Hometowneostasis

It's every bit as fun as I'd hoped it to be, coming back to St. Louis for a month. It's just not for the reasons I had anticipated. As I type here, on a PC in the first floor of CAMP, I am shaking, under-slept and over-loved. The familiarity of this town so devastated my new social habits that I've learned new ways of being satisfied with the words I speak to myself and the little things that keep me alive. Like water. Water in St. Louis. And I read the news. And hide in spaces that seem far away because of their abandoned qualities.
Aimless wanderings, cold weather, and no appetite. It feels just right.

When do I leave?

It's been a minute since I've taken the time at a computer to write about my travels. So I'm all backed up on scattered information.

We left Venutra, heading south to LA on a tip about a manifest train we could catch out of the Van Nueys yard. We must've missed it cause it's apparently a reliable daily train, but we got all caught up in hanging out with meth and crack heads with guns who were camped out right by our catch-out spot. No, no, we didn't actually WANT to hang out with the tweekers, we just were asking for information about passing trains when we realized it was 10:30 am (little too late).

We hung around LA til about 3:30 when we decided to hitch 101 N towards San Francisco. It took us about 2 hours of playing "what celebrity is driving that car?!" when we got picked up in a Mustang convertible by our Armenian Cokehead, Tigran. Everyone in LA is on speed, I think. It's pretty obnoxious. Regardless, Tigran took us to dinner and then left us to camp out in Oxnard, where we found probably our weirdest spot yet, a huge plain of dirt. Construction site. And we didn't make it back to San Francisco the next day, though we did meet more tweekers. No, it took us three days to get to SF but it was worth the effort.

We had our last ride (our best ride ever! Logan, who loved Third Eye Blind) drop us at 5lowershop so that Leanne good say her good-byes before meeting Hannah in the East Bay to hitch to STL.

And so it was..
I spent a bit of time in the East Bay with my friend Geoff. Geoff took me to the Albany landfill, which has been squatted consistently for years now. It's some sort of post-apocalyptic post-dump, where people have taken it upon themselves to build art from the remaining steel and trash.


As for now I'm secretly back in St. Louis until the secret is over. You can find me singing with Celia's Yuletide Express.

Power Squat at the Albany Landfill


Trash Castle at the Landfill

The Vegas Adventure

We hitched from San Francisco to Ventura in two days. We got a few rides from women, one a mother and one a psychic, and the rest were men of different, casual occupations. Our night on the road was spent in a field about 50 yards off from a truck stop parking lot. We were surrounded by trees and the ground was soft. The late night employee offered us free showers and hot dogs but we opted for coffees to save for the morning.

Once in Ventura, we got all cleaned up. We sat around my sisters house and watched movies and "I Love New York" on VH1 (for which we're having a "new episode" party tonight, nachos and champagne, the whole house). That's about it.

SO WE WENT TO VEGAS!!!!!!!!

Vegas is the toxic shit on the bottom of my shoe.

Let's see. My aunt Laura's wedding to Mr. Ken Aydelott was fun and great. I love ceremonies and rituals that reinforce love. We saw David Spade after the wedding, he was in a golf cart at the country club. Leanne's first celebrity sighting! Ha.......

But really, Vegas is a city that only humans could survive in. There is no sustainable anything on that little island of neon, and you can't get a bight to eat for under $10. Luckily we picked up some beers before we got to the strip to keep us rightfully buzzed (when I was sober in Vegas I wanted to cry constantly). But even so, CASINOS ARE THE WORST POSSIBLE PLACE TO HAVE A HANGOVER, AND EVERY HOTEL IS A GODDAMN CASINO. I almost puked all over my $12 omelett. What is more, Vegas is so densely populated with tourists that I couldn't make it 10 feet without high-fiving some college bro. So I wore my sunglasses and kept my head down so all that I had to deal with was "WHATS THE MATTER? YOURE IN VEGAS!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" which was just ridiculous enough to be tolerable in it's irony. Thanks to Grandma for providing my entire family with everything, by the way.

We're back in Ventura now, about to head back north.

Le Foto

My sister, Mz Alison Virginia Knox, came to the bay to document a lil of our day-to-day. She's a photographer, so it goes. Here's a few of my favorite pictures she took, drastically resized, and a few very slightly altered by myself (probably a major offense, but for the sake of resizing I felt it helpful... errrr... uh... ok).

Goodbye burn-outs, surfers, hydrogen punks...

Well, well, well. I made it into November with my heart still stuck in October. I loved San Francisco.


