This is Ashley's first attempt to post a blog entry on the Icarus Journal. Now she is trying some bold text.

So there's blogs here now....

Solstice for the national Icarus organizing collective was a raucous party at Sascha and Ashley's farm in upstate New York with much dancing, singing, and music playing. The past year has been a time of tremendous growth and success, exciting and scary, joyful and difficult.

I used to travel all over the country meeting new people wherever I went. Part of me always figured that if I made enough friends then I'd never get into too much trouble because I'd always have a bunch of folks to look after me through the rough times. A big anarchist family of freaks and rebels. But too many times I learned the hard way that things don't really work like that.

Sometimes I wander around my hometown all lonely and lovesick and surrounded by ghosts, stuck with this awful longing in my gut and my broken heart beating out of its chest. There are ghosts everywhere on these streets, I think they’re always there but I see them clearly when I don’t get enough sleep and I’m walking the bleed in time between late night and early morning – the edge time when everything’s creeping under my skin and my eyes are all glassy and fragile but the most incredible things make themselves painfully clear. I see ghosts everywhere then: ghosts in the buildings, ghosts in the flickering subway station lights, ghosts in the cracks in the sidewalk, ghosts in the names of streets, ghosts in the clouds in the sky, ghosts in the faces of the other people walking by me. Layers of ghosts like crystal onions or the cracked and peeling paint walls of abandoned apartment buildings telling stories in their colored lead rubble dust.

Human beings are so obsessed with permanence, of holding on to the past. Its definitely part of the attraction of tattoos. We all so badly want to hold onto our memories and make them important because thats what gives us a solid foundation to build on when were trying to figure out who we are and where we fit in this crazy world. So I guess Seras suicide just rubbed it in her face that no matter how many friendships you build and stories you write and photos you take and tattoos you get --youre still going to fucking die, and thatll be the end of that.

These days the government and corporations seem to be able to program us like computers: trigger our emotions with slick video clips and rewrite their new versions of the Truth every couple months -- feed it to us like those mass produced AOL free minutes disks that magically show up in the mail all over the place. The TV these days looks to me like some deranged Hollywood war movie I watched when I was a kid, Im so desensitized to the reality that theyre actually dropping real bombs on the other side of the world and people like me with flesh and blood and families are dying horrible deaths.