and it's rough. it's all posts on the icarus discussion forums from the winter and the spring. i'll come back and format it better, maybe edit some. this is for me to make sense of and share with some friends. i'm glad i have a record of me losing my mind this time around. this is a quote from my Bellevue Hospital Discharge Summary:

Patient is a 33 year old Bipolar type I with psychotic features. BIB EMS as EDP after being found on the roof of a building on 34th street, disheveled and without shift or shoes, smashing a satellite dish because he thought it was broadcasting alien signals.

but let's go back some months, shall we?...

PostPosted: 04 Feb 2008 01:38 pm    
i have these fantasies that creep up periodically that the world is going to turn upside down: that one day there's just going to be a switch, like an enormous corporate window smashing, and all of a sudden it's going to be obvious to everyone that things have been incredibly fucked up and will never be the same again. it's nice to dream. it's important to dream.
it's snowing outside and i'm in bed, reading Teaching To Transgress by bell hooks and so excited about a near future of traveling the country visiting classrooms and stoking the flames of revolution in young minds.
in the meantime i'm just enjoying the hell out of the NOW.
i think it's much easier to appreciate the present when we realize that the past is just as malluable as the future -- that there are always multiple tracks running, many many worlds in one.
i'm excited from afar for the icarus women's encuentro that madigan has been scheming about. here's a site link with an article that my farmmate kaya wrote with her friends and just sent from chiapas about the zapatista women's encuentro: www.upsidedownworld.org
i've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be an ally, in lots of different contexts--from what it means to be an ally to the women in my life to what it means for my friends to be an ally to me as a mad one. the world could use more good allies.
i'm around today, hanging out in bed with mama cat, watching the snow come down.





PostPosted: 08 Feb 2008 04:25 pm      what does it mean to be an ally?       

i've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to intentionally be an ally to different people in my life. i've mostly been thinking about it in the context of gender and race as i am a white guy grappling with how best to handle the random social privilege i was born with, but i've also been thinking about it in the context of the people in my life being an ally to me as a mad person -- someone who is clearly more sensitive than, for example, the rest of the people who live in my house. being able to articulate my needs as someone with different needs than most is really important. anyway, i'm just wondering if others have thoughts. the more i think about this idea of "allies" the more i like it. acknowledging difference, acknowledging the need for us to look out for one another. i think it's cool.

What is an Ally?

An ally is a member of the “majority” group who works to end oppression in his or her personal life though support of and as an advocate for the oppressed population.

The following quotes about what it means to be an ally were taken from discussions conducted by Student Allies for Equality at Western Washington University:

- “An ally validates and supports people who are different from themselves.”
- “An ally realizes and questions personal privilege and uses it to benefit people who are oppressed.”
- “An ally examines their own prejudices and is not afraid to look at themselves.”
- “An ally supports the oppressed group’s voice and sense of autonomy.”
- “An ally works with the oppressed group, offering support by being accountable to, but not being responsible for, the oppressed group.”
- “An ally is an advocate by challenging (mis)conceptions when the oppressed group is absent.”
- “Being an ally means: sharing the power, taking a risk, taking responsibility, opening yourself up to the unknown, realizing that you are a part of the solution, leveling the playing filed, accepting differences, making allowances, and leading by action.”


PostPosted: 09 Feb 2008 02:48 
 baby icarus crashes into the mainstream       

does anyone else working on the icarus project ever find themselves walking a sketchy line between being proactive/positive/revolutionary and then feeling like a fucking camp counselor trying to rally kids together for activities?

i was talking to montana on the phone this morning about this somewhat bizarre topic.

montana is the intern supervisor for the campus icarus project at nyu and she was expressing something that i've heard before from others and definitely felt myself at times: trying to fit the Icarus Project Vision into something that works for a regular student club or student group can sometimes be challenging or at worst nauseating and seemingly disingenuous.

i think it's like this: we're living in times when extreme cynicism is just the backdrop of the cultural landscape. it's like our language and symbolism is so twisted around that actually giving a fuck about anything important seems quaint and naive. it's such a trap. with an everchanging supermarket display of exploding signifiers, it seems like trying to hold onto anyone's attention takes the skills of a pr agency these days. at least in new york city.

the Icarus Project was born of alienation and distrust for the System. i have no interest in us losing that edge. but in the end the Icarus Project is all about getting people actually sitting down and talking to each other. it takes having a faith in people's ability to communicate with each other and support one another. and that takes being positive and proactive.

i, personally, never went near any kind of student clubs. i dropped out of college. i got kicked out of summer camp when i was 13. i was always hanging out with the 'bad' kids. i would venture to guess that there are lot of folks like me in icarus' ranks. it just so happens to be that a lot of people stepping to organize with icarus are people who've never had an easy time navigating socially in this cutthroat world. surprise surprise.

but there has to be a way to distinguish between the campy feelgoodness of posi group therapy and the radical honesty of a social network hellbent on revolution. right? a big part of it is being able to tell your personal stories and draw people in, letting that honesty be infectious somehow.

so i don't know. i got an email announcement for an icarus meeting the other night saying come participate in our 'mental health peer education' activity and it freaked me out. not because i don't think mental health peer education activities are really cool, but because that's the language i was using to get our grant money, that's the language of the system and i think it's useful in official contexts but otherwise it's boring and imaginationless. it makes me think of the counseling center or the wellness exchange or something. and something inside me says: what have we become?

but i mean, then immediately another part of me says let's get real: any language we use to talk about this stuff inevitably runs the risk of having already had its meaning sucked dry and nutrasweetcoated. it's part of the game. and organizing work is work. so we have to be on our toes.

i guess, but just like anyone, i don't always feel like playing the anarcho-cheerleader. can anyone else relate? this is one of those dilemmas that's just going to keep coming up and up. i look forward to having more people to talk to about it.



what does is mean to be a mad ally?

i think there's a lot of overlap with the mad maps project/vision.
i'm wondering if anyone out there has some thoughts on the matter. our mad maps are more personal, i'm wondering about general ideas. are there things that can be generalized about 'mad people' and our sensitivities and volatilities? or is that foolish and reductionist?

meanwhile here's a piece of the maps dialog, just to add to the mix.

https://site.icarusprojectarchive.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=64614#64614
Quote:
I definitely found the act of trying to figure out who would really be there for me if I needed them to be kind of hard and painful, but all of it really rewarding. I feel like there's a lot of people that I love and who love me back, but there aren't necessarily going to be there for me if I'm having a psychotic breakdown and totally fucking up my life and scaring most of the people around me. So anyway, It's a fluid list, meaning I think the people who are closest to me change depending on what's going on with my life, but I think there's actually a stable core. Real friendship is a lot of work.
Crisis' either tear people apart or bring them closer. I think one of out ideas is that if we can articulate this stuff before it happens, if we can articulate who are the people we really trust, just the act of doing those things is helping to build sustainable radical mental health support networks. if you try and make a list of who your true support people are and they don't exist yet, then that's a really good place to start: figuring out how to get tight with your friends or get some new friends you can be tight with.



PostPosted: 16 Feb 2008 08:50 

hey everyone -- it's saturday night and i'm in my little cave, catching up on all kinds of email and stuff after three days in the city spinning my head around in delicious and freaky and exhausting ways. i have the most intense deadline of my life on the horizon, a book into the publisher the first week of march, and it feels like the most important writing i've ever ever done, but none of my writing is actually finished yet. i have what i think is a funny writing style where it all happens in pieces -- like one story will be in 25 little pieces in my head and i go into a trance and connect them together with sentence fragments and thoughts and patterns -- move in and out micro to macro over and over and over again until it's done. but i have three essays to write that are all in fragments right now, and when they're done it will be such an incredible relief.
i was hanging out with my friend jonah about a month ago and he was really manic and i expressed concern (that it was 1am and i was going to sleep and he was heading out to ride his bike around the city and talk to strangers) and he said, "hey man, open your mind a little. you might think i'm manic but i think i'm just in a state of evolution right now. my mind is downloading the new operating system--jonah 3.0."
and i actually think he was right. sometimes we don't need to sleep as much as other times. you know the last time i smoked weed was a month ago tomorrow. i had been smoking everyday for two months straight and it got me through the holidays, i wrote an incredible amount of notes for my big book, and got as high as i needed to get.
and now i have to do the hard part and actually string together a bunch of really complicated ideas into a form that lots of different people are going to be psyched about reading.
meanwhile there's all this icarus organizational restructuring going on which is incredibly exciting to me. i was just saying to silverelf in a pm that i've been working on the icarus project for 5 1/2 years and i'm so ready to not feel responsible in the ways i've felt responsible all this time. and it feels really amazing that there are so many good people stepping up these days and we now just need to provide some semblance of a structure for them to step up into so they can do what they want with it.
anyway, have a lovely evening y'all. i'll be on the monthly call tomorrow if anyone wants to talk, though i'm still not sure what we're going to talk about. but we'll figure it out.
anyone interested in helping to facilitate with me? it would be much appreciated! alright, hasta pronto


osted: 17 Feb 2008 11:41 am

i was up at 7:30, out feeding the goats and chickens, contemplating sesame street and how my parents wouldn't let me play outside unsupervised as a child because of the crackheads so instead i got to watch public television with a virtual neighborhood and virtual neighbors. anyway, mama turkey reminds me of big bird and the cats are nothing if not furry muppets. i'm just waiting for the rats in the walls to jump out onto the kitchen table and bust into song.
i made a deal with my friend paz in the city that i'm going to text him every morning when i start meditating so that we can be in solidarity with each other. he's my old friend that lives at 7th street squat who i stay with when i go to new york. he's a yogi master with a long black and white beard in braids, totally freak, amazing man, and we wake up early and meditate for an hour when i stay with him. his place is a lot warmer than mine.
anyway, i meditated, ate some beans and eggs and tortillas with my housemate ash, and then crawled back into bed and for the last couple hours i've been reading this book by Mumia Abu-Jamal called We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party and it's blowing my mind. in the year 2000 i lived in north oakland in a neighborhood filled with old black panthers and folks who'd been around in the late 60's when it was all going down. i was pretty obsessed with the race politics and class dynamics in my community at that time, and i was pretty manic and open, so i was having all these amazing conversations with all different kinds of people. i got locked up in LA county jail psych unit shortly after that and was so depressed and fucked in the head when i got out that all those discussions of race and class i was having shamefully disappeared back into my own head. anyway, it's powerful picking back up where i left off. i working on a couple of pieces of writing at the moment that have the personal quality of the words that inspired the icarus project dialogues but are all about race and class dynamics. i'm hoping they'll inspire a lot of good discussion.
anyway, i crawling back into bed but i'll be on the call this afternoon if anyone wants to say hi. i'm still hoping someone's going to step up to help facilitate!



