The Circle Again

In the fall, I returned to San Francisco for the sixth time.

I had spent the previous seven months working nearly every hour of every day on a derelict sailboat that I had recently acquired -- pausing only to check the trash for leftover french fries at the Sea Breeze restaurant around lunch. I sanded, painted, and scraped. I fiberglassed, caulked, and poisoned myself with epoxy. I cursed dry-rot as my sworn enemy, and found a friend in fungus-hunting epoxy. I went to sleep with a sunburnt face and woke up with sawdust in my hair. I dangled from the tops of the masts, varnished relentlessly, and sewed with vigor. I tempted fate with propane, and was involved in at least one Kerosene siphoning incident gone wrong. I felt strong at the end of the day with engine grease on my hands and dirt on my face.

At the end of all that I took an impossible single-handed sailing trip to Mexico and back with no engine. There were times when I sailed through sunny days with bare feet and fair winds -- feeling lucky to be alive with the sun's hand on my face; times when I sailed into mean swell as cold as the night -- gripping the tiller with white knuckles and hoping against the overwhelming power of the ocean that I would once again be able to sigh relief with the morning light; and times when I floated for hours and hours in dead calm -- feeling totally isolated in this sad and lonely world.

On the way back up the California coast, I ran into winter storms that met me with 18 to 22ft swell. I dropped my anchor in Morro Bay, secured the boat as best I could, threw a few of my belongings in a backpack, and rowed to shore -- finally broken by the sea. I walked out to highway 1, stood on the on-ramp, and thought about how the warm asphalt felt like home through the soles of my shoes.

I caught a ride with a guy in a Winnebago who declared that he was going to give up on California, as if it were a lover that had betrayed him after all this time. He showed me excited pictures about the land that he was going to buy in Thailand, and we talked all about our lives and how each of us was doing on our search for meaning in the world.

Eventually he dropped me off and I caught a ride with a runaway kid who's car was full of clothes, books, and boxes. He told me that he had been living in San Diego and had been going to school there. "Actually, on my way to class today I realized that I didn't want to go. Then I realized that I had never wanted to go, and that I was tired of living such a boring life based on other people's expectations and routines! So I put all my stuff in this car, skipped my midterm, and started driving towards Santa Cruz." He had been living with his affluent parents, reasoned that they never really knew him anyway, and left them a short note explaining that he was leaving for good. When he saw me standing on the highway, he had customarily driven past, then realized that he wanted to pick up a hitchhiker and always had. So this time, trying to realize self-directed control over his life, he stopped. Eventually he also decided that he'd take me all the way to San Francisco, so we talked for hours on the road and he'd ask me great questions like "Wait, now what's a 'collective'?" and "I've been wondering if it's possible to travel and experience the world without staying in hotels and spending money on transportation?"

When we got to San Francisco I told him how excited I was for him, wished him luck, and started off in search of familiar faces.

There's Very Little Geography In A Place

Returning is always a little sad. All the things that I usually remember about a place have changed in subtle or striking ways. Certain people might be gone, and things have inevitably changed in a way that is inconsistent with nostalgia. For a long time I avoided returning all together, now I just make a conscious effort to treat returning as a new experience rather than a continuation of an old one. When combined with the curse of traveling -- where you end up knowing and loving people in many different places and are always missing someone or something somewhere -- the whole thing can be hard. So with all of this in my heart, I returned to San Francisco with the intentional idea that I was stepping into something new.

I stayed at Station 40 for a few days, and ran into all of the usual suspects there. I told stories about sailing towards the horizon, eating raw fish, and looking out on the ocean with bleary eyes. I learned about what had been happening there, and started thinking about where I wanted to stay and what I wanted to do.

One day I bumped into Jason on 16th street. I'd first met Jason in the spring of 2002. Ever since meeting him, we had occasionally seen each-other and talked about the things that we were looking for and running from in ourselves. Jason is the kind of profound maniac who is able to constantly recognize and challenge all his assumptions, motivations, and foundations of thought. For him, there are no answers, no truths, no ideas that can't be torn down and forgotten at a moment's notice. He is not just intensely aware of his surroundings, but is also aware of his perceptions of those surroundings and how those perceptions are conceived. Once at a birthday party of his, the music was lowered so that everyone could tell their favorite Jason story. Everybody had one. "Sometimes when we take the bus together, Jason will help mothers lift their baby strollers up the steps. Looking down at the stroller, he can never see it, but the mothers always have an expression of terror on their faces when this bearded maniac steps in to carry their baby up the steps." Jason would only smile calmly, nod, and comment "Yes, yes, Jesus had the same problem..."

We talked a little about where we had both been, as well as what our individual plans were for our time in San Francisco. Jason and his friend Marie had both given up on paying rent years prior, and for the first time since returning I began to consider squatting instead of renting. I was looking for stability, which seems inconsistent with squatting at first glance, but I realized that by squatting I could ground the stability that I was looking for in the city itself, rather than in a house or a room. I began to think of squatting as a way to live in the context of a community, but without all of the routine that usually begins to kill me. Maybe squatting would be the way to blur the line between stability and excitement that I'd been searching for all this time.

Before I left to go sailing, I was plotting the places that I went and the routes that I took on a map of the city. The familiar patterns that emerged were almost sickening, and at times I found myself almost wishing that I'd fall off my bike on my way from one place to another -- so that I'd at least get that shocking taste of blood in my mouth. By squatting, though, you can't rely on familiar places and familiar routines. When looking for a squat, you have to take the streets that you wouldn't ordinarily take, often through areas where you'd never ordinarily travel. You have to go slow and really look at the things around you.

I began to concentrate on letting excitement and adventure exist in my life during a period of stability, rather than just resigning myself to routine.

Capp Street

My friends Jesse and Pablo were planning on trying to live in the park -- hiding in the bushes from the rain and the police. I suggested that we attempt to find a squat instead. Pablo and Jesse are both pretty intrepid, or at least always willing to break out of that old comfortable logic and into something new. So sure enough, that very night we grabbed a pry-bar and some bolt cutters, got on our bikes, and rode two blocks down Capp Street. In the middle of the third block, Pablo said "Hey, this one looks empty." Sure enough, no furniture was visible through the second-story window, and there was a small collection of junk mail in the mailbox. The second floor window was the only window, though, and the whole front of the house was well lit by an unfortunately placed street lamp. We could see that if we got into the courtyard of the neighboring community center, we could easily access a subtle side window on the second story. That gate was locked too, though, and was absolutely not climbable. We stood around ruminating about how we might be able to get into the courtyard when a small group of men walked right past us, unlocked the gate, and went inside. We looked at each other and followed in unison. "Are you guys here for the Thai Chi class?" they asked. "Right, the Thai Chi class..." we responded. Once we were in the gate, though, we didn't seem any better off. Naturally, the Thai Chi instructors would probably not have been amenable to us pulling out our crowbar, scaling the wall of the neighboring house, and breaking our way in. "Maybe one of us could lie in the bushes until the class is over and everyone leaves" suggested Jesse. "Are you volunteering?" asked Pablo. It started to rain slightly, and everyone shivered at the thought of silently lying there in the mist as the night grew colder.

We ended up leaving and continuing our search down the street -- riding slowly through the rain and feeling the night air chill our exposed fingers wrapped around the handlebars of our bikes. The wind left that nice sharp feeling on my cheeks, but I thought about how nice it would be to lay down inside. Eventually we came to an apartment building that looked empty, and it had a padlock on the garage door. We reasoned that if we clipped the padlock, we might be able to get into the building through the garage.

Just as we were about to clip the lock, a protest in honor of the presidential election results came clambering down the street with drums, bull-horns, trumpets, and... a large contingent of police in tow. We couldn't believe our bad luck, and stood amidst the burning effigies with our crowbar -- whistling innocently. Friends would come up to us and ask "Hey, you guys came out for this huh?" "Well, not really..." we'd respond uncomfortably. Finally, the crowd dispersed, the cops trickled away, and we got back to our task at hand. It was the first time that I clipped a padlock to get into a building -- sparks flew and the cracking sound of that masterlock giving way echoed down the street.

We opened the big garage door, closed it behind us, and turned on the light. To our chagrin, the whole place was full of new construction materials, along with all kinds of appliances like new refrigerators and washing machines. Worse, there was no way to enter the apartment from the garage. It was a dry spot, but we imagined sleeping on the cement floor only to be woken up and caught by construction workers who had come to install a new refrigerator at 7am. The thought wasn't appealing, and we were ready to abandon the place, when we heard a car pull into the driveway. We looked at each-other in surprise, and then we all frantically got on our bikes inside the garage -- ready to ride straight out the door yelling squatter war-cries the moment it opened. We held onto our handlebars with white knuckles for a few minutes before the car pulled out of the driveway and motored off. "Well, squatting sure is exciting..." Pablo commented as we let ourselves out and headed back down the street.

By this time the Thai Chi class was over, so we decided to try going back to the house we had originally seen, getting into the back yard of a neighboring apartment building, and climbing over the fences of back yards until we got into the courtyard of the community center. From there, we would be able to pry open a window on the side of the abandoned house without being seen.

We slipped into a neighboring apartment building by following someone coming home for the night. I started to climb the chain-link fence at the back of the building, but it was really tall and built without a cross-bar at the top. So the higher I got, the more the whole thing would wobble back and forth -- loudly. There I was, wobbling uncontrollably back and forth on this fence -- sometimes almost upside down --- when I looked behind me to see two brothers silently staring at me through an open window with puzzled expressions on their faces. Pablo, worrying about his legal status, looked up at the window, then over at Jesse "I think I'm going to go wait back on the street, because, you know, I'm an immigrant and all." I smiled sheepishly at the guys in the window, and managed to pull myself up over the remaining bit of the fence. Jesse was awkwardly left alone at the bottom of the fence, silently waiting for me to return along with the two guys staring out their window. I made my way two fences over before I came to a yard with at least six dogs in it -- all of which were not happy to see me. They started to make a real racket. I couldn't imagine dropping myself into a melee of bared teeth and escaping in a satisfactory way, so I gave up and headed back.

By this time it was almost 2am. It was still raining slightly, and we still didn't have a place to sleep for the night. We stood in front of our unoccupied house, looking at it longingly. "Give me the crowbar," sighed Jesse. He took a few determined steps toward the house, climbed up to the second story, and started working on the front window. Pablo and I would whistle whenever anyone came down the sidewalk, and Jesse would do his best to make it look like he was just sitting casually on the roof of his house. Eventually he got the window open and climbed inside. A minute later the front door opened and Jesse emerged with a big smile on his face. "Welcome home..."

The place turned out to be really nice, and we stayed there for many months with our friends Marie and Jason. For comfort and security reasons, we usually all slept in the back room together, and it was like a slumber party every night. After dark we'd play big games of mafia with friends, or just lay awake in our sleeping bags, looking at the dim ceiling, talking into the early hours of the morning.

