Shortly Dawn makes her annual visit to her family and I am left to my own devices in the torn apart apartment. I waste no time in getting the rooms more organized, but Cat is coming to stay the night and tomorrow she leaves for Guatemala. We spend the time drinking, drawing, listening to music, screwing and cuddling. Long conversations emerge about being present and creative in the lives of the people around you. Our own past was pretty spotty, short fits of intense emotional and physical exchange, a few weeks of screaming laughing fucking and then months of silence, I go my own way, travel, be a recluse. Enough change has happened in each of us that this time it gels and is a lot more solid and fun and creative. I feel full enough to not fear sharing, balanced enough to not let anyone take more away from me than I have. In the comfortable silence, twisted together on the couch, I feel pretty sure that we are doing right by each other. Love multiplies, we slowly and somehow manage to all fit in one another’s lives in a way that is energizing and right, through lots of work and honesty.
The excess and absurdity of the following days is memorable. Helen and her playmate Tyler show up an hour or so before Cat leaves to the airport. We shortly go through 3 six-packs, Cat leaves, we get more beer and play air hockey. And then strip dare-hockey. Old-school sexual tension / wonderful filthy friendship between Helen and I plays out, Tyler is caught in the middle. We get dumb hammered, go to the one bar nearby open on Christmas, somehow drink more, come home and get naked and stupid.
Tyler, whose friend was murdered the day before in New Orleans, is so totally not up to roll with some spontaneous menage and Helen and I kind of just cruelly steamroll over him for awhile until we accept that he is obviously not even physically capable of fooling around, let alone whatever mental scars we just idiotically tore open. It was dumb and fun, but I did wrong for my part in ignoring him. Helen and I both wake up around 4am to piss and get water and talk in the kitchen. At 9ish, we all get up and I start cleaning and get excited to make them both breakfast and just air the whole situation out over food and coffee. Dawn and her sister are on the way back and will shortly arrive. Instead of anything good like that happening though, I get a call from work: You Are On A Double Today, Fool.
Whoops. I run out the door to arrive an hour late and nothing gets discussed.
Work is crushing and grey, I greyly crush it through a wall of hangover. Much later, Dawn and Stef come and eat dinner and I get sprung to go ride up to L.L. Bean in Freeport for Dawn to get boots. This is an awesome prison break and it just barely comes off. I am so joyful and Dawn is radiant and we run around giggling like kids in the store, afterwards buying awesome sleds. The trip is bookended by beautiful galactic snow drives, scored by terrible now-country-music. Chemistry teachers are tapped in the dome. Text messages are exchanged and we converge towards Helen and the North Street hill.
Parking the car on the East End, gale force winds rip across the Promenade and almost blow us to the ground. Even in my full mountain climbing gear, I feel the cold cut through me. The grass is scoured of snow, elsewhere it drifts head high, the tiniest most frozen crystals, cutting bitter mountains accreting from the scything air.
All arrive through the arduous journey, the body fights to live. Each run is lazer fast and blinded by wind and cut quartz pink street lights, swelling with the odd orange plow klaxon. Helen arrives hammered, with no gloves and wearing only jeans. I estimate the wind chill at -15, but she sleds, I give her my gloves. A few runs, we are done being at the bottom of an ocean of cold. On the walk back, Helen and I talk about the night before, mostly laughing jovially. To her, it’s clearly in the category of Good Times and possibly Crazy Shit That Was Fun and we both realize out loud, more or less in keeping with the trajectory of our friendship to date.
Stumble home, which now contains 5 people, two couples and a sister. Go out to get a six-pack, which nobody actually wants.
Tyler is also drunk upon arrival and his emotions oscillate. He does not know where he stands on what and is by turns punchy, sheepish and morose. I try to just be there and hang out with him and talk about N.W.O.B.H.M., which he is way into, but honestly I am just fucking tired and I want 3 of these people out of our house. I go to bed, Helen crashes on the air mattress Stef brought, she sleeps in my room, Dawn and I bundle up in her room and Tyler chain smokes in the bulkhead when he isn’t nodding off over a Shipyard that never gets drunk, listening to Christian Mistress.
The next day is a blur, Helen plays it all cool, Dawn and I broil in laughter and the absurdity of our overflowing storm besieged home, making strings of private humor to pass the time until they all go away but good-naturedly hosting our people. Stef naps. Tyler putters and reels until they settle into watching King of the Hill episodes on my computer.
Eventually the snow tapers, Stef takes off and Helen and Tyler nail down a cab to the bus station. We hug goodbye, I wish I’d had just a minute to talk about it, but now I’d rather watch movies with my sweetheart and we do, between which I fill her in on what happened while she was gone. Dawn points out that I am a bad man for ignoring Tyler’s bereavement and dragging him into sexual intrigue with the person he is ostensibly dating. I agree, we feed each other chocolate covered Oreos.
