Category: Community

At least it was here

Community
Close-up selfie of the author, a white man wearing glasses and a "The Rebound" baseball cap, from the nose up. A lit sign hangs above him that reads, in simple sans-serif font, "Lower your expectations". It's night time, and the trees in the background are lit up by off-screen lights.
The official unofficial motto of the festival this year.

I have so many notes and so many pictures relating to this weekend and the XOXO Festival, enough for a half-dozen posts about events at the festival alone, and what feels like enough creative energy to not run out of ideas for posts in general and the urge to create through the end of the year at least.

I also have a lot of feelings about it all, like my shame in discovering that I’ve been telling a lie and 2014 was my first year volunteering, or the shame in being so broke and despressed that I could not bring myself to volunteer for the last few events (2016, 2018, and 2019) even though I have been a fairly active member of the Slack community during that time, and the massive “I don’t fit in here with all these amazing creators” imposter syndrome I carry with me, and the “don’t be a weirdo” shame spiral.

While the guests over the years have talked about the amazing things they’ve done, they have always also included the down sides. The pushback, the backlash, the struggle to persist when it feels like they have no spare resources (money, attention, focus, protection, rights.) It’s a hard path, independence.

It’s not all negative. XOXO as a dream has caused me to take action on my own creative efforts over the years. The fact that this blog is active again after ho-ho-holy shit 21 years of posting is testament to my desire to write, to share, to communicate, and to be a member of a community, is energized by Andy B. and Andy M. and all the other XOXO people in my social sphere. The urge to be useful, to help out, to spread the word — all buoyed up by the spirit of the founders, staff, guests, and attendees. And the feeling that I get, sometimes, rarely: the feeling of belonging. That’s the dream for me. Kindness, inclusivity, community, creativity. And those things help counterbalance the downsides.

Processing all the notes, pictures, memories, faces, shame, joy, and belonging, is going to take some time. And maybe many posts from me, first drafts, unedited, just posting to the wind to try to gather my thoughts and give my readers something useful to take with them. But I can at least give you this much: this place is mine. It reflects my interests, my fears, my joys, my mistakes, my learnings, and my distractions. It’s me, in written form.

XOXO is about independence from the structure and policy of media companies. Those companies use their massive wealth to confine, restrict, and narrow the voices of the people who give them content for their platforms. XOXO founder Andy B. said “everyone should have a home on the web not controlled by billionaires.” and Lunar Obverse is my home.

This may be the last XOXO festival but it has built a community of weirdos, not-actually-imposters, influencers, artists, writers, dreamers, fighters. You might not know their stories but hopefully I can share some or many of theirs, while also continuing my own creative story. The spirit of XOXO lives on all over the place but also here. I’m glad you’re here, too.

Why I want to build community

Community

Community Part 3

Now that Community Tales is a series, time for me to explain myself. And the starting point is, folks, things are bleak. The majority of the country has been left to fend for ourselves, having to work long hours at low pay just to afford the things we need to maintain a life: adequate living quarters, clean food and water, and healthcare. And then we’re forced to pay even more just for the tools we need to keep a job on top of all that.

A convicted felon is running for president and he’s polling even with the establishment centrist. Our elected leaders would rather ignore the rising right-wing tide in favor of propping up an authoritarian apartheid state, and slow-walking tiny crumbs of OK policy here and there, none of them addressing the literal ecologic collapse we see happening before our eyes. And the unelected illegitimate highest court of the land is stripping away the legal foundations of the bare democracy we’ve fought and bled and died for.

I could go on but you see where I’m going with this. It’s bad and feels like it’s getting worse. How can I keep going in the face of all this bad news?

Community, that’s how. I think that’s the key. We need to start building our own communities, band together, try to put together our own safety net. There’s way more of us than there are of our leadership and the billionaires who buy their attention. We need to organize. We are stronger together.

A sign, lit up from the inside, that says "Make This World Better" in friendly multi-colored letters sits on a shelf, with a blurry background overlit by sunshine.
We can’t wait for our leaders, we have to do it ourselves.

We need to reject fear and hopelessness. We need to move our bodies and dance. We need to join our arms, raise our voices, and sing. Joy is what fascism wants to stomp out, so we need to find joy in the world. There is still so much that is beautiful, even if it feels apocalyptic.

The world may be ending, but death comes for all of us, rich or poor, young or old. While we still draw breath, we need to love one another, we need to create and write and be beautiful. And we need to do it together, in every space and public forum we can, right out where the cowardly liberals and grasping conservatives can see us.

It’s difficult, I know. I am aware of what happens when we try to fight back. So many of us have paid the ultimate price for resistence. But it’s the one move we have. We need to build our own better world.

The old labor union battle cry was “8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will!” If our homes are our First Places, and our jobs are our Second Places, where are our Third Places? Where is our time and place to do whatever we please? The demands of longer hours at work to crank out the productivity that our billionaire overlords steal from us have encroached on our Whatever We Please time and space.

We have lost our Third Places for Whatever We Please over the decades. Our billionaires and politicians want us to work until we’re too tired to do or think about anything else. But we can claw back that time and space, if we start to rely on ourselves for help, for healthcare, for food and drink, and housing. It’s a reality that labor always produces more than it needs. That means a little bit of our labor can provide enough for all of us, provided we don’t let the capitalists steal it from us.

I’m trying to start where I live, by reaching out to my literal neighbors, the people who share this apartment complex with me. This is the community I live in, and this is where I plan to build my metaphorical community as well.

Together we are stronger, but we have to work at it.

