P u r s u i n g N o t h i n g

April 28. 2012.

Last night I ventured into the sleeping room to find another person’s mattress flush with- shit, I don’t wanna write this. It’s tedious.

We moved down to the hall to sleep because the room was over-crowded and it smelled like hell.

Pedro arrived. He’s a close personal friend of Heather and Carolina. They’ve both worked with him for a long time. He’s a member of The Global Square project. He and Garth spent the entire night making the room between the radio and the kitchen into an extra computer lab.

While I was lying on our bed between the library bookshelves, I listened to Mohawk and a bunch of other people play magical middle-eastern desert music. I wanted to catch it in a word bottle. That’s what I want to do with everything. But I let it go.

These bastards left the kitchen a giant mess again.

Garth said he’d eat breakfast with me, but he didn’t. I’m not going to be seeing or talking with him much now that the other members of our team are here and things are beginning to happen.

We need content for our websites. I had these ideas for how to create it. Now I don’t feel like doing them.

I am here alone. I don’t care.

My uterus feels sloshy and sick.

I’m going to read a book. That’s what I’m going to do.

“I want you to be okay,” Garth says. “Even tho I’m distracted. I want you to be okay. ‘Cause I like you.”

He disappears again. It’s okay. I understand. Hormone imbalance.

My writing today is going to suck and the internet isn’t going to work. Nothing ever works.

April 26, 2012:

“For free,” a handwritten sign says. It’s pinned to the wall above the kitchen counter. The first donated food has arrived. A huge pot of stone soup steams next to bowls of tomatoes, kiwi, potato, apples and eggplant. I make two cups of coffee, chop some fruit, grab some croissants and go downstairs to find Garth.

The guy with the solar panel display asks Garth to move one of our sings so he can pin some text to the wall. His long hair is slicked back. He wears aviator sunglasses and gold-tipped boots and carries a metal suitcase that he says is his entire life.

A young fellow and his father approach.

“Can you give us information about this area?” the son says. “I’m confused by this space. There doesn’t appear to be a structure we can follow and I don’t really understand what’s going on.”

Garth and I are the only ones in the Hall. No one else is awake. We explain the Occupied Biennale, then we explain The Global Square. The young man walks away inspired.

Carolina and Heather arrive. They have to go upstairs to work online because the internet doesn’t work in the Hall. Garth and I stay on the Global Square couch. We have to hold down the space. Turf wars are already beginning.

I don’t understand the territorial mentality. That was one of the first contradictions I noticed within this movement when Garth and I arrived at OWS in October. This movement is supposed to be about people from different projects collaborating and working together, not drawing property lines and erecting distinct, separate booths with electric fences around them.

We make signs while Heather and Carolina work online. The physical situation makes me feel like a flunky. Someone who does the simple tasks while the people in control do the meaningful work elsewhere.

“Two months ago, they had all this international press,” Garth says. “Now they just have two people sitting here with markers, coloring on signs.”

Yeah, and one of them doesn’t know shit about the internet or website building, I think to myself.

One of the main developers decided not to show even tho the group bought him a plane ticket. The other has been out of contact for days.

I highlight a calendar. Garth copies the definitions of Stigmergy, Epistemic Communities and Concentric User Groups onto a sign. Visitors trickle in. A finely-dressed black woman passes by with her hair in a tight bun. She reads an incomplete sentence off of Garth’s sign.

“Projects are driven by ideas…”

She laughs. Hwah-hwah-hwah.

What is so funny? Is it obvious that projects are driven by ideas? Is that why you’re laughing? If you weren’t so distracted with the smell of your own beautiful anus, perhaps it would also be obvious to you that the sentence you’re reading isn’t finished being written.

Why would you judge and critique a concept that isn’t fully formed? Where does this woman come from? Who does she think she is?

