macrame as money remix

sweet! so, as i have written already i have been making bracelets and necklaces the past couple of days with the intention of selling them. an intention i have had in the past and have never actualized because i am a big scaredy cat. for real. yesterday was some happening at the square and i didnt set up a display because i was making bracelets specifically for a person. she bought hers so today i had no excuses.

my a frame, and some wares

i had built an a frame the day before and had the set up all in my head. everything was ready, but i needed something to calm me. so, i decided on music. i went and bought some little speakers that run on batteries, that i could plug my ipod into. i got to the square around 9 am. there was an antique show happening, and i tried to talk myself out of it because it wasnt the right crowd. so i cruised around a bit and scoped the scene.

eventually i talked myself back into setting up and at 9:30am i had my a frame, little table, my chair, macrame supplies and my speakers. i walked to the spot i picked out. i was trembling. actually shaking, i was so terrified. i starting setting up, it only took a couple of minutes and then i plopped into my chair put on some music and dug my head into some macrame.

slowly, the trembling stopped. i was into the music and everything was fine, except no one was stopping. which was okay with me. it was early and i had never really sold anything this way. and then, around 11am it happened. someone stopped, a biker couple, and they bought.

they bought two bracelets and were off. then a lady came up and looked and asked if i would custom make her a bracelet. of course i would, she told me what she wanted, i told her to come back in a half hour. she came back, another couple came by and had me custom make them each a bracelet. some lady stopped and grabbed two necklaces and a bracelet. it was all just happening. and it was easy.

it felt like i was making alot of money, and i was having trouble keeping my hooks stocked becasue they were flying off the hooks, or i was making things custom. i sat there until 4pm, when things were winding down. i checked my pocket and i had $80 more than i started with. WOOT! in total, i sold 3 necklaces and 11 bracelets.

fnb also came around 2pm so after i had packed up i had nothing to do. i wasnt hungry, i didnt want to sit in the park or make more macrame, it was too early to start wasting away at the bar, so i just sat and stared into space.

and that is what this trip is all about, this self described "life journey." i dont want to have to sit and wonder what to do, i want to just be content sitting and not feel like i need to plot some future action. alternately i want to just know what i want. i never have. i have always just been open to what comes and appreciative of that. i want to want something.

i am moving to prescott arizona

someday, maybe. it is so nice here! the slogan for the place is "everybodys hometown" and how true. yesterday was awesome, i made $20 selling hemp bracelets without even trying. i also bought materials and created a necklace/bracelet display case. very fancy. and i made a bunch more in between.

i dont know what was happening yesterday, exactly. there was what looked like a car show, then a biker brigade, and ongoing was a folk arts festival. today is an antique show.

last night was SQUARE DANCING! but, at first i was disappointed. i got there when it was slated to begin at 6:30, because i hadnt anything better to do. but it wasnt what i expected. it was a laptop computer with a prerecorded voice leading very old couples through two steps and waltzes and stuff. i sat for about 15 minutes and was ready to leave.

but i stuck it out and at 7 the square dancing began. again, not what i expected. see, in portland a square dance is a bunch of kids and a couple older couples enjoying some live old timey music with a caller. generally the caller leads you through the dance slow and then through it at real time so everyone can get it. kind of like an always beginner class. but with live music and raucous dancing.

there was a caller, who was very good, but the music still came from a laptop, and it was modern music (think karaoke music) with him calling over it. and he didnt call out what he was going to do first, and he went very fast, and all of the people dancing (three squares) were "professional."

so i just sat and watched. they looked like they were having a great time, but it was pretty low energy. around 8 it was getting real cold and i was thinking of leaving. but then! the caller asked all of the pro dancers to pick someone out of the crowd to show 'em how its done and how easy it is.

ginger picked me out, and i was very eager. i told her i knew the basics and loved square dancing. we were the head couple of the first square. the caller called it slow through once and then we did it real time. and it was a blast! i love square dancing, can i say it enough?

but i wouldve enjoyed more upbeat music. i was actually dancing as we all circled left and bopping through the dos-i-dos. ginger informed me that the proper way was to shuffle your feet through, and not to lift them. i appeased her, but the fun is in the dancing. because, to me, square dancing is supposed to be real fun and okay to be wrong and just about getting out there and performing a beautiful calculated dance with other people.

