UNOBJECTIONABLE

2010-01-29T15:08:00.000-08:00

still in victoria, and some friends and i are going on a 'find a coffee dumpster or bust' adventure tonight. we've finagled a vehicle and locked n loaded every roaster in town. we might be driving around for hours to no avail, but gosh what an epic victory that would be for the working class.
theres a coffee dump in minneaplolis whose secret is guarded like the golden fleece so it doesn't get blown up.
a new fork and stem were successfully installed and are currrently operational. thanks luke.
maybe to returning to vancouver a couple days before larissa to get started with the five cockrings of death. yes folks, its the olympics.

2010-01-29T15:05:00.000-08:00

i'm in victoria and its so nice and warm here. we went camping over the weekend and had a fire on the beach and i went swimming. which isnt really like swiming. more like floundering momentarilly in wicked cold water and runing back to the fire we had on the beach. the forests on the north shore of the island are like a docter seus forest, with lots of wonky oold growth douglas firs. so dank and pretty. pretty moist.

i was borrowing a bike from a friend thats here and a car in an intersection was about to run me down real slow motion like. i was able to jump off the bike and get out of the way of the car, but the front fork got all mangled in the collision . so i reported it to insurence after getting the niceguys info. they arebuying my friend a new used bike, which is great. but i'm taking in the old bike to a for profit but cool bike shop that will let me use their tools for a few bucks and am going to try and fix it up. headsets are funny! its an old bike so i'm hoping it wont turn into an avelanch of 40 tiny ball bearings rolling everywhere.

2009-07-14T09:09:00.000-07:00

hello #2!

i am in frech speaking québec city. i`ve been in montreal these last weeks, and there also is the speaking of french, but here. gosh. i don`t stand a chance and wish you were here. for your constant and attentive translations i would pay you in the knick nacks and trinkets i picked up on the side of the highway during my 7 hr hitch here. its just incredable how many people want to give you a ride 10 minutes down the road when you have a sign stating clearly and in BOLD BLACK CAPITAL LETTERS that you are going the distance.

i am traveling with a friend, her name is sonia, and we came to see the musical group Beirut. but the venue was overcroweded and we didn`t stand a chance of getting it. and of course, like so many fall back plans concieved of and competently executed, we bought a bottle. ours we drank on the midevil city walls while the city music festival that brought beirut in sounded from sides all around us. then on our top-heavy bikes (which might of been more our top-heavy heads after that bottle) to the fairy, across the st laurence river, and the long bike to the house of sonias parents. anyway, all this is leading to you. you are involved in this story. because now it is morning, and a fluke would have it that sonias brother is here visiting also. and get this. he is flying to france tomorrow and will be in paris with no place to stay in a week.
so, you know. if you want to put him up for a minute your welcome to. he comes from good stock, and he actually got into the show last night, so i can speak highly of his musical tastes (if nothing else exactly) because they are somewhat similar to my own. and his sister is top knotch.

xxxxxxxxxx is how you can reach him. his name is Phill. but these frehch-0-phones they might spell it any old how.

i`ll be leaving montreal on saturday, on my bike with a friend who will be on hers, with her dog that will be in a trailer towed by her bike. we`ll be making tracks north of the great lakes and then south into minesota to minneapolis where i will be living this fall.

love you olin! i hope this letter reaches you well. lets try to talk friday night! i`ll email you again when it gets closer. there is one house where the phone rings!

2009-06-18T10:42:00.000-07:00

After much time, some spent well, some completly out the window, periods of intense productivity followed immediatly by sevier laziness, i would like to keep this thing a little (but not at all entirly) relevent to my life.

I stuck it out in Minneapolis and eventually pled my seven charges down to one misdameaner disorderly conduct on time served with no fine. During these 4 months of judicial hang-ups I was a part of BarBones Halloween Puppet Theater, meet lots of sweet people, and enjoy Minneapolis.

Had a heck of a time getting back to Asheville, but my perminent record will speak for itself on that account.

Now, I am on a bike trip north. I've been traveling for a couple months and have been able to spend weeks in richmond, DC, baltimore, philidelphia, and now almost a week in binghamton. i planned on leaving today but the rain and my good friends Medusa and Miles convinced me not to. I'll be biking north to burlington, vt by myself and rejoining Cusi, a good friend i met in minneapolis who i have been biking with from asheville, nc (pictured above, all excited about a fire he kept going through an hour of rain). Here are some pictures i've finally gotten off my camera, maybe 40 of them spread over quite a lot of time and space, too much i would have like to document.

