After reading this zine, I feel grateful that I do not have chronic pain. I also feel better able to see the world around me, as if something previously invisible has been illuminated. An important zine.











A Weekend In The Woods, And What I Thought About






It smells like fall. Already. I sort of knew this would happen. Shannon and I went to the woods, to see Sarah Monious- but Sarah Monious had gone on an expedition, and the whole village was silent. So we stayed in her dark cedar cabin, and cooked meals on her old gas stove. There was a worn loveseat and an issue of The Sun, and we had twenty pounds of farm produce that Shannon had packed in. I hadn’t realized, on the hike in, why Shannon’s pack was so heavy. And then that first evening we sat on the rocks next to a forest stream, and suddenly Shannon’s pack became Christmas. With just a fork and our knives, we had between us the most incredible picnic. And to illustrate this idea, here is a list of the food we had with us-

The Things We Carried (or rather, Shannon carried)

-GF millet bread, one dense loaf (it’s like if you chewed up a loaf of regular bread, spit it out, and shaped it into a brick!)
-nori rice-cakes
-quinoa, dried
-cream cheese, one package
-Carrot’s Special Almonds (soaked, tossed with mineral salt, toasted in the oven)
-curry trail mix
-delicious prunes
-figs, fresh- green and black
-mango, dried
-raspberries, freshly picked
-smoked salmon, one pouch
-sardines, two tins
-green and black olives, two dollars’ worth
-carrots, from the farm
-kale, also from the farm- two bunches, dino and red Russian
-green beans, farm
-zucchini squash, farm
-ripe tomatoes, from the farm
-cucumbers, farm- two of them
-dried seaweed in a little baggie
-sheets of Nori
-avocados- two
-parsley, one bunch
-curried lentils, prepared
-black beans, two varieties
-one small white onion
-two heads garlic
-chocolate-covered dot dot dot
-NO SALT

Our meals were so incredible, we hardly mourned the absence of our friend Salt. On Sunday we hiked to the top of a ridge that overlooked the whole world, but the view was buried in clouds and cold rain fell from the sky. We sat beneath a dripping hemlock and made nori rolls with smoked salmon, cream cheese and avocado. Then we hiked back to Sarah’s cabin and I tried to absorb her very existence just by being there, second-best to actually seeing her. I pounded out a letter on her thrumming, dim-ribboned electric typewriter, and made fast friends with her space-heater. I thought of how Sarah is one of the people that make me feel like anything can happen, like anything can happen and it’s ok, like the whole world is just some mad carnival ride and everything is going to be ok. Outside, rain splattered the alder trees and I knew the huckleberries would never be sweet- there hadn’t been summer, really, only spring and fall, and now winter would come and bury them as they were.

On Monday Sarah walked into camp and collapsed on the wood-chips. Her hair was cut almost all the way off and she wore bright purple leggings. She rolled over and laughed and it felt so good to see her- like, if we were in the same place at the same time again, what fun it would be! Her trip had been wet and cold and long, and now she was exhausted and sore, and all her clothes were soaked, and I was here but I had waited two days and now I needed to leave. It felt, suddenly, like we were never going to see each other again. Like I had come to visit but really it didn’t matter, because she was here and I was somewhere else and what’s the point of making friends at all, if you have to leave them right when things are getting really good?

On the car ride leaving camp I thought, I can’t do this anymore. No matter that I’ve said that six times, said it six hundred times. I can’t float forever like a cork on the fluidity of the universe, you know? I need roots, I need community- I need to be around the people I share history with, people who have known me for more than a year- and I want to SEE them- I want to SEE the people I care about- I want us to grow together in the same place- I can’t stand to cut my moorings anymore and watch the people I love drift away towards the horizon.

It kind of makes me feel all raw inside, like I don’t even exist. Like whole years of my life have been erased. Like I have no-one, like I’m totally alone, even though I know there are people who love me and care about me, and miss me as much as I miss them.

I leaned my head against the car window as we left camp, watching the meadows roll by with their late-afternoon light. It seemed so quiet there, outside the window. I looked out at all the places I wanted to be, all the shafts of light and slanting barns, the deep grasses and groves of trees.

“I want a meadow,” I said to Shannon, waving my hand at the window. “Really, I’ll take any meadow. Any meadow at all.” I closed my eyes and thought, I’ll come back here someday, as a spirit. I’ll come back as a spirit and I’ll live in shafts of light, in the meadows. And I’ll finally get to be all the places I can never go.











The Gut-Bone's Connected to the Mood-Bone






I haven’t seen Jade in a long time. He’s cut all his hair off. It’s short now and parted severely, flattened with beeswax and curled a bit on his forehead. It looks amazing, like a femme-y 1920s gay man on a date. I immediately want the same hair. As the day wears on, I just cannot stop staring at Jade’s hair.

“That’s the first original short hair style I’ve seen in years,” I say, and I mean it.

The next morning I sit on the floor of Jade’s bedroom with his little tub of beeswax, and we try to make my hair look like his. Beeswax, now there’s a hair product I could get behind. What if you even got the wax from bees you raised yourselves? Hair product, right from the hive!

My hair’s a little too long, and I end up looking like I have a massive comb-over. I laugh and wash my hair but the beeswax won’t come out, so I just laugh some more and put my hat back on.

On Wednesday we walk to the food-cart village on 12th. It’s august in Portland, so the sidewalks are littered with walnuts and windfall apples. I like picking up these apples and taking a bite out of the good half, then dropping them back on the sidewalk. I like the green ones that are blushed pink on one side, and clefted deeply where they were crowded on the twig. These apples taste like fall to me, and make me think of this time last year, when I was on the Olympic Peninsula, sleeping in a moldy cabin and eating duck eggs. Some friends had rented a cider press, and they stood in the pouring rain and pressed a whole abandoned-orchard’s worth of apples. They put the cider in a massive carafe in the kitchen-cabin, and it changed every week- from juice to mead to the strongest vinegar you could imagine, and then no-one could drink it anymore, except maybe a shot in the morning as a health tonic.

As I toss another apple onto the sidewalk I think- There is nothing more perfect than these apples. It’s a miracle the city makes them at all.

As we walk, Jade and I talk about “how we’re doing”. Ok, not so good, really bad.

“I wish people wouldn’t say- ‘How are you’,” says Jade. “I wish they’d just say- ‘How’s the crazy?”

We laugh- about expectations, about how shitty everyone is always doing, and about how no-one, really, wants to hear you talk about it.

As we talk about moods, Jade tells me he wants to see an intuitive healer. I plug for allergy testing.

“Your gut, it’s connected to your head,” I say. “At least mine is. More than I can believe, sometimes.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh yeah. If I hadn’t stopped eating gluten a few years ago, I would’ve killed myself by now.”

We laugh again. The sun is dropping, and the shadows are long. I wonder if that’s really true. Maybe it is. Who knows. Who knows how many people are out there suffering, trapped under a hundred-pound wet blanket of depression, moods changing faster than the new Portland weather, and all for a little gluten allergy?

Your gut-bone’s connected to your mood-bone…

Even if it is just an allergy, or the long wet winter, or lack of exercise. Or a buildup of environmental toxins in your system. Or all of these things combined. It’s not like you can just rationalize it away. It’s hard to have hope, when you feel heavier than lead. When it feels like the very center of the earth is trying to reclaim you.

For the last two weeks I’ve had this stomach bug. It’s actually clearing up a little now, on it’s own, and I’m starting to feel a little livelier. But DAMN. Did that thing make me feel depressed! The feeling would come in waves, after I ate. Sadness washing over me like a summer thunderstorm. I cried a lot on my bike, pedaling across town in the hot sunshine. It felt good, crying on my bike. Sobbing and wondering if anyone would notice. Meanwhile, my stomach was doing all sorts of crazy shit, gurgling and feeling nauseous and being in pain. It was like food was poison. Every food. What a nightmare, I thought. What if it was like this all the time? What if I was allergic to EVERYTHING?

The last few days I’ve been feeling better, and little flowers have started to come up in the springtime of my psyche.

(That’s the cheesiest metaphor I have ever written. Ever.)

Whenever I start to feel like shit for some new reason, when I get depressed, anxious or tired, I often wish I could just pop my hood, pull the bad thing out like jammed paper in a copier. But it’s never that easy- no matter how many books I read, no matter how much I regulate the food I eat, no matter how much control I have over the environment I live in. It’s hard to keep up- impossible, really. There’s too much already, and there’s more of it every day. Too much against us, against our physical, animal bodies, the ones still living in the past- and now everything’s changing- new poisons coming out faster than we can adapt to them. It’s here, people. And we’ve got it the worst, my generation and folks younger. We grew up waist-deep in it, we didn’t even know what we were swimming in. And now it’s kicking us in the face, chronic this-and-that like a trust fund we never knew we had. Sometimes I look at the older folks in my life and feel jealous. Where will my generation will be, I wonder, when we’re in our sixties? Fifties, even? Will we live that long?

Yeah, we’re pretty much fucked.

And that’s what I want this blog to be about. Not about how we’re fucked, but about what we’re doing to cope. To make it through day to day. And if we’re doing pretty well in spite of everything, I want to talk about what it’s like to watch our friends go down around us, to watch our best friends struggle like salmon in a gillnet.

It’s not that I have hope. I don’t. But while a lot of us feel like shit a lot of the time, we’re not dead. And since we’re not dead, we might as well talk about our problems, right? We don’t have much to lose.

Thursday Jade and I biked to Oaks Park. It was the most obscene summer day, and all the world’s children had turned out to ride the mini-train and eat soft-serve ice-cream cones. In line for chicken strips, Jade talked about the inherent racism of disney world. A girl in front of us turned around to listen.

“I like disney world,” she said, staring up at us with a sort of fierce look. “Have you ridden the ___ ride?”

“No,” said Jade, smiling. “But I have ridden the ____ ride.” The girl turned back around to order her onion rings. On the back of her shirt, in six-inch letters, were the words “I Love My Two Moms”.

“Only in Portland,” I whispered to Jade. “ONLY in PORTLAND.”











Coconut Yogurt and TC Boyle






I’m sitting in the most comfortable chair in the world. I just biked around a lot and then came back to my friend’s where I’m staying and ate chicken broth with seaweed in it, and also coconut milk yogurt. Did you know there was such a thing as coconut milk yogurt? There’s no dairy or soy in it. I’m not sure if it really exists, tho. The yogurt had all these additives, and a lot of sugar, even though I got “plain”. I think it might just be a scam. They should call it “Cultured Carrageenan- Coconut Flavor.”

This chair is making me want to take a nap. It’s a big overstuffed recliner. Someday when I live somewhere, I am going to have one of these. Today I’ve been reading How To Become A Famous Writer Before You're Dead, by Ariel Gore. I like it a lot. I also like that she’s queer and lives in Portland. It’s like one of my friends wrote a book for me, about how to be a writer. I also tried to read a bit of TC Boyle, earlier at Powell’s. I picked up his book Drop City, about a hippie commune in the sixties that decides to move to the Alaskan interior. On the cover of this book is a photo of a bunch of naked people laying in a field in a circle, face down, with their heads together in the middle. They all have long hippie hair. I thought- that cover’s pretty dumb and sensational, but surely the book is good. I mean, I’ve never read this author, but he sure has won a lot of awards! And what a plot!

Ha. The chapters I read were nothing but sex, drugs, and bad run-on sentences. And I know a bad run-on sentence when I see one, because I am a bad run-on sentence veteran. Don’t fear the period, man. I mean, run-on sentences done right can be incredibly beautiful. But his just seemed- stupid. And fake. And the characters did so many drugs. They were high constantly! They woke up high to a glorious sunrise (extra glorious cuz they were high), they milked the goats high (p.s. Dear TC Boyle- goat milk is not yellow), they made a big pot of lentils together, high, and then in the evening they started to come down. So they did more drugs and danced around topless.