Before Marie and Jason moved in, they had gotten caught at their longtime squat in Potrero Hill. There, a neighbor had seen Jason one day and yelled "Hey! What are you doing?" Jason ignored him and continued unlocking the front door. "Hey! What the fuck do you think you're doing?!" yelled the neighbor again. Jason looked up. "You don't live there!" the neighbor continued, just as Jason opened the door. Jason, faced with the absurdity of the situation -- obviously he did live there -- was at a loss for words, and he closed the door behind him. A few days later, the police showed up there. They pounded on the front door and peered through the windows, yelling "Hey! Come out of there! We know you're in there!" Marie and Jason were pretty hidden at the time, and decided to try waiting it out. The cops kept yelling, getting more and more belligerent, until Jason heard them radioing for a K9 unit. At that, our squatter friends decided that it wasn't worth getting mauled, gave up, and started to leave. As they walked out of the closet that they were hiding in, the cops saw them through the window and really started going ape-shit. "HEY HEY HEY! We fucking see you! Come out NOW!" Jason walked over to the door and yelled "Alright, I'm slowly opening the door..." As soon as he turned the nob, they pounded the door in and tackled him. He sighed on the floor through bruised ribs.

The San Francisco police department rarely makes arrests for squatting. After pulling you out of the place you live with either violence or the threat of violence, they will eventually say that they're not going to arrest you -- because, you know, they're really nice guys. The lecture that one of the cops was giving Marie and Jason was a little confused, since he started out by saying that they were so young to be squatting. He looked at Marie with fake compassion on his face, "And you, only twenty three..." Marie is the kind of person who seems shy, but is actually just fearless in a totally calm and composed way. She looked up "I'm not twenty three!" The cop was not expecting that kind of interruption to his patronizing sermon. "Wait, how old are you?" he asked as he held Marie's California ID. "Figure it out!" Marie responded. When he finished doing the math and realized that she was actually 30, he changed his tune and started talking about how they were too old to be squatting. So according to the SFPD, the socially acceptable age window for squatting is 24 to 29. When the cops had asked earlier whether either of them had been arrested before, Marie had said "Just for protest stuff..." So then the cop who was lecturing them said "Well, you guys better be careful, because if you get arrested on a felony charge -- and breaking and entering could qualify -- then you won't be able to vote anymore." Jason, who was more inclined to just let them get the lecture over with, remained silent. But he could see that Marie was almost visibly shaking as she held her response in. Finally she shouted back "I don't vote!" The cop frowned "Hey, Harry, did you hear this? She'll protest, but she doesn't vote..." As if he was staring at a prime example of American Apathetic Youth.

This is all to say that Marie and Jason were somewhat paranoid about being seen by neighbors as they entered or left our new squat. So they'd often wake up before sunrise, and the rest of us would watch with bleary eyes as they got their stuff together and walked out into the cold morning. The thought of leaving that early seemed so unpleasant, and once I asked "Hey, where do you guys go so early in the morning?" "Oh, I don't know," Jason responded, "sometimes we just walk around, or ride our bikes."

Eventually, they started sleeping in with us. The house had been for sale, but the new owners had never moved in. As a result, all the neighbors assumed that we were the new owners. They'd seen the 'For Sale' sign go up, come down, and then we appeared. So we'd sit outside changing the locks in broad daylight, and the neighbors would smile and wave. We spent a lot of time wondering who the new owner really was, and imagined him carrying his new bride across the threshold -- only to finally discover us sitting on the toilet or washing our dirty feet in the bathtub. Every night, I'd go to sleep chuckling, wondering if the next morning would be the one where I'd wake up with groggy eyes and see some shocked family silently staring at us with open mouths -- their U-Haul truck still running on idle outside.

Jesse and I spent a lot of late nights walking home together. Over the course of those months, we walked with our heads bent low through the rain, sighed deep on clear nights, and moved eerily through the fog. We were even shot at once. Through it all, we discovered some of the many mysteries of Capp Street.

A major institution of those few blocks was the Capp Street couch. Sometimes it moved a block up, sometimes a block down, but it was always there. Sometimes the pillows will disappear, but they would always return. It wallowed alone through the rain, and enjoyed company in nice weather. I never understood why Sunset Scavenger didn't take it away -- maybe they knew it was a part of the community.

One night I was walking by the couch on the way home, and there was a guy setting a tarp up next to it for the night. The only thing unusual was that he had six pallets of eggs stacked next to him. He probably had 900 eggs there. I walked a little further down, and there was another guy setting up for the night with maybe 300 eggs. I kept looking back and forth between the stacks of eggs, wondering where they came from and what these guys intended to do with them. How could you possibly cook that many eggs?

The next morning I walked back down the street. Both guys were gone, and so were their pallets, but there were close to a thousand broken eggs on the sidewalk and all over the street -- scattered across the entire block. It was as if they had been silently waiting for the break of dawn to mark some kind of crazed egg fight, and then they'd left as silently as they'd come.

Another time when Jesse and I were walking past the couch in the morning, a car full of six highschool-aged kids pulled up to a stop in the middle of the street -- literally straddling the yellow dividing line. They all opened the doors, got out, and walked away. They left the doors open, the car running, and the keys in the ignition. We looked at the open car, and back at the kids. They just walked casually down the street and out of sight.

Beyond Germs

I've been working on having polyamorous relationships the past four years. After a lifetime of being told to find that one perfect person (who I hear is still out there somewhere), I began by questioning how possible (or even how desirable) that was. Notions of "the one and only one for me" are certainly romantic, but it seems impossible to think that another person and I could ever mutually meet all of our various needs consistently over the changing context of our lives. It also seems like quite a demand to think that a partner is responsible for dealing with my entire emotional self. And the kind of monogamy where I would operate as a 'unit' with one other person (to any degree) reeks of the very social alienation that I'm fighting against in the rest of my life.

For instance, I think it's interesting to look at how married couples interact with social alienation. I've noticed that many married individuals rarely seem to have close friends, other than their spouses. I think this is because there's a general expectation for married couples to spend all of their social time together -- to operate as a unit. To the extent that this is true, it necessarily makes all of their ongoing interactions with other people group interactions. It can become difficult to ever really know other friends, because it's rare that they're spending one-on-one time with anyone else. Married couples are an extreme case, but I think of all monogamous relationships as being, in some ways, a shadow syndrome of that larger condition.

So I want to have feelings of trust, understanding, and connection with more than one person. Having those feelings with multiple lovers is really only a slight expansion of the monogamous social model that I dislike so much. So ideally, I'd like to extend those feelings of intimate understanding to everyone who I am friends with. This is difficult for me because I'm not a social person to begin with, but also because I think there's something about the vulnerability of sexual intimacy that naturally helps create trust. So without sexual intimacy, I've often wondered how to make those connections that I'm looking for with friends.

I've been cooking Food Not Bombs on Fridays for almost four years, and most of my friends have also cooked Food Not Bombs on Fridays for the past four years as well. So every Friday evening, after we've eaten the last of the soup and washed all the dishes, we're all poised to set off into the night together. There are a lot of us, and at times if we go to parties we'll immediately double the size of the party.

One Friday night we all went to a party at Genevieve and Josh's house, which quickly turned into a big dance party. A lot of old-time Food Not Bombers were there, and German Alex even made an appearance while yelling "We make a party? Detroit Tesh-no?"

At some point there was an unexpected shift, and the whole thing spontaneously turned into a big make-out party. People were lying everywhere, making out, and talking about things that they had been thinking to themselves or holding back from each-other. The interesting thing was that we weren't all making out with each-other in terms of romantic interest, but rather as an expression of how strong friendship can be.

And so in a lot of ways, that night I discovered the beginnings of an answer to this question. Paradoxically, in that instance, the answer to building a sense of connection without sexual intimacy was... sexual intimacy itself.

An Inadvertent Zine

Eventually our happy home on Capp Street was closed up. In the end, it finished with a whimper rather than a bang. Every moment of our experience there was colored by the constant thought of "what if we are discovered right now?" -- which made coming home to find Jason passed out in front of the toilet even more entertaining than usual. But as it happened, Marie and Jason just showed up one day to find the locks changed. Sometimes I ride my bike by there now, and I frown at the sight of lights and furniture in the window. The only consolation is that the back room probably still smells like us.

Suddenly without a place to live, we spent a few nights looking for something new. Jesse and I had a false start at the house directly across the street from where we'd been squatting, which we'd always planned on defaulting to should the occasion arise. I boosted him up to a small open window, and he got half way in before getting stuck. I tried to stifle my laughter and look casual standing on the open sidewalk, despite Jesse's legs flailing wildly in the air above me for a good five minutes. It turns out that there had been broken glass directly under the window, so not only was he stuck -- but he couldn't put his hands on the floor to help himself in.

That place didn't seem quite right, and we weren't sure whether there was active construction happening there or not. In the process, though, we discovered a boarded up place on 19th and South Van Ness.

There was a large wall in front of the place on South Van Ness, and the door to it was actually screwed shut. So Marie, Jason, and I spent a few days casually walking up, removing one of the screws, and walking off. Eventually we got them all out, and finally went in one night. Once we got inside, we discovered that the place had been squatted before. There were syringes, dirty blankets, jars of urine, and piles of trash everywhere. It was pretty interesting to look through the artifacts of who had been there before, trying to discover who they were, what they had been like, and why they'd left. We found a few of the pages of a girl's diary, covered with candle wax and drops of dried heroine.

The girl walked down the street again, taking the same path that she takes every day, she walks she closes her eyes, calculating her steps

I see the girl, so much older than her years, a vacant sadness in her eyes

The stale stench of urine overwhelms my senses

When will this ever stop, I can already feel the streets changing me. I have become calloused and bitter, and I trust no one, they say I don't belong here. I'm far too pretty to sit on the concrete sidewalk reeking of urine, they say you have so much talent sister, you have so much potential, you're gonna make it someday. And I think to myself, Julianna, what the hell are you doing, trading the chance for thousands of people to hear you sing, throwing away all these wonderful opportunities that have basically been given to you on a silver platter? For what - a hit of crack and a shot of heroin, fucking junkie. I know that I'm not living in God's will right now, I've basically disrespected everything I ever believed in, the only thing that I have not done is compromise myself trading my body for a quick fix. I figure if that every happens, there is no hope for me, so that last thread of self worth I will cling to for dear life. It's hard being in a city where I have no friends. If I wasn't with Mikey I think I'd either flip out, or take a bus back to Tucson. I miss everyone - Edward, Keith, Ryan, even my family and it sux that me and Charlotte aren't kickin it. I really need a girl friend. I enjoy Nicole's company, but because I use, I feel like I have to hide shit from her, and I guess she's mad at me. I have no idea why. It's hard for me to be Mike's girlfriend. Everyday I have to worry - oh God did he go to jail, did he get jumped? Sometimes I just sit by the window and stare out the gate for hours just waiting, listening for any sound that he might be home, it's enough to drive me crazy. I love him but I am not happy with the way he hustles, it's not right, ripping off innocent people so he can make the buck. I was so pissed at him this morning, last night I played my ass off to the point where my voice was harsh and cracking and I made a decent amount of money with which I got both of us well, and also bought some smoke. Last time I talked to him, was early this morning, around 6am he couldn't sleep so I asked if he would go to the store to get me some food. It's now 11:30 at night the next day and I haven't seen him since he took all of my money, even the change, and my wake-up which really pissed me off. He could have left one fucking dollar for me to get some food, but I was sick all day and hungry. Sure that something bad had happened to Mike, finally after waiting all day for him to come home, wanting to get well, I figured that I needed to go hustle and cop myself, while I was out a bunch of people said they saw Mike all day out on the streets selling so I'm really fucking upset with him. He had no right to take all of my money and he better get me fucking back next time I see him. I think I might have to play on the streets again tonight, I really don't want to, but I can't depend on anyone for shit.