Thank you everyone who kept on me about writing here, but understand IM NOT MAKING ANY PROMISES.

My PD

2008-10-12T19:34:00.000-07:00

So the public defender issued to me (my second actually) is horrible. I am filing a complaint against her (below). I have hired a real lawyer (for lots of money I am making by painting a little carpentry) who is great. He is representing some other folks arrested with me so is privy to what happened and how best to fight the charges. The state has singled me out out the group, giving me the most and the harshest charges as well as pushing my case forward the quickest. I am scheduled for a trial by jury on the 20th (way before any other RNC case I have heard of), but my lawyer will hopefully get it pushed back to give him time to prepare.

Now without further, my complaint to the Ramsey Co. Public Defenders office.

Both interactions I have had with Marilyn Knudsen have been an exhausting
and demeaning experience.  The first was a phone conversation where she
was very angry with me for 15 minutes for not mailing her a description of
the events prior to my arrest.  She did not receive contact info from my
first Public Defender Ron Paulzine, and she refused to contact me any way
other then then a house in upstate NY that I do not live in anymore.  She
said she did not have the time to 'babysit' me.  Nothing else was
communicated during the 15 minutes, it was just her yelling at me.  When
we met before my Sept 25th court date we had talked for 2 minutes before
she said "I have many more important clients and having to spend so much
of my time on you is making me sick."  She was demeaning constantly during
this short interview.  She refused to believe that I was protesting
non-violently because I had on a black sweatshirt, wore a mask, and did
not give my name at the time of my arrest.  I understand that she has to
anticipate the questions a prosecuting attorney might ask, but her level
of hostility during this brief conversation was startling.  She asked me
why I was wearing a uniform that symbolized violence, and informed me that
she hated uniforms before I had a chance to answer.  She asked me why I
just didn't join the army if I wanted to be violent and wear a uniform.
At one point she contemptuously asked my level of education.  I answered
her and she replied "Then you must understand the English language." She
was not filling out a form or getting information pertinent to the case,
she was insulting me because of my lack of knowledge of the legal process.
At another point she asked if I was mentally disabled.  When I was called
before the judge he told Mrs. Knudsen and I that the state was adding 4
charges to my case, bringing the total to 7.  He asked Marilyn if she had
spoken to me about them and she said "yes" but I had to interject that she
had not.  It was important to me that I understand the severity of the new
charges, since I had been charged with misdemeanors and was now being
charged with a gross misdemeanor for the first time.  She asked the judge
for a 5 minute recess and was furious at me for contradicting her in front
of the judge, but did answer my questions about the new charges.  It was
during this 5 minute recess that she told me that this was not a pretrial
hearing (as had been scheduled), but an omnibus hearing.  I had no idea
what was going on or what to expect when we went back in front of the
judge.  I wanted to ask her, but was afraid to.  Her level of hostility
and outright anger at me, combined with my need for her to act on my
behalf, effectively silenced me.  After my case was heard, she left the
courtroom immediately and I have not spoken to her since.  I feel that it
is important that you understand that during each of my interactions with
Mrs. Knudsen that I was consistently trying to be both helpful and polite.
I was (and am) very aware of how helpful or hurtful she has the power to
be right now.  My hope is to find alternate representation, although I
have given her the document she requested of me in case I cannot.  I would
like her not to know that I am part of this complaint until I find other
representation.

Alex Taft
10/1/08

Its been too long old friend

2008-09-17T18:19:00.001-07:00

I have slacked on this blog. It is true, and the world is not shocked.
I am back from Europe. I've been stateside long enough to help my father with his house, see friends along the east coast, and commit myself to a work trade agreement in a community house in Asheville. And then I went and got myself arrested here in Minneapolis. The coppers have accused me of barricading an intersection during the first day of the Republican National Convention. That was way back on the 1st of September, but here I still am. At the moment they are charging me with 3 or 4 misdemeanors (it fluctuates) and I have plead not-guilty to all of them. I didn't do anything wrong and they've got the wrong guy.
Money is running really short (especially because some heroes bailed me out for $1000), but I am staying with friends that I lived with in Barcelona and there is a Little Ceasers and an Aldis right down the street with decadent dumpsters. And the Food Not Bombs crew is tight tight tight.
My needs are being met, but I really hope a couple odd jobs will come threw for me soon (and it looks like they will). This place is so nice! But I wanna get back to Asheville and start the projects I said I would! All my stuff is in a bedroom I'm not doing worktrade for! What will happen if they actually take this thing to trail and try to screw me?
So that is the whats what of me now quickly. And you should all know that there are so many sweet people here doing so many sweet things. I've gotten to help a friend build a wood fired forge, be in a puppet show at the Bedlam Theater, jump off of a bridge into a creek, have a love affair (he left town this morning), play lots of badminton, and fight fascism.
I will write more on the RNC once this whole thing is legally cleared up for me. But I will try get more quick updates posted.
Love you all so much! Thanks specially to all of you who have really come threw and been suportive of me during all of this.