I didn’t think that people like this actually existed. I thought they were stereotypes cultivated  for the purpose of providing background extras for films about Andy Warhol. A woman comes down the stairs. Her bleached white hair is shaped like a space ship and she wears an outfit of only gold clothes. They’re worse than stereotypes, they’re cartoons. All they do is drift, look and judge. They don’t actually do anything. All of life is a show and they are a passive audience, critiquing it as they watch it go by.

I feel on edge. I don’t like being observed like an exhibit. And I certainly don’t like being critiqued. It suddenly occurs to me that I don’t have to put up with their shit. I’m so trained by my experiences working in the service industry. I’m brainwashed to keep quiet when someone disrespects me out of some delusion that they’re better than me.

“I could be an absolute asshole to these people if I wanted to,” I say to Garth.

I go to the kitchen for some soup. The Solar Guy comes in.

“I want to put up a sign that says, ‘No cooking meat in this kitchen.’ I hate the smell of cooking animal corpses,” he says.

Well, I hate the smell of sweaty feet, but I can’t kick the other occupiers out of the sleeping room. I live here. I have nowhere else to go. If I can’t cook meat here, I can’t cook it at all. I don’t want to become a vegetarian so this guy won’t have to smell meat cooking. I didn’t come here so people could dictate my lifestyle and my eating habits based on smells they don’t like.

Animals eat each other. That’s how life is.

I sit on our blue couch downstairs and watch cartoons. Pierre runs up to us in his flight suit.

“Tomorrow. One R or two?”

He runs away again.

I feel out of my element. The conversation has switched from philosophy to coding. I can talk philosophy and make art all day, but I know nothing about the intricacies of the internet.  The Global Square is a system I want to make a reality. The ideas on which it is based are exactly like the ones in my head. I want to contribute in a way that makes the group value me. But I don’t yet know how. I’m afraid that this will turn into one of those situations where the group just views me as Garth’s pet, someone who follows him around on a leash because I have nowhere else to go, someone who’s only here because he’s here. At least I can advertise. I can explain the project to passersby in a way that inspires and interests them.

I’m really here to write a story about the whole scene. That is my function. I’m on my own.

Carolina and Heather come back down to the couch in the afternoon.

“We’re gonna go to a Vietnamese restaurant with soup for 3 euros,” Heather says. “You guys wanna come?”

“Someone has to stay here and protect our space,” Garth says.

“I hate this!” Heather exclaims. “This is set up like a farmer’s market. People aren’t working together, they’re just protecting their turf. I hate that you guys are down here and we’re up there. We should all be sitting right here doing this together, and we should be able to go out and eat together without having to worry about people kicking us out of our space!”

Garth stays back while I walk to dinner with Carolina and Heather. The restaurant is cramped, but the chicken noodle soup is incredible. It comes in massive bowls. We discuss why people aren’t working together. The Occupy Berlin group is a closed circuit. Those of us from other countries feel like outsiders. It’s hard to say whether it’s a cultural difference or a trait of the group itself.

When we get back to the KW, the courtyard is packed. It’s a mosh pit. People spill drinks and eat bratwurst. I thought the opening would be on the 27th. Apparently it’s right now. It takes an hour to get down the hallway. The balconies are filled with spectators looking down on a big assembly taking place in the center of the Occupied space.

The activists sit in a huge circle, discussing why they are at the Biennale and having a whining session about how the visitors are just looking at them like they’re an exhibit. They’ve been debating these issues since before Garth and I arrived and making no progress toward an answer.

“Well, I have to admit, I do feel a bit foolish sitting here practicing politics in an art gallery where we are on display,” one fellow says.

While Heather, Carolina and I were at dinner, Garth was ambushed by other Occupiers who drove him out of the space in which we’d set up The Global Square. They moved all the projects and displays against the walls to accommodate for the crowd of onlookers. Heather is enraged and the fact that they ganged up on Garth after we left and eradicated him from our space.

Carolina gets on stack. When it’s her turn to speak, she walks toward the balcony and screams up at the observers. “Silence! We need some silence! We are here to talk about the world situation! If you’re not going to join us, you can leave!”

