lost some coals, but i'm still burning.

she wrote the joy of cooking!

okay, quick recap for the recent days. alison and i went to the budweiser brewery, yay! it is something i have done, i think, everytime i have visited stl in my adult years. it isnt the greatest tour, but there is free beer...and that is hard to pass up. after that we went to the st louis walk of fame. there were some interesting people, but overall not very exciting. some highlights were: josephine baker and nelly.

i enjoyed the time and activities, but i was enjoying more just spending time with another person, walking around and enjoying life as not a loner. adventure is more fun when it is shared. so, along the walk of fame was, apparently, the best pizza in st lou. that was out destination. the place is called pi, and if you are from portland it is dove vivi except for yuppies. the drinks are super expensive, but the pizza is actually cheaper than dove vivi. go figure.

anyway, we had some mojitos to start our dining experience and those were very good. except the bartender had a crush on alison and gave her a double shot...so i had to drink that one. then we sat and had a roasted garlic bulb with garlic aioli to spread on bread, aka garlic bread. it was good, then the pizza came and i miss cornbread crust deep dish pizza. i enjoyed it immensely.

i am told that barack obama, the us pres/bi partisan pussy (i dont usually use words like that), enjoyed pi so much that he flew the chef to the white house and had him prepare a number of crusts to be frozen and prepared in the future at the white house. also, i am told that chicagoians were unhappy about that.

dinner was nice, we closed down the side of the restaurant we were on, just talking and enjoying the atmosphere. then we moved on to the next bar across the street, some moonlight lounge. this place had potential. it was the rooftop bar of a swanky hip hotel (ala jupiter hotel in pdx). we went in and i tried to explore and get to places i shouldnt be, but there wasnt much to be done. eventually we just took the elevator to the top and had a drink on the rooftop. a fake moon spun in the foreground and the real moon fingernailed in the background. it was sweet.

after that we went home and maybe talked for a little bit but we were quickly asleep.

next day. morning, i get up. and we have a day planned here! this is the day that i get to start reconnecting with my past in stl, i get to meet up with the one person left that i know here: betsy! betsy and i met each other in boston and became friends on the dnc to rnc march. she and i along with about 140 other people marched from boston to new york city in 2004, protesting the two party system, and the american government. it was a fun time, at least the parts that i recall.

i got in touch with betsy and we decided to meet up at forest park, the art museum. of all the times i have been to stl, i dont have many memories of doiing touristy things. mostly it is activism of some sort and then partying of some sort. the arch, the science museum, the brewery, those are the only things that tourists do that i recall doing. well, most of the museums and stuff here are free, and a majority of them are in forest park.

so, alison and i drove up there and met betsy around 10:30a and we went into the art museum and perused. i was nervous. i hadnt seen or really talked to betsy since probably the ncmr in 2005. or, if i was here for something in 2006 (i am starting to doubt that i was). part of my anxiety about seeing people i once knew and meeting new people is that everything has to be perfect, and it is my role to make it so. i also thought that alison and betsy would like each other and it would be awkward if they didnt.

betsy and i hugged, and once inside the museum, started to catch up a bit on recent history. let me get this out there: if you want to talk to someone, meeting them at a museum is a bad idea. so, we walked around and looked at art, quickly everything was okay. alison and betsy did seem to like each other, getting together to laugh at various suits of armor or admiring poor art together, that certainly eased any anxiety i was feeling. and, as with other people, betsy is a great person. she has new things in her life, but i liked her before and i like her now, she is just a great person.

when we were done with art, we went out for lunch at the boathouse. the intention was part lunch/part paddle boat, but the heat ruled out the paddle boat. we waited for a fair amount of time to sit and we caught up more. betsy bought us lunch, and that was very sweet of her. however, betsy did not give me very many stories of she and i together that i had since forgotten about. the only one that she gave was stealing a paddle boat somewhere along the dnc 2 rnc march, however i cant even talk about that now because i am not on the east coast!

the history museum!