PostPosted: 20 Feb 2008 04:42 

oh get me to that portal! fuck. everything's just piling up, i'm reaching a tipping point but i'm not allowed to crash right now, i don't get to be the "crazy one" as much as i just want to lose it and run off into the woods (even though it's fucking freezing cold outside.)
i cut the fucking fuck out of my left index finger yesterday with a really big sharp knife and i'm taking really good care of it but it's such a sign that i need to slow down. i have like 30 windows open on my computer right now. my metabolism's burning so fast that it seems like as soon as i finish eating i'm already hungry and shaky again.
there is all this emotionally charged icarus organizational shit going on and i have a week to get this book i'm writing done so it can go to the printer and the two enormous things feel like they're crashing into each other in my head with all their godzilla-like enormity, and then on top of that somehow i'm supposed to pay my bills and keep myself clear and rested and remember to eat.



Posted: 22 Feb 2008 06:12 pm       
it's snowing really hard here. i just fed the goats and i'm in for the night. eating chips. listening to reagan youth. tripping out that i have a crazy deadline coming up. deep breaths. mad love


Posted: 23 Feb 2008 03:46 pm            
asleep round 4am, up at 8 with a cat all in my face, kicked cat out of bed and laid there for a couple hours with a tetris game of paragraphs flipping around in my head, up at 2:30, in bed with bell hooks and h. rap brown and my crazy dreams about the zapatistas and the borders coming down and the windows of reality being smashed, the riddle of where the mad ones fit into the struggle, the creatively maladjusted who tear down the walls because it's what they were put here to do. shaking my dreams off me and running outside into the snow to stare up at the sky.

we will build the bridge to the future
we are the ones who bury the past
a new species rise up from the ruins
we are the ones that were made to last

we are the ones




Posted: 29 Feb 2008 05:52 pm            
i dreamt i was walking through the neighborhood i grew up in with this man who in real life was kind of a big brother figure to me but ended up letting me down. he was wearing my leather jacket and going to photocopy his journal (which is the kind of thing i'd be doing) and telling me about his exploits with all these different women (which is what he used to do when i was a young teenager.) (and all these years later he's the womanizer character in my head) woke up at 1pm, i've been staying up really late writing cause i'm on deadline and i'm at the really hard part where i have all these ideas cutting and pasting around my head and i have to turn them into a cohesive whole. and i'm writing about race and class and gender and the movement, this white boy alone in his room grappling with old demons, trying to turn them into lessons and ladders. i'll be so happy when this chapter is over and i have some concrete writing. it's always like this. navigating the space was one of the most painful but at least i had ashley to cuddle and comiserate with. this is such a solo journey in some way, in some ways i feel the presence of all my friends with me here in this room. woke up today and wrote down my dreams and was scribbling on the draft from the night before and i had this realization that took a huge weight of me: most of the stuff i'm working on right now that i thought i had to get done by next week is stuff i don't actually need to put in this little book that's due at the printer next week, it's all stuff i can use for the bigger book. it's all the stuff i had the most fear about writing, i put it first and got it out of the way.
so yeah, check in hello from the self-involved writer guy.
mad love and dreams




man, i've been in a cave for a bunch of days. i was camping out on the floor of the misled youth house working on deadline to get this little book i've been working on done and on day four, or more like 3am of day four i crashed into myself and caught on fire and burned for a little while and then came back down with the understanding that my little book just ain't gettin done right now and the world's not going to end because of it. but it was like moving at 80mph to get to the finish line and then suddenly stopping short and having to reassess, with all the other pieces of my life pushed to the side. oh well, it's good i'm learning patience in my old age.

but there is nothing that brings me closer to the edge of madness that being on deadline for a writing project. it's always ends up being so fucking painful that i want to die and i'm hitting myself in the face and i'm so frustrated with my limitations. it's hard to imagine how i get so fucked in the head over it but it's because i know how important it is, i can see what the effect will be if i can finish it, and then i hit these walls and it's like old scar tissue, deep insecurity, fear of the hospital, of having to drop everything. i literally always go through this. sometimes i hate that i'm a writer. i need to figure out a way to not write alone so much. it's very hard for me to finish a writing project on my own. but anyway, i feel like i came through the other side in the last day. and it's nice to be back.

_________________

Posted: 12 Mar 2008 10:33 am    
this awesome person never returned my fan mail but i think it's worth a read. i'd love to talk to SOMEONE about this stuff. the link i'm referring to its further up in this thread.

scatter@theicarusproject.net
Subject: thank you so much
Date: February 11, 2008 12:04:14 AM EST

michelle - i'm so grateful for your voice and i just have to write and tell you so. if we've never met personally, there's probably a good chance we've crossed paths somehow over the years. my friends and i run an organization called the icarus project, and one of our members from st. louis who writes as silverelf posted a link to your article from 2003--'Whose Ally?' and i just read all 28 pages straight through and find myself quite moved by your words on a number of levels.

you:
Quote:
We have a political culture that leaves very little room to talking about the unconscious -- for recognizing that you can spend your entire life pretending like you are right on and thinking that you are right on and never actually be right on. Spending forever trying to model something, no matter how dedicated and careful you are, is different than actually being in that space. Trying to copy what I might think the proper antiracist behavior is fundamentally bullshit, if that respect isn’t coming, genuinely and truly, from a real space within myself. If that real respect is lacking, it will always show through eventually.


your words ring so true to me, but that's not actually what's inspiring me to write. i spend a lot of time plotting and scheming about cultural evolution and social revolution, about what we have to do to create the kind of spaces that allow people to feel comfortable talking about the really hard stuff--how we can strengthen our diverse communities and inspire folks to be better looking out for one another.
my crew and i facilitate a lot of workshops on issues of mental health. we've been doing it for awhile but we're just beginning to incorporate the language of 'allies' into our work, and it feels to me like we're at this really critical juncture where things could get really radical and transformative, or get really wack and watered down!

we're been very inspired by the LGBT organizing on college campuses, and we've actually managed to get a grant to create a Safe-Zone like cultural competency training around mental health issues at NYU. what this looks like is still to be determined, but i think there's a lot of potential for it to be really fucking cool.

i'm not sure if you're familiar with icarus, but one of our successes thus far, at least from my perspective as one of the founders, is that we're managing to create these spaces where we're redefining together what it means to be 'healthy' or 'sick' or 'productive'. really what we're talking about, in very concrete ways, is the creation of sustainable mutual support networks. we've been modeling this idea of "mad maps" or "wellness maps": personal and collective documents that are created with the intent of providing guides of how to look out for one another. basically personal documents on how to be allies to each other.

silverelf posted the link to your essay in response to my request to the community for thoughts about being allies to mad people.
the whole question of who falls into that category and who doesn't opens up a whole interesting puzzle because really one either self-identifies as mad or not.
but either way, in the end, if we're living and working with one another, it's our responsibility to be looking out for each other and knowing how to do it. the idea of diversity in this context takes on really different shades and textures. there are ways it has common ground with race and gender and ways in which it really doesn’t. but in the end it comes right back to the importance of Respect as opposed to Proper Modeled Behavior. Can that be taught in a safe-zone training? your talk of mainstream diversity trainings was so on point, so relevant to our current struggle and crossroads.

these days the way most folks are organizing with Icarus is by downloading a manual we created entitled Friends Make the Best Medicine: A Guide to Creating Community Mental Health Support Networks. one of the tools in the guide is a preamble with meeting agreements which folks can read at the beginning of their meetings for focus. One of the lines in the meeting agreements is:

Quote:
We recognize that overcoming oppression helps everyone’s liberation; it is the group’s responsibility to challenge racism, classism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice. We educate each other in the spirit of solidarity, and hold others accountable for their behavior without criticizing who they are as people.


which is all fine and good but obviously isn’t much help in the face of real issues around power and privilege when they rear their ugly heads. how to talk about these issues without being divisive and awkward and tripping all over ourselves is clearly part of the long term work we’re engaged in as a radical community. in that spirit, there was some other stuff you said that really hit me. i found this insight particularly illuminating in the context of antiracist organizing:

Quote:
Lacan comments on the peculiarly human ability to deceive by telling the truth. The key part of the trick, like all tricks, is what is clearly visible but never quite seen, the screen is the form itself - in this case, the very issue of guilt. The many outpourings of guilt provide the illusion of addressing an issue, even an elaborate calculus of degrees of guilt and the convincing persuasion of the confession.


and this:
Quote:
White ally antiracist organizing, as I have participated in it, provided white people with even more sophisticated strategies to obscure, enforce, evade and perpetuate our own racism. In antiracist white ally organizing, white people get to stay the heroes of the story. The discussion is still dominated by white people, still centered on the needs, interests and thoughts of white people, and still directed to locating the issue in the choices and actions of white people. So white people remain the center of our own thoughts, remain locked in terms and concepts we generated, remain the central actor in the fantasy in our own heads. And now, we get the added delusional bonus of thinking we are somehow an antiracist actor in all this.


so yeah, straight up: your words are clear and cut through a lot of bullshit and i’m grateful and appreciative.
anyway, i just want you to know you're appreciated by me from afar. you wrote this five years ago so I’m sure you’ve had a lot of thoughts since then about strategy and organizing. i wonder if you have any thoughts about or any desire to join in this community conversation around the issue of allies in the mad movement. it's an exciting time to be having the conversation. i think we have the potential to bring a lot of groups together to talk about the future. although the Icarus Project was started by a couple white kids and has its roots firmly in the predominantly white north american anarchist movement, we cross A LOT of boundaries and build A LOT of bridges in our work and we’re crossing more all the time. i’m amazed at how quickly we’re growing as a movement, but i think it’s just a reflection of how much need is out there for new vision.

are you familiar with martin luther king's talks on "creative maladjustment"? Martin Luther King made at least 10 speeches during his lifetime where he spoke of the future lying in the hands of the “creatively maladjusted.” He even repeatedly called for the formation of an organization called the “International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment.” “Men and women should be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, 'Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream'”. I have a lot of faith in the power of the Mad Ones to inspire change. I think there are a lot of kids being put on psych drugs who have mad superpowers and i think there are a lot of prophets that are locked up in mental hospitals and wandering the streets. although it surely doesn’t seem like it by the looks of the mass media, i think it’s pretty clear there are some powerful movements brewing below the surface and i think if we put the organizing work in now, it’ll make our lives a lot easier when the shit starts going down!

so thank you for doing the work you do and being so damn articulate while you’re at it. i hope we have the chance to work together sometime. Mad love, Sascha



Posted: 12 Mar 2008 10:43 am            
annie i'm so sorry you're struggling so hard these days. you sound really lonely and sad. it's at times like these that you have to remember the only constant is change. i had a reminder the other night of what it's like to be suicidal and desperate and i'm still a little shaken by it. it's like i've worked so hard to change my patterns and cut new grooves in my psychic map but the scars are still thick below the surface. i wish the icarus project was a physical place and there were a bunch of people around to keep you company. in the meantime this is what we've got...mad love to you, sascha



Posted: 13 Mar 2008 11:55 pm    
i've been staying the hell away from this thread because there aren't actually that many men who work on the inside of the icarus project and that list of 'behavioral themes' from the women's encuentro makes it appear like there are horrible things going on behind the scenes here. especially this:

