Abrasion.

I knew before, in a vague sense. I do not like working with other people. I do not like the idea that I can do my tasks meticulously, to the letter, and the result will still be failure, because someone else did not perform their role at the level I expect, the level the project demands.

I was constructing benches. They pushed the boards right up against one another; the diagram had a small space between them. Perhaps so that the boards don’t warp as much, have room to grow when they expand and contract with moisture. They started their way, and when I started mine I did it according to the diagram. “That’s not how you do it,” Haley said. It is, I assured her. “Well, let’s be consistent,” she insisted. “You do it their way.” People would rather be consistently wrong than inconsistent.

Still, the project was good: building a playground, outdoor classroom, bulletin boards, cubby holes, and a gazebo for a school with 300 volunteers. I worked on the classroom, digging holes through the thin layer of grass and the thick layer of blacktop beneath. If all projects were as rewarding as this one, I would be less miserable here.

Thanksgiving went well. People commended the turkey I cooked, the pumpkin pies I baked. The cranberry sauce I cooked didn’t get much praise, because people have a strange fetish for the disgusting cylinder of gel instead. Far too much food was made: Chris’s two pounds of brown-sugar carrots and pecans; Will’s brown sugar squash and apples, Jeremy’s four pounds kugel, some sort of sweet Jew noodle pudding; Wendy’s green bean casserole; Garrett’s corn pudding, and Carmella had Aaron make mashed potatoes using the entire ten-pound bag of potatoes. Entire sticks of butter were used in many dishes, and my body cries out in sorrow whenever I put one of them into my mouth. People were quickly stuffed; every dish was a dense one.

I ran today for perhaps an hour and a half by myself. This is forbidden, especially after dark; I left at sunset. I told Will, Aaron and Garrett I’d left and I took nothing but my phone. I’d taken a break there when I ran down to the busy part of town and saw some friends from other teams in for the weekend carousing with some of my teammates. (Carmella's been gone since Thursday, out drinking with fellow team leaders. She was seen carrying a fishbowl full of liquor down Bourbon Street one night, and talked with Haley about how she was surprised and kind of unimpressed that most people on the team were only out until 2am. Apparently last year she was something of a boozer. On the plus side, she hasn't checked in on us all weekend. Others have been drinking; I'm simply enjoying the absence of authority.)

When I arrived home, Haley barked at me. She said I wasn’t to go out after dark alone ever again because it was unsafe and against the rules and that nobody knew where I was. I told her that she was wrong, she wasn’t Carmella and wasn’t in a position to lecture me, I was a responsible individual, and that I didn’t really care what she had to think. She said that I was endangering the whole team with my actions, and when I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere I decided to just agree with everything she said. I wish I could say this made her stop talking.

This went on for twenty minutes. I was not completely scathing; after all, I do have to tolerate her presence day and night. When one of the other team members decided she would resume lecturing for another forty after Haley finished her piece, I was less polite. She insisted danger was around every corner and that people waited in alleys with two-by-fours waiting to club me over the head, that people would run up behind me dead-silent and punch me in the back of the head while I was jogging just on the chance I might be carrying something worth taking. I insisted she was an idiot. A stalemate.

I come from the water.

Today I saw the Toadies for seventeen dollars. Andrea went with me, and we were right in front-- You seriously could not have been any closer to the lead singer than where we were. No more than five feet. I could see all the intense angry facial expressions he made when he sang, and occasionally his eyes would dart around, and he'd stare directly at me out of the corners of his eyes for a couple seconds while he sang and I swear his irises are solid black.

They played all of my favorite tracks and obviously had a fun time doing it. "You're a fanfuckingtastic crowd, and this one's for you," they'd say. And then jam on their guitars for ten seconds and say "Thank you." This sort of thing happened more than once. There was a bobblehead of Thor from Marvel Comics on the drum set.

The Toadies are getting up there in the years, but the vocals are still solid and they definitely still have it; the show kicked ass and I screamed my lungs out and sung along. Andrea liked it too, in spite of not knowing the band.

The lead singer switched guitars twice. Each time he did he threw a guitar pick. All the people around me were very drunk and uncoordinated. I now have a guitar pick that has a t in a triangle and says "toadies" on one side and "This pick was STOLEN from Vaden Todd Lewis" in scratchy letters on the other. And to top it off, the bassist gave me a set list and the guitarist signed it for me, skirted requests from drunk people (including arm-signings and 'will you leave my sick girlfriend a voicemail') and talked to me for a minute or two before leaving for an end-of-tour party backstage.

"Hey, I have a question for you: my friend and I were having a bit of a debate a while back. Is 'I Burn' (which I was absolutely thrilled that they played, I might add) about smoking pot?"
"Nah, it's about a book. Do you know Fahrenheit 451? Todd read the book and as soon as he put it down he started working on that song. Trust me, if it was about pot it would be way more flowery and have absolutely nothing to do with smoke or burning or anything."

He smiled and took a drag of a joint, and I wondered if I was being led on, if he was making this up on the spot.

They have a new album out after eight years' hiatus, "No Deliverance," and they played some things off of it. It certainly sounded good live, good enough that I'm going to look into it.

I thought they were going to leave it out, but the very last song they played was the song that sounds like a love song but is actually about breaking into a girl's house, kidnapping her, and running away to Mexico. I think I pulled a muscle in my throat singing along as loud as I could with the rest of the crowd.

2801 Marais St, New Orleans, LA 70117

It occurs to me that I talk about my side projects without talking about my main project.