Schizophrenia

I took a short trip to Arcata to visit a friend. On my last visit to that town, I'd had a hard time hitchhiking home, and I ended up spending a cold night on the roof of a grocery store in Ukhia. So this time I was determined to make it back in one afternoon. I made it back in two rides. The second ride might have been the most interesting ride of my entire hitchhiking career.

At the Arcata ramp, I turned down a number of short rides and eventually caught one all the way to Hopland, which is about two hours outside of San Francisco. I knew that the next ride would be critical, because anything short of San Francisco would probably let me out after dark -- which is essentially a promise that you'll have to sleep out somewhere.

I waited there for an hour, turning down a surprising number of short rides. Finally a kid about my age pulled over, and when I asked how far he was going, he sort of shrugged and said "LA" -- as if I should have already known. The car was absolutely full of trash, and I ended up sitting in a heap of it. Every once in a while I'd pull something like a tube of toothpaste out from under me and lob it into the even larger pile of trash in the back seat. The kid was pretty tall with dark bushy hair and a goofy grin. He was wearing khaki pants and a sweater that was a little too big.

When we started off, I said "Thanks for stopping" and he didn't respond. I waited for a little while, but he only looked longingly towards the road ahead. Eventually I asked why he was going to LA, and he immediately said "I'm going there for Truth." "What kind of Truth are you looking for?" I asked. Again, without any hesitation, he responded "It's connected to my telepathy, the daemons that have been chasing me for years, and the rapture that all of our lives are connected to. I figure that I'll go to Compton and wear a bunch of gang colors while thinking racist thoughts. If they don't pick up on my mind waves then it's all a riddle for sure. If they kill me, then I guess I deserve to die because then I'm clearly insane. Yes, the end is near."

I looked around the car again, and noticed for the first time just how fucked up it was. I started to worry a little, since I didn't really want to be riding in a car with a driver who is immediately interested in dying. I asked why he wanted to die, and he responded "I don't want to die, I want the Truth." Before I could ask what he meant by that, he asked where I was coming from. When I told him Arcata he laughed and said "Arcata! Today?"

"Yep."

"What time did you leave?"

"About noon."

"Ahh, are you following me?"

"No, I don't think so."

He asked what I was doing there, and I told him "Visiting a lover." He chuckled again and said "A lover! Women, women... they're all adulterers." I thought that "adulterer" was a pretty strange word choice, so I asked what adultery meant to him. He immediately responded, again without any hesitation at all: "Let's say that I walk into a grocery store, and there's a married couple in there. The woman will look at me like she wants to have sex with me, and the man will let her because he wants my son to be a part of their family. When the woman does have sex with me, that will be adultery because she's breaking her promise to her husband."

The conversation continued, and he mentioned "his son" several times. He once added "I'm sure it will be a boy" for emphasis. Eventually I learned that he had escaped from a mental hospital in Sacramento, where he had been on his way to Alaska from Tallahassee, FL. We were in a stolen car.

I contemplated trying to get out many times, but eventually decided that I was safe enough, and that it would actually be more dangerous to try and get out. Besides, we were headed all the way to San Francisco.

His reality was this:

1. There is a large conspiracy of people who are trying to steal his sperm via rape or other methods. He hates all women, because it is their aim to rape him and steal his son -- which would generate some type of Apocalypse. If he lets this happen, he will be a failure in God's eyes.
2. People called "watchers" follow him around and listen to his thoughts (because he's telepathic, although the telepathy is only one-way). About 1 in every 10 people are watchers. Many of the things we encountered along the way were "set up" by the watchers. Many of the people talking on cell phones in cars around us were watchers. I may have been watcher.
3. There are other people called "translators" who can not only listen to his thoughts, but vocalize them themselves in real-time. It is as if they are stealing his thoughts. He is pretty impressed by these people.
4. He absolutely does not care whether he lives or dies. Death would be better than the hell of having someone steal his sperm or even the reality of having to deal with people constantly trying to steal his sperm.

Several times he turned around and started groping through the back seat while we were on the highway. I had to grab the wheel and steer through the turns while he was doing this. Once, he retrieved a large set of papers for me. They were his notes, which he'd numbered neatly as if they were aphorisms. He allowed me to read them, and even narrated a few of them for me. They were all incredibly crazy, but also strangely cogent in a somewhat disturbing way. Some of them were thoughts he'd had, and some of them were accounts of things he'd experienced. A few of them were about suspicious things that had happened while he was masturbating: "27) I was jacking off on the side of the highway in central Oregon and just then an ambulance went by with the sirens on."

At one point he told me explicitly: "I'm not crazy. I'm actually much more real than everyone else. These people are not alive, they are hypnotized by their lives. I'm just aware of what's really going on. I'm not crazy, I'm in a crazy situation." (!)

He also mentioned his multiple personalities once. I asked "What do you mean multiple personalities?" He responded: "I have so many complexes that I'm working through because of how hard it is to escape the watchers and the pressures of what I'm dealing with. Sometimes it's easier just to play a role, be the person that people want you to be. So I have personalities that can be funny, sad, offensive, whatever everyone wants to hear. It's hard for me to be real." (!) But of course by "people" here, he's referring to all the people that are listening to his thoughts through the radio waves.

At one point he asked when he was going to hit the desert. I told him that there's some desert on the way if he takes the I5. He said "Desert, yeah. I'd like to walk across the Sahara. Walk right across that motherfucker. Of course I'd have to have a helicopter deliver water at certain mile-markers along the way.... it probably wouldn't show up. Oh well, it'd be a fitting end."

Sometimes he'd start a story with "This could have been a delusion, but I'm pretty sure it happened..."

Once I asked him who "Jared" was in one of his notes. He said "Jared is a good man, a righteous man. He helped me want to be a good and righteous person. But he won't talk to me anymore. One night I was hanging out in his back yard, and he came out with a beer -- it was cold outside, which is impossible -- and told me that I shouldn't go in because his wife was going to sleep. I looked up and saw his wife in the window, and I realized that Jared was going to murder his wife. So I told him that I needed to go to the store and get a cigarette, and instead I called the police from a pay phone and told them that Jared was murdering his wife. I was young then, I didn't know anything about loyalty."

His impression, of course, was that Jared had given up on talking to him because he hadn't been loyal in allowing Jared to kill his wife.

I've never really thought a lot about mental illness. I've always sort of tacitly accepted the general radical analysis that people who are diagnosed with mental illness are just people who don't fit in with mass culture. That things like depression are just symptoms of problems with the world that we live in, not problems with the individual who is suffering. But then all of a sudden, here I was in a car with a paranoid schizophrenic. And all I could think was "Whatever, this guy is fucking crazy!" But there was something strangely cogent about his delusions, and after a while I began to think that he wasn't so crazy for thinking the things that he did. He would sometimes use the phrase "the oppressors" instead of "the watchers," and sitting in rush-hour traffic on the interstate, it didn't seem so crazy to think of all the people talking on cellphones in their SUVs around us as "the oppressors." He was so afraid of mental hospitals and authority because he thought that they were in on the conspiracy to rape him and steal his sperm, but maybe his fears weren't so unfounded. I can certainly see how those places might be an institutionalized form of rape. It was almost as if all his delusions were just hyperbolic reactions to the things that he was interacting with day to day. Where I had become desensitized to these difficulties that I'm forced to live in the midst of, he had felt their pain intensely.

I told the story to a friend of mine, and he told me about a guy that he used to work with that was also paranoid schizophrenic. He had become convinced that cars were secretly conscious beings who were trying to kill him. Crossing a street was very difficult for him, but he had decided that the cars could only come after him if they could see his face. So before crossing a street, he would put his head inside his shirt and rely on angels to guide him across the street. Of course, what happened when he blindly stepped out into the street only re-inforced his belief that the cars were trying to kill him. But here again is this situation where a person who seems clearly insane is also strangely... right. Maybe the cars are after me too, only for some reason I've stopped thinking about how much time I spend trying not to get killed by a car each day. When I do think about it consciously, it is kind of distressing.

Squatters Of Incredible Intelligence

The place that we all moved into on South Van Ness was not nearly as luxurious as the place on Capp Street, but it was still pretty accommodating. There was no water or electricity, but there was a little more space to spread out. We would also hang out there during non-sleeping hours a little more often, since the threat of discovery was almost non-existent. The weather started to improve, and in a way everything was looking up.

I made an emotional map of the United States, plotting all of the most meaningful moments of my life that I could remember over a geographical landscape. It made me think about all of those moments again, and I realized that while I've had a lot of them -- spread out across the entire US -- they've all occurred over short periods of time, eclipsed by a penumbra of routine and instinctive/unconscious decisions.

I started thinking about trying to account for my time in more intentional ways, and about ways that I could do that without making the process of intentionality a routine that would just subvert itself with banality. It's still unclear how to make that happen, but it seems like it is at least necessary to combine making specific day-to-day plans with keeping my eyes open for the potential of spontaneity.

Falling in love with someone during a time when we were both somewhat homeless was pretty nice. The limited set of possibilities was, in some ways, enriching. Whatever temptation that might have existed to hang around each-other's houses was impossible. If we were going to make out, it had to be on a park bench under the stars on a cold night, or briefly in the closet during Food Not Bombs. Our conversations happened under the eerie glow of streetlights and on midnight bikerides through empty streets. It was so much harder for status quo or routine to find a way in.

At one point Pablo, Jesse, and I decided to check out the potential for another squat in the Richmond. We rode our bikes out there late one night, locked them on a nearby side street, and walked casually by the front of the building while discussing how we might get inside. The place was one building away from the corner, so we decided that we could probably get in through the back by climbing behind the building directly on the corner. Jesse and I made our way in that direction while Pablo kept lookout. The courtyard behind the building that we wanted to access was a 10 foot drop down a dividing wall, and we wondered about how much noise the jump would make. We also imagined the comical situation of jumping down, not being able to get into the building for some reason, and then not being able to climb back out. Eventually we decided that it might just be best to come back the following night with a length of rope.