Quote:
1. Sexual harassment. Women repeatedly express needing to turn away sexual advances of men and have been forced to grapple with a culture in which sexual relationships with men seem expected despite complex power dynamics.


that's a pretty big accusation without any context to go behind it. and the implications of it are really creepy and would definitely make me uncomfortable not knowing what was actually going on behind the scenes. honestly i was relieved to see agustina's posts because without her critical voice of the process i'd personally feel pretty backed into a corner. but i don't actually think it's the intention of anyone in the encuentro group to be backing me or anyone else into a corner.

alexslash:
Quote:
oppression isn't this mono-vectored energy. it works in systems, with webs and spirals of oppression radiating in all directions, and we take on roles and perpetrate pain without knowing so often.


i think the really important thing to remember here is that the women's encuentro isn't meeting with the aim of talking about the personal relationships of the folks in the icarus project, they're attempting to lay the groundwork for how to actually restructure how power can flow differently in our organization. and they're doing it in a way that, it seems to me at least, models how change should happen -- from prioritizing people's individual stories.

agustina:
Quote:
This totalitarian language is so.. old school or something.. together, but diverse.. that's the zapatista lesson and language should express that without falling in this false dichotomies and simplistic over generalizations very unfair to the work of the many men that i'm sure have been so helpful so many times.


despite however it might appear from the harshness of the language, i guarantee that this isn't some kind of behind the scenes power play vying for control of the organization. i have a lot of respect and trust for all the women that i know are involved in the process. and even if there is a lot of unresolved anger towards me personally for stuff that's gone down in the past, i think the respect is mutual between all of us. as personally uncomfortable as its been to know there are all these women getting together to vent about feeling wronged by icarus (and knowing how many of those stories involve me), on another-way more important-level it blows me away that all these people are getting together to talk about actively shifting the power relationships in icarus. that people care enough about the project to want to make it happen is amazing and inspiring and fucking humbling.

inel:
Quote:
we all want a more open, inclusive, safe sustainable structure and a feeling of connectedness and shared leaderfulness. I feel strongly that we are moving imperfectly in the right direction, together. This is a process unfolding and the mystery is all of ours to explore. How do we honor the past while looking toward the future and keeping our feet firmly planted in the present?


i think the whole issue of needing safe space to talk about painful history is something to be greatly respected. i think we all can relate to in our different ways to the importance of needing space that feels safe to talk about painful stuff. my understanding is that pretty soon the women's encuentro is going to invite more folks into the dialog. and i hope that we, as a community, can help create a space for change and growth that allows folks to be critical of the process but at the same time where there's fundamentally enough trust between us all that we don't attack one another in hurtful ways. but we all know that when anger gets repressed ugly things can happen and we're an intense bunch of people.

and we have a hard road ahead of us. anyone who's been around for awhile has surely seen their share of organizations devolve because of unresolved issues around power and privilege. this winter i read a bunch of books about the civil rights movement in the US and had a lot of conversations with good friends and fellow activists about race and class and gender. the reason i'm doing all this reading and talking to folks is that it's clear our movements are growing, it's a very exciting time we're living in, but unless we grapple with this hard-very personal-stuff now it's going to end up eating us away from the inside and leave a whole other generation of burnt out activists who didn't figure out how to take care of one another. all that reading left me pissed at my folk's generation. meanwhile, this is a line from the 'meeting agreements' in our Friends Make the Best Medicine guide:

Quote:
We recognize that overcoming oppression helps everyone’s liberation; it is the group’s responsibility to challenge racism, classism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice. We educate each other in the spirit of solidarity, and hold others accountable for their behavior without criticizing who they are as people.


to tell you the truth i cringe every time i look at this or hear someone reading it at a meeting. it's all fine and good for us to talk about challenging oppression--we NEED to be doing it--but it takes education and having some common language and understanding between people. education and common language that often is not there. and i'm still not sure where i stand on how icarus should play a role in anti-oppression work. but it's obvious we're going to be doing it soon enough. there's a whole other budding thread going about this stuff over here which i encourage you to check out if you're interested:
https://site.icarusprojectarchive.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11106

back to one of the main issues at hand:

agustina quoted by sandpiper:
Quote:
there hasn't been any will to try to keep people in the forum posted about what happens in the ground, and yet, every time there is an intra power problem, the forum is the place where they come to get the popular support.


this is a very striking observation and i want to acknowledge it but also say that it makes me look forward to a time in the near future when there are a lot more people involved in the website and we're using the drupal end for folks to blog about all the different stuff they have going on. i get this sense that as soon as we get our shit together and figure out how to share power better and involve more people in the process this thing, this icarus project thing, is going to take off in some really positive new directions. i personally am burnt out from 5+ years of icarus organizing but i have faith that there are a lot of folks like you out there that are ready to step up. but clearly we have to address the fundamental issues first. if there are a bunch of well respected people who've worked in the organization that feel wronged enough to make a list like the one that was posted on march 5th, i don't think we're in a place to be making any big decisions until they give us some feedback.

and agustina, i just want to thank you so much for being your hyper-critical self. it's your voice that's allowing me to feel comfortable in saying everything i'm saying including this: as far as the issue of cultural appropriation is concerned i think the "encuentro" name is actually quite appropriate for this process. the zapatistas are an international movement. much of their power lies in how they've managed to inspire so many of us from around the world in our own countries and environments--the rural campesinos influencing us city slickers. your list of rights from 'The Women's Revolutionary Law' apply very clearly to women in Zapatista communities in Southern Mexico but there's nothing on there about online communities and mental health support groups for mad people in cities. but the spirit translates--the same way that women in the Zap communities were creating space to tell their stories and raise awareness and talk about alternative gender dynamics--that's what's going on here.
madigan's off in mexico somewhere and i haven't spoken with her in a couple of weeks but i think her trip to chiapas inspiring to spearhead this process of icarus evolution is really powerful. i think her heart is in the right place. i think she's being very strategic. i think it's been a pretty exhausting process for her. so i just want to make sure she's getting the respect she deserves. if only all the gringas who were in chiapas over new years returned home to the USA to organize the women in their communities!

cause seriously: how amazing would it be if we could actually get through this process stronger and with some ideas that might inspire other organizations to go through similar transitions? in the end i really believe it's going to be the mad ones that because of our sensitivities set the right fires and push through the right boundaries and steer us on our course to cultural evolution. it seems very clear to me that the women's encuentro is all part of that process. so that's my piece on the organizational tip. on the personal tip i am so down to talk about my role in oppressive gender dynamics at the icarus project. i'm just waiting for some guidance on how and when and where.

inel quoting margaret wheatley:
Quote:
I crave companions, not competitors. I want people to sail with me through this puzzling and frightening world. I expect to fail at moments on this journey, to get lost – how could I not? And I expect that you too will fail. Even our voyage is cyclical – we can't help but move from old to new to old. We will vacillate, one day doing something bold and different, excited over the progress, the next day, back to old behaviors, confused about how to proceed. We need to expect that we will wander off course and not make straight progress to our destination. To stay the course, we need patience, compassion, and forgiveness. We need to require this of one another. It will help us be bolder explorers. It might keep us from going mad.


or too sane depending on your perspective.
with so much respect to all involved at 1am,
sascha



Posted: 14 Mar 2008 12:08 am    
have you been half asleep?
and have you heard voices?
i hear them calling my name...

man it's 1am and i have a couple more days at the farm before i fly to SF for the anarchist bookfair and to visit a bunch of old friends for a month. i was talking to ashley mac on the phone the other day and she mentioned that there were cherry blossoms on the trees as she was walking down the street and i felt it in my body so strong--the rush of spring! how do those trees go from being so dormant and skeleton bare to being so lush and full?
i guess we do the same thing.
so much of me has been so dormant all winter, but its allowed for what feels like some amazing personal growth.
we're making syrup in the woods--there's a sugar shack set up with a fire boiling down sap and a whole tapping system for the maple trees- pouring into 5 gallon buckets which get emptied into a bucket with a funnel and line across the creek and into a 50 gallon barrel. we have 5 barrels. it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup so we keep the fire going and burn off all the water. the whole thing is so fucking amazing.
anyway, i have mad amounts of shit to do before i take off on saturday. i didn't smoke weed for 6 weeks and then smoked for a couple days there, spun off into the mythic realm (which i'm a lot more fluent with after a whole winter of writing soul searching and meditating) but then couldn't get back down and ended up taking 25mgs of seroquil last night and i've been such a zombie today. no more smoking weed for a little while...
but it's cool, we know that it's probably magic.
thanks for the inspiration max


Posted: 19 Mar 2008 03:38 pm    
woke up in oakland this morning at my friend joe's house by the traintracks and the highway. joe and i went to high school together, i got arrested with him in the bronx when i was 14 for mouthing off to an angry cop and he's the reason i originally came out west cause he got a scholarship to UC berkeley and told me stories about people's park and gilman street punk shows. we were little anarchsits together and almost 20 years later joe just graduated from acupuncture school and is off doing his clinic work while i lounge in his kitchen and eat his food and type on his computer. i'm so proud of him and so grateful to have this chill place to stay after being such a hermit all winter.
i just got off a call with molly and will about icarus organizational stuff and the WE and all. i keep getting messages and calls from people assuming i'm stressed about the accusations of sexual harassment in the organization which is sweet but i'm so not personally stressed because there's nothing lurking in the shadows for me to stress about. but i'm definitely starting to get frustrated by the lack of response by the women who created this opening for people to talk, it's starting to feel irresponsible to the community. and then on the flipside there's agustina comparing the owl collective to the fascist military junta in argentina! woah. i'm gonna go out and play in the sunshine and let someone else worry about it. it's really nice to see linda room42 around, i so appreciate her wisdom and perspective. and everyone: despite whatever issues that need communication and resolution this place continues to inspire the hell out of me.
here's something i wrote 5 years ago about the war:
https://site.icarusprojectarchive.org/a-handful-of-seeds-in-a-world-full-of-war
mad love/happy spring, sascha



On the mod forum:
PostPosted: 19 Mar 2008 04:01 pm    Post subject:       
just in case any of you are curious, i'm definitely frustrated that people are jumping to conclusions about my personal relationships to women in the icarus project and that no one from the WE is clarifying their statement and trying to get the conversation back on track in a proactive way. my sense is that they're being flakey about communicating with each other, which feels really irresponsible to the community, but it's just how it is sometimes.
the truth behind some of the shadiness involving me is that it's incredibly high drama and involves all kinds of exciting sex and madness and multiple genders and definitely is not about me sexually harassing any women in the icarus project. it's about a bunch of crazy people trying to figure out how to share power with one another and spending way too much time together and eventually some people walking away hurt without a way to talk about it with the community. of course there are fucked up gender dynamics and we should be talking about them. in the meantime the silence create space for all kinds of bullshit to arise. lots of people have hurt each other. but my sense at least is that the 'sexual harassment' stuff is about unaddressed things that have gone down at fountain house and nyc icarus meetings, not about me and will.
i'd write about it all but it's just not my place. in the meantime icaristas far and wide get to project their creepy stuff onto me. and i hope in the end that not to much damage has been done and everyone feels better when the stories actually come out.