and thats what it was to ginger also, but we have different ideas of beauty apparently. they only did one square dance like that, but i was happy to at least be able to get out there. they hold classes starting on september 13th, so i guess that could be a goal to get out here by.

if indeed i plan to move here. no promises, especially since i am still in the beginning of my trip. anyway, perhaps more square dancing will come down the line. more joy.

macrame as money; or doing what i always wanted to do

so, i spent today in prescott hanging out in the old town square. making macrame. i relearned to make necklaces, making 3 in about two and half hours. i would like to get it down to about a half hour per necklace. i was just enjoying the weather and environment, hanging out. kind of waiting for food not bombs, but mostly just enjoying the day.

i made two basic necklaces and one fancy one. while i was making the fancy one, a lady came up to me and chatted me up. she wanted to know if i knew where she could buy a hemp bracelet. i pointed at myself and smiled. i quoted her $5 for a bracelet. she seemed pleased with that. i gave her my number and she said she'll call tomorrow.

so then i started making bracelets. bracelets are very quick and easy. i can probably do 4 and hour. i made two and set up ten more. while i was working on the second on another person walked up and asked if i would make him one. i told him that i sell them for $5 and he asked if i would be here tomorrow.

of course i would. why? because there is some craft fair going on tomorrow at the square and later on a square dance! heaven calls. i love square dancing. now i will just need to find someone to dance with... confidence be with me.

so, tomorrow i will probably do more of the same. i have 10 more bracelets set up and ready to be knotted and i think 9 necklaces. so, hopefully i get dont with most of that tomorrow and sell at least the two that were spoken for. sweet. maybe i can sell more at the craft fair.

i guess, for explanations sake, i will tell the story. when i first came out to oregon i was making necklaces and bracelets (i called them necklai and bracelai, respectively, at the time). i had a cache of about 20 of each, and i would regularly go down to the saturday market and the waterfront with the intention to sell them, but i could never work up the courage to lay out my wares for people to judge. i was way to critical of myself and petrified of someone making fun of my stuff.

now, i think that i am over that. i can just sit in my chair and have my stuff on my little table. let people come and go as they please, buy as they wish. i think that i could make some money doing this, and for that i am happy. we'll see what happens after tomorrow though. i like this place.

the way to prescott / phoenix sucks

well, tucson is now just a recent memory. i left this morning around 9am or so, headed for phoenix. i had done some research online this morning and found an infoshop in phoenix and a free guided nature walk. so things were looking up. from tucson i got on the expressway just fine and got to phoenix in record time.

phoenix was large and sprawling, i wasnt into it from the start. i went to the first place i knew to in the city, the infoshop. the infoshop, called "the tribe" was just a small brick house on a real busy street next to an ace hardware. there was nothing on the exterior to make a person believe it was actually an infoshop. there were two cars in the driveway that had the sunscreens on them, as if they had been there a real long time. it was discouraging.

i circled a couple of times and then assumed it was dead. so then i was stuck. no good info, no people known, and a big hot city. i drove around the city a bit, got lost, and then found some internet. there i confirmed that phoenix wasnt for me and decided to head out. i went to the nature walk that was a bit outside of the city. i got there and the counter person said that the free guided tour had been canceled but i could pay $7 for a self guided tour. wha? i thought about sneaking in, but i was the only person there and i had already given myself away. discouraged with phoenix altogether, i left.

i headed toward the living history pioneer museum, it sounded interesting. and it was only a couple miles north of the nature walk place. i got there and my god it was dead! living history my ass. there was no one else there and it was just some adobe walls with wild west saloon scenes painted on them. again, discouraging. i turned around and got on the highway.

which highway, carefree highway, headed toward wickenton or something. i am a sucker for things, so when i saw the stanton ghost town turnoff, i took it. i would love to see a real abandoned town, a ghost city like fort ord. it was about 20 miles from the highway on a dirt and gravel road. and when i finally got there? tons of people! it wasnt a ghost town at all, there was a small community of rv folks that lived there and panned for gold. i walked around the "old" buildings (they had all been refurbished and people lived in them) and it was free to stay the night there if i wanted. i thought about it, but just left.

