"With A Little Help From My Friends..."

Though I have been too busy to post much these days, I have been continuing my freegan lifestyle and outreach, with such things as the dumpster rides, interviews, personal bin raiding, and my work at the Hippie Kitchen.

 In my last post, I mentioned that I would be leaving the LACW this spring, to hit the road once again. I'm excited to get back to the nomadic lifestyle that has shaped my adult life.

At the moment, my friends and I have a van as a living space, but we're looking for more. We don't want anything extravagant, but just a small trailer (10' to 14') that can be easily towed by our vehicle.

It's unusual for me to ask for anything, but I am aware that people often have travel trailers or campers rotting in their backyards. If any of my readers has access to such an item (like the one on my graphic wishlist below) that they'd be willing to part with for free or cheap for the sake of a few free spirited freegans, please contact me! Any response is greatly appreciated. 

Mixed Blessing

It's been raining record amounts here in the "City of Angels" during the season of Christmas. The Oregonian part of me rejoices in the life-giving waters. The humanitarian part of me aches with every thought of the "unwanted ones" who come to eat at our Hippie Kitchen, many without shelter, proper rain gear, or some even without shoes. We do what we can, but still people suffer in the rain. How can we face that?

Post #100! and Quote of the Day

This is my 100th post! Strangely, it has taken a year and a half to get this far... but WOO HOO anyway.

I came across this cute thing that a friend of mine said of Eric and me:

"You two are like foster parents for garbage."

Happy Thanksgiving!

I just wanted to wish all of my readers a happy holiday tomorrow. Make the best of it, even though it's based on a twisted interpretation of colonialism.... ;)

I'm going to have a great time. Here at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, we have invited many of our guests from the streets and personal friends to come to our big house for a giant lunch time meal.

And a big news flash: "Suleo" (Zero Currency Man) is currently in LA, for the first time! I cannot wait to see him.

CW Reflection

Thankfully, I did get some rest this weekend. Ah, I enjoyed sleeping in until almost noon (though I didn't get to sleep until 2am anyhow) on Monday. The weather also decided to cooperate with my intentions to rest that day. I took it easy the whole day, including a lovely walk in the light rain. This mildly stormy weather is a welcome break from the record breaking 110+ degree weather we had last week (so says the Oregonian typing this blog). Unfortunately, our homeless friends may not enjoy either option...

I wanted to share something I read today. This comes from the quarterly newsletter of the St Francis Catholic Worker House in Chicago, but it accurately describes the LACW House (at which I live and work), too.

St Francis House is a house of hospitality in the tradition of the Catholic Worker Movement. The movement was begun in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. It is based on communal living with people struggling with poverty and homelessness, and nonviolent resistance to war, injustice and materialism. There are 150-200 Catholic Worker Houses in the US and other countries, but there are no organizational ties to the Roman Catholic hierarchy and Catholic Worker houses are not dependent on it for support. Each CW house is run solely by the people who work there, most of whom live in community at the house itself. In most cases community members need not be Catholic.

St Francis house practices the work of hospitality by taking in single adults who need a place to stay. Decisions are made by a group of people called workers who share the responsibilities of managing the house and are committed to the CW movement's ideals. They have no titles, they need not have professional credentials and they are NOT paid. St Francis house is supported entirely by personal donations and earnings; it receives no government, Church or corporate funding. We are not recognized by the government as a non-profit organization, thus donations to the house are not tax-deductible. We reject the government control that comes with the non-profit status and we feel that federal taxes are best not paid at all because of the violent use to which much tax money is put. 

A Little Burnt Out

I've still been rescuing food almost every night, serving on Skid Row nearly every day, living communally (that means having lots of meetings) and keeping a busy social schedule. When the weekend came, my body told me it had had enough of the late nights and early mornings. We all need balance, even the most energetic and idealistic of us. I tried to sleep in this morning... of course I only made it to 9:30 (after a bedtime some time after 1 AM). Let's try this tomorrow...