Rebuilding Together works in more places than just New Orleans, but there's definitely a focus here. Our director... Kristin, I think her name is? She's lived here for a long time and is very conscious of the architecture of the area. Our orientation included a very interesting lecture about the styles of housing and where they came from. She loves their use of space-- the shotgun double is a long, narrow house broken into two sides. Sometimes a family lives on either side of the house, and the fireplaces are built into the wall that divides it in two. Most don't have hallways because they were looked at as wasted space-- it's a series of square rooms that just run to the back of the house.

Rebuilding Together finds low income elderly or disabled citizens, and also first responders (firefighters, EMTs, policemen), and builds them houses. They take special steps to make them as green (in the environmental sense, not the color schemes) as they can-- bamboo flooring, things like that. The furniture in the houses is all donated from movie sets! Which I think is really cool.

There was recently a huge volunteer project sponsored by Starbucks-- they spent $31 million leveraging 10,000 volunteers for two days, gave them all outfits, water bottles, espresso, fed them, paid for their airfare and hotels to come to New Orleans, really went all-out... They got a lot done, I think a hundred houses? But most aren't all the way done. A lot of the volunteers wouldn't get on ladders, so our job is to get to high places, paint trim and touch-ups, oftentimes on rickety extension ladders 30 feet off the ground. We scrape excess paint off windows that weren't taped beforehand.

Last week I did a different job on a different house every day, never to completion: repair broken window panes, install fence-posts, paint eaves of a roof, work in the warehouse, install a curtainrod and arrange furniture and wipe down floors by hand. Sometimes it feels a little like busy work, and it can be unfulfilling feeling like you never get to see the end of things. Other times, it's unexpectedly fun.

Historical homes that are slated to be demolished are oftentimes salvaged for windows, doors, mantles, columns, and anything else we can get our hands on. These parts usually only need a bit of work and are sold to the public pretty cheap. They apparently did this to offset our cost of living for utilities and things. A popular thing to salvage is barge-board: the ships that would bring supplies down the Mississippi couldn't go back up the river, so they were disassembled and the wood was used for building. Some of our stuff is made from barge board here.

I have had an ear infection for two weeks and I finally went to the doctor today. I left the marathon I was working at to go because we didn't have any days off this week. I got an antibiotic, five days of Zithromax, that I hope kicks in soon, because the infection's gotten worse the past two days. Right now it sounds like my right ear is stuffed full of cotton, or like I'm listening from underwater-- sensible, because there's apparently fluid built up in it.

I leave on December 15 and return to Denver by December 18. I fly home for Christmas on December 22. I return to Denver on January 2 at noon and I just realized that my mother may have just inadvertently made life very difficult on me when she bought this ticket for me before I left if Kat's plane tickets home take her home after I leave, shit

Uh anyway

My address is in the title, if you would like to surprise me with a letter before then.

Pink stinks.

Saturday was spent working for Brad Pitt's "Make it Right" organization as part of an ISP, an independent service project. We were told we'd be "folding tarps for the Pink Project" and most of us expected to be working outside with a huge group taking down these tent-houses that were set up as a fundraiser. The girls woke up early and primped a little on the off-chance they'd meet Brad Pitt. His love of adoption no longer applies simply to children from foreign nations-- He now adopts entire cities.

Nnnot quite. When we got to the project site we found out it was an old Walgreen's in the Lower Ninth Ward. The letters are long-since pulled down on the outside and you can see the silhouette of them on the building, cleaner than all the surrounding concrete. It's completely gutted on the inside and is being worked on to be converted into a church. It was filled wall-to-wall, hip-high, with pink tarps, and one person showed up to tell us what was going on: Pierre. The church wanted the tarps gone, so we're moving them to another warehouse a few blocks away, and someday in the future they might get turned into something useful, like reusable grocery totebags.

Some of the tarps were wet. Some were covered in ants. Some were one piece that made an entire tent-house and took three people to carry. It was foul-smelling, grueling, lots of people have sore backs and muscles, and we spent about nine hours doing it. But I got some really great pictures of the whole thing. Consider this the meet-the-teammates post, as well. Still no good ones of the elusive Jeremy and Andrea, though-- perhaps in the future, dear reader.

Haley's back, Aaron with his eyes closed, Will, blurry Chris, and Carmella.

A typical Aaron and Chris situation.

Carmella and Wendy wax philisophical.

Chris and Garrett badly miss football, and talk about it often.

Haley, sporting the "rugby shirt," a long-sleeve polo-type shirt that's this odd mix of cream and grey. A lot of people like it, but I still haven't even taken mine out of the plastic wrap-- I think it would look terrible on me and I don't like the shirt at all.

When all was said and done we moved four full-sized U-haul trucks worth of tarps and stacked them into a mountain in this harbor-side warehouse that smelled acrid and oppressive, likely from the flood. If plastic could go stale, this is what it would smell like. Most people didn't mind, but it made me really uncomfortable-- fortunately, unloading is quick work.

Pierre gave us a tour of the Lower Ninth Ward and the part Make it Right was working on. About one in ten houses still stands on those blocks closest to the pier. Most of the lots look like this:

It's very grim out there, driving through and seeing this over and over again, seeing houses still standing with X's spraypainted on them during recovery efforts showing some of the vitals of the house: dates checked, occupants recovered, and in some instances, a body count. The Lower Ninth has a whole lot of those, houses with "DEAD" spray-painted on the outside.

There's a little color seeping in from the outside, though. Make it Right sells super-environmentally-friendly homes for only $150,000. They just finished their first few homes recently, and they get excited for the little things, like when their new residents start getting mail.