I mean, come on. I know the hippies did drugs, but was it really like that? I always thought that the hippies were sort of like my friends are today, only not as sober and they wore less black, and weren’t nearly as feminist. But if you were part of a collective, and your collective did that much drugs, and you decided to move to the Alaskan interior, there’s no way you would survive.

Damn. Now I wish I had the book here with me. I didn’t read the ending part. Do they survive? I have no idea. Maybe they die, and it makes the whole book worth it.

We’ll never know.











Western Medicine: 0 Plantain: 1 million






It Healed! My spider bite is better! I only did four poultices, even. After the very first one, the bite cooled down a bit and stopped spreading, and now it's just a faint red circle. Hoooray!

Now I just have to deal with my Giardia-type stomach bug, whatever it is. I should have the test results back in a week. I'm so curious! It sure does make me feel like shit! I thought the bug was from drinking water while hiking, even though my hiking partner didn't get sick- but then a friend wrote and said that everyone out at the place in the woods I was working has been getting sick- so it might have even been something in the water there, which comes from a creek.

Thanks for all your comments, friends! And thanks for reading!











No Comment?






Friends, strangers, the curious-

as the little counter at the bottom of this page spins faster and faster, I wonder-

why no comments?

Am I posting too much, too fast? Not enough time to mull it over? If you saw me today and said, a little sheepishly, "Hey, I read your blog!" then you are now required to comment. At least once! Tell me you like something, or just say hi! You don't have to be a blogger to comment. You don't even have to talk about the post.

I'm on a stage here, and the bright lights keep me from seeing the audience. You came for the show, at least whistle or throw something at me!

In other news, I Have Been Bitten By A Poisonous Spider. It's been a fun year people, and it just keeps getting better! Saturday morning I woke up in my tent, in my friend's backyard, and found a half-dollar sized welt on my thigh, with a little bite-hole in the middle. I went to the zine symposium, and as the day went on, the red circle grew. It got sore, and hard, and grew and grew! I looked on the internet, and the only likely culprit for this act seems to be-

The Hobo Spider.
I know, the irony is killing me.

The Hobo Spider, (Tegenaria agrestis) apparently LOVES the pacific northwest. It also LOVES backyards and gardens, and although bites are uncommon, the most likely time to get bit is August. The bites are reported to be less severe than those of the brown recluse, and less likely to be necrotic (that's where your flesh rots away).

This morning, the bite was still there. In fact, the red circle had gotten bigger. No streaks yet, no bulls-eye, nothing weird like that. But it was hot to the touch. I went to the second day of the zine symposium, and had a fun time showing it to people throughout the day.

"Look at my spider bite!" (pulls up short)

"UGGGGGGGHHHH!" (satisfying response from friend)

After the symposium I sped to the Herb Shoppe (which is now on Hawthorne), because I knew that they would, unlike "real doctors", or even the internet (except for this guy, but Hydrangea doesn't grow out here) have all the answers I needed. The red circle now covered most of the front of my thigh.

I walked into the shop, immediately reassured by the long shelves of glass jars. Plants! Any plant I need! Herbalism for the lazy man! I walked up the the counter.

"Yes?" asked the woman behind it.

"I have a spider bite- look! What plants should I use?" I pulled up the leg of my shorts.

"UGGGGGGHHHH!" It was not the response I was looking for, this time. "You should see a doctor! Right away! I mean, you should really see a doctor for that!"

"I mean, I know I could go to a doctor," I said. "But I'm sure there are plants for this."

Because, you know what? There have been spiders a lot longer than there have been antibiotics.

"Oh. Ok. Hold on, I'll ask..." And she disappeared behind a curtain.

And then this nice woman came out, who's name I can't remember, but I think she's the owner. I used to see her there alot when the shop was on Burnside, and I had herb school classes there.

This woman pulled me in back, into a little room like a doctor's office, and had me show her the bite. Right away she touched it with her hand, and I immediately felt better. To have someone who might be able to help you, to have them put their hand on the place that hurts and say, see look right there, no streaking, it's not infected- sometimes it feels like that is all I need. Like that could fix whatever is wrong with me.

She hurried me out into the front of the shop, and started pulling glass jars off the shelf, handing them to me.

"We'll need plantain," she said, "to pull out the poison. And comfrey. Echinacea, too."

At the counter she unscrewed each jar, and picked up a scoop.

"Make a herb cake, you know how to make an herb cake?"

"No," I said.

"You take a spoonful of powder, you mix it with a little boiling water." she was talking rapidly, tossing the herbs together in a bag. "You put a circle of the paste on the bite, cover it with a hot towel." she sealed the baggie, shook it up. "You do it three times a day, as often as possible."

"There you go." She put the bag on the scale. "Four dollars."

I left the shop smiling, my little baggie in my backpack. I had had a feeling plantain would be the herb for me. I could've saved myself the trouble and picked it from the backyard, made my own poultice. But why do any of that when you're in Portland, and you can go to a magical place like the Herb Shoppe? Where they look carefully at your bite, mix up a special blend for you, tell you how to use it, and then charge you next to nothing?

Plantain is the real deal, people.

Once upon a time, a friend of mine (Hi M.!) rode a train by herself to Eugene, from Portland. She was being a bit sketch, and trying to get into a boxcar that was moving too fast. Well, she fell, and scratched the hell out of her knee on the ballast, making a gnarly, bloody wound. Unperturbed, she got right back up and tried again, this time making it into the car. Her knee bled some and stained her pants, but she ignored it and rode to Eugene.

Arriving in Eugene, she realized that the blood had dried, and her pants had stuck to the wound. So she peeled them off, and her knee was swollen and a bit infected. So she cleaned it and went about her business, a day or two later getting on another train, and riding back to portland.

This friend got back to the house we were living at in Portland, and boy, was her knee infected! I don't remember the details, but I think it was gnarly- swollen and pussy and stuff. Now, she could've gone to the doctor and gotten anti-biotics, but instead, one of our housemates knew just the thing-

"Plantain," he said. "Pick some plantain, chew it up, (the enzymes in your saliva activate something or other) and make a poultice. Change the poultice as often as you can. The plantain will pull the infection out." My friend followed his instructions, and sure enough, in a matter of days the knee was no longer infected, and it went on to heal normally.

So now, dear reader, we will see how well this plant works for the bite of the tent-dwelling hobo spider!












Once Upon A Time I Almost Froze To Death On A Train






It was February and Sami & I wanted to go to Guatemala. We had a handful of money we’d acquired through noble, if somewhat illegitimate means, and we planned on using it to pay for hostels and Spanish school. We’d thought it all out, down to the dollar, and we had just enough- three dollars a night for a hostel room, $150 a week for Spanish school- we figured we could stay for two months and learn just enough Spanish to get by.

We were in Portland, living in the crowded sort of house that everyone used to live in. A “shotgun shack”, some people called it- meaning you could stand in the front doorway and shoot a gun straight out the backdoor, where it would lodge in the back gate. It was the kind of house you crammed as many people into as possible, because you wanted to live cheap, and there was a big plastic telephone everyone shared. The fridge was always full of dumpstered juice and bruised vegetables, and the red-painted cabinets held mason jars with rusted lids, kept stocked with grains and herbs for everyone to eat. You had your own cubby hole for mail and you cut the corner off the floor sponge, and stacked in the corner were 4-gallon buckets, one of which contained dumpstered chocolate sauce.

The house was damp, and smelled of cumin. A door was always open in summer, letting the air and visitors in and out, and no-one had a key. People lived where they could- on a loft built under the stairs, in a van in the backyard, in a cell-like room in the unfinished basement. There was a warehouse building next door who’s roof could be accessed from the roof of the garage, and in the warmer months folks would throw a mattress and a few chairs up there, under the shade of the massive elm tree, for sex and old-time jams.

The elm tree. It was the biggest tree around. You could see it all the way down at the end of the block, dwarfing the little peaked house we lived in. It had a plaque on it. It was a Portland Heritage Tree. Wych Elm, said the plaque, and so that was the house’s name. Wych Elm House. One day some folks came by and switched the plaque. “Turns out,” they said with authority, “it’s an English Elm. We identified it wrong before.” We took the old plaque from them and hung it in the house, went about our business, pretended nothing had happened.

The house was always full of visitors and no-one had any privacy. You lived off the common spaces, or you were attached to the common spaces via a vent that carried sound, or you slept outside with no heat. You heard sex, you heard music, you heard telephone conversations. The bathroom was filthy and badly maintained but we didn’t shower much anyway. There was a list on the wall of housemates- defined as anyone who had paid rent or lived in the house for a month- and after two years there were fifty names on that list. There was a picture wall, too, that covered one third of the kitchen, and battered message books lined up on the shelf like yearbooks- full of good-bye notes, crudely-drawn maps, and many thanks for the floor to sleep on.

This is the house where I learned to ride trains. It was a stop on the travel map, a sort of depot, a community center. I lived there, threw my futon down in a room with dirty green carpet, and participated in house meetings, so I got plenty of chances to pick things up- the wind would blow in folks and they would set down a wax-box of cabbages, announce they were headed to Canada and did anyone want to come along? Some of these kids were more likeable than others, but they all had one thing in common- a sort of fierceness, a devil-may-care genius that said I Set My Own Rules, I Do What I Want, a disdain for money and societal acceptance and a yearning for the impossible.

Privilege had its role too, and in a way we were all misplaced colonizers- folks of European descent, most of us, from middle class backgrounds, at least a few of us, born hungry for something new that could be ours alone. But there was nothing left to colonize, we’d gotten as far as the Pacific ocean and everyone knew that that was all there was. And we were born into a world, too, that we didn’t like, and so we refused to play by its rules. We lived in the wealthiest country on earth, a country that valued property more than life itself, and so we were poor- we were as poor as we could possibly be. We lived as cheap as possible and used money as little as possible, and it felt like something, it felt like the biggest thing we could really do- it felt like a big Fuck You in the face of all this validation we were supposed to want and need. We’d live by our own rules, we said, or die. At least for now.

Lindsey M. was a fiddler from Minneapolis. She told good jokes and had an old fiddle she’d gotten from a junk store and fixed up. She had been staying at the Wych Elm house but she wanted to go south to New Orleans, to learn to play Cajun music and sleep in the bushes until she got chiggers. New Orleans was on the way to Guatemala, which was good because Lindsey had ridden lots of trains but Sami & I had only ridden a few.

The first train we wanted to catch would take us to LA, but neither of us knew how long it would take to get there. So we asked Benjamin, who was the sort of person you learned as much from as possible and then cut out of your life completely. He was tall and volatile with a jealous temper that struck like lightning, but he knew all sorts of stuff and was always doing things you would never think to do- like playing his fiddle on top of a speeding train, as the train is going through a tunnel, or getting onto a moving boxcar with a fiddle, a banjo, and a bike, as the train crosses a trestle (train bridge). He could also bake pies, and sew western shirts on a treadle sewing machine by the light of an oil lamp, from a pattern. Benjamin was one of the folks you liked to have around, in spite of his over-the-top machismo- he was always upping the ante, pushing the line a little farther, making a place where you could follow in his footsteps. And like many of us, he knew a thousand ways to get whatever it is you wanted, for free, while still keeping your dignity and without resorting to violent crime. His clothes went so long between washings that they were waterproof and shone like waxed canvas, and he always smelled the way traveling kids do, like tanned skin mixed with diesel exhaust. It’s a healthy smell, a smell I love to this day. We asked Benjamin about the UP route south and he told us it took 24 hours to get to LA on that train, and so we packed two liters of water each, because that is how much water you need in a day.

