Unclaimed Position

Yesterday we served coffee and oatmeal and hard-boiled eggs while security guards hired by the business association took photos of the homeless in line. They’ve done this regularly since the police and county health inspectors tried chasing the food servers away earlier in the year.

How about the position of the homeless in downtown L.A.: Being photographed in order to receive a free breakfast.

Afterward, my friends and I attended a burial ceremony to commemorate the year’s unclaimed bodies in the city.

There’s a reasonable chance some of those bodies ate food prepared by my friends.


Here's the latest on the breakfast line.

The Step-Down Room

The step-down room on the second floor was added to the Victorian in the 1940s. It is the most popular bedroom in the house, with good reason, beginning with the four steps leading from door to floor. 

Sunken rooms are fun, especially in a hippie house where everyone lives in voluntary poverty.

When my friends began occupying the Victorian in 1978, they used the step-down room to put together editions of their radical newspaper. The newspaper’s overflowing archives and parties have since been moved to the basement of the back house, so that the step-down room has passed from occupant to occupant, and I mean couple to couple.

Jim and Joyce lived in the step-down room 20 years ago. Now they live in Long Beach. Jim still enjoys driving up and answering the phone at the house on Saturdays, while everyone works at the soup kitchen.

The ceiling in the step-down room was painted a few years ago by a couple who fell in love after meeting here. After they moved out, Kurt and Sybilla moved in for a year.

Now the step-down room happens to be my girlfriend’s room.

Last night I fell asleep staring at the ceiling and listening to the sound of helicopter blades churning over Occupy L.A. Five members of this community were present at the eviction. Four were arrested.

I’m so grateful there was no serious violence, despite the local newscast repeatedly and unequivocally stating beforehand that 15 to 30 “bad apples” among the protestors were going to become violent with the police and the police will have to respond.

Don’t you just love it when reporters tell you the story before it ever happens.

Of all the garbage the local newscast dished out, my favorite was a demonstrator grabbing the microphone of an on-scene reporter and criticizing the mainstream media for showing images of people with gas masks ready instead of interviewing school teachers planning to be arrested. The station cut away to another reporter on the scene showing protestors with gas masks ready.

This morning, I flew to Cleveland to complete the data analysis for my animal shelter story. I'm really looking forward to sharing it here later this month.

Issues of fairness and justice have been on my mind, and how these sorts of stories are told. I find myself thinking about the future of this world plenty lately. 

But mostly I just like hanging out in the step-down room.

Enough Food For All

For Thanksgiving 80 people showed up. Forty were invited. It usually works the other way. Half as many as invited show up.

I washed a total of four plates and spent the afternoon playing croquet on the lawn with our guests.

I don’t get the alone time I’d like to have here in order to write, and this past week was especially challenging with the holiday.

But that’s the world. I’m thankful for a roof over my head and for being able to swing a mallet while the cleanup was done without me.

Clothesline

Kids from the neighborhood occasionally crawled up the hill at night and stole jeans off the clothesline. That happened in the 70s and 80s and even 90s, before this neck of East L.A. gentrified. Now many of the kids in the neighborhood wear nicer jeans than the hippies and anarchists who live here, and a pair hasn’t been stolen off the line in years.  

One washing machine spins the load here and no dryer. There is no shortage of clothespins, so long as side-by-side items share a single pin. Dish towels and general cleaning rags from the soup kitchen are washed and hung before personal laundry, which is how it usually works.

Pictured above is Catherine Morris. She has been to jail more than 40 times over the past 40 years in protest of various injustices, from the latest war to the consistent treatment of homeless folks.

So it’s a kick to know these people who have been doing civil disobedience for a long time, especially when we load up the pick up after working a full day in the soup kitchen and head out to feed everybody at Occupy L.A. Today they got ice cream. 

Staircase

Working and living here and working on my draft of my animal shelter non-fiction narrative has consumed a lot of my fire lately. But I chased some light in the stairwell this afternoon after my nap in the closet and wanted to share. Looking forward to reading blogs this week.