The next days are amazing, our house becomes omnipotent and fun to be in, we are inspired and happy and creative and kick ass. Many conversations took place with odd friends over the following two weeks regarding ideal communities, including out on Martha’s Vineyard with Emily Spykeman and her rad fellow Justin, which brings us up to the present. Here’s a digest of my thoughts on that.
I think that we hope that our friend sluttery and poly melange and our skill share and travel friendships will coalesce like a sun into a community that knows itself, truly, that is better than a nation and more honest than most families and freer than a cult, full of utility like a military but empty of spite though honorable and admirable by all within.
A community that will be better, if even only in transit, than all the lack the hobbling divisions of capitalist life in America and the lack maybe of our families and attempts at monogamy. I think that this is the hope and the dream for the Rat Kids.
We all want a farm. We all want everything we eat, wear, ride, build, enjoy, smash, and snuggle up to to come from us. We all want to be eachlike a little guild in an enchanted hamlet on the outskirts of the vast magical wilderness, each offering up the fruits of love and the willingness to cultivate the necessary. I do anyways; with caveats.
This is a totalizing view. A majority of Animal Kids only even participate marginally in that amorous overlap and most I think probably only think about practical utopia on certain mornings… it is a series of arrangements arrived at from desire, convenience, necessity, friendship, comedy and pack bond. There is no mind for this thing, but I still get to dreaming it when my hands are cold and I’m cut from work and I contemplate big ends and schemes.
Let’s locate the author: my family performed so abominably for me that of deep need I want connection, spontaneous arisal
of true love and radical action. I work at that, especially in being that myself because that’s where its at and because the more pure percentage I am that, the more instances of it truly occur around me. Give infinitely to get any of what you can truly use. Biology is shaded here: hominids dig monogamy, hominids dig sluttery. There are so many historical and biological reasons why monogamy worked out great. There are so many personal reasons why I choose against it. There is no Poly-messianic scenario. Percentages are likely to be marginal forever, even if that may not be so, preaching is a turn off. Whatever your kink, rock it hard core. Believe in it, do it.
The absolute alpha and omega of an intentional community would be stifling, suffocating. Without critique, without brushing up uncomfortably, violently even, against those who do it different, maybe better, apart definitely, any project would turn in and devour itself. This is one of the ways my family performed so abominably for me, it left a giant bleached absence where a world should have been: there was no description, no acknowledgement or incentive to learn about any world beyond ours, except in the occasional indulgence of prejudiced generalizations. It is no wonder that I lived inside the universes of gaming, where there was diversity and mystery for me to explore, because there sure was none in the real world as far as my perspective was permitted to see. And this is the lesson of the burbs: living in a bubble is putrefaction of the soul and I am deadly serious. I have felt my soul begin to rot and forced my escape. Any time I’ve had to go back, I try to check in on those who stayed behind and I have found them most assuredly dead, inside-out.
And yet, and yet! so many Kids you meet in this sphere are so guilty of recreating the very conditions they ran screaming from.
Painting it with what titillated you and therefore shocked your parents does not make it better, in fact that is the very essence of how the dynamics of suburban families form and play out. The degree to which you imagined you separated from your parents sins / values is directly proportional to the degree to which you will feel estranged and isolated by the new generation, once you have settled into your hipster / poly / music / crafts UTOPIA. Failure to connect with and admire the necessities and innovations of each generation will leave you barren, unable to reproduce a myth, a history, a culture, for anyone (and it need not be your own offspring, but any variant the modern world will offer: adopted child, students, youth group, audience for your band, kids from the neighborhood come to your radical bike shop or food not bombs, etc.). You are the continuation and evolution of your forebears, not a separation, not the new race, not the end-all. You are standing on a mountain of human effort and destruction, on one particular crag, that you find yourself at the elevation of because your parents threw you out here after some climbing of their own.
What this points at is not strictly a reverence of what has been done, not at all, but a serious acknowledgement of how huge and complex the effort has been and simultaneously an awareness that One cannot engineer a vast success by surrounding like with like, or even the known with the known. Look for knowledge and strength outside of what you would ever consider to be something you’d like or be similar to.
From a strictly tactical point of view, meshing together a network or a community of people to circumvent the Dollar to whatever extent you wish (and this is a whole ‘nother discussion: totally, partially, slightly, for the ends of collapse, to reduce inflation, to build real security through friendship, for survival?) necessarily demands that you reach far and wide to gather up all manner of skills and ways of thinking. Identity politics are self indulgent once you have become sure of yourself. Lingering in doubt perpetually is, to me, a failure to mature and a fear of the World.
Which wants to eat you, whole, and use you to become greater. So get on with it.