Posted: 19 Mar 2008 09:56 pm    

Stolen Election 2000 and 2004
yeah i hear this loud and clear sandpiper. i'm still seduced by the prospect of mass electoral organizing laying the foundations for future non-electoral uprising. in the end whether he wins or not is not my issue. there's something undeniably powerful about so many people rallying together for change like this and whether or not obama believes his own rhetoric about the importance of local empowerment and community organizing (which i get the feeling he does) people are taking him seriously. there's going to be a whole new generation of young people that get politicized by this election and whether or not he wins, a bunch of them are going to go on to do all kinds of interesting stuff with their lives. especially if we keep at it and keep creating alternative structures and support networks. i would love for us to have a nuanced conversation about the relationship between underground subcultural movements like the icarus project and mainstream mass organizing. i see it kind of like some of the visionary seed breeders i know who do all their breeding work in small garden plots and then use their neighbors fields to grow out large quantities of the seed for public consumption. subcultures and underground political and social movement are integral to a healthy culture and society, and the local culture needs to be protected from the mass and the monocult, but a strategic relationship to the mass is essential for large scale social change. what would mass change look like if it was positive? can we even imagine it? we have to be able to imagine it if we want it to happen.
am i making sense?
i feel like i've been part of a social movement for years that is incredibly distrustful of anything mainstream, just like the indigenous farmers in mountainous regions of the world who still haven't been seduced by modern agriculture and continue to save their own seeds. it's a good fucking thing they're saving their seeds and not getting them from monsanto, just like it's a good thing we're talking about revolution on these forums and not the 2008 election on an aol discussion board or something. we're coming up with new ideas together, we're creating new culture together, we're evolving the dialog together. and we're able to do it partially because there's a high concentration of brilliant alienated folks who want to change the world. i love that about this place.
but if we're going to be a part of creating large scale positive change we have to figure out a relationship to the mainstream that maintains our integrity and doesn't just end up with some lame sell out cooptation story. i don't think it has to be like that.
i look at the barackobama website and fantasize about what that kind of sophisticated web/community based organizing could accomplish if we were organizing around getting icarus groups onto college campuses all over the country, large scale visioning/mad mapping/support networking.

i think the whole way we've been raised to think about nation states is going to dissolve before our eyes. i think the capitalist free market global economic experiment we're living under and the internet technology that has developed under it is going to totally transform the way people think and interact with one another. i think in this context anarchism is going to become relevant in a whole new way. if that's going to happen we're going to have to mainstream ourselves somehow, and getting involved in historic political campaigns doesn't seem like such a bad idea to me.

but i'd love to hear what more people think cause there are many complex sides to this one.

PostPosted: 19 Mar 2008 10:06 pm           Lithium Kidney Function Warning
my kidney's thank you linda.
i'm down to 900 from 1200, planning to work down to 600 later in the spring when i get back from traveling. i get the regular tests and my levels are fine. i eat a lot of dried bananas. i drink a lot of water. i shake like an old man at 33. i hope the shaking stops when i kick the lithium. it's such a deal with the devil. but it's where i'm at.



PostPosted: 19 Mar 2008 11:17 
i see it like this: people start talking to their neighbors for the first time because of an electoral campaign. people meet and gain trust by working together in an electoral campaign. people starting having big dreams and feeling like they're part of something larger than themselves amidst times like these.
there's no reason why all that energy can't be transformed into revolutionary organizing in a different context. those relationships are still there. those connections forged in the midst of grassroots organizing, even if they appear reformist, have the potential to be a part of a much more radical movement, especially if the economy keeps sliding.
if there are folks like us who have much larger visions of change and we're working on the ground in the mix of the reformist organizing, we can help redirect some of that stagnant liberal democratic energy. i want to see what those organizing camps look like that they were talking about in the rolling stone article. camps to train folks in organizing skills. no matter how reformist the obama camps are they're teaching organizing skills. my mind can't help but start fantasizing about what it would be like if we had icarus training camps all over the country teaching folks survival skills and how to organize support networks in their communities.
i also think about our relationship to an organization like fountain house that is way more mainstream but we're taking advantage of the resources they offer us. like a young tree using the old root systems of the dead trees in the forest. work with what we've got.
that's kind of where i'm coming from rogue. i'm trying to get creative and not be so puritanical anarchist about the electoral political thing.
what do you think?
full of shit?
stars in my eyes?
i'm open to being wrong.

PostPosted: 21 Mar 2008 05:37 pm      The Secret Life of White People (this weekend)       
The Secret Life of White People
3:00pm Sunday at the San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair
Come hear Sascha Scatter from The Icarus Project tell an untold story about anarchist community, unspoken assumptions, and the psychotic race war in his head that once pushed him to the brink of suicide because he didn’t know how to tell his friends about it. A 20 minute action-packed talk about whiteness and privilege in relationship to punk rock and anarchist activist culture, the power of shame to keep people divided from one another, and the important role of the “creatively maladjusted” or “Mad Ones” in breaking through stale stereotypes, revealing hidden power relationships with xray visions, and carving new paths in the cultural landscape.

http://sfbookfair.wordpress.com/
Golden Gate Park, 9th Avenue & Lincoln Way, San Francisco, CA.


The Secret Life of White People (Coming Soon From PM Press)
Part mad manifesto, part revolutionary love letter, part freight train adventure story--The Secret Life is a self-reflective shattered mirror, a twist on the classic punk rock travel narrative that grapples with race, class, and the search for meaning and connection amidst the bleached out anti-culture of the Monocult.

It was just a joke between strangers, but it was the kind of joke that managed to cut through layers of culture and language like a finely tuned bullshit detector. It was an ironic joke, but not the whiteboy ironics of modern hipster-speak that often seems to suck the life out of everything wonderful and spit it back cool and untouchable. That’s not my kind of fun…



\
PostPosted: 21 Mar 2008 05:49 pm    
sandpiper - that was such an inspiring and illuminating post on the WE thread about spiders. i've been trying to be so good and understanding but that WE thread has been making me feel physically ill the last few days. i feel so judged in a creepy way where it's not clear what i've done. i'm just trying not to take it too personally and hope that the dialog actually goes in a positive direction. from the look of the direction of the posts today it seems like it might. in the meantime i'm gonna attempt to hold my head high and try and be really social even though i kind of feel like hiding under a rock.


Posted: 31 Mar 2008 02:50 am      Writing the Story of the Icarus Project  
the way we tell our stories has everything to do with how we live them out.
we (the "staff", the "owls", the "whatever") are supposed to write a report every year to our fiscal intermediary so we can keep our non-profit tax status. it's pretty routine, not such a big deal. in times past we've written grant reports together, but everything is so discombobulated right now that the report was really late and i just wrote this and sent it in. it's not how it's supposed to happen but that's our own rules, they don't really care what it says and that paperwork needed to get done. i'm really hoping that by this time next year i don't have anything to do with this process. i'm really hoping that we can come up with some kind of structure that welcomes a bunch of new people into administrative decision making roles. i want out. i am ready to do something else and let other people in. so ready. in the meantime, here's what i wrote. it's very imperfect and i'm hoping people might want to add onto it. so much is happening in this community. so much happened last year. anyone have anything to add to the list? what do you think of the whole very conscious dismantling of the heroic narrative? the discussion of the WE? please tear this text apart and rewrite it so that my voice just becomes another in the mass of us. please let me step back. i am listening. i want to follow.


2. It was an eventful year for the Icarus Project. We published the long awaited and controversial Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psych Drugs. We welcomed Molly and Mimi into our team. Alicia Ohs set up our office distribution system. We received a grant from the New York Community Trust to develop a peer-led educational outreach and support program model for college campuses in New York City based at NYU. Our publication, Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness was used with a class of 50 students at Virginia Tech.We celebrated our 5th anniversary in the Bay Area this past Fall after a cross-country ï¿1⁄2Mad Giftsï¿1⁄2tour of college campuses and bookstores and community centers. We were profiled on National Public Radio for our work with students and administrators at Virginia Tech. Our posters and stickers and zines can be found all over the country in activist houses and coops and more and more college campuses. The word is spreading. Our message and vision is beginning to have an effect on the next generation of young people struggling with mental health issues and the next generation of health professionals and peer counselors. Our materials are sought after by a lot of people and weï¿1⁄2re still in the process of developing effective distribution networks. While weï¿1⁄2ve begun to put our booklets online as downloadable PDFï¿1⁄2s and our office space at Fountain House, we have the potential to be distributing so much more.

The Icarus Project is in an important process of transition right now. From the leadership of two founders, to the creation of a small collective structure in 2004, we are now working to expand our leadership and accountability to the greater community that has developed around our organization. It is challenging because there are not many 21st century organizing models to look at. One of our biggest challenges is that so much of the communication in our organization takes place over the phone or the internet in the form of emails and discussion boards and blogs. This has proven to make life more interesting and more complicated.

Since the new year we have been in a period of internal reflection as an organization. Beginning in January, a group of women, inspired by the Womenï¿1⁄2s Encuentro of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico organized a discussion to talk about ways of shifting gender related power imbalances in the Icarus Project. This discussion opened up a lot of space for marginalized voices and has shed a lot of light on internal power dynamics that have reduced our ability to work collectively in an effective manner. Though it might seem like our recent struggles point to a weakness in the organization, it seems as if our inherent ï¿1⁄2sensitivitiesï¿1⁄2 and inabilities to do things in the ï¿1⁄2normalï¿1⁄2 way are actually providing us with the opportunity to come up with new models for interacting with one another. We hope that this ï¿1⁄2laboratory of resistanceï¿1⁄2 that we have created will birth a stronger and more effective organizational model based on a vision of community capacity and respect for diversity. More and more we have begun to quote Martin Luther King Jr. ï¿1⁄2Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.ï¿1⁄2

Within our own community it is clear that the language and culture around mental health is actually shifting and seemingly evolving in new and interesting directions. While we might not be as traditional ï¿1⁄2productiveï¿1⁄2 as a conventional mental health non-profit, the listening spaces we have begun to create in the community point to something with greater insight and longer lasting relevance. Following in the example of the LGBT movement, we are developing safe spaces to talk about complex issues and providing a voice for many people who have traditionally felt very lonely and alienated.

Something in our work that is hard to quantify has to do with the development of a culture and an ideology. The language of the ï¿1⁄2Mad Onesï¿1⁄2 rather than the ï¿1⁄2mentally illï¿1⁄2. ï¿1⁄2Celebrating Mad Giftsï¿1⁄2 rather than ï¿1⁄2combating stigma.ï¿1⁄2 We now talk about ourselves as ï¿1⁄2Icaristasï¿1⁄2: a conscious play on the Latin American revolutionary tradition of using martyred heroic figures from the movement as symbols (i.e. Emiliano Zapata and the Zapatistas and Agusto Sandino and the Sandanistas.) Of course Icarus was a mythical boy who flew too close to the sun and drowned to death, not the traditional revolutionary leader. One of the most amazing things that weï¿1⁄2re witnessing as the Icarus Project grows is the replacement of the traditional hero narrative of founder Sascha DuBrul with the voices of the greater community. We are participating in visionary discussions about power and privilege and gender and race and class and the world we want to create together. We are building links between different movements that all have mental health and social justice as common ground. Our numbers are growing in a sustainable way. Our messages are evolving carefully and creatively. And the future is looking really interesting.



