Give a “gift of service”

I don’t think I’ll ever do a product endorsement (per se) on this site — besides obvious and repeated references to duct tape, Leathermen, and Sharpies — but I’m still fluey and this seems like a good and important thing to tout. Especially if you’d like to start siding with Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping in this holiday season.

If you know your Bay Area freak-lore, you know Wavy Gravy is awesomer than Santa Claus. He counts as one of the original hippies, lived at the Hog Farm, and still to this day walks around San Francisco and Berkeley in a clown nose and a red-and-white-striped ’20s bathing costume, leading a plastic fish around in front of him on a leash.

The Hog Farm were major players in the whole Woodstock shebang at Max Yasgur’s farm, and planned it out pretty well. When asked by the cops how he and his Hog Farm team were going to handle security issues and fights at Woodstock — which they were in charge of — Wavy Gravy replied: “With seltzer bottles and cream pies.”

And if you’ll recall, violence is not one of the things people focus on when reminiscing about the original Woodstock. Ever. Unlike the debacle in ‘98 when all these chicks got gang-raped in the pit because security there were either far too lax, overworked, or violent themselves. Since I’m a festival worker and erstwhile clown myself, I think this brilliant clown-gineering of one of the world’s most major concert events is one reason Wavy Gravy is my hero.

The other reason is this: He helped start SEVA, a non-profit organization which helps native Americans and people in “poorer” and more remote places around the world get and learn basic things they need: health care, eye care, education, women’s empowerment, and sustainable community services.

…and maybe if we all looked upon the glory and splendor of the Earth a little more, we’d shop and drive a little less?

So instead of rushing around buying crap that’s eventually going to end up in a landfill or a thrift store, this Holiday season you could buy your loved ones, say, a cataract operation for an old woman in Guatemala or a visit to the doctor for a family of Himalayan children. You could help the people who lived in America centuries before the “modern world” invaded re-up their own communities. You could do other stuff like this, of course, without going through Seva, but I’m just tossing yall a line here.

So happy holidays again, and stay the hell away from the mall. It’s not doing anyone or the planet any favors, and you know that. Let’s do something different from now on.

Survival, tee hee isn’t it cute

Let’s get something straight. I don’t fancy myself a rabid survivalist-woman by any means. I’ve never spent a night alone in the woods. I grew up in bland-ass suburbia. I learned basic carpentry from and went fishin’ with my grandfather — who could’ve surely gotten our whole family through the Apocalypse, had he not chosen to store dozens of gallons of oil paint in the bomb shelter — but I ain’t never killed nothin’ bigger than a fish. Never killed anything that bled and ate it, either. I have, however, spent a lot of time in my life seeking out people like my grandfather, who can tell me things he might’ve told me if he were still alive.

I’m not a regular wilderness camper, other than a long habit of coming out to the Black Rock Desert to live in “rustic” accommodations (tent, van, bunkhouse, etc) for one to two months out of the year. I’m not a hunter or a farmer or a nature child. But there ARE things I’ve always been exceedingly interested in without being anywhere near well-versed, and survival is one of them.

she had a lot to do with it, as did an endless childhood supply of fire-and-brimstone sermons about Revelation

Survival. My friends laughed at me, but I never cared. Survival is a pretty hip thing to be into, anyway. I’m only glad it’s not more trendy, because then the stupid people would catch on, and buy all the gear, and talk all the talk, and play along that they wouldn’t be the first to be eaten by zombies when the radiation hits.

And that kind of shit is annoying. Co-opting fashion without understanding the history or meaning of the movement always is. Just ask anyone who’s overheard a second-year Burning Man attendee dressed in a store-bought raver-pimp outfit pompously tell the first-year person standing next to them Just How It Is Here.

(Don’t get me wrong. Much love and respect to all humans and yada yada but everyone’s got something that gets on their nerves like that. At the end of the day we “desert festival workers” know the cowboys in town would stand next to us at the bar at Joe’s Gerlach Club and overhear our endless shop-talk and think the same thing about most of us.)

Anyway, so I don’t know any more than any other suburban-turned-urbanite, college-educated art fag about how to save my own ass if something REALLY went down.

Or I didn’t. Ever since a couple years ago, I’ve been leafing through relevant books and trying to find the time to ingest them thoroughly. I’ve also been pestering Otto and some of the other mountain men and ex-military shitkickers I know for information.

Mostly, I’ve been reading a book called Survival that my friend STVCO gave me. It was written by the Headquarters of the Department of the United States Army.

This is my favorite quote from Survival:

“In all things indecision is more fatal than the wrong choice. Advance or retreat, but never hesitate. Every action produces its reaction, and the Will must foresee the onslaught of contrary forces in time to lessen or check it. All future things hang in the balance between Good and Evil. The Mind that cannot find equilibrium resembles a run in eclipse.”

Basically, in laypeople’s terms, act like you know what you’re doing, and suddenly, you will.

So yeah. Sorry to be all doomsday, but from where I sit, it’s kinda fun. Some of us have been waiting for the (hopefully somewhat mild) smackdown ever since we first laid eyes on Mad Max. It’s worth it at least to get your Apocalypse Starter Kit together, as well as a sterilized, vacuum-packed store of food. Praying you might never need this type o’ thing might soon turn into wishing you had it.

——

And finally, something cute to memorize, from Survival:

S – Size up the situation.
U – Undue haste makes waste.
R – Remember where you are. (they mean pay attention to yr surroundings)
V – Vanquish fear and panic.
I – Improvise.
V – Value living.
A – Act like the natives.
L – Live by your wits, but for now, LEARN BASIC SKILLS.