We dropped out of school, got divorced, broke with our families and ourselves and everything we’d known.We quit our jobs, violated our leases, threw all our furniture out on the sidewalk, and hit the road.We sat on the swings of children’s playgrounds until our toes were frostbitten, admiring the moonlight on the dewy grass, writing poetry on the wind for each other.We went to bed early and lay awake until well past dawn recounting all the awful things we’d done to others and they to us—and laughing, blessing and absolving each other and this crazy cosmos.We stole into museums showing reruns of old Guy Debord films to write fight foul and faster, my friend, the old world is behind you on the backs of theater seats.The scent of gasoline still fresh on our hands, we watched the new sun rise, and spoke in hushed voices about what we should do next, thrilling in the budding consciousness of our own limitless power.We used stolen calling card numbers to talk our teenage lovers through phone sex from telephones in the lobbies of police stations.We broke into the private pools and saunas of the rich to enjoy them as their owners never had.We slipped into the offices where our browbeaten friends shuffled papers for petty despots, to draft anti-imperialist manifestos on their computers—or just sleep under their desks. They were shocked that morning they finally walked in on us, half-naked, brushing our teeth at the water cooler.We lived through harrowing, exhilarating moments when we did things we had always thought impossible, spitting in the face of all our apprehensions to kiss unapproachable beauties, drop banners from the tops of national monuments, drop out of colleges . . . and then gritted our teeth, expecting the world to end—but it didn’t!We stood or knelt in emptying concert halls, on rooftops under lightning storms, on the dead grass of graveyards, and swore with tears in our eyes never to go back again.We communicated with each other through initials carved into boarding school desks, designs spray-painted through stencils onto alley walls, holes kicked in corporate windows televised on the five o’clock news, letters posted with counterfeit stamps or carried across oceans in friends’ packs, secret instructions coded into anonymous emails, clandestine meetings in coffee shops, love poetry carved into the planks of prison bunks.We sheltered illegal immigrants, political refugees, fugitives from justice, adolescent runaways in our modest homes and beds, as they too sheltered us.We improvised recipes to bake each other cookies, cakes, breakfasts in bed, weekly free meals in the park, great feasts celebrating our courage and kinship so we might taste their sweetness on our very tongues.We wreaked havoc upon their gender norms and ethnic stereotypes and cultural expectations, showing with our bodies and our relationships
and our desires just how arbitrary their laws of nature were.We wrote our own music and performed it for each other, so when we hummed to ourselves we could celebrate our companions’ creativity rather than repeat the radio’s dull drone.In borrowed attic rooms, we tended ailing foreign lovers and struggled to write the lines that could ignite
the fires dormant in the multitudes around us.
You have discovered arachnoanarchy
otter clan omarian otter oasis
