How to catch up on things?
So, where to begin. "Begin at the beginning, continue on until the end, then stop," I was once told about how to write a novel, and while that may be grand fine advice for the person issuing that, it's not exactly what I would term "helpful," to me.
November is here, and with it comes National Novel Writing Month. That's not the beginning of the story, though that is where the story I am beginning (again) begins; back up, rewind, let's try this again.
I deleted the Dreamwidth journal, since I saw no proof of life - the reason I was moving away from Livejournal was to seek vibrance in a different forum, to regain whatever semblance of a spark this space once occupied and continue onward. That never appeared, and was just a cross-posting mechanism and a second place on the Internet to have to worry about The Girl's name being spread without her 'by-your-leave-madam,' so clearly it was not helpful and thus got to die. How we communicate, the networks of friends (and let's face it, networks of strangers too - I have never met tamnonlinear but that she posts to LJ is at least half the reason I continue to bother reading mine) and how they propagate, these are interesting thoughts and worthy explorations for understanding how the world actually works, now that I am part of Occupy Wall Street and trying to seek the answer to the $64,000 question of "how do we convince Normal People (TM) to do the difficult thing and get involved?".
But that's not the beginning either, because frankly this is the beginning of the end for me with Occupy - The Girl is moving back home soon and I shan't have the free time I once had and had dedicated to that cause, and my continued participation would of course be a source of anxiety both personal and professional considering that her prospective employers are likely to be on a list of "groups that Occupy is not terribly thrilled with." But more fittingly, I told myself I would be here through Election Day and trying to usher a transition - to help give birth to a greater level of activism in American life, to meet whichever candidate wins the election next week on Inauguration Day with strong civil engagement and a clarion call for people to take action and get involved instead of sit back and let the professional weasels continue running things into the ground. And no longer than then, because I needed to find an endpoint anyway, and that day will be the day by which I will have either succeeded or failed at trying to hew a new course through the wilds... and being a pathfinder is exhausting.
When last I wrote, I was discussing the one-year anniversary of Occupy. That went okay - but the part I wanted to make happen, the part where we began a serious discussion about the 2012 election and what to do about it, that didn't happen. I was arrested for the first time on September 15th, and can now discuss it as the matter has been brought finally before a judge for arraignment and the matter has been adjourned in contemplation of dismissal, meaning I am not going to be prosecuted and, most importantly, the word "Guilty" never had to be wrenched from my mouth because those would have been fighting words. I was arrested for 'walking while opinionated,' and my arresting officer's own words as to what the charges would be, when asked, was "the charges will be bullshit," so I was certainly not going to be party to my own miscarriage of justice. (The matter of receiving my due measure of justice will come up in civil litigation, when I bring that officer's words up in court not just as grounds for my own civil suit but as grounds to prove that a companion with whom I was arrested, who was assaulted by a lieutenant of the NYPD for doing nothing more than I was, was assaulted by my arresting officer's superior officer... who, if my arresting officer knew I was being wrongfully arrested, must surely have likewise known he was in the wrong, and thus is not due his normal 'qualified immunity' to protect his personal assets from the civil suit. Because I'm clever like that, and mean when it is the right thing to be.)
I am trying to teach Occupy to form an extragovernmental oppositional party to resist the Democrats and Republicans in office with, using external pressure outside of the bounds of government to control policy and advance legislation without needing to ourselves capture seats through the electoral process. Unsurprisingly, this is like herding cats through a hurricane, which if early Monday morning is any indication they are VERY GLAD INDEED that I never have to do that, because the cats were terrified of the noise and the wind, and freaked out hours before as they no doubt felt the pressure dropping and knew trouble was a'coming.
There is not much for me to say, personally, about Hurricane Sandy, even though I live within the technical disaster radius. I live in central Brooklyn and thus flooding was never a risk, and we never lost power, so I've just been caged up inside and kind of bored, frustrated that I cannot work on what I want to be advancing within Occupy because of the disaster getting in the way; my fellow Occupiers have sprung fully forward into disaster-relief work, and I am glad they are doing so, but it means the last things I was trying to do with Occupy before wandering off are very likely to fail, even though they are very important and critical new ways to think and engage with the public, and received a lot of enthusiasm and support... they received enthusiasm and support but took no new workers onto the project when presented thusly, meaning that much as I might want it to work it's not showing signs of life no matter how good the idea.