She speaks loudly, aggressively. It’s  volatile moment. Even the other activists are visibly uncomfortable with her extreme directness. I love it. This is what we need. The activists I’ve met so far in the Occupy movement have been way too polite. I’m not here to be polite and I’m glad I’ve met two women who feel the same way. Heather speaks next. She has a very quiet voice and she refuses to use the people’s mic. She wants people to shut up and listen. She talks right over everyone who attempts to make her use hand signals or shorten her sentences so the group can repeat them.

“I came here to connect and create!” she says. “Are we going to do that, or should I just put a big picture of myself on the wall so you all can walk by and look at it?! Some of you think this movement started on September 17, 2011! Some of you think it started on May 15th, 2011! It started in 2010! It started with my work at WikiLeaks! In 2010 we woke up! In 2011 we stood up! In 2012, we rebuild! That’s what I’m here to do!”

After Heather and Carolina speak, they disappear and the group goes back to debating what they’re doing and why they’re here. It’s such a waste of time. How can you not know why you’re doing what you’re doing?

Garth goes around picking up shattered glass so people won’t get it stuck in their feet. As he’s coming down a hallway with bottles in his hands, a drunken blonde grabs him and drapes herself all over him, wrapping her arms around his neck. He pries himself away and she stumbles down the hall, running into a door frame with a loud bang. All the activists disappear. Garth and I tire of fighting the crowds. We go to bed. The sleeping room smells like hell, but it’s the only place that’s quiet.

I’m disappointed with the whole day. I’m disappointed that Occupy Activists used the Majority Rule tactic to drive Garth out of our space the minute we left him alone. I’m disappointed that everyone is here for themselves rather than to connect and collaborate. I’m disappointed that we’ve made a display of ourselves rather than making an example of the kind of community we want to see in the world. I’m disappointed that we came here to share projects and ideas with people, but when those people showed up, the projects and ideas were swept into the corners  to make room for a mindless goddamn cocktail party. I’m disappointed that no one even knows what the hell they’re doing here. It’s fucking obvious.

Here it is:

Why Occupy is at the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art:

1) Art is the act of visualizing, creating and sharing something new. Occupy is envisioning, creating and sharing a new way of organizing communities and of governing humankind. We are always engaged in an interactive, communal, constantly-evolving work of art.

2) When a new way of thinking about or representing a concept emerges in the world, artists are usually the first to introduce it to the general public thru their work. It makes sense not only to work in the same space with artists, but also to work WITH them.

And to answer the other question:

Why are the visitors responding to us as tho were are an exhibit instead of interacting with us?

1) We are building within this space an example of the society we would like to see. We have arranged it like an art exhibit, so people are responding to it like they’re looking at an art exhibit. It consists of separate, distinct projects, booths and displays which do not interact or collaborate with one another. They are arranged in lines against the walls.

A community is not made up of information booths and passive observation stations. It includes living space, working space and education space among other things. People should eat, sleep and work in the hall. They should LIVE there. If we are not interacting with each other, the visitors will not interact with us. Our ideas, our models for society and government, are new. We have to show people what to do with them, otherwise they will just pass on by. We are responsible for being an example of what we’d like to see in the world.

This group has failed so far in that respect.

April 24, 2012:

I don’t have to do anything today.

That’s my first thought upon waking. It shoots me into cool, empty space, where the stars are goosebumps on God’s dark, unfathomable ass crack.

Sandy glasses and dirty coffee makers crowd the big wooden table. Garth and I sit next to them, eating cinnamon toast crunch, oranges and pudding. Cheery sun flutters angelically thru the window, batting its eyelashes.

A crowd materializes in the hall, surrounding Conceited Ponytail Guy. He stands with hands thrust deep in his pockets, a sheepish grin deflecting their questions. He tries to explain the movement, justify our presence at the Biennale. Words like “right, left and utopia” fly around. Like all press everywhere, they aren’t buying it. It’s too abstract, too philosophical, too new. What catchy headlines will they sift from this mire of leaderless chaos?