To buy one of these houses, they have quite a few criteria: you must have lived in the Lower Ninth before the flood, you must prove that you'll be able to take good care of the house, a few other things... They have a very forgiving loan plan, apparently-- most of these peoples' houses were valued at only $50,000 before the storms. One of the local antique dealers I took a liking to was talking to me about it and he said it was a nice gesture, but not the most intelligent move on their part. That the houses have lots of specialized parts, and that many of the residents will have a hard time maintaining them. Not to mention that they don't look at all like the usual New Orleans houses, the Creole cottages or the shotgun doubles; they have none of the flavor of the local architecture and frankly look a little weird.

Your eyes do not deceive you: the roof is asymmetrical, the slope on front much steeper than that of the back. Most of the houses look a little fucked up, and one of the weirdest designs that nobody's bought yet, when you look at it from the front, it looks like an M. Like you could half-pipe on the roof or something. Still, the homes pass a ton of rigorous tests for weather and flood resistance and insulation and they have built them ridiculously quickly, something like six houses in 45 days. So I can't fault what they're doing at all.

These houses would easily cost three times this back home, and in the right neighborhood I'm sure they'd sell for over a million. But apparently here, at $150,000 a house, they aren't losing any money on it. They've figured out how to help these people by giving them houses better than they ever could have had, and are giving it to them as cheaply as they can humanly afford. Little by little, they're rebuilding a whole neighborhood.

Same as it ever was

Randomly, without warning, a daze strikes me now and again, things feel fuzzy, surreal. I am outside myself, this does not feel like my life, and my tongue, my hands, move of their own accord. I see these faces, I understand that I know them, but then realize I do not: I share a room with people whose middle names, criminal backgrounds, old relationships I do not know, whose loves, worries and fears I have yet to see. Icebreaker-games alone do not tell you about a person. I acknowledge them during these team meetings, at dinner, at work, I smile, but something deep inside me says: wait, this is a ridiculous situation. Who are these people? What are you doing here? This is the best you could come up with? What compelled you? Firefighting? You're going to want to do nine months straight of this?

This is new, but it is still you. Did you think a new place, new people, would make you happier? Well, here: have dozens of new places. Have two hundred new people. Are you happier now? No-- you wanted a challenge, to be sure, but you were hoping that with it would come some sense of fulfillment, satisfaction. (But then, maybe that will come later-- you are only a week into your first project, you know.)

We are friends, we are a small family a month old, because we have to be. I do not say this like it is a bad thing; that’s simply how it is. We embrace it, because there is no alternative. We eat, cook, and sleep together. But your family is at home and your co-workers are at work and your friends are at your leisure; these people are all of these at once, in sequence, inescapably. These three groups are meant to be three separate groups for a reason: no one group is meant to fulfill all these roles, or stress comes quickly.

When all this sturm und drang passes, I would like to be able to stand back and look and say I was happy.

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

And you may ask yourself, "What is that beautiful house?"
And you may ask yourself, "Where does that highway lead to?"
And you may ask yourself, "Am I right? Am I wrong?"
And you may tell yourself, "My god, what have I done?"

Friends and Family?

Perhaps a rundown of my teammates is in order, in case I ever mention them and you’re clueless. This will be later edited to include pictures of all the folks in question.

Aaron and Will are our team’s clowns. They talk almost exclusively in the Borat voice, call each other “bra”—a strange corruption of the word “bro,” and not a ladies’ undergarment. Will is the dark-haired one, is from New York, and occasionally says something very clever I would not typically expect. They got jumped in Denver on Halloween, dressed as a banana and a fisherman, but only lost their soda and half a cigarette. The two of them are obsessed with McDonalds, and go nightly, thus violating the ‘no going outside after dark’ rule. For some reason Carmella does not mind it as much as she does if anyone else goes out.

Garrett is a pretty preppy guy, and very smart and funny. I feel like he went to a pretty upper-class university but I can’t think of which. Like Noel, he has the power to make you like him regardless of what social strata you’re in. He is most definitely a people person, and I’ve seen him joke back and forth with random people on the street, or different homeowners whose houses we work on. He enjoys The Office and jokingly called Sports Center “his meditation.”

Chris Paradis (pronounced ‘parody,’ but everyone says ‘paradise’) is a fairly skilled musician, and plays his guitar every night. When he’s clean-shaven he looks like Michael C. Hall (Dexter from the eponymous show, David Fischer from Six Feet Under), but he has some sort of no-shaving pact with Wendy. He has a novel that others have been reading that I strongly suspect reads like “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac. I like Chris; he’s very smart, and out of everyone here his sense of humor is probably closest to mine.

Jeremy is tall and has glasses that make him look like Clark Kent, and in his college pictures he is long-haired and clean-shaven and looks like a whole different person. I thought he was older than me when I first saw him, and learned later that he’s not. We bonded over running; he has ridiculous endurance for it and has a hard time finding people who can keep pace with him. He is probably the quietest guy here.

Wendy Angus-Anderson (Chris wrote a song about all her names; she has six or seven of them, when all her middle ones are factored in) has asthma. She has a hard time with running. She, Chris, Jeremy, and some others back in Denver were all pretty good friends, and I like them, but they can feel very cliquish sometimes, and I have a hard time being a part of that. She used to be a dancer, I think. I would not be surprised if she and Chris got together by the end of this, nor would I mind: I think they’d make a decent couple.

Andrea is from San Diego, and as far as I can tell she never left her house, because everything is new and surprising to her and she does a lot of weird things she thinks are perfectly normal, like breaking up toast with jelly on it into her oatmeal. At first I thought she might have had an eating disorder—She is very skinny, I saw her at the gym all the time, and she seemed to eat very little. Now that I’m living with her I realize I was completely wrong; she’s always rushing for seconds or thirds at dinner and snacking throughout the day, but she never gains weight.

