kika and hibickina

We still believe in the viability of dreams, in and through and around the stuff of daily living, and even as the bedrock for our most solid practicalities. Dreaming is a dangerous position; it dares us to risk everything, to walk blind into the hills, to do the hardest work in ourselves and in the world—and to reap the richest reward. Sometimes, possibly, our dreams urge us to reveal ourselves intimately to an audience of strangers, and hope they’ll meet us where we most want to be. (7)

Stories and streets are powerful venues for contradicting the imminent doom of loneliness. The public art we make of ourselves in the street, the languages of our bodies tracing postures and assuming them, the paths of our eyes grazing each other, are either participatory or resistant. Here, in public, we can choose to change our immediate world by remaking our myths and telling our own stories, by remembering how to ask and listen, and by learning to show our most real faces to each other and celebrating them. Show your warts, and you defy the very process of airbrushing the truth. Risk smiling at the person sitting next to you on the bus, and immediately the message of isolation is undermined. Not just for the two of you, but also for those watching this unusual event unfold. The moment we notice that we can make fresh choices every minute, the moment we take Funky’s advice and think for ourselves, it’s easy to see that we’re all in this together. Isolation was somebody else’s bad idea. (43-44)

Our entire lives have been squatted by systems we don’t believe in, and our very souls have been occupied by indoctrinations which destroy our ability to love and create, and which take away our freedom from the inside out. It’s time to squat back, we had agreed again and again, time to stake claim to the bones of human history and sew them new flesh. Maybe that was why the caricatures of skeletons were so prominent in squat culture. (61)

Kika and Hibickina. Off the Map. Olympia, Washington: CrimethInc, 2003.

burroughs

I’d never seen a real, live gay man in person before; only on the Donahue show. I wondered what it would be like to see one without the title “Admitted Homosexual” floating in blocky type beneath his head. (70)

Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when. No wonder my parents smoked, I thought. That part of me that used to polish jewelry for hours and comb my hair until my scalp was deeply scratched was now lighting cigarettes every other minute and then carefully stomping them out. It turned out I had always been a smoker. I just hadn’t had any cigarettes. (75)

Burroughs, Augusten. Running with Scissors: A Memoir. New York: Picador, 2002.

sappho

You may forget but

Let me tell you
this: someone in
some future time
will think of us

Sappho, #60