LETTERS FROM THE FRONT

2008-05-13T01:56:00.000-07:00

Here I find myself in an anarcho syndicalist bar. There are pictures of the circle A everywhere alongside trade union posters and one old timer for each seat at the bar. It is tiny and playing David Bowie. About 20 seconds in I am offered a cigarette and the warm pale beer is as Spanish as beers come. Luckily, more often then not, as far as beer goes, your standard bubbly barley hops beverage can't be all that bad no matter where it comes from. I have just dropped off my bike's bum back wheel at Nicks bike shop. I am pretty sure that I mounted it at an angle like a jerk and bent the axle. And I am going to need my bike on Saturday. The owner of the shop is paying me to trail a large herd of Danish tourists around the city on a bike tour. It has the potential of being absolutely horrible. I told Nick on my way out of the shop that we may be there when the tower falls. I will be something of a sheep dog, keeping everybody moving in the right direction and rounding up stragglers. They said I shouldn't need to use my cattle prod. Bowie sings “time takes a cigarette and puts it in your mouth” in between lines about space invaders. Why is he still so neat when he has always been such a dork? And why does the one drunk in a crowded bar always insist on talking to me? Questions for the ages...

Friends from the Auzzy squat Thumderdome came by today. Some sketchballs in an old yellow postal van were loitering in front of their house. After one of them was overheard talking about needing a ladder they started to worry about an illegal eviction. They were checking out the upstairs windows and balcony from the street and really really didn't like it when someone in the squat started taking their pictures. Sometimes the real life owner of a squat will hire a band of ruffians to break into a squat and physically evict its occupants. These types of evictions are against the law, often violent, and don't always work, but the upside is that the owner of the property doesn't have to go through the lengthy court process and the cops don't seem to care either way. My house will probably sleep over there tonight just in case, but probably nothing is going to happen, and either way all the doors and windows are going to be heavily barricaded. Now the old chap who gave me the cigarette is getting all upidy: leaving over my shoulder spitting slurred Catalan in my ear. I think he is talking about May Day and the price of beer and pointing at his empty glass. I have absolutely no idea what he is getting at.

There are few things niftier than getting on an underground train at one and slowly walking its length. Going from car to car, getting a good glance at everyone taking the ride. There is something about trains that make their passengers seem very simply themselves. It is like a random collection of people in a theater, stationary and having a shared experience. Instead of a constructed story projected in one direction, everybody experiences each others projections while pretending not to. Everything is lit harshly by florescent lights, some of it lighting up the black tunnel walls that crowd in and streak by the windows. The train rocks back and fourth meditatively while its captive audience think about where they are coming from or where they are going or what kind of problems might happen on the International Space Station when the US fleet of spaceships goes off line until 2015. The ends of the subway cars are joined by rubber walls, like an accordion, linking the whole train something like giant snake. If you stand in the last car it is possible to look down the entire length of the snake as it winds, twists, and dips along its tunnel.

2008-05-12T00:48:00.000-07:00

These days I feel like a ghost. Not tragically, its just the first word that comes to mind. I feel myself move through this environment, but not touch it. Partly, I think, it is because I am not invested here. The things that I do touch are ungrounded, like me. The improvements made on the house are temporary gains. It will probably be evicted and destroyed before the year is out. The people I have become close to have left or will be gone soon. They are from all over the world, and most of them have a lot more of being all over the world until they settle down for any length of time. Another reason I feel this way is because my footprint has become so light. Living here, like this, I have come to realize how minimal my need really are. This has been great. An absolutely necessary education I should have gotten when I was thirteen. It is strange to transition into having almost no income and no expenses: Everything I use to meet my needs are things that people have decided have no more use. Again I am a ghost haunting an old house, that last residents long dead. All of my food has sat on a grocery store shelf, passed by but for some reason never picked up until it was thrown out. My clothes are castoffs. Somebody bought and wore them until one day when they didn't make the cut. Everything around me has already had a life. Every day I spend hours gliding through this city on my bike, with my eyes open and my mouth shut, passing through overwhelming histories and a bright busy present. A present that is soon not to include me. It is a hallow feeling to think that one day soon I will walk down the stairs into the underground to catch the metro to the station, and it won't be until I am have left Barcelona that the train will come out of its tunnel.

