Punk Rock Summer

This newsletter alternates between a free-for-everyone essay of some kind and then a more personal post such as memoir, journals, and works in progress. This is one of the latter posts. But I pair these posts with updates, also, with the hope that it serves a purpose for every subscriber!

The most important update of the week is that next Tuesday, a game I’m working on launches on Kickstarter. It’s called Defenders of the Wild, by Outlandish Games. It’s a board game with a companion alamanac / tabletop roleplaying game, and I’m one of the writers on the roleplaying game. If you’ve ever wanted to play a bear smashing up the machines that are destroying the wild, or a squirrel shooting rockets at walls that are enclosing the commons, this is your game. You can sign up to be notified when it launches!

Other than that… this week’s Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is about the surrealists who went to war against the Nazis in their surreal way. And Autumn has come at last to the mountains where I live, which means driving through tree tunnels under falling leaves, and its means fewer bugs and fewer snakes, and it means getting to wear layers. Autumn is my favorite season, which will surprise approximately no one.

Without further ado, here’s this week’s chunk of memoir. This is part four of a longer piece I’m writing that tracks my life through dropping out of college to become a street kid and a wandering activist. Where we last left our hero, it’s the summer of 2002 and she’d just given up on catching trains and taken a bus to Baltimore, where she’d promptly been jumped.

Part One: I Didn’t Belong in Art School

Part Two: The Call to Adventure

Part Three: The Anarcho-Pirate Brigade

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We rode the city bus in silence, out to the end of the line. Towson, Maryland, a suburb I’d never heard of, let alone imagined myself heading towards with a failed crew of train riders.

We walked—well, Mark limped—down a small-town street (suburbs are never what people assume they are), past small unassuming houses, until we reached the squat. We crept around the side, down through the cellar door, up through the first floor to the one bedroom on the second floor.

I wanna tell you it was romantic, that it was our corner of safety in a disinterested, cruel world. That queers and scumbags found joy and life and filled the place with the scents of fresh-baked bread and drying herbs. That we ran Food Not Bombs out of the kitchen and fell in love and broke one another’s hearts and everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

I wanna tell you that, but the only parts of that which wound up true is that we were queer scumbags. Well, we also broke each other’s hearts.

Sometimes when you open a squat, you announce what you’re doing. You tell the neighbors, you fix the place up and try to make the place better, turn a rotting shell into a home. Some squats you sneak in at night and don’t shine flashlights and you just sort of hope you don’t get caught, because you just need a place to sleep for the night. This was one of the latter. It was just a small abandoned house that found new residents. A month or so later, some of my friends were going to be dragged out of it at gunpoint by police.