I love agates. Well, I love all rocks really, but I really love agates, and there’s a million of them right outside in our sand pile. Fire agate, moss agate, fairburn agate, crazy lace agate, thunderegg agate, purple princess sparkle party agate. They all have a story to tell. They’re our oldest ancestors, they’ve seen some things, observed and absorbed all of that vibrance, at our innermost core we’re made of the same exact minerals. We are living breathing rocks. Living breathing elements of the Earth.
Of the stars. And just as the stars can tell you of the ancient past and the distant future, rocks can too.
Take this one for example, what do you see? Could be a buffalo on a hillside, or maybe that’s the cave we’re supposed to retreat to when it’s not safe up here after all of CERN's manmade earthquakes or whatever it’s gonna be, or maybe that yellow streak is, oh yeah it is huh, I think it’s Orion, not the stars though but the real one, the cat-person one, the one I know very well, well would you just look at that.
“Hey Rocksy, whatya got over there?” cuts DJ.
“Oh nothing,” I freeze and tuck away my precious stone,
“Just a silly old rock is all, nothing special really, nothing about Orion or anything, just the same old end of the world stuff, just thinking about all those rocks outside, and inside these walls, I still remember the first day we got here and about lost my shit over all those gorgeous agates.”
Whew, close one, let me just hide this thing in the wall over here real quick. This place has really come a long way since that first day, it was pretty much just a hole back then. It was only DJ and the Official Shaman, the Loudtalker had already left after a month-long groundbreaking ceremony with just the three of them, which meant mainly just the two of them since the Shaman doesn’t seem to do much other than be
the guy with the truck and facebook followers, and of course his official shaman guest appearances.
DJ makes up for it though, that boy can work, and I ain’t never seen him bend a nail he couldn’t drive in anyway. Ain’t hardly any nails in this place though, not a one in the loft, it’s all just wedged and locked into the walls three ways to Sunday.
Back then we were camped outside, I just stayed in my truck, I think it was five of us came rolling in just as the Shaman was about to give up hope, though DJ seemed to be expecting us somehow.
This was just an empty hayfield out in the middle of the rez, there wasn’t even a kitchen yet or anything, just a few tents and Shaman’s RV, which he was cool with being the community space as long as he could complain about it being the community space. Let’s see, it was me and Auntie, Spiff, Mike Longprayer and the Critter Gitter, plus the two of them.
And boy let me tell you, it was a good time.
“Magical,” agreed DJ.
We’d get up with the sun, some of us, well not really get up as much as lie there and let it wash over us from a million miles away across the wide open tangerine plains. And then coffee. Chitter chatter and vivid dream recounts would stir up the tents until someone finally had to get up and pee, and start the water. Coffee, chuns and chill while the rest of them drip into the morning, a solid session to start the day right and where’d DJ go off to? He ain’t already out there working is he?
Fucker.
“Just prepping,” he’d shout.
Which meant smoking a cigarette and thinking about it, a puff of grounding energy to get the wheels turning, and he’d be mad if you came along and solved it for him or else he’d have to hurry up and smoke one before he forgot to. The clay pile was what had come out of the hole, a bunch of rock hard chunks but zero rocks, blah, so we had to shovel it through a screen to filter out the finer bits of glue for our glorious sand pile, I of course stashed away any agate I could, nearly lost a finger in the wheelbarrow while DJ was mixing, threatened that next time he wouldn’t miss.
“And I won’t,” he promised from atop the wall, “I’m half convinced a little flesh and blood’s the only thing holding this thing together.”
*******
“I just gotta figure this next one out then I’ll be ready to start,” he warned. “Just gotta smoke a cigarette and think about it.
Each day is like its own little puzzle out here, each ring of bags with its own unique set of challenges and calculations to overcome in order to shepherd this thing together in a good way. Doors or windows or loft beams or peepholes to the gate, you gotta get it all nestled in just right so it doesn’t get unraveled and come crashing down on its unaware occupants.
It’s kinda like making up a story, with a second story somewhere in the works, and really having no idea how it’s all going to come together in the end but having enough faith in your own sails that you’re pretty sure you can get there, and however today works out you just have to trust that tomorrow you can figure it out from there. I consider tomorrow, sure, I consider a vague concept of the possible outcome too, but I can’t let it consume me or I’ll never get through today’s row, and I’m not really in charge of how it turns out anyway, this is a cooperative art project that I’m merely nudging in the right direction, simply the shepherd as the Loudtalker would say.