It was February, and Portland was a big, dark, wet-blanket of underwater wintertime. Nice, cold, face-stinging mist-rain, falling from a sad, black sky. We knew it would be cold going over the Cascade mountains, way up on top and with the wind in our faces, so we brought lots of layers- lumpy oversized layers and ugly stretchy layers, things we could throw away once we got to LA. The universe practically handed me a brand-new, ultra-light, zero-degree down sleeping bag, and as an extra precaution we stuffed our pockets with instant hand and foot warmers. We were Ready.

“This car is rideable? Really?” We’d been waiting in the golfcourse in SE Portland, and our train had just pulled up and stopped. The only problem was, there weren’t any rideable cars on it. Or so I thought.

“Oh yeah,” said Lindsey. “It’s called a ‘pig in a bucket.’ Totally rideable. You’re nice and hidden, too!”

I didn’t believe her. It looked just like a rideable car, a car I had ridden in fact, except with no floor. Instead of a solid floor there was just the edge of a floor on either side, about 2 feet of solid steel, and in the middle were these huge 4-foot diameter holes that went straight to the tracks below. The car had low walls at least, so we would indeed be hidden. And sitting in the car was the trailer from the back of a semi-truck, wheels and all. So we would be above the holes, but under the truck. That’s about as hidden as it gets on a train.

We jumped into the car, and crawled under the truck. Lindsey clipped the straps of her pack around a metal rod that ran the length of the car.

“See, you clip your pack in like this, so it doesn’t fall into the hole.” She pushed her pack as close to the wall as possible. “Anything you don’t want to fall into the hole, you clip to this bar. You take off your shoes to sleep, you tie them to this bar.”

“Got it.” There was only room for two in each car, so Sami said farewell and headed to the car in front of us. Lindsey and I shared a bit of dried mango, and the train began to move.

Trains are loud. As soon as ours started moving the conversation stopped, and Lindsey & I settled in to our respective steel ledges, rolling out our ridge rests and watching the blackberry jungle glide by through the crack between the wall and the truck trailer. The train was ambling along at a steady pace, clearing the suburbs of Portland one by one, and as it entered the open countryside en route to Eugene it picked up speed, barreling past the open fields and pushing the wind down into our car, blowing grit in our faces.

I did something stupid. I rolled out my brand-new, feather-weight sleeping bag, and then I decided to cross the car to Lindsey’s side, so we could shout and gesture at the passing scenery together. I crouched under the truck and crossed on the narrow strip of steel between two of the holes, clutching the ribbed underside of the truck trailer for balance. What I didn’t realize is that when the train picks up speed (which it just had, all of a sudden), the holes in the floor of the car become a vacuum, an evil, sucking portal of doom to the shimmering, rippling tracks below. As soon as my weight was off that sleeping bag it rose gently into the air like a goose-down poltergeist, and slurp! it was gone, through the portal.

“NOOOOOOOO!” We shrieked, but our voices were lost to the thundering train. My sleeping bag! My goddam, brand new sleeping bag! In fucking February! Several years later and a bit more weathered, I might have cried or felt a bit crushed. Good sleeping bags are hard to come by, and ‘more difficult’ does not always equal ‘more fun’. But as it was, I only laughed. Our adventure was about to get even better!

Lindsey shook her head. She happened to have an extra wool blanket with her, and a tarp. Most people’s sleeping bags weren’t as nice as mine had been, and they had to carry these extra things to stay warm. I could use the blanket at night, she said, and the tarp to cut the wind, and I might be alright. She would sleep in just her dirty synthetic bag. It would be a little cold, but no-one would freeze.

I settled back down on my side of the car, and watched the evening fall just past Eugene. As we cut east and began to ascend the Cascade mountains, I took a drink of my water- I was down to just one liter, since I’d drank one while we were waiting for the train. No big deal, I thought. We’d be in LA soon enough.

A freight car is made of cold, solid steel. We were crossing the cascades, and it was dark. There were several inches of snow on the ground, and the Fahrenheit had dipped to twenty degrees (I learned this later), without the windchill. The train was hurtling down the mountain at 60 miles an hour, and we had nothing to protect us from the wind but two heavy truck mudflaps and the scarves we had wrapped around our faces. Lindsey and Sami were bedded down to weather the storm, safe in their sleeping bags like winter larvae. But I couldn’t sleep. I was too fucking cold. The blanket wasn’t long enough to cover all of me at once, and as hard as I tried to wrap myself up in the tarp, it just flapped up in the cold wind whenever I moved. I was so fucking cold. I crouched, awake, arranging and re-arranging the blanket and tarp, stomping my feet and wiggling my fingers. At some point I’d remembered the hand and foot warmers and shoved them into my boots, and for this reason I could still feel my feet and my hands weren’t so cold I couldn’t use them. But I could not rest. It was too cold to sleep, and the gaping hole taunted me from the floor of the car, sucking at the corners of my blanket. If Benjamin were here, I thought, he’d squat over the hole, and sharpen his knife on the tracks.

By and by the train would stop, and sit silent in some cold dark forest, where the firs were changing to pines as we crossed to the other, drier side of the cascades. These were my moments of hope- if I could get up to the rear unit (engine), if I could just get up to the unit, the engineers would let me ride inside and I would be warm. (This is in fact, true, and I have friends who have ridden across Canada in the wintertime this way. There are upwards of four units on any train, and only the first two are occupied. It’s practically impossible to hide your presence, however, once you’re there, and so usually this sort of ride is a co-operative affair which includes the complicity of the crew, who are often amused by your very presence. They even give you their sack lunches, sometimes, or at least the part they don’t want.)

Each time the train stopped that night, I threw myself over the side and ran like hell towards the front of the train, cold legs pumping at the sandy soil. Only problem was, our train was about two miles long, and we were at the very back of it. No sooner would I see the wandering beam of a worker’s flashlight than the tell-tale hiss of air would fill the quiet night, the sound of brakes releasing in preparation for departure. At this point I would turn and bolt as fast as possible back to my car, lungs burning, hoping I would make it in time. I always made it back to our car before the train picked up any sort of speed, but I never made it up to the unit.

Morning came, and I uncurled my fingers in the weak light. I may have slept a bit, or at least forgotten whole hours of the night. The day warmed and the air was much drier here, but to my dismay we were still in the mountains, and the three of us realized that Benjamin had been wrong- that we had no idea how long it really took this train to get to LA. We were also pretty much completely out of water, not having planned for the extra time or the fact that the wind and the cold will both dehydrate you. And it didn’t help that all the food we had was compact and dry, too- dried fruit and almond butter, most of it. Train riding is not like backpacking, where you have a nice stream to re-hydrate your soup. There is no water on the train, and the whole experience is very drying to the soul. I learned later to bring along a nice can of beans or three and an apple on every trip, for the comfort of wet food, heavy pack be dammed.

All there was to do was nap and pass the time, waiting for night to come again. But surely, I thought, by nightfall, we would be safe in the warm California desert! But alas, I was wrong again. Night fell, and we were still in the cold northern California mountains, stopping randomly and then hurtling forward at a speed to rattle the fillings from your mouth. So there was another night of misery, of shuffling in the cold wind, of wishing I had ten times as many tarps and blankets, a sleeping bag fifteen feet thick, an entire gallon of spring water.

Morning came again, and the larvae emerged from winter hibernation. The sweet, sweet California desert, warm sunrise in a pink and turquoise sky, glowing for all the world like early eighties surf wear. I had never been to this part of the world. Wow, I said, as we sat on the porch, watching the rolling land go by. We had been transported, somehow, into summertime. Finally our layers came off, finally the balmy wind hit our skin. The promised land! We slouched, grinning, under the truck trailer as our train pulled towards the dusty outskirts of early-morning LA. It began siding constantly, as trains always do outside of cities, giving us plenty of time to stuff our bags and hop safely over the side, ear-drums vibrating as we gathered our bearings on the ballast.

We had no idea where we are. We were hungry and dehydrated. My tongue felt a little swollen in my mouth. Not a good sign, I thought. We walked a few blocks, past teenagers selling heart-shaped balloons and baskets of candy. It was valentine’s day. We turned a corner and there in front of us, in a long, dirty strip mall, was the taqueria of our dreams.

Packs were slung off, faces and hands were washed in bathroom sinks. Styrofoam cups of ice-water were drank, giant burritos and baskets of chips & salsa were consumed. Finally we slouched happy against the red plastic booth, eating a last pickled carrot or salty jalapeño. The proprietors watched us from the back of the restaurant, curious. Soon it was time to go and we shouldered our packs again, new-found energy coursing through our blood, water-bottles full. Lindsey was taking a greyhound the rest of the way to New Orleans so we said our goodbyes, and I handed back my borrowed blanket and tarp. Sami and I planned on riding the train all the way to Texas, where there was a cheap bus into mexico. But first, I had to somehow get a new sleeping bag.

And that is where Sami’s dad came in.

Sami’s dad, although genetically responsible for her existence, had never been much of a father. Their relationship was new, sporadic, and recent. Try as she might to forge a closer bond with him, he was somewhat of a flippant asshole, and kept her always at arm’s length. He lived in Burbank in a white house with a palm tree out front, and drove a shiny red sports car. He worked for disney doing something or other, and his wife was a costumer in Hollywood. They kept a neat house with thick beige carpet and glass-fronted china cabinets, and it was fun to speculate what their reactions would be when we showed up, filthy with diesel grime and smelling of unwashed clothes, and threw our packs down in their living room.

Sami’s dad put on a cheery face.

“Can you take us to trader joe’s?” Asked Sami. “We need to dumpster some food for the rest of our trip.”

And that is how we found ourselves at the Burbank trader joe’s at two in the afternoon, stuffing armloads of bruised pears and yesterday’s sushi into the trunk of Sami’s dad’s shiny red sports car. Next he ferried us to a large chain out-door gear store, where I waved my magic wand (and ‘returned’ my rain gear that ‘didn’t fit’), and walked out with a sleeping bag that was even newer, warmer, and lighter than my last one. The salesperson had tried to talk me out of buying the warmest one I could find, saying, “Where are you going camping? Alaska? You don’t need that!” but I waved him away, and bought it anyway. I never, ever, wanted to be cold, ever again.

That night Sami’s dad took us out to Thai food. Here we were, they might as well bond. As we ate, his wife picked at her noodles, and told us about her job working in Hollywood.

“Are you happy?” I asked. “Do you like it?”

She looked up at me, and her chopsticks fell still.

“No,” she said. “I hate it. I’m really unhappy. I wish I had never gotten this career. I wish I could do something else.”

Sami and I were silent, stunned at her honesty.

“Wow,” I said. And there it was, in her eyes, looking across the table at me. Admiration, with a hint of jealousy. She wanted to be me. She wanted to be “free”. She wanted to “drop out and run away”. Sami’s dad paid the bill and we left, and for a minute I felt bad. I felt bad for acting like everything was so easy, for acting like you could just ride trains forever and never get old and never need health insurance and never have to file your taxes, I felt bad for walking around like the world I lived in even existed. But the moment passed, and deep down I knew that the truth of the matter was that she had something I wanted and I had something she wanted, and there was no way anyone could have both those things at once, ever.

It was outside of the train yard in Colton that I realized I had pinworms. We were in Colton because that is where you catch the train that goes to Texas. We’d taken a bus there from LA, and followed the cryptic directions we had (left at the burnt-out burger king sign, under the overpass, through the hole in the fence) to a nice spot next to the tracks, where we figured, by our calculations, the train would surely stop. There was no place to hide but there were over-sized tumbleweeds in abundance, so we built a sort of house from them, and slept inside. We waited for two days with no luck, and on the morning of that second day I crossed the tracks to take a shit in the weeds on the other side. I’d been feeling a bit woozy, and had diarrhea. I’d chalked it up to dehydration and an all-nut butter diet, but that morning as I squatted on the dusty ground, I realized there was something else going on. I finished up and looked down at my little pile of shit, and there, writhing around without a care in the world, were dozens of short white worms. I would’ve shrieked, if I hadn’t felt so weak and dizzy.