I used to like seeing my name and picture in the paper, but lately the press feel like poisonous insects. They can’t be trusted. They’re tools, not of the people, but of the boot heel. Their mission is not to collect and present true facts, but to filter facts according to agendas so that they may make money. They can’t be blamed. They’re trying to survive. Nevertheless, I prefer to be my own press. I am a giant eyeball made of flypaper. Everything sticks to me as I swivel around.

I don’t have to smile.

That’s my 5,089th thought of the morning.

The word is written in big letters at the bottom of a list of tasks on a chalkboard in the middle of the hall. It sticks me like a skewer to the ribs, but I don’t have to do it. I could be the worst, most repulsive asshole in the universe if I wanted to. This isn’t the service industry. I won’t get fired. Supposedly, you’re valued for your contributions here, not your personality.

Thought # 4,000,130: I need to know how to get tampons for free. That would solve all my problems.

My morning hours disappear into a pile of random crap. They turn into speakers, computer monitors, heaps of cables. I sort them into plastic bins and place the bins on metal shelves in the tech lab. My afternoon hours disappear into the bedroom and the basement. They become large, dirty shelves, tables and dividers. They become piles of tarps, sleeping bags and ground pads. I dig them out from under piles of boxes and jungles of DVD players. I haul them up cement stairs. I shake leaves and sand out of them. I fold and organize them. They come to resemble a cafe area and a sleeping area, separated by a wall of shelves.

At first, I work alone. Ponytail Guy comes into the room, speaking German with another fellow. He gestures with irritation at the stack of sleeping bags I’ve made in the window seat. He plucks them off one by one, setting them on the floor. I wait for a break in his conversation and say, “Do you need me to clear the space around the window?” I’m trying to help. I get no response. He doesn’t even look at me. He’s a foot away. I know he hears me. “Do you need me to clear the window space?” I ask again, loudly, clearly and politely. Still no response. I drop the blanket I’m folding and storm out of the room.

“That guy is such an unimaginable douchebag!” I sneer to Garth under my breath.

“Which guy?”

“The guy with the ponytail.”

Garth’s had problems with him too. They were building the kitchen floor together. Ponytail Guy was using a power tool wrong, so Garth politely attempted to correct him in order to make the work easier. Ponytail Guy got offended and chose not to use that tool at all. He also refused to speak to Garth for the rest of the day.

“Let’s go talk to him,” Garth says.

This approach hadn’t occurred to me. I was going to jump straight to gouging his eyes out with a chainsaw. He’s gone when we get back to the sleeping room, so Garth and I finish cleaning and constructing it together.

Thought # 13, 900, 007: I hated my girl scout leader. She was stuck up and her hair looked like a poodle.

“Assembleaaahhh!” Hector calls from the center of the Hall. He cups his hands over his mouth. “Assembleaaahh!” His voice carries like a shining bugle note over an empty plain. Paula joins him. Their voices harmonize in a war cry that fills every room and hallway.

A circle of chairs gather shoulder to shoulder in the Hall’s center. Inside those, a circle of blue couch cushions snuggle together. Inside that there’s a fluffy beige rug. People drip into the concentric rings, filling the chairs and floor. Little kids in rainbow sweaters jump on the cushions and vault over the picnic benches. People open laptops and notebooks.

The kids belong to Fabricio and his wife. They wear rainbow sweaters too. The wife looks like a Gypsie Kaleidoscope, swathed in layers of colorful pants and skirts. Her long, dark dreads thread thru seashells and tangle up into a green scarf, sticking out in all directions like a wild jungle plant. I can’t stop looking at her. She’s from that mystical, elusive “Somewhere Else” I’ve been looking for.

We met Fabricio last night. He harvests mate (mah-tay) by hand from the forests of Brazil and makes beer out of it. It’s the first open source product I’ve heard of. He will release the recipe for anyone to use, modify and produce.