It takes a lot of concerted effort to fill just one of these bags, preferably from a lot more people than just me, but even on days I’m all alone I still gotta keep plugging away. First the dirt had to get out of the hole, and we mighta chosen the hardest hill in all of South Dakota, then you gotta screen it, scoop it, mix it, by hand of course because our foreman is a real hardass, don’t look at me, I’m just the shepherd. A chain of coffee cans pump it into position, I knew there was a reason we drank all that stuff, and every little hand along the way is crucial to making it all happen. And that’s just one bag.
Like the sand particles inside each one, zillions of them, tiny jigsaw shards that we tamp into a solid setting, each
seemingly minuscule but undeniable that they are the building blocks of our building blocks. One self-conscious grain could argue its own inconsequentiality when the pressure begins to feel too much, but its quite frivolous to suggest that Rocksy could just start plucking agates without poking holes in the plot.
So grain by grain we fill bag by bag to ring each row, eventually navigating every obstacle we come across as the sheer gravity of the semi-intelligent design somehow holds itself together, looking back at rows of bags of memories of who was here to shape that day, and a much more meaningful recollection of solo performances than it had been the first time around. It’s quite an incredible sensation to sit atop such a magnificent co-creation, or to take it all in from a distant dimension, I would imagine, it’s pretty much just a hole right now.
But it has the potential to be so much more, it’s already taking on a whole life of its own as its unbridled individuality sparkles in the hundred degree sunshine, and soon enough the snowball will continue as more of these one-of-a-kind collages compose the hillside, community gardens and cob pizza ovens and a bustling vitality that bloomed from that single seed of sand. It’s happening with or without any of the particular participants, myself included, which pretty much leaves it up to you guys whether you wanna sit around and bullshit all day or take on an active role in a book I might write if we ever finish this thing.”
*******
I don’t know who the hell he’s out there mumbling to but the rest of us were pretty much ready to get to it. We always started the day with a four direction song and a prayer, and hopefully it wasn’t Mike doing it or we’d never get started, the whole crew was gathered together into a good headspace and an intention set for the day’s vibe.
When you stack the bags of sand and clay they’re twice as fat as they will be once you’re done tamping them into bricks,
machine minds try to engineer a contraption to roll out an assembled line but it’s actually each one of those tiny tamps that performs the magic. The jagged puzzle pieces wiggle into place and the electrostatic energy of each little jiggle aligns the microscopic clay platelets into a scale-like epoxy that holds together the substance of the stars. So it’s kinda important to think happy thoughts and even more important to speak them when so much energy is going into building a house made out of ohm.
Soon enough we’d be eating together as the sky began its four hour descent, we could always count on someone slacking out early to graciously prepare dinner, then all we had to do was cut-up and entertain ourselves for hours on end.
“Hey everyone, I graciously prepared dinner,” offered Spiff.
“What a gracious surprise,” I said with a nod to the lens.
“Who wants to grace us with a blessing?” DJ asked as three of us rushed out an unintelligible “Not Mike!”
CG would be off searching for rattlesnakes, Spiff and the Shaman rattling on about their own he said she said storyline, me and Mike telling two different stories at the same time, Auntie cracking up at all of it and DJ would be, wait a minute, is he out there fucking working again?
“You’re tuning into DJ’s sunset session, featuring the laid-back earthtones of such groundbreaking pioneers as the Rollaway Stones, the Dirty Projections and the Grateful Bread.
It really is the best time to work off a day’s hard labor, nice and cool and a red velvet view that never ends.”
I still couldn’t get over him wearing out work pants, like non-corduroy work pants, men’s work pants.
“I think I’ve finally decided to grow out of my teenage girl phase and put on my big boy pants,” he said.
“I did not ever say that,” he says.
So I say “Um, I’m pretty sure you did.”
“Never, look at me right now, I’m presently still stuck in them.”
“I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.”
And that was that, another one for his books, we’d lie around in our tents singing each other to sleep until it all faded into the next episode, and tomorrow was a big one with a new crew member joining the squad.
*******
“So I don’t get it, can I still get in on this or what?” asks the narrator.
“I don’t care,” I say, “It’s not my universe.”
“No, I mean, where are we right now? Caught up in some future flashback that I wasn’t even a part of yet, so how can I be here at all?”