Days of Fruits, Nights of Lipids

2008-05-03T15:23:00.000-07:00

A strange wind this way blows. Our house has become a vortex of late. Things are coming inside. Our door holds none barred. Its become easy. Much of this has to do with a lack of discretion, plane and simple common sense. People are becoming comfortable. And when the people become comfortable, they become lax. Our young Slovak runaway has decided to adopt a young runaway rat. It feels soft but it grows fast. Aarto has brought a puppy into the house. Fleshy jowls wrinkle down from its wet eyes and distract you from its ominously large paws. It gnaws on the metal legs of our outside table as though its just warming up. A late house mate decided it would be a good idea to let an old graff artist friend from Australia stay over for a few days. He said they used to be on the same crew, whatever that means. Now there are 4 of them using our walls outside like the stall of a shitter in some dive dinner's bathroom whenever they can't find a parked train. Every time one of them throws up something I really like, the next day another one covers it up with something else. We have a sort of tiki lounge aesthetic going in the back yard and I thought maybe they could paint something to go along with the theme. I wanted one of them to do something really tasteful for a change. Well now we have some overgrown lizards breathing fire on Shiva. I know that doesn't exactly sound predictable, but it sort of is.

The last dubious addition to the household is all my fault. Coming back from getting food, I spied a large white kitchen appliance. At first I thought it was a rice cooker, which would have been great. I got all giddy and ran up to it. I saw a cord hanging off it, which was exciting because there are a million metal scrappers in this city that would scrap their own mothers if they were made of copper. I have seen so many nifty electronic gizmos on the curb with their electrical umbilical cords prematurely severed: another nickel in some metal mercenaries oily palm. It wasn't a rice cooker. And then it wasn't a bread baker. It was better and worse. It was a deepfrier, in all its dangerous glory. Its reservoir of oil runs parallel with the psyche of the house: sometimes sweet cauliflower tempura fries quietly in fresh sunflower oil, or golly french fries gostle around all rolly-polly. But more often then not more sinister things happen. Late in the night and inebriated, people convince them selves that they are being creative. They scan the kitchen looking for something. Anything. The rat scampers back to its cage and the dog whines by the door as cheese curds are stuffed into wads of pie dough. Croissants are injected with choco filling and then take the plunge. The thickly battered beer battered snausages let off a dank and hazy grease that crawls around room and eventually somebody makes a meek plea for somebody to change out the oil, but instead settles down with hot sauce and an egg deepfried inside a layer of onion.

There is a running list on the walls of experiments to be made, things to be deepfried. I regret to say that this list is growing faster than things can be cooked. But we are making an effort, these thing must be done. When something is fully submerged in boiling oil something special happens. It is an intrusive process, the oil changes it from the outside in to its core. To really appreciate this you have to be there with it, inside this three dimensional invasion. When it happens, when it really happens, something is expunged. Something bad is released and becomes good. Even though the end result is heavy and sodden with vegetable fats, it is somehow cleaner for all of this. Physically, everything is dirty and oily, from the air that we are breathing to whatever we are putting inside our guts, the slick plates and the filthy frier. But something intangible is somehow better. Its just better and its hard to explain why. It is a bitter sweet thing to be inside my house, and it is always there, sitting on the counter. It takes about five minutes for the oil to heat up to frying temperatures and who am I to blow against the wind.