A short, skinny girl in camouflage pants and blue pixie-cut hair facilitates the assembly. Instead of assuming a position of neutrality and making sure the conversation runs smoothly, she argues endlessly with people, delaying and drawing it out. She monopolizes and micro-manages the conversation and then gets irritated with people who direct their comments at her, as tho she’s a chairman, rather than addressing the entire group.

She insists we must get consensus on the order in which agenda items are discussed. She outlines two different “Order” options and puts them to a vote. No one gives any signals. She does this four times, receiving a lukewarm response which hopes only to shut her up and force her to move on. No one really seems to care about the order in which we discuss topics, but she isn’t picking up on that. She can’t gauge her audience. I’ve never seen any facilitator do this and I can’t see why it’s so necessary. We spend an hour on it before actually beginning the meeting, which drags out into torturous tedium for three more hours.

A flower made of bicycle wheels spins overhead. I let its metallic hiss fillet my brain. White paint chips off the faded wood table. Splinters stab into my fingernails. Globs of leftover color gather in my cuticles and I remember last night’s painting. Mozart’s notes turned my collarbones to glitter and I blew it onto the wall like pixie dust. That feeling of connecting and disappearing sinks into my knuckle creases like a tattoo. It will be remembered by no one except my decaying body, as it wears away against the world’s rough roads, getting smaller and smaller like a bar of soap.

This is not a tour. This is not an exhibit. This is my life.

Garth crawls past folding chairs onto the center rug and plucks 2 cookies from a wrapper. He hands one back to me. It’s a sandwich of waffle wafer, cinnamon and caramel. My teeth sink thru it, my spine glows and my forearms radiate the neon pink of dawn.

Alinka breaks out crying in the corner. She argues with someone at a neck-snapping pitch. The assembly ignores it at first. Grisha eventually wanders over to investigate. Some of the things she donated to the children’s booth have disappeared and no one can explain.

I must know that I need to disappear and become thin mountaintop air if I want to paint an honest picture. Forget everything with my rational mind and let the world and all its greasy hamburger wrappers sink into my skin like feet in wet sand.

The assembly has a big, long, noble discussion about how everyone should take care of the KW and refill toilet paper holders when they go empty. Then someone takes the last cookie and leaves the wrapper on the carpet at the center of the group. Everyone ignores it. Garth picks it up and sets a pink piggy bank in its place. A knife protrudes from the coin slot in the top of the pig’s head.

I need to acknowledge the pad stuck to my crotch and the fact that I’ve been on my period for two weeks straight.

I can’t do this. Four hours, no concrete decisions, infinite revolving arguments about why the sky is blue. As if the answer would make a difference in our lives.

I leave the assembly. I don’t care what decisions they make. It’s not as tho I let others make rules which I will passively follow without question. It’s more like I let people make rules which I totally disregard because I don’t feel that they apply to me. That’s not meant to be an egotistical statement; it’s a proclamation of self-sufficiency. I’m not interested in tangling myself up in a massive ball of yarn and throwing myself down 13 flights of stairs.

Even laws made by real governments feel like something meant for another universe. For example: I’m only allowed to stay in Europe for three months. Does anyone in a position to remove me from Europe know I am alive? Will they send someone crawling into the bushes to check my passport?

Two days have passed as quickly as single frames in a film. I was moving constantly, and when I finally went to bed at 4am, I still wasn’t tired. I like it that way.

April 23. 2012.

A curly-haired fellow with a 5 o’clock shadow and an American accent sits on the couch with a small group.

“I just wrote this sentence,” he says. “This is not an art project or a publicity stunt, nor is it a replacement for the occupation of a public space.”

A chainsaw’s high wine rips thru Alinka’s dissection of the statement. Alinka is a very active member of this group. She’s an older woman who was very politically active in the 60′s. She lives on a plain of existence which is tipped ever so slightly, so that everything she perceives and everything things she says is skewed almost imperceptibly. She seems to be talking about the same things we’re talking about, but her responses fail to fall flush with the rest of the conversation. They slip slickly past the connection docks and float out into the open sea. Sometimes, all you can do is watch them drift away. I like her tho. She’s genuine and earnest. She cares about the movement and she’s always bringing in waffle irons, flyers and huge pots borrowed from the neighbors.