I took a walk through lower Manhattan yesterday, to see for myself where things stood after the flood waters receded, and it is eerie the darkness that comes with nightfall there - I stood in the middle of the street on East Broadway just south of Canal, looking up straight through the darkness to the only beacon of illumination to be seen for miles from there, the Chrystler Building lit up as if it were a distant lighthouse directing us to civilization and the coming of the shore. Civilization is something that feels as if, slowly but surely, it is leaving lower Manhattan behind. The first day was the worst - underwater, damage done, exploding power stations, and let's face it - lives lost. The second day was the worst, too, but in that eerie way - and it is just going downhill from there, as there is no power, not really enough food either, and no national guardsmen nor FEMA employees helping to send rations or relief to them there... they just feel forgotten, and it is only getting worse, so tensions are rising and the populace is becoming more grim in these suddenly forlorn regions. Tensions didn't spike in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina for several days, after all - the worst is yet to come, as we inevitably lose the race against civility due to the sheer magnitude of the problems.
And enormous they are. The disaster relief crews are making it out to the hardest-hit areas, the waterfront spots in Brooklyn like Far Rockaway that is now minus not just boardwalk but also beach, as in there is a part of Far Rockaway that has just been reclaimed by the sea and is never to be seen again. Boats aplenty were forced up on land in Staten Island, and a massive fuel spill into the waterways was reported - 300,000 gallons of diesel fuel, gone and nobody knows where - and as they are cleaning up the worst-hit parts of Staten Island, let's face it, they're starting to find the bodies.
It is little wonder that Halloween was today and I simply forgot; work did not have power, still, so I am stuck home (not that getting to work would be easy - realistically, I'd just have to walk, and that's well over an hour each way) and going slightly stir-crazy with the internal tensions and unbalanced frustrations I still cannot afford to vent, and must simply bite back on lest I lose any hope of anything in my efforts to make what I want to happen the reality I intended to craft. You do not get to just ignore a hurricane and try to work around the aftermath; you are not special enough that you get to have your way just because you want it, even if you think it's important. Because what is important has been revealed in the wake of the hurricane, and it is not those things I am referring to as my priorities.
There. That's the beginning. Now to continue on from there...
November is National Novel Writing Month, and I am taking this month as my hoped-for re-balancing of my efforts away from Occupy Wall Street and my involvement in that movement, since while it is going interesting places it is not going where I want to go, and shows no signs of doing so in the near future even though I have found like-minded people it would be good to work with. It is evident to me that [Black Science] is a very Occupy-type of project, and thus by advancing it further as an active project to work on and complete I might do far more by applying my ingenuity and completing the novel - it was intended, after all, as a moral argument for some things and against others, the same moral arguments that drew me to Occupy Wall Street, so it should be of little surprise that channeling myself back into that work feels like the most productive way to use my time: you can reach many more minds through a written work than through anything I've done in my time so far with Occupy, and changing the culture is the true goal of Occupy Wall Street, not just changing the politics. I can help with that by myself, in a way I cannot by trying to apply protest movement to political sphere of influence, because as the author I get to make all of the plays - give me but a lever and a place to stand, and I can move the world.
This is not to say that my time with Occupy has been wasted. It hasn't. There are things I have done of great significance, even if they were only to one person, even if that person never knew. I came to Occupy with the intention to counteract a statement made by a friend - that it felt very unsafe for women to be there - and do that I did, applying my firm moral compass where no moral compass seemed to be in place at all and removing those who would do harm to others to the best of my ability. I have arrested a rapist and made sure he was escorted to the police, and surely that affected someone's life in a way that I am glad that they will never have to know. I have done much and more in subtle ways, like feeding information consistently to Keith Olbermann from the week after I joined to the day he was fired from Current TV, because I matriculated a contact and put in the work, not just of writing her an email every day but of learning what Occupy was doing when the information was far from readily available and understanding how Occupy worked, when that seemed to be the least-clear thing in the world to any who wanted to know. I have been an Occupy-whisperer, trying to teach it to listen to itself and do great things, and I have been a source of housing, with a person who would otherwise be left homeless sleeping on my couch for the last six months because she does good things when they need to be done.
Mostly, I've brought cookies to homeless people that were being brought food but nothing that cheered them, and I tried to be that cheerfulness to keep people moving - as well as a source of information, to keep people involved despite the high barriers to entry with Occupy. And I've learned self-empowerment, because that is the true message of Occupy Wall Street - and it is a lesson I can never forget, because I have learned first-hand what I am capable of if I try, that I possess the strength to advance my own convictions if I might only find the will to. I have taught that lesson, too, or at least tried to impart it - we have so many who have yet to learn it but need to, and winter is coming again with too many homeless activists left on the street because they know of no other way to make progress with the movement, so they are stuck in last year's model that ultimately fell before the brunt of coordinated state repression... left no good way to be a part of what they want to be, and no support structures besides.
November is National Novel Writing Month, and at the two-hour mark I've already got a thousand words. Where there's a will, there's a way - I "won" in 2010, hitting 50,000 words when I literally did not write for the first six days, because I was lost in the mire of self-doubt. And now, I know that I am powerful if I try to be, so I should simply try to be... instead of be gnawed upon by doubts, I cracked Microsoft Word and applied fingers to keyboard. And so I shall continue to do, easy or hard.