As we were leaving we walked back by the front of the building, and I cavalierly suggested "Hey, why don't we just go in through the front windows again?" -- conjuring memories of Jesse's blatant frontside entry on Capp Street. It was 2am, the whole street was dark, and nobody was around. We boosted Pablo up to the window, but he couldn't get it open with his hands. So we lowered him down, got the crowbar out of the bag, and boosted him back up. As Jesse went to hand up the crowbar, he dropped it and it clanged incredibly loudly on the sidewalk. We quickly dropped Pablo back down and tried to look casual through stifled laughter. Finally we boosted him back up, handed off the crowbar without incident, and watched him wiggle for a few seconds before he disappeared over the ledge and landed inside with a thump.

The place was a large five unit apartment building, and for some reason it had been unoccupied for about ten years. We spent half an hour checking out all the apartments. The possibilities were endless. We could all move into one apartment, sleep in a different apartment every night, or each take our own apartment -- occasionally inviting each-other over for dinner. It was late, though, so we all settled down into one of the front rooms to sleep. Just then, a bunch of flashlight beams started shining in through the windows. We all sighed. I peaked out the window, and sure enough there were six cops gawking up at the building from the sidewalk.

We belly-crawled away from the window and into the stairwell, then went up onto the roof. We sat shivering in the cold on the roof, listening in utter silence through the access door, wondering to ourselves if they would get inside or just go away. After a painful half hour, we finally heard them come in the front door. We ran and jumped across to the roof of the neighboring building, then clambered down the fire escape on the back side of it. We emerged onto a side street, and smiled at the success of our dashing rooftop escape.

"Alright, let's just disappear into the park here," Pablo said. "We're home free!" I countered. "If they catch us outside now, how could they prove it was us? Let's at least get our bikes and ride down to Claire and Crystal's house." "No, that's just dumb," replied Pablo. "Well, wait here then," I responded. I went and unlocked everyone's bikes, then brought them back to where Pablo and Jesse were waiting. Somehow, my stupidity spread to Jesse. "Well, if we're going to ride to Crystal and Claire's, I'm interested in riding by the front of the place to see what's going on." "Sure," I agreed, "let's just ride down the bike lane on the way there." Pablo shook his head and laughed, "You guys are idiots, I'll met you at 6th and Fulton."

So Jesse and I took the bike lane in front of the place we had just escaped from. There were four police cars out front, and right as we rode by two cops came out the door. Jesse and I smiled at each-other and whispered "Suckers!" under our breath. Fifteen seconds later, one of the cop cars zoomed up behind us and pulled us over.

I still felt confident, but just as the boot of the first cop to step out of the car hit the pavement, it occurred to me "Oh my god we're fucking idiots -- we returned to the scene of the crime!" The cop walked casually up to us. "Say, were you guys in that place back there?" "Uhm, place? What place?" "Don't know anything about it, huh? Well see that's strange, because you two match the description that we received exactly." Description? "So we're sorry if this is a mistake, but we'll just have to detain you here for a minute until we get the witness to come and ID you." Witness? "Oh, and would you mind lifting up your shoe? Well, isn't that interesting -- those are the exact tread marks that I found on the roof." I sighed inside again. Tread marks? We're fucking idiots!

Eventually the witness did come, and sure enough she recognized Jesse. They looked through all our stuff, confiscated two screwdrivers from me, and announced that they'd be letting us off with a warning. "See, we're actually pretty nice, huh?" We hesitated. "Say we're nice!" "Right, uhm, you guys are really nice people, thanks a lot." "So we want you to stop throwing shit at us during protests. In fact, we want to see some pro-police rallies." Again, confused hesitation on our part. "We said we want to see pro-police rallies!" "Uhm, right... pro-police rallies, we'll start organizing that just as soon as you guys turn us loose here." "Alright then, you're free to go."

Pablo was waiting for us. "I told you you guys were idiots."

Gutter Punk Crew

One night when we were staying at our place on South Van Ness, a large band of kids calling themselves "Gutter Punk Crew" broke in through the window. In many ways, I think that they were as surprised by the encounter as we were. Jason talked with them about our reservations around living with travelers who aren't as invested in a space and are more careless about it getting busted, as well as our general desire to live with people that we know and trust. He even gave them a very detailed list of other places that they could try opening, along with specific notes and instructions about how to gain entry. We didn't make them leave that night because it was raining, but we didn't expect to see them after the next morning. Little did we know that this was the beginning of a long and painful relationship with GPC.

Night after night, they continued to break in. Dealing with them was pretty difficult, because it was clearly an amoebic group. There were different people there every time, and if we made progress talking with one or two people on one occasion, they might not be there at all the next time. Often it seemed like many of the people who came in had just met each-other that day.

Dealing with them was also difficult because they were usually shit-faced drunk. On one such occasion, they finally admitted that they liked to break into our place because it was close to a certain store that sold really cheap beer late at night. Of course, when they bought their 48-pack, they wanted to go to the closest place where they could drink it.

Once when I wanted to talk with a couple about them staying there, they looked at me blankly and responded "You're talking to the wrong people, the leaders are down the hall." I hesitated. "The leaders?" "Right, the people who make the decisions." I couldn't believe it. Explicitly authoritarian... gutter punks? I didn't know what to say. "Uhm, right, well, then I guess I'm interested in talking with you as individuals, not as members of a group." "Listen to what we're saying -- you're wasting your time, the leaders are down the hall." I sighed. "Well, I guess I'd just encourage you to get in touch with your individuality, then." The woman I was talking with looked confused "Oh, believe me I am! I'm a full-on anarchist!" Her claim seemed pretty funny in that context, and she saw me smiling. "It's just that... we're forced to be a part of a group for protection in this city." The implication being that groups required leaders.

For a while there was a tacit arrangement that when they did stay there, they had to at least leave when we did so that we could lock the door. Once when Yann was going to be the last one out, he stopped by the door and was trying to get everyone else to go. Eventually Yann noticed that there was a kid standing there with his pants down, masturbating. Yann gave him a surprised look, and the kid responded "Give me a second."

I finally gave up when I came home one night and found some guy sleeping in my bed. I thought about waking him up or sleeping on the floor, but balked at both and just laid down next to him on the mattress. After a few minutes he started to murmur in his sleep, then the murmuring got louder, then he started screaming -- an incredibly loud blood curdling scream. He was asleep, but the screaming didn't stop. I waited for a few minutes, but he just kept going. I expected someone else to come running in to find out what was wrong, but nobody came. Then he started twitching and jerking around while he was screaming. Eventually, I shook him awake with some difficulty and said "Hey man, you're screaming in your sleep and it's making it difficult for me to fall asleep. Would you mind sleeping somewhere else?" He looked at me with strange eyes, hesitated for half a second, then gave a startling yell: "I don't scream in my sleep!"

I got up and went to Jason's room. I discovered that he wasn't there, and realized that I would probably not be able to sleep easy knowing that I was alone in a house with a bunch of semi-hostile gutter punks and a near-psychotic kid sleeping in my bed.

I grabbed my stuff, shook my head, and walked out into the night.

The Two Sides Of Smell

At one point during the winter, I went to Atlanta Georgia for five days. I grew up there, and I went back to visit my mother -- who I hadn't seen for a long while. My relationship with her has often been strained, and despite my intentions, this trip was no exception. The interesting thing was that this time her theme of harassment narrowed almost exclusively to one point: the way I smelled. Now, my friend Ted has called me "the most non-odorous dirty person he knows." I don't actually know to what extent that's true, and I realize that the way one's scent is accepted differs greatly between the expectations of my mother and the expectations of the community that I'm normally a part of. But this was straight up harassment. Every time I walked by her, got near her, or was in any way around her -- she mentioned it. You're probably thinking "Why didn't you just take a shower?" Well, I did. I'd shower more than once a day. Every time I came out of the bathroom she'd be standing there like a stalker, ready to smell me. She would immediately make a face. "You must not have used soap!" she'd exclaim. I eventually decided that this was clearly ridiculous and that she must have had some kind of psychosomatic block, but when someone is constantly telling you about how badly you smell over and over again throughout the day -- it starts to get to you. Especially when you aren't around other people you know. "Imagine," she'd say, "you spend all that money on an airplane ticket, and are forced to sit next to someone who smells as bad as you."

One morning I woke up to find that she'd come into the room I was sleeping in, taken all my clothes, and washed them in what must have been an entire bottle of detergent. They were actually a little slimy from the soap residue, and as soon as I put my shirt on I started to break out in hives. I had to wash them all over again without using any soap at all, but the water was still bubbling like crazy from the amount of residue on them alone. I felt like a walking Glade Freshener, but that still wasn't enough for her.

On the way back to California, I found myself looking around the airplane nervously. I'd wonder "Is my mom right? Are these people all really annoyed by the way I smell?" Finally when I made it back to Station 40, I came in to find Jesse, BJ, and Aaron at the top of the steps. "Moxie!" they all yelled, and came over to give me a hug. When Aaron hugged me, he sniffed loudly "Wow dude, you smell!" And here I'm thinking "Oh man! My mom was right! I really do smell bad!" Aaron continued, "Yeah, you smell like some kind of... awful fabric softener, or something!"

Sailing The Salt Seas

After six months, the timing of open schedules and good weather actually converged, so I finally endeavored to bring my boat back from Morro Bay to Berkeley. This nightmare tale (And Together We'll Face The World! #1) started when I sailed from San Francisco to Mexico, and last ended when I couldn't make it all the way back up the California coast alone. I had resolved to trailer the boat the rest of the way, but of course that never worked out. I still didn't have the energy to make the sail alone, so instead I gathered a buccaneer crew to brave the central California coast with me.

I was actually pretty nervous about getting people who had no sailing experience into this situation, so most of the "recruiting" time was actually spent trying to dissuade people from coming. Knowing what I know, there is no way that I would want to come along on this trip for the ride, so I did my best to impart that knowledge on those who were volunteering to do just that. I wasn't very successful in my attempts to dissuade people, and actually, the more unappealing I made the trip sound, the more excited people seemed to be about it. I'd go on at length about the miserable combination of cold, wet, wind, seasickness, hunger, and sleep deprivation -- to no avail. I even started talking about a 50/50 chance of death or serious injury. In the end, though, I was satisfied. Clearly, my crew was a foolhardy one, but there is no way that anyone could say my disclaimer hadn't been extensive enough.

The final roster included Marie, Jason, and Jennifer (who'd come all the way from Ohio for the trip). The sail back from Morro Bay was going to be hard enough, but first we had to get down there. None of us had a car, or knew anyone who would carpool us for 10 hours. Hopping the coastal train out of Oakland is pretty fickle, so that left hitchhiking -- which is something that I really do not enjoy anymore. The whole experience of watching hundreds of cars go by without stopping generally leaves me feeling pretty depressed, and the excitement of meeting new people who I would never ordinarily meet under other circumstances has been replaced by a number of unpleasant interactions. But to add insult to injury, we also had to transport a large, four person, inflatable dingy.

