Feb 162012
Feb 162012
Time to go, time to get back on the dust, the gravel, the wet morning woods of dawn’s crabby mug… folding up wet tents for nobody, not caring about facebook, knowing that nobody knows what town I’m in, and sitting against shop windows with moth-ball-smelling old lady skirts that fatten the racks of old-time thrift stores of nowhere Redwood towns, where all caves and caverns lead to hallucination in the ageless, timeless whine of not having a clue and not giving a damn, and people won’t give me free food and rain gear, won’t carry my bags in the exhaust fume 18-lane hell of asphalt that the world has become, which I rage against- RAGE AGAINST THE ASPHALT!!! There is nowhere to walk, always falling off cliffs and spraining ankles in maddening bumpy, grassy inclines that lead into ditches full of garbage in front of big lawns lying themselves out naked like whores in front of massive mansions which shrug, abandoned, and whose owners never pay the taxes that string us all up on the rack despite how hard we all work for our FREEDOM! yes! YES! Ranting. Raving. Jack and me and the ever-present Lizard. We are setting out again on a mission to tell. Tell All. A tell-all mission in the tip-toeing groove of Thelonious Monk and the other voices that scream like ghosts across the fire escapes and dripping cat-quiet garbage cans that rattle below your glowing yellow window as you try to seduce the fate of Chet Baker and his dead valentine, and fire-apple-red blood tracks that splatter across the desert cactus and the lobster tanks of the middle of Nevada… in times of woe, who do we woo? Can we not afford to woo the danger of life? The danger of Life! Not hidden but waiting to be raped by my ultimate disregard for all shackles and the freeing of eyeballs into substance of madness which transforms all living into a game of catch me if you can. You don’t know I’m in your woods. Yes! This is the real tingle of the dinner triangle. EAT IT! Chew hard, it’s rubbery as fuck and I’m not your mother! Just listen. Just put the record on the table and watch it spin until you get lost in the barely-there black grooves and disappear… Did I ask you to interrupt my wee-hours gasoline with your goddam sale-of-a-lifetime throw pillows?! No! Radio! “Turn on the fucking radio,” she whispered, so quietly I could hear her red lipstick cracking and her blue eyeshadow flaking off as she batted her lashes at the falling stars and the the vomiting green moon, getting dizzy on the black waves of night that undulate just to spite you. And I did. And I looked out the window. There on the fire escape, in the pouring rain… There was Jack, smoking a cigarette with his back to me. He’d returned. But not to say hello. He doesn’t waste time. The girl, she just sat on the lizard’s lap and talked in her Betty Boop croon. But I couldn’t hear. Not anymore. It was time to go.
(P.S.) If you don’t get it read it again while listening to Thelonious Monk. If that doesn’t help, stop thinking so bloody hard.)
Feb 042012
The 750-mile Occupy walk that Sarah and I helped organize from Washington DC to Atlanta has come to an end. A supporter put the entire marching group up in a southern mansion for three days of celebration, which came to an end yesterday. The marchers will now stay with other Atlanta-area supporters until beginning a new Walkupy march to Chicago on February 11th.
Although no major Atlanta news organizations picked up on our arrival, the march was an overall success. The goals had been to help the fledgeling Occupy Movement survive through these first crucial winter months, and to build within the movement a culture of long-distance marching and individual mobility. It is now overwhelming clear that Revolution has survived, and that Walkupy has been successful at spawning many marches planned for this spring and summer.
The Walkupy tagline is “Mobile Occupation Headquarters”, meaning that its purpose to provide a centralized resource for all types of non-stationary Occupations. With this in mind, Sarah and I have decided to branch out rather than continue with our original group to Chicago. While we don’t yet have any funding to disperse to other Mobile Occupations, we have built a social media network that can help breath life into them.
A cross-country march is set to depart San Diego on February 18th, which Sarah and I plan on joining for at least the first few weeks. Seeing that the San Diego group has obtained almost no media coverage or funding so far, we feel that they are in much the same predicament as Walkupy was when it left Washington DC on December 1st. At that time we were in constant danger of perishing due to a general lack of support, because nobody knew about us.