Make no mistake; I am not complaining. I choose this life and I love every minute of it. But sometimes we're just tired...

Funky Freegan Home Brewing

My boyfriend Eric has made a personal commitment to stop buying alcohol; he already spends less than $5/week on food. Eric's decision was sparked by a sudden inspiration to brew his own drinks from our dumpstered fruit finds. Thanks to our home-brew enthusiast friends Kurt and Sybilla, a home brewing supply store on the West side and an initial investment in equipment, we've bottled our first two batches of hard cider already. Celina (Eric's 10 yr old daughter) labeled each reclaimed beer bottle afresh as "ERIC'S Funky Freegan Hard Cider".

Now the "Raga Jazz Freegan House" (so named for the combination of Eric's and his roommate's respective activities) is brewing alcohol, in addition to all the freegan potluck parties and tons of dumspter food that pass through! My life is too much fun. :)

Comic of the Day

Actually, this was in the paper last week; but I can call it what I want.

Yes and No, Mr. Bliss. Food for thought, indeed...

Just Living

I haven't been posting much recently, merely because I haven't had that much to say. I've just been doing the usual: serving the residents of Skid Row, protesting the wars, riding my bike, reading books and dumpster diving with the love of my life. Thinking deeply about life and all it entails has been a part of my recent activity, but I don't really know how to translate that into words at the moment. I also got a nasty sunburn from riding to the beach on Thursday, but who wants to hear about that?

Perhaps I will get the inspiration to write my thoughts soon.

Comments on My Last Post

I just wanted to say that, after I posted my last blog post, I thought back and noticed the hypocrisy there. In the first line, I mention that I was "hit with a traffic ticket". A few days earlier, I had posted a rant about the insanity of cars. So, I am a hypocrite of a cyclist... yes, I drive. I would like to defend myself, since I do try to take my bike or public transit as often as possible. However, I realize that I'm more likely to ride as often as is comfortable. :( We all get sucked into the culture of our enviroment, however much we try to go against the grain.

Enough beating myself over the head.

On a more positive note, I would like to post an update about Homeboy Industries. On Tuesday, I went to an event at their headquarters. Father Greg Boyle, the founder and head honcho of Homeboy, has just written a book. The reading and signing was well attended and inspiring. I picked up a copy of the new book, "Tattoos on the Heart" and had it signed for the LACW community. I have only read the first few chapters and would already recommend it to readers of this blog. It's a collection of stories from Father Greg's more than 25 years of working with the gang-involved youth of Los Angeles.

Peace out.

Homeboy Industries

Recently I was hit with a traffic ticket (ugh) and was assigned community service to pay the fine. Because the Catholic Worker is not registered with the government as a tax-exempt nonprofit (see second half of this post), I could not do my hours at my normal "job" (which is itself a community service). So I chose Homeboy Industries, a nonprofit I only knew a little about. The most I knew was that a branch of Homeboy makes all the T-shirts and keychains for the LACW.

I learned much about the nonprofit in my four Mondays there. It's a gang intervention program and much more. Here's a little snippet from the "history" section of their website.

Homeboy Industries traces its roots to “Jobs For A Future” (JFF), a program created in 1988 by Father Gregory Boyle while he was serving as pastor of Dolores Mission parish in Boyle Heights. Begun as a jobs program in 1988, offering alternatives to gang violence in one of the toughest neighborhoods in the city, the program soon grew beyond the parish.

With the addition of a small bakery in a run-down warehouse across the street from Dolores Mission, JFF had its own business, one where it could hire the most challenging, difficult to place young people in a safe environment. The hope was that they could learn both concrete and soft job skills, to make them stronger, better prepared candidates for permanent employment. A tortilla stand in Grand Central Market downtown solidified the evolution of JFF into Homeboy Industries.

