As many events in my life are, this post was sparked by a discussion on Gawker (lately, it’s the rare one which doesn’t center around how awful Kinja is becoming, and god knows, it started out badly).
…and was welcomed by the locals in much the same spirit.
Now, I’m going to make a radical proposal. There will be mucho blowback on this controversial statement; of that I am well aware. My lawyers are standing by, along with a team of trained PR ninjas, to ensure we all come out of the ensuing melee with our orthodontistry intact.
I’m going to say that the gentrification of Brooklyn has been going on for more than a century. It’s true! There never was a time when it was “the undiscovered country!” And there never really was a time when anyone was happy to move out of Manhattan and across a bridge, unless they were getting out of the MCC.
Here’s your proof. Memory is a wonderful thing, my friends, for lo, it has enabled me to read a Gawker post about sprawling colonialism in Brooklyn and tie it to this comic, from Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, a marvelous collection of turn of the last century but one comics, all based on nightmares from having had too much Welsh Rarebit. I must test this theory out on the ol’ drinkscoaster blog someday, and snarf a whole Welsh Rarebit just before bed, preferably with the kind of beer that just gets gassier the farther along the gastrointestinal tract it gets.
From the brilliantly twisted mind of Winsor McCay, and from the readers who sent in their dreams for illustrations (or the stories he made up when nobody was forthcoming; was this the first Overheard In model in history?), not to mention the good people at the Comic Strip Library, comes this panel. True then as now, down to the olde timey get-ups and the novelty smoking equipment.
God or Cthulhu or universal pantheistic principle help me. I’m turning hippie.
Yes, after several long months of dithering and running all over BC in search of pets to sit, I will be sitting still for some time, as in BEING GEOSTATIONARY, at least until I go back to Vancouver to volunteer at the BIL conference (an alt-TED conference) and run a Bitcoin workshop. And the next month, when I come back again to poodle-sit for an old friend. But otherwise, I’ll actually know where I’m going to be from one week to the next, which is something I haven’t been able to say since last April, when The Prospective Landlord from the world’s most perfectplace bailed on me, rendering me technically homeless and throwing me into a new sideline as a pet and house and occasional child sitter.
I will be at an Ecovillage just outside of one of my favorite places, Not-Ucluelet, of which I have spoken before. For those who wish to take this opportunity to pizza me, remember: I have no credit cards and I prefer my pizza with anchovies.
Behold the ecovillage:
This could be the end of Hobocoaster (although there’s still a book in it if I ever have time to write it, as my friend Alex pointed out. Bitcoin and Backpacking? Something like that).
The question is, is this the beginning of Hippiecoaster? I’m not sure, as previous experiments in veganism did not exactly work out (unless you consider chest pains and fainting as “working out”) and I don’t like pot. Naturally, I turned to the internet for answers.
OKCupid says I’m Alt-Hippie, the most mainstream of hippie archetypes, which most people who know me would agree with. I did used to work for Greenpeace but then, I did used to work for Starbucks too.
Alternate
You are 32% experimental, 50% feral, 41% spiritual, and 10% square!
Congratulations! You’re Alternate. The Alternate is, at first glance, the most mainstream of hippies. You are probably more into protecting disempowered people and the environment than expanding your mind or achieving a higher state of being, but you aren’t so into nature that you choose to live in a tree. You even shower at times, and some people may not notice the passionate hippie lurking beneath the seemingly conservative exterior.
The hippie world needs you because you earth the other hippies, and form a bridge between them and the rest of society.
If you believe that opposites attract, you probably find yourself around Full-blown hippies. If you are more inclined to enjoy the company of those with similar attitudes, then other Alternates, as well as the Faerie-child, Treehugger, and Raver are for you.
According to this infographic, I’m a fairly advanced Level 6 hippie, Hippie 2.0, which seems right, since I refused to move to the ecovillage until I had been assured there was both electricity and wifi.
The Hippie Continuum
Now, Shahee, who has more or less set this whole thing up, is your basic, full-blown hippie. I sometimes worry that he feels guilty for wearing clothes made of plant fibers, and probably walks through meadows going “Excuse me!” “Oops, Sorry”! etc to all the plants he’s stepping on. So it’s going to be a bit of a cultural shift for me.
Then again, having had cultural and geolocationary shifts every two weeks since last April, it might come as something of a relaxing change. If nothing else, on a green kale and smoothie diet I’m going to lose some of the blubber which keeps me warm in the winter.