November is here, and with it comes National Novel Writing Month. That's not the beginning of the story, though that is where the story I am beginning (again) begins; back up, rewind, let's try this again.
I deleted the Dreamwidth journal, since I saw no proof of life - the reason I was moving away from Livejournal was to seek vibrance in a different forum, to regain whatever semblance of a spark this space once occupied and continue onward. That never appeared, and was just a cross-posting mechanism and a second place on the Internet to have to worry about The Girl's name being spread without her 'by-your-leave-madam,' so clearly it was not helpful and thus got to die. How we communicate, the networks of friends (and let's face it, networks of strangers too - I have never met tamnonlinear but that she posts to LJ is at least half the reason I continue to bother reading mine) and how they propagate, these are interesting thoughts and worthy explorations for understanding how the world actually works, now that I am part of Occupy Wall Street and trying to seek the answer to the $64,000 question of "how do we convince Normal People (TM) to do the difficult thing and get involved?".
But that's not the beginning either, because frankly this is the beginning of the end for me with Occupy - The Girl is moving back home soon and I shan't have the free time I once had and had dedicated to that cause, and my continued participation would of course be a source of anxiety both personal and professional considering that her prospective employers are likely to be on a list of "groups that Occupy is not terribly thrilled with." But more fittingly, I told myself I would be here through Election Day and trying to usher a transition - to help give birth to a greater level of activism in American life, to meet whichever candidate wins the election next week on Inauguration Day with strong civil engagement and a clarion call for people to take action and get involved instead of sit back and let the professional weasels continue running things into the ground. And no longer than then, because I needed to find an endpoint anyway, and that day will be the day by which I will have either succeeded or failed at trying to hew a new course through the wilds... and being a pathfinder is exhausting.
When last I wrote, I was discussing the one-year anniversary of Occupy. That went okay - but the part I wanted to make happen, the part where we began a serious discussion about the 2012 election and what to do about it, that didn't happen. I was arrested for the first time on September 15th, and can now discuss it as the matter has been brought finally before a judge for arraignment and the matter has been adjourned in contemplation of dismissal, meaning I am not going to be prosecuted and, most importantly, the word "Guilty" never had to be wrenched from my mouth because those would have been fighting words. I was arrested for 'walking while opinionated,' and my arresting officer's own words as to what the charges would be, when asked, was "the charges will be bullshit," so I was certainly not going to be party to my own miscarriage of justice. (The matter of receiving my due measure of justice will come up in civil litigation, when I bring that officer's words up in court not just as grounds for my own civil suit but as grounds to prove that a companion with whom I was arrested, who was assaulted by a lieutenant of the NYPD for doing nothing more than I was, was assaulted by my arresting officer's superior officer... who, if my arresting officer knew I was being wrongfully arrested, must surely have likewise known he was in the wrong, and thus is not due his normal 'qualified immunity' to protect his personal assets from the civil suit. Because I'm clever like that, and mean when it is the right thing to be.)
I am trying to teach Occupy to form an extragovernmental oppositional party to resist the Democrats and Republicans in office with, using external pressure outside of the bounds of government to control policy and advance legislation without needing to ourselves capture seats through the electoral process. Unsurprisingly, this is like herding cats through a hurricane, which if early Monday morning is any indication they are VERY GLAD INDEED that I never have to do that, because the cats were terrified of the noise and the wind, and freaked out hours before as they no doubt felt the pressure dropping and knew trouble was a'coming.
There is not much for me to say, personally, about Hurricane Sandy, even though I live within the technical disaster radius. I live in central Brooklyn and thus flooding was never a risk, and we never lost power, so I've just been caged up inside and kind of bored, frustrated that I cannot work on what I want to be advancing within Occupy because of the disaster getting in the way; my fellow Occupiers have sprung fully forward into disaster-relief work, and I am glad they are doing so, but it means the last things I was trying to do with Occupy before wandering off are very likely to fail, even though they are very important and critical new ways to think and engage with the public, and received a lot of enthusiasm and support... they received enthusiasm and support but took no new workers onto the project when presented thusly, meaning that much as I might want it to work it's not showing signs of life no matter how good the idea.
I took a walk through lower Manhattan yesterday, to see for myself where things stood after the flood waters receded, and it is eerie the darkness that comes with nightfall there - I stood in the middle of the street on East Broadway just south of Canal, looking up straight through the darkness to the only beacon of illumination to be seen for miles from there, the Chrystler Building lit up as if it were a distant lighthouse directing us to civilization and the coming of the shore. Civilization is something that feels as if, slowly but surely, it is leaving lower Manhattan behind. The first day was the worst - underwater, damage done, exploding power stations, and let's face it - lives lost. The second day was the worst, too, but in that eerie way - and it is just going downhill from there, as there is no power, not really enough food either, and no national guardsmen nor FEMA employees helping to send rations or relief to them there... they just feel forgotten, and it is only getting worse, so tensions are rising and the populace is becoming more grim in these suddenly forlorn regions. Tensions didn't spike in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina for several days, after all - the worst is yet to come, as we inevitably lose the race against civility due to the sheer magnitude of the problems.