“I’m sitting across the room from you dummy,” I say, curious how everyone thinks I’m the nut, “Right here in the current day EarthHouse 55.”
“So then how am I stuck in here? It felt like just yesterday I was on another plane of existence and now I’m reduced to this 3D model of sandcastle material.”
“Are you talking about a dream or a rock or something?”
“Maybe, I don’t know, it’s hard to wrap my head around from inside this experience, within this moment in time, but what will happen to me when my page of the story is over and I’m still three feet deep in it?”
“Well,” I puzzled, “Where were you at before you were somewhere?”
“I can’t remember. Nowhere? Anywhere? Everywhere?”
“Good,” I congratulated, “So you’ll probably just go back there with another one of these books under your belt. I’m sure he’ll write a sequel for you to stretch yourself back into soon, and all that really matters is this present you’ve been given of getting to be here right now with us.”
“Good one,” says DJ.
“And you,” our narrator barks, “You can just hush your little sparkle party into next week. I know this is your fault somehow, mister man with the answers and never needs anything and somehow always has a solution for it all. And your pants look dumb, though they do act as an adequate
tether of timeline, hand-stitched flares of alligator green clash with every prepubescent fashion trend since the nineties, which I’m sure is where the thrifty manage to find such a dumb color, what is that, toasted mauve?”
“Purple aventurine I’d say,” I say, “I’d say that’s a stone that even explains some of his whole inner peace thing.”
“It was definitely a couple years worth of pants ago when I scooped you up last, which probably only means one pair, vertical red knee patches on what mighta been about the same color green as those dumb looking flares.”
“That was just after I got back from hitching out west, huh?” confirms DJ. “Had time to type up that last book and started feeling the thing. It was just as virus lockdowns had started up and I knew I was a frontline worker, not a sit around and waiter, and homeless people were exempt from stay-at-home mandates, so I was thinking to head to North Dakota where Wendy had been helping the rez up there ever since camp. Figured she could use help with whatever good deeds she was undoubtedly up to, and next thing I happen to hit up this guy and he’s headed to Minnesota to meet up with his girlfriend, and then Wyoming or something way out there like that, pretty much right through Wendy’s yard, and of course they want to see each other too, sounds like a plan.”
A plan, good one, we all know how those tend to work out.
It’s not like there’s some grand mechanic of the cosmos or anything, tinkering and twisting and putting it back together, except you know it’s a rez car with duct tape and a few extra nuts, and I think I mighta left my wrench in here somewhere.
“And then in the three days it took us to synchronize watches the world exploded.”
*******
Nine minutes of silence rang out.
Mourning poured through the night.
Smoke clouded a city that couldn’t breathe.
The Earth stood still as her babies stood up.
*******
“So I guess it’s no coincidence we’re driving through Minneapolis while it’s on fire, huh?”
“Never is,” replied DJ.
Ever unable to pry into his inner workings I still know the substance of his contemplation. He doesn’t choose where he goes, not really, might launch his origami airplane into the jetstream but from there all he can do is lean it away from the brambles. He was thinking to go help Wendy help the people, probably feeding them during a global everything shortage, the last stop of a broken supply chain where even in good times they are a forgotten population. He’s a frontline guy, a frontline chef at that, he follows his own aroma to wherever he can best serve, wherever the people need to be showered with love and decadence and shown that we’re still here, plus the rez already had the best of the best serving them. An hour out from town he piped up his next improvised recipe for disaster relief.
“Thinking maybe this is where I’m meant to be working, probably the most in need at the moment, and not lost on me that we just so happen to be here right now during this. We’ll see how it goes, you know how it is, just prepping you that there’s a chance I end up hopping out and posting up here for a while, especially if we happen to find a tentful of hippies dishing out some gourmet shit or something.”
I already knew this of course, he’s about as predictable as the rest of his labyrinthian hallucination. I’d have been much more surprised, and likely disappointed, if he’d have elected instead to stand in solidarity from a more secure location.
Must be nice to rely on a carfree lifestyle to relieve yourself of indecision and leave it up to a dance with the stars.