We decided that we'd split up, travel in groups of two, and meet again in Morro Bay. The dingy was divided into the large blob of vinyl (which took two people to carry) and the wooden slats that served as floorboards (which could barely be managed by one person). The group that got the slats would also have to carry the paddles and pump.

We played a rock-paper-scissors tournament to decide who had to carry which part. Jennifer and I won, so we chose the slats/oars/pump. At that, we set off.

We spent a lot of time waiting on the 101S on-ramp in San Francisco, but eventually got a few short rides out of the city. We accidentally left our bag of food in one car, and also had to walk a few miles down the highway, since there was no southbound on-ramp where we were let off. The caustic smell, noise, and wind that speeding cars kick up in their wake is pretty unpleasant, especially when combined with the thought of all the good food that had just driven off in the trunk of a stranger's car, who probably wouldn't even eat it himself.

The sun was shining, though, and we eventually made it to the next on-ramp. The setup wasn't so great there, but we only stood out for a short while until a sleek new Mercedes pulled over. The guy inside informed me that he was only going about 20 miles down the road, but that he could take us that far. I asked if the on-ramp where he was headed was a good one, and he immediately responded "Oh it's good! Reeaaaal goood." We got in, and he mentioned that he used to hitchhike a lot in his day. "Back in the 60's."

I guess it's pretty old news, but I've been fascinated by the whole baby boomer phenomenon lately. Suddenly I realized that this guy might qualify, and asked "Could you be considered a baby boomer?" He snaps back: "Oh, I am a boomer! I'm Richard Jakes, six foot three, 235 pounds of black DYNAMITE... I was hanging out in the Fillmore, pre-afro, listening to Ike and Tina Turner!" At that, he turned up the stereo (which I assumed was playing Ike and Tina Turner) to sing along with the "whoohoo" and "oohooohs". During the twenty mile trip, he gave us the synopsis of his youth, his time as a conscript in Vietnam, as well as the story of his selling out to become a real estate broker.

What I found interesting was that he seemed to equate all of 60's radicalism to drug culture. From his perspective, giving up on that radicalism was as simple as "getting his nose out of the bag." And, of course, he'd made the decision to "get a real job" when he'd had kids.

We got closer to his exit, and he said "Now I'm going to show you guys how this is done. Check out this on-ramp here, reeaal wide shoulder, not like that death trap back there. This is THE PLACE." We started to get out, and he handed Jennifer a $100 dollar bill. We said that we didn't need it, and he said "Oh no, this is from Ike and Tina Turner!"

So we were feeling pretty good about things, took two steps across the on-ramp, and stuck out our thumbs just as the first car was passing. That car immediately pulled over, but the driver was only going 20 miles, and was drinking a beer. We thought we'd just wait for another ride, since this one was pretty short and the driver was drinking. Besides, the first car stopped, surely we'd get another ride in no time!

And oh were we wrong. We waited on that on-ramp for six hours. Finally, the sun went down and we had to quit. We walked off the on-ramp, and discovered that we were in Blossom Hill, which is essentially San Jose. I checked my voicemail and learned that Marie and Jason had made it all the way to Morro Bay in three rides. I sighed at our defeat.

We managed to get all of our stuff and our half of the dingy onto the roof of a Hollywood Video, and slept until early the next morning. We trudged back out to the same on-ramp, and waited for another two hours. I was about to go insane, when some folks finally picked us up. They were only going two exits down before turning off the highway, and apologized as if it wasn't going to work out. "Oh no no no!" we insisted, "We'll take the ride! Just get us the fuck out of here!"

Another memorable ride was with a woman who had to pick her son up from highschool on the way. So, we rode with her through the carpool line in her minivan. When her 15 year old son got in the van, looking pretty surprised to see us in the back seat, I wanted more than anything to know all about how much he hated highschool, and who in his class he had a crush on.

We finished the trip laying in the flat bed of a truck, riding through the ravine of highway 41 as the sun was setting. We met up with Marie and Jason, put the dingy together, and rowed out to the boat. It was a nice feeling to be back at anchor, especially with friends, and playing hearts that night under the warm glow of the oil lamp was as cozy as I've ever felt.

We spent the next day going over the boat and practicing sailing in the harbor. It was somewhat tricky to teach sailing effectively, since that harbor is pretty narrow and littered with boats at anchor. We actually hit another boat while practicing our maneuvers. As we were heading towards it, I yelled "fend off!" to Jason at the bow. He gave me a confused look and didn't move at all. We crashed right into the side of it. Afterwards he came back from the bow and asked "I couldn't hear you up there? What was that you were yelling before?" I laughed, and for the rest of the trip we'd spontaneously yell "fend off!" to each-other in different situations.

Later that day I ran into someone who I'd met on previous trips to Morro Bay. He asked me if I had a crew for the trip back, and I told him that I did have a crew, but that they were pretty green -- in fact I had just taught them how to sail by tacking around the harbor that day. He laughed out loud "Holy shit! That was you guys! Good luck man, good luck..."

We sailed out towards San Simeon the next morning on the 4am tide. The trip out of the harbor was incredibly surreal, since the moon had set and we were navigating strictly by the compass and the flashing red/green channel markers. We could feel the motion of the swell, and we could hear it crashing against the breakwater as we got closer and closer to the entrance, but we couldn't see anything.

Almost as soon as we made it out into the ocean, Jason got sea-sick. He seemed to be sitting quietly, and I thought he was lost in introspection or marveling at the stars hanging over the open ocean, but when Marie asked him to come and help her look at the chart, he sort of mumbled "Sure, uhm, just give me a second..." in a strained voice. Eventually he had to lie down in a berth and close his eyes. From the few times that I've experienced sea-sickness, I know that it's one of the worst feelings there is. It makes you feel like you've always been sick, and like you'll never be well again. Jason's analysis was that any kind of sensory input becomes nearly unmanageable. We thought he was sleeping for most of the trip to San Simeon, but later he told us that he just had his eyes closed and was trying to block out as much sensory input as possible. Jennifer threw up into a bucket a few times right next to him, and Jason just continued to lay there completely motionless. He later told us that he thought the sound of Jennifer's puke hitting the bucket was a leak that we'd sprung in the hull, but he had just continued lying there absolutely motionless since thinking about the implications of that would make his head swim. Marie, as usual, was as cool as a cucumber.

It was only a 27 mile run and we made it to San Simeon in 5 hours without incident. We anchored there, everyone recovered from their sea-sickness, and we decided to take a break by blowing up the dingy and going to shore. We rowed towards the big fishing pier, but discovered that there was no ladder for us to tie up to. "Oh well," we said casually "we'll just row up to the beach." From the bay, we could see what looked like very small waves breaking slightly up against the beach. Nothing that we couldn't handle in our four-person dingy. Sure, I'd gotten burnt by this before in LA, but this was different. I wasn't in a pool raft this time, right? As we got closer, the swell started to seem a little larger, but still not too much of a problem. At most, we might get splashed a little. We got in a little further, a big wave came, and completely flipped us. I saw Jason emerge from underwater, wearing his camouflage rain gear over a backpack, with a face of utter shock and bewilderment. Looking around, he saw our trash bags and empty gas cans floating by. "Let's..." he stammered, "Let's get this stuff out of here!" Marie, who had just read about "capsizing" in her book on sailing, was saying "Capsized!" over and over again. Someone yelled "fend off!"

Jennifer had managed to hold onto the dingy and avoid getting tossed out. I thought about the camera in my backpack and made a direct line for the shore. And, once again, waded up soaking wet.

We were all wearing our warm clothes and had our backpacks with us. Instead of casually hanging out on the beach, we spent a fair amount of time shivering, trying to dry our clothes, and waiting for the swell to calm down so that we could actually make it back out. Eventually we ended up making a mad dash back out through the swell from a somewhat calmer area of the beach, and managed to return to the boat without another capsize. We were planning to leave that night, but all of our clothing was still wet and we needed warm clothing for the long sail ahead. We planned to let our stuff dry overnight and leave mid-morning instead. The forecast for that day was "NW winds 15 to 25 knots." Which is pretty stiff, but a far cry better than the 30 knots steady that had been blowing for most of the spring. We got out into the ocean, and the wind almost immediately overpowered us. We reefed down the main sail, and Jason asked "Should we put up the storm jib?" I sighed, "Yep, I guess we should." All the while the seas had been picking up, and by now the swell was running pretty large. Waves and spray were breaking over the sides, so we were all pretty wet. Jason was asking questions based on his reading about sailing like "So when I take down the head sail, should I flake it out and fold it into a sail bag?" I'd shout back through the wind with answers like "You're going to be lucky if you can stuff it down the hatch without getting swept overboard!" So Jason, like a fucking hero, headed to the bow of the boat. For never having changed out a headsail before, he did amazingly well. The whole process took half an hour, during which time the bow of the boat was being completely submerged underwater. A few times I saw the freezing water come up to his waist. When the storm jib was finally hanked on right, he wasn't able to move his legs from cold and cramp. He had to belly crawl back across the deck of the boat to the cockpit, where he started to get sea-sick again. We're lucky we got the storm jib up, because the wind just kept getting stronger and stronger. Eventually it was howling by at a consistent 30 knots, while gusting to 40 knots. We were well into Force 8 winds, where wave height usually averages 15 feet. So much for the forecasted 15 - 25 knots. In those winds, forward progress was extremely slow. We had to tack back and forth up the coast, and had only made 10 miles of actual forward progress by the time the sun set (although we'd probably sailed at least 30 miles). At one point we saw a large power cruiser that looked like it was floundering heavily in the swell, and I wondered what our little ultralight looked like to them. Fighting our way through the gale was exhausting, and since there's nothing between San Simeon and Monteray, it was clear that we'd have to suffer another few days of getting continually beaten down before we made it. Jason was still puking from sea sickness, though, and everyone was feeling pretty worn out. At one point I shouted to Marie "So! What do you think!" Marie looked back at me "About what?" "Sailing!" She paused for a few seconds and then replied calmly "Well, I guess I wouldn't choose to take too many more trips like this." I laughed "No! I meant, should we turn around and run for our lives, or suffer our way through this!" Eventually, we all decided to head back for San Simeon. Coming about in a rough swell can be tricky in an ultralight fin-keeler, so we waited until just the right moment in between the waves, then came about hard and started the downwind run back in the direction that we'd come from. It had taken us eight hours to make it that far upwind, and it only took us two hours to make it back. Once we dropped the anchor in San Simeon, we all collapsed in our wet bedding and slept until morning.

Marie and Jason decided that the sailor's life wasn't for them, and that they'd disembark there. Jennifer and I resolved to sail back to Berkeley or sink trying. So, once again, we rowed into shore at San Simeon. This time we were a little more careful about our approach -- looking frantically behind us to see what the next swell set would be like as we got closer. We managed to make it in without capsizing, and Jennifer and I managed to make it back out by ourselves.