What we needed was the internet. So we hid our packs and found the library, where the internet was kept. After an hour of careful perusal, I had the information I needed. Next we found the nearest tienda, where I bought half a dozen heads of garlic. More nut butter (parasites hate nuts!), some corn tortillas (as apposed to bread made with refined flour- parasites love sugar and white flour!) and that was to be my diet. We did eventually find our train, and for the entire ride I ate like six cloves of raw garlic a day, diced up fine on a nut-butter tortilla, which is not as sick as it sounds. The worms were gone instantly, and I kept up the diet for two weeks, which is their life cycle, to make sure no eggs hatched. Then they were gone completely, and they never did come back.

It was a thrill to finally find our train. And now we were really in the desert, mid-winter be dammed! The sun shone down on us, the warm wind blew, our fore-arms got tan. We had a better car this time, and gallons of delicious water. All was going according to schedule, as we hurtled through Arizona and New Mexico. And then, in Texas, we went to jail.

He was tall and dressed just like a cowboy, which is to be expected in some parts of Texas. We heard the tell-tale Pong! Pong! Sounds as he mounted our train in his cowboy boots, and then he was on the porch looking down at us, in his white ten-gallon Stetson. His belt-buckle shimmered in the morning light. We thought he was a worker, come to tell us we’d been seen. We started stuffing our bags, prepared to exit the yard discreetly while he looked the other way.

“Y’all better hurry it up,” he said, “Y’all are under arrest,”

“Oh man!” we said, and looked at each other. We rolled our eyes at him, and I pulled my pants on over my lavender long underwear, started lacing up my boots.

“I saw you,” he said, voice cracking, “up on the hill.” He pointed, and we saw his rail-cop SUV parked up near an overpass, where he could look down at passing trains and see any riders in cars like ours.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, as I strapped my layers to the outside of my pack. I had a bad habit of being snarky to cops, and this Bull (railroad cop) didn’t like it one bit. He was already sniffing the air like he smelled a skunk, and looking with disdain at our dirty clothes and empty water bottles.

“Where are we?” asked Sami, tossing her pack onto the ballast.

“Sweetwater, Texas.” said the Bull. “And y’all are under arrest.”

Sweetwater, Texas, is a very small town. And a very Texas town, at that. For all I knew, our train had gone through a portal into 1950s TV. I’d never been to Texas before, and now I felt like I was at an amusement park, a sort of Texas theme-park.

The jail was tiny, and felt like a small-town post office. The wardens who booked us had huge blonde hair like Dolly Parton, and thick, thick Texas accents. They kept asking us why we smelled so bad, and we kept telling them over and over that we’d spent the last five days on a freight train, and that there were no showers on freight trains.

“Well why,” asked one warden, “didn’t you stop a night and get a motel? You could’ve showered there!”

“You’re a little gamey,” said another.

“You stink,” added the first.

They searched through our packs, looking for exciting things like drugs or proof that we were terrorists.

“You know who rides these freight trains,” one of them had said earlier, looking me straight in the eye. “Terrorists! Terrorists ride these freight trains!”

I learned later that Texas has the highest-security freight yards in all the US, and it is because of the border with Mexico. And by terrorists, they mean Mexican immigrants. That day was the day I suddenly realized that I was white, and that if I had not been white, my experience would have been much, much different. And that once again, my privilege would save me from actually becoming the thing I pretended to be, for adventure. A person on the run, a destitute person, a person without a country or a home. Because actually being that person is not fun, it is not adventure. It’s scary and hard and you only do it because you have to.

They took our wallets and rifled through them. Inside Sami’s wallet were traveler’s checks, for Mexico.

“What is this,” asked one of the Dolly Parton drag-queens, waving the checks in the air- “Canada money?”

We laughed. We couldn’t help it. We didn’t know it at the time, but later the judge told us that our laughter had hurt the poor wardens’ feelings. They had thought that we had thought that they were just dumb Texans, and when we laughed at them, it had hurt their feelings!

They told us we were to stay overnight. The judge, they said, could see us in the morning. We were given clean black-and-white striped uniforms (like in a movie!) and our cell had long metal bars (also like in a movie!). Our cell-mates were nice, and taught me a cool card trick (didn’t I see this in a movie?). We had cable TV, and Sami and I curled up on our soft beds, and watched “Save The Last Dance”, twice. Actually, it wasn’t that great. I hate being in jail, and I cried almost all night. Jail makes me claustrophobic like nothing else, and is one of my biggest phobias.

They fed us gross fried food that made us constipated, and in the morning they handed us back our clothes, neatly folded and warm from the dryer. They had washed our clothes for us!

The judge met us in the hallway, a huge, friendly man in jeans and a button-down.

“I know y’all just think this is ‘Bill & Ted’s big adventure,’ ” he said, “and you’re waiting to see George Carlin in a phone booth.” Sami stifled a laugh. “But it’s not. Now, I had no complaints from the warden, other than that the two of you were a little, uh, ripe-” We smiled at each other, and covered our faces, “and you’ve served your time, a night in jail. So you can go now.”

We stumbled from the building in our newly washed clothes, grateful for the fresh evening air. Traffic slowed to a crawl as people stared at us from their cars, but we didn’t care. We may of fallen completely off of our planet and onto a strange and hostile world, we thought, with its own strange language and fear of weary foreigners, but there isn’t any corner of the world, anywhere, that you can’t hitchhike out of.

And so we hitched the rest of the way to Austin, where I got food poisoning, and we rode a bus to Mexico, and Guatemala, and went backpacking, and came back two months later tan and completely broke, and I had scabies but I didn’t know it yet-

But that is another story for another time.











Ask A Ho!






Friends! Strangers! Future sex-workers!

My friend has just started a blog, ASK A HO. A blog who's time has come! Haven't you always wanted to be a sex worker, but didn't know how to go about it? Field your questions blog-ward, brave souls!

In other news, I finished my new zine today- this one was going to be smaller than the last- but it's still 60 pages long! How do I do it, you ask? By blogging, is how!

Just kidding! Only one or two things in it are from my blog. There's tons of material in there exclusive to the zine. I'll tell you how to get it when I stop being lazy.

Blogs are nice for lazy people like me.

! ! ! !! carrot











How I Really Feel






Wait wait- I have found the very best knuckle tattoo. The very best combination of 8 letters that exists, anywhere. It came to me today, while riding my bike home from a friend's, where I'd eaten an incredible meal of

-smallish crab plucked from the puget sound by one friend, red in color, boiled and cracked and picked of meat
-chicken of the woods mushroom ("The 'chicken of the woods' mushroom has no poisonous look-alikes, but is itself sometimes poisonous") gathered by another friend, in the forest nearby, cut into small pieces and fried in butter and rice vinegar
-green beans from the garden, a little tough, but delicious steamed and served with balsamic and olive oil, salt and pepper,
-apple pie made with apples from the old orchard, very tart
and
-dryer's ice cream from the corner store.

on my way home the sky was a dazzling purple-blue, bright with electric lights. It felt so good to be on my bike, to be rolling over the surface of the earth. And it felt so good to eat a meal, with friends, new and old- no less a meal that was almost entirely either grown or wildcrafted by someone at the dinner. And no-one even planned it that way! And the ice-cream? Hey! As far as I'm concerned, dreyer's ice-cream comes from the corner store. Crappy ice-cream is born in corner stores. It grows there, like stalagmites, inside the soda fountain. I'm sure.

And this is how I really feel-

FUCK WORK

Best. Bumper Sticker. Ever.





Seen today, on the bumper of an old chevy-

REAL COWBOYS
are packed like a can of biscuits

Also, it's national "Give all your money to Kinko's" week on planet Zine. I think they cut down a whole forest just for this. Don't forget, everyone, you can ask them to put 100% recycled into the machine.














Whoah






StatCounter just blew my mind a little bit. I installed this counter at the bottom of my page, and now I can sift through all sorts of data about where my visitors are from and how they got here, what page they left on and how long they stayed. It's kind of insane. For example, I just learned that someone in Pakistan found my page by doing a google search for "bearded men".

In other news, I have some sort of stomach bug from drinking questionable stream water while backpacking with Kristi. I feel all weak and I can't digest any of my food. My stomach makes crazee gurgling noises. It reminds me of the time I got pinworms on my first long freight train ride. I didn't know what was wrong with me until we were in LA, sleeping next to the tracks in a little house we'd built out of tumbleweeds. One day I crossed the tracks to take a shit and I was like- Oh. My. God. I have fucking pinworms. It was february, and we'd just ridden the train from portland. One interesting thing that had happened is on the way down, as we barreled through Eugene, I'd lost my sleeping bag under the train. We were riding in this crazy car called a "pig in a bucket" which has huge 4-foot diameter holes in the floor. The holes create a vacuum as the car picks up speed, sucking all of your belongings toward the tracks below. My rolled-out sleeping bag didn't stand a chance- it must have looked like the train hit a flock of geese. It's not a car I would ride in today, but I was new to trains and still learning and willing to do sketchy things just because my travel-mates claimed they were safe. We also neglected to bring enough water, so not only was I hella cold (a solid steel car, 20 degrees and a 60mph wind) but soon I was super dehydrated too. We got off the train in LA and headed for the nearest taqueria, sucking down ice water and eating the biggest burritos they would sell us, dirty and dusty and so grateful for the warm desert air. We were going to Mexico, and I did get rid of the pinworms eventually- I ate hella raw garlic for two weeks, and they were gone, gone, gone. And then I never did get sick while we were in Mexico or Central America, the way everyone does. Not even once.

So much else happened on that trip- I should write more about it.

Alright, time to get on my bike and find some food. It's nice to be here for a week with nothing to do but write and figure out how to kill the invaders in my colon. The zine symposium is this weekend- I'll be there, if I can find some square-inch of table to occupy, selling gluten-free muffins and zines. There's enough people that want to table at that shit, they should just shut down the whole city and fill the streets with folding card tables. Then we can all sit and twiddle our thumbs and wait for someone with a few crumpled dollar bills to buy the shit we made from felted goodwill sweaters. And a whole felled forest of zines, too.

ZINES!
ZINES!
ZINES!












Madge's List

A pond to swim in
woods
good growing light for plants
good house light to live in
green house house
kittens
horse riding and working horses
(Freasians?)
Hunderwasser buildings
good soil for foods
hay and animal feed growing
goats
chickens
cheese and bread making
growing grains and corn
pigs and sausages
herbs, orchard, fruits
kiwis, berries, veg, nuts
well or spring water
water mill energy
neighbors (good ones)
kids
old friends (over 60)
friends working together
WWOOFERS
Sauna
hot tub (fire run)
brick oven
little buildings
big kitchen and eating
couches
music
yoga
trapeeze
warm and dry
stoves for cooking and heating
river or lake with fish
old tools

No Monsters






Arctic Boulevard was a barren expanse. There wasn’t much within walking distance, which is unfortunate for a kid with no bus money or a car. There was a 7-11, a used bookstore, a party supply store that sold balloons and stickers, and the paper cutouts that teachers put on their walls. Arctic Boulevard, the last apartment I lived in with my mom, was by far the most depressing. We never even moved our furniture in, only a couch and a TV, which sat on the floor. I slept on the carpet in my bedroom, against the wall, my things in a plastic trash bag in the closet. A box of cheap laundry detergent had broken in the closet, and it covered the bag. How depressing is that? My clothes lived in little piles around the room. I got one of the paper cutouts from the party supply store, and put it on my wall. It was a butterfly. I decided that when I wrote my first novel someday, I would call it “paper butterflies”.

