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Everything I need to know I've learned drinking hairspray down by the tracks


Agt. Adopus

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Everything I need to know I've learned drinking hairspray down by the tracks

Evasion communique #2.25- A hobo Primer

As featured in D.I.Y Guide II

The Evasion book

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The "travel" idea as I remember it, was a defining case of "form following function". What else could I do? They'd kicked me out of every place in town. Mcdonalds for the "meat is murder" stickers. Safeway for looking guilty, cornering me on the only day of the year that I have not stolen juice. Thrift Store for my bold sence of entitlement to there garbage. The Supermarket were I read the paper each morning crossing into that grey-area misdimeanor theft, just ths side of arrestable and that side of the register. Oh, and that little mall whose bathroom I groomed myself in each morning - yet to actually physically throw me out, but only because I locked the door. I always made it in once in a while when the tanning salon guy had his head turned, but there remained the debilitating effect of raging battle over legal deed of ownership to that little space under the sink, between pipe and porcelain, where I stored my shaving cream and toothpaste. Whatever. I owned it. Day after day, I'd pull back soggy paper towels, pull my toiletries from the trash, and dream a little dream - of Midwest sunsets

and a sad country song...... Until that point, the relationship with my town had been like one of those rap album covers, with the big-baller shotcaller looming 80 stories tall behind a skyline of the city, each elbow resting on a skyscraper below his name spelled in diamonds, lookin' down over his dominion and noddin' with a grin, as if to say - "whose your daddy?", but knowing the answer.... Street by street, this hood-once-mine was becoming occupied territory. I returned six 8-foot pipes at Home Depot, cleared my throat, and sang the song of hoboe - "coked-out trucker, it is for you my heart sings......"

 

Since then, I've hitchhiked roads both ten lanes and two, I've loved in Chicago and lost in Oberlin, been on boxcars and band tours. I've learned things, lessons forged in hunger and frostebite, those lonely nights that make the best stories. In olympia, 6 years after my first ride, I sit alittle bruised from the years to write on lessons learned in blood. Use this not to spare yourself the injuries, but so that you yourself may know the bliss of bleeding.....

 

PART I

Q: "SIR, WHY DID YOU SNEAK INTO THE DINING HALL?"

A: "IT'S WERE THE FOOD IS"

 

UNIVERSITIES For my years of Student Union Building naps and top-floor-of-the-library research, I feel someone owes me a degree in something. In the libraries and student lounges, having life's questions answered in a book, I look up to wonder the biggest question of all - why am the only bum doing this. Never have I tripped over another sleeping on the roof of the library. I'm sort of nervous about it, but would like to raise a sweeping 2-point purposal: 1) We, the vagrants all acknowlage that, in 2002, "shock value" is pretty much dead, put something a bit more pratical and a bit less punk, amd 2) Go deep cover as "college students". Let these campuses be our country clubs. The university: where there's always an empty room to sleep in, a new book to read, an event were someone famous is speaking to attend, a locker room to shower in and a dorm dining hall to crash, and if you buy as many records as i do, you'll have a blank tape for the media room stereo. Keep this on the downlow, but UNC-CH has a whole-floor AYCE buffet, the most colorful known to bum or billionaire. There's soymilk in the walk-in freezer, and it's unlocked! WHAT TO PACK Lay everything on the floor that you're certain you cannot be without and cut it in half. Replace every "multi tool" with a book and every tent with nothing at all. Steal $130 and order a Vango Ultralite 700 sleeping bag (http://www.amg-outdoor.co.uk/vango). A cloaking device the size of your head. Settles at the bottom of a small "collage kid" backpack, bring all who cross my traveling path to ask - "thats all you carry?!" HITCHHIKING Clears your head. Raises "getting there" from "half the fun" to all of it. Puts you in confined spaces with members of famous bands disproportionate to their numbers in the general population. Unfocused notes: It's a good day when you're wise to say just to this side of the "No Hitchhiking" sign on ramps. Never hitchhike on the freeway. Who are these people hitchhiking on the freeway?! Or while walking? With one hand on each shoulder I wish to shake free an answer..... Pretend you are not dangerous and put a nice shirt on. Make eye contact. Smile. Give them room to pull over. Leave your tag on the sign and post it below mine. Handwritten signs are functional in the movies and almost nowhere else. The punk girl will stop once ever six years. Be nice and talk - it's the only reason they picked you up. Truckers are great for long rides and bad music, can be solicited at the "Enter" doors of truck stops, and short of a ride, can be hit up to put out a call for a ride to others on their CB! Oh, and never spill the drivers pot! So there I was, in the passengers seat after the More Than Music Fest, rolling him a joint. Lightning struck me, rolling my first joint on a straight edge record. No mortal standing before the eyes of god will understand what happened, but after a slow-motion fumble there lay more drugs on the floor than the paper - or the honeywell 7". There was an abrupt turn for the shoulder. "You can get out here......" SLEEPING My vagrancy career vegan with a point to make: that bushes and park benches were kind of unnecessary. In the immediate years, I've learned the false hood of these missconceptions and others. Like how I've never seen the inside of a foodstamp office, or really ever been axed to death. Now, at night, after pushing the limits of "liberal tolerance" towards bums in arenas both private and public, I take a little walk..... What they call "living with out dutiful purpose" can be exhausting..... Where: rooftops (strip malls, donut shops and so on; acess by ladder, dumpster etc), storage closets (hotels, apartment buildings, universities, etc. -open with knife), university libraries overnight (hide well), movie theatres (behind the screen), little used staircases (big hotels, university buildings, shopping malls - very top and under stairs at bottom. "Fire Exit Only" always a solid bet - it says "alarm will sound" and it's probably lying. The sleepy traveler is like the skateborder, always scrutinizing the landscape for the little features we exploit for our sport. "Places to stay" are overrated. Because you know, if I waited for a place to stay, I'd never leave home..... SHOWERS In seismic departure from my brethren, I clean myself often and feel quite good about it. Where: University locker rooms, hotel swimming pools, abd when suburban locked, 24-hour fitness gives a free day pass to all "prospective members"!. FOOD I don't know, there is food lying around everywhere, just take it.

