a day in the life
I'm going to be 25 years old tomorrow and...
everything has been super wild this last year. Frenetic. Year of the Rat.
But now it's Oxen momentum-gaining strength-exerting deep-oceanic feeling time. And I've got much in motion.
I bought a building in East Lawrence last month to house the many dreams I've wanted to give form. I'll get to play in it at the end of March.
Eventually, it's going to be a collectively owned residential space with 5 people and a permaculture based neighborhood community center, with the whole yard spaces as a garden going in a couple years. This year we may just grow mustard to soak up heavy metals and toss it. In the back there is a big garage that will likely be a workshop and resource center for tool sharing and skills development, bikes, carpentry, bike machines, a worm farm... Oh, and it's got a room for me to do massage in. Hopefully it will change this neighborhood to be more connected, radical, and liberated, and change the culture and feel of lawrence in these same ways.
Bahgeera will have a better place to live than this stuffy apartment and more people to see than the stuffy ole me. n so will I.
It has been really difficult. This began as my vision that I've tried to drum up excitement and interest for and commitment to with an invitation and room for co-authorship over what it will become. It's just getting to a stage where others are stepping up and taking on part of the load and I've been working on this since November, pretty much right after graduating massage school. I haven't really taken the break I promised myself.
But it's happening now. I feel as though I've tricked something out of the socio-cultural game we're in, pulling this off with no money, no real estate agent, no accounting money management know how (it's a language unto itself reserved for rich white people to speak I swear to god), when the economy and capitalism are basically going in the shitter, having worked restaurant jobs my whole life alongside undocumented immigrants from every central american nation. I feel like the trajectory of my demographic of not completing highschool, or college, mentally ill, single parented child/ divorced parents, parent in prison as child, queer, if anything is supposed to move repeatedly every couple of years after being laid off at attempted higher wage jobs, only to become a truck driver and accept the trend so I can buy a ranch house someday to die in after my body gives out for selling it to bosses over 50 or 60 years. I've got a lot of inherent privelage, but lots of streetpeople also bear my race/gender make and model, and this year of all my years have I lived closer to that community than ever. I shared meals with and saw more of those folks these past 6 months than friends I swear to god. I have this image of me clawing at this solid clay earthen wall and my fingers just sliding right down it leaving the shallowest trails behind them and clay and grit building up underneath my nails and my fingertips getting raw and just having nothing accumulated to show for it. That's how I think about the last 12 years I've spent laboring, until now.
bootstraps. haha. and white male privelage. and literacy. and being born in this country. but seriously! those bootstraps!
and now I'm gonna be 25 and I'm super tired already. haha. but hopefully the next however long will be beyond what I've been able to imagine at this point, given the inspiration and new experiences I can already foresee.
everything has been super wild this last year. Frenetic. Year of the Rat.
But now it's Oxen momentum-gaining strength-exerting deep-oceanic feeling time. And I've got much in motion.
I bought a building in East Lawrence last month to house the many dreams I've wanted to give form. I'll get to play in it at the end of March.
Eventually, it's going to be a collectively owned residential space with 5 people and a permaculture based neighborhood community center, with the whole yard spaces as a garden going in a couple years. This year we may just grow mustard to soak up heavy metals and toss it. In the back there is a big garage that will likely be a workshop and resource center for tool sharing and skills development, bikes, carpentry, bike machines, a worm farm... Oh, and it's got a room for me to do massage in. Hopefully it will change this neighborhood to be more connected, radical, and liberated, and change the culture and feel of lawrence in these same ways.
Bahgeera will have a better place to live than this stuffy apartment and more people to see than the stuffy ole me. n so will I.
It has been really difficult. This began as my vision that I've tried to drum up excitement and interest for and commitment to with an invitation and room for co-authorship over what it will become. It's just getting to a stage where others are stepping up and taking on part of the load and I've been working on this since November, pretty much right after graduating massage school. I haven't really taken the break I promised myself.
But it's happening now. I feel as though I've tricked something out of the socio-cultural game we're in, pulling this off with no money, no real estate agent, no accounting money management know how (it's a language unto itself reserved for rich white people to speak I swear to god), when the economy and capitalism are basically going in the shitter, having worked restaurant jobs my whole life alongside undocumented immigrants from every central american nation. I feel like the trajectory of my demographic of not completing highschool, or college, mentally ill, single parented child/ divorced parents, parent in prison as child, queer, if anything is supposed to move repeatedly every couple of years after being laid off at attempted higher wage jobs, only to become a truck driver and accept the trend so I can buy a ranch house someday to die in after my body gives out for selling it to bosses over 50 or 60 years. I've got a lot of inherent privelage, but lots of streetpeople also bear my race/gender make and model, and this year of all my years have I lived closer to that community than ever. I shared meals with and saw more of those folks these past 6 months than friends I swear to god. I have this image of me clawing at this solid clay earthen wall and my fingers just sliding right down it leaving the shallowest trails behind them and clay and grit building up underneath my nails and my fingertips getting raw and just having nothing accumulated to show for it. That's how I think about the last 12 years I've spent laboring, until now.
bootstraps. haha. and white male privelage. and literacy. and being born in this country. but seriously! those bootstraps!
and now I'm gonna be 25 and I'm super tired already. haha. but hopefully the next however long will be beyond what I've been able to imagine at this point, given the inspiration and new experiences I can already foresee.