2008-04-22T08:56:00.000-07:00

I have on my feet the second pair of Velcro tennis shoes I have ever had. The first pair met an abrupt and tragic end. I was young, strapped into the baby seat in the back of my family's Oldsmobile. I don't remember if it had fake wood paneling down the sides, but I hope so. My folks tell it like this: I had really wanted Velcro shoes because I could put them on and take them off all by myself. This was a really exciting proposition to a young boy who's chubby and uncoordinated fingers had yet to master the subtle art of shoelaces. So my parents gave in and bought me some snazzy new Velcro sneaks. A couple days later the three of us were driving along one of Eastern Washington's many high and dry bluffs, along a road that skirted around the top of a low valley. My father always drove, and at the time did not believe in using toxic conveniences such as AC, so all the windows were down. My mother looked behind her into the back seat just in time to see me, grinning from my car seat, throw one of my new “I took off my shoe all by myself!” sneakers out the window and down into the canyon below.

Needless to say, my parents never bought be another pair of Velcro sneakers again. This has not exactly left a whole in my heart. Or even left behind some kind of dull consumer ache. But I always coveted them. When I was old enough to request another pair I never did. I just wasn't courageous enough. Being that weird gangley kid hovering friendless in the back of the class was awkward enough without wearing the thick soled plastic shoes typically designed for severely handicapped. I wanted them because I thought they looked snappy and made fun noises. To me they are a throwback to very specific old fashioned genre of science fiction: When all the space ships were large and bulbous, the sci-fi damsels wore high boots and short skirts, and the sci-fi hunks wore tight one piece track suits that hugged thick shoulders and rumps. Needless to say, this shameless desire was put on the back shelf for some time. Years passed and I was only reminded of this odd affection by the odd Velcro shoe that happenstance passed my pay. This all changed a month ago.

There is a large squat in an abandoned arboretum around the corner from where I live. Inside there is a wagenplatz (a community of people living in wagons) there full of Poles and on Tuesdays we play soccer in a big dirt field up the road. I only brought my big steel-toed work boots to Barcelona, so I would always try to find or barrow shoes to play in. I have come to realize, to my annoyance, that Spaniards do not share my shoe size. One Tuesday after one of the games three toes from each foot were sticking out of the front of the shoes. Another Tuesday had me clomping around the field in my shitkickers. It was the third time I played that send me to a store. I had pushed my feet into shoes that were just too small. It hurt a bit to run, but I figured it was better then my boots. Until some big Pole and I decided to both kick the soccer ball in opposite directions at the same time. I thought I broke my big toe, but all that happened was a lot of bruising and bleeding underneath the nail. So I broke down and decided to look into buying some new shoes. Which was something, really. I have made a policy for myself to not spend any money here (with some very necessary exceptions of course : pens, beer, tobacco, bike lock, things hard to recycle). The cheapest shoes I could find were 6 euros, in the basement of some big sporting goods store. And wouldn't you know it, they were my new shinny white Velcro sneaks. Well, they were new and shinny and white. They were mine, and it itched a scratch that was decades in the making. And my toenail fell off a few days ago while I was swimming. Its a rather particular feeling, like a fresh circumcision.

Now, in the present, there is a special tenderness and sensitivity to every step I take. I walk forward into my destiny, but the shoes and that unguarded fleshy toe I walk with are always bringing me back to the past. Which is special. Thats why I included pictures of these things for you to see.

Our house, in the middle of our street

2008-04-14T07:58:00.000-07:00

Excuses excuses: A kitchen full of food and people. A kitchen like the carcass of a gazel. If you don't join the circle of hyenas and get your snout in it then all that'll be left is the gristle. And these other hyenas are good folk: two stoic Finnish, one sassy French Canadian, a disgruntled and drunken Australian, a mum Pole, a young Slovak runaway, and a dashing and daring Minnesotan with a wry sense of humor bred from the long cheerless winters of the high prairie country. You might notice one glaring absence from this laundry list: Our house has a lack of that thick Catalan and Spanish blood. Well, its not my fault.

Our house is a large cumbersome old thing. Empty for at least twenty years, its only crime is inefficiency. The largest construction company in Barcelona bought it up to tear it town. Soon its footprint will be like the rest of this city: a boxy five story apartment building wall to wall with neighboring five story apartment buildings that look almost exactly alike. The ground floor is divided into a large business space that might have been used by a mechanic and a massive kitchen thats the best room in the house, with more gleaming white counter space then in right. I think it was rebuild for restaurant use. The business space with the large doors to the street is walled off from us, and is so full of rubble and boxes and metal and furniture we just can't bring ourselves to clear it out. We have the only back yard on the block, and it to was overwhelmingly crowded with trash, but we tackled it good. Green space in this part of town is so rare it would be a real shame to let it waste away under tons of debris. There are a couple shacks out back that have become bedrooms, and we have the best tiki-lounge this side of the Mississippi. Surf boards, hanging chandeliers, christmas lights, a burn barrel, and palm fronds. Thats right. Palm fronds.

