I was reminded of this memory last night when something combusted. I am forced to face learned helplessness. Nobody wants to be weak but it seems i've accepted it. I have to overcome this. Something needs to click into place.

"A reveller’s night in Minneapolis ended in me and the Maine bees backing away from a resounding train alarm and “three flavors of cop” closing in on us.

It started with a night at Hard Times, eating delicious co-op vegan faire. We then strolled over to the puppet theatre, where a vicious punk show threw down. I was reacquainted with other rovers, arrestee buddies down with me in Florida. I got drunk on dancing, and pulled a muscle in my chest that would hurt for a month afterward.

Someone grabbed the mic.
“The delegates are having a shindig in Downtown Minne. The last lightrail leaves in five minutes. See you there.”

People flooded for the doors, or to the bathroom for a quick bandanna-apple cider vinegar fix.

There were fifty of us rag-tag punks waiting on the platform cracking knuckles, pulling up our bandanas, writing legal numbers on our stomachs in sharpie marker. You know, preparing. There was one woman behind me shimmying her way up a light-pole. I accepted it as drunkenness, but then a crack came over the loudspeakers,

“We have all of you on camera. We can see every one of you.”

The train bells sounded. Guard rails swung down. There was no train in sight. Then cop cars descended from both sides of the tracks. One, two, three patrol cars stacked the road. Me and the other bees conferred, then started walking away, sans Duende.

I wanted to stay by his side. I wanted us to link arms, interlace fingers in a unified fist. I wanted to shake down the police, tell them we had every right to be there. That they couldn’t pin us with anything. But they wanted to arrest as many as they could, and they reigned. How did they have the power? Through the militia atmosphere which unfolded overnight in that once cordial Midwest city.

I wasn’t willing to get arrested at the RNC. I feel guilty and embarrassed of that fear, feeling no one was there for me. Though, security is a very real and understandable need, we really are all alone. It’s been both a blessing and a curse to embrace that knowledge on this trip--to have total freedom and also the release of security, the loosening of my grip on all these wive’s tales of what safety really is. I’ve been slowly uncovering a flirtation with death. Death is always there, but more firmly planted when people throw these ideas into your head, telling you multiple times everyday to “be careful”, “you could die”. Dr. Claudia Shippert in the Women's Studies department once expressed her disgust with society's female fear propaganda to keep them in their roles. In relation to myself, I remember in January, before embarking on my trip, crying on the weed man's couch having a complete breakdown because of the unmentionable terror of traveling alone, without a man. And here I was afraid to fight, without the fortified strength of one. When will I ever be able to really defend myself or even brazenly aggressively show fighting spirit if I have to?

I do like that feeling of being on edge, always ready to kill something if it comes down to it. It's real. It's instinct. Backpacking alone with no steady form of transportation, and only my two feet for reliability gave me that incessant anxiety. It was both thrilling and running me ragged. But instead of a swaggering independent confidence I ran by stealth, constant hyperawareness, avoidance of dangerous situations, and expressing my beauty and kindness and exposing my sexuality, enticing people to help me get what I needed. It is the erotic in the female which is a power unequaled in to that in males. But it is a power that can easily be broken. It can be nullified by the constant exposure of the parts of a woman rather than the woman herself, reproduction of the body parts, mere commodification. The tearing down of a woman's beauty when you judge her as being subpar, and a woman is always on display. Unless she dresses in baggy clothes in which case she's a dyke.

So you see, only the fist and the sword matter and the full uniform please, not just the costume, of violence must be embraced to assert my power - no not my power, but my independence and self-contained freedom from domination. This includes knowing how to fight, knowing how to kill and being able to, really fucking being able to do it. None of this hestitation bullshit. None of this walking away from the RNC with my tail between my legs, before I even had a chance to begin being bad ass."

***

"That anger is there and I have to get it out. That's why I keep hitting things. It has to come out somehow. It's like a riot. Smash windows until you're satisfied. You keep going 'til you're done."

He said this and I remembered that when I was there, when I was at the epicenter of riot central, I didn't. I didn't do it. He would. He will. Will I?

(From the RNC)"Why did we fight? I want to feel the height of insurrectionary atmosphere but I don't understand the relevance. When asked, Daisy said, ' I don't feel like rioting is how I want revolution.'"

Now, in this place far from all that a year later I wonder why we fought. It's either rage or death and I need to step it up.

I walked into the bedroom and he was sitting on the floor with my computer and my half-assed speakers. "These don't work!" he said and slammed his hands on the floor. "You can choke me with them." I told him. "Can I?" he seemed brought to peace from the frustration with this new idea. He did and it was great. He squeezed it around my neck in three different ways allowing the pressure to surcome on slightly different elements of the neck's anatomy. It was never that I couldn't breath, just trickling erratic oxygen consumption. I wanted to feel like it would be to really go out. Then he stopped. and kneeled upright at the base of my knees. I got up and tackled him onto the bed. He squirmed. I put all my weight on him, held him down. We rolled off the bed. My guitar was in its case, but still I was worried it could break. "Just don't sit on my guitar" I feel like I let up a little so he could get a good swing in or countermove. He erupted like a cat and scratched my chest. He looked beautiful. I didn't want to be in the line of his feline inspired fury. "Hey, hey, no scratching, that's dirty."

I don't remember exactly what happened. He got up. We were no longer on top of my guitar case with the threat of crushing it. I remember being on top of him, his knees curled in so at any moment a hard kick to my stomach would send me flying. We were slow. we didn't know just what to do. We didn't know what we wanted to do or if we wanted to be in that situation, but we were in that situation and none of us wanted to back down. I reluctantly punched him. I remember calculating whether I should have done it in the eye or the temple. I punched him in the forehead to the right of the temple. It felt like I did nothing. I wished I could have punched harder but I didn't want to hurt him. I threw myself off of him and against the wall in shame. He ran at the closet door, behind where my guitar case lay. He started punching it and doing damage. He looked behind him and grabbed a medeval axe we have lying around. "I don't know if that's such a good idea." I said. I wanted to see him use it. I wanted to have the balls to use it. There were times I spent contemplating just how hard it would be to throw that axe into the wall to break it down, as a battering ram, as a blade. I backed towards the jamb out of the room. There was a chance he could throw it at me. He put it down and ran back to the closet door. punching it 4 or five times. Leaving a gorgeous gaping hole. it's ripped the paper where my fukuoka quote is "the perfect relationship between man and nature is an ideal marriage in which partners together realize a perfect life without asking for, giving or receiving anything of eachother." I wrote that quote down for him. It's how I feel about him, remorsefully. It makes great poetic sense that he punched it in beyond all recognition.

My hand hurts. I wonder how his hand feels. I feel like a pussy for feeling pain. I need to learn how to kill people. I need to learn how to tranquilize and sedate people who are in violent fits. I need to have some of my own.