Audible punctuation in my sentences is always a bad sign. If I also narrow my eyes while. enunciating. clearly. , adopt a defensive posture IMMEDIATELY: Stop, drop and roll and if you’re lucky you won’t be hit by the fallout. If you’re really clever, you’ll keep on rolling to the liquor cabinet and roll back with a very large, very cold stirred Botanist Martini for me.
and how was yours, motherfucker?
“It’s not a done deal.”
There are many points in life when you don’t want to hear those words, but I’d venture to say that among the very mostest so is the seventeenth of the month when you are expecting to move into the house on the first of the next month. From your landlord.
Or maybe not-landlord.
Particularly having packed up everything you own and thrown it in storage at a cost, thanks to enthusiastic but amateur labour, of about $300 more than one had budgeted for labour.
THIS is my fortune? From lunch Saturday.
I. God. Damn. Well. Better. Be.
The possibility exists that he’s hoping to leverage my desperation against the price of the rent and pop it up by a hundred or so a month, which would frankly make this a non-possibility for me; I took that off the table immediately by being upfront about how much I do and do not earn in a month. As it is, the place would take slightly more than 50% of my income, but the lifestyle rewards would more than make up for that in my book.
It is indeed a lovely house in a lovely pocket valley with lovely vineyards, a spectacular view, a half-hour walk from my friend’s barn with her two horses, and a couple of blocks away from the covered riding arena. When I asked what the facilities fee was for the riding arena, I was told there is no fee.
Also, plenty of room in the house for Julian, should he wish to take refuge on a Canadian Indian Band reservation, with a very aggressive attitude towards independence from whitey’s Big Sweatervest in Ottawa. If the RCMP or, god forbid, the Yanks, set foot on the Rez for the purposes of nabbing Jules, there would be an international armed uprising the like if which hasn’t been seen since we Canucks looted and burned the White House. So, either way this is a win for a revolutionary, right? AMIRITE?
He’s all like, I dunno, whatever you say, raincoaster
So, this has basically been my position every day for the past, say, TEN YEARS, ever since I moved into Mildew Manor. Within a week, I noticed black mildew in my bedroom, where a concrete structural column comes up quite near the bed. The building manager told me to keep the bedroom warm and it would eventually go away, which it did after I coated the entire column in bleach, only later finding out that causes the mold to release spores or weaponize or some godforsaken thing.
About four years ago, I started to notice greyish stripes in my living room walls, coming down from the ceiling. I didn’t know then it was black mold on the uprights, but I do now. For some reason, I assumed the stripes were my fault, maybe from burning something on the stove, or the candles, or maybe incense, and the “extra gravity” of the uprights attracted the microscopic particles. Yeah, I was drinking a bit at the time.
By the time I found the mushrooms growing in my carpet and the hole eaten in the wall behind the tv, however, the jig was up and I knew it was not my fault. It’s ZEUS’s fault, damn him. Eventually the co-op fixed the eavestroughing, so the water no longer cascaded down the wall outside, right where the tv is. And eventually the carpet became so wet it would no longer support any fungus this side of blue-green algae. And eventually the mildew decided it was being too geostationary, and started spreading across the walls everywhere, giving the place sort of a greyed chicken pox look. It’s very Derelicte!
Not to mention the incessant soundtrack. We’ve had two years of construction at the co-op, and it has finally reached my apartment (they’ve been trying to work out their courage, I guess) and so every day I have been waking up to a symphony of sledgehammers and jackhammers and smash, crash, boom, to the point where the entire bed shakes, not to mention the two I call the Fuckery Twins with their vocabulary. Seriously, nobody should start with that vocabulary until I’ve had my coffee. Bring back the nice supervisor who did bird calls and sang to himself; he was nice. I bet he was cute, too.
Anyway, for the curious, here is the soundtrack to which I awaken each day at 8, which is awkward since I work each night till 4.
Anyway, 300 words to say that in ONE MORE WEEK I will never have to deal with this place again (other than sending in my tax assessments for the last three years so they don’t sue me, welcome to co-op living). And I’m telling you, I cannot wait.
Since the power’s off, because I DO NOT WANT TO BE ELECTROCUTED BY MY BASEBOARD HEATERS, I sleep with three empty whiskey bottles full of hot water (yay for central hot water) and one actual hot water bottle, and it works very well under my eiderdown, Hudson’s Bay Blanket, and down-filled full length parka. For lights, I use a railway lantern from Army & Navy which would work well if it weren’t made in China and thus leaks as soon as you set it on a hard surface. And that, when it works, works well.