Anyway, so about a week and a half ago, Leanne and I decided to take a vacation from the industrial waste dump and ride on down to Santa Cruz. Oh, Santa Cruz, you treat us well, so long as we never have to consider paying rent in your general area. We spent our first night in the redwood forest surrounding the UCSC campus, checking out all the little squats built throughout the location and clumsily hopping the ten-foot fence into the dining hall come night time. I actually broke the fence while climbing over it, causing a loud "CRACK," which generated lots of head turns and stares from the college folk. I waved and rolled over and dropped the ten feet, and ran into the dining hall, promptly taking off my sweater and disappearing into a sea of buffet-goers. It was a delicious meal filled with spinach and the now dreaded tofu. My belly is apparently completely over digesting the bean curd.

So we wake and make breakfast in the student lounge. Our friend Konstantin tells us of a train we can hop that will take us to a beach eight miles north. It comes through three days a week around noon, usually rolling at a walking pace. Well it was a running pace on this beautiful Friday afternoon, and I felt it to be a little too fast for my on-the-fly abilities. Four kids caught it and we decided to meet them up the coast via hitching the 1. So we got there in a half-hour, thanks to a woman testing her new power-steering fluid and needing a reason to drive around (like picking up hitch-hikers, you see). The beach was fabulous, some kid played fiddle, I played with my video camera, and the rest tried to swim naked. I thought that was absolutely ridiculous because I dislike swimming in cold water and the Pacific, these days, ain't warm.

Waiting for the train


We hitched back to town only to hitch four miles north again come nightfall for a post-apocalyptic themed guerrilla theater showing down on the beach. They projected Twilight Zones and animations on the cliff while we all shivered in our sleeping bags around the burn-barrells. about 15 of us camped out on the sand, Leanne and I were the last to wake in the morning. It was only 9 am but we were alone. Then, as if we had made it to heaven, two separate people came down to give us coffee and pastries. All fed and caffeinated, we decided to stay on the beach til our skin was about to fry right off our bones. We went back to Santa Cruz proper for one more night in the redwoods and then hitched back to San Francisco in the morning.






So I'm writing now from Ventura, where I am sun-burnt, bleach blond, and wearing my sisters clothes. Clean and well fed, I'm ready to get dirty again... but that'll have to wait till after my aunt gets married in Vegas this weekend.

bein round

We've been in the Bay Area for nearly three weeks now. Most of the time here has been spent in San Francisco at 5lowershop. DWe have turned the back yard into a self-sustained coffee/art/music spot, going as far as to build a wood-pallet patio containing a burn barrel and occasional tv/vcr combo on extention cord from the warehouse, upon which last night we watched Bruce Springsteen's video anthology 1978-89. "It's 1985!" He yells, "Blind faith in leaders, or anything, will get you killed..." and then he goes to play "War." It was a good night. We drank dumpstered Powerade and ate beans over the fire.


My sister, Alison, came up the the bay to work on a photo essay about Leanne and my lifestyle. We took up the photo project idea in exchange for riding in her car to dumpsters, especially Trader Joe's in Berkeley, where we got mad sushi and salads. Some of the people at 5lowershop were so happy, they cooked us vegetarian meals (rare).

For a few nights, we stayed in Berkeley with my old roommate and friend Andy Jones, and then we tried staying at this tree sit on campus only to be aggravated by oogles and homebums all night. And rain. Rain with a tarp tooooooo little.

Dave Salad came up to visit us over the weekend, which was wonderful. We went down to Ocean Beach and watched the sun set.

I have a lot to tell and not the time to do it, as we're about to hitch to Santa Cruz for a few days before returning to the bay for Halloween.

Sean and Sharky

New Toothpaste!

Monday is the New Sunday

(Tuesday is the new Friday)

OK, LINEARLY:

We got a ride out of Portland from some beekeepers, who dropped us in Ashland, Oregon after they took us dumpstering for chocolate and nut butters. We camped on the side of I-5 and woke in the morning to roll down the hill and hitch off the highway, cause in Oregon it is actually legal to hitch right off the side of any size highway... so we got a ride in about five minutes.
The person who picked us up was the front man of the 80's sort-of successful rock band Lotus, who toured with the likes of Bon Jovi and some other total bullshit like Bon Jovi. He thought he was cool for it though, so whatever, Paul Carey, thanks for the ride and keep on believing that you are something else, you schizophrenic racist scumbag (Paul Carey of Lotus hate website coming soon)

And so we arrived in San Francisco and got together with our good friends Johnny Ace and Patrick Ritchey from St. Louis. After misfitting around the Tenderloin and getting two free rounds of drinks by dancing with an old bar queen named Wanda, we spent the night at Johnny's place which is actually a hotel room in a week-by-week hotel up on the edge of North Beach and Chinatown.

Honestly I'm extremely exhausted and mentally worn out so this is a very brief account of my last week of living... and I'm too tired of talking about things to explain much more by phone or otherwise so uh I'll be sure to fill ya'll in when I'm feeling less nuts.