This little group is attempting to write a document describing what Occupy is doing at the Biennale. In a direct democracy, the most difficult task a group can possibly undertake is the writing of a document which defines your group, its principles or its demands. You spend 6 hours debating whether or not to use words like “all-inclusive,” and 4 hours debating what the definition of the word “from” could possibly be and whether or not it adequately represents you. This is why I am now leaning away from direct democracy and toward stigmergy, epistemic communities and cocentric user groups.

The latter trusts the most qualified person or group of people to make decisions in their field without being constantly stymied by those who know nothing about the subject. Whether or not they have the qualifications to make such decisions is based upon peer review of work they’ve done in their field. And people who are affected by their work see a transparent record of it and give feedback, educating themselves on the topic so as to gain the ability to participate more actively in and have more of an effect on the decision-making process.

In other words, people who are capable of doing things simply do them, skipping the 800 hours of fruitless roundabout discussion of trivial matters; and people who want to be able to to do things, can learn how without slowing down or stalling the process that’s already underway.

A woman sings in German. Her eerie folk song echoes like a ghost thru stencils of naked men and words like “global” and “change.” A hammer knocks at nails, punching holes in the melody. A woman named Paula passes out the first copies of the Occupied Biennale Newspaper and then sets up a booth full of free childrens’ clothes and books.  A man with long hair sits on the balcony railing, typing on a laptop. Another man lashes a video camera to the same railing with blue tape. Manuel and Hector perch their laptop on a pedestal behind the railing. It’s live streaming. We’re being recorded from all angles.

A big green army tent sags onto its green wooden poles. I sit inside, writing in dim light. There aren’t enough people milling about yet. I can’t hide amongst them and observe them without being noticed.

“I’m gonna make a statement,” Garth says.

He colors the tip of a paint stirring stick red. He erects a ladder behind the cityscape made of boxes. Two tall, thin towers stand side by side in the back. He screws his paint stick to the top of one. They now unmistakably resemble the twin towers. Ground zero. A man laughs heartily from behind him. It’s homeless Genie, the long-haired, black-bearded fellow who had to argue for two hours with the general assembly about a 9-11 related display he wants to do. I still don’t know if they’re “allowing” it.

A solar panel smiles proudly from the black chalkboard wall. It’s plugged into a bike. Black and white curtains, silent dusty televisions and a few sleek gray couches from the deck of the Starship Enterprise give the hall an empty, airy space odyssey ambiance. Buckets of paint stack in ramparts around a sign-making table and a wall patch-worked with stencils. Out back, people plant a garden.

The balcony wraps around a red brick wall with ten arched doorways. They lead to the kitchen, tech labs and sleeping room. One of the hallways is covered from floor to ceiling with columns of blazing neon orange writing. A woman named Ursula stands on a ladder, copying passages from books onto the white wall with her paint brush. On other walls, news clippings, pamphlets, giant comic strips and books hung from wires fill the empty space between event calendars and spray-painted slogans of revolution.

Everyone is gone by 11pm. Paula hands us a set of keys so we won’t get locked out. The big green tent lurks in the dark, silent hall, a hibernating beast. Our key doesn’t open the door to the bathrooms. Looking for another one, I wander into the basement with a flashlight. The building is an ancient margarine factory. The ground is silky sand. The low, arching brick corridors crumble as they lead me in every direction. Around every corner, another corridor branches off toward another room full of sinks, stacks of wood and random weird things. Every hallway is darker than the last.

In the Hack Lab, Garth rolls gray carpet onto the floors, sets up benches and chairs, drills a hole in the center of the wide cork board table so that all the cords and power strips can pass thru.

“Do Whatever,” a strip of masking tape shouts from the wall.

