cities & farms

I know I have all the time in the world to try out different places and different lives and figure out what's right for me, but opportunities always seem to pop up when I can't really take advantage of them, and they're always hard to find when I go looking.

Yesterday I talked to a few of the Biofuels kids about an internship on their CSA farm, over on their industrial site in Pittsboro. The pay is low, but more than enough, especially since housing is provided, and ever since I worked on a WWOOF farm in Ontario two years ago, that's the environment I've been longing to come back to. Working on a farm, or in any small, fairly contained setting where you both live and work, there's a distinct and wonderful feeling of community that has to develop. I like to know what my physical work is for each day, and to do it, and to know, tangibly, that it is done. Working with a small number of other people is rewarding in the same way - you will develop tangible relationships and bonds, and take the time to value them.

I've been trying to live in a collective house in Chicago - we're all trying. My housemates are wonderful, caring, smart people, but we're all so busy all the time, with things in and out of the house, that it's hard to spend the time to feel really connected, sometimes. This is how I feel about Chicago in general, and maybe just about city life. There are so many places and people and attractions pulling us in different directions at any given moment that it's hard to choose any one direction to focus on. There are a lot of half-finished projects. There are a lot of promising friendships that remain on the verge of acquaintance and comrade.

I was talking about this the other night, to a friend from Chicago who now lives in New Orleans but is also visiting family in Chapel Hill for a week (as always, a small world...). Everyone is concerned about community. But everyone I know is moving constantly, looking for new adventure or maybe looking for a new scene that hasn't dried up yet, when maybe what we should be doing is staying put, establishing relationships and reciprocities that will have to last longer than a few months or a few years. Maybe we should stop being so afraid to let our roots latch onto the ground beneath our feet. Nico says that it comes down to people needing each other, and I agree. I've spent enough time fighting with myself about this thing exactly, about whether it's better to be independent and thus somewhat safe & less vulnerable, or to openly, joyfully need other people. I need to feel needed. I know that.

He says small towns are probably the model, ideally, for the ways we will have to live if things become bad enough, in some societal or ecological way, for us to have to start needing one another again, and to be self-sustaining within smaller communities. Yet we're all looking to cities, because they are big and sprawling and beautiful, because in a city I can work and live and bike and grow in community gardens and use public transportation and have access to arts...but what I can't do is be a necessary part of it, because the whole system is too large. We forge communities within it, wonderful communities that overlap with other ones and last for a short while, but we all know that we can move at a moment's notice, that we will not all be here forever.

All I'm trying to say is something about community and human dependence. I spent yesterday agonizing over whether I should stay here and be happy and healthy and focused, working in the dirt, learning to live with a small group of people, or whether I should go back to my big beautiful Chicago, to a similarly tangible job and to a small group of people I could learn to live better with. I'm going back, of course. I have too many plans and commitments and friends coming from out of town; I have way too much love for the long, flat streets and the ability to get around without a car.

I just got new wheels built for my bike, after all.















(pictures found at the "Virtual Tour of Piedmont Biofuels" photo set on flickr.)

it's a small world after all

...as we all know, as it proves itself again and again in lovely small ways.

I'm in North Carolina, after a pretty last-minute trip based around helping Lindsay and her pop drive a U-Haul down to Richmond to store her stuff for the summer while she travels South America, before moving to Carrboro in the fall. It was a great drive - once we hit the South, the air got warm and the sun got bright and when we stopped in DC traffic, we could smell the honeysuckle by the side of the road.

It's nice to see hills and trees again. It's nice to sit in coffee shops for hours talking to every familiar face that walks in. It's nice to ride my dad's bike through these small-town streets and up the steep hills I'm not used to anymore, to have long conversations with friendly strangers, to spend afternoons on our shady front porch in Bynum with the dog.

This afternoon my mom and I drove out to the Piedmont Biofuels Co-op, past Pittsboro, for their weekly tour. They showed us the process in which the waste oil they've collected is converted into high-quality biodiesel, and all the ways they're trying to become sustainable, using solar power and teaching courses to interested homebrewers, starting a "farm incubator" program where they "grow farmers" - giving new faces a chance to get a start and learn their craft on the land before striking out on their own. At the beginning of the tour, he showed us the large solar panels on the roof of a shed filled with big containers of oil sitting to allow the crud to settle out at the bottom. Half the panels were shaded from the afternoon sun.

"We'd get way more power if we cut down this big tree that's blocking it, but we like the tree, so we're not going to do that," he explained. A big black dog was lying in the shade; a hammock was strung between that tree and another. I'm glad their work towards efficiency and sustainability hasn't yet required the compromise of a shady tree. That seems important.