i was on my way to prescott. steev and greta told me prescott would be better, it would be cooler (in temperature) and cooler (in general). i got my hopes up, and so far they havent been let down. it is a mountain community, that reminds me of portland pared down and crumbled together with crown point indiana. i went to the downtown square where a lie band was setting up and got some wifi right there.

the infoshop is just a block or so from the downtown square, so i walked to that. it was closed but looked wonderful. it had a free porch outside and a little stage outside, a bookstore and infoshop inside. they had an information board and and sheet of resources for free food, shelters, and other resources! how great. ecstatic i walked back to the square.

there i just walked around for a bit, the band was still setting up. i got a free weekly paper and then just sat and breathed it in for a moment, enjoyed it. then i got back online to find a bar! or something else to do tonight. i found a place called sundances place. the only punk/dive bar in prescott. tonight is 80's night and they have cheap beer and wifi.

i could like this place. since i bypassed phoenix, and this place seems nice, i will try to stay here through the weekend. try to slow down again, sit in the park and catch up on knotting cord. hang around the infoshop, maybe catch a show this weekend. the weather is nice, high 70's for the next week or so, and it just seems real laid back and nice.

yay.

tucson.

as i drove into tucson, i put on a desert rat cd "trickle in the canyon." the music is all about his time living in tucson and things that took place in tucson...probably in the mid-90's. it is some pretty good music and i dont listen to it enough. i wish that i had more of his albums on cd.

anyway. this is my second day here, i came in and called my friend steev who i am staying with. he was working when i called so i went and checked out the botanical garden. i have become pretty good at sneaking into botanical gardens. three for three.

and it was pretty amazing there. the various fruits that can grow in this climate is amazing. grapefruit, oranges, pomegranite, figs, and more i am sure. they also had mulberry trees, and a vegetable garden with squash, tomato, tomatillo, beans, and other things. it gave me some hope for living in the desert. something i have been toying with, and will extrapolate on later.

then i went downtown and walked around a bit. then steev called me and i went over to his house and we chatted for a bit. i dont know steev that well, we met around 2003 in portland and were friendly toward each other, but never really hung out. so far it has been pretty nice catching up with him and his partner, greta.

later we rode bikes! it was the first time i had been on a bike for quite awhile, and i was riding an extracycle. apparently they were created here. it was also a cruiser, and it was nice. we rode to a mexican fo place where we got some burritos and chatted more. then he and greta had things to do, so i went to the hip area and had some beers at the sultry wench.

this morning steev and i went hiking in the sonora desert. i like hiking, it is something i will try to do in many places. we left around 7am, to beat the heat (it was already around 80), and got to the trail head around 7:30. then we just hiked up through this wash (a wash is a dry river bed that floods during the monsoons) called kings canyon trail. we saw lizards, and deer, and ground squirrels. we heard locusts.

near the top of the trail we saw and went up to an abandoned mine shaft. apparently they are all around this place, but it was sealed off rather well and we couldnt get in it. oh how i wish we could have. we had been out an hour by that time, so we turned back on a different trail.

the trails and the desert are odd things. it isnt like a forest. there are a number of different cacti (some growing up to 30 feet tall and living for an average of 150-200 years) the names of which escape me. and there are some small trees and other bushes, but it is rather sparse. you can blaze your own paths very easily because most things grow low to the ground so you can see far in front of you. but the wash was like walking on the beach, and that isnt the easiest thing.

cacti are really amazing things. something i didnt know is that the saguaro cactus (the typical cactus that you think of) produces fruit. and people eat it! they make syrup and wine, and apparently they are very good. there is a bunch of stuff around the desert that i never knew about things that are living and producing, the things that people lived off of still exist. it was really amazing to see that. (unfortunately i forgot to take my camera today...)