And that, my friends, is how I’m going to be packing up my apartment over the next five days, God help me.
Here’s a brilliant idea: since the US government just announced they’ll use $700,000,000,000 yes, seven hundred BILLION dollars, to buy junk assets, this site, BuyMyShitPile has decided to let the people market their crap directly to the government, no middle man required! As anyone who has seen the interior of my apartment can attest, I’ll be a bajillionaire in no time! Party at raincoaster’s!!!
“I grew up in America and I love my country, but Lord knows, I have to make a living,” Peter Starmeyer, 38, says from the makeshift plywood and cardboard shanty he now calls home on Toronto’s increasingly seedy west side.
“When Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and I lost my job, I had no other choice. The only way for me to keep living the American dream was to move to Canada where businesses value and respect workers and try to help them hold on to their jobs.”
An e-mail that began as a rallying cry from a lone journalist to an influential circle of friends to protest the U.S. government bailout of Wall Street has ignited a national day of street protests. Some demonstrators plan to dump their rubbish in front of the bronze bull sculpture near Wall Street in downtown Manhattan Thursday.
“People are going to bring their own personal junk that they think is worth as much as the junk financial instruments that the government is proposing to buy from the Wall Street banks,” says Andrew Boyd, an activist and freelance online-video artist for nonprofit groups in Manhattan. “We’re hoping that people show up with their 8-track cassette collections, their old Spice Girl CDs, their surf boards that got bit by sharks and old Enron stock certificates.”
This week the White House is going to try to push through the biggest robbery in world history with nary a stitch of debate to bail out the Wall Street bastards who created this economic apocalypse in the first place.
This is the financial equivalent of September 11. They think, just like with the Patriot Act, they can use the shock to force through the “therapy,” and we’ll just roll over!
Think about it: They said providing healthcare for 9 million children, perhaps costing $6 billion a year, was too expensive, but there’s evidently no sum of money large enough that will sate the Wall Street pigs. If this passes, forget about any money for environmental protection, to counter global warming, for education, for national healthcare, to rebuild our decaying infrastructure, for alternative energy.
This is a historic moment. We need to act now while we can influence the debate. Let’s demonstrate this Thursday at 4pm in Wall Street (see below).
We know the congressional Democrats will peep meekly before caving in like they have on everything else, from FISA to the Iraq War.
With Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie, AIG, the money markets and now this omnibus bailout, well in excess of $1 trillion will be distributed from the poor, workers and middle class to the scum floating on top.
This whole mess gives lie to the free market. The Feds are propping up stock prices, directing buyouts, subsidizing crooks and swindlers who already made a killing off the mortgage bubble.
Worst of all, even before any details have been hashed out, The New York Times admits that “Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it,” and its chief financial correspondent writes that the Bush administration wants “Congress to give them a blank check to do whatever they want, whatever the cost, with no one able to watch them closely.”
It’s socialism for the rich and dog-eat-dog capitalism for the rest of us.
Let’s take it to the heart of the financial district! Gather at 4pm, this Thursday, Sept. 25 in the plaza at the southern end of Bowling Green Park, which is the small triangular park that has the Wall Street bull at the northern tip.
By having it later in the day we can show these thieves, as they leave work, we’re not their suckers. Plus, anyone who can’t get off work can still join us downtown as soon as they are able.
There is no agenda, no leaders, no organizing group, nothing to endorse other than we’re not going to pay! Let the bondholders pay, let the banks pay, let those who brought the “toxic” mortgage-backed securities pay!
On this list are many key organizers and activists. We have a huge amount of connections – we all know many other organizations, activists and community groups. We know P.R. folk who can quickly write up and distribute press releases, those who can contact legal observers, media activists who can spread the word, the videographers who can film the event, etc.
Do whatever you can – make and distribute your own flyers, contact all your groups and friends. This crime is without precedence and we can’t be silent! What’s the point of waiting for someone else to organize a protest two months from now, long after the crime has been perpetrated?
We have everything we need to create a large, peaceful, loud demonstration. Millions of others must feel the same way; they just don’t know what to do. Let’s take the lead and make this the start!
AGAIN:
When: 4pm – ? Thursday, September 25.
Where: Southern end of Bowling Green Park, in the plaza area
What to bring: Banners, noisemakers, signs, leaflets, etc.
Why: To say we won’t pay for the Wall Street bailout
Who: Everyone!
raincoaster 