There are a lot of really great projects going on around here that I'm excited about every time I visit, even though the most I can do is come check them out for a day, maybe hang around and help out and make some friends, and then vanish for six months or a year before coming back to check on their progress. It's a bummer, and it's at least in part a function of not living here, and therefore having nothing but time when I am here. There are great projects that I don't get involved in, in Chicago. If I was visiting there, I probably would make a point to check them all out and get excited about them, and wistful about leaving them behind.

Or maybe it's just that this is where I'm from, and so these are people who seem to speak at my pace.

Projects/Stuff I wish I could stay & get involved with:
Durham Bike Co-Op
Carrboro ReCyclery
Piedmont BioFuels
Bull City HeadQuarters
Paper Hand Puppet Intervention
Nightlight
Chatham Marketplace
Carrboro Comida No Migra (like Food Not Bombs)
and much more, i'm sure

backtrack

remember: the scent of woodsmoke still rising from our pillows in the morning.

remember: blue ink under my fingernails on slow Indiana hills.

i'm forgetting the phone numbers of all the girls i used to love - or, still do, but maybe in distant and parallel ways.

big blue skies & a southward breeze and we passed the mountains long ago.

short hair, dragging feet. gold wristwatches. ghost towns with the most beautiful broken shutters in the world.

my back is turned, but my ears are still faintly straining for the sound of you trying to stop me. i'm the best eavesdropper in the world. i'm the best at sneaking away. i'd forgotten the joyful feeling of my ribs expanding, somewhere in the process of my slow vanishing.

(& sometimes, all answers come down to this:
because he holds me like a starfish when we sleep.)

Food Not Bombs Party & Iron Chef

photos from lindsay.

stomachache.

some days it's slow slow slow, and stiff knees and sore spines and everything coming just a little bit undone on my bike, a little bit unwound, creaking and crunching and all sorts of sounds you don't want to hear beneath you as yr trying to fly through yr day. it made it all through winter and then everything needs replacing all at once, right now.

i need more sleep than i will ever get, my uncomfortable eyelids popping open way too soon each morninglight and leading me swooning through my days. i want to reclaim nighttime ! but bed is so cozy.

forgettery

i remember when it was harder for me to meet people then it is now, and i remember when it was easier. i yo-yo back and forth. i forget what's important, then i remember. i like to turn big rocks gently over and watch the squirming paths of worms and centipedes and doodlebugs twisting through the earth. i like to sit on the stoop and watch the kids on bikes wheel up and down the street, or the families yelling to one another, leaning out to toss keys out of second story windows. i like to ride my bike on cool windless nights down the empty industrial corridors, past open doors where sparks fly and machines hum, past the quiet storefronts and mysterious factories and never ever ever have to stop for lights. i like to take long walks through alleys, to the record store or the park or your house, collecting treasures as we go. to snip cuttings of plants and watch them root and grow in old juice bottles on our kitchen sill, the fragile stems too tender yet for outside air. i like to wear mismatched socks, to cook and share and sit around the kitchen table longer than we mean to.

i barely remember school. i barely remember austria, or a month ago, even. i want a little bit of everything back, but i don't think i'm the same shape and size and hue to stick myself in the outlines of where i used to be, again. everyone is taking off, these days, and everyone is looking for new places but i'm still sort of shyly looking for new pieces of myself. recollection is a funny thing. she says all we need is a slight affirmation and we'll fool ourselves each time. he hopped a bus again, and then we all gathered to watch the lightning, like dogs turning in circles to lie down.

san diego morning air

all night i was grumbling how i want to be at home in chicago playing in the dirt, riding my bike around looking for wood to build things for the garden, and here i am in southern california plastering a grin on through all the family small talk i can bear.

but this morning i'm awake early, listening to my sister snore beside me and my brother shout in his dreams, and the breeze from the window smells dry and clean and soft. the scent of the canyons - i'd forgotten that. this place is not for me, but it does have its charms, my own dear aggravating loving confusing kind extended family included.

for a while i was surprised every time i saw myself in the mirror, but now that i've learned my own face again i miss something of my fluidity.

in the midst of breath. forgetting justifications. i'm trying to be self-assured and tall, to ignore these roping concerns.

no, i don't miss you this fast. i'd like you to be here so i could crawl over to you in this early morning light and fall back asleep, and i'd like you to be my backbone while i have all these stiff conversations, but yr far away and really (we may never sing anything at all).

the ovals of airplane windows.

how to arrange the cadence into song. how to sing at all. how to impress the family by showing up late with tomato juice drops on the front of my freshly (finally) washed t-shirt. my legs always ache with sitting still. i'm terrified of being old and stiff, now with my knees and glutes already aching all the time. i can't even sit through a movie, let alone a flight. (remember those eight days crammed on busses last year, or my rubbery legs last week?)