Today was my last day of community service at Homeboy, and I was a little sad for it. I feel like I just started to get to know the place, in its many facets, and the great group of people who work there. I heard a testimony of one of the homeboys this morning, who told his life story with passion. It's still "therapeutic" for him, he told the group of white students he was leading on a tour of the huge Homeboy headquarters. He spoke of his childhood and his journey from there to gang-banging, in and out of jail and, eventually, to Homeboy Industries, where he was offered a job and a chance to change his life around. It was an inspiring story, to say the least. But Brian is just one of the hundreds of such stories to be heard at Homeboy. Kudos to the work of Father Boyle.

There are so many issues, so much pain in the world. What can we do to make some kind of small difference where we have the chance?

Why Cars?

Last week when we were doing our weekly anti-war vigil procession around the downtown federal building complex, I decied to count cars. I counted for about 10 or 15 minutes while we were walking. My estimated tally of cars driving down Alameda Blvd in that period is 300. I counted around a dozen buses, 6 Metro trains and 3 bicycles. That's 1 cyclist for every 100 motorists. Most of the cars held only the driver. It made me hope for a day when cyclists outnumber cars. Motor vehicles are so big and need so much more fuel to power than a bicycle does. Why do we need cars anyway? They take so many more resources to create and to function.

I am reminded of Cuba in the 90's, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Cuba's source of fossil fuels was drastically cut off, and so they had to adapt. The country's agriculture changed significantly to reduce the use of petroleum products. Cars were forsaken and traded for bicycles. The face of transportation was transformed simply because there was no longer a source of cheap fuel. Check out the documentary "The Power of Community" for more info about that page of Cuba's history.

Someday the rest of the nations will have to face that same situation. I say we adjust now, before we are forced into an unfamiliar lifestyle by circumstance instead of choice.

The Money Illusion

I don't have much time to post right now, as we are getting ready for one of our video potlucks, so I thought I would share a link to an article a friend sent me. It's from the satiric paper "The Onion", which I love. The article is about the fact that currency is an illusion and reports a fictional nationwide realization of this. Of course I thought of my moneyless friend Suelo, whose main message is that money is an illusion. Click here for his blog.


Here's the link for the article, titled, 

U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion

Funky G's Recent Reading List

Yo. I've been doing a lot of reading lately (as always) and thought I would share some titles that I recommend to progressive-minded folks (and any folks). Just a couple of days ago, I started to read "A Woman Among Warlords" by Malalai Joya and am very impressed. It's very intense, describing the political history of Afghanistan's last 30 years of foreign occupation in a very personal way as it follows Malalai's life. I picked up the book in November after hearing her speak in Pasadena. Her message is clear. Democracy cannot be forced on any country, "freedom is something a people must work for and cannot be imposed on them". Obviously, she doesn't feel that the US has "liberated" her people at all.

Other books I have enjoyed recently include "Crimes of Dissent" by Jarret Lovell, a professor at California State University at Fullerton and a friend of the LA Catholic Worker. His book on civil disobedience features Jeff and other members of the LACW community. It's also an inspiring tribute to people power and philosophical anarchism.

If you're interested in the Catholic Worker movement, speaking of philosophical anarchism, a good book about the history of the movement and its founders' ideologies is "All the Way to Heaven". Though I am not religious anymore, I still appreciate people who use their spiritual views to do good. Radical Christianity is something I still support, even if I do not hold the same spiritual thoughts (hence my involvement in an anarchist Catholic community).

Today I sit at this magical screen after almost a week of no computer interaction. It was actually quite wonderful, doing other things and forgetting for a while about my addiction to the "information superhighway" (remember when people actually called it that?). After a few days of computer-less time, you begin to avoid it on purpose, saying like an old friend of mine, "It's too much to bother". But virtual reality gets us all sometime...

