desanitization (originally sent 31/10/06)

just done that stupid thing where i have lots of leftover food and decide to cook it all in one go in one pan as an omelette but then there is far too much food and i have to throw some of it away anyway (although at the moment i am just leaving it and hoping i will be hungry again soon)

i hadn't eaten for ages anyway, which always makes me think i can eat more than i can. got called to a surprise (to me) meeting at 8pm just when i was abotu to eat to discuss the next steps for the girl who has got federal charges against her after that demo the other week. as you would imagine, the university bosses are being well underhand and trying to get people to make statements against her, recording conversations with supposed 'impartial advice' people and generally trying to show they are hard nuts and are not going to be compromised by a few smelly anarchists. i didn't really have much to input, what with not knowing anythign about the legal systems here or having any experience of these type of things and how to sort them out. apprently you can ring the 'district administrator' and ask to have charges dropped against someone even if you are only a member of the public. crazy stuff. there seemed to be a bit of an unspoken 'we know none of what we are doing is really going to help, but we have a duty to do it anyway' running through the meeting though, and i didn't feel very energised comng out of it.

during intros in nearly all meetings here they do a 'silly question' or ice breaker or whatever; today it was 'what are you going to be for halloween?'- here some couples go as matching things (!), so someone was going to be a doughnut to someone elses cup of coffee, and another peter pan and wendy. thanks to a random encounter at the weekend i had a solid answer- i am going to be a marine (with full on marine formal dress) with a clowns face and red nose, like in Oh what a Lovely War. originally when this person gave me the marines outfit after i told her i didn't have anything to wear i thought i might put a bullet hole in my head, but i think being a clown face does the same job in a less aggressive way. i am also going to speak in an mid-west american accent for the duration. i hope we get to attend some good parties- someone said today that santa cruz is the halloween capital of the world, so much so that in the downtown area tommorow night any fines you get (for drinking, littering etc) and TREBLED, so you have to pay like $480 if you have an open can on the street!! american capitalism knows no limits.

americans on england:
do you have forests?
does weed exist there?
do all english people drink like tanks?
do you go to france much?
do you like your accent?
"english people make me /think /so much...

so anyway, everything is pretty swell here apart from getting slightly tired of being asked the same things all the time and people pretending to understand what i am saying when they don't. i spent most of the weekend in my allotment, which i am now sharing with a lovely girl called elisa, who shares more than 3 letters with alida, and our plot now consists of

chives
cauliflower (which i thought was brocolli when i planted it)
basil (which actually is looking pretty peaky and yellow already)
peppermint (i was so excited when i realised peppermint is actually a plant)
lavender cotton
spinach

when we first started working we just had a load of weedy, dry, lumpy sandy soil, and the process of converting into a healthy patch was possibly the most enjoyable thing i have done since i got here. it is so peaceful i breathe deeply without even noticing it. also the seeds that lauren gave me have now started to grow a second set of leaves, making them look like green diamonds from above.

you know i was saying how weed was mashing my head? well i think maybe i just had some bad stuff then, because more recently everything has been much morerelaxed, though i must admit i haven't been smoking with random people much since that time. i have been having great times with my Mbira instead though; i now completely get what i read in books last year about how players think the mbira 'teaches them' new patterns and how melodies can be formed from the various harmonics available. i go out after everything is finished for the day (like i will when i finish this email) and smoke and play and my mind wonders off to different things and when i am thinking about bad or frustrating things or things i wish i hadn't done (and maybe this is a sort of paranoia in itself??) i find that the music i am making is similarly restless and it almost feels as if my negative energy is going out through the instrument. i must add a disclaimer to all of the above that maybe this is all just a construct of the cannabis, like the appeal of buckets full of jelly babies.

spent the weekend before this one at an anti-nuke conference in santa barbara, which is just north of Los Angeles. had a really nice time getting to know the people from my UC and the Bomb class who turned from people you see twice a week and debate with to people you can hug and jam with. (the activist crowd here hug quite alot, boys on boys and everything, which is brill but because i have been missing good hugs, but the shift has been so sudden i briefly became really self aware when hugging which was wierd but now it is ok again). the conference itself was really interesting, though i don't feel like we are going to make a dent in the US military juggernaut anytime soon, and i learned a shitload about native american history and their current struggles. it seems like the last big legitimate racism here directed against the native peoples- the pope created the 'doctine of discovery' when cook and others were setting sail around the world, basically saying that it was a good christian's duty to either convert any natives they came across or kill them, or at the very least take their land, and this law was used as recently as 1996 to justify repossession of native american land by the federal government!!! unbelievable. also 70% or all american nuclear waste is currently dumped on native american reservations (cos the peopel can't afford to say no to the money reparations offered cos they are in such a tight fix) etc etc the list is as long as my arm, but got to meet some amazing native american elders who are fighting for their rights and have a chat with them. there is a remote possibility i will be able to visit a reservation at some point and stay with a tribe called the Western Shoshone and do a bit of ethnomusicology fieldwork (:)) but everyone makes promises at conferences that get forgotten i guess, especially big ones.