 

PART II

ADVANCED VAGRANCY - TRACT FROM THE INNER CIRCLE

 

TALK TO STRANGERS "More affraid of you then you are of them"; spiders, editors and locals. My social skills are whack, but traveling creates this rad "nothing to lose" climate, crucial for social ease and crime in unsustainable levels. A small town saturday night, a high school hangout and one man of mystery - the closest I'll ever come to celebrity. Strangers..... sometimes they let you sleep on their couch! Or like Seattle last weekend - there basement floor.....

BE STRAIGHT If the experience isn't it's own "high", you're probably kind of boring, and stepping over you outside the 7-11 is getting kind of old.....

LEAVE WITH LITTLE OR NO $$$ I read somewere - "The less you spend, the more fun you have."

SCAM, STEAL Paying for things on the road is kind of uncalled for. I look at theft like I look at those answer raps of the 80's - like UTFO dissin' Roxanne and Miss Shante returning with a scathing rebuttal - it's a response (theft) to an insult ("work or suffer"), done without looking them in the eye, but the point is made. And it only takes one well executed "hit" to to retire on! Yo, pass the mic and the soymilk! Two solid crimes -1) Money: Receipt from trash outside retail store + corresponding item + left hand technique followed with a "return" of the item makes every reciept as good as cash..... 2) For the basics, the "left hand technique" is unapproched in it's sucess rate and finesse. One chooses a moderatre ammount of merchindise to be stolen, abd an inexpensive ticket throught the line, like, say a bottle of water. The item(s) to be liberated are held casually at ones side below the counter and outside the cashiers line of sight, while paying for the inexpensive item. Take your change and walk out. They are not looking for this. I feel that in 2002, "concealment" is a round about method of what can be achieved more quickly by just arresting yourself. Picture a man -identity known to none - who has practiced the left hand technique twice daily for 7 years with out arrest. You often question it, doubt the statistics, but then, you're often in court.....

EXPLORE America's underground geography.... there are whole worlds out there. Someone should write a book about trespassing. I really charish my time creeping behind Fire Exits and over barbed wire, up ladders and through college doors opened with a pocket knife. Had I not been sneeking - quite illegally - around campus construction site, where would my life have taken me if not down that manhole, to a tunnel network four stories underground..... Just like the Goonies!

ALWAYS ASK To this day asking before taking pains me as deeply counterintuitive. But worker disenfranchisement is at an all time high, and so goes the free stuff. Pink hair, the little band pin, her being a singer for that really great band you saw last month: things I've seen on the road leading to an illicit understanding and "no charge". The little people look out for each other. It was a punk girl and bold request accruing me the best new hardcover I've read this month.....for 60 cents. "You look cool. i have a question....."

JIGGLE DOORKNOBS Finding an unlocked door is like a really good dumpster - forgoing the enjoyment of a great thing, I can only get depressed, thinking of how many more of the same I'm missing at that moment. I dwell on this quite alot. So when I'm in the tunnels behind the mail, I'm checking. In university buildings at 1 am im tugging. Failing this, the "credit car/knife to the door" from TV Sitcoms really does work!By the grace of 7-year statute of limitations, I recall the night I stood before the wide open glassdoor of Rite Aid at 1 am. Stores don't burglarize themsleves, they need our help! A travel hobby that continues to the present time. I think of my recent post-breakup wandering delivering me to another unlocked, where I found a dusty projector..... and sevral moths of free rent!