The upstairs has five bedrooms and lots of holes in the floor covered with wood. People tried to squat this house a year ago and got thrown out the next day. Some beefy construction guy thought that if he punched some holes in the floor and made a huge mess that nobody would want to squat it. If he had done that to the roof, he would have been right. But a shovel, a broom, and some well laid boards foiled his poorly laid plans. The upstairs upstairs is a delicious sunny patio.

It is big, it is dirty, but it is ours. Except for one small balcony. That is still the pigeons.

/ D Am Em G / / B F#m C#m E / /

Our house, was our castle and our keep
Our house, in the middle of our street
Our house, that was where we used to sleep
Our house, in the middle of our street (3X)

/ C Gm Dm F / / D Am Em G / / B F#m C#m E / /

NATO Maintains Control of Situation

2008-04-10T04:26:00.000-07:00

In classic Yes Men style, NATO arrived in full force at an otherwise peaceful separatist rally in Gent. The preparation was minimal: copying 1,000 fliers the day before, and the morning of putting together the

amazing NATO banner, turning the van into a Police paddy wagon, and getting into the camo. But the effect was massively uncomfortable and awkward to the max. We rolled up on the steps of city hall, dropped the banner, and The General gave his speech.

A little back story.

The Flemish (north) region of Belgium has been on a conservative nationalistic streak. Politicians have been pushing an anti-immigrant platform and non-dutch speakers have felt an increase in racist sentiments. The more liberal Gent sits smack dab in the middle of all

this,and decided to secede from the rest of Belgium and become its own city state. Of course this was all in jest: Somebody's bright idea that the media jumped on and turned into a citywide joke. A big rally was planned downtown with a all day concert featuring Belgian bands. In the spirit of things NATO decided to step in to ensure the safety of everyone and the continuation of the ethnically diverse union that is Belgium. The url www.nato-press.com was purchased and set up to look just like NATO's official site (www.nato.int). Our NATO spokesman contacted lots of local media about our planned presence, and told them to contact us threw the website.

The guy who set the site up still has charges against him for doing a similar stunt last year. He set up a Belgian government website and issued a bunch of fake press releases to the effect that the Belgium was withdrawing from NATO. That got a lot of publicity and people were calling NATO and Belgian politicians for weeks. There is actually a long and proud history of these types of hijinks. The Yes Men (www.theyesmen.org) have a fake WTO website and they receive invitations to speak as representatives of the WTO at conferences all around the world.

NATO Game Over protest in Brussels

2008-03-25T11:45:00.000-07:00

Laura is from Finland and has lived in the house with me for a week when she decided to hitch to Belgium for an anti-NATO protest and I joined her. The trip north went well, except for an unplanned 14 hour layover somewhere between Lyon and Dijon. We arrived at the action center in Brussels mid action, people were already going over the fence and at least 50 had been arrested. I thought it would be a bad idea to get arrested since I had some questions about my ambiguous legal status here in Europe. So I didn't rush in all gun-ho. I deciding instead to join a walk to NATO headquarters through some farms. It was as peaceful as 60 completly nonviolent poets and artists walking through a farm could be, but that did not stop a couple of paddy wagons full of police from chasing us down and at least a dozen cops of horses herding us away from the NATO compound. Here in the picture, two cops had Laura and I zip cuffed and were walking us back to there vehicles. Due, I think, to a 'lack of interconnectivity of police intelligence', the horse cops were pushing the rest of the protesters where we were being led. When I had a chance, I broke away from the cops and ran into the crowd. Some media people started interviewing Laura and there were lots of ridiculous pictures taken of us getting arrested on a farm, with nothing but grass and grass. These showed up all over northern European and especially Scandinavian newspapers, as a bit of a joke. I think the mustached reflective sunglasses wearing leader of the Anti-Farmwalk-NATO-Protest police didn't want all of this media attention, so the two cops who had cuffed us sort of slowly wandered away from Laura. We didn't have a problem getting the zip cuffs off. All the pieces in the mainstream media about the NATO Game Over protest talked about the excessive police violence toward the protesters that tried to enter the NATO compound over the fence (50 succeeded!) and the comically exaggerated police presence confronting us in the fields barely within eyesight of NATO headquarters. There were maybe 30 cops on foot, most in riot gear, at least 12 cops on horses, a helicopter over our heads, and more police cars that couldn't drive through all themud circling around the farms. There was not a lot of newsworthy stuff happening the day of and the day after the protest, so in terms of the media attention attracted it was a huge success. It was a bit discouraging that almost every report underestimated the number of people attending the action, the number of people arrested, and that a NATO press release claiming that nobody entered the NATO compound was included in most of the news pieces. I have not attended very many protests, but I think this sort of thing happens a lot. There were lots of good people there, and a two day antiwar conference in the days following. Laura and I were planning to hitch right back to Barcelona, but were convinced instead to stay with some new friends in Gent. More on that later.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

