Back in America, a little dazed, after a 10-day trip to Europe that ended up lasting two weeks when I was misinformed (along with a Swedish family and a Danish guy) about a crucial train connection in Berlin and got stuck in a transit vortex for three days. I cried in the Toronto airport when I fell asleep and missed my flight. Guess I shouldn�t have gotten on that train. It�s sad, too, because I had to leave the first people I�ve ever felt could be my family, after knowing them for only a matter of hours. Interesting how a few days with some people can affect you as strongly as a lifetime with others. But family is a matter of choice, I guess, and can be found anywhere. Isn�t that one of the purports of this Roaddawgz project? It�s been one of my long-time credos that allies share information. I can�t keep living by the belief that my community is somehow divorced from me, unreachable and far away. It�s important to take what you have and make from it what you want, no matter how hopeless and full of despair what you have may seem. Nothing is really stopping any of us from doing what we really want.

I tried to write an editorial before I left but it ended up being a barely-palatable rant bewailing America�s economic structure. I�m going to go look at it and see if there�s anything I can cull from it to use or not:

�God, there is so much I want to be doing with this project. I sit here when I�m at work and feel crazy from all the ideas running through my head. It�s just never enough; I mean, yes, it�s a good thing to get people to write, but there are so many other more pressing matters that I can�t even begin to help with yet. It really bothers me that I have to let people leave knowing they have no place to go. Last week a young woman came in who had just been put out on the street by the people she was staying with. I felt like the biggest asshole on earth to sit there watching her walk out of the drop-in knowing that she didn�t know where she was going to sleep that night. There needs to be accessible housing of some kind for EVERYBODY, EVERY NIGHT, and it doesn�t make sense that in a country as wealthy as the United States the possibility of such a thing being possible gets slighter and slighter. With more cities pushing money-backed propaganda to get people off the streets, what�s going to happen? Nobody wants to be responsible for the well being of anyone else, at least not from what I see. It�s not like people are saying, �Let�s get homeless people into some kind of place where they can sleep and eat and maybe get cleaned up enough to get a job.� People just want the homeless factor to disappear. Look on the web under modern-day concentration camps and you can find photos of unused detention facilities. For what? Anything I could say would be pure speculation, but it does seem very apparent that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening at an ever-increasing rate in this country, and I am none too optimistic about the outcome. Maybe I�m just repeating the same formula of impending doom that every generation thinks is inevitable, but I suspect that the kind of war that is now only written about in fiction is not so far off as it seems � middle-class suburbs, walled off with the violent starving masses lurking outside. I thought that there was going to be some kind of social upheaval when I was in L.A. during the riots back in the early �90�s, but the energy of communities in cities all across the nation was forced back onto itself and people ended up ransacking their own neighborhoods. As the tiny percent of the population that owns most of the resources expands its corporate reach, demanding that the poor be put out of sight, I can�t help but feel that eventually things are going to get really bad for someone.�

Well, my first thought upon reading that is that I shouldn�t have been saying anything if I wasn�t offering people the use of my living space, back porch though it may be, despite any personal economic reasons I might have had. Where DO you draw the line, and is there really a line at all? If there is, should there be? I�m going to have to move again at the end of the month and I�m having urges to just give most of my shit away and just go homeless. I�m sick of the whole rent culture. I feel trapped by it. I don�t know, maybe I�m just addicted to movement and I know that not having my own space won�t make anything easier at all - but I feel like I�m spending all my time and resources just to surivive in a city where I never feel like I have my own space anyway. It�s a box I�ve built in my mind. I have to start living outside my own self-made confines. At any rate....

It�s weird to have been reminded of what it�s like to be a traveller after so long and then to have so quickly have been jolted back to my former reality. After two weeks I�m still feeling unsettled and a little dazed and unmotivated to try to make anything work. San Francisco can be a harsh and jarring environment. It can be tiring; easy to convince the self it�s stuck in the chaotic energies.

Europe, as it always has to my jaded American eyes, seems much more well adjusted. Denmark was astoundingly clean. I told people there that it was weird because in America there were trash cans everywhere with garbage piled around them, whereas they had barely any trash cans yet no garbage anywhere. The bicycle lanes were as wide as traffic lanes. Everyone waited for the signals at the crosswalks. It all had an appearance of being very orderly and respectful. I saw about five obviously homeless people, who were generally older and very drunk. I met someone who worked at a methadone clinic, but the day I tried to see him to find out from his clients what it was like to be a junkie in Copenhagen, I got really lost and then it started to pour Scandinavian summer rain, and I gave up. Anyway, I�d imagine it�s like being a junkie anywhere, except perhaps less desperate as far as basic comforts are concerned.

One of the main things I had hoped to accomplish while there was to write a piece about Christiania, a self-governing community that was established in the heart of Copenhagen by anarchists and punks 30 years ago. My memory of what it was like from 10 years ago was a lot more idealistic than the reality � or, perhaps, the reality has changed over the last ten years. Last week, the contract that the founders of Christiania had with the government (the community was built within the property of an old military base) was slated to run out and the people who live there are waiting to see what will happen. Apparently there�s an economically right-wing government in power in Denmark that wants to corporatize much of the property while leaving enough of the original commune to keep it as the number one tourist attraction in the country. I heard more than one person in Denmark comment on the Americanization that is taking over some of the cultural values there. Still, Christiania is a fantastic representation of what groups of determined individuals can create for themselves. I hope that in getting that story down I�ll re-inspire myself to create the energies I need in order to stop talking about how life should be and start living how I think life should be. It�s a process, I know, but we�ll see....