Unfortunately, I have been sick in bed these past two days, and so I wasn't able to do much more than read a couple books (including the wonderful "People's History of American Empire"). It does, however, give me an opportunity to brag about the fact that I have never been ill from eating dumpster food, to my knowledge (that's always one of the first questions I am asked). My sicknesses usually come in the sneezing, running nose, deep chest cough and itchy throat variety. They seem to be more a product of community living than of my food lifestyle. If you just use the same common sense you would in your fridge, dumpster diving won't make you sick.

I've been wondering what to do for Eric for Valentine's Day, since: 1. I've ended up on House Duty for that day and 2. We don't buy each other stuff (I couldn't even if I wanted to). :) And so I must lend myself to creativity...

Another random musing for the day is in the bummer-ness of having to cancel our last two dumpster bike rides due to rain, in Los Angeles. Oh well. We'll try again tomorrow; wish us good weather and a good turnout.

I'll leave you with a great video inspired by the late, great Howard Zinn and narrated by one of my favorite actors (if only because he portrayed Aragorn in the LOTR movies).

A Little Bit of Reality

You may wonder about my romanticized accounts of working down in Skid Row with marginalized people. Yes, they are just people, individual and beautiful each in their own way. But sometimes there are bad days: it's not all bits of wisdom and smiles. Occasionally we hear gunshots and sirens, witness a fight, get confronted by unhappy guests demanding we "serve them" a certain way or look up to see that the light fixture in our bathroom was ripped out of the ceiling. And all that was just what happened to me last week. Oh, life, how we love your little bits of reality...

Lesson of the Day

Today was a beautiful day down at the Hippie Kitchen, after almost a solid week of heavy rain. The sun was out this morning (as it still is) and people's spirits were much higher in response.

I really enjoy what we call "Table Wiping Duty", which is a job that we do during serving hours. It involves walking around the serving area (a large urban garden with picnic tables) with a rag or broom to give the pretext of working, but is mostly about keeping order and socializing with the guests. You really can learn a lot from the people who eat at our soup kitchen. It's a mix of people who live on the streets and residents of the "SROs" (single room occupancy hotels, used as low income housing). All are on the "bottom end" of the economic system for a slew of reasons.

Today I was a "table wiper" and I learned a lesson from a friend of ours whose name is Kin. I was just chatting away with him about things in my life and he gave me a heavy dose of optimism. "Don't think of things as a 'test'," he told me, "think of it as "enhancement". This man is always smiling, joking. Here he is, a resisdent of an SRO in the "homeless capital of the US" (Skid Row, LA), without much money, eating at a soup kitchen and teaching me about optimism! To me, that is amazing and beautiful. Material circumstances do not dictate your attitude at all.

(pictues: from the catholic worker photo page. Top, Katie wiping tables. Bottom, Marie watering the serving garden)

A "Prayer Request" or Two

There are many people who need our positive thoughts, or prayers (whichever term you prefer). My evangelical background is still in me deep down and so is prayer.

In particular need of prayer in my life right now is a friend, only 42 years old, who had a brain anuerism/stroke last Tuesday and has had several surgeries to counter it. She is still in ICU and her partner also needs mental/spiritual support.

Also, never lose mental sight of those in Haiti and those here in our very city of LA who will be affected by the heavy storms coming our way. I was down at the Hippie Kitchen today and so was reminded of the people who have no place to go when the rain and wind start their bickering. Tarps and disposable ponchos only do so much. I often feel like we're just a band-aid, and an ineffective one at that.

Correction and Confession

Ok, so January has turned out to be less of a "slump" than I had hoped, as evidenced by my lack of posting. One of my "resolutions" (not specifically aligned with New Year's) was to keep up my blog better than I have been. :) Who can actually do all the things they wish they would really do? Some people like to think that I do just go for whatever I wish to in life, but I find myself to be a little disappointing sometimes. I may live alternatively like I want to, but there is so much about how I do things personally that I would like to change.