There are no rules here. There is no manager, no supervisor, no leader. There are no assignments. There is no such things as “Permission.”

I spread plastic on the floor, haul brushes and buckets of paint into the lab and spend 5 hours painting a big picture of a computer tree on the white wall. I listen to Mozart’s Requiem, like I used to when I painted by candle light in the the abandoned church in New Orleans 4 years ago. “Requiem” makes everything in the world fall apart so you can see the insides and know that the real beauty of life is that nothing makes sense. I’ve always wanted to paint freely all over a huge wall.

Two fellows from Frankfurt arrive. One is a big, husky guy with dark skin and short dreads that stick up off his head like an aloe plant. His name is Hubert. The other wears purple balloon pants with colorful stripes down the sides, an orange and black houndstooth ladies jacket and a gold purse. His name is Sasha and he’s building a portable radio station for the 99%.

I really like our new home.

April 21. 2012.

“Someone emailed us and said they have a place for us to stay,” Garth says.

We jump off our bench by the fountain, leap across the street, fly down the stairs and arrive on the platform just in time to miss the train to Berlin. The next one won’t arrive for 18 minutes.

We’re cutting it close, like always. Our phone is dying, the train ride will be at least 30 minutes and Pierre leaves for France in 50 minutes. If we don’t arrive at Hauptbahnhof  Station to meet him and get the keys to his flat before he leaves, we’ll have no place to stay. Also, we will have wasted time and energy riding all the way into downtown Berlin for nothing. And that particular station is the size of a small town. If we do arrive in time and our phone has already died, we won’t be able to call Pierre to find out where to meet him. We may miss him by seconds.

I get out my laptop. Garth plugs the phone into it to keep it alive. Every second that ticks away is a bullet to one of my brain cells. I count down the stops as they crawl by. I’m not nervous about missing out on an apartment. Our spot in the woods is quite nice. I’ve enjoyed it. But if we can stay in the city, we can participate again in the project that drew us all the way to Germany in the first place.

We make it with two minutes to spare. Pierre stands next to a black suitcase, wearing an army green jacket with protest buttons clustered above his heart. He’s so international I’m never sure weather to kiss him on the cheek, give him a hug or shake his hand. We always do that stiffly smiling robot-dance combination of the three that ends up in a “Well, we’ll get to know each other eventually and you’re going to go live in my flat, so we may as well hug” type of thing.

He quickly scribbles instructions on a pink sticky note and hands over a set of keys. He’ll be gone until Tuesday. We’ll stay in his room for three nites. Hopefully, the Hall at the KW will be open for Occupiers by the time he returns home. Not that he would kick us out. We just don’t want to impose.

Pierre jumps on a train to the airport. He’s going to vote in the French Presidential Election. Garth and I jump on a train back to wherever we were. We’ll return to the woods and get our stuff.

Once there, we take our time, sitting in the treehouse, drinking our last two beers, eating our last two cheese sandwiches. I really like this camping spot. I feel relaxed here and I have a foreboding feeling about going back to the city, trying to get involved in the Occupied Biennale again.

I stuff the sap-sticky tent into my pack and zip the straps down tight. We traipse slowly thru the sunny woods and board the train for a third 30-minute ride. Fifteen minutes into it, for some unknown reason, Garth gets up to look at a rail system map and convinces himself we’re on the wrong train, going the wrong way. He shoos me out the door as we roll to a stop. We dash across the platform and hop onto a train going back the way we came. I take a look at the map myself. We weren’t going the wrong way at all. When the train stops, we rush out the door just in time to miss the train we should be on. The next one doesn’t come for ten minutes. Garth paces and fumes.

“Fuck! God damnit! I’m so sick of this shit! I’m so sick of riding trains and trying to do things!”

Garth hates waiting. He also hates public transportation. Subways, city buses, Greyhound buses and airplanes all strike an intense, irrational, anger-inducing panic in him. My best guess is that he hates being forced to rush and hurry. He doesn’t like being herded along in the Rat Race. He wants to move at a pace which is comfortable to him, so he has time to understand what’s going on. I get that. I’m the same way.