then we went to the history museum and that was a bit funner, at least more interactive. we were able to talk more and touch things, but we were getting tired. by the time we were ready to leave there it was pouring rain outside. betsy took us back to alisons car, and we parted with the intention to meet up the next night for a concert in the park and a picnic. so, alison and i first went to the cupcakery to have a cupcake and then to the store to shop for a picnic. wine, cheese, olives, crackers. yum!

then we just went back to the house. it took some convincing, but i got alison to act as if i were a regular person and not some special guest, and with that we were able to just relax for awhile. instead of being out and busy and doing things, we just sat on the couch and watched some shows. it was awesome. it has been so long since i have watched a tv and i had heard of some of the shows but never actually seen any of them. i just sat there, relaxed and watching tv, something that millions of people just get to do and i havent really participated in for a number of years.

and then today. today i didnt really have any plan for what to do, but betsy gave me an idea. part of my trip is remembering things that i used to do, things that i used to care about, and seeing people that experienced these things with me. overall, this has been a wonderful trip so far and i think that it has potential to get better. but today i decided to revisit the millenium hotel, this was where the ncmr conference was held in 2005. this was also probably one of the culminating moments for my activist time.

the millenium hotel, today

active with the activists. i had gotten a scholarship along with a few other folks from portland to attend the media reform conference. i think i flew in to chicago and then emily came from to detroit and drove us both to st louis. maybe other people as well. this was also the trip that eventually landed her living in portland. i used the free money that i got for travel and other expenses as wisely as possible and stretched it to include a jaunt to pittsburgh for biodevestation there among other things. anyway, my life then was kind of like my life now, except there was a whole lot more stability then.

i had been helping to organize protests and indymedia sites and spaces since 2003, it started in sacramento and then blossomed in miami. it continued with the presidential debates and the conventions in 2004, and other sprinkles in between. may 2005 was going to be bringing together the media folks that i had worked with at all these other places and we werent supposed to be protesting we were organizing, networking, having a good time. and back then i could really live it up.

i was excited to be in a less stressful environment where i wasnt as much a behind the scenes person and more of a fore runner. i had been discussing on list servs for the previous months about indymedia and its future and was looking forward to meeting some handles in person. before i came here, i wrote an article for the local radical paper and was just sowing seeds for a great time, a time to be recognized.

i dont think things went as well as i built them up, but i got involved with local affairs, and worked with other media activists to do what i had been doing, organize protests in relation to media freedom, to bring media back to the people and take it away from the corporations. jesus, i cared about things so much back then. it makes me want to cry with joy thinking about it now, but i know i am embellishing and beautifying it in my mind. anyway, the media reform conference was turned into our little media revolution protest, and a number of us did a fair job hijacking the the convention just before the keynote address on the final night.

walking around the millenium hotel brought back these memories in a flood. i remembered where things were, and what happened in various corners around the hotel, it was really a great feeling. in all the other protest work that i engaged in, neither my name nor my picture ever made it anywhere, i wasnt even a blip just a nameless faceless organizer, someone that facilitated the protests to happen. but here, i was in the mix and there are pictures of me and stories written by me and referencing me, it was a glory moment (at least it was now in my head), truly one of the best times in my life. also probably one of the main reasons that i have always had a love for this city and am very happy whenever i come back here.

anyway, that euphoria didnt last long, the hotel didnt really offer me many more things to do. i decided that i would rather write about it. in writing about it, i researched and looked for pictures and stories and found a bunch about this time and then i tracked my life from there. less that a year later i was almost completely out of the indymedia picture, jaded with mass convergences, and delving deeply into community politics where i lived. i wrote so well about those times, and it all led me to yell in my head: I WISH I HAD SOMETHING TO CARE ABOUT AGAIN!

and thats what this is for, what all of this is for. just to find something to care about, something to latch onto and put my energy into and feel good about it. if i dont find that, this may just be a failure. i dont know. now i am sad.

also, i want to note that the last few paragraphs of this were written like a snowball, just building up and being spit out before i could really think about them. i have the luxury to change it now, but i wont. also, this song has been resonating with me today: punkin pie - wish lists