Posted: 31 Mar 2008 11:00 am            
love and healing to all of you. i'm packing up my stuff off my friend's floor where i've been camped out for the last two weeks and catching a cragslist ride with a bunch of strangers up to portland. eyes wide open.

Posted: 06 Apr 2008 03:03 pm    
(hey nancy - we were writing at the same time. 'bipolar variation' somehow brings to my mind that really cool chapter about tulips in michael pollen's book The Botany of Desire where he was writing about the ways that tulip breeders in amsterdam back in the day figured out that the really strikingly beautiful tulips were the ones that actually had some kind of virus or sickness -- so they were hard to breed and keep alive but were so much more beautiful than all the others.)

ok, here's where my sunday morning went:

i think pakana is so right: words are just containers and they definitely have the meaning sucked out of them all the time, especially by the people we're up against in this war of ideas. i think we're setting ourselves up for failure to try and come up with the catch-all term. the terms are always going to be shifting around. nevertheless, i have a few thoughts to add to this most interesting and important of conversations:

i'm pretty obsessed these days with that Martin Luther King quote:
"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted."
there's something in those words that's like a shining light in the dark to me, just somehow totally reframes the conversation in this brilliant and visionary way. and it was MLK talking in the late 1960's. it's like that permaculture principle "the problem is the solution." it's something about staring straight at our fears, something about cultural evolution, about wounded healers, something that just totally circumvents the "combating stigma" dialog and takes our struggle out of the constructed "mental health" arena and puts it smack in center stage.

anyway, i myself am partial to mad ones.

as in, i have faith in the power of the mad ones because they're the only ones that are crazy enough to think they can change the world and have the outlandish visions and drive to be able to do it.

i've been thinking a whole lot in recent months about what a large coalition of diverse groups could unite under in an effective and long term way. and what common language might look like. the anti-war shit is clearly so demoralizing by this point. i keep reading all these books about the 60's political movements and they're so simultaneously inspiring and miserably depressing because there was so much potential back then, so many people so inspired and working together in ways we're just trying to figure out how to recreate now 40 years later, and then it was crushed so hard most of us don't even know a glimmer of our own recent movement history.

i don't know about you all but i know i want to be a part of a movement that has language to talk about power and class and race and gender without devolving into fragmenting identity politics, a movement that is full of love and actually prioritizes supporting the people in it, a movement that can collectively learn from its mistakes, a movement that knows its history and tells the stories publicly and loudly and beautifully, a movement that prioritizes community health and community support in ways that capture people's imaginations and in ways the state and corporations will never be able to, and a movement that has mad respect for wild dreams and true diversity and the ones who--by their very nature--don't fit into neat boxes and never will under any system.

a movement of the people that respects the freaks and wild ones.

i also like the language of mad ones because of the double meaning of "mad". maybe this might be potentially alienating for a mainstream movement, but goddamn there's a lot to mad about and we better be talking about it publicly with all of our love and rage. when it comes down to it, we can debate whether there are genetic components to what is now considered "mental illness" but fundamentally our message is that society is driving us mad. oppression makes people crazy. maybe some are more predisposed. but "mad ones" straight up cuts across race/class/gender lines in this way that has the potential to unite so many different groups of people.

i have been having this amazing conversation with folks from the hip hop mental health project that's just getting started in new york. as someone coming from the mostly white punk rock world its been really interesting to talk to folks who are part of a people of color led cultural movement. their analysis of power and privilege is so much deeper and clearer than that of me and my white friends struggling to figure out where we fit in to the movement. but part of what i'm realizing is that what the punk world offers is this rich tradition of celebrating madness in all its fucked up and freaky forms. growing up around punks is how i survived getting repeatedly locked up in psych hospitals without believing that there was actually something wrong with me. which i think is something to be shared. thus i feel quite comfortable in referring to my people as the "mad ones" and letting others self identify and associate as they see fit or are inspired to. it just kind of flows off my tongue at this point.

on the flipside to the hip hop thing, last week i caught a craigslist ride from oakland to portland with this young white woman and she was talking about her struggles with depression and how she comes from a really economically privileged background and feels so guilty about all the resources she has that most people never will. her class privilege is what has kept her feeling like she has a biological illness because how could she be depressed if she's so economically fortunate? it was quite a conversation driving up I-5. because i could relate to her so much. for years so much of my own shame, that has been so incredibly hard for me to talk about, has had to do with my class privilege and feeling like my problems aren't as serious as everybody else's. it must be brain chemistry, right? but what if we flipped the whole thing around and started talking about the ways that economic privilege makes people sick in the head? that in fact it's the class system itself that makes people sick. suddenly "mad ones" starts cutting across all kinds of lines. you can be a poor kid or a middle class kid or a rich kid and still be a mad one.

this is really interesting to me as far as movement building is concerned.
i got up in front of a bunch of people and started talking about this stuff a couple weeks ago at the anarchist bookfair. and the way i framed it was: fuck it, i'm crazy, i'm just going to tell you straight up what i think about class privilege and whiteness as a privileged white guy. i'm going to talk about these things that we're not supposed to talk about because i'm mad and i hope there are more of you mad ones out there that are ready to tell your stories about this stuff, because that's how we're going to be a part of an effective movement for change. so in that context being a "mad one" was about not giving a fuck about freaking people out. a rich punk rock tradition.

if we're really going to be breaking down stigma we need a term that is going to bring together everyone from the middle-age homeless schizophrenic black man that has chronic tardive dyskinesia from too much thorizine to the rich white girl who's cutting herself because she can't feel anything in her sheltered suburban life. and everyone in between. there are a lot of us out here. and clearly we need to be reframing the conversation to talk about community mental health - not individual mental illness. somewhere in this vision are beautiful mad maps of many shapes and colors and styles, the excuses for us to talk in groups about the hard stuff, about how we can support one another individually and collectively amidst it all. somewhere in there is an understanding that some people are really sensitive and good at crossing boundaries and we need spaces to cultivate those skills. somewhere in there are collectively developed skills and spaces that feel safe to talk about power and privilege and shame and can build the bridges and networks that will hold together a growing movement. maybe "mad" isn't a term that everyone is going to relate to. but i think it's worth adding to the mix.

okay, one other thing on the language tip cause it feels really important:
these days i think a lot about whiteness--about how so much of what's considered "normal" in our culture has to do with european standards of normality which are so invisible when so many of us are raised to be "color blind" and brought up with the ridiculous idea that everyone has "equal opportunity". i've been trying to figure out how to talk about how "whiteness" is actually this incredible sickness that only exists because all these other cultural roots have been severed and histories drowned in the historical melting pot. it's a sickness that's a bi-product of an evil system. and meanwhile there are so many people out there desperate for connection and community and roots. so many people so desperate for something to belong to and to believe in.

which is how we've been talking for years at the icarus project about the "monoculture" or the "monocult":
https://site.icarusprojectarchive.org/articles/underground-roots-and-magic-spells+
i would love to see this language around monoculture more widely adopted as a way of critiquing the system we live under. and i would love for the idea of monoculture to become automatically associated with white supremacy, because it totally fits.
Quote:
You can see it all from the highway: enormous monocrops of identical corn plants that reach for miles bordered by an endless sea of strip malls, parking lots, and tract housing. You can see it on our kitchen counters and in our classrooms: the same can of soda on the table in Cairo and Kentucky, the same definitions of 'progress' and 'freedom' in textbooks around the world. Monoculture: the practice of replicating a single plant, product or idea over a huge area, is about the most unstable, unsustainable, unimaginative form of organization that exists, but in the short term it keeps the system running smoothly and keeps the power in the hands of a small number of people. In the logic of our modern world, whether it's in the farmer's field or in the high school classroom, diversity is inefficient and hard to manage.

i would love for the icarus project to become known as the mental health support organization of mad ones that got everyone talking about how whiteness and monoculture were the actual diseases. and that the solutions all have to do with respecting diversity and wildness.
there's something deep there. something that maybe will give us more tools for understanding our place in a larger movement. something that has the potential to build a lot of bridges and call out some of those elephants in the room most people seem afraid to mention.
if not the mad ones, who else is going to fucking do it?


Posted: 06 Apr 2008 03:34 
last week i caught a craigslist ride from oakland to portland with this young woman and she was talking about her struggles with depression and how she comes from a really economically privileged background and feels so guilty about all the resources she has that most people never will. her class privilege is what has kept her feeling like she has a biological illness because how could she be depressed if she's so economically fortunate? i could relate to her so much. for years so much of my own shame, that has been so incredibly hard for me to talk about, has had to do with my class privilege and feeling like my problems aren't as serious or important as everybody else's. it must be brain chemistry, right? but what if we flipped the whole thing around and started talking about the ways that economic privilege makes people sick in the head? that in fact it's the class system itself that makes people sick. suddenly "mad ones" starts cutting across all kinds of lines. you can be a poor kid or a middle class kid or a rich kid and still be a mad one.

i was talking to my friend mike antipathy on friday night about all this stuff and he reminded me how much our friend sera bilizikian was tormented by her privilege and how at the time she committed suicide she was living in a house with a group of trans folks that were struggling with their own identity issues and were really unsupportive of her in all her straight, white, privilegedness (as opposed to their queer white priviegedness...) how much of sera's suicide was about being in a "radical" community that was committed to "changing the world" but wasn't prioritizing respecting one another as individuals? what happens when people are going through personal/political issues around power and identity and lash out at the people around them because of the oppression they've faced, without having any accountability to those other people as fellow community members?
part of being a conscious "mad one", in my mind at least, is understanding how sensitive some of us are and therefore working extra hard to create safe spaces to talk about complex and painful issues with respect and love.

i wonder if anyone else out there has more thoughts about this confusing and painful yet somehow exciting and potentially paradigm shifting topic


PostPosted: 06 Apr 2008 03:46 pm    Post subject: a ringside seat to her own stroke.       
ok, i think this is really interesting. do we write it off because it's too medical model and she's holding a fucking human brain in her hand as she's talking to us? do we write her off because she's working with NAMI? or is there some common ground in this story?
and if we were going to make friends with this woman what would we say? cause maybe i'm being duped but she seems like a really awesome ally to me. what a story!

http://www.ted.com/speakers/view/id/203



PostPosted: 14 Apr 2008 03:13 pm    Post subject:       
happy birthday amy!

i'm just popping in to say hi and be the friendly reminder that the 7 million books aren't going anywhere, and you definitely don't have to read them all, especially if you have friends that can read some of them for you and summarize.

i watched the show Heros with my friend joe last night. it blew me the fuck away. i think that's what folks should be watching and discussing in icarus groups. they're making fucking tv shows about us, it's totally over the top. makes me think there's going to be a whole other mccarthy era in the entertainment industry where folks are going to start getting popped for encouraging terrorism.

i have like no time to really talk about it but me and madigan and zuni and xenobia sat down and had a pretty amazing talk about icarus gender dynamics - personal and political. i'm really looking forward to helping open up the dialog when the time is right. okay, back in the wormhole...mad love, s



Posted: 26 Apr 2008 09:40 am          
hey indiamelia that's so exciting about the grant and i'm so glad you're documenting your work as you figuring things out and starting to network with other folks. it would be great to start compiling a campus icarus contact list, it still has yet to happen and i'm so busy with other stuff these days.

inel:
Quote:
i was just thinking how cool it would be to have a book of workshop templates/summaries for people to use to do stuff with groups of mad rad fab folks.

there's some pretty great stuff here:
https://site.icarusprojectarchive.org/art/art-journaling



PostPosted: 26 Apr 2008 09:48 am       

there's a kitchen of folks cooking food for the sedar tonight. i just switched my schedule and woke up at 7 to feed the goats. the new crop of baby goats are cute as hell. it's good to be home. the cherry trees are blossoming. i prepared half a dozen garden beds yesterday and there's a bunch of lettuce to get transplanted today. we're making dandelion wine. i'm making rooting hormone from willow branches to try and root a bunch of herb cuttings. friends from the city coming up, i took responsibility for getting the haggada together, first time in my life i've ever really cared. all week been trying to make sense of this jewish thing, reading books, having conversations with friends and family. more thoughts soon. have a lovely saturday y'all.