The rest of our belongings lived in the mini-storage across the street, on the other side of Arctic Boulevard. Everything was behind one of the sliding metal doors, in a huge pile. You could climb it like a mountain, your legs sinking in to the knee. I would do that sometimes after school, rifling through boxes and barrels and trash bags, stuffed animals and clothes and Christmas ornaments, messing everything up even more than it had been before. I didn’t know how to be neat. I didn’t know how to be clean. Being neat and clean meant facing the mess, and the mess was much to big for me- it went back years and years, like layers of rock.

It had a smell. I pulled the hard metal handle as hard as I could, and the door slid up and open, back on its rattling track. A light clicked on. The world around me was cold and frost, but I didn’t give a fuck. Here was a mountain of things, mostly discarded, smelling of mildew. It was a Mess with a capital M. It was heavy. The weight of it threatened to crush my young heart. A mess that could never be cleaned up.

Sometimes I feel like I live my life in reverse. A young kid, living with a single parent, a single parent with severe mental illness who cannot take care of herself much less children, cannot clean the house, do the dishes, wash the clothes, remember to buy soap. You’d think I’d buck up and take on responsibility, the way kids in young adult novels do- you’d think I’d clean the house, cook meals, move our things from the storage unit armload by armload across the frozen street, kick open the back door to the building, washer thumping in the basement, heat and the smell of dryer sheets making my cheeks hot. It’s alright, Mom, I would say, as I filled a plastic trashbag with her old soda cups, sticky and smelling of flat corn syrup, and gathered the teabags from around her like flower heads, stuffing them into my bag. I’d yank open the yellowed blinds, crank a window to let in fresh air, sub-zero winter be dammed. Smoke would funnel out the window as if from a vacuum, a good clean vacuum, god’s vacuum. I’d gather her cigarette butts too, floating like dead goldfish in the stale tea. I’d fix her a nice soup, something simple from a can.

“You have to eat Mom, here-” I’d say. She’s look up at me with that blank face, rancid sweat smell rising off of her unwashed clothes, her liver pumping like a tired man bailing water. She’d reject the soup and put on her long quilted jacket instead, fastening the toggles with shaking fingers and walk to the corner store for cigarettes and a tall waxed cup of mountain dew, rattling with ice. I’d sneak a drink of it and run my thumbnail along the outside of the cup, watching the wax peel up. Cigarettes and mountain dew, all she ever ate. Black tea too, the cheap red boxes with the ceramic figurines inside. Monkey, horse, rabbit. I see them in junk stores now, someone has thought to collect them.

In the young adult novel that could have been my life, I attempt to care for my mentally ill mother. I wipe at the mess of my life with a gentle and tireless cloth, helping as best I can to fight the avalanche of flotsam and trash that builds up around us if we do not fight to keep it back. We have to hold it up. We have to Keep It Together. But all was not together, and my home was a reflection of that. It was, quite frankly, a physical manifestation of my mother’s mental state. Something Is Wrong, it practically screamed. Help, Help, Help. There is nothing I could have done that would have made it better, except get out, get out, get out- out of her world and into one I could start to build for myself, from the ground up like building a cabin from downed trees, peeling and sanding each log yourself, feeling the seasons come on with the bird calls, knowing you’ll have a house some day.

I climbed inside the cold storage shed, trash bags popping open under my feet. The smell of mildew and spilled ajax filled the air, stale clothes and silt-covered dishes. I grabbed a bed frame for support, where it jutted from the mess like a wrecked ship. There were few boxes, mostly it was just plastic bags, all piled and jumbled together like there’d been a natural disaster. And mental illness is a natural disaster, in its own way, a natural disaster in your head, coming out through your fingers and mouth and disordering everything you touch.

In those last few months, my mother had gotten much worse. My brother had left the year before and not long afterwards our benefits had been cut off. Rent, utilities, food. It all came from the state. $900 a month for a family of three. After my brother left, our mother neglected to fill out the proper paperwork, the paperwork to let social services know that she had one less dependant, so they could adjust her benefits. As a result, we lost everything. Our life support was gone.

There was no way she could have filled out that paperwork. At that point, she couldn’t even read. If you called her name, she didn’t respond. She sat, kneeling in her room, elbows on the floor, her face inches from the softly glowing radio dial. The radio murmured quietly and she murmured back at it, lost in her world of voices and colors and strange, terrifying hallucinations, all of it fitting together in a way that you and I will never understand. On the carpet in front of her, amongst cigarette ashes and strands of her long black hair, were sheets of paper where she scrawled her delusions out in tall, flowing script, free-writing out her strange world, ordering it. Pinning her word salad to the page.

That last year, my freshman year in high school, was the year my mother stopped beating me. We were pretty much physically matched at that point- my mother; aging, emaciated, insane, long grey patches sprouting in her black hair, and me- hungry and small, my growing body trying to get through puberty with what little I could forage for it. One day we were fighting and we ended up on the carpet, with her straddling me, choking me with her long, thin hands- I punched her in the face and she shrieked, jumped up hissing, spit flying from her lips, her eyes wide with hellfire and psychosis. She never tried to hit me again.

I climbed to the back of the storage unit, and began digging through stacks and piles of papers, photo albums and old junk mail. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, I just knew that we were going to be evicted soon, I felt it coming like the forest animals sense an earthquake. And I knew that this was it. We had no money- no money to pay our rent, no money to pay for the storage unit. The unit would be locked, all our things would be lost. I was leaving for Colorado, my mother was giving up her parental rights and my grandparents were adopting me. My mother would be homeless, lost, dead. God only knows. If there was anything I wanted to keep, any photos, mementos from the last 14 years of my life, I would have to get them now.

I found a dog-eared yellow folder of papers, dusty and scrawled all over with my mother’s loopy handwriting. I opened it and flipped through the pages, grainy Xeroxed documents from long ago.

What’s this? I said, and held one of the sheets in my hand. A diagnosis. A diagnosis from a psychologist. For me. For seven-year old me.

PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder. The documents said that when I was seven years old I had seen a psychologist, and that I had been diagnosed with PTSD. I remembered none of this. In fact, there wasn’t much of my childhood I did remember, before about nine years old. The memories start suddenly at nine, like the beginning of a movie- the year the three of us, my brother, myself and our mom, went to Colorado to be near our grandparents for a while.

I was about to start fifth grade. I enjoyed making star-shaped dolls out of scraps of fabric, chasing the cat, and feeding rolls to the player piano in my grandparent’s parlor. My favorite foods were pizza, salad with ranch dressing, and canned olives. In the morning my Grandmother would comb my hair, clean the dirt from under my nails, and send me off to school, dressed in one of the outfits she had bought for me. She would also help me brush my teeth, which I had never done before. My mother was there, too, she had an apartment across town. It butted up against empty dirt lots and an irrigation ditch. There were lots of large, friendly insects there, that I could collect and play with- grasshoppers and praying mantises. I had a pink and grey ten-speed and a battery-powered radio I hung from the handlebars. I liked to make my hair into the tightest ponytail possible, and fasten it with a giant white bow-clip. We stayed for a year and then went back to Alaska- back to cold and dark and filth and decay.

Memories. This is what it’s like to have memories.

The time before my ninth year- is blank. I know we were in Alaska. But where did we live? Who knows. Did I have any friends? Beats me. What were my teachers like? What schools did I go to? What toys did I like to play with? I have no idea. The few memories I have are the stories I tell myself over and over, the out-of-context images like junk-store photographs, a few handfuls of paper I’ve pulled from the dumpster behind my brain, enough to fill a quarter-shoebox. I’ve gone over and over these images, again and again, and always it’s like I’m looking at someone else’s life. They are there but they are fading- they are worn from being held, losing true feeling like dried flowers fading on a windowsill. I can count them on my fingers-

1. I come home from camp (but what camp? Where? How old was I?), clutching a banana, and burst into tears. I liked camp, and don’t want to be home. At camp people were friendly and cared for me and gave me food. Distraught, I run upstairs to my room and hide. (My room was upstairs? Where did we live?)

2. My brother John and I, eating chunky peanut butter out of the jar with a fork. We keep the jar in the fridge. I hate peanut butter, but I’m very hungry.

3. I think we had furniture for a while- nice furniture like bunkbeds and toyboxes- and then we- didn’t?

4. A white apartment building. We’ve been evicted, we have to move again. I’m crawling around on the floor, sobbing, pretending my mother has died. It makes me incredibly sad to think my mother has died, and for some reason I often pretend she has. It makes me cry inconsolably. She’s asked us to “pack” our things, so I’m stuffing my toys (a doll? Some other stuff?) into black trash bags.

5. We get taco bell and wade in the creek. There are salmon in the creek, and long insects that live inside sticks.

6. Canned corned beef hash from the food bank. It sits in our cupboard, unopened. I am afraid of it.

7. Stealing other kids’ school lunches. Getting caught.

8. A pet bird. I think it died?

At 14, I stood in that storage unit, and looked down at the papers I’d found. I dropped them to the floor. I remembered next to nothing of my childhood, and now I knew why.

I kept digging, hoping to find some pictures I could take with me to Colorado. I was devastated to be leaving Alaska, everything I knew, and the close friends I had finally found. But the time had come to leave my mother. I was moving towards an age where my mother would become less of an abusive monster in my mind, and more of a human being with a horrible illness. I was moving towards an age where there would be distance between us. I was moving away. I was separating myself from her world and leaving to claim what was rightfully mine- a normal life. Four walls and a floor. Limits to the known universe. Order. Not that any of those things actually exist, but we have the right to look for them. And run from things that might destroy us.

And I was moving towards a place where someday, there would be forgiveness. A peace inside of me, black hate falling off like a broken rubber band. But not yet.

I used to tell people, “Yeah, my mom is crazy, but she is also a terrible person. And a real bad parent. An all around monster.” And maybe that’s true. But she’s also human. A human possessed, but nonetheless human. And stranger things have happened- like war, genocide, organized religion. In some ways my mom was just acting out one little piece of the world, passing on a little something she picked up somewhere- in school, in her genes. Wherever. She’d jumped off the diving board into the great Pool of Adulthood and hadn’t managed to learn to swim- she’d sifted all the way down to the bottom, along with pieces of scrap metal and cellophane from cigarette packs, had two kids along the way and woke up in a low income apartment complex, her hungry kids gone off to fend for themselves, hair knotted for lack of combing. And she DID wake up. She woke up for moments, for hours, for days. She stood up, she opened the windows, the pain and horror fell from her face. She could talk again. She could hear you when you spoke. She could fill out paperwork to keep the rent paid, she could clean the apartment so we wouldn’t be evicted- again. In these moments she was like a whirlwind- cleaning, shopping, making plans. No more hallucinations, no more violent psychosis. No more word salad.

In these moments it felt like I really had a parent. And it made my heart sing with joy. Because I loved her. And when she felt fear, I felt fear. And when she was awake, and would look down at me, and I could be close to her, it would seem like nothing had ever been wrong at all, and her manic optimism would assure me that nothing ever would be, again.

I found the photo album I had been looking for, a heavy padded book upholstered in green and white flowers. Inside were Xeroxed portraits of dead relatives, some school photos of John & I, and even a picture of my mom and I together- I looked to be about three and was balanced on her hip. She was smiling. Her teeth were huge. The photos were all out of order- stuck under the cellophane pages as if at random. Filed away by an amateur historian, a feeble attempt at making order from something that made no sense whatsoever.

I stepped out of the storage unit and pulled down the sliding metal door, hearing it rattle and meet with the cold concrete. The light inside clicked off, leaving me alone again, in the dark.














not ready






If each of us
contains

heaven & earth

then I am not ready

to know you














The Sunset Route






(For those of you who have read this story in my zine- I recently re-wrote it in the first person, and I like it much better this way.)

