With Our Hands and Our Bodies
or: if you work on a computer for a living, do physical hobbies
This particular essay builds on my essay The Punk Rock Good Life.
The squatters in Amsterdam were not impressed with me.
The eviction wave was coming—squatters in Amsterdam always put up so much of a fight that in order to evict a single squat, the police had to gather from across the country to do it, so a few times a year multiple squats were evicted on a single day. The eviction wave was coming, and the squatters were getting ready.
If you aren’t immediately on the side of the squatters, then let me tell you this: in the 1980s, real estate prospecting had left a third of Amsterdam vacant while people desperately needed housing, so squatters started to make use of empty buildings to house themselves and others. Dutch squatters prided themselves on improving their spaces, not just living in squalor, and I’ve never met a community of people so dedicated to, and capable of, DIY home repair.
Even the government agreed the squatting was a social good, and it became legal, for decades, to occupy any building that had been left vacant for more than a year that the owner had no plans for.
But the government didn’t do this out of the goodness in their hearts. The squatting came first, and the government rushed to follow. (This is, incidentally, how all social change happens.) Even in an era of legal squatting, the squatters knew they had to defend their buildings. If evictions ever became easy, squatting would end.
So every eviction was a wild spectacle of paintbombs (from the squatters) and water cannons and tear gas (from the police). People told me stories of rooftop paintbomb catapults. People told me stories of how one time the police gave up on the front entrance and filled a shipping container with cops and lifted it up with a crane to break in the third floor, only to have squatters with a long wooden pole spin that cargo container around in circles.
Incidentally, the way they made their paintbombs was that they dipped balloons in wax, then deflated the balloons to leave a hollow shell that they filled with paint and then sealed with more wax. In case you were curious.
People had told me wild story after wild story, of hidden and spring-loaded trap doors, of empty beer kegs poised to fall down the stairwell, of the Home Alone hijinks that preserved their way of life and kept real estate prospectors from once again gutting their city. They told me these stories, and they were pretty disappointed with me while we were getting for the eviction wave and I explained that I had essentially no construction skills to speak of. In particular, I didn’t know how to weld. What kind of person doesn’t know how to weld, they asked themselves.
People like me, was the answer. An American art school dropout who had majored in photography. I didn’t know how to weld.
My dad had actually been a professional welder for awhile, and I’d arc welded once or twice in our garage when I was a little kid, but it was a finicky process and for whatever reason, I was not naturally gifted with manual dexterity (or, more importantly, attention to detail) so it didn’t stick. Well, actually, it stuck too much. That’s an arc welding joke… arc welding is a tricky process where if you use too little pressure, you don’t make a weld, and if you use too much pressure, you weld the welding rod to your work material.
In art school, my sculpture teacher asked me: “you were the kid who couldn’t cut on the dotted lines, weren’t you?” which was true. Later, my drawing teacher took me aside and told me: “there’s no shame in dropping out if art school isn’t for you.”
So no, the Dutch squatters weren’t impressed with me any more than my drawing teacher had been.
Ten years later, I built a cabin and lived in it. These days, I spend most of my free time making things. I still haven’t gotten back into welding, but it’s on the list and I think I’ll be able to learn.
When I was a kid, most of my hobbies were on the computer. Video games, digital art. Fixing computers. Making games in simple game-making programs like ZZT. Writing terrible cyberpunk fiction about lonely introverted teenagers. Layout—I was the designer for my school’s yearbook and, if you must know, I graduated as editor-in-chief of both the yearbook and literary magazine.
You won’t be shocked to know I wasn’t big into sports. I rode my bike around a lot since I didn’t have a car, but everything I did for fun involved a keyboard and a screen. (I’m eternally grateful that I grew up before smart phones and that I grew up before World of Warcraft).
A few years after I dropped out of college and had been hitchhiking around, I got myself a laptop to bring around with me. I traveled with a full-sized hiking backpack, an accordion in a heavy wooden case, and a laptop bag. I was not exactly an ultra-light hiker. I made good use of that laptop, though. I ran anarchist websites. I ran a zine distro that’s still around today. I wrote terrible cyberpunk fiction about lonely introverted twenty-somethings. I made music. I recorded a whole terrible album of industrial music during the half a year I lived in Amsterdam. I helped lay out a squatter magazine, learning punk graphic design from an Austrian woman. I did all the things that soon enough became my livelihood (I designed book interiors and ebooks for AK Press for most of my income for roughly a decade).
But I also made a decision early on that I’m grateful for every day. I decided that since I worked on a computer, all my new hobbies had to be physical.