PostPosted: 27 Apr 2008 01:16 pm           The Secret Life of White People

a friend walked over to the computer when I was watching it and said "wow, that guy is all over the place" and I thought, really? it makes sense to me. and that’s exactly what I would sound like if people were ever willing to listen to me.


that's a really interesting and sweet response. I guess that would explain why i was looking out into a crowd and there were a handful of people with wide eyes staring at me with looks of recognition and then a bunch of people that looked kind of uncomfortable and were squirming in their seats! I suppose it’s not just the content, it’s the frequency we’re tuned to. Some people are good at making tangential jumps – I believe “loose associations” is what the psychiatrists call it…

And yeah, I know how lucky I am that people actually listen to me when I talk. It wasn’t always like that. I’m all too aware of what it’s like to be the one who’s “crazy.” But I really have come to enjoy this roll of being able to say things other people aren’t supposed to say, with the aim of carving space for more people to feel comfortable speaking their truths. Sometimes life is so complicated that we make ourselves forget really important things because otherwise they might drive us mad with guilt or fear or anger or confusion. But I’ve really come to believe that it’s our personal stories, especially the complex and charged ones that lie below the surface of our consciousness, that become the fuel behind the fire of social movements. When you screw up the courage to tell me a story from deep inside your heart that makes me feel safe enough to tell you mine—that act of sharing between us, that alchemical safe space that is created from our trust and courage, it then allows others to step up and tell their stories. We weave our future from the stories of the past. And why shouldn’t it be the “mad ones” and the “creatively maladjusted” who take responsibility for speaking the hard truths? Maybe we’re the only ones crazy enough to do it?

Going back and looking at my notes from a winter of writing, what feels like the most important stuff are the stories that are still all in fragments. But I’m going to just try and scratch the surface of one of those stories in particular cause two of you mentioned it and it’s an especially intriguing one.

Okay for everyone who doesn’t feel like sitting through me rambling on tangentially about my childhood and the race politics of the 1980’s: in that video link above I tell a story about going to elementary school with Assata Shakur’s daughter and not realizing it till I was in my mid-20’s and living in Oakland, CA around a bunch of old Black Panthers and learning my history of what actually went down in this country in the 70’s.

Quote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assata_Shakur

Assata Shakur (born July 16, 1947, as Joanne Deborah Byron, married name Chesimard) is an African-American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army (BLA). In 1977 she was convicted of several felonies including the murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster during a 1973 gunfight on the New Jersey Turnpike. During the gunfight and ensuing chase, New Jersey State Trooper James Harper was wounded and Shakur's fellow BLA member Zayd Malik Shakur killed.

She escaped from prison in 1979 and has been living in Cuba with political asylum since 1984. Since May 2, 2005, she has been classified as a domestic terrorist by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has offered a $1 million reward for assistance in her capture. She is the godmother of the late hip hop artist Tupac Shakur (the sister of his stepfather, Mutulu Shakur).


In Assata’s autobiography she talks about her daughter Kakuya who was born in behind bars, raised in New York City by her grandmother, and then, after her mom escaped from prison, came to live with her in exile in Cuba in 1985. I realized that though I hardly knew her, Kakuya Shakur was in my elementary school class for years and then mysteriously disappeared one day. When I tried to think about what happened to her the only thing I could come up with was this memory of my 5th grade classroom, lining up for lunch, Kakuya not being there, and this rumor floating around my class (of 9 year olds) that “Kakayua’s mother had murdered Martin Luther King.” What?!? How to make sense of a memory like that?

Like most people in this country that are my age or younger, I learned about the Civil Rights Movement in elementary school. I went to a public school in Manhattan in the early 1980’s. My school, Hunter College Elementary on 94th and Park Avenue was an incredibly racially integrated place, a proverbial melting pot of cultures. Looking at old class pictures I see a rainbow of beautiful little faces, all of us growing up around and rubbing off on each other. Puerto Rican and Japanese and Jewish and WASP and Russian and African and African-American, all the Eastern European mutts and mixes and hybrid descents of immigrants that makes New York City such a vibrant place. My environment was so multicultural. Along with Christmas and Hannukah we celebrated Kuanza, the Pan-Africian holiday. But we were all Americans. We celebrated Thanksgiving Day and Columbus Day, sang The Star Spangled Banner and recited The Pledge of Allegiance just like everyone else.

I don’t remember being very conscious of race when I was a kid. I was taught by my parents and my school to believe that, like Martin Luther King Jr. so eloquently put it in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, that people should be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” President Ronald Reagan signed King’s birthday as a holiday into law in 1983 and around that time I remember watching slide shows about MLK and his Dream of social equality. We learned about how a Long Time Ago in the South, which was Very Far Away, Black people weren’t allowed to be in public places with White people. Black people had to sit in the back of the buses and couldn’t eat at the same lunch counters as white people. We learned about a Black woman named Rosa Parks who one night got up the courage and bravely refused to sit in the back of the bus. We learned about the courageous women and men, Black and White, who held non-violent Sit-Ins to protest segregation. We learned about the Freedom Rides. We learned about a peaceful movement that forced the government to change its laws.

So we learned about the Civil Rights Movement as if it was a piece of the past, disconnected from the present. And we didn’t learn ANYTHING about the Black Power movement that emerged in the late 60’s out of the wreckage of that era. We didn’t learn about Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, The Young Lords, the Brown Berets, The George Jackson Brigade, the Black Liberation Army, COINTELPRO, any of it. All that history was hidden under a whitewash of liberal crap about “we shall overcome." We were never given the vocabulary to talk about power and privilege, about race and culture. We didn’t learn about our history as a nation of immigrants and slaves severed from our own histories and lineages. We were Americans and supposed to be proud.

I’m piecing this all back together from very fragmented memories, because the honest truth is that I don’t actually remember a lot of elementary school. I watched a lot of television and played a lot of Atari 2600 video games and read a lot of comic books. I actually remember some TV show characters more than I remember most of my classmates. Like many children of my generation, I was raised in front of the television. We were the generation that went straight from Sesame Street to MTV (but this was before they started diagnosing all of us with ADD.) The television was my culture—my second family, my window to the outside world. The television was my ritual, my religion. Without a stable family I watched The Cosby Show and Different Strokes and they became my family. So, for example, all these years later I can’t really tell you anything I learned about Kuanza, but I can sing you dozens if not hundreds of TV show theme songs and commercial jingles. In fact, here’s a piece of one that’s been in my head lately, tormenting me. It’s from the sitcom Different Strokes, which was about these two black kids from Harlem who go to live with a rich white family on the Upper East Side

Everybody's got a special kind of story,
Everybody finds a way to shine.
It don't matter that you got, not a lot, So what?
They'll have theirs, and you'll have yours, and I'll have mine.
And together we'll be fine!
Because it takes, Diff'rent Strokes to move the world.
Yes it does. It takes, Diff'rent Strokes to move the world.

Do any one else remember this? I watched that show religiously. Those people were like my second, corporately sponsored family. Same goes for Good Times, The Jeffersons, What’s Happenin’, The Cosby Show, A Different World...there were stable in my life, where my outside life wasn’t.

So…put the comment about Kakuya’s mom in that context of the 1980’s. I grew up in a place where, even though it was really “racially and ethnically diverse” we were handicapped by the limitations of our language and culture and society and lack of understanding of history. And for all we knew, the Black Liberation Army had murdered Martin Luther King….

there is so much more to the story, in my mind i can see it like a web of connections that leads right up till last night and the passover seder we had at our house--the historical relationship between Blacks and Jews in this country--the heroic narrative of Moses in the story of Exodus and the Chosen People. how many of the stories we live are we just living because we watched them on television or read them in the bible? what's going to happen with all the hidden history rises to the surface like old ghosts? there are so many political prisoners locked away in this country, so much bloodshed washed under the table, so much justice to be served. but what happens when the oppressed get the power to oppress and are so damaged from years or generations of abuse? do we just play out the same stories over and over again? or do we figure out how to heal with each other, find common ground, and flip the script?



PostPosted: 29 Apr 2008 11:07 am
yesterday was one of those days where i spent hours riding a bicycle in the pouring rain surrounded by manhattan traffic but somehow the city was so beautiful even though i was dripping wet and shivering. i feel so much love and so much hate for humanity. i told someone the other night that i could relate to terrorists who strap bombs to their bodies and blow themselves up in crowds of people and he looked at me horrified. but i love just as strong. what ya gonna do?



Posted: 03 May 2008 08:43 pm
what's crazy is when a bunch of people are all projecting their different stuff onto each other - getting pissed and disappointed and freaked out but it's just a bunch of shadows, a prerecorded story, smashing like pool balls in some crazy game. the trick for me is just to be as centered and self aware as possible, then anyone can project anything onto me and i can see it clearly for what it is. i feel like i'm in an ackward phase of coming to recognize so much about power in society but still trying to figure out how to talk about it and what to do about it. stumbling and marching my way forward, sometimes alone, sometimes with a bunch of friends, sometimes in a crowd of strangers. and so it goes.