--------------------------------------

I was waiting for something to happen. Winter wouldn’t come. Winter was lost somewhere out over the ocean, circling, looking for a place to land. I watched the trees along the trash-creek put on pussy willows, looked at the sky but there was nothing but sun.

You came down from the Midwest in a dodge neon that burned oil in great gusts and had a battery cable taped on with singed black tape wrapped in folded tin foil. You brought skirts and tights with you and pineapple earrings and a mullet you cut with a razor blade. You were running from a red farmhouse banked with new snow and the memory of an old boyfriend, he was hot but mean and it broke your heart when everything you’d made together, ended.

“I hear this town is nice,” you said. “Is that true?”

We were staring at a hot fire in someone’s backyard. We all had corsages made of dumpstered roses. I was dressed like the civil war was still happening, and I kept staring at the way your tits sat on your chest under your cotton shirt. I could imagine you in the summer time, squatting in the fields in your bathing suit, your hands covered in dirt, your back covered in freckles.

“You should come over to my house,” I said. “You should hang out with me. It is fun here, it’s just that a lot of folks don’t have time to entertain anyone, or run around having adventures. But I do.”

Then two things happened- everyone in the whole world left for Christmas. The second thing was that you moved into my house. My housemate was away and you moved into her glossy, red-floored room, with a hard futon pushed up against an attic window and a smell like clove cigarettes.

There had been other friends, other lovers, but now we were all gone and we were the last two people on earth.

I’d been lonely for quite some time, in this secret southern town of awkward, winding streets and dumpsters filled with birthday cake, and I wondered about you, appearing here with no context whatsoever save for your smoky car and a pile of clothes, a soccer ball, vice grips and a box of instant cheesy grits in the backseat.

You came skipping down the stairs one morning when the house was empty and I made us breakfast of eggs and rice and greens, we poured Texas Pete over everything and I decided to leave the dishes in the sink. The sun coated the table in the front room and we started up a long card game to welcome the day, we’d go dumpstering, we decided, in
your foul neon, and turn the radio way up, and fight over the stations. Then we’d steal from the scrapbooking aisle at Michael’s and make crafts, with the candy-colored Christmas lights on full blast and a tin of bland sugar-cookies nearby. We did all of those things and then I crashed from the sugar and lay in a heap on your bed, watching you block-print bike tube bracelets on the floor for your friends back home.

“Where did you come from?” I asked you and then you crawled into bed with me, wrapped your freckled arms around me and told me stories about the universe you’d inhabited, before you fell out of the sky into this one, dressed in a Lycra jumpsuit and looking to dance someplace until you gave yourself whiplash.

“I want to build a tall bike,” You said. “My friends like to drink beer. I have two cats I miss. They are my babies. My dad is a truck driver. I live on a farm I inherited from my grandfather. The winter is hard where I’m from. In the summer I turn bright red. I had goats with my ex partner. When I was younger I was into powders. When I was a kid I beat people up. When I was a kid I huffed propane. My friends robbed liquor stores. Some of them are still in jail. My sister is like Paris Hilton. I’ve been farming for the last five years and I need a break.”

We held each other on the hard futon, waiting to fall asleep. You are such an interesting mix of good and bad, I thought. Reckless and grounded. Creative and self-destructive. And then sleep came and I forgot that you were there at all.

We went to a new year’s party at a friend’s. At midnight the wine that I’d been drinking had made me moody.

“Kiss me!” I said to you on the deck, it was crowded and I had to shout above the noise. A light rain was falling. You pulled the foil off of a bottle of champagne and then kissed me, closing your eyes, which were painted the color of an LA sunset. Neither of us were having fun and I felt nothing at all. Later I sat in the cab of a friend’s pickup in the gravel driveway with the heater on, petting his dog and hiding from the rain, my friend needed an ear to talk to so we sat in there where we could hear each other, trying to be separate from the shallow, noisy party, packed with people from out of town and littered with empty wine bottles and leftover Christmas candy. He had a little stereo and we listened to country music tapes and his dog sat on my lap in a donut. After a while I walked back into the party, sobering from the champagne, and you were propped against the couch, exhausted from wine and dancing.

“I thought you left me,” you said. “I thought you left.”

I asked you what your plans were.

“I have no plans.” You said. “Not right now.”

I asked you if you would ride freight trains with me, from Georgia to Alabama to Mississippi bayou, hot yards in Texas, New Mexico like the future and the past, like the surface of the moon, Arizona where there were no seasons (and oranges on the trees! Like in The Grapes of Wrath), run, run through California where you cannot hide, you cannot steal, you cannot sleep, all the way to Oregon, where white people go to be sad. Portland, the land of five million acquaintances.

You said yes.

“Yes?” I said. No one had ever said yes before.

We started planning our trip together, put pencil to atlas, jumping off into the great wide anything, we’d claw our way across the continent on clumsy slow freight trains, got the gear we needed bit for bit, made lists, stressed. I drew pictures of trains.

“See that,” I made pencil squares, “is a stack train.”

I had ridden freight trains before. I’d eaten a cold can of beans or two in my time. Over the rockies in Canada, down the west coast with winds like ice and too little water, slept in a house made of tumbleweeds in LA. Across the middle of the country and back again, yellow fields and weather that hit without a cloud in the sky. I’d shit on my fair share of cardboard, bathed under the buzzing fluorescents of a few filthy gas station bathrooms, out the door and around the side, here’s the key, tied with wire to a block of wood with WOMEN or MEN on it in cramped sharpie, depending on how many layers I was wearing and how dirty my face was.

Now it was late January, not hardly past the halfway mark to summer and I was feeling restless energy that was energy I didn’t know what else to do with, it seemed like movement was the only thing that made sense sometimes, blow space and time like I was born with more than I could possibly use. It was the Sunset Route for me- the train route that went from Georgia down to Alabama then Texas, New Mexico and Arizona- a long string of steel boxes stacked in high-sided freight cars with space to hide at each end, if you were lucky- Tropicana refrigerator cars up front, that’s how you knew you had the right train. And I figured, why not, no place I’d rather be. Eat up the poetry of the passing desert and know that I’d fed myself and if it rained, I had a tarp. End up west just in time for crocuses and cherry blossoms and the bright wet end of the rainy season, peoples’ hearts exploding like they’d just been brought up from the sea floor.

You and I started fucking in an earnest, desperate way, a few weeks before we had planned to leave. It was awkward and we needed space from each other, we were wild about each other as friends- laughing and screaming so hard it was nearly like vomiting and falling onto the kitchen floor, but this attraction was something we tried to force, and it felt about as strong as a dusty can of instant coffee. But we needed touch and we were hungry for romance and we were the last two people on earth, so we would have to make due with what we had.

And then one day you were gone completely, like a breath of fresh air that left the room as soon as I entered it.

“I miss you,” I said to you one night, in the hallway.

“We’re leaving soon,” you said, irritated.

And we were leaving soon. I was exhausted and stressed. I didn’t see you at all that week, as I packed my stuff to ship and gathered all of the things that I would need for our train trip.

And then February came with a clear winter wind and we were off- heavy packs stuffed full of woolen things and a cardboard sign that said Fairburn, GA, hitch-hiking thumbs bright red from the cold, going south to find the juice train.

Looking for the train in Georgia, we were tired and windburned. We got lost walking in the cold, out on an empty road that went nowhere. The woods were dark and we leaned against a pine tree on the shoulder of the blacktop, watched the silhouette of an old man against the windows of his house, back-lit yellow. It got colder and the sweat chilled on us from carrying gallons of slowly-freezing water to where we thought the yard might be, so we got up and walked back the way we had come in the fifteen-degree night, kicked rocks on the train trestle over I-85. Out of the stillness I wanted to talk about the distance between us.

“What happened?” I said. We’d been on the road for a few days and questions wouldn’t stop circling in my head like stir-crazy chihuahuas. “I feel like you only made out with me because I was the only one around.”

“I don’t know,” You said the next morning, when we woke in the freezing dawn and stirred, breaking the sheet of white frost on your sleeping bag and brushing it onto the ground, sitting up under the low tarp we’d spread in the trees. And you didn’t know. Just loneliness, I guess. No more reasonable than the patterns of falling rain and just as common.

“I just want to be friends!” I cried, as if we were anything more. Trying to grasp some control of the situation.

After all of that, things suddenly got better. We were friends now, and not only that, we were the only two people in the entire world. We set about creating our very own universe out of made-up words. We were runaway bandit partners on the coldest, longest train trip this side of six months ago. We were Matie Specs-Macular and Tracker Jack, the dirty, sunburnt, potty-mouthed scumbags stumbling like turtles under twenty pounds of canned beans and sleeping in the thorniest, dustiest ditches America’s mainlines have to offer. On the train it was too noisy to talk so we made faces at each other and stuck our filthy fingers into cans of corn, threw liters of bright red piss over the side when we were both on our periods and destroyed a book you’d brought, it was a book about some guy who’d hitched around the circumference of Ireland with a fridge, and we decided it was the dumbest shit on the face of the earth and that we were tired of books written about privileged white guys and their stupid fucking adventures. The book spent a night spine-up in the rain, covers flapping in the wind and when it dried out it made a handy tablet for score-keeping during our card games.

Suddenly we were halfway through Texas, and the long train stopped ten miles outside of Alpine. You stood up full in the sun with your back against the orange freight container, looked at the blue sky and waited for it to warm your bones and drive the stale, dull cold from you. You unclenched your jaw. You said your mouth tasted like dust. I removed my hat and scratched my hot scalp for a length of time, stretched my stiff fingers and cracked a few of the knuckles. We were contented for a minute to stand and feel the sun, hear only the rush of quiet and the fragile crack of sagebrush, then we drank long from our plastic gallon jugs and sat cross-legged on the stained steel floor of the car to play a card game with my thin finger-smeared playing cards, they were from a railroad station gift shop in British Columbia, and showed a winter train coming out from a dark tunnel into white snow, with bare maples scratching up the margins.

Our train so far this trip had sided long and often, pulling off onto stretches of double track in the lonesome desert to wait for other, higher priority trains to pass, auto cars and piggy backs and other stack trains and well, it seemed just about anything. Our train would stop and sit suspensefully for hours, with only the woo-woo of cold winter wind and the ping of settling steel. After mysterious amounts of time had passed the brakes would release with a pressurized hiss of air and the train would creep forward, so seamlessly at first we might not notice its movement until a tree or pole passed slowly overhead in the empty sky.

This morning we played our cards and our stomachs growled in the warm sun and fresh breeze. I reached for the peanut butter but then could not make myself eat one bite of it. My heavy cold cans of beans didn’t seem like a good idea either, not even the can of pale green peas, wet and salty and soft, that I had packed to break up the monotony of beans.

After eight hours passed you said, I want the fuck out of this box, and I agreed. So we gathered our half-full gallon jugs and folded the blue tarp and threw ourselves over the side, landing squarely on the ballast and walking through brittle sagebrush towards where the road was. We stopped halfway and turned and looked back at the train, going both ways so far you wouldn’t guess it ever moved or even ended, if you hadn’t just rode up on it earlier that morning. I felt a pang of longing just looking at it, the train we had worked so hard to locate and then stow away on for three cold black nights through Alabama and Louisiana, New Orleans the warm red glow of city overhead and voices all around us, boots crunching on gravel and the two of us hidden deep in our sleeping bags, waiting excited as the train stopped and started mysteriously, until finally we were out of it and in the morning their train was like a great raft crossing the Mississippi bayou, tree-choked swamp on either side as far as we could see.

I looked at it and was sad to leave it but we needed a break. Our stomachs were flat, dirt-smeared, and hungry. Our legs pumped happily at the walk to the road, our souls sang joyfully at the quiet dessert. Blood flowed through us and our metabolisms kicked in like flocks of birds. We were off the train!

