so sharkside is coming along better than we have any right to expect. it took me a long time in life for my actions to match up to my idealism and even after i quit poisoning myself every day, i still needed to meet the right people.
[sorry this is my egoistic take on our local skate collective, everyone else can tell it in their words].
jacob and i are both interested in preserving the indigenous homeless population that haunt the woods bordering our slab of paradise. not content to not push them out, we’d like to plant food for them, us.
i know a tomato isn’t the first thing i clamored for when i was homeless and hungry but not only does it add to the aesthetic value [like ladybird johnson’s MO] but it can make a boring soup kitchen sandwich more alive. i hope that didn’t read as daft and clueless as the minutemen guarding the border who carry garlic and water for the Mexicans they detain. or as self congratulatory as protesters who shut down traffic for a few hours or get someone fired.
it’s a start.
Quinny did most of the finishing work on our pyramid[after we butted heads for a spell], our piece de resistance and though you can’t see them here, i planted nasturtiums. they’re an edible flower, as much for aesthetic shock value [he’s eating flower petals!] and redefining what we think of as food as it is actual ‘sustenance’ but it’s our 2nd gambit.
our tertiary move will be dropping strawberries from my yard that are past their prime into the grass gap or other green spaces so that the tenacious berry plants can proliferate next yr and take over. i’m on that johnny appleseed in the city.
then i want to transplant a mulberry tree if anyone has a sapling, god bless! there’s already one there but i’m afraid it can’t produce berries w/out a friend in the area so i’d really like to move on that.
more tomatoes in the ground will reproduce next yr [my raised beds are a mess w/ the descendants of tomatoes past].
the rest of the sharkside collective asides Ali, are mostly all Clarkies. we’ve chopped it up about diversity. i’m not ‘for diversity for diversity’s sake’ per se but it’s sort of that way organically and that’s awesome. i’m down for any type of skater [provided they pick up their own trash]. we’re welcoming to anyone.
but supposing skating isn’t what girls are into, this can be our autonomous zone to share for other purposes. i can always use a hand planting and so long as your freedom doesn’t infringe on the gnar gnar, make sharkside yours too.
i wish there were more girls there. i’m homophobic as shit! i can’t pass my own reflection w/out bristling.
^them’s jokes if you can’t tell but it is rad when different folks are there. 2 vodka swilling sexagenarian homeless ladies told me they heard sharkside was a ‘safe place’ as they watched us work from the shade, heckling and offering encouragement. i shared Quinny’s grapes and our water w/ them.
we had an acquaintance named ‘Shadow’ who drank and lived in the woods nearby when we started the plaza. he always looked out for us, was an amazing sketch artist and may have frozen to death over the winter. hoping he makes an appearance or that his hardship was enough for his folks to take him back. he’d drank himself onto the streets like i used to do except he’d earned his PTSD being a vet while i just got mine stateside.
maybe we can incorporate shelters into future obstacles? like a slant bank that’s also a tiny room, a cement lean to. give people a place to sleep and skate, like the opposite of multi-no use benches. what cockblocks skating is also anti homeless person being able to lay down.
on the subject of hostile architecture, i am a fan of pricker bushes as inhibiting trespass, so long as they harbor delicious fruit. i’d love to propagate blackberries [black raspberries? whatever you call em] around the border of the squatted property.
if anyone has other ideas, i’m down to facilitate them or at least chop it up about them. it could be a free auditorium where my boy Gabriel can do a workshop on mycelium and how mushrooms run tings, tings no run mushrooms. or Filipino knife fighting. he’s wicked diverse. or the wormside boys can teach us a thing or 2 about pouring cement [totally not a scam to get them to do a better job at expanding sharkside]. or i can wax didactic about urban foraging or honeybees since it’s one of the few things i know.
get train doc on the horn, we could be a food forest/safe sleeping area for train kids who stop in the Worm. maybe i’m just jealous wormside is on the crew change but them kids come through and buy weed too so i can use that to re-invest in materials.
if anyone just thinks what we’re doing is rad, thank you, we know.
just kidding but if you wanna be down, you’re down. come by, pick up a broom, drop off some marble or angle iron, we’re looking for nonbiodegradable, non trash items mostly although i’d be into an arsty installation w/ old tvs or laptops cemented into a wall so we can carve over dead consumer products. there’s a metaphor in there somewhere but mostly i dig on the idiosyncratic obstacle.
we’ll take dollars too if you wanna help out that way, cement gets pricey but mostly we’re hamstrung by responsibility, lack of volunteers w/ the same time off or vehicles. it’s labor of love like frente! and ever evolving like society.
if you know how to get shirts or hats printed up cheap, maybe that can be our way of financially saying ‘damn the man, save the empire!’
here’s our most up to date ‘walk through’ filmed before the pyramid was finished or SHARKWAVE! jersey barrier was delivered.
“the Jews have kept the sabbath and the sabbath has kept the Jews” — law and order SVU
I.E. if we take care of the spot, the spot will take care of us
i’m sposedta go for surgery tomorrow, fingers crossed. then that sets me up to come back in 6 months but i’d like to go somewhere different every yr.
i went out to the beeyard after a jog and it looked like a war or mass poisoning. there were bees stuck to the roofing paper like they were basking in sun til the wind caught em torpor and they stuck there lifeless as gargoyles.
private street dangerous 