That leads me to a recent article published about me on the blog of an international journalism student in the UK. She paints a very rosy, "pedestalizing" picture of me and of Freeganism. I don't know how she got the idea that Freegans don't use money, or at least that I don't use money. It does seem to be a common misconception. Some freegans have reached that point in their application of the freegan ideals, and I aspire to be that strong. In the community I live in, however, members of the house receive a $15/week stipend, which doesn't seem like much to some people. But when your needs are provided for just by definition of living communally (mutual giving and sharing of our time and resources includes food and a space in the huge house the 20 of us share), any extra money is just that - extra. And when you have extra money in your pocket, you're probably going to end up spending it, even if your ideals are against the spending of money on yourself. Well, that's how I have a cellphone and go out drinking occasionally (now you know).

There are valid arguements in favor of using money in order to do good. I do happen to agree with that, as long as the money comes from a valid source. I mean, that's how the Catholic Worker and the JCs operate at all. In order to do humanitarian or educational work, there is some level of compromise with the system that goes on. It's rather unfortunate and drives me crazy, but it's true. I don't know that one could live entirely on the outside of the economy and still provide for needs on the large scale that the CW does. However, they do what they can to minimize thier involvement with the structures of power, such as not taking any money from the governments to fund their work. The LACW is not a 501(c)3 tax-exempt cooperation and doesn't ever want to be. It means a little inconvience for us and our donors sometimes, but it's a way to express the beliefs of the group.

From freegan.info's "philosophy" page: Freeganism is a total boycott of an economic system where the profit motive has eclipsed ethical considerations and where massively complex systems of productions ensure that all the products we buy will have detrimental impacts most of which we may never even consider. Thus, instead of avoiding the purchase of products from one bad company only to support another, we avoid buying anything to the greatest degree we are able.

And even if I did not spend my stipend and lived completely without using money, it would not be that great of a feat. I get my food for free quite easily (if not from the dumpsters, then from the shared donated food we eat at the house), have clothes given to me by friends and my younger sisters and have a free place to stay, in return for my time doing something I want to do anyway. It seems like much too easy a life. Sigh.

EDIT: another correction to another common misconception - the community (Los Angeles Catholic Worker) is not a freegan organization, nor do any members besides myself claim to be freegan. I know other freegans just like me, though, who live in communities of alternative lifestyles and still use money, hesistantly or not. 

Christmas Joy and Freegan Fun

The Christmas season has come and gone, taking its bustle and cheesy music along with it. We're now entering the quiet month of January and it's a welcome slump for me. The holidays were busy, loud and fun, but it's time to rest.

My parents did eventually video chat with me and apologized profusely for missing the first appointment in favor of shopping. I got a large box of gifts in the mail with a note from my mother: "In honor of your [freegan] beliefs, we did not wrap your presents". Sweet, but misguided. Many of the gifts had been bought - from Wal-Mart! I would have rather had handmade or recycled presents wrapped in new paper than tissue-wrapped gifts brand-new from a major corporation that is crushing our planet and its people. However, I can appreciate the sentiment and enjoy the gifts.

During the week after Christmas, my younger sister Clara visited me. She took the 20 hour greyhound trip for her first visit to LA. I try to remember what my first impressions of Los Angeles were after living in a rural Oregon town for most of my life, like her. She really enjoyed herself. I did my best to give her a good time, LA-alternative style. The first thing we took her to do, of course, was dumpster dive (Eric, me and Clara, posing with our rescued food). It was far from her first dip in freegan practices, but the biggest haul she had ever experienced. Through the week we went to the beach (in December: a first for these Oregonians!), visited Hollywood, rode the Rose parade route on New Year's eve and worked in the Hippie Kitchen Clinic.

It was very nice having her here to experience my life first hand. I wonder how my lifestyle affects my siblings, who are all in the stages of decision-making/development (between the ages of 16-18). Clara wants to study languages and travel, but is pretty set on a "normal", family centered life as an adult. Of course, that's how I felt when I was 17, too. :)


at right: Clara, me and Eric's daughter, Celina
more fun photos here