we're so lonely even together that sometimes i wonder what either of us could do to be a bit whole or right or even okay.

on the airplane, I read a book about earthworms and all their subterrestrial lives, the relationship of these crawling blind creatures to the movement of continents, "...the tiny bristle-like hairs called setae that worms use to anchor themselves in their burrow or to hold onto one another when they mate". how beautiful, how small.

if we end as we begin, it will have to be in a shy conversation about the weather, not in a big mess of shouts and fists and things breaking to bits. all we can do is talk in double negatives and i think it's time to move to the other side of the axis.

i want, i want, i want, not what i don't.

the cartography of yr ups and downs could build mountains out of mere divets in the earth.

everyone's niceties are finally coming out with the sunshine, like my bare legs seeing the light of day for the first time in months.

shy-town

sing till yr life fades.
this city shrinks and grows at a dizzying rate. two of my favorite ladies in the whole wide world and especially in this moody city are taking off for opposite coasts and opposite lives, way too soon for me to fathom. i need more friends to sit in my kitchen and drink whiskey and make coffee and talk about things quiet and slow and fun and fast even before we go out to dance with the rest.

things tug me in different directions. things, lately, are not new.

i am enamored with physical missives, with messages that cling to their objectness, that refuse to travel except from hand to hand. maybe that's half of why i like my job so much; the other half has to do with feeling strong and alive, with the immediate gratification, physicality, sense of completion, in taking one thing from one place to another. no more trying in vain to stretch my bored weary legs behind countertops or talk my way through another long day.

chicago is the antithesis of and the antidote for my urges, both. i close my eyes and think of hills and trees, the scent of pine, mud between my toes and every face easy and familiar on small-town paths. i open them and i'm in love with long long flat streets in every direction, with the hugeness and smallness of everything, with collapsing distances between one place and another as we spin our legs faster and play with the wind and the traffic flow and the way the bike flows smooth n sweet.

sometimes i think that's the only thing that keeps me here, this teeming stupid downtown and the way i can work sort of at once in and out of and beneath it.

but everyone is always looking in ten directions at once, and i just want us to stroll into each others' houses without knocking, move slowly and calmly, dogs and gardens and markets and front porches with creaky swings. something of the south is ringing in my ears, still buzzing in my ribcage, but i don't know if i could shake off the humming pulse of this city.

strangerer

rodeo revelations and a white-knuckled grip as they keep on tryin' to buck you off. fleeting encounters memorable mainly for their brevity. some people will never be anything but unknowns. others come around full circle and make sure you never quite let go. i found a scratched record of cowboy songs at the thrift store and listened to it with all the lights off, eyes wide open into the dark of our empty humming house, open wider trying to grasp at the starry skies of wide open spaces far-off.

when i was a kid, in the car on the way to school, my dad would lead us in latin exercises or poetry readings from the driver's seat until we asked for cowboy tapes instead, and that song where the dog dies always made me cry. last christmas i dug in the wooden boxes of cassettes till i found the two "wagon wheels" tapes and played them loud loud through the house until my sister couldn't help but sing along. (sometimes family is serendipity, even when you never truly forget what to expect.)


three strange incidents right in a row at work on friday, a strange day anyway with morning sweaty temperatures and me all too overdressed for it in my long-sleeved shirt, till the winds picked up and the dark clouds rolled in with the cold.

one: "hey! alleycat! hey! miss!" with mean eyebrows yelling in my face from the sidewalk about ordinances and dangerous things while i shrugged and rode safely quickly away.

two: three blocks later a middle-aged man with a friendly face asked "may i?" & catfooted his way between cars, brought his lens in close so close while i fidgeted waiting for the light, took my picture, patted my shoulder, walked off.

three: i smiled at the dentist as he handed me the package but he squinted in at my grin and handed me a business card quick, "do you have a dentist? you should come here." and i thanked him but wiped my teeth with my sleeve once the elevator doors had shut.

strange attentions, strange visibility in a job where some days i love what seems like my own translucence. unknowns crossing paths and bumping shoulders, leaving little smudgy traces only to mark their way. i fell the day before, hard, on my knee, tangled up in my bike and my bag in the rain, and yeah i waved the car on, but no one even glanced or stopped to offer a hand up from the pavement.