Haley is deaf, but apparently deafness isn’t what it used to be, because she has hearing aids that let her hear just fine. Haley is a little dense, though. There was a neon sign in a New Orleans storefront that said “No drugs or nuclear weapons allowed inside,” and she thought it was serious. The last group that was here had a plumbing problem and had to go to another house for a week because this one flooded, and when the Rebuilding Together staff member was explaining this, Haley thought she meant they left to go to Texas to help out with hurricane Gustav for a week. She is perhaps the most motherly of all of us, in all senses of the word.

Carmella is the team leader. She is a sweet girl, but she is very by-the-book, which can be frustrating sometimes. I have been told that I’m not allowed to read while in the front passenger seat because I’m supposed to be watching for road hazards (ATD, assistant to driver, this is called). I can’t read while standing around waiting for a job because it looks like I’m inattentive (while others have been standing around idly bullshitting with each other for good lengths of time). I can only wear my bandana when it is functionally necessary (keeping paint out of my hair), but she told me to take it off the moment I got in the truck. I can’t tie the sleeves of my cover-alls around my waist.

Carmella does not allow anyone out alone, or after dark. When we jog in the neighborhood, no-one is allowed to bring their iPods in case someone decides to jump the pack of ten of us. If we leave when the sun’s up, we have to be back by 10:00pm weekdays, 2:00am weekends, but we can’t walk—we have to taxi. Even though it’s only perhaps a mile to the hangouts. And we aren’t allowed to drive the trucks there. With the fence around our lot, it starts to feel very cagey.

My better judgment tells me to simply say “okay” and do what she says when she says I should do something, but part of me always wants to say “Carmella, nobody is going to tell on you for letting us do this.”

Overall, they are good people, but we are crammed in tight and never apart, and it wears thin on me, has been wearing thin on me for days. I wish I could go out at nights; I wish weekends did not seem so short; I wish I knew more than just these nine people here. I am eager for Christmas, for nothing more than to just sit alone in my own space, to have a mattress and not a cot to sleep on.

Halloween at the Children's Museum.

The Children's Museum I spent Halloween at might be one of my new favorite places.

Becky, Lena, Lauren in bunny ears, and Kat.

Chris sporting an awesome cowboy hat, the back of Mike's head, Sarah, and ohIdon'tremember, possibly a Lauren, we have a million Laurens.

Immaculately-dressed conductor. The larger version of this picture perfectly captures his focused expression, which is giggle-inducing.

The room I was in charge of for the first portion of my evening was the A to Z room, where mask-making took place. This overweight guy's costume may have been the creepiest all night. The little girl with the wings was adorably quiet and aloof, and in some strange way reminded me of Kat.

This very cute Spider-Man had a curly moustache painted on his face. He was as talkative as he was cute. Below him is an ADORABLE BABY with an expression like an uncaring emperor in the larger version of this picture. Here, he just looks sleepy. Which, come to think of it, is more on the mark.

The table of bubbles in the blacklight room. Unfortunately, blacklights can be tough photographic conditions.

I included the shopping area just because I thought my mom might think it was neat. This sounds more misogynistic than I intend it to be.

There are two outdoor-themed areas. The above one is the clubhouse room with soft carpet and no shoes allowed; the bottom one is the one with animal costumes you dress up in.

When no-one was looking, I donned the guise of my power animal-- the rabbit-- as best I could. I am wearing my halloween costume over my Americorps uniform.

For bonus entertainment: my costume as I wore it around to the party on-campus.

Where the Heart is, While the Heart is in New Orleans.

Home is in the ghetto. I can’t tell if the houses were always this bad, or if it was the hurricanes. Our house is called the green house, because it’s painted lime green. It’s surrounded by a purple seawall-fence with razor wire atop, and our yard is the storeyard for the orange warehouse next door. Bathtubs, sinks, metal railings, molding, doors, windows, fireplace arches—anything that could be salvaged on these unsalvageable houses was.

Our (very pregnant and still very pretty) supervisor Daniela came by to give us a brief introduction to tomorrow’s work and the area: Don’t walk at night, go in groups, last year a volunteer was carjacked, went to chase his assailant down, got shot in the stomach and was hospitalized for months. Two kids got mugged right outside the fence. Carmella refuses to let us walk, in any number, after about 6pm. We can’t take the trucks out either, though; we have to taxi home.

The house looks nice enough, outside and in: hardwood floors, fresh coats of paint, well-organized. Tiger print rug in the living room. No TV, but a computer. But I suspect it’s veneer: In two days we’ve found twenty cockroaches the size of your thumb. Some are killed, some slip away. They do, in fact, scatter when the lights come on. At about 3:00am the first night, we realized that train tracks run through our backyard, and the house shakes a little and the conductor makes liberal use of the whistle. We found out again at 6:30am.

There are two bathrooms, and showering is lukewarm and means standing up to your shins in water. Three bedrooms, ten by fifteen feet: the team leader has one to herself, but allows us to store some extra stuff in there. The three other girls have a room to themselves. The six guys share the last room. The girls are happy, and the boys hit their knees on the cots every time they enter. Any time someone complains, someone else says, “You wouldn’t have it any better in Tent City with FEMA in Texas!” Yes, but then everyone would be suffering equally. This is my gripe.

In truth, though I complain, it’s a really interesting situation, it’s novel, and it’s entertaining for it. It’s rugged, it’s Fight Club, whatever comparison you’d like to draw. Work is right next door, which is convenient, and Class XIV left us a fair amount of food, a ton of rice.

Two nights in a row, I've had dreams about getting stabbed: once in the small of my back by someone back on campus in Denver, and once in the chest while I was chasing down someone in a grey skull mask for stealing the Christmas decorations off my mother's lawn.

Travel to Project One.