2008-03-18T12:28:00.000-07:00

On this Tuesday, March 18, 2008 the Dali Lama threatened to resign, Gov. Paterson held a press conference to talk about the different affairs he and his wife have had the day after he steps in for Elliot Spitzer (who resigned after buying time with a prostitute after signing into law anti-prostitution laws that may be used against him), the Fed cut interest rates by 3/4 of a point to fend off the bear market, Fox news plays again and again old and new footage of Barack Obama's pastor Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright ranting against the racist state, the EU decides that China's murderous actions in Tibet to not justify boycotting the Beijing olympics, and perhaps I lost my great grandfathers ring. And then Barack Obama gives this speech:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/us/politics/18text-obama.html

Heck of a bunch of words. Lets hope some people were paying attention. I didn't vote for this guy in the primaries, but if we have to have somebody establishment in the white house, he might as well be able to put a couple sentences together. Its been a seedy, sordid, and foul smelling sort of day to give to reading and watching the news, but something about his speech blew across me like a not so nasty smelling sewer wafting over from the wrong side of the tracks.

This is an ominous beginning

2008-03-13T15:27:00.000-07:00

I feel I should start all this by saying it was a long and sordid night. And it was all, it was all because of that god damned bear constume. Lindzey wanted Veronica and I to go to this costume party in the Barrio Gotic, but not in a squat. It was on the third floor of a real live apartment building and by the time we got there it was 1 and the karaoke pop coming threw the door gave me a bad feeling in my stomach. I had asked Lindzey if the Thunderdome people were going to be there, what was the scene going to be like? She said it was new people. What kind of people? She said it was a gay party. OK great. That I can handle. At the door, in our costumes, I was begining to have second thoughts. Perhaps American Gay diverged from Spanish Gay in some kind of shocking and startling way that I was unaware of and unprepared for. But it was Saturday night and it was too late to turn back. Veronica was dressed as some kind of antique space moon colony cadet, all tin foil shinny with a fire hoses coming out of everywhere and blinking flashlights affixed to her glasses. Her hair was definitly in some kind of antique space moon colony cadet hairdo, and she had some alien scrawl on her face. But it was my costume that was making me feel uncomfortable. I was wearing the bear suit. And I had to take drastic, although not entirely unprecedented, actions to get into it. I think you know what I mean. I gutted the crotch. These pictures I attached speak only to the pregame optimism that we all shared. How often in life is preparing for a costume party so much better then the party itself? The big groin level hole attracted alot of attention. From alot of the wrong sorts of people. I was accused of being everything from a zoophiliac to a furry. They were serious and it wasn't pretty. Only the Americans dressed up and we had no other option than to take full advantage of the open bar and the dark back rooms. Like I said, it was a dark and sordid night. Nothing about it will prevent the bear suit from being worn again. These costume freaks are worse then a sewing circle. It just wasn't a good showing from the oldest democracy in the world.

After we left things really went downhill. I took Veronica to the airport a couple hours after we got home. We were still drunk, and it was only after we were almost there that I realized that she had a RyanAir flight and there was no way in hell she could get to Girona in time. So we spent the day sobering up in the airport emailing friends and family until she could get a ticket to Dublin that night so as to connect with her flight back over the big pond. While we were waiting for people to write back and all of the necessary communications to be made we scoured what eateries the airport had to offer: mostly soggy french fries and most of sandwiches. By 8 o'clock when she boarded her plain and I headed back on the train, security was happy to see us leave. Although it was sad to see Veronica step on that escalator and get pulled up to the second floor and then the sky, I was glad to be going home, to a place whose ambiguous legal status at least made some sense.