(went to see caribou and fuck buttons last night, and then a show at WOR, and remembered why being a wintertime hermit gets old. let this be the last weekend of cold ever ever ever ! i'm ready for spring and fun.)

static

static out of an unplugged radio: secret transmissions from beyond and between the sockets of yr navel and yr spine, yearning squirming joyous sounds twisting through all yr mess of inner circuitry, through all yr mess of me and my eyelashes on yr shoulder blades.

out with the old and in with the new, and in with more old and worn at the edges, too.

these things get trapped in the humid air, dissipate in the winds off the lake, before they ever hit paper or memory.

at work, on stand-by, i eat so many french fries my stomach hurts and i stagger woozily past security, brushing potato crumbs from my lips.

erosion

small fractured things, like strings so slightly out of tune they throw the whole song off kilter, like the sun vanishing behind a cloud on a february day, sending out only splintered, chilly warmth.

fissures, i mean: fissures appearing in surfaces we think we can trust, barely perceptible, the way that things erode and slide, the precarity of our own flesh and bones.

fractured memories and everythhing slipping together except for some small illuminated keepsakes, moments that might better bear forgetting. (who wants to see again and again a wounded look in his eyes, or long for adventurous nights whose image (&scent, &softness, &newness) only ram home the sort of metallic back-of-the-tongue nostalgia that twines too closely with regret?)

regret only in the sense of constantly mapping, and the unrecoverable joys long past.

needless to say, or maybe need to say, this is all an eruption of sorts; this is all a straining sinewy mass of all the things we don't say all day, all night, always. trapped behind my teeth are all sorts of regrets or maybe just reluctant instinctive niceties, fleeting as air, except air sticks around to remind us, to lay damp and heavy on our forearms and the backs of our necks.

maybe this is is what they meant by redemption.

(this sounds like such despair, but all i mean to write on is how beautiful the sun and the shards of melting ice.)

sledding

you're all complaining about winter and dark dampness and the smell of exhaustion in the air, but the snow is so beautiful when it piles up deep, buries our stairs, flies sideways through the wind so that everything is white on one side and bare and lonely on the other, trees standing tall and skeletal against the orange sky in the park. today my stomach and my arms are sore, my elbows aching just a little, but it's all worth it for those two hours we sledded down that hill, yelling and falling and running back up to the top, calf-deep, snow down the backs of our necks, to do it all over again. the best is not the steepest or the longest downhill slope; the best is to find a flattened, faintly reflective groove where others have sledded before, and it's smooth sailing from there. we made our own paths, too, between deep snow angels where i chased the sled as it rolled downhill and i sank in up to my knees, held it in front of my face to keep the shards of sleet from my wind-burned cheeks.

and then we dive into big bowls of spicy soup and dry clothes, march back out through the snow to one place after another and maybe winter's just the coziest time of all.

now it's february, and there's so much more of the cold still to come that i'm not aching for summertime yet, but i'm remembering how i wasted a lot of last year's sunshine by working two, three, four jobs, avoiding the people i loved, shutting myself away and aloof and rolling my eyes at every party i went to. remember, in the summer i hated hipster dance parties and all the raucous sweaty joy of the places i used to love. remember, in vienna, those dumb giddy thoughtless nights were what i missed. there has to be a compromise here. sometimes excitement feels empty. sometimes, i think, there seems to be a divide between things that are meaningful and things that are fun and things that are neither but make the time fly faster. (since when do we want time to go so fast, anyway? i want to wallow in each moment for as long as i can.)

hansel & gretel

the winds pink from my cheeks, i mean, my cheeks pink (from the), i mean, the trails we leave behind as we move, like the faint voluminous traces of snails, like crumbs dropped by betrayed children in the woods.

sometimes we resemble nothing more than palindromes, for all our purported asymmetry. all sudden reversions and revisions, all suddenly telescoping mosaics, kaleidoscopes of infinitely patterned forms. stuttering again and again back to old familiar themes, moments of regression.

each stem you trim short grows out again and again, seeking the shears of yr disapproval. pruning is another way of blessing - creating sharp borders from which meaning can unfold.

i could write a book on this stuff, he says - man, i could write a book on the things i seen.

in winter, things fall to pieces. sometimes the fall is more of a slow slide, a fading of edges, a whimper of a descent or dissolution. the instability of all these connecting forces, these ties we forge to shore ourselves up against the reminders of our own precarity, reminders which hover beyond the corners of our eyes.

in the winter, we close our eyes against the sting of the falling snow and jog blindly forward in search of warmth. (the soft ways bodies acquiesce to one another in the dark hours of morning.)

eavesdripdrop

steam still rising from the pan (from our feet, from his hair, from the warm compost in the frosty air).

always a series of hallways, like the ones in all my dreams, every glimpsed or eavesdropped moment framed in layers of doorways and corners and long, searching glances from one room to the next (and another).

poker-faced jokes and rererepeated names. coconuts and apples and melons gleaned from a dumpster in the snow, slush in the streets and car wheels sliding through the mist. when the music fades out between songs and i hear a slice of you, singing in the other room, eyes closed, head down, fingers hesitantly strumming.