“I hate these transitions!” he says. “Next time we’re out, we’re out for good! I’m done!”

The transitions between hobo life and civilized life. Trying to live in two worlds at once rips you apart eventually. Garth and I need to pick one and stay put. I’ve been leaning more and more toward hobo lately. The woods. A slow, natural pace. There’s no place for me in the civilized world and my attempts to live in it despite being completely destitute are becoming increasingly depressing. We never have the resources to do what we’re trying to do. We don’t even have train fare. I’ve been looking over my shoulder all morning, scanning every platform for ticket checkers.

I hate the transitions too. And I’m sick of listening to Garth bitch and curse about the same shit every day. It doesn’t solve anything.

“Stop it!” I say. “Just shut up! Please!”

“Why!” he demands.

“Because I don’t wanna listen to that anymore!”

Pierre’s apartment is close to the KW. It’s an old building  with a huge tree in the courtyard and two sets of massive, ornate double doors on each landing. The white living room ceiling is ringed with a crown of carved foliage and cherubs. A chandelier hangs down amongst orange art deco couches that are dusty as dumpster dive scores. In the kitchen, open bottles of olive oil and a pot of dried-up chili crowd the stove.

“I liked the other apartment because it felt like no one else lived there,” Garth says.

I’m already tip-toeing, wondering if it’s okay to sit there or move that, feeling hemmed in on all sides by someone else’s life.

In Pierre’s room, gray slacks, a burgundy sweater and a stack of neutral-colored t-shirts spill out of shelves stacked with books, photographs and a camouflage helmet. A cord tangles around an iron that sits atop a stack of papers on a wicker table. Garth and I perch on the very edge of the bed with it’s black and white Japanese comforter.

Even tho I like Pierre, even tho he’s probably my favorite of all the people we’ve met here so far, it still makes me nervous to live in his space.

I take a shower, my first in four or five days, and find a tic buried in my left calf muscle. I’m going to die of lyme disease someday.

When we go out to eat, Garth and I find nothing but hip restaurants and the kind of convenience stores that sell an apple for three euros. We have just over 100 euros left. We can’t afford any of it. There are no real grocery stores for miles. We pace up and down in a cold, gray wind, staring with painful indecision at chalkboard menus that mock us happily from between cafe picnic tables.

Finally, out of desperation, we settle on a corner bratwurst bar. A young kid with a black chef’s jacket and huge spacers in his ears gets annoyed as we try to order two fries and four bratwurst in our frightfully limited German. It’s amazing how many simple words you can take for granted every second when you’re conversing in your native tongue.

We sit on stools at a wooden bar that faces out the window. The bratwurst are plain. No buns, no sauce. The fries are plain as well. Altogether, they cost 9 euros. Eating an  over-priced  frugal dinner in a hip bar on a Saturday night, watching stylish people laugh and talk as they stride toward their exclusive good times in one if the most happening cities I’ve ever been to is quite depressing. And one of our bratwurst is cold. Completely uncooked. I can’t help but wonder if they did it on purpose. This only depresses me further.

Garth and I disappear from our stools, take the last two brats to the flat and microwave them. We eat them without speaking and go straight to bed.

I don’t know if we should’ve bothered coming back. Most of the people involved with the Occupied Biennale are self-absorbed. This isn’t going to be an Occupy encampment, a community. It’s going to be a bunch of hip posers putting themselves on display for connoisseurs of “discourse-based contemporary art.” With the exception of Carolina and Pierre, I feel nothing human emanating from this group and it’s killing my interest in the movement. There are too many people in the world, and most of them don’t have time to do anything but plaster cleverly applicable quotes from JFK and MLK all over facebook. Will enough “shares” and “likes” change the world eventually? I’m beginning to think the best I can do is get out. Disappear. Hide. Wait for the ice caps to melt and drown everyone.