Making money is a distraction, it’s a distraction from daily life. People laugh all around the room, but I’m old enough to know that the noises are more about fitting in! Conservatives think that leftists are about going against the grain; anyone involved in community organizing for long enough know that fitting *within* the *against* is more important than finding ways to stand further apart. The meeting is gluttonous in its indecency. Everyone has to be a star. A participant asks us to share our Instagram handles (the whole room) nearing the end of the gathering. I don’t want to look at anyone in the eyes when they ask this, because I just look like the kind of person who is active on Instagram. I make a personal note that I want to wear skirts less. Wanting to look hot, to everyone here, feels penultimate. To the organizing. Afterward, on the train, I draw my knees and shins and legs up beneath me like I’m twelve different horses, and noodle with the weirdly long hair that’s growing behind my calf. It feels good to mash my face with the palms of my hands until my eyes feel different colors; I adjust my skirt and whisper ‘Gomu Kassana’ (cow legs) to myself in a monotone that reminds me of my yoga practice, my affair with whimsy, that I can use my physical voice whenever — even by myself on the train, where I may look ‘crazy’. All winter, I read this tome of a ‘historical novel’ called Direct Action (by Luke Hauser) that follows the trajectory of protest organizing in the 1980’s Bay Area. So much of the work is heavy with Hauser’s personal hesitancies, embodied in a differently-named protagonist, that the activism of street theatre and punk die-ins wouldn’t prevent corporate, and therefore the State’s, advancement. Shucks. Hauser, I meet you from the future — you were not wrong! I read an ad in the subway for a 60 gram of sugar fruit juice that is rebranding as just enjoying yourself — it’s a smart campaign. We know you know about the sugar, but buy this anyway… The informed consumer, who in previous decades with more leverage, was an activist. When the term meant something. Reading Direct Action now, during the late 20’s of the twentieth century, feels even more bleak, and trying to organize in the face of both the Labor Movement’s and the Neoliberal Progressive Movement’s failures doesn’t feel romantic to anybody. People are going to meetings for protests because they’re lonely…Abbott and I are smoking in my CR-V in front of their sister’s bachelorette party, and they say, “I want to organize with other people and I don’t want to make friends! I want to get the work done, and go home. I want to feel connected to the other people I’m working with but I don’t want them to assume we’re going to hang out in another capacity after we work together.” I agree exuberantly, my besties always understand what I’m on. Are we the problem? Or is the assumption that group work lead to a virtual performance of community, suffocating?
Since moving back home, from the rich and diverse suburbs of DC to the shifting and exclusionary country exburbs of Annapolis floating alive across the water, transportation is my gleaming irradiated nugget of fascination. After classes, I leave my car at the College Park Metro and ride the rails all evening, articles from The Anarchist Library propped up on my phone’s browser and a fresh pre-roll tucked behind my ear. I watch multicultural couples perched on low stone walls scroll their phones together, faces luminous with screen and the contentment of having an Other of their own, in a public space. People with professional DMV jobs get on the train with backpacks on like proud elementary school students. Their presence does seem to be the fuel through which the train powers across the train yards, their employment the embodiment of the productivity of the District of Columbia. Every time my friends visit, and we’re out to eat or walking the Mall or thrifting and book-hunting, they relay their fascination at how the physical sensation of the State is looming in the District. Growing up in her shadow, and surrounded by her, she leaves me quiet. I think about Aaron Bushnell’s body burning and the police emptying bullets into his form, I think about the resulting discourse about his ‘performative white activism’ on Twitter that I begin to think is sparked by CIA moderated Twitter bots, I think about how homelessness where I’m from in Maryland is almost impossible if you don’t have a car — to drive out from the compactness of gridded, central DMV to the remoteness of the beach. What is not preventable is a youth population of homeless who are from the Shore, revolutionized in the suburbs. What is not preventable is me, paying for a train ticket and yearning in each second for a world profoundly more free.
I’ve been sleeping in my car for more nights a week than I’ve been sleeping in my family home, to understand more about the relationship between upper-middle-class youth trapped in permanent adolescence by a weakened economy, engaging in forms of homelessness that were popular during the late Bush-era of American politics. Riding the rails, squatting, traveling across the country. I’m 28 — Black women my age are after plane-ride trips to destinations padded with the comfort of a resort and natives serving foreigners hand-on-foot. A man is supposed to buy me a trip to the Cayman Islands, and I have to be sexy enough to deserve it! Instead I’m in my car, reading the last of a book I can by my dying nightlight. I drive across the State in less than a day, sleep in rest areas and parking lots that look welcoming. I trust the night and dispose of the fears haunting women who have done the same. Jackie Wang is the saint looking over my SUV as I drift into sleep thinking of her biking on to on-ramps and flashing a thumb for a ride, or getting between Brooklyn and Baltimore in one day like it was nothing. I am one step closer. Tonight, the temperature of the night is perfect, and I crack both of my back windows. Is it true, that because of my relationship to my family and wealth, that in the morning I will drive home and take a shower? Yes. Do the people I have waiting at home love me? Yes. Are they concerned that the way that I’m living does not seem to be running parallel to conventional American success for young people? Yes. What my family thinks of me means something to me, too — pain comes with this. But I have to know what’s on the other side. I’m not running from anything unsafe. I am running from a feeling of complacency — worthlessness — picking up the new clothes I just purchased and thinking, “Is this all there is?” Professionalized labor doesn’t promise satisfaction. She promises accumulation. I cannot be distracted by a tactic invented to do so when I’m inventing a new method of participation, as worthless as the practices of the spoiled brat organizers may seem. When I return to my bed, I find it harder to sleep…it’s too soft, too easy, too accessible and I don’t feel like the labors of my day deserve this cushiness as a result. Tingles pressure my hands. Maybe my relationship to labor is changing, because of anarchistic risks I’m taking to gain a new perspective.