santa barbara the town and campus is pretty insane. they have automatic paper towel dispensers and urinals that disinfect your piss /as you piss /by releasing blue goo from inside the urinal when your piss lands on it/. /playboy rates it the 4th biggest party campus in USA./ /word on the street is that 1/3 of students have herpes and i heard one guy asking if a girl wanted to sleep in his tent with 'we are in santa barbara after all...'. there are 9 square blocks filled entirely with students, thousands of them, mostly minted, with huge fraternity and sorority houses with their bollocks latin crests painted on the houses. it was the closest i have come to the OC so far. in amongst all this shite though was a 'tent city' in the middle of campus where about 20 people were camping out to protest about 24 families who are being kicked out of their houses to make way for more student accomodation. on the last night me and a few others camped with them in solidarity and had a great jam with this big tall black guy (a rarity on campus) who was rapping about how the last 4 years of his life at uni were so shit and racist and after i was like 'it can't be THAT racist' and he took me to the nearest toilets which had white power slogans and monkey references scrawled all over the cubicle walls. i couldn't believe it. then later, just as i was getting comfy in my sleeping bag at 3am, the guy who gave me tent space was like 'ah, you have rizlas, do you want to go on an adventure?', and he took me on his handlebars to the beach and then along a cliff to this little spot where someone had build a wooden platform out of the cliff and nailed 3 chairs to it. great stuff.

we have mid terms exams here, had music of india on tuesday, was possibly the easiest exam i have ever done, just multiple choice then some true or false!!! "an alap has no rhythmic accompniment, true of false??' i could have shat on the exam paper and still passed. tommorow is jazz theory exam though, which is going to be pretty tough, i have to (amonst other things) play chord progressions on the piano and SING, and improvise infront of the whole class.

i cooked a full english breakfast for my flat on sunday (minus beans and hash browns) to mark my leaving. it sort of reinforced my decision to go- only max said thank you for the food or commented on whether he liked it or not. i asked edmund if he enjoyed it and he shrugged and left the room (but to be fair he ate it all which i was happy about) and. one of my flatmates is coming round on friday to pick all my stuff up, then i will slowly move in over the weekend. it is going to be cool i think. ohoh! there is also this thing called 'free skool santa cruz' starting next week where members of the community just put on lessons according their skills, i guess like a formal skill swap, but there is a whole course on bike /building /and maintainance, trips foraging for fruit and other things around the town, survival in the woods trips, how to cook acorns, how to brew mead, all these things just because people want to share the knowledge. amazing. should start one up everywhere. before i left sam's dad was telling me about trotsky's 'transitional demands' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_demands) and i think this maybe a really relevant one.

and i played 'soccer' for the second time on friday also. we lost 5-0 but i gave up thinking i was too cool for school and playing in midfield and switched back to defence where i was pretty pleased with how i played (only 1 of the five goals was when i was defending, the others i was rolling subbed off or fannying aroudn being a striker), put in some well solid challenges but then got a yellow card for slide tackling. i got the ball. YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SLIDE TACKLE!!!!!!! bullshit. i tried to explain to the ref that slide tacking was the highest art in football but i don't think he fully understood what i was saying. american footballers are nippy and can be skillfull but have little spacial or positional awareness and, apparently, have grown up thinking challenging hard is a bad thing, so it was a whole different ball game and one that we lost. i was well impressed with this girl from new york who was playing left back- she had that cooler than thou east coast attitude with her descrete eyebrow piercing and long shorts, looked like she had grown up on the set of the film Kids, but she was really good at football and kept shouting at me to do things, which i thought was great.

so yeah, some things are starting to grind me down a bit, mainly american fear and rudeness, but mostly i am feeling much more settled these last weeks. santa cruz is starting to open up her secrets to me (turns out the girls who had my bike all of last week have 3 huge cannabis plants growing on their yard, and let me taste one of them, then gave me a sizeable bag of bud butter for nowt!!! buzzing) and i am excited. simon is coming at easter and we are going to bike down the coast. the more the merrier.

speak soon
love ben