 

"Freedom is the one god I worship"

 

Contact: Evasion c/o Crimethinc. Atlanta

evasion@crimethinc.com

Evasion #3 Coarse and unnecessary 100-page epic out soon.

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I been here before, on another thread, a few months ago. My opinions about these Crimethinc.people stirred up a bunch of shit from the anarchist crowd. All I can say is this guy has worse judgement than he does boundaries. I work with kids every day who have been locked up for more than a year for the LEAST of the crimes this guy lists above. All I can say is if you wanta be free, best not break the law. And if you break the law and get caught, don't snivel when you get punished.

 

But if you live the charmed life this guy ^ does, then go ahead, just do whatever you want, steal whatever you want, take drugs, whatever. Personally, I think his survival skills suck, but what the fuck, I'm not twenty years old and living out of a back pack anymore.

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  • 2 weeks later...

rant

 

Originally posted by KaBar

I been here before, on another thread, a few months ago. My opinions about these Crimethinc.people stirred up a bunch of shit from the anarchist crowd. All I can say is this guy has worse judgement than he does boundaries. I work with kids every day who have been locked up for more than a year for the LEAST of the crimes this guy lists above. All I can say is if you wanta be free, best not break the law. And if you break the law and get caught, don't snivel when you get punished.

 

But if you live the charmed life this guy ^ does, then go ahead, just do whatever you want, steal whatever you want, take drugs, whatever. Personally, I think his survival skills suck, but what the fuck, I'm not twenty years old and living out of a back pack anymore.

 

I've met most of those crimethinc kids,and traveled with some of them and the majority of them are a bunch of middle class white boys in thier early to mid twenties that still mooch off thier parents,unfortunately I'm not exaggerating either...(except for a few women in it who aren't nearly as bad)....which is what I can also say about a majority of graf writers these days...and punks...and just about any subculture that has ever had anything beautiful about it that has been filtered and distorted and appropriated...so that you can buy your place in the scene...anyway...back to my other rant...

evasion has no evalutaion of class,race,gender,or age AT ALL, its totally written from a totally privelaged narrow minded perspective and pisses the fuck out of me...mac totally romantisizes the idea of being poor, when he doesn't even fucking know the meaning of the word, not to mention theres a quote on the back of the book, something to extent of "homelessness,poverty,crime, if your not having fun your not doing it right" that kid doesn't know the first fucking thing about poverty or crime OR homelessness...if i ever met him (and i probably have) and had to hold a conversation with him I'd slap the punk out of him...evasion is banned from the wooden shoe (an activist run bookstore here in philly)and crimethinc knows if they ever tried to come here they would get laughed at (and they have)....thats all.

 

chae

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I'm not really dogging anarchism

 

I used to be an anarchist myself, years ago. I became a committed, dedicated anarchist after reading a really great book by two English anarchists for whom I have much respect, Stuart Christie and the late Albert Meltzer. Stuart spent five years in Franco's hellhole Spanish prisons for smuggling dynamite from UK to the CNT-FAI in Barcelona. Albert was a WWII veteran who got drafted, and served in North Africa, and who was a life-long trade unionist and revolutionary. He fomented anarchist revolution on just about every contient in the world, wrote several books, a bazillion pamphlets and several newspapers and anarchist journals ("Black Flag" was my favorite) and so far as I know, he never shoplifted a goddam thing.

 

There is a big difference between being a class-concious anarchist stalwart and a cheap-ass, rip-off dilletante. I no longer believe in anarchism, because I'm no longer a socialist. But I do have strong Libertarian leanings, although my political stance is within the Republican Party these days. I vote LP when I have an opportunity.

 

I do not agree with stealing, and I do not agree that capitalism is bad, although I once did, when I was young. Guys like Albert Meltzer have such power in their beliefs, it's hard to not agree. But I didn't meet the Spanish-Civil-War-FAI-CNT anarchists when I went to demos and actions. The people I met seemed a mile wide and an inch deep. With the exception of the Chicago Ice Pick Association and a few Texas anarchists, very few anarchists that I met had the balls to back up what they said, or the integrity to live their creed.

 

My inclination is to give a long recitation of "What an anarchist is and is not" but I've bored you all with my opinions on this matter already, so I'll refrain. Don't steal shit. You'll get caught and go to jail.

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Re: I'm not really dogging anarchism

 

Originally posted by KaBar

But I didn't meet the Spanish-Civil-War-FAI-CNT anarchists when I went to demos and actions. The people I met seemed a mile wide and an inch deep.

 

Likewise, but did you stop believing in anarchism because of your dissapointment with what you thought a revolution was supposed to look like, or because you really thought it was flawed regardless of how people went about it?

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