feeding him lunch

for 17 years now i have been working with disabled people in berkeley.
i have been around for so long in this field that i have filled almost every role there is
from working with the city to get funding, being on the board of directors, to the terrifying
time spent in the hospital with a broken neck and laying in bed in nonstop pain thinking i will be disabled the rest of my life for saving some one else.
the way i see people is totally enriched by my job. i love it. its blood shit and piss and degrading.
its asking for money. its saving someones life and not getting any thanks. its also being with
people while they die or just go bye bye in spirit. as well as getting overwhelmed with gratitude for
itching a nose or plugging in a lamp.
today it was all about class issues;
j.d. is recent to being disabled. he has power issues around this and i know that he wants me to
be invisible while i feed him his sandwich. he is talking to two girls on campus and they are
mustering up awkward small talk about their teachers and dissing on fellow students.
totally ignoring my presence. i don't mind and i wipe his mouth. give him a drink and
pull out the other half of his bologna sandwich, not untill they are arguing about a dumb
half unit class that they need to fufill some credit.
i spoke my first words of the hour. " i took a half unit of ballroom dancing."
in that sentence i
1. made myself exsist
2. let them know that i too was a student at this university before them
3. made light of the whole serious dilema by suggesting the non academic "ballroom dancing"

they laughed, they started to look at me -something real happened in the supperficial awkward
meeting they were in.

however it is breaking the power that j.d. had in keeping me as his tool.
in a progressive town like berkeley this is thought of as "bad"
but in the context of a disabled person getting his needs met i am just getting paid to attend.

to me its a significant metaphor; physically i have all the power. socially i am just a tool.
just like larger groups of repressed people who are being used. its not so obvious right away.
it was easy for those girls to treat me like that, like i wasn't there. untill i opened my mouth
but that inadvertantly took j.d.s power.

genoa

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/13/HODLUU63M.DTL&type=printable


my house in oakland was where i ended up after barrington hall was forcibly shut down by the
university of berkeley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrington_Hall#Barrington_graffiti

there was about 200 of us officially and un- living in a huge three story building with a flat roof
top for the naked suntanning inclined.
also the was a scary boiler room basement that no one went into. i saw it twice in the three years
i lived there. in the official court papers filed against barrington (and there were alot)
are claims that teen aged run aways were kept as sex slaves down there.
we were also charged in court as being "experimental testing grounds for drugs of the future"
after barrington hall was closed a small hand full of us tried looking for a place to start another
co-op. fast forward almost 20 years i finnally did it.
genoa st. house, a.k.a purple house is officially a collectively owned house with the title
no longer in my name but in "pink inc." a non profit with a board of directors.
we still have parties and run a muck with the city but its no longer my liability !!

im not sure why we got away with what we did the last couple of days before the bus
broke down. it only seems appropriate that the engine just quietly quit. my psyche was telling
it that either i have a mental break down or the bus so she became the martyr ...

first off detroit as a city is as american Apocalypse as we have, block after block
of beautiful archetecure rot, trees growing off the walls of buildings who refuse to give up
long after the community has. boarded up neighborhoods and corporations. we drove the
bus to pick up the audience and bands around an island that was a car racing track. we had
a bbq where lots of young hip folk showed up and dropped acid. that was pretty much the
beggining of the night.
i didn't know that when the sudden flash thunder storm hit that more lsd was being passed
around. we drove thru a stampede of the baseball stadium emptying out into the rainstorm
a drenched girl escaped the shower with her bike by asking if she could come into the bus. she stayed with us all night. other random folk hopped on at the next stop
we pretty much hijacked the audience of the "question mark and the mysterians"
show. we parked at the roll up door to the show right in view of the stage. the band was just
starting "96 tears" thier big hit from the late 60's and soon we had lots of old hippies in the bus
while a band was playing inside the bus. we took over thier parking lot after the mysterians
were finished.
then we drove our larger audience to the 20 story monster empty trainstation. where promptly
all the audience floated into the haunted building.
little did they know or could process that we had been followed there by the most stealth cop car i have ever seen

the cops slowly drove up to my drivers window with the head lights off. sat there then drove to the corner of the block and watched as hallucinating people ducked under the barbedwire
and entered the train station. the band was pod blotz
whos blast of noise could be heard echoing thru the building.
then. strange enough to not really be out of place. a mini van
full of drunk people with black metal corpse paint showed up:

There have been alot of questions about the bus, where it is and what's happening with it.
today i am spending all day in my room. like a sabbatical, my own self imposed retreat.
yet the phone has been going off and the last few calls were just friendly;
"hey, hows it going? where's the bus?"

so after three of those in a row i turned it off.
started a blog
uploaded some pictures
then im going downstairs and make some food from the fine load of food not bombs deliveries
that showed up this morning.

im very happy with the latest chapter in the bus project.
basically in a nut shell;

the bus is
a big empty show space. inside the bus is a stage, p.a., lights and room
for an audience inside aswell as on the roof. its powered by veggie oil, solar panels
and batteries. we take the venue on tour and have local stuff happen inside.
as of 08 we have done 191 shows, over 600 bands have played inside.

-on our way back westward after our second time around the country the bus engine quietly ate one of its own pistons. we were leaving detroit with somewhere around 18 people. on this leg of the tour
we had done shows with bands in the bus from florida to maine. from maine to niagra falls, around the great lakes
and did an all night show with a bunch of picked up audience members around detroit
(that show is a book unto itself)
i drove about two hours out of detroit on our way to chicago when we had to coast to a stop
in a town called " albion "
about an hour after the bus spewed all its liquids onto the albion exit another white bus
pulled up just to say "howdie! i just bought this bus 45 minutes ago..." all the passengers from
my bus and some music equipment got loaded into his bus, while he was explaining where he was going. just happened to be the very same block in chicago we were headded.

dave kloot and i stayed in albion. the rest hopped trains into a storm in Iowa where they
got flooded in.
we stuck around getting the bus into a yard and trying to figgure out what next.

last weekend we bought a house on ebay for four thousand dollars in albion mi. hopefully we
can get a crew together to go back out and revamp the bus - fix up the house - do art
spread some love around albion.

Flickr

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