Streets

Because sometimes it's nice just to sit in an internet cafe and just write. if you want to know where I am and what I'm doing, scroll past this entry.

I think the biggest culture shock I will have when I go back to America is the streets. What they are used for, road etiquitte, the cowshit. All different. In America, we take it for granted that if you go in the street, you will be killed immediatly by blind unthinking machines zooming past at unsafe speeds. if you have to get across, you go when the machine-light tells you, to keep your body intact while the waiting iron beasts grumble behind the gate of the white line. In India, life is lived on the street, together, everyone always in each other's way, people, bicicles, rickshaws, thupthups, and all manner of animals. The street is the only center of commerce, the only malls. They are the home of all the cows, all the goats, pigs, camels, a lot of dogs, monkeys above the street, everything. And all jumbled together without laws or order; you walk in the middle of the street, and when a car or a bike wants to go around you, they honk at you and then drive around you. It leads for a lot of honking, and a different attitude towards it. In america it's considered rude, a gesture of aggression, to honk. Here it is the safe and polite thing to do; it's much be better to be honked at than mowed over, and if it's a motorcycle, it can be hair raising ot be zoomed around by a bike with no warning. Anyway, this way And this way the community sees itself, lives with itself, instead of separating itself into little private bubbles. If it's a small city like pushkar or even a medium sized (for india by western standars, is huge) you begin to recognize the faces of everyone who is living in your urban space--you won't know them all, it's too many, but people will begin to look familiar, unavoidably. Because when they are not in their rooms, they are on the street.

This is also why you get the opportunity to develop real connections with the environment around you, mostly the animals. All indians have only one best friend, who they keep completely secret and never talk about: the cows. Because when you're walking down the street, and you see a cow, a little part of you unavoidably is happy. They are beautiful beings with a beautiful spirit, and you can see it in their eyes, and in their mouths when they chew and slobber. And they are completely unaware of absolutely everything around them, they are always in a daze. the traffic steers around the cows, because they would never move for a car, it's just not in their nature. It's a state of complete being, just simply existing. they eat trash and give us milk and eat more trash. They have to do surgery on all the cows once a year to remove all the plastic they eat. That is why we have to stop using plastic right now. and that's why we love the cows, because they are here, on our streets, living with us, instead of sequestered into fenced-off pastures. It makes it difficult to eat beef, I don't know if I will be able to when I get back to america. The other animals here are just as good as the cows in their own way. The goats are great because they all look insane and eat everything. The monkeys are so much like little people, except they are little bastard theives and passive-aggressive as hell. They will steal your food and jsut sit there, just out of reach, on a branch, and just eat it right in front of you, just to make you more angry. The dogs are scary because they're all underfed and have mange and maybe rabies, but the ones that are healthy adn nice are awesome, as nice dogs always are.

But, getting back to the point, all of these animals are in the street, with all the rest of the humans and also tourists, who are part human and part borg.

Some of you may remember that about two years ago (really two years already? holy crap.) I was arrested for standing in the middle of the street in San Francisco. The assumed reason that we were standing in the middle of the street was that we were protesting the biotech convention taking place--that's what was going on that was worth protesting, so everyone figured that was what we were protesting, without asking us. But the protest against the biotech companies had taken place that morning, people had already been arrested for that. We were part of another movement, called Reclaiming the Streets, an idea which has the radical idea that the streets should be real public space, a place to build a community, a place to live. So they block traffic. Only to create a merely symbolic public space on the street. At the time, I wrote a small essay about how strongly I beleived in that idea, and I wanted people to know that that was why I had chosen to be a part of that mob dancing down market street in San Francisco. Maybe it's in the archives on my other blog, I think it is, I don't know if you can find it. Sure I don't have the balls to make a mob by myself and just stand in the middle of the street alone, I need to be enabled by social circumstances, I need to be part of the herd. But that doesn't mean I didn't believe in the idea that the streets are the only veins that run through our cities, and the only way to build a meaningful community and overcome the hate and fear that controls our lives is to go out on the street, to have a real physical public sphere, to always be in each other's faces.

more later.