It’s not just the grill

Community

Community Part 2

I came home from a walk last week and dad asked me “Do you want a grill?”

I paused because that request came out of the blue. A complete non-sequitur. I had walked past him sitting on the couch, and had gone into the kitchen to get something to drink. I poked my head out of the kitchen and looked at him. Because of the angle and because his neck doesn’t turn as far as it used to (he’s got steel rods in there now), he couldn’t see me but I could see him.

“Yes?” I said. Because why not. But… “Why? How?” Was he offering to buy me one? Did he miss grilling food?

Close up of an open barbecue grill over orange-hot and black coals.
This could be us but you’re chillin’

“Well, Glasses has one and she’s trying to clear off some space on her patio. I was talking to her and she asked us if we want it.”

Oh, that made more sense. Dad’s been talking to my neighbor, who I call Glasses pseudonymously. “Sure,” I said. “That’d be great!” If I had a grill I would definitely sometimes maybe grill things.

But my happiness at getting a grill for my patio was overshadowed by my sudden worry for my neighbor. “Hey dad,” I asked, “is she still getting evicted? What’s going on with that? Is she OK?” Maybe if dad is talking to her, some of that has come up.

He grunted in embarassment. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, voice low. “I didn’t ask. I didn’t think it was my place.”

Well that’s bullshit. That was my immediate thought. If she’s having trouble, and she feels isolated, that makes it worse. We should at least let her know… I don’t know. That we know, and it’s OK. But we don’t talk about this stuff. We don’t share it. We don’t ask after each other. It’s considered icky, taboo, impolite.

We don’t have community with one another. Our employers tell us not to talk about our salary, claiming it’s just bad karma, when in point of fact everyone in America, at a Federal level, has the right to discuss our salary with our coworkers, and there are penalties for employers who try to make policy against it. Talking about money feels shameful. They have made being poor, facing eviction, and not being able to pay our bills all off-limits for public conversation. They have trained us away from building any kind of common ground with everyone else in our circumstances. They have denied us community.

I’ve never been rich so I can’t be certain of this, but I bet the rich don’t feel the same social pressure not to talk about money, perhaps because they have so so so very much of it, and sharing stories about it helps them loot even more of it from the working class.

I resolved the next time I saw my neighbor to thank her for it, and ask her if she’s OK. It’s a start, right? Gotta build community somehow. Gotta start somewhere.

Community Tales

Community

Part 1

A couple of weeks ago, I got up one morning, went dowstairs to get some coffee and wake up. Dad, since he’s been staying here, normally gets up before me (at least he did before I started working again) and makes a pot of coffee. Dad was sitting at the desk where we put his iMac and he was scrolling through Yahoo! news or Facebook or something.

A cherry turnover on a plate next to a coffee mug in the shape of BB-8 from Star Wars. Both are sitting on a computer desk. In the background on the desk are a pair of computer speakers, the arms for a computer monitor, a USB hub with cables coming out of it, and a stack of Oregon Megabucks lottery tickets.
A perfectly normal breakfast: cherry turnover and coffee in the shape of BB-8.

I made my coffee drink. I take my 20 oz. BB-8 coffee mug and add about 2 ounces of half-and-half, 2 ounces of chai concentrate, and two tablespoons of chocolate syrup then fill the rest of it with brewed coffee. I call it, “coffee”. Then I walked over to where dad was sitting and scrolling. Took a look outside, saw grey but no rain.

“Another gray day,” I said.

“Yeah, where’s our sun at?” dad said. He shifted in his seat a bit. “Had to go out front for a smoke.” My apartment, a townhouse, has a back patio where he normally goes to smoke, but if it’s raining, he goes out front because the overhang usually protects him from the rain better.

“Oh? But it’s not raining.”

“I just wanted to see if Glasses [nicknamed for her privacy] was out there.” Dad is, despite his age, an incorrigible flirt, and he’s been talking to the woman who lives next door. Just small talk, I’m sure, but he’s more extroverted than I am, so he likes talking to people, especially women. He made a sound halfway between a grunt and a chuckle that indicated to me, embarassment. “She’s got an eviction notice on her door.”

My stomach sank. I’ve been there. I’ve had to deal with no money and rising debts. I was kinda going through that now, actually; if it wasn’t for dad’s help, I would be a month or two behind in rent myself. This story is before I landed my job, when I was still hunting. My empathy for my neighbor kicked in, hard. I carefully opened my front door, saw no one was out there, cracked open the screen, looked to my right. Sure enough, a large legal paper was taped to her door.

She’s a single mom, with a teenage-ish daughter who may or may not work. I think Glasses works, not sure. I am also well aware that just having a job does not mean someone can pay the bills, especially the rent. I went back inside.

“That sucks,” I said. Dad grunted again in agreement. I wondered what he was thinking. I didn’t think he would be inclined to help her out, though he certainly could if he wanted to. I wouldn’t judge. He’s been helping me and I appreciate it immensely. I’m also quite aware that when I was much younger, he would have probably been against providing me with any kind of financial help. But people change over the years.

When I was a kid, for various reasons related to my probable neurodivergence as well as incuriosity about the world and general distaste for doing irrational things like labor, I did not like or want to work at all. Now, while I still hate doing irrational things for irrational people, I also know that I need to do a certain amount of it so I can continue to live indoors and eat food I didn’t pick out of the trash. Fucking capitalism. And maybe dad feels better about helping me when he knows I’m doing my best to helpl myself?

Glasses, though. Regardless of her circumstances, I wouldn’t wish the anxiety of possible eviction on anyone. If the sheriffs’ deputies come, I pledged to stand in their way.