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