We walked to the road and crossed, stuck our thumbs out headed west and then put them down again. There was no traffic. We leaned our packs against our legs and stood squinting, our joints finally loosening like soft butter in the sun. By and by a few cars passed, and then a pickup pulled over for us and we sprinted after it, water jugs banging irregularly on the sides of our packs.

The man opened the passenger door for us and we saw he had long legs like calipers for squeezing horses and a bright handsome Texas face, his eyes were a clear glass blue and he said I can take you into Alpine, where you need to go, and we said, see that train, we just got off that train, to explain why we were standing on the bright empty shoulder here of all places, our faces smeared with diesel grime, and why we smelled like hot dusty sweat gone clammy and then warmed over again.

He dropped us off at the Laundromat and we stuffed our filthy things into a washer, washed our faces with soap in the bathroom, and wiped at ourselves with coarse brown paper towels. In the dumpster behind the grocery store we found a pecan pie and I said, my favorite. We bought fruit and sardines and things we thought we might like to eat, and sometime in the evening our train blew through town with a clatter of joining track and a long whistle. We were walking to the catch-out spot, the sun was getting low and cold was creeping in.

“Whatever,” You said. “We’ll get the next one. That train was too slow anyway.”
It got dark and we set up in the deep shadow of a wooden shed across a dirt road from the tracks, used our headlamps to check for hobo loaf and then set our things in the weeds, the pie in a plastic sack on the ground.

The cold came in like deep water and we covered ourselves in sleeping bags, curled awkwardly on the ground trying not to fall asleep. Then around two a.m. an intermodal train going our way pulled up loud headlights sweeping and then stopped, sat quiet while we stuffed our sleeping bags away, hearts racing, shaking our stiff bodies. We sprinted down the ballast in the dark, forgetting the pie. We found a rideable car and climbed banging down inside, rolled out our sleeping mats on the cold steel floor. We snuggled gratefully into our warm bags and drifted off, the train sitting and then finally hissing and pulling west into the great open desert as the first grey washed the bleary bowl of February sky.

Our train was slower than crunchy peanut butter and in the desert, every day, it rained. We used our “tarp of invisibility” (it was bright blue, but somehow it worked) to make it through El Paso, the highest-security yard in the whole Goddam country, and when we were finally winded just west of San Diego I got arrested and you had to use the money you’d made doing sketchy medical studies to bail me out of jail, we stumbled to the deep blue canal sweaty and dehydrated and swam until our worries floated away, rinsing our clothes and laying down to sleep in the dirt, head to head on our blue tarp with the sky magenta then turquoise then black and asleep before all the stars were even out.

We ate and then fought and then laughed, we wanted to kill every single person that picked us up hitchhiking, the cops were terrible and we’d never felt freer, trapped in LA in the middle of the night with no energy left in our bodies, you sat down on your pack to roll a cigarette and I said

“What! What are we doing now? Can you help me? Do you think you can handle that?!”

In a neighborhood on the edge of the city the sun was so hot it burned our faces where they’d already been burnt, and we gave it their forearms too, and the backs of our necks. We walked endlessly through streets of concrete courtyards, with straight palm trees to a rolling, secret field surrounded by a tall fence. The fence had been broken, bent and trampled right where the dead-end street met the field and we climbed gratefully over it and walked deep into the grass to a huge tree and flung ourselves down in the shade, next to an old tire that had once been a swing and beneath a branch that curled like a worm to the ground, from decades of being pulled on by children who wanted to climb the tree.

You pulled out your sleeping bag and fell into a fitful sleep. We hadn’t slept the night before, we’d spent it wakeful in Union Station after a young man who’d picked us up at a rest area had dropped us off in LA too late for any of the buses to be running, we’d planned on sleeping in the rest area and hitching past LA in the morning, only taking rides going through to the other side, but he’d promised us greyhound tickets so we’d gone with him. He was a gentle young man commuting from his military base to visit his mom; he looked sleepless and had ideals so bright they practically shot out at me, sitting entranced in the passenger seat poking stories from him like pulling buckets of water from a deep well. We got into LA after midnight and he dropped us off in some sketchy part of Hollywood and drove away, and it was only then that we realized that he hadn’t bought us greyhound tickets.

Now in this dry field you were sleeping but I thought, I’ve had too much coffee to nap now, and pulled out my book but was too anxious to read and cleaned the dirt from under my toenails instead, with a toothpick, taking off my shoes and socks and releasing my hot feet to the air and the grass. I finally read a national geographic we’d gotten from the Yuma Public Library freebox, fighting with the wind for control of its pages. I read about Dubai, a city where they build palm tree shaped islands in the ocean and sell them to rich people, forever altering the ocean ecosystem. The article was great, but after reading it, I still had no idea where exactly Dubai was.

I poked you and said, “Don’t you think we should go?”

“In the hottest part of the day? Another hour,” you said, red-faced, from your bedroll, and went back to sleep. We were trying to hitchhike the fuck out of there, but it was still early afternoon, so whatever.

After awhile I poked you again and you got up, flushed and groggy, and knifed open a can of tuna and produced several mayo packets. I brought out the corn tortillas, which do not go with tuna, but that was all we had. We laughed at our disgusting lunch and then ate it, and wearily lashed our packs back together, so we could hoist them into the air and find the highway, the wall of sound on the other side of all this grass.

We got kicked off of I-5 in about thirty seconds by a poker-faced cop. Fuck, you said. We stumbled back through a different part of the field, and found ourselves cut off from the neighborhood by a tall, barbed-wire fence, shining and strong and intact. We climbed over it awkwardly, to the astonishment of some guys working on a house across the street, you catching your skirt on the barbs and struggling to get over without flashing your junk at the whole neighborhood. We sent the packs crashing to the other side, and once we were down on the ground we saw a straight, person-sized hole, neatly snipped into the fence at ground level. Fuck, you said again.

Finally the sunny part of the country was behind us. A snowboarder was taking us all the way up to Portland.

In the car, you asked him,

“Can you drop me off in Salem?” And to me, “I’m going there for a few days before I come to Portland.” You held my hand. “I’m visiting my friends there. You knew that was my plan. I’ll come up in a few days.”

I felt a panic in my chest. The planet we’d created spun wildly out of control. The stars fell out of the sky.

You looked at me like, this isn’t the end.

I was being projected, alone, into space. This was the end.

We left you leaning against the cinderblock wall of a gas station, surrounded by your dirty things. Back in the car, the conversation dried up like a New Mexican aquifer. As we neared Portland, buckets of rain pelted the windshield.

That night, safe and sound in the guest space at my friend’s house, I could almost feel the indentation in the bed next to me where your body would be, an ache so lonely and deep I cried and said, I didn’t know it would be this bad. I woke up at dawn like we’d been doing sleeping in the weeds and pulled all of the things out of my pack, everything smelled like corn tortillas which is a smell you come to know traveling the way we do, eating nothing but cold cans of beans and stale tortillas crumbled up like soup. I thought of walking behind you and watching the way your legs bowed out as you walked, three pairs of long underwear under a maroon skirt with a crooked hem that swung across your ass with the rhythm of your steps. You’d pull a stick of gum from your pocket for me and tell me not to spit it onto the ground, that a bird would eat it and die. I’d do it anyway when you weren’t looking and then you’d see in on the ground and try to melt me with your eyes. I’d put my nose against your neck and wrap my arms around you and inhale the scent that rose from your filthy cashmere sweater, one hundred twenty dollars stolen from the gap and good thing I got grey, because you couldn’t even see the dirt.

“I like the way you smell,” I said. “You smell like traveling. You smell like all of the crusty people I’ve ever loved. You smell like home.”

I fished around for my last clean pair of boxer briefs and then stuffed my things back in my pack, picked up the phone and called you.

“I miss you so bad,” you said on the other end. “I almost cried last night.”

But you’re not here, I thought. You’re not here, you’re not here, you’re not here.

You showed up in Portland after three days, freshly laundered and covered in raindrops. Your eyes were like emotional coleslaw and as usual I tried to tell you everything that was on my mind all at once, and you set down your pack and drank some dumpstered mango juice and maybe you didn’t say anything at all.

We fell into bed at one a.m. and buried ourselves under pounds of blankets in the cold basement room, I grabbed you around the waist and we both sighed to be close to each other, fitting together like tarnished cutlery and the tension drained out of us like water from a broken levy and I squeezed my eyes shut to keep from crying, to keep from telling you everything I was thinking and risk sounding like a total loser, like I wanted more from you than you were willing to give, like I wanted freedom and honesty and intimacy, I wanted to alter the present and the future and place us side by side in this galaxy like twin planets instead of appearing together by chance, each of us on our way to somewhere else.

Life, I thought, had suddenly gotten shorter than I could ever remember it being.

And then I was asleep.












WiFi Is Bad For You





No, Seriously. Ever since reading this article in the March issue of The Ecologist, I can't stop thinking about electromagnetic radiation and how it effects us. It's a terrifying and fascinating subject to ponder, because not only is this technology very new and fairly un-regulated, but it's becoming so widespread that it's almost impossible to escape it. There aren't many places you can go these days, aside from the middle of a cornfield or deep in the woods (and even at my last job in the woods, we had satellite Wifi) where you aren't being constantly radiated with these pulsing electromagnetic beams. And the crazy thing is, half the time the technology is entirely unnecessary! It's not the internet that's radiating you, it's the wireless technology! All one has to do to eliminate electromagnetic radiation from their school, home, or business, is switch back to wired internet! You can still have the same high-speed youtube bullshit, alone in your dark bedroom, just run a wire down the hallway!

Here's the deal. Having a wireless router in your home, (or for that matter, being in range or your neighbor's router) is basically the same as holding a turned-on cellphone up next to your head, 24 hours a day. While you sleep, while you eat, while you shower, always. And that exposure leads to all sorts of well-documented, if frequently unpublished, side-effects. For example- (these studies pulled from the Ecologist article, down near the bottom)

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All studies listed below have found adverse health effects from microwaves at levels similar to those emitted by Wi-Fi equipment:

Santini et al, 2002: 530 people living near mobile phone masts reported more symptoms of headache, sleep disturbance, discomfort, irritability, depression, memory loss and concentration problems the closer they lived to the mast.

Oberfeld et al, 2004: 97 people living near mobile phone masts reported more symptoms of fatigue, irritability, headaches, nausea, loss of memory, visual disorder, dizziness and cardiovascular problems the higher their level of microwave exposure.

Eger et al, 2004: A three-fold increase in the incidence of malignant tumours was found after five years’ exposure in people living 400 metres from a mobile phone mast.

Wolf & Wolf, 2004: A four-fold increase in the incidence of cancer among residents living near a mobile phone mast for between three and seven years was detected.

REFLEX, 2004: A four-year study on human cells found that, after exposure to lowpower microwaves, they showed signs of DN A damage and mutations that were passed on to the next generation.

Abdel-Rassoul, 2007: Residents living beneath and opposite a long-established mobile phone mast in Egypt reported significantly higher occurrences of headaches, memory changes, dizziness, tremors, depressive symptoms and sleep disturbance than a control group.

Bortkiewicz et al, 2004: Residents close to mobile phone masts reported more incidences of circulatory problems, sleep disturbances, irritability, depression, blurred vision and concentration difficulties the nearer they lived to the mast.

Hutter et al, 2006: 365 people living near mobile phone masts reported higher incidences of headaches the closer they lived to the masts.

Stewart report, 2000: Research conducted by HPA chief William Stewart advised the main beam of a mobile phone mast should not be allowed to fall on any part of a school’s grounds.