Camp in Ashland

Johnny Ace and Wanda

Leanne, Pat, and Johnny

Rooftop breakfast at an abandoned warehouse

5lowershop yard

Hannah, Leanne, Alyssa, Me

We're in the Brother's Room, in the mansion, with the key, holdin it down, yeah, we're invited...

Portland has been an unexpected "getaway" spot, and had it been expected, I might have better prepared myself.

What I've gotten used to is the introduction, the hyper-stylized conversation where we meet and angle our way into each other's lives like time is on the loose. Funny MO when you find yourself in a big, empty, climate-controlled house with a hot tub, trampoline, and two sweet pitbulls for a week. Leanne and I have been living off of food-bank garbage and bike rides on our borrowed Peugeot road and BMX bikes. Luckily we've made a few good friends outside of this house, or else we might bore ourselves to death with the internet and scattered Kerouac and motorcycle books about the place. It's a beautiful thing to watch Leanne read "Dharma Bums" and look up every once in a while and cite the parallels to our adventure. Skagit County, gondolas, sharing wine with common folks. Nothing pivotal, it's just the fabric.

We made friends with the 20th and Alberta crowd, this collection of ramblers who sit on the sidewalk and bullshit all day. This man Shorty has me remembering all those old men I've met on the sidewalk in the past who carry their wisdom on their sleeve. Like this man I once met on Venice Beach who had carved a giant sand mermaid with his one-inch pinky nail. His mouth was rotten but his soul was so firmly intact inside that decrepit body, and he spoke of his death as if it were tomorrow, welcoming it with every sip of vodka. I think of Venice Beach, I think of that bohemia it's been depicted as in words and pictures, I think of bohemia and it's appeal versus it's reality. Terminology charmed commodity. It's more of an elated feeling of sinking. Shorty, though, he's hell-bent on his room in the world as an angel, a man, and a philosopher of astrological persuasion. Drunk like a fox.

We're taking a ride on Monday to Northern California, on which we'll be stopping in Ashland, Oregon on the tip of free chocolate and nut butters. It's getting cold in Portland and I'm ready to go South.

Dog Walkin'

Leanne with Shorty

Food-bank instant mashed potatoes

Train Photos

To all you who thought I would die within a month of leaving St Louis,

No one was born in Portland

Harvesting hops for our friend Paul in Portland

I am really happy to see that my extended family has been reading this blog, especially those of you who I have not seen in many years.


.........words

His mother died of stomach cancer nine years ago
and he still recalls
when she said "thank you,"
"thank you" cause he loved her after
all the shit he put her through.
and today he speaks of right and wrong and how to live with love ----
He speaks it drunk and cackles
and falls over in his lawn chair.

Heaven IS a Place on Earth

Brad at Finney Farm


It turns out, it's very difficult for me to write about my time spent in Skagit County, Washington. I have to ask myself why, and here's the deduction.

I have not seen that many stars in my entire life.
I have not been in such a beautiful place in all my life.
I have never eaten better food.
I have never met so many kids-on-the-level in one place.
Off-the-grid living has never been so directly illustrated to me, and I am overwhelmed with new knowledge.
Honestly educated children is a relatively new concept for me, and meeting kids who are so vastly developed for their age blew me away.
Second-storey greenhouse on bus.
Small town gossip!

We were able to stay on Finney Farm for a week and a half by an agreement to a work exchange, where we worked on projects for and with the farm/ers for at least four hours a day in exchange for food and housing. During our time spent there, work included berry killing and picking, raking, demolishing an old cabin frame, socializing at knitting circles :), and then a day trip to Feral Farm, where we helped out with the construction of a cord-wood sauna. Cord-wood is a pretty beautiful example of unconventional construction, and Matt of Feral Farm mentioned that he likes to explore projects that can not be commodified. The wood used in the project had to be dried for three years before installed into the wall.

While Finney Farm utilizes a lot of sustainable rural practices such as outhouses and wood-stove heating, Feral Farm is completely off the grid, running power off of a solar generator and collecting water by way of a well. Alongside the sauna being built there will be a laundry room supplied by a rain water catchment system.

The community of Skagit County was pretty wonderful to meet up with. Everyone we met was an absolute sweetheart and total freaks and dorks about their lifestyles. Loved it.
So now we're in Portland, we've been here for a day and ALREADY we've made it to a dance party with a fun DJ and walked ourselves into serious leg pains.

Izzy by the Sauna


Leanne's Birthday at a swing in the middle of the forest


Violet and Myself


Birthday cake for breakfast with Demeter


Demolishing a cabin for materials


Leanne


Jennie calls it "rural dumpster diving," picking fruit and mint at an abandoned homestead


Skagit River on Feral Farm


Cordwood building


Gettin out of town