*******
-Untraceable suspect charged with the following crimes in accordance with nature-
*Conspiracy to be in the know with known assailants of stalemates and foreign imports of uncivilized disobedients
*Failure to comply with the third degree of authorized threats while aggravating a state mandated assault
*Felony littering for feeding street trash and refusing disservice to the lowering of class divisions
-Last seen wearing a tattered fedora and mix-matched pants, burnt chartreuse maybe-
*******
We pull into town and head straight to the burned out Target, figured ground zero was our best shot at dropping my dead weight and at least a fine place to get into some good old fashioned nonviolence. Charbroiled burger joints and blown down buildings surround the third precinct in shambles, long abandoned by the run-off of villains, a city block destroyed but not near a fraction of the murder and mayhem perpetrated on these same streets in the name of crime prevention.
“Let’s park back there somewhere,” my passenger seated driver suggests. A crowd of people gathered around a stage of passionate eloquence, tables of non-perishables dispersed into the crowd, and damn it if he’s not done it again as we climb out of the car and stumble into a tentful of hippies dishing out some gourmet shit or something. And they had a real chef, no offense, “None taken,” we’re talking vegan curry, homemade bread and an assortment of dank sandwich baggies free for the taking. And in case we hadn’t smelled them from a mile away, DJ’s hippie-dar immediately tuned into the dreads and tiedye and is that a Wookiefoot tapestry?
“What’s up fam?” he introduced as he approached his familiars.
“Hey brother, you hungry?” they invited him in.
“Nah, well yeah, but I really just wanted to see if ya’ll need help, I’m sort of a traveling protest chef and it seems like you folks might be my people.”
“Hell yeah, for sure my dude, we’ve been staying up all night making all this stuff, we could definitely use a hand.”
“Word. But also my ride is just passing through town, so I would need a place to stay too.”
“We gotcha bro, you can crash on my floor if that works, that’s where we’re doing all the cooking anyway.”
“Yep, I’m a floor person alright. We’re gonna go get into some nonviolence for a few hours and then swing by your place.”
How in the hell does he do it? How do we pull into the one parking space in all of Minneapolis that’s crawling with crusties? I mean, really, a literal tentful of gourmet hippies?
And a traveling protest chef, is that even a thing? But he damn sure can cook, and he managed to reserve accommodations with total strangers that don’t seem any more questionable than him, and I just so happen to have a cooler full of catfish I can donate for jambalaya, and I think I’m starting to see how he always manages to eat so well without money.
The fractured bullseye may have been where the crumbs lay piled, but the scene of the start of it was across town at George Floyd Square, a cordoned-off corner of the broken city.
A crying out for justice laid in memorial of delicate color, flowers filled each edge of walkway, vigilante art abounded from every available vertical surface, tokens of comisery and hope connected the dots as articulate voices pelted the crowded enraptment, far-traveled words of support amid a local community of incredibly well-spoke poets. I dumpstered some cardboard for my own defundment of certain municipal services as we settled into the undispersed social commentary.
*******
www.facebook.com/djrankin
June 3, 2020
Friends and relatives, to all those who have been unsure of how to feel or what to believe concerning the events in Minneapolis and around the globe, I am here in Minneapolis right now and would like to share what I have witnessed
firsthand. The people who live in these communities are peaceful, the love pouring into the streets is overwhelming, but they are in mourning. Morning for George Floyd, morning for the four hundred before him, mourning for centuries of struggling to survive a system built on the oppression of their communities. But they didn’t burn their own neighborhoods, that’s ridiculous, although they are coming together in a beautiful way to make sure that no one is left without food or family.
But more important than finding who is responsible for the vandalism, and more important than dehumanizing the voice of a movement with blanket labels of violent protest, perhaps we should look closely at the violence we are so quick to condemn.
Civil disobedience, is not violence. Social unrest, is not violence. Destruction of property - is not violence.
Shooting plastic coated bullets at unarmed citizens, is violence. Using chemical agents on a population in mourning, is violence. An angry mob of armored police storming through neighborhoods as they shoot at people on their own front porches, is violence. Spraying mace into the eyes of an eight year old girl from two feet away, is violence. A culture built to believe that a twenty year war is somehow the solution to peace on Earth, that assault rifles and riot gear are the key to deescalating the tensions of a system built by and for racial inequality, years of repeated acts of police brutality and murder, by repeat offenders with rap sheets of acquittals, and a society unwilling to address the systemic changes necessary to provide each and every citizen with these freedoms worth killing for - is violence.