I plan to add a couple more photos of the staircase over the next couple of days. Ten minutes of light wasn't enough to do justice.

Yesterday

Got up at six. Had tea and toast. At the soup kitchen, we swept the outside seating area by 7. By 7:20, I was eating a pancake the cook whipped up for the early morning help. I made salad dressing for 1,200 people. I forgot to mix four garlic heads into half the batch, but it all worked out because the cook needed to get the pasta going quick and when he found out what I had left in the blender he was thrilled. While we served food, I tossed tomatoes in the salad and buttered bagels and opened donated bags of pasta, the sample size. 

Got home at 1:15 p.m. The week’s community meeting began at 2. It was noted that an unusually large amount of food was served for the first day of the month, which is when people who live on checks usually receive their checks. They don’t visit soup kitchens until their money runs out later in the month.

I made dinner. It consisted largely of leftovers from an acclaimed Monday meal. I’m lucky that way. On my very first “house day” in 2006 a friend of the community’s dropped off an entire rib dinner for forty. There were twenty in the house at the time, but we put it all away. I accepted credit for the rib dinner as I did the leftover buffet, though little was forthcoming. After dinner, five people performed a Gregorian chant after the cat was removed from the room. The cat knocked over a photo of Cesar Chavez on the top-most tier of the Day of the Dead altar in order to sleep. Luckily, there are many pictures of Cesar in the house. Also lucky that someone snapped a photo before Star was evicted. 

Before I locked up the house at 10 p.m., I forgot to fetch the 10-gallon pots from the garage and fill them with water on the stove so the early risers could fire up the burners for whichever anarchist or hippie happened to be making coffee and oatmeal in the morning. I fell asleep in the closet to thoughts of sugar plums and having the entire afternoon free today to write in my blog.

The Closet

My room is the closet. I've lived with my hippie friends three times, and I've stayed in a variety of rooms, but never the closet. I've heard tales of watching the hummingbirds come to the feeder outside the window and other enjoyable experiences, like napping, in the tiniest of rooms. The closet is the first room on the left at the top of the staircase. It was originally the bathtub and shower portion of the third-floor bathroom. Then somehow cement fell down the drain, and the tub no longer worked. A community member at the time, John, remodeled it into a nook of a room with a slim loft bed. This was about 1980. John didn't sleep in the room. It was more of a showcase piece. People just started living in it. These days beneath the loft is a dresser and a built-in trunk with a trap door that John originally fashioned to be a desk with a swinging tabletop. The space beneath the loft has undergone many transformations. The room itself attracts much in the way of decoration. Sam hung the bird feeder outside the window a few years ago. Sybilla painted the walls, floor and door a couple years ago. Before I moved into the closet this week, Mitchell was living here. Someone will stay here after me.

I plan to live in the commune through the end of the year. I'm grateful for what is my fourth stay here since 2006. I am diligently working on my animal shelter story and expect it to publish in December. I will keep you posted. I'm looking forward to talking more about putting it together. Meantime, I may write a little about this alternative lifestyle I will be participating in for the next couple months. And the house we all live in.

Peace Plan

The official decree says we aren’t supposed to hold hands. The newspaper of record says it’s an act of treason to smile at each other. The politician announces that we are not allowed to assemble in public if we plan to do so for longer than ten minutes.

My flower power queen, I want to climb the nearest garbage truck and sing about us. I want to croon it to the haters doing their best to disguise their fear. I want to drape my arms over the redcoats and chalk pink hearts on their shields.

Experiencing the basic principle of this world is a tradition: You do what the man with the gun says.

The expectations dwarf me. The grand plans might wash us away. I was born under a purple moon and honestly, no one really wants to see us together. But I’ll go anywhere you lead me, no matter which world, no matter which brand of gun.


For dVerse Open Link Nite.

Mr. Slow Learner

I have learned something worth learning.

Sure, I know how to touch your body a thousand different ways.

But it’s love that brightens the sky.

And making you happy is the greatest turn-on of all.