We listened to the marine weather forecast, and it sounded like the weather would be much nicer two days from then. So, we sat at anchor in San Simeon for two days. We tried fishing, did an epic amount of sewing, read a lot, and listened to our one tape over and over again. Finally, the time came and we set off at midnight. We had really amazing weather, and sailed a pleasant 27 hours straight to Santa Cruz -- blowing by Monteray completely.

The last time I anchored in Santa Cruz, the pier was bustling and there were probably 12 other boats anchored out there at the same time. When we arrived at 4am and dropped anchor this time, though, we discovered that we were the only ones there. I guess spring sailing isn't for everyone. We hung out in Santa Cruz for a day, replenished our food supplies, and woke up the next morning to find that the Southwesterlies which we were expecting that evening had arrived early. Santa Cruz bay is completely unprotected in south west winds, so the anchorage was already starting to get a little rough. We got everything together as quickly as we could, and barely got out in time. As we got out towards the Santa Cruz buoy, we could see the waves starting to break where we had just been. We decided to duck into the Santa Cruz harbor to get some fuel before setting out north, and by the time we headed back out things had picked up considerably. The forecast was 5-15 knots SW, and instead we found ourselves in a consistent 30 knots. For a moment I thought we weren't going to make it out of the Santa Cruz harbor and that we'd end up floundering on the rocks instead. We got hit really hard by a breaking wave, and the cockpit nearly flooded into the cabin. We were in an incredibly dangerous situation, because the increasingly strong wind was very close to blowing us ashore. The phrase "fighting your way off a lee shore" acquired new meaning for me, and there were a few moments when I was seriously worried that we weren't going to make it around Santa Cruz point. In fact, throughout the whole trip, I had an interesting relationship to panic. Usually, it seems that people who are uninformed or inexperienced with a particular kind of adversity will panic when faced with that adversity. Usually, experience renders calm and capability. However, I went through just the opposite while sailing on this trip. Since my buccaneer crew had no sailing experience, there were times when the shit was really starting to go down, and only I knew it. Everyone else was experiencing things like "Oh, so this is sailing" while I was the only one with enough experience to know "Oh no, this is really really bad." We did manage to make it offshore, though, and once we got around the Santa Cruz point we were running downwind.

We put up the drifter and sailed at 8 knots all the way to Half Moon Bay, where we intended to ditch out for the night. Two things prevented this from happening. First, I was using a GPS waypoint for Half Moon Bay that was printed in "The Cruising Guide To Central And Southern California." It was hard to tell at night, but as we got closer to the waypoint, it occurred to me that we seemed very close to shore. I went below and plotted our position on the chart, only to discover that we were basically on top of the shore line, definitely less than one mile off shore, in an area with many obstructions. I jumped back into the cockpit, Jennifer untied the preventer line on the boom, and we jibed around hard for a run straight West. In trying to find out what had gone wrong, I discovered that the GPS waypoint for Half Moon Bay is printed 10 miles off! Talk about deadly information. So with the correct waypoint, we started for Half Moon Bay again. The entrance to the harbor is marred by a number of reefs, which are marked with flashing buoys. At night, it was essentially impossible to tell what buoys were marking what, what were actually lights on shore, and where we should be going. Eventually we decided the that the whole thing was a bad scene, and set a course straight for San Francisco instead.

Usually, it's very important to time your entrance to the Golden Gate in order to avoid the strong tidal currents. The ebb tide can hit 6.2 knots at times. We didn't have a tide table, though, so we just hoped that we'd hit it on the flood tide. We arrived at the Golden Gate around 3am, and of course the tide was ebbing. So there was a good 45 minutes where we were sailing hard but sitting completely still in the water. We sat directly under the bridge for a good while, watching the water careen by us while we made absolutely no progress. Eventually we eeked under, and it was smooth sailing across the bay from there. It had taken ten days of chapped lips, sun burn, wind burn, bitter cold, and pure exhaustion -- but I was so relieved that the boat had finally returned.

Relationships And Context

Around this time I thought a lot about how relationships exist contextually; that relationships might actually be a dynamic between me, another person, and the context that we're in -- rather than just the dynamic between me and another person. In that sense, if there is a change in the context of our lives, the relationship is a different one.

I've had a number of relationships that started out full of excitement, and then mysteriously grew stale over time. When thinking about relationships contextually, it's easy to see that if the context of my life is changing over time, then it's possible that whatever beautiful synergy existed between me, another person, and the context of our lives might not be able to exist as the context of our lives changes.

In monogamous relationships, I've often found that I am in a relationship one day just because I was in that relationship the day before. There is a very static sense of being "in" or "out" of a relationship, and so I think less intentionality exists as status-quo prevails. To some extent, I've found that this is not as true with polyamorous relationships. Things are a little more dynamic, and so I think there is an opportunity for more intentionality to exist. I find that, day-to-day, I'm more capable of evaluating why I'm in a given relationship, what it is that I'm getting out of the relationship, and why I love this person. It's easier for me to evaluate the impact of contextual changes as well. The nice thing about all of this (beyond knowing that I'm involved in something that I really want to be involved in) is that since I'm very aware of the things that I love about my lover on a day-to-day basis, I can tell that person what those things are.

In this sense, I find it strange that people enjoy monogamous relationships for the "security" that they provide. While the logistics of monogamous relationships do provide an abstract sense of security, I've found that the emotional truth is usually the opposite. Personally, knowing that I have some security in a relationship just because the rules of monogamy define it that way is actually more unnerving. It doesn't matter whether a lover of mine has other lovers or not; nothing makes me feel more secure than knowing that this person is actively choosing to be in a relationship with me, knowing exactly what it is that this person loves about me, and knowing that our relationship exists in a very intentional way. Sometimes this type of understanding is actually more clear when a lover of mine does have other lovers, as it's easier for me to know these things when all the static constructs of relationships disappear.

Intentional Hypocrisy

I realized that just as context can define the undercurrent of a relationship, relationships can also define the context of my life -- sometimes in a way that is not congruent with my desires. This, to me, is somewhat troubling, and it made me realize why I spend so much time traveling and doing new things by myself (or with new friends). Because just as it can be incredibly fulfilling to be around people who know you deeply, that depth of understanding can also turn into a projection of who you're supposed to be that can limit personal growth. Having my relationships define the context of my life is difficult because I'm interested in exploring intentional hypocrisy. Instead of falling into the routines of who I am supposed to be, I want to be free to explore different ideas based on how I'm feeling about them day-to-day. This is harder to do if I am around friends who (however unintentionally) project ideas (good or bad) of who I am supposed to be, which saddle me with preconceptions.

Incremental Porn

Sometimes if I'm staying in the east bay, I'll go to the Berkeley public library to check my email. You have to make an appointment to use the computers there, but they have one drop-in computer that you can use for 15 minutes. Usually someone is already using it, but in that case you know that you only have to wait a maximum of 15 minutes. Once I went in, and there was someone already using it, so I sat down behind him to wait.

While I was waiting, I glanced over his shoulder and noticed that he was typing a document in MS Word. The font was fairly big, and I read a paragraph. I realized that he was writing a porn story... at the 15 minute computer in the Berkeley public library! The document was fairly long, and when his time was almost up he saved it and emailed it to himself. I can only imagine that he comes into the library every day, writing this porn story 15 minutes at a time.

Summer Travels

I think that leaving is such a good feeling because it's such a vivid time. Everyone that you've met, everything that you've done, and everything that you could have done is put in perspective. You say goodbyes, and the relationships that you had cultivated are frozen as they were made. For the time being, your chances are up. In a sense, leaving is vivid because there's very little room for routine there, and all of the feelings you have about a place, your history with that place, and the potential for your future with that place come to the forefront. Sometimes, even watching other people leave can cause me to have a similar experience.

After sailing back up the California coast the first time, I realized that I'd come up with an elaborate plan to escape San Francisco every year for the past five years. These plans have always failed in the sense that they didn't permanently deliver me from San Francisco, but it was always a fun time, and I always came back excited with new ideas and new energy. So eventually I realized that there's nothing wrong with staying in one place, working on building a solid sense of community over the course of several years, and leaving to travel over the summer. This is essentially what I've been doing all along, it just wasn't my intent.

When people found out that I intended to leave for the whole summer, they'd ask me "What about the projects that you're involved in? What about the reading group or the idea share? What about audio anarchy?" I'd say "I hope those things continue, and I'll be back, but right now I feel like I'll die if I stay here."

The Hobby

I think that I have a long-rooted distaste for the word "hobby." I don't remember a lot of my childhood, but I can remember a few elementary school moments very clearly. One was when we were taught about "agendas," and the other was when we were taught about "hobbies." The gist of the lesson on hobbies was that we were expected to have one. One. This was the thing that was supposed to define or differentiate us from everyone else. It was a given that we would all go to school or have a job, etc. Most of our lives were very overtly expected to be identical to the lives of everyone else, but the "hobby" was to represent our facet of choice. Ironically enough, though, there were a number of predefined hobbies that were strongly encouraged: collecting stamps, coins, baseball cards, etc...

I took a trip to the Institute Of Applied Piracy to help teach some sailing workshops in June. Jennifer and I traveled there together, and we ended up having to hitchhike part of the way. We caught a ride with a really nice guy all the way from Klamath Falls to Salem. In a sense, I think he was expecting us to provide some entertainment outside his usual talk radio routine. He kept asking us about the other rides that we'd gotten, and when we mentioned that we rode a long ways in a car full of heroine addicts, he immediately cut in "Oh, drugs -- you miss out on too much of life that way. For me, my hobby is snowmobiling."

I cringed instinctively at the word hobby, and then continued cringing when I thought about the implications of snowmobiling = life.

It turned out that an acquaintance of this guy's was following us home on the highway. When we stopped at a rest station, the guy following us stopped too. While I was drinking water at the water fountain, I heard the guy who was giving us a ride talking with the guy who was following us.

The guy who was following us was talking about his weekend plans, when he said: "Well, there's a race this weekend. My hobby is racing remote control cars. I'm the president of the club." The guy giving us a ride responded: "Oh, my hobby is snowmobiling. I'm on the board of the club."

I nearly snorted water up my nose in a fit of disbelief. It was just how my elementary school lesson on hobbies described it...

Ninja Train Riders

I was really charmed by the Pacific Northwest during my time at the Institute Of Applied Piracy, but eventually I set off across the country on a trip to the south east. I caught a few rides back to San Francisco, watching the cool thick trees of the northwest thin into California's rolling hills. I arrived back in town on the 4th of July, and walked out to the Desert Yard just after the sun had set. Fireworks exploded all around me, casting my shadow across the train tracks and lighting up the yard with sparkles of green and yellow. Unfortunately, however, all six departure tracks were completely empty. I laid down on the gravel in the shadow of a control box and watched the night sky. Eventually the fireworks stopped, and I was left with the embrace of quiet crickets. I thought about my trip to the south, and looked forward to the deafening roar of crickets that I'd find there.