I know that it all seems too big an issue to reform, but it is happening, with or without you, now is not the time to hide behind the few instigators as an excuse not to address the fundamental issues with our society that have driven an unheard population to use the only voice that seems to get our attention. Now is the time to use our privilege to dismantle our privilege, it is not enough to simply not be racist, if you are not
anti-racist then you are a part of the perpetuation of the problem.
I know that these are difficult conversations to have, to address a privilege that is so ingrained into every facet of life that you’ve simply never considered its existence, a privilege to choose when and where we acknowledge the effects of racism in our communities, which is a privilege that people of color have never known.
But these are the most important conversations to be had and we are the ones who have to have them. This is not some other person’s problem that they have to figure out on their own, white privilege must be torn down by those who hold the privilege to be heard. To do this we must first acknowledge that privilege. We must genuinely want to understand how deeply embedded it is into everything we have ever known about the world. We have inherited an existence built on white supremacy, and it is our duty as human beings to learn to listen as we amplify the voices of those sentenced to a life in the margins.
Don’t look at the work ahead as a punishment for a crime you didn’t commit, you should be honored to be a part of the generation who stood up and said enough is enough, it should be your privilege.
I’ve been up here for a couple of days and will be for the foreseeable future, I’ve linked up with High Hopes Free Kitchen and today we fed a thousand people some healthy gourmet food, you know how I do. We’re set up at the Target, if you know anyone who needs food please send them our way, and I’d love to see any Water Protectors who are in the area.
And frybread this weekend!
*******
‘“So then he dropped me off with a hug and a cooler of fish,” I said as I filled another sandbag, “Warmly welcomed into my new crew, I passed along my gift of Folgers and was assured there wasn’t a strict showering policy. ‘Oh, and I love your pants,’ she said, one of my four new roommates, a tight
click of comrades from the Harmony Park scene, as quick to take in a stray as I was to stray.
Everything had gone down in their own backyard, they knew they had to jump up and do something quick, joined in directly with the action but also saw a need for hot food and warm salutations, so they pooled their spare change and put it to use. Up late every night roasting chicken sandwich salads, half baked and rolling in the dough, sauces from scratch and curry to taste, and it all tasted good. Prepped by five, nap til eight, coffee, then posted back up for another day of giving away the now.”
“You somehow always manage to find your way to the food,” pointed Rocksy from the claymation station.
“It’s a gift,” I conceded, “It’s a good way to make a lot of quick friends too. Like this one cat who was dropping the mic at the stage next door, we hit it off as he started to realize that it wasn’t my first rodeo, others would get in there but it was mainly him spreading the good word and he had a few pointy suggestions to share.
His biggest common sense amendment was a ‘Cuffs-On’
policy, simply put it would mean that once a suspect was detained in handcuffs it would then become illegal to use deadly force to subdue them further. Sounds right to me. And to any sane follower of legal letters. Mighta made him think twice as his knee pinned the helpless throat to the ground and cut off all airflow for over nine minutes, while he was already on the ground in handcuffs.
Another good one was stricter guidelines on community policing, most of the cops in the city don’t live in the city, who would dare try to raise their kids in such a crime-filled ghetto?
The iconic neighborhood policeman living on the same block knows little Timmy, he watched him grow into Mr Timothy, he has a vested interest in the well-being of his community and doesn’t rush to judgement or raise the guillotine over every minuscule allegement.
George Floyd was killed for passing a fake twenty, a commonplace occurrence in that very Cup Foods, something the owner doesn’t condone but doesn’t condemn with a call to
the firing squad, only because a new kid was behind the register was it ever reported. Poor kid. Maybe not completely innocent but far from a violent act, by all accounts a loving man and vibrant component of the community where his only alleged act was defying the capitalist power structure. Guess I’m guilty as charged too.”
*******
“Of course you’re guilty, just look at you,” teased Rocksy.
“Doesn’t take a geologist to know you’re up to something. You say there was a pretty good native presence up there?”
“Some, yeah. They have their own neighborhood with a tribal community center and all that, the more radical ones spent the nights protecting their buildings from vandalism but we’d still see them getting involved around the city too. One day an AIM crew of Anishinaabe came out to pray and sing and dance, so of course I had a big long bundle of Sun Dance sage from here and lit it up, circled the crowd and singers four times in a most humble and sacred manner.”
“Save it.”
“But for real tho, I even heard the MC assuring innocent bystanders that it was just a smudge of sage, nothing illegally intoxicating to see here, except for native spirituality. I don’t know any Anishinaabe songs but I do know the AIM song, felt good to reconnect in that way and recharge myself a bit.