Mon., Nov. 10: We leave Denver at 9:00am, the first day of our three-day trip to New Orleans. The unit leader says we're supposed to be ahead of the bad weather, but he's wrong. We stop every two hours to switch drivers, and at the first stop, we have a snowball fight. In New Mexico.
Lunch at Subway, we move into Texas and it’s like the snow was never there. The sun’s beating and we pass solemn-looking oil drillers that look like dipping birds. Chris remarks that they look like sad, like they’d start attacking us if only they could break free of their masters. We pass a road that looks exactly like the road from the end of SE7EN. Check-in at the Days Inn at 10:00pm. Dinner at IHOP; I had nutella crepes, bacon, sausage, and eggs.

Tue., Nov. 11: Breakfast at the Days Inn is actually pretty good: biscuits & (iffy) gravy, scrambled eggs, waffles you cook on a little iron, english muffins, toast, PB&J, oatmeal, fruit, milk, juice, coffee, tea. I'm starting to feel like Wednesday in American Gods: eat your fill and love it every time, regardless of how bad it might actually be. We drive about 500 miles and spend it all in Texas. Texas is an endless expanse of level, straw-colored grass and dust. The sky is completely clear, completely surrounding, and the world feels infinite. Scale becomes meaningless: a tiny silo on the horizon begins to looks like a giant ant waiting for your approach to pick you up and take you down into his hive.

Lunch at McDonald’s, dinner at Applebee’s (the lead truck had a sense of humor, though, and drove into the IHOP parking lot next door first, leading to much swearing and horror from our truck until we’d realized we’d been duped). Jeremy and I went for a run, the first run since our leaving Denver’s elevation, and I ran easily three times what I normally ran, felt like I could do plenty more. It drizzled a little towards the end of our four-plus-mile excursion. I listened to Joanna Newsom for the whole of the run, and the chi was good.

Wed, Nov. 12: This Days Inn breakfast left something to be desired: oatmeal, danishes, fruit, coffee, orange juice and milk. We traveled into rainy Louisiana, past a swamp that reminded me of the swamp temple in the Super Nintendo Legend of Zelda game. A thin pool of water and trees growing out of it as if it were soil. A few bridges, and telephone wires stretching across a lake towards New Orleans. Glooming, looming clouds.

Because of the elevation, all the gravesites are mausoleums (so the caskets don’t come up and float away when it floods), and the expressway overlooks three blocks of them. You pass right by them, tightly packed, the blocks surrounded by brick walls. Water from the flood means ivy grows on the tops of the mausoleums, the houses. Nature’s creeping in, reclaiming this dense urban nest, and it’s beautiful to look at in an odd sort of way, even if you wouldn’t want to live in it. Some of the houses are painted garishly, many are wood-paneled, and all are worn and dirty from the water. The fleur-de-lys is plastered on EVERYTHING out here: shirts, banners, storefronts, trash cans, port-a-potties, bandanas, tattoos, stadiums… It is a city of contradictions. Regal but poor, carefree but dangerous, uncultured but with culture, it lends it je ne sais quoi. I would take a million pictures, if I could stop the car whenever I wanted.

Firefighting demo.

They moved us out of our rooms in Walsh Hall and into new rooms in Marian Hall for one week and it was a real pain. My new roommate was one of my teammates, Garrett, and he's a really funny and charismatic guy, but he makes me feel especially awkward sometimes. He and his friends are more of the preppier, college frat sort of guys, and sometimes when they socialize it reminds me of how bad I can be at it. Sometimes I think I might be a little too verbose for my own good, that it can be a little alienating. (Er, case in point: words like "verbose" and "alienating.")

The room was a shithole, by far worse than any of the other rooms on that hall. Among the treasures within were a sticky mason jar of honey, a half-eaten box of chocolates open on the desk, a used condom in the sink cupboard, and a number of dirty socks scattered about the floor. Deodorant was broken across the counter, and a baby blue silk ascot hung from the towel rack next to the sink. I washed it and boxed it up in the package of things I don't need that I'm having Bonnie mail home. I swept and mopped the floors and washed down the sink, only to be told a week later by the unit leader that I needed to do it again upon moving out because we somehow dirtied it up just as bad in that one week.

Last Friday (11/7) was my first firefighting day, the only one until January. It beat up everyone pretty good, myself included. A lot of people weren't very ready for the physicality of it, I think. Especially after three nine-hour days in the classroom for all the firefighting training. It was a tremendous amount of repetition, and the test was open-book-- the Incident Response Pocket Guide, a small notebook which condenses all the most important fire information into your pocket. No-one failed, which is good, because it would have been easy even without the book.

The field operation itself was a simulation-- digging an eighteen-inch-wide fireline. There are a few different kinds of tools for this: the shovel (which is, ironically, perhaps the worst digging tool for this kind of work), the combi (a collapsible small shovel/pick), the rhino (an enormous hoe), the alien (a modified McLeod cut down to a sharpened triangle with two spikes coming off the back to make it lighter and easier to store; it's menacing-looking), and my personal favorite, the pulaski (an axe/mattock). 30 people work down a line-- each person takes a couple swings, sidesteps, takes a couple swings, sidesteps, and so on, and the idea is that when 30 people have each taken a couple of swings you've cleared an 18" wide line. The pulaski is great for the beginning and the combi and rhino are great towards the end. You work your way down a few miles-- but we work in units called "chains," 66 feet. Fun fact: an acre is made up of 10 square chains.

The idea is that a line of dirt ("bare mineral soil") won't burn, and you put a ring of it all the way around a wildfire, let it burn to the ring, and it stops. This is not a perfect solution: on dry, windy days the fire will shoot embers into the air and send them across the line, causing small fires you have to run over and dig around. In certain conditions the fire will get pulled into the wind just right, and turn into a flaming tornado, called a fire whirl. I asked the forest service guy how often these appeared and he just shrugged and said, "They happen."