Hecht & Balzer, 1997: A huge review of studies concluded a vast array of health effects, including insomnia, brainwave changes, cardiovascular problems and increased susceptibility to infections.

Carpenter & Sage, 2007: Concluded that an maximum outdoor exposure limit of 0.6 V/ m should be set, and that Wi-Fi systems should be replaced with wired alternatives.

ECOLOG-Institut, 2000: Found evidence for increases in immune and central nervous system damage, and reduced cognitive function. Recommended an exposure limit 1,000 times lower than current guidelines.

Kolodynski & Kolodynska, 1999: School children living near a radio location station in Latvia suffered reduced motor function, memory and attention spans.

-----------------------------------------------

I know it's really long, but you folks should read the whole article. It's fucking intense. And in the meantime, if you're not the type to trust 'studies' and online articles for this type of information, how about listening to what your own body has to say-

The Carrot Quinn "Sit With Your Wireless Router" Experiment

-First, go for a walk. Get some nice fresh air. If you can, go to someplace that feels like the country, like along a river or through a forest. Take nice deep breaths. How do you feel? Do you feel anxious? Nervous? Grounded? At peace?

-Next, go home. When you walk in the door, take a few deep breaths and check in with yourself again. How do you feel now? What are your thoughts doing? How does your heart feel (like, is it racing?)

-Now, pull up a chair and sit as close to your wireless router as possible. Just take a seat. Close your eyes. Sit there for a few minutes. How do you feel now? What are you thinking about? What is your heart doing? If you have metal fillings in your teeth, how do they feel? How does your head feel, right behind your eyes?

Seriously people. I'd love your feedback on this, if any of you actually do it. Extra points if you live in the boonies and have satellite wifi. We had one of those satellite routers at my last job, and that shit was CRAZY. I actually showed it to one of the camp interns once, pulled her into the dark closet where the router was kept.

Do you feel it? I asked. Do you feel it?

Yeah, she said. Yeah.













Carrot's Gluten-Free Buckwheat Yogurt Muffins






So, yesterday I made a batch of these muffins, here in Portland where I'm staying with some friends, and I realized that they really are my very favorite gluten-free muffins. They're so super-most and not overly sweet, and also really nutritious, so they make you feel like you've actually eaten food, not just some baked-good crack. And if that isn't enough to convince you, get this- the first thing you do is mix the flour and yogurt together and then let the dough sit overnight, so the yogurt gets a chance to break down the phytic acid in the grain, making the grain super-digestible and the nutrients really bio-available, ala the way people have processed and eaten grain for thousands of years- by fermenting and soaking. The complete opposite of the way we eat grain in this chronic-disease ridden, nutrient deficient, can't-digest-our-food western culture.

Here's the recipe, and remember that the secret to successful gluten-free quickbreads (or any quickbreads for that matter) is don't over mix. Mix the ingredients just enough to blend everything together, and then stop! Also, don't open the oven door in the first 10 minutes of baking, or the muffins might fall.

Carrot's Gluten-Free Buckwheat Yogurt Muffins

makes one dozen

1 1/2 cups buckwheat flour
1 1/2 cups amaranth flour (or millet, which is cheaper)
2 cups yogurt (you can also use buttermilk or kefir, or if you don't do dairy, you can apparently use 2 cups water plus 2 tablespoons lemon juice or vinegar- although I haven't actually tried this)

2 eggs, beaten
1 tsp sea salt
1/4 cup maple syrup or honey
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 tblsp melted butter

Mix flour and yogurt and let the dough sit for 12-24 hours. Muffins will rise better the longer the dough sits, but overnight is fine.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees, grease muffin tin.

In a separate bowl, beat eggs, and blend the other ingredients into the eggs. Add the baking soda last, blending well.

Add the egg-mixture to the flour-mixture, and blend together. Mix just enough to blend the ingredients, and then stop! Do not over-mix!

Spoon into muffin tins, bake until a fork or toothpick comes out clean.

Hurrah!











Greta Garbo, Freest Cat There Ever Was





On Monday I left my job in the woods, drove two hours, and got a new job at a hot-springs resort on the other side of the mountain. I showed up and parked my car in the dusty lot, looked at the trees around me. It was drier here. I'd never been to this place, but lots of friends had. It had hotsprings and a ton more people than where I had been working, third-growth forest with trampled-down moss, some sort of cedar I didn't even recognize. Microclimates are so interesting. Just one ridge east or west, and everything can change.

I walked up to the lodge, and thought, of course there is a lodge. Everywhere that I work has to have a lodge. It's a central theme, an old building, a word. It means nothing. Sometimes people stay there, sometimes they don't. The walls are made of wood. I usually spend lots of time inside.

Madge was there, of course, at the lodge. I called her name and she turned, hardly surprised to see me.

"You got my psychic messages," she said. "Since I can't use the internet."

We hugged. Of course we had found each other. So much time had passed. What time had passed? A whole river. Dark water under the bridge, cluttered with flotsam.

Madge had arrived at the resort the night before. She was doing a working interview, as fill-in for the kitchen.

Madge sighed, and swept her arm over the meadow. It was strewn with wooden deck chairs.

“Where do you want to sit?” she asked. “Sun or shade?”

“I don’t care,” I said. We both knew that I usually chose shade, while she chose sun. Today I was feeling impartial.

“I want to sit in the shade,” said Madge, which surprised me. We sat on a wooden stage, which was painted green. Paint, I thought. Nothing at my last job was painted. All the cabins were dark inside, red cedar boards like the womb of the forest. Paint, I thought again. It’s a sort of line in the sand. One step closer to everything.

Madge pulled the sunglasses off her head. She was wearing all black. That’s odd, I thought. If anyone, Madge likes to wear color. More than anyone I know. Lace and stripes and velour. Things from cardboard freeboxes. Torn things and too-small things, things that other people throw away.

I started talking and of course, I talked a lot, even though I was tired. I told her how bad I felt, and how good I felt, and how scared I felt, and how strong I felt. Finally I asked her how she was.

“Bad.” she said. “Really bad.” She pushed at the coleslaw on her plate. Her soup had gone cold, half a rosemary bun stuck in it. “Greta died.” she said, and then I understood everything.

I understood why Madge had wanted shade. I understood why she was wearing all black.

Greta had been Madge’s best friend in the whole world. Greta Garbo was a cat. A cat, but not just any cat. A Rectangular Cat With No Tail, small and grey and soft like a fox hat from the goodwill. And feral too, really wild. Greta was a country-cat, a stalks-the-forest-at-night cat, a flame-lit eyes and plaintive-meows strung together like beads on a string cat. And Greta was more than any cat could ever be. She was a hitch-hiking cat, a rides-the-bus-in-a-plastic-carrier cat, a sleeps-wherever-Madge-sleeps cat, which could be anywhere, nowhere, everywhere.

Greta went everywhere that Madge went.

Greta went to the farm and was a farm cat, she went to the woods and was a woods cat. In the city she was a wild, pent-up house cat, but always she was a spoon-me-under-the-covers cat, a turn-me-over-and-pet-my-belly cat, a hold-me-upside-down-in-the-air-I-trust-you kind of cat, a small and lithe and living cat, a glimmer of hope for all of cat-kind, a brilliant contrast to the dull-eyed cats of apartments everywhere, loose-furred and sluggish cats, cats like sad mops for humanity’s dirty front steps.

She was a lot like Madge. She was a part of Madge. A half of Madge, a third of Madge. And she pulled at her, whenever they were apart. She pulled at Madge whenever Madge could not take her along. She had pulled at Madge this summer, when she was in Europe. She tore at her heart.

Madge came back from Europe, and Greta had died. Crawled under the farmhouse where she was born, right under the bathroom floor. Maybe there had been a catfight. Everyone thought that Greta was only missing, but Madge knew better. And then after a few days they smelled her there, under the floor in the August heat.

“I don’t know why she didn’t meow,” said Madge, her chin tipped down like she couldn’t stand the weight of her head. “She always does her little meows. I don’t know why she didn’t do her little meows.”

It was so fucking sad. I wanted to cry, right there, on that painted stage at the hot springs resort, where colored bath towels dried in the sun, draped over the deck of the lodge, and hula-hoops littered the trampled grass where they’d been dropped by children. But it wasn’t just Greta. It was Madge. She was so fucking sad, it came off of her like fog. And it came off of me too, and we sat there and I thought, it’s alright. It’s alright. We are the same, the two of us. Somehow we are the same.

“What are you going to do now?” I asked.

Madge shrugged.

“I went to the farm, and everything reminds me of Greta. I went to the Peninsula, but that doesn’t feel like home. It’s all sort of up in the air right now, I don’t know where to go or what to do. I don’t know where I’m supposed to be.”

“I know!” I cried. “I know. I feel the same way.”

“This seems like a nice sort of in-between place,” said Madge, nodding her head at the dirt lane in front of us.

“Yeah,” I said. “It used to be fun, not knowing what to do next. But it’s not fun anymore. I’ve BEEN homeless before,” I said, “but I’ve never FELT homeless. You know? What are you going to do after your interview?”

“I promised A. I’d go on a hiking trip,” she said. “On the peninsula. A. doesn’t know what she’s doing, either. She’s pretty depressed about it. She wants to go on adventures but complains that everyone has ‘regular’ lives now, that they can’t get away from. She doesn’t know what to do or where to go.”

“She almost had it,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“She almost had it, last summer. She was going to live on Sam’s land. She almost had it.”

We ate the last of our food and looked at our plates, drying in the heat. In a minute Madge would leave to start her interview, would disappear into the ether again. I felt a panic in my chest.

“How come there’s no place for us?” I asked. “It’s like we don’t exist.”

Madge nodded behind her sunglasses. “There’s some land,” she said, “in California. I’ve been thinking about California. How do you feel about California? Go south, I was thinking. There’s some land, called Bear-something. It’s owned by punks, or whatever we’re called now. They’re motto is ‘free land for free people’.” She laughed a little. “After my trip with A., I think I’ll go to Idaho. I want to go help out my mom. I want to go to Idaho, and be useful to my mom.” She brightened- “Do you want to go to Idaho? I’m recruiting?”

My future was as blank as a two-dollar notebook. I shrugged my shoulders.

“You know,” I said, “If I don’t get a job here, or anywhere, I’ll come to Idaho with you. I’ll come hide out with you.”

Madge picked up her plate.

“I’ve got to go start working. Are you going to be here?”

“For a little while,” I said. “Then I’m driving to Portland.” I slumped my shoulders. “I’ll be there for a few days.” I didn’t want to lose her. She was like me, only sadder. She was just as lost as I was. I hugged her. “I love you,” I said. “There’s a place for us, somewhere.”

After Madge left for the kitchen I found the office, a dark building on a hill with a rope-hammock out front. I wanted to lay in it, but thought, maybe I shouldn’t. It was hard to accept the relaxing vibe of this place. Inside the office were hikebooks and cookbooks, gemstone rings and dagoba chocolate in a locked glass case. AA and AAA batteries, flashlights and floppy hippie hats, all of it for sale.

“I applied to be a fill in,” I told the woman behind the counter, “on the website. But now I’m here and I’ve never been here before. Is there someone I can talk to?”

And so they hired me, and I can start in a week. But not necessarily Madge, because she wants to work in the kitchen and they don’t need kitchen staff just yet. I’ll be cleaning shit, outside moving stuff around, draining hot tubs, that sort of thing. I’m glad I’m not going to work in the kitchen. Food is just too serious a subject for me.

I met up with Madge once more that day, and she told me about her List.

“You have a list?” I asked. It was a list of what she wanted, and she carried it in her pocket.

“Now that I know what I want,” she said, “I just have to find it.”

She read it to me, in the soaking pool, from the journal she clutched in her wet hand. She’s going to email it to me, and I’m going to put it up here.

Because it is amazing.