anyway. i am learning alot about this part of the world and the desert in general. i still dont think i could live here, but it is nice to learn that it is possible. then we came back to the city and had some iced coffee's at revolutionary grounds, a neat little coffee shop. and then steev went to work and i went off to explore on my own. unfortunately it was too hot to do very much, i walked around downtown for a bit. and then sat in a park for awhile knotting cord.

now i am chilling out indoors for the heat of the day, wiling away the hours. i am planning on leaving tomorrow, headed for phoenix. i probably wont stay there long...

of fences, cops, and imagination

so, something that i havent been mentioning at all is the border control. the fence. the checkpoints. i havent been mentioning it by design, i felt that it would deserve its own post and a bit of a spotlight.

when i came back from tijuana the line to get into the united states was about two hours long. there wasnt a line to get in. the line for cars looked to be about the same, again, no line to get in. the fence at the tijuana border was monstrous. it was about twenty feet high, and had barbed wire at the top...just in case someone made it there.

after leaving san diego, on the two lane highways as close to the border as possible, i started seeing a lot of cops. at least i thought they were cops. the cars looked like them, the pickup trucks looked like mini-jails. it was the border patrol. they dont pull you over for speeding, i learned that quickly, and it doesnt seem they do much of anything else but stir up dust and congregate at local businesses.

i mean that literally. some of the pick-up jails were towing behind them four old tires chained together, and it seemed that the only reason was to stir up dust and shake anyone from their migration path. at random points i would see congregation of ten or so vehicles just sitting on the side of the road, whenever i went through little towns all of the restaurants had congregations of border patrol vehicles outside. randomly in the middle of nowhere a border patrol vehicle would just be sitting empty, as a deterrent.

i also had to go through a "checkpoint" somewhere along the way. it wasnt much, the idea had me on edge. i am alone in a pickup truck and you cant see well into the back, and what you can see is a bed and other living things. i felt for sure coming up to it i was going to be searched. but when i got there, i was just waved on through, with barely a second look.

all of this smoke, the dusting, empty vehicles, congregating, and at the one point where the border patrol people can actually check the vehicles, they are just waved through, everyone that i could see was just waved through. what a job.

and then there is the fence. i wanted to travel as close to the border to see it, i was sure it had been built and i wanted to see the monstrosity, i wanted to write about the new wall, the new symbol of fascism. but i didnt see it for a long time, i was expecting the twenty foot high tijuana wall, but when i did see it, it was just off it the distance, it looked like a low lying snake. from the road it looked to be about two feet thick, black, and about six feet tall.

but i wasnt very close. the road is far from the border, and i think that is strategic. the southwest is all desert. constructing the road twenty miles from the border makes it that much harder for anyone trying to cross. there is probably some official only access road right along the fence, but i didnt see that either. i did see, dotted along the side of the road, blue bins with large flags that apparently held bottles of water for migrants. i thought that was nice. later i found that the border patrol doesnt pay for those, border activists provide those for the people that need water.

when i did actually see the fence, when the road was closest to the border, it was high desert. it was sand dune desert that you see on the planet tattooine. and i am sure it is epicly hot. once when i was visiting indiana in the summer, i walked on a lake michigan beach barefoot for about 200 feet. when i was done i had huge blisters all across my feet and i couldnt walk for two days. first degree burns for such a small place far from the desert.

i couldnt imagine the hell that a person must endure to make it across the border. but there are alot of people that try. and that just makes me wonder about the hell that exists just across the border.

and it makes me wonder about the border in general. it is just an imaginary line, something that doesnt really exist. it was created in 1853, it is barely 150 years old, and what purpose does it serve? american companies have been moving factories to mexico for cheap labor, and mexicans have been migrating to the us for better jobs. it is a paradigm, something that fences and border patrol will never solve.

i have seen the future.

ruins on the roadside

last night i caught a glimpse of the future, this morning i realized it. the future is casa grande, arizona. or generally, perhaps the american southwest. there are numeruous factors that are driving this future, they include: globalization, water scarcity, biotechnology, global warming, and fear.

last night i was trying to find a place to park and sleep. the landscape out here is flat, aside from distant mountains and clear. there are very few trees, and most of them are under 20' tall. it is kind of a barren wasteland. dotting the two lane highways are burned out homes and businesses, shells of places that were once inhabited.