Sarah and I plan to create a page on Walkupy.org devoted to the new San Diego march. The donation and social media links on that page will be those of the San Diego march, not Walkupy. We will use our writing, photography and video skills to create content on the new page, hopefully driving a large amount of Walkupy.org web traffic through to the San Diego march.
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In the meantime, Sarah and I have set up shop in the little suburban down of Fayetteville, GA. We are camped out in a wooded area near the library while I continue building Walkupy.org and she edits a book detailing her Occupy experiences from October till now.The book will be available as an e-book and in paper format as an Amazon.com “print on demand”.
Realizing the historical significance of individual mobility during revolutionary times, we have decided to devote any proceeds from the book to Mobile Occupations. Our original Walkupy group will get first dibs on disbursements, to be donated in increments at Sarah’s discretion with 100% financial transparency. If a large amount of money is generated then other Occupy marching groups will be next in line to receive funding. Third in line would be other forms of Mobile Occupations such as bicycle or bus tours.
While it would be preferable to deposit book proceeds into a fund that is dispersed by consensus, no such reliable organization exists at this time that is devoted to mobile occupations. That is in fact exactly the type of organization we hope to help Walkupy or its successors to become.
At the turn of the last century, a group known as the IWW nearly brought the United States government to its knees, resulting in coordinated federal raids and long-term prison sentences for its members. Just as September 11th brought us the Patriot Act, with World War One came the opportunity to imprison IWW leaders on political grounds. Their brilliant method of non-violent protest had become too powerful……the ruling class knew that their power was under immenent threat.
IWW members were known as Wobblies, and their key protest strategy was mobility. They would stream into communities by the thousands wherever an injustice occurred, coming from all over the country in just a few days time. Wobblies protested when, where and how they wanted, quickly filling local jails to capacity when authorities tried to stop them.
Now imagine for a second…..Wobblies with the Internet……..this time around the ruling class cannot kill us by decapitating our organization. Through instantaneous social networks, two new heads will grow from each one that is severed. By the time authorities kill the Internet we will have already become unstoppable.
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The world is finally at the cusp of a truly global revolution, which will spread around the globe very rapidly once it takes complete hold of the United States. One thing is certain, that the change is going to happen, the question is how it will happen. A very dangerous situation awaits us, in which the world shall fall into rapid chaos if the chain of revolutionary events brings us to anarchy.
Unfortunately, this world is not yet ready for peaceful anarchy. Imagine a huge technologically-developed country such as the USA instantly falling apart. Its citizens are completely dependent upon the system to sustain themselves, and their primary entertainment is fictionalized violence. What do you think is going to happen? Mass atrocities unparallelled in human history.
Bringing about peaceful change is only possible incrementally. The first stage should be to shrink the US goverment, and we just so happen to have a popular presidential candidate who is willing to do so on a revolutionary scale- Ron Paul. We don’t have to agree with his policies, that’s not the important issue in this election cycle. The issue is survival. If Ron Paul is not elected then the Revolution will lead to a horrible world for a very long time. Yes, the USA is just one country among hundreds, but it remains the sole focal point and so will affect the global revolutionary direction.
If Ron Paul is elected then the Revolution will naturally focus its energy on the new opportunities that have been created- opportunities to massively shrink the government. Many of us don’t support Ron Paul because he also wants to shrink social welfare programs, but this is a necessary step in a peaceful revolution that will someday bring us both honest capitalism and global social welfare.
In other words, we can have our inevitable new world in one of two ways, with or without a period of extreme planetary violence. Allow Ron Paul to dismantle our current system then elect others to rebuild it into something humane for all. Ron Paul’s efforts will not be met with political gridlock if they coincide with this revolutionary movement.
This is the only way I see for the Occupy Movement to move ahead. The alternative will kill most of us, rest assured.