After four hours of digging with only a fifteen-minute lunch they simulated a situation where the fire overwhelmed us. With a tool in hand and 20 pounds of gear in my firefighting pack we ran a half-mile down the road, unstrapped our packs and pulled out a bottle of water and our fire shelters (a thin layer of silica, aluminum foil and fiberglass that reflects radiant heat and absorbs conductive heat, and looks frighteningly like a giant baked potato or a bodybag) and ran another mile down the road. This was really tough for a lot of people, and everyone was winded, but I guess my cardio's better than I thought, because it didn't hit me as bad as it hit most.

The weekend was spent getting ready for leaving Monday morning. Oh, and one other neat thing: There was a girl who I talked with over the summer while I was getting ready to join Americorps. Mallory gave me a bunch of great information about the program and told me about her experiences with it, and we became casual friends because of it. Class XIV returned to campus on Friday and then got dinner with their teams, while I went to a giant indoor warehouse full of trampolines and trampoline dodgeball with some of the RA's/long-term residents on campus I'd befriended. When I got back I looked for her, and when I turned the corner to the first floor girls' hall there were a few sitting on the floor talking. Some looked at me and wondered who I was, and a blonde head turned and looked surprised, and got up and ran over and hugged me. She introduced me to all her friends from class XIV and they talked about all the ups and downs of it with me and amongst themselves.

I didn't see her very much all weekend-- they're busy and we're busy and it's different tasks for the both of us. But I went to say goodbye the morning before I left and she gave me another hug and told me to have a good time and we took pictures together. I look a little goofy and flushed because I'd been running around getting my things in order and was a little out of breath, which makes me look all the less photogenic because she is very much so. Still, she's an absolute sweetheart and I'm really glad I got to meet her in person-- it felt strangely fulfilling, like some personal goal I hadn't realized I'd made had been met.

The Mostly-Highs and Rarely-Lows. (CTI Training)

Maybe an events calendar would be in order. God knows I need one to keep track of all this stuff. If only I'd waited a day to mail out a letter to Kat; I'd written it all out nicely for her and now I don't have it.

10/6 arrival. Got my room, roommate. Filled out some forms.

10/7 uniforms. Grey shirts with an A on the chest and right sleeve, and khaki or black pants. We have to tuck our shirts in and the pants are ridiculously-sized. I don't think there's a single person who found a pair of pants that fits both the width of their waist and the length of their legs.

10/8 boots and getting lots of shots (including paying 20 dollars for a flu shot) and a drug test at the doctor's office. Something like 15 people were kicked out for drugs-- and one for pregnancy. i'm colorblind, by the way. but i had already suspected as much. I can pass those things sometimes.

10/9 exploring downtown Denver; hiking in Roxborough State Park (pictures to come). It's desert-like out there-- cacti, mountain lions, rattlesnakes, PRAIRIE DOGS. We saw a field full of prairie dogs and their burrows. The mountains are these diagonal juts of red wind-eroded sandstone that make the whole place look very science-fiction, like you're on another planet. I got sunburned, which then turned into a tan-- but only on my arms and face. I wear my bucket hat and sunglasses a whole lot now. The hiking boots Joseph bought me for my birthday were a fantastic investment-- they are some of the most comfortable shoes I've ever worn, and damn if they don't match my clothes pretty well too.

10/11 twelve-person van driving tests; Lookout Mountain & Columbine

10/12 wildfire physical test. I got a 6:22 on my mile, and came in about 5th out of 40 or so. Denver air in the morning and lots of hilly bits made for me wretching after I finished my run-- good thing I hadn't eaten yet.

10/17 weeding an elementary school vegetable and decorative gardens and preparing them for winter. Deanna and Lena have pictures but can't seem to get them to me. Suffice to say it was cute. There are murals painted on the walls surrounding the school grounds, and the garden had sunflowers and corn that towered over me. Our contact there, Gigia, made us a huge pot of vegetable soup for lunch using the vegetables from the garden, and it was spicy and really great. A little boy named Jesus, eight years old, introduced himself to each of us and shook all our hands and made conversation during recess.

10/18 broke into pairs (my partner was Deanna, who incidentally looks just like a blonde Maggie Gyllenhaal) to supervise groups of ten volunteers in Denver City Park. We laid 3+ miles of trail made of a very fine gravel to make a natural-feeling, mountain-trail-esque path through the park. afterwards was a big gathering in the park for a catered Mediterranean lunch, and the mayor of Denver and some other local politicians spoke.

10/22 we don't have the budget to afford wood to make bookshelves for our hands-on tool training, so instead we went to Rocky Mountain National Park. My group took the trail backwards and had a beautiful, serene, peaceful hike all to ourselves. It was about a seven-mile hike, all told, and there was just a little snow coating everything, and low clouds touching all the tops of the mountains. We were told to bundle up and by midday it was really warm; I really can't imagine it ever being prettier and more pleasant there than when we went.

10/23 i tried out to read the induction speech. I didn't win, though-- I think mine was a little short. I was pretty zen about it, but my roommate Dave was really mad he didn't win. He wrote a very stream-of-consciousness thing that didn't make many references to AmeriCorps and was more literary than motivational. The one thing that does bother me is how much of a smug bastard the dude who did win was.

10/24 diversity training. The single most miserable lecture we had. Two late-twenties white girls taught us about how broad the world is. We held funnels over our heads because some dude wrote a theory about how the history of the world is like a funnel and that every previous moment has led to this moment, just for you. If you have nothing to say to someone you're supposed to reply to them with "thank you for sharing," which sounds so condescending to me, and you're never supposed to use the word "but." you're supposed to say "yes, and".

