Adventures on the road

Hello all, its Alex coming in with some updates and musings. Me and jim have been is Santa Cruz since Monday and it has been an interesting experience. Santa Cruz seems to be a meca of sorts for traveling dreaded youth. There are many young adults and teenagers here playing music on the streets, smoking grass and asking for change. They are all mostly white folks who for one reason or another became or chose to become vagrants traveling around America and eventually ending up in this place. Of these groups of vagabound white youth we met up with a very familiar troupe with was our reason for coming here.

Grex has been in this city for two weeks and some of them seem to have developed a love affair with this place. During this time of year Santa Cruz is the perfect place to be a homeless youth. There are many others like you, its hot and dry enough to sleep outside wherever you want with no shelter, which is the housing situation that most of these travelers opt for. There are plenty of large corperate stores that seem to be looted on a regular basis for food and alcohol and the dumpsters are plentiful with food, so with free food and shelter the cost of living here can be very low. Out of the four nights we have been here me and jim stayed with an amazing couch surfer for two of those nights. She was a college student at UC santa cruz and her and her peers where very kind and intelligent people. It was interesting seeing two faces of youth in this city, hanging out on the street with street kids during the day and then spending the nights with college students. The other two nights we where out slept under the stars with grex and other traveling youth. It is a very comfortable life style with little concerns, no job no worries about material goods.

I cannot avoid the feeling however that I am playing homeless. The reality of my financial situation gives me the choice to live much more conventionally but for some reason enjoying the life style and comradeship of vagrancy seems more appealing then staying in motel rooms and eating out. It makes me wonder how many of the other traveling youth out here are making the choice to live this way or if they where put into a situation that dictated this life style. My guess would be that most have chosen it, and that does not seem to be an absurd choice. Once one has abandoned any care for social norms of behavior and material comfort the easy lifestyle of homelessness in the bay area becomes very attractive, especially since there are hundreds of like minded youth making the same decision providing a whole community to become apart of. This kind of thing would just not as comfortable on the east coast, given the reality of constant mosquitoes attacking you. After two nights of sleeping outside here I have not had a single bug bite or seen a single mosquito. Once the entirety of the outdoors becomes a place where you can comfortably sleep I suppose it becomes easy to forget about a bed and a roof over your head.

Soon we are heading to Oakland to volunteer for a period of time with the coordinators of the Tax and Regulate marijuana movement. Don't know where we are going to stay yet but hopefully my contact in that movement can find us a free place to crash while we are volunteering. I have been in touch with the managers of the petition as well and things look all lined up for me and jim to be working on getting signatures for the ballot by the end of the month. Its pretty exciting to see this all coming together and I cannot wait to start getting a good feel an the organization of the movement and see where I can fit into it. I have gotten to know the national groups pretty well in my time in the movement (MPP and NORML) but have not really had any interaction yet with the Oaksterdam folks and Richard Lee's camp of activists. I hope things go well and they are very happy to have someone with good experience from the East coast coming in to help them out, so we will see how things go.

Back on burning man. I know that my last post on the topic was very confused and drifted from place to place. I was still adjusting to reality again and digesting the experience that I had just had. I will attempt to describe things section by section so that they are somewhat more coherent.

The Bars: At burning man you are constantly having alcohol shoved in your face. Every 20 to 30 feet on every major road there are people behind a bar waving you down to have a drink. Most bars are attached to a camp which has a certain theme, and the bar is always in line with the theme of the camp. For example there as a party naked bar, where if you got naked they have you a Hawaiian style necklace. There was a whiskey and whores bar where to take a shot of whiskey you had to spin a wheel that you tell you to hump a stranger, kiss a bartender, dance on a strip pole or simular activity. People at bars want you to drink, and often demand that you do so. Strangely enough, even in this high alcohol environment everyone maintains their composure. At burning man there is a strong social stigma against incompetence, which includes a stigma against getting inebriated to the point that you loose your composure. Out of every festival or large gathering I have been to people have had themselves the most together at burning man by far, which is very impressive given the aggressiveness that alcohol is poured down your mouth. The bars are also a place where rapid fire socialization happens. You show up to a bar and start interacting with strangers very quickly, often in unusual ways. As with everywhere else in burning man people generally make a presumption of friendship and are very open and real with you, but more on that latter. The bars also tend to have live DJ's or bands playing at them, some of them good some of them not. This is not a constant thing but it is cool to see dozens of what would be local musicians playing in a place where you will never go. The bars are a critical part of the forced socialization that goes on in burning man, but represent a gear in a much larger machine.

I will cover something else in my next post, since I don't want to drag you all through several paragraphs of this stuff.

Also, I feel I should note a very odd experience I had the day after burning man. While I was driving heather to the SF air port we drove by, and almost over, what was almost certainly a dead body. It was very shocking to see someone lying between two lanes of rapid highway traffic as cars swerved around it. I had up to that point never seen death in that context, in the moment of event of death still occurring, there where no emergency service vehicles near by at all. We did the only thing we could do and called emergency services and let them know that there was a body on the road and where. My reaction to the experience was quite stark, I did not really know how or what to feel beyond pure surprise. I guess these things happen every day and we just played a small part in the ending of someones life by calling emergency services, but beyond that my emotional reaction to the experience is somewhat dissociated. I would think that I would have more direct sympathy for this body but I don't really have any idea who this person was or how their life ended. It is however somewhat haunting to look at a body as a object rather then a individual, but overall I have not been plagued by negativity around the event, its something that simply happened and that's it.


Well, if you read the whole post good for you, your actually interested in our experiences out here. Keep posted as the next few days with the Oaksterdamn folks should be very interesting and I will have some experiences to relate to you all. Keep living good out there wherever you are.