The Ride Down

Today I had one of the most interesting drives of my life from Santa Cruz to LA. It was spent with a friend who is in his mid 50's and a self proclaimed "hobo".

For the entire 4 hours and 45 minutes that it took to get to his drop off point, we conversed. Music wasn't turned on until the last 45 minutes of my drive which surprised me a good amount. Before the drive my friend was more of an acquaintance but within those 4 hours and 45 minutes he became a good friend. Hearing his life story was amazing: growing up in the mountains, being a train riding hobo, hunt sabs that could get you beaten severely or killed, squatting for almost half of his life, living an anarchist life style and so forth. It was really influential to hear him talk about his life and even issues that we both face together today even.

We talked a lot about what it means to be "radical" or an "anarchist" by examining alot of how self-proclaimed anarchists act: the usual snobby kids who say they are so anti-authoritarian and consistently say "fuck landlords" without actually attempting to get their hands dirty and trying to create the lifestyle they wish to live - they instead mooch off people without any recognition or appreciation. An example are kids that abuse the priviliges of the house that I live at: basically squatting the back yard when they are too lazy to go to their own squat or if its raining, using the house computer/internet and not being social with the people who live in the space, etc. It straight up sucks.

Other stuff we talked about was taking spare amounts of time to do small deeds. One major example we talked about was habitat restoration/invasive removal. ANYONE (with proper knowledge on invasives within your bioregion) can easily remove certain small growth invasive plant species on any walk, hike, bike ride, etc. If a good amount of people started doing this in a place like California there would be significant benefits considering California has the most invasive species out of any state in the country - I think about 70% of existing species in our state are invasive but I'm not positive on this.

Another example we talked about was people putting volunteer time into local projects and spaces rather then just abusing them and mooching off of them like I had mentioned earlier. If everyone in a community just took that little time to do such work, community outreach would be even more effective because it would should show people that radical communties are actually capable of achieving goals rather then having a bad name based off the media.

It's getting later into the day and I should probably hang out with my mom and dad so I'm going to do that. I just needed to blog about my ride today to get good feelings out!

I will post more music soon. I promise!

-Reesh