Posted: 03 May 2008 08:50 pm    Post subject: need help going to the doctor

wish i was around to be there with you, i have the hardest time at the doctor too. you know this already.
Quote:
I could try to drag in a friend, but my friends haven't really been around lately with all this health stuff.

i'm going to say what i said to you on the phone the other night but i'm going to say it publicly cause i thought it was actually pretty good advice:
if you're having serious mysterious health problems and your icarista friends aren't being supportive enough why don't you go to a support group for people struggling with the kind of health issues you're struggling with? cause that's where you're going to find people who understand and can support you.
your response the other night: "i don't want to go to a group for SICK people."
my response: "that's probably how some people talk about icarus meetings." think of it like you're doing research to report back on. that little mental trick gets me through all kinds of bullshit.
good luck max, sorry i'm so self involved and far away. hopefully really good things willl come from these hard times.
ml, s

________________

Posted: 03 May 2008 08:58 pm  
 Post subject: Learning Disability, or Just Lazy / Crazy?     
i can relate really really strongly to all four of these things.
i've been given all kinds of tests and supposedly i have a bunch of "learning disabilities." it's been particularly hard and confusing for my self esteem because i went to schools for smart kids starting in fucking kindergarden where we had a lot of pressure on us to achieve and i was always the stupid and slow kid that got picked last on the teams and always was getting lost in class conversations or physically in the street! my birth name is sascha dubrul and in second grade i had the nickname "such a dumb fool". kids are so fucked up to each other.

my take on it these days is that it's really important for me to surround myself with folks who can do all kinds of different things. we all have our strengths and weaknesses, if we're lucky we find people that compliment our strong points rather than spending out lives trying to fit in where we don't belong. i think i'm always going to be kind of a scatterbrain, it's probably not going to get any better as i get older. the trick, as with many things, seems to be to find people who will love you for who you are and find situations where you can contribute in ways that make you feel good and connected to something larger than yourself.

_________________

PostPosted: 04 May 2008 10:16 
i have a small tattoo of two interconnected rings on my right wrist that is a very specific message from the healthy, connected-feeling part of myself to the miserable, disconnected part that says "don't give up!" it's always right there when i need to see it.
all my tattoos are parts of myself talking to other parts of myself. i have a bar code tattooed on my arm that's very obviously my 16 year old self screaming "don't sell out!" i'm still grateful for the reminder and i'm 33 now.
i wrote this story a few years ago, maybe you might find it interesting:
https://site.icarusprojectarchive.org/pirate-dreams-and-dark-blue-stories



PostPosted: 09 May 2008 11:10 
dreams: may 7th,2008
woke up saying the blessing prayer in hebrew. in my dream i was stuck in europe wandering the streets of an unfamiliar old city, hiding from soldiers that are asking for everyone's id. i run into s and we're hiding in tunnels. then i'm on some island that's half caribbean tropical and half atlantic temperate - like jamaica and westhampton beach. i leave all this stuff on the atlantic side and i have to go back for it. i'm eating pancakes with a&t and they're humoring me because i'm acting crazy waving my arms. then i'm on the other side of the island hot aspharlt burning the bottoms of my feet, something about a colony of psychiatrists and having to hitch a ride to get back to the other side. then i'm suddenly back home and wondering how the hell i got there, my memory is shot. they've recorded the whole thing and other people are watching it like it's a tv show. i'm looking at myself in the mirror and i don't recognize myself and then i realize it's a computer screen. i've made it to the other side and now i can't get back. the material realm is gone and have to keep wandering in dreamland. the blessing prayer is just to mark the time so i can come back with friends later and switch codes so they can't find me. i miss you too.

Posted: 11 May 2008 08:03 pm    Post subject: The Audacity of the Anarchists  
or The Exploding Cult of Personality Circus

has anyone else noticed that it's looks like obama's getting the democratic nomination?

i'm never ever ever going to forget this day, mother's day 2008:
blustery blue skies smelling like lilacks, the flawed but important new york times story drawing parallels between gay pride and mad pride, and barack obama on the front page in black and white (the code that it's historic) with a series of articles making it clear from multiple directions that he's going to be the democratic presidential candidate.

i was raised by people who believed in electoral politics and it's always felt like such an obvious sham. my dad was friends with david dinkins, the first black mayor of new york, and i was on his "youth advisory committee" and got to see first hand how full of shit the whole thing actually was. growing up in the 80's with reagan and bush at the end of the cold war, any glimmers of hope from an earlier revolutionary era squelshed under thick layers of corporate class war propaganda straight from the right wing think tanks in d.c., the underlying race and class and gender battles that tore apart a movement eating away at our personal lives.

i hung with the anarchists and we voted with bricks through windows and parties in the streets. we were visionaries and we were mad and beautiful. now i hang with the anarchists and we vote with our shovels and forks and rakes and carrot seed. we vote with how we take care of each other and every aspect of our lives except the ballot. there are a lot more of "us" now then i can ever remember there being.

but amidst it this is the first time in my life that i've ever allowed myself to get genuinely excited about a presidential candidate. it reminds me so much of my mom's stories about the kennedy campaign. i find myself reading old tom hayden books and imagining what would happen if more alliances between the progressive democrats and the radicals of many stripes started happening. how much more could our movements and radical communities flourish if the boot on our necks was lifted just a little. and if the warring factions of the "left" buried their differences and found common ground with people on the "right", and then it started to become clearer and clearer that the whole thing was a social construct that is crumbling around us along with the whole notion of "nation states" in an era of global capital.

from where i'm standing it feels like such a mystical riddle, no one could have written a more interesting story: the cold war that became the war against terror nightmare puppet show, the neoconservatives are old trotskyists, the oppressed become the oppressors, the blacks and the jews actually have to figure out how to talk to one another about what went down in the late 60's, all the political prisoners and ghosts from put down rebellions waiting in the sidelines, a generation of mad kids struggling with monocult voodoo labels and psych drugs communicating with lightspeed technology...

and i tell you straight up: i will campaign door to door for barack obama because it's an excuse to talk to my fellow americans about race and community and we need to be having those conversations about race and community! and we need to have some fucking hope that things can actually get better, that we can find common ground with our neighbors, that we can rise above this nightmare and evolve into something new together.

because the alternative is some ugly corporate fascism, the alternatives are the dinosaurs and the death culture.

but this is the point of my (admittedly sleep deprived) post:

i had kind of a epiphany today when i was talking to my mom and she expressed fears about obama getting assassinated. there's still so much trauma in our society left over from what happened 40 years ago when all the leaders started getting taken out.

what if, somehow, amidst this election year, we the anarchists managed to start articulating a vision of a movement where there were no "great men" -- where a man like obama really was just a symbol of hope but the real force was actually in the people?

that way they could kill our leaders and we'd just get stronger. is that a crazy idea or what? can we even imagine what that would be like? it's not like we haven't been talking about it for long enough.

there's so much lucking in the background just waiting for us to reclaim as ours. so much great history. what if we flipped the script and there were no more "great men", just human beings that were all connected to one another, and a history of struggle and respect for the freaks and outlaws and rebels who held on tight to the history through the hard times?

The Audacity of the Mad Ones.
i'm going to sleep before i start getting into trouble.




Posted: 12 May 2008 08:18 am    
yes, i have a well documented and complex relationship with zyprexa. it used to be my drug of choice for sleep because it was the only thing i knew would actually put me out and keep me out.
but it's a Really Strong drug that dulls whole parts of your mind. if i'm really manic i can take it like kryptonite to superman, but if not in a genuine manic swing it can really contribute to my depression and make me feel horrible and stupid.
there's all kinds of advice from dozens of folks on these forums about how they sleep and what herbs and drugs work for them, i just figured i'd pop in and give my 2 cents. for me it's skullcap with a stash of ambien if i get really off track.
if you're really desperate break a 2.5 in half or a third and see what it does. if not i wouldn't fuck with it.



Posted: 12 May 2008 09:00 
blech: thanks for coming to this community looking for help with such a complicated and inevitably painful situation and
kerigirl: thanks for making yourself so open and providing resources and support. i'm so glad you're around here and in the hudson valley.

the only way we're going to grow and evolve as a community is by being really honest with one another, no matter how scary it may seem sometimes. and there are so many things we don't talk about publicly. but sometimes it just takes one person being a little brave.

(at the request of x i edited out the personal part of this post but i'm still down to talk about it the fuck away from this discussion board!)

so blech, whoever you are out there, i'm really glad you decided to post on these boards about being a man and having sexually assaulted a woman in your community, because the only way we're going to change is if we talk about these things and hold each other accountable together with the rest of our community.

in the same way kerigirl is offering to talk, i want to offer that we, and any other men who are interested, create some more space to talk amongst ourselves. over the winter i tried to get in touch with that DWOS group on myspace but never heard back from them. i definitely know some cool men that i've been wanting to reach out to more, some of whom post on these boards already. i've sworn off conference calls, and i'm trying to spend less time on the computer, but i'm around and very interested in this conversation.

i also want to mention my friend cindy crabb and the work she does in our extended community of activists and radicals and punks. here's a link to her website and a zine callout i pulled off her blog. mad love, s
http://www.dorisdorisdoris.com/zines.html
Quote:


Learning Good Consent Zine
Call For Submissions
This is a request for contributions to a zine on positive consent experiences.
This zine will hopefully empower all of us who've had our boundaries crossed and help in opening new ways of thinking for all of us who've crossed other's boundaries.
Examining ourselves closely, many of us have crossed someone's boundaries at one time or another. We live in a culture and time when "normal" sex is noncommunicative, where violation is eroticized, where others' emotionl responses are routinely trivialized or invalidated or ignored.
How do we challenge this culture?
How do we unlearn habits and patterns of behavior that silence others and desensitive ourselves?
How can we learn to engage with each other in a way that cherishes and centers consent?
As a starting point, one might envision consent as the process by which we actively come to understand and respect others' boundaries.
We seek submissions of writing, art, and comics to be published in zine form; please take care to remove or change any identifying details of the people in your stories.
Some ideas:
--stories of good consent in non-sexual settings
--hott stories of consent
--reimagining crossed boundaries (what would have happened instead if someone had been respecting your boundaries/working towards real consent?)
--stories about working on the process of consent; how people have been able to identify and undo boundary-crossing behaviors
what does consent look like in complicated situations? (S&M, intimacy with survivors, and so on)
if you have special considerations or concerns, please feel free to write--this is, after all, a zine on consent and we're happy to work through or clarify any hesitations you may have.)
The compliers of this zine are coming to this project as a continuation of both their work variously supporting survivors, working towards their own and others' awareness and accountability, and building more robust forms of community response to sexual assault and boundary violation, in all its forms.
write with questions or submissions:
nevada. bramble.greenbrier@gmail.com
or cindy po box 29 athens, oh 45701

deadline may 15th

Posted: 12 May 2008 09:04 
hey y'all - made the rough decision at 5am to re-up my lithium dose to 900mg cause my head was spinning off in 20 directions and my heart was racing and a few folks around me have noticed that i've been speaking really fast lately...sigh. it's rough having superpowers. hasta pronto



Posted: 13 May 2008 10:00 am    
i have 12 different documents open on my desktop right now because i'm trying to write more history for the folks who are going to be working on the icarus project in the future.
it's cathartic and bizarre!
it's so over the top!
me and ashley were so grandiose when we came up with all this stuff!
i have to get out in the sunshine but check this out: it was the original grant proposal we wrote in 2004 that got us the $80,000!