Got to talk to the singers afterwards and shared some love from down here, met a handful of local Lakotas too, always cool to surprise a relative with stories from back home. Then one of my new pals had a mental health issue so an ambulance showed up to help, but not until four assault rifles wielded by National Guard piled out of the bus and posted up in four directions, but at least they did it in a sacred manner.”
“Haha, and here you are agitating the outside and everything.”
“Yep,” I confessed, “Just like back at camp, why are you here meddling from some other state unaffected by worldwide oppression, you don’t have a dog in this fight like our private
security do, so just go home.” I finished tamping the threshold as I assumed the disposition for the obligatory celebration cigarette. “It’s the same old narrative they’ve always tried to push, ever since the Freedom Riders were crossing state lines to stand up for their borderless brethren back when civil rights weren’t just for the cool kids. These people ain’t from around here and we don’t need to let them intrude on our down home politicking,” I said,’ DJ says from his perch in the now cobbed doorway.
“It’s the same shit they’re doing today in Cop City,” adds the narrator. “Except they’re upping the game even more with next level charges for simply holding space in a space they don’t hold title to. Domestic Terrorism charges, no joke, for everyone arrested no matter what the lack of evidence they have that links them to any of the alleged disobedience. In fact, it seems that most of those arrested were nowhere near the alleged crime scenes and were instead picked up at peaceful gatherings, even a free outdoor music festival, with the only evidence of involvement being mud on their shoes, at an outdoor gathering in a muddy field.
Domestic terrorism, up to thirty years in prison, maybe eighteen months in jail waiting on a day in court. No way the charges will ever stick, but they do accomplish getting another movement member off the streets while ostracizing them from whatever involvement with the mainstream world they still hang onto, and it makes it way riskier for new folks to join the momentum, all while draining resources from the opposition at $350,000 bail per dirty person.”
“Well I guess I’m fucked then, huh?” laughs DJ.
“No doubt, but you blend in so well they’ll probably never find your filthy ass. It’s also about propping up that same old news story, they’ve been releasing local residents when they get detained and giving DT charges to all out-of-staters, that way the press can report an organized crime of purely outside agitators when Atlanta has been outspokenly against this thing since the beginning, but Joe Blow Proudman from his lazyboy gets a different picture in picture and it only solidifies his stance on the need for a militarized police state. Ain’t no damn
foreign terrorists gonna try to hug trees on my watch, which is the most convoluted narrative on this page as nearly half of the recruits for Cop City training are from out of state, and they’ve also made an agreement with the Israeli military to train their soldiers to fight Palestinian resistance as they prepare for people around the world to stand up in solidarity.”
*******
“Looks like it might be time to choose sides of history, either you’re a dirtperson or you’re fighting against the Earth herself,” I muse silently, which is unordinary considering my incessant stream of filterless babble.
Being a member of this earthhouse project has been such a huge opportunity to be working towards the building of a new way to live, an alternative to a broken down system that we have to overcome before we can ever convince anyone that another way is even possible, a positive manifestation of fresh energy instead of the tired old fighting against the imperial war machine. But then there’s the whole Cop City thing, I may not want to fight broken politics anymore, but can I just sit by as they build the infrastructure to decimate any chance we’ll have of rising up together to implement this brave new world?
“But I imagine it’s a lot like back at camp,” DJ butts in as if he already knows what I’m thinking somehow. “We might have been battling DAPL, but the real victory was what we all experienced in camp, the selfless community that flourished, a massive sharing of ideas and resources, spiritual uprising and a huge step towards birthing that utopian dream. Hell, it brought all of us here, didn’t it?”
“I might be invested in your free world scheme more than your pretend pockets,” estimates the narrator, “But that ain’t stopping me from giving everything I have to tearing down the rest of it. I can pretty much sum my offensive maneuvers up in four words.”
“Live, laugh, love, lizards?” pokes DJ.
“Lick a rock daily.” I decree.
The narrator patiently waits for the room to run through their display of infinite jest before revealing his own emphatic enunciation, “Defund, disarm, dismantle, dismember.”
“Eeeyah!” DJ hoops. “But then you’ll have to worry about the next logical repercussion.”
“Sleeveless shirts?” I guess.
“Nope, felony littering charges.”
“Oh yeah, huh.”