10/25 final teams and Make a Difference Day. Our team of ten planted about 30 trees out of 200 that day as part of a million tree initiative to make Denver greener by 2025. One of the people Will and I planted for was a pretty young man in a wheelchair who was very excited to see us and completely in love with life. He'd been shot in the spine in Iraq, and told us about a program to allow handicapped veterans to go back and serve again and how much he'd have loved to do it. I can only hope if something like that ever happens to me, I can be as happy and carefree about it as this guy.

10/27 U.S. Air Force Academy obstacle courses and teambuilding exercises. These are physically-demanding problem solving courses that were really neat-- getting gear and team members across broken bridges, through tunnels, over steep walls set with alarms, across land-mined roads. (Okay, we had to use our imaginations a little bit.) The second part was an individual obstacle course. I wish we could have done more of it because it was a lot of fun. Plenty of pictures of these ones coming.

10/30 wildfire pack test. 3 miles in 45 minutes, wearing a 45-pound vest. The next morning my legs hurt only a bit, no more than from a hard run... But my ass was KILLING me. I did not know my butt muscles could get that sore. That night was also the Halloween party on campus. A lot of people floated in and out, declaring it a little too high school for them, but I thought it wasn't bad. A bunch of the Tajikstani kids who live on campus lurked creepily in the shadows, and there was a very oppressive strobe light, but there were some neat costumes-- especially Glenn's, who built a robot suit and pistol out of bike parts and hockey pads and wore a silver skull mask with this big mess of black 80's hair. It was hilarious and awesome at the same time. I wore a tiger-striped loincloth and rags that i'd sewn myself out of cloth my mommy mailed me.

10/31 halloween! I volunteered at the Children's Museum of Denver and I don't know if any project I do is going to be as neat as that one. I was stationed in a room where kids could trace paper masks and decorate them. Some of the exhibits in the museum are fantastic: a blacklit room with a table with neon bubbles and a tie-dye spinner; a crafting room with kid-sized workbenches and recyclables and blueprints to make cars and trains out of the reusable boxes and cartons; a room where you put on animal costumes and run through their giant-sized burrows, tree trunks, tunnels, nests; a firefighting engine, a doctor's room, a supermarket, all kid-sized; a playroom stylized like a park, with benches and wildly-shaped trees to climb over and big stuffed animals to lay on and read. They LOVED us there, praised us and cheered when we showed up, fed us some good Mexican food for dinner, let us take home as many pumpkins and loaves of bread as we could possibly want. They gave us all the leftover food they had, which included enough taco components to make about two dozen tacos. Mike had a taco party in his room, but realized it sounded a little naughty and declared it a fiesta instead.

11/1 induction. There was a Hispanic motivational speaker/AmeriCorps alumnus from class... 5? Who spoke to us about success and opportunities. I liked him, but apparently most didn't, thought he was cocky and full of himself.

11/3, today. Of our 220something people, only 50 are left-- three firefighting teams, and two teams stationed in Denver. We have a week of firefighting training, including two days of field practice, and then my team leaves for the heart of New Orleans, two blocks from Bourbon Street. We're working with Rebuilding Together and we're going to be painting and putting molding on houses; finishing touches on the ones the previous groups have been working on. We'll also be sorting tools in a warehouse for the next group of housebuilders. I'll be back on December 15, flying home on December 22. I would like to have another New Year's party like I did last year and see all my friends while I'm home, so take note, friends.

Well, there's what's been happening. I got a little carried away with it; was just intending to do one-line descriptions of each and elaborate on the cool ones individually, but I guess those individual posts get to be almost entirely pictures now! Stay tuned.

Lookout Mountain, Columbine High (Part II).

Day four, we practiced van driving. Each team of ten or so had a staff supervisor, and mine was Libby—one of the younger staff members, and pretty sarcastic. This was fine later in the day, but I had been the first to volunteer to drive, and I didn’t really appreciate it at first, ha. Her route for us took us past Columbine High School, and even just going by was eerie. It's odd recognizing a fairly nondescript building you've only seen in pictures before. Like you've been there, but you haven't, and you can't quite remember which.

We drove to Lookout Mountain, and I was disappointed to see that it wasn’t the same Lookout Mountain from American Gods. Lookout Mountain is in Boulder, though, and that’s the city where the good guys are drawn to in The Stand. Lookout Mountain has Buffalo Bill’s grave, mediocre chili, and great fudge. The fog was thick—no more than 100 feet of visibility—and I got some beautiful, haunting pictures. Sparse pines, broken rocks, grey-white mist all throughout. With the fog so dense, you could barely tell we were on a mountain, which is too bad because Libby swore the view was fantastic.



We passed Columbine again on the way back, and Libby asked if we wanted to stop. I absolutely did, and I was glad I wasn’t alone. As if on cue, it started to rain. It was just heavy enough to be visible, and there was no wind but it was freezing nonetheless. The sky was a monotonous grey all around the memorial.

It’s a paved circle—brick laid about. A half-circle outer wall has maybe a dozen plaques on it. Quotes from students, staff, local officials, politicians. The students, the staff—their quotes were far more striking. Honest, not concerned with sounding like good speeches. Real people, sincere thoughts.

The inner circle is two raised half-circles of granite with dead students’ names and tributes from their parents written on them. A lot of them spoke extensively about God, Christ, heaven, dying because of their beliefs. Some were strikingly good, and some were downright awful. One made me coldly angry.

It takes a small-minded, selfish father to use his son’s memorial gravesite as a pulpit for his beliefs on abortion and prayer in school. Your son is dead and you don’t want to talk about his life, what kind of a person he was—you’d rather rant about Roe v. Wade?