PostPosted: 15 May 2008 08:22 am    
9am thursday morning
germantown, ny
overcast sky, checkin in just to say hi
man i hope i don't do what i did yesterday: i fucking spent all day working on this piece of writing that was just supposed to be a response to that thread about spirit possession - instead it was like i got possessed and wrote myself into a box and at 10pm i was wandering around outside getting scared by the wind, totally freaked myself out.
amidst it i had this conversation with my mom where she said she was 'really worried' about me because she thinks i'm 'getting manic'
it;s so confusing to have all the good stuff tied up with all the scary stuff.
like i know i'm been talking faster and reading 20 books at once and connecting all the ideas together, i know these are symptoms of 'hypo-mania.'
but it's really hard to explain to my mom that it's just part of who i am sometimes and i have a really good community of friends and i'm taking care of myself...it's hard to explain to her that she's not helping by calling me up and telling me how worried she is about me.
i know how traumatized she is from watching me get locked up and having my life fall apart a bunch of times. but it's been almost 8 years since i had a 'psychotic break'. i take such good care of myself. and for fucks sake, the organization i co-founded was just written about in the sunday new york times! of course, they quoted me as saying i 'take drugs to control my superpowers' but so what?
some people have cops in their heads. i have a mom in my head something serious. anyway, just sayin...
have a great day, y'all. i'll be around in front of this screen a bunch cause im trying to get some writing done before taking off for a week if anyone wants to say hi
oh and this is my new favorite video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AshzpF8pU40


PostPosted: 15 May 2008 09:30 
koffeedeath:
Quote:
because race, class and gender issues have pervaded community organizing efforts and social movements, there is a possibility that such issues can divide us and separate us when our real common struggles such as getting decent living conditions, food, community, mental health, public space and so on, can be destroyed because of the lack of awareness of who we are as individuals. We're too often stereotyping each other on the basis of identity, blaming each other and giving guilt trips, instead of helping each other to learn.

Quote:
how do the various cultures of resistance find and communicate with each other so that we can join together and fight oppression?

these are such important questions and i so appreciate you straight up asking them, kd.
it really does all feel like a riddle to me, and as weird as it sounds i think part of the answer to the riddle has to do with the Mad Ones, the sensitive ones, the ones that feel injustice and power struggles like knives under their skin, the ones who aren't only struggling for decent living conditions but are vicerally fucking haunted by the ghosts of slavery and genocide and the mass rape of women and the earth. it seems like it's our responsibility to carve some space for those voices, not just drug them into silence. i think our power might actually be in the things that we're the most scared of showing the world.
and of course the game of electoral politics is a circus of rhetoric and mind control, smoke and mirrors. but there is a power in masses of people. in the end there are actually a lot more of us then there are people behind the scenes pulling the strings. they are fucking slick though.

i was reading through sunday's new york times this morning and found an ad for the "american jewish committee":
Quote:
Thanks to the sponsorship from the American Jewish Committee, hundreds of classrooms in the New York area received delivery of The New York Times and "America's Table: A Thanksgiving Reader," as part of a program on diversity, tolerance and democratic values. For more informations visit www.ajc.org.


do a little search for "AJC America's Table: A Thanksgiving Reader"
i know it might seem off topic, but it's all about how we tell the story
chiaroscuro:
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I've always thought it'd be cool if anarchists went door to door, like the Jehova's Witnesses. Just hand out some pamphlets and be willing to have a (hopefully) friendly chat explaining what anarchism is all about.

i actually love this idea. what would it look like?
what if we made our own readers for classrooms about "diversity, tolerance, and anarchist values..."?

anyway, i sent that Audacity of the Anarchists ramble to a few friends and this was my favorite response:

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man, oh man, i grew up precinct walking with my pa/for my pa, walking door to door, every fucking weekend during one of his campaigns. that shit totally terrified me. now a days i could totally see myself out there talking to strangers door to door. i say yes, sascha, get thee to your neighbor's door. personally, i'm not excited about pushing for the next prez. obama's gonna keep up the US military occupations, the buffering of all US finance, etcetera... like the rest - but who ever the next prez is, they're reign is gonna hurt bad with the recession and the iraq/iran/palestine messes and the plummet of the value of the dollar and the food shortages (in this country and beyond) and the sky-rocketing price of oil and the fact that most of the GDP is solely based on finance and not any thing real... i'm feeling (more than ever) this nation state's precariously teetering, and when it falls asunder (to use a word, save for glen danzig, that no one ever uses) it's going to be raining all doom and gloom 24-7.

oh and this too, fucking crazy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFPSVYKhL5g&feature=related



Posted: 26 May 2008 06:54 
monday 7am may 26th
voice upon waking: "if you want to see my layers of control just look closer at who's talking in your dreams." in writing this down i somehow feel connected to everyone else in the entire universe -- all of us slowly expanding and contracting and expanding and then comes the split...wake up!

woke up with an image in my head of molecules forming and reforming -- new shapes that are always made of the same stuff -- seeing my friends and then everyone in the whole world -- we're made of the same stuff, continually forming and reforming different combinations but with set patterns -- attract repel attract repel -- the song remains the same -- we've been doing what we've been doing throughout history -- the voices we're using are just borrowed, it isn't personal, it's universal.
what happens when you split atoms?
what power is waiting to be unleashed?
what if we could cut holes in the fabric of reality with our anger and brilliance? what if it suddenly became clear that we're being held together with a bunch of social constructs that aren't as old as the spirits that are tearing them apart through our eyes? what if it's not about the story - it's about the way the story is getting told? perspective fragments into thousands of shards as the window smashes. linear time crashes into itself and implodes, but we're still here. we've been here this whole time. it's just a trick of the light. it's like a hall of mirrors.
you are not alone.
the voices in your head are calling
stop wasting your time there's nothing coming
only a fool could think someone would save you
the men at the factory are old and cunning
they don't owe nothing boy get running
it's the best years of your life they want to steal
it's all the same
only the names have changed
here we go again





PostPosted: 27 May 2008 11:07 am    
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delete an entire community at the click of a button. poof gone

we surely are living in weird times.
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i felt really psychologically burnt at the stake in a way.

i hope you come out stronger and healthier and wiser with your new skin.

it's about to downpour here, been up since 6 tending to the animals and moving compost and getting ready to plant tomatoes. the CSA starts next week. i've been writing a lot, fighting galactic battles in outer space, then coming back down and realizing my housemates would appreciate me spending a little more effort communicating in the material realm. sigh. on my way to meet caprice in hudson to catch up and talk about the mad love revolution.

we had a big party at our house this weekend and i realized i want a new word that's like 'gaydar' but to describe that feeling i get when i meet someone like me who doesn't fit in anywhere but has figured out how to cross between worlds. i've learn to peg you people from a mile away.




PostPosted: 28 May 2008 07:50 am    
mystical union

dream about decomposition -- white lines like spiderwebs creeping around the edge of my clothes like i'm an old log in the forest that's be innoculated with change. don't be scared. i notice some of it -- white on my black shorts, it becomes a symbol for change, for acceptance of the decomposition process.
before union is possible we have to pass through the darkness
you can't get me i'm sticking with the union till the day i die
one big union
the union's become profane, shed their luminous character, we're left with the shell of empty promises, power hungry men firing out the barrel of a gun
there is a greater power
a different kind of union
it's right in front of us, we just have to connect the pieces
fragments of a movement, the frog and the princess, the intellectuals and my old communist grandpa grumbling about the anarchists.

read after dreams and before meditating this morning:
"fear is compassion in seed form. heal the fear, and compassion bursts forth. the instinctual self must not become the enemy. anger, greed, and lust are all hidden resources that can be transformed into love, clarity, wisdom, and courage." alberto villoldo



i think the map maps and allies conversation go hand in hand.

Maping Mad Maps: A Community Brainstorm/Discussion
https://site.icarusprojectarchive.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=83845

and i think they both really want to be hanging out with this lonely grant proposal:
http://www.openplans.org/projects/icarusproject/09-21-07-grant-proposal-to-the-new-york-community-trust

can anyone else make the not so loose associations?
what would it be like if icarus had a concrete workshop plan for anyone to use anywhere that incorporated these elements?

what are the struggles we have to go through to realize that vision?
what are the blind spots that haven't been articulated?
how can we do this together in a really awesome, supportive way?




PostPosted: 28 May 2008 03:35 pm    
it seems like one of the key pieces to the lingering mad maps puzzle is the very conscious reframing of the story:

refocusing our attention from 'an individual's mental illness' to the 'collective health of the community'. after all, a map is only as helpful as the people who are going to be reading and taking it seriously. and we can't continue to use the disease model and blame our biology when there are so many very basic basic changes in society that would have enormous impacts on all of our mental health.

i still envision a workshop format that could be adapted to different situations, but has the goal of creating not only space for dialog about 'what community support looks like' but actually Creates Community Support: tools for better communication, shared resource lists, understandings about individual and collective struggles, written documents and things to hang on the walls as reminders and references.

i think it might be helpful to join two conversations that have a lot to share with one another.
What Does It Mean to Be An Ally?
https://site.icarusprojectarchive.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11106


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and meanwhile, i shift so rapidly. right now i could be at both extremes at the same time.


nightbloom: when i envision your map it's like the map i envision for myself: multidimensional and taking into account that i have multiple perspectives coexisting inside of me that don't always know how to talk to each other. i think we need to figure this one out together, it's the only way.






Posted: 31 May 2008 11:50 am    
feverish sick in bed. pouring rain outside the window. waves of word fragments crashing around my head like surf, deep breaths, achy body. lonely, i'm scared of losing my mind again. i think i have to close some of these doors, my 6th chakra is glowing, easy to get seduced by the power to see right through everything around me. we are stardust. we are divine. but we're not supposed to know. we have to forget. pray for forgetfulness.
your fingers weave sweet mineretes
speak in secret alphabets
i light another cigarette
learn to forget
learn to forget
learn to forget
let me sleep all night in your soul kitchen
warm my mind by your gentle stove
turn me out and i'll wander baby
stumble through the neon groves...
something about pain and suffering ripping holes in the fabric of reality and letting others cross to the other side. unstable molecules, unstable dispositions. dark passengers. emotions like nuclear explosions, eyes like dying suns. bloody red eyes go to sleep.




Posted: 31 May 2008 05:34 pm    
i've been feverishly sick for the last 24 hours, all aches and sweats.
it just hit me out of nowhere when i was working in the field.
i'm feeling terrified of losing my connection to the spirit realm that i've been swimming in for awhile. i've gotten so comfortable moving back and forth between worlds, having such easy access. but a bunch of people i trust are worried about me, and i hate this part of the story: the worried friends, the slew of half finished writing projects on my desktop, the come down. i think i'm getting better at it as the years go on, i fucking hope i'm getting better at it, but i'm so scared of falling apart and letting people down, i'm so glad i've stepped back from most of my icarus responsibilities. sigh. i'm going to try to write about this some more.