After 24 hours of waiting, I got on an IM train headed across the Overland Route. We rode all through California, and whenever the train stopped I'd get off to pick blackberries in the woods. I'd been looking forward to eating them all summer, and my fingers were dyed a deep purple from the juices.

I was feeling pretty good about how ninja I'd been with the train riding so far, when all of a sudden at a crew change in Portolla, I heard a cacophony of noise approaching. I looked up, and three train riders were stampeding down the tracks in broad daylight. They were yelling back and forth about which cars might be rideable, dragging their barking dog along, and playing music from a boombox! They tried to jump in the 48 I was riding, but thinking that these guys were going to get busted for sure, I told them to head back a few cars. They ended up riding the car directly behind me. I couldn't believe my luck.

We pulled from Portolla without incident, and two hours later, just as the sun was setting, the train sided out in the desert. All of a sudden these guys jumped off the train, and started a stampede up towards the units. "Water run!" they yelled as they passed by. "Wait, you didn't bring any water?" I asked. "Nope!" they yelled back. These guys were getting on a train for a 24 hour ride through the Nevada desert and Utah salt flats, and they bring a fucking boombox -- but no water. They were gone for a good while, during which time I assumed they'd been caught, when they eventually returned looking somewhat downtrodden. "Man, there was no water up there or anything..." We stood next to each-other in the darkness. I asked them where they were headed. "Santa Barbara!" they replied enthusiastically. "Whoa, you guys are going almost the exact wrong way then. This train is headed towards the east coast, this is the Nevada desert." "Oh, well, I guess this is just the long way there then."

The train rolled through the night, and we pulled into Elko for a crewchange in the morning. I thought that they'd surely get off there, get some water, and catch the next train that rolled through. Instead, they left their stuff on the train, jumped off with an empty jug, and walked over to a puddle in the middle of a salt flat. I mean, this puddle was clearly resting in a large bed of salt. To my astonishment, they started filling up their water jug there. The train started to pull from the yard, so they sprinted back with their 1/3 full jug of brine water and hopped back on.

Just as we were leaving the yard and picking up speed, I heard them taste the water.

Once we got into Utah, the heat really set in. Every time the train stopped out in the desert, they'd run up to the units and demand water from the engineer. He would refuse, having none to spare, and they would get really combative with him. They did this over and over again, to no avail. I jumped from the moving train as we got close to Salt Lake City, avoiding the garrison of police that were likely stationed in the yard to intercept the band of antagonistic train riders who had been threatening the engineer. And so there I was, back in Salt Lake again.

I ran into Kalani within 10 minutes of being in town, and caught up with everyone over at the Bike House and Boing. I really love that town, and it was really summertime there, complete with the warm nights just right for drinking wine on rooftops.

Chasing A Thunderstorm

From Salt Lake City, I took the bus out to the Ogden yard and caught an all-grainer train that took off at light-speed through Wyoming. In Cheyenne I switched to a doublestack train since North Platte was coming up, and I saw a big thunderstorm up ahead. The clouds looked pretty ominous, the sky was flashing with lighting, and you could actually see the streams of slanted rain approaching. We rode right into it, the rain came down hard, and lightning flashed all around us. I was in the well of a 48, so I got pretty wet, but eventually we came out on the other side.

I was relieved to be through the storm, but then every time we stopped for a crew change or sided out, the thunder storm would catch up to us and the whole thing would start over again. So, in this way, the train chased a thunderstorm all the way across eastern Wyoming and western Nebraska. I felt like one of those cartoon characters who walks around with a miniature thunder cloud over his head that follows him everywhere he goes.

Left For Dead

I rode into North Platte after the sun had set, and I felt pretty ninja about my maneuvers within the yard. It's the largest rail yard in North America, has hardcore security, and is where I was once humped and knocked unconscious. I was in the yard for the whole night, and didn't really get a chance to sleep at all. It seems, you see, that I snore quite loud. When I was sleeping in the same room as Jesse, Pablo, Marie, and Jason over the past year, I got to hear a lot of stories about my snoring habits. Apparently, the snoring is pretty fucking loud. What's more, it's somewhat diabolical, in that I fall asleep instantly. There was never any chance for anyone to get to sleep before me so that they wouldn't get kept up by the snoring, because (apparently) I would start almost as soon as I'd closed my eyes.

So I was afraid to sleep while I waited on the train in North Platte -- because I thought that a yardcop or some worker would surely hear me snoring during a brake check and find me. I ended up staying awake all night, shivering in the cold and occasionally nodding off. I pulled out on a train headed for Chicago, but it mysteriously died in a town called Grand Island, Nebraska. It was clear that I would not be able to catch out of there any time soon, so I ended up having to walk seven miles down a road with an asphalt shoulder to the interstate, and it was so hot (110 degrees) that I left footprints the whole way. This marked the beginning of my hitchhiking portion of the trip.

The Rides

I ended up standing right on the I-80, since the Grand Island ramp was super low traffic. I was somewhat surprised when someone pulled over pretty quickly. This guy was an ex-marine, turned entrepreneur. He'd fired the first shot in Kosovo, and had the scars to prove it. When he got out of the marines, he was homeless for a while, and being a pretty clever guy used a number of scams to get by (he had a pretty good variation of the notorious "you left two cheeseburgers out of my order" scam). Now he owns seven houses, and makes a lot of money by doing tricks with mortgages, renting, and re-selling. Which, in some ways, is the biggest scam of all. The car we were in was one that he'd seen advertised on eBay. He thought it was pretty cheap, so he went down to a local dealership and told them that he owned it, showed them pictures of it, and asked how much they'd take it for. They offered to give him several thousand dollars more than it was advertised for on eBay, so he bought the car, flew to phoenix, and was driving it back to sell at the dealership.

He dropped me off at an interchange, and so I stood on I-80 again until I got picked up by a drunk couple in a Cadillac. We were in Des Moines, Iowa at this point, and the guy behind the wheel was all "Shit man, I really like you! If I had the money, I'd take you all the way to Bloomington right now! Fuck, I get paid on Friday, if you wanna wait around we can go then!" I told him that I'd take my chances hitchhiking, and they went to drop me off at their exit. The woman in the front seat got pretty upset "Awww! Saeid, I don't wanna leave him! We can't leave him!" "I know! I know! But what can we do until Friday! Hey man, you sure you don't want to hang out until then?"

I caught one more ride into Iowa City, and got dropped off at an interchange again. The sun had just set, and I saw my first firefly of the summer. I had to walk quite a ways down the interstate, but I was content to walk through a field alongside it in short sleeves and cut-off pants while the fireflies glowed all around me and the crickets roared.

Iowa For Eternity

I thought that I would never make it out of Iowa City. I started trying to hitchhike at 7am, and nobody even seemed to think about stopping. Eventually a cop showed up, and he decided to get rid of me by ferrying me over to the next county. Nobody would pick me up there, either, and eventually a cop from that county showed up and decided to get rid of me by ferrying me back to the place that I had just come from! So by 3pm, I was standing at the exact same on-ramp as I had been at 7am, fully expecting to be ferried back and forth between these two counties for the rest of eternity.

Finally a woman picked me up and drove me clear across Iowa and Illinois, onto the 65 in Indiana. There I quickly caught a ride with a guy who was on his way home from a "uunioon meeetin." We talked all about how the union worked, what his pension plan was like, what was going on with the money, etc.

He dropped me off about half way to Indianapolis. Standing there on the highway again, out of the blue a trucker pulled over and picked me up! This was only the third time in my life that I'd been picked up by a trucker, and he drove me clear to Highway 37. We talked on and on about life on the road, his marriage, what it's like to be a trucker, and what's happening in the trucking industry. It's funny how everything is always so much more significant, complicated, and rife with intrigue when you're deeply involved in it. I would think that trucking is trucking, that business unions are business unions, or that mortgages are mortgages -- but talking with all of these guys in detail about their involvement always turns up all kinds of stuff that I would never even imagine. More than usual, there was a pretty prominent pattern in my conversations with people that I caught rides with. Their attitude would usually go from hesitation (this guy might be dangerous or nuts), to comfort, to disbelief. The conversations would always end up like "You know, you're really smart! Why the hell are you hitchhiking, don't you want to do something with your life?" No matter how many times I talked about how hitchhiking isn't my life, that I was just trying to get to Bloomington, and that I spend a lot of time working on personal projects that I do care about, it didn't matter. The conversation would always continue, and eventually we would get down to definitions of success. And here, of course, is where it would become clear that if it didn't involve making money, I wasn't doing something.

The Farm

I spent my first few days in Bloomington working on an organic farm with Ted and Jordan. More than anything, there was something really calm, nice, and right about being away from the city and planting purple pea pods in the warm rain with friends. Trooping up to the house as the sun set with dirt under my fingernails, and that feeling of strength that comes from hard work, was really rewarding. But it was hard work, and I was amazed at how much went into the operation of the place. The days would start at 4am and run into the night, and some of the work could certainly be considered "backbreaking" (turning compost in particular). I've decided that any time you're taking a break for breakfast, the schedule is fucked up.

Crimethinc

I ended up stumbling into the Crimethinc convergence, and was actually surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I met a lot of great people that I want to keep in touch with, and I discovered a lot of energy in myself through others. I did my Mutualism workshop there, since I thought that was as un-crimethinc as I could get.

There was a plan-it-x records show on the last night of the convergence, and a lot of people were planning a festive parade to follow it. It was mostly about having fun, but it was also tied in with the I-69 stuff that's been happening around there. I jumped into the parade after the show, which quickly generated a large police presence. The parade didn't break up as smoothly as we wanted it to, but eventually a number of us made a rendezvous at a separate location so that we could all drive back to the place where we were camping.

It had been several hours since the parade, and a group of six of us were carelessly walking down a street towards a truck that we had parked there. Suddenly, a police car drove by, spun around, and started back towards us. "Well, what do we want to do?" someone asked. "I think... we should run!" I responded. Before I had even finished the sentence, everyone had taken off in different directions.

Three of us became trapped in a green space that was encircled by a road, while a police car circled around the road and spotlighted us. The entire green space was empty, except for a single tree in the exact center. Every time we ran towards one side of the circle, the cop car would get there before us and cut us off. We knew we didn't have much time to act, since there would almost certainly be more police there soon, and then we would definitely be cut off. We decided to try splitting up and running in separate directions. I ended up beating the cop car out and into an a golf course. I ran hard, feeling my heart beat faster than my feet, and disappeared into the shadows of some trees. More police cars showed up and started spotlighting the golf course. I moved from tree to tree, eventually emerged from the golf course, and slowly made progress across a residential neighborhood. The cops chased me that far, so eventually I dove into a tool shed behind someone's house, and I sat there (with the spiders) for hours, while I listened to the police cars screeching around the neighborhood. The night was incredibly hot, my face was streaming with sweat, I kept hearing them shoot rubber bullets, and I thought it would only be a matter of time before they brought out dogs. And so once again, as I engaged in the time-honored tradition of hiding in a tool shed overnight, I realized that I would not be able to sleep -- for fear that my snoring would give me away.