what exist out here are strip malls, gated communities and desert wastelands. so, i was looking for a place to sleep and i just kept seeing these long walls of gated communities. i would drive to the entrance and see the gate closed, a guard at the gate. i would have to drive on. eventually i gave up. there was a walmart amongst the strip malls and they allow rv's and campers to use their parking lots over night.

another ruins nearby

i went to it, but this one had signs at every row saying "no overnight parking." so i had to leave and keep looking. eventually, behind the home depot, i found a walled community without a gate. i drove into it, but it was hard to distinguish if you could park on the street. there werent very many cars parked on the street and instead of lawns they have rock yards that blend into the sidewalk and sloping sidewalks that blend into the street. that, and it seemed every block and a sheriffs car parked out front.

the one community not gated was the community that all the cops lived in. great. i found a decent looking place just off of a cul-de-sac in that community, i parked and jumped in back. i put up all my "curtains" so it would be harder for anyone to see me. and i slept. not very easily, but whatever.

a jet plane engine?

when i got up in the morning, i dressed and did some hygiene, then left. it was about 9am when i saw the first temperature of the day: 103 degrees. at 9am. it was 107 degrees at 5pm yesterday. then, as i was driving out of town, i got past the last strip mall and there was a field of green, then a field of desert, then a field of desert, the irrigation channels all dry. and it continued to be desert for the next 19 miles. one or two green fields maintaining.

i dont have much hope for the world. the temperatures are rising, what once was green will turn to brown, what once was water will turn to desert, everyone that can will live in a gated and guarded community, and all those people will be businesspeople managing the assets that used to be here but are now in india, china, mexico, wherever corporations can exploit people.

and then there will be the rest of us. scorching in the desert heat, trying to find some shade under a bush, eating ground squirrels and agave nectar, slowly plotting and planning a way back.

magnificent journey part two: june / heading east

well, this is kind of a big deal, the next part of my journey, where it starts to become a little more real. when i left portland my intention, what i told people, was that i would head south and then east. that was my plan, there was no point south at which to turn east, but i knew that the south part would be the easy part.

i lined up two people that i was pretty confident would like to hang out with me in california, which is a pretty easy state as it is. i took my time, enjoyed most of it, and progressively got better at this traveling thing, because i am rusty.

with bradley i was only there a night, i was too hung up on the idea that i was imposing on him. i randomly dropped in and his place was small, i felt bad. even though i am sure he would have loved to have me stay and be able to help me. it was something that i had to get over.

with tiffany, three days and i was feeling pretty good about it. la was too big for me to really feel comfortable, but i felt very welcomed at tiff's and not at all like an imposition. it was cut short because she went to texas. although she did offer for me to stay at her house while she was gone.

ricky was the icing on the cake. it wasnt lined up and i stayed for four days. at no time did i feel like i was burdening them and that was wonderful. there, i felt that i finally had my sea legs and could venture from the shore. although in this analogy the shore is really the ocean and the sea is the land...you figure it out.

and after that i turned east. the practice round is over, i have my game face on, and i am trying not to let my self get in the way of my experience. i worked a whole lot of symbolism up in my head about the importance of turning east. unfortunately i am not able to transcribe it right now...because i have forgotten most of it.

but, now i am on it. i am in arizona for day two. i am doing a better job of moving slower and finding things to do in between people. today i took it slow on the two lane desert highways. it was eerie. i was the only car for miles and miles. i was driving off the road a bit and was stuck in an old lava field for 27 miles on a dirt/lava rock road. i was running low on gas but kept on, willing the truck to the petroglyph monument just so i could find out what a petroglyph was.

things like that. then i sat in a park eating pickles and knotting cord for a couple hours, just to try to pass the sun away. unfortunately that didnt work. when i got back to my truck it had just sucked up all of the sun and the steering wheel and shifter were too hot to touch!

i dont think i could survive down here for a very long time, the heat is simply too oppressive. if it were this hot and there were some trees around, maybe, but this is just desert. i am very glad i never took off to try to live in bisbee when i was younger.

also, my mind is moving faster than my ability to type.