Dead silent at that memorial. Hoods up, solemn faces. Grey sweatshirts slowly turning darker, damper, heavier, And absent: any reference to the shooters. No memorials. No apologies. No justifications.

I wore a trenchcoat in high school, and caught a lot of flak for it. These boys were a big reason why, the only reason why. Couldn’t count the number of times some jock asked if I was going to shoot up the school.

It’s not like I was never angry. But I wasn’t that angry. These people I went to high school with—and high school is an emotional cesspool, all these confused kids looking to find their place in life, giving and getting garbage because everyone is a little insecure—they are largely good, or at least decent, passable, acceptable people. Some of them may go on to beat their wives, to run down a kid while drunk driving—some were assholes—but it’s no one’s place to frivolously, single-handedly, devoid of checks and balances, take their lives. A bully in high school is probably a bully for life—but they are lives.

Still, even though they were the kinds of goths I wouldn’t have been able to stand, these kids didn’t deserve what they got, what they’re getting now. They needed help and got stepped on. You can only jab at a wounded animal so many times before it, feeling cornered, feeling threatened, fights back, goes into a frenzy. Some animals just want to flee, and some are feral—these two were feral.

In a sense, I identified. In others, I didn’t. But it’s pathetic when Marilyn Manson is the only person who offers to listen to these kids, suggests something started being wrong long, long ago.

The place had stern intensity, and I think it gave me something far different than it gives most.

The First Days (Part I).

They keep us busy. Staying up past eleven feels irresponsible and downright dumb when you wake up at seven. Day one was paperwork, settling in, and a meet-and-greet with the staff and team leaders. Day two fitted us for uniforms and got us a bank account, and I missed the second Obama/McCain debate for a meeting on wildfire fighting. Day three had us shuttled to a doctor’s office for physicals, a drug test, tetanus & tuberculosis shots—I also requested and paid for a flu shot—and upon our return we were fitted for steel-toed work boots.

There was also a three-and-a-half hour meeting on the member handbook. They said to come prepared, so instead of napping I read it cover-to-cover in the 45 minutes prior. It was a wasted effort, as it was read aloud to us, cover-to-cover. After dinner were the first of the wildfire interviews. They were really hurting for members this year—this class is smaller, and showed a statistically low interest in firefighting. We’re separated into four units—Earth, Fire, Sun, and Water—and anyone who showed an inkling of interest in firefighting during the registration wound up in Earth unit. They made another push to sell people on it, and it worked out okay for them. They desired 30 members and had about 40 do interviews and go to the baseline physical tests.

I did well in the interview and had a 6:22 for my mile, coming in about fifth. I had about 30 push-ups and 60 sit-ups, and scraped all the skin off my tailbone doing sit-ups. It was an inconvenient place for scabs.

Phoenix.

In the time before I left for Denver I went to a store in Ann Arbor called Hollander’s. The lovely Kat accompanied me and helped me pick out decorative papers. I had wanted to take up bookbinding for some time, but my spending was still a bit impulsive—to the tune of one hundred dollars. On the rare occasions I was separated from her in the following week or two (and sometimes when I was not), I made a 128-page blank book from scratch. It became my AmeriCorps NCCC book. The first thing I put in it were laundry instructions from my mother. Then I remembered a defunct blog of mine, and decided to make it my AmeriCorps NCCC blog.

The facebook group was our hub for communication, and I don’t think anyone’s posted a thing on there since we got to campus. People discussed flights there, saw who the government decided to put on the same planes. I was flying by Pioneer Airlines, and I was flying alone.

My suitcase was 57 pounds. The exasperated black lady who checked my bag had me take one or two things out and put them in my backpack, and just ignored the rest of the surplus weight. She was an odd mix of curt and helpful, and it cost me nothing to check my bag, instead of the 75$ it costs for an overweight bag. I still brought far less than most people, and I still brought a bit more than I needed. They fail to emphasize how much time you spend in uniform—eight hours a day, six days a week.

Flying delights me. It’s amazing to me, the things we’ve discovered. (But then, sometimes I’m equally as amazed by pasta. We figured out how to grow wheat, grind it up into flour, mix it with water into a dough, stretch, cut and dry it into noodles, boil them to eat. I’d have never figured that out.) The pressure from landing wasn’t as bad as I’d remembered from my last flight to Space Camp in 6th grade, but that was Florida, and not Colorado, and there’s a bit of an elevation difference.

I got my luggage and was directed by some team leaders and staff to a waiting room right in front. There were about 20 of us there for an hour, waiting for others to land, because we needed 50 before we could load onto a bus. I bought some Panda Express and gave half of it to the guy next to me—George, who talked slowly but was nonetheless eager to eat new people. He wiped off my fork with a napkin and ate the rest. Coincidentally, the first guy I talk to is directly across the hall from me.

My roommate had beaten me there. Dave has curly hair that he’s probably going to shave, and like many of the guys here, he’s taken to the scruffy look. We get along pretty well, though part of that might be because he’s practically never in the room. He sleeps here, and that’s about it. Like so many of us here, he fancies himself a writer. He likes some high-brow discourse, but conversation in the room is pretty sparse, since we see each other right before bed and right after we wake up.

heartchitecture.

in eden my heart is a sphere
and at birth these four continents were one
the pushing and pumping did not need be
and the valves and humours simply were

i unlocked my door and let you in
you reclined on a chair in my atrium
and you looked up my throat and saw the sun

but the plates are drifting now
and pangaea is no more
pangaea is gone
never again will be

Alpha.

This will be a blatant rip-off of http://coyote-speaks.blogspot.com/ and I hope she doesn't mind.

In my defense, it was very spur-of-the-moment, created mid-poetry writing. What the hell, I haven't done that in years. Poetry, I mean.