“No, for real, you heard about this at all?” he rhetorically inquises as the rest of us are still caught up on the cutoff date.
“Sounds like a joke but that’s what they’ve been doing back in Asheville to quell mutual aid movements, people that have been posting up to feed the unsheltered community in a city that projects progressiveness but is owned by tourism elites.
They’ve been invoking a law meant to penalize toxic wasters to felonize samaritans while banning them from public parks, for feeding fellow human beings caught up in a housing crisis brought on by the same mechanisms of greed.”
“No shit,” processes the narrator, “Fuck man, and that’s just what you were doing in Minneapolis too, damn, domestic terror and felony litterer, and somehow those pants are still your most egregious offense.”
“Alright, alright,” I intercede in all seriousness, “Leave the poor boy alone, he’s only got like four possessions so we don’t have to be constantly ripping him a new one, besides, looks like they’ll fall apart on their own soon anyway. But I do remember discussing humanitarian byproducts somewhere back in the deja voodoo that you do so well. We mighta been something like two rows above the steps by then, talking about single-use plastics and latex gloves floating around for this decade’s plague of the century, and DJ said something like ‘It was the same back in Minneapolis too, all those ziploks for every sandwich to-go and throwaway bowls for soup, at least the hippies were clued-in enough to refuse styrofoam.’”
“Or in Kentucky,” our faithless narrator chimes, “Used more polystyrene there than in the last five years, but of course we were eating seven meals a day.”
“We sure ate damn good though, didn’t we?” I say. “But I guess as long as you run around with DJ that’s pretty much a given, I think we were munching on a whole case of plantains he plucked from the universe when he started talking about something or other.”
*******
“They’re pretty much nature’s banana,” he said with a straight-faced smirk that betrayed nothing. His subtle brand of sarcasm often leaves one wondering if his entire life’s the joke he lets on to be. You either get it or you don’t, and he seems to be more than comfortable being the only one in the room who does. Likely somewhere in ambiguity, a layered riddle within itself meant to question any answer conceived, or perhaps yet another string of nonsense words whose real purpose won’t be revealed until the reader has reached the next milestone of their own internal unraveling. But probably just another rant on monocrops so I find it better not to even ask.
“And there was a whole pallet of them, was all I could do to only take one case. I try to stick with what I know we can eat, but also aware that most of them are just gonna sit there and spoil in the sunny parking lot. It’s hit or miss what they drop off down there at the donation spot, most often dairy a day past its prime with a shorter lifespan than midsummer roadkill, you just gotta dig in and pull out the least freshless and hope for the best.
Nice and all to have a magic pallet garden that randomly restocks by the grace of God, but it’s also backstocked by a treaty of knowledge with a rich history of providing rotten commodities to the natives of our homeland. A redwashed philanthropy as mass produce overstock demands a quick reduction of taxable supply chains, why don’t we just drop it off in the POW camps, the world will applaud our generous nature and we can leave a written-off culture to clean up their own mess. A transparent motive once you learn to see through the veil, but also a better option for everyone involved than contributing to a more blatant flavor of food waste, and for
once you’ll never hear me complain as I frequently feast on the outskirts of colonization.
That actually kinda segues back to the backstory, as much as my rants ever do anyway. A pallet of plantains would have kept our free kitchen in business but they were probably rotting in a parking lot somewhere, and we were out of the disposable paper products everyone insists on trading for food, so it was about time for my next whirlwind dumpster tour across the country. Just one quick layover until my connecting flight arrived.
Next thing I knew I found myself outside of town at a hemp farm startup, less farm and more startup, I really gotta watch what I’m smoking. They were doing some pretty rad stuff, had big plans to anyway, and I’m one to appreciate the grand schemer, but I also try to keep at least one foot on the ground. Aquaponic systems with fish and worms and worm poop and collecting urine and organite experiments and is this how crazy I sound most of the time?
I was with it, in theory anyway. I may have guessed it wasn’t my long-term calling but I’ve long-learned my lesson of being fully present wherever the creator’s chosen to put me, otherwise I might find myself on indefinite standby. I rocked out a few projects and got a chance to share some spiritual stuff with folks that were more than ready to hear it. I never take lightly any opportunity to sit around the fire and connect in that most sacred way, and although I didn’t know then what I do now or what I might know the next time, I still knew enough to sprinkle my own gratitude into the flame as I live a reality most can only dream of.