In the end the rain helped us, and it turned out that everyone was able to escape. I emerged with the break of dawn, and stole back across town to another rendezvous point.

Those Southern Cops

I took a trip to Asheville to visit a friend, but I was immediately knocked out with strep throat on my arrival. I slept for three days, but it was dance parties and sangria that eventually set me straight (not to mention the antibiotics). I spent most of my time there hanging out with Kirsten, helping her finish the roof of her house, and testing the strength of my recovery by riding a too-small bike around town. Again, it was really summer time there, and I even went swimming in a swimming hole.

Eventually, when I was well enough, I set off to meet some pirate punks in Charleston, SC. I spent a while figuring out the Asheville train yard, and caught out of there at 2am. Aside from some block-swapping in a town along the way, everything went smoothly. I was riding on the back porch of a grainer, and we were slowly making our way through the woods just outside of Linwood Yard. Suddenly I looked up and noticed a guy with a walkie-talkie running along next to me. "Whoops," I thought, "time to jump off the other side of this thing and catch another car in the confusion." I moved to the other side of the train, and there was another guy running along that side as well. Fully caught, the train stopped. I was accosted with thick southern accents. "Where's your friend? You been climbin' around on the roof of that car?" "I don't know what you're talking about." I jumped off at their beckoning, and one of them radioed to the train "The trespasser is clear!" The train carried on, and they had me sit down on the intensely hot gravel with my hands on my head.

There is nothing more dissatisfying than helplessly watching the train that you spent hours waiting for roll away. All that time looking for a good spot, stalking through the yard, and watching the patterns of movement -- wasted. They explained to me that a pedestrian had seen me and "my friend" riding on the roof of a grainer, waving as we passed through town. I hadn't done any such thing, and was pretty confused at my luck. Just then, two kids on the back of another grainer rode by with some curious looks on their faces. Seeing me with my hands on my head and two security-looking guys watching me, it finally dawned on them that they should duck, but they moved out of sight way too late. The security guys exclaimed "ah hah!" and radioed for the train to stop on their walkie-talkie. As luck would have it, the batteries in the walkie-talkie died just then, and the train rolled away unmolested.

So there I was in Spencer County NC, in 110 degree heat, continuing my tradition of having other train riders get me busted. We were just on the edge of the woods, and I was silently sitting on the ground with my hands on my head while we waited for the local cops to show up and take me. All of a sudden, a large tree next to us randomly fell over. There was no strong wind or anything -- it just started crackling and then toppled, shaking the ground with a loud thud. We all sat looking at each other in amazement, when one of the railcops finally spoke up: "Well, I reckon that goes back to the old saying -- if a tree falls in the woods and there's nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound? Mmmhmmm... And I reckon that we've discovered the answer is 'yes'." (!) I couldn't believe he said that, but I hesitated before deciding that this was one of those moments where "speaking truth to power" is ill-advised. The cops eventually came, checked me for warrants, and turned me loose. The yardcop swore up and down that if he caught me in Linwood he'd have me locked up for sure. I believed him, and since Linwood is a yard where you have to ask a worker in order to differentiate from the West and South trains, I resolved to try my hand at hitchhiking. "Is there an interstate that runs near here?" "About seven miles down the road that way." "Oh, well, which way are you guys going?" "That way." "Could I get a ride?" "Nope."

I started walking down the road towards I-85, and after a few miles a bunch of old guys drinking malt liquor in their front yard hailed me down. They saw the mini-guitar that I'd gotten at the Bloomington Really Really Free Market and asked me to "play them a summer breeze." I was somewhat relieved to sit down for a second, and set about playing the guitar. I was really dirty from the combination of sweat and train grease, so I was surprised to find these characters so accommodating. While I was tuning the guitar, I listened to the old guys talking. "Yeeap, George! I remember that time that you went off a hoboin'!" "I wasn' hoboin, I was jes tryin' to git back hom from Kentucky!' "Hee hee he, yeah but you got on a train goin the wrong way!" I played the guitar for a little while, and after a few minutes a woman came running out of the house, screaming at the top of her lungs. "You good for nothing bunch of lazy old sacks! Here you are drunk as skunks in front of little Timmy, and now you've got a hobo hanging out in the yard as well! You! Git! Git out of here! Timmy! Git back in the house!"

I continued my trek down towards the highway. The heat was incredibly oppressive, and at times it was difficult to see because there was so much sweat in my eyes. Eventually I made it down to the on-ramp, which turned out to be very low-traffic. Just the same, I stood there for an hour or so before the police pulled up.

"It is illegal to hitchhike in the Great State of North Carolina."

"Wait, even if I'm not on the interstate?"

"It is illegal to hitchhike in the Great State of North Carolina, anywhere."

The cop looked around, as if he were appraising the heat. "Boy, you're gunna die out here." He paused. "You the one they pulled off that train?" I sighed. "Do you ever feel like the world is conspiring against you?" I asked. "No, I carry a gun, that doesn't happen to me." "I'm not sure that a gun would help me right now, actually."

In the end the cop essentially inserted me onto a Grayhound bus (no charge) headed for Charleston.

A Case Study In Why I Don't Like Sleeping On The Ground

When traveling, I'm a strong believer in sleeping on rooftops. Sometimes my friends think that I'm a little fanatical about it, but I sleep much easier knowing that I'm up where nobody is going to notice me. The first night I was in Charleston, I met a nice woman named Ashley who let me stay at her place. The second night I was in Charleston, I decided that I'd sleep outside. It seemed like it would be interesting, since it was so hot that I could sleep in the open with shorts and a tshirt on and still be warm. The architecture there is pretty interesting, and provides a lot of room for discovering strange passages and rooftops. I found my way onto a roof, and then laid down to sleep. Around 3:30am, the mosquitoes woke me up. It felt like I was being eaten alive, but the mosquitoes are really small there and I couldn't see them in the dark. I spent a while trying to figure out whether I was scratching myself out of some psychosomatic response, or whether I was really getting bit repeatedly. Eventually I decided that I couldn't take it anymore, and that I had to move somewhere else. I climbed off the roof and trudged over to Marion Square Park, where there is usually a little bit of a cross breeze.

I didn't like the idea of sleeping on the ground, but it was 4am and I didn't want to spend a lot of time looking around for a mosquito-free roof. I laid down in the park, and slept for 30 minutes before I woke up to the feeling of someone (not very subtly) trying to remove my wallet from the pocket of the shorts that I was wearing. I was sleeping on my stomach, and my immediate unconscious reaction was to whip around with flailing arms and slap this guy in the face. As soon as that had happened, I realized that this guy was much bigger than me, and that perhaps that hadn't been the best course of action. But instead of beating me to a pulp, this guy got really defensive, and started trying to convince me that I should trust him or be thankful of him for not stealing my guitar (because, as he said, he could have). He eventually went off a ways, and I had to go back to sleep with one arm looped through my bag, one arm around my guitar, laying in such a way that the stuff in my pockets was between myself and the ground. "I hate sleeping on the ground," I thought as I dozed back off and slept for another hour. Then the sprinklers came on.

Hanging out by the Atlantic was really nice. I crewed in some sailboat races before getting banned from the local yacht club for "repeatedly inappropriate attire," and swam in the ocean the rest of the time. It was so hot out that the water temperature was 87 degrees! I met some kids on the beach with a hobie-cat that they'd just gotten, and I helped them rig it before we sailed right off the beach, through the breakers, and out into the ocean.

Atlanta Bound

I had a sunburn on my back long after I left Charleston. I could feel it whenever I wore my backpack, but in a way it was a nice reminder of running around on the beach or sailing a hobiecat through the salt seas. I tried riding the train to Atlanta, but Charleston isn't actually a crewchange point. I waited in the CSX yard for two days until a DS train happened to stop for clearance near the west end of the yard. There were no rideable cars, but I was tired of waiting, so I jumped on a suicide 53' with a long porch and hid under the walking grid. The train pulled, and did not stop until we got to... Savannah. The wrong way! I lamented the vagaries of east coast train riding, but decided that it had been a nice ride just the same.

I set off to hitchhike towards Atlanta, and it took me two days.

I'd like to make a color-coded map of the united states where areas are color-coded by "mean time between rides while hitchhiking." I feel like you can tell a lot about a place by how long it takes to catch a ride, and I know from experience that the dark colors of Atlanta would be an accurate reflection. As I got towards Atlanta, the hitchhiking became worse and worse. It's one thing if you don't pick someone up, but pretending to pull over and then driving away when you get your hopes up, or slowing down to emphasize licking an ice cream cone is just fucking mean.

Eventually, I made it. In a lot of ways I was really surprised and amazed by what I'd discovered in the south on the trip thus far. I'd grown up in the south, and maybe I had to leave and come back in order to see what I had been living near for so long. But Atlanta was still the place I ran away from six years ago, and every time I go back I want to run away all over again.

Atlanta

My time spent in Atlanta was pretty strange. I stayed a lot longer than I intended, and being Atlanta, of course, my routine was so devoid of exercise that I had to start running in order to feel good. I'd show up back at my mom's house, panting, thinking "I just ran in a circle..."

I ended up seeing a lot of old friends from highschool. It was strange to discover how radically our lives had diverged. A good number of my friends were married, homeowners, or both. In some ways this has been kind of shocking for me. I remembered when we were all in highschool, and we hated it. We were forced to be there, and I always assumed that when we were finally set free we would do everything we could to strike back. So it was a real surprise when most of my friends went to college or started careers. On the other hand, I've always assumed that friendships are based on similar interest. So it was somewhat surprising that I really enjoyed the company of all these old friends, even though we have virtually nothing in common. In many ways we don't even speak a common language, but it's almost as if we have some kind of connection that transcends similar interest, and in some ways is more powerful. It also allowed me to discover a lot about the lives of people that I would not normally intersect with. All in all, it's a pretty complex situation. For instance, a friend of mine who was very DIY growing up is now really into his government job. He wears a shirt and tie to work every day, and I was kind of wondering about that transition, when he showed me his home made cuff-links based on foreign coins, small bolts, jb-weld, and nutcaps.

I took a trip to DC and spent some time reveling in the belly of the beast, but I realized that it'd been a long summer. I'd felt the enchantment of the Pacific Northwest, discovered how fulfilling it could be to work on a farm in Bloomington, ridden trains through deserts and forests, walked through warm rain without concern, sailed the salt seas of the Atlantic, stood for hours on hopeless on-ramps, watched the fireflies glow like moon-lit glitter over fields of corn, and slept outside on nights so warm that it was enough to lay down on the ground in shorts and close my eyes.

Finally, I set off back across the country to San Francisco.