And enormous they are. The disaster relief crews are making it out to the hardest-hit areas, the waterfront spots in Brooklyn like Far Rockaway that is now minus not just boardwalk but also beach, as in there is a part of Far Rockaway that has just been reclaimed by the sea and is never to be seen again. Boats aplenty were forced up on land in Staten Island, and a massive fuel spill into the waterways was reported - 300,000 gallons of diesel fuel, gone and nobody knows where - and as they are cleaning up the worst-hit parts of Staten Island, let's face it, they're starting to find the bodies.
It is little wonder that Halloween was today and I simply forgot; work did not have power, still, so I am stuck home (not that getting to work would be easy - realistically, I'd just have to walk, and that's well over an hour each way) and going slightly stir-crazy with the internal tensions and unbalanced frustrations I still cannot afford to vent, and must simply bite back on lest I lose any hope of anything in my efforts to make what I want to happen the reality I intended to craft. You do not get to just ignore a hurricane and try to work around the aftermath; you are not special enough that you get to have your way just because you want it, even if you think it's important. Because what is important has been revealed in the wake of the hurricane, and it is not those things I am referring to as my priorities.
There. That's the beginning. Now to continue on from there...
November is National Novel Writing Month, and I am taking this month as my hoped-for re-balancing of my efforts away from Occupy Wall Street and my involvement in that movement, since while it is going interesting places it is not going where I want to go, and shows no signs of doing so in the near future even though I have found like-minded people it would be good to work with. It is evident to me that [Black Science] is a very Occupy-type of project, and thus by advancing it further as an active project to work on and complete I might do far more by applying my ingenuity and completing the novel - it was intended, after all, as a moral argument for some things and against others, the same moral arguments that drew me to Occupy Wall Street, so it should be of little surprise that channeling myself back into that work feels like the most productive way to use my time: you can reach many more minds through a written work than through anything I've done in my time so far with Occupy, and changing the culture is the true goal of Occupy Wall Street, not just changing the politics. I can help with that by myself, in a way I cannot by trying to apply protest movement to political sphere of influence, because as the author I get to make all of the plays - give me but a lever and a place to stand, and I can move the world.
This is not to say that my time with Occupy has been wasted. It hasn't. There are things I have done of great significance, even if they were only to one person, even if that person never knew. I came to Occupy with the intention to counteract a statement made by a friend - that it felt very unsafe for women to be there - and do that I did, applying my firm moral compass where no moral compass seemed to be in place at all and removing those who would do harm to others to the best of my ability. I have arrested a rapist and made sure he was escorted to the police, and surely that affected someone's life in a way that I am glad that they will never have to know. I have done much and more in subtle ways, like feeding information consistently to Keith Olbermann from the week after I joined to the day he was fired from Current TV, because I matriculated a contact and put in the work, not just of writing her an email every day but of learning what Occupy was doing when the information was far from readily available and understanding how Occupy worked, when that seemed to be the least-clear thing in the world to any who wanted to know. I have been an Occupy-whisperer, trying to teach it to listen to itself and do great things, and I have been a source of housing, with a person who would otherwise be left homeless sleeping on my couch for the last six months because she does good things when they need to be done.
Mostly, I've brought cookies to homeless people that were being brought food but nothing that cheered them, and I tried to be that cheerfulness to keep people moving - as well as a source of information, to keep people involved despite the high barriers to entry with Occupy. And I've learned self-empowerment, because that is the true message of Occupy Wall Street - and it is a lesson I can never forget, because I have learned first-hand what I am capable of if I try, that I possess the strength to advance my own convictions if I might only find the will to. I have taught that lesson, too, or at least tried to impart it - we have so many who have yet to learn it but need to, and winter is coming again with too many homeless activists left on the street because they know of no other way to make progress with the movement, so they are stuck in last year's model that ultimately fell before the brunt of coordinated state repression... left no good way to be a part of what they want to be, and no support structures besides.
November is National Novel Writing Month, and at the two-hour mark I've already got a thousand words. Where there's a will, there's a way - I "won" in 2010, hitting 50,000 words when I literally did not write for the first six days, because I was lost in the mire of self-doubt. And now, I know that I am powerful if I try to be, so I should simply try to be... instead of be gnawed upon by doubts, I cracked Microsoft Word and applied fingers to keyboard. And so I shall continue to do, easy or hard.