IWW Olympia Branch
Train Riding Subcommittee
Black Hills Special Reportback 2
Hello, hello, hello fellow worker! Please accept my offering of nothing but the strongest most wholesome solidarity that I can beam to you across time and space. That, AND! If you’ll allow me to fill the firelight of your mind, I have prepared for you PART TWO of the Black Hills Special Reportback. A tale of love, danger, miscommunications, nazis, mountain lions and federal agents. A story brought to you by myself, your faithful Gonzo Wobbly, coming to you late from the woods and cold and wet.
I was looking for the revolution, and then at the end of the last report, I found it. Because revolution is a noun, but perhaps it should be the only noun. Everything called a noun is in reality a verb. Nothing is really static or separate from the action it is performing.
Everything is constantly changing. Everything is in constant revolution. To try to seize this, to become a verb among verbs. It’s tricky. You could become a revolutionary, but then you’re just a noun again. The trick is to make revolution your fucking verb. And then get down to to verbing.
That being said, What if I was sent on this mission by General Strike, a human with the head of a black cat?
It might have gone something like this:
“You’re the only motorcycle-drone recon unit we’ve got, Gonzo. And the work, it agrees with you, does it not?”
“The work, you mean, anti-fascist work, General?”
“Yes, it agrees with you?”
“It agrees with me very much, comrade.”
I show up at the site of the revolution, finally.
Here must be some verbs ready for action. I find Kiki, the woman with the mohawk and face tattoos there. At first she doesn’t recognize me in the dark, then after realizing I'm not a cop, she leads me through dark forest paths and along a cliffside overlooking the creek and then across it to arrive at the kitchen.
The kitchen is a forest punk technological marvel. Stoves, counters, ovens, workspace, shelter, dish station and seating around the fire, all made using sticks and stones. And a big tarp.
“Welcome here!” The people around the fire say “Got any rolling papers?”
I don’t have any papers. I introduce myself to the crew and uncuff the lunchbox full of cash and give it to my contact. This is going to turn the tide. I delivered the payload. Dodged all the jackals and their snares and managed to give these crazy fools what they need to make a difference.
I spend the night listening to stories of alien contact and also the sci fi origin and continuing saga of the Lakota.
That night I sleep in a tipi that has the Hindu deities Shiva and Hanuman painted above the entrance. Indian, get it?
General Strike joins me in my dreams:
“Ah, comrade, we joke yes.”
“Yes sometimes, sir.”
“But it is because we are so serious that we can joke like this.”
“Maybe.”
“Why do you think we can joke like this, comrade?”
“I don’t know.”
“It is because we are so serious.”
The next morning I wake up in the tipi and with music blaring in my ears. Some leftover from a dream I guess, but it gets me moving. Alive in the land of verbs. How can we make this forest-verb, verb its way to our future. One where it’s a forest and not a mine. Or a foresting freely instead of mining slavely
Verbs from across the country are here: hacking anonymously, astral projecting indigenously, researching academically, farming sustainably, building naturally, composting futuristically, mountaineering invisibly, and of course, motorcycling wobbly. Bunch of fucking antifa super soldiers if you ask me.
After a delicious breakfast of pancakes, bacon, eggs, coffee and/or rice and veggies. We go out to scout. Mining claims are everywhere.
Mineral Mountain Resources, a Canadian company, is planning on clearcutting all this gorgeous green kaleidoscope of life in order to dig up gold. Yeah, fucking gold. Change is constant, yeah, everything’s a verb, but does anything ever really change? How long before this story of empire changes to something else? The whole earth is sick of it.
Imagine you’re in the passenger seat of a car, fellow worker. Imagine the driver is a boss and is driving the car towards a cliff. You try to grab the wheel but he is intent on heading over the cliff. He hires a security force to prevent you from grabbing the wheel or altering the course of the vehicle in any way. To make matters worse the driver transforms into Donald Trump and the car expands and the back seat is full of all life on earth. And all future life is in there too! It’s a psychedelic ark, by god.
Well despite the firm ordnance that the only verbing shall be towards the cliff. We are here in the woods, in my mind, to just keep grabbing for the wheel, never fucking stop until we get it.
Here’s where we can build another kitchen. Here’s where we can build a library, a school. Here’s where we can build an outhouse. Why aren’t the woods full of anarchists living outside capitalism in a sustainable way? I ask. Then the feds show up.
Forest Service Law Enforcement. Recruits straight out of the Marines. They wear bulletproof vests, carry pistols and tasers, with the assault rifles stored in the SUVs. They wear gloves too, so you know they mean business. These are straight up steroid-using, skinhead, Trumpfaced, GOONS!
They show up four trucks deep with an ATV escort.
This ain’t no “Howdy campers!” They’re here to shut us down. And while they are informing us that they are being “cordial” and “casual,” and that they aren’t here to debate, one of our Lakota comrades decides this is the time to claim that we are here because of something to do with treaty rights.
Well they give him a ticket for having a campfire without a permit and leave to go raise the alarm.
At this point communication breaks down. We don’t have a meeting about what to do next. Or rather, some people have a meeting about how not everyone is down to have a meeting while the people who aren’t down start packing up camp to go relocate.
Seems like a reoccuring theme in anarchyland and I think it indicates we’re confused about something.
I tried to tell the people who wanted to have a meeting that they should just have it anyway, but there’s like this shit talking virus, where if people start talking shit it just spreads. Bad oral hygiene. What are we verbing about here? Didn’t we have something important needed verbing? Vibrations had turned nasty. There was no communication. We had degenerated to the level of beasts.
I’m not going to lie I think the whole mess started because people got scared. If they scare you, you’re on their verb. They’ve verbed you. You can’t let em scare you, fellow worker. People act stupid when they’re scared. Have you noticed. People act really dumb.
It’s a tricky world, being a verb. It helps to be tricky too. Hell, be full of tricks. People get all tricked up because the world’s too tricky. Don’t get verbed, verb.
I think of revolution as a musical jam. You’re creating the environment together, in the moment, with each other. It can be a good jam or a bad jam depending on affinity. Some people like to improvise, other people like reciting classical music. Some people learn by ear, other people need everything written on a page in front of them.
I like music, and would rather spend my time doing that than having to prevent the world from being destroyed. I mean, sometimes it’s fun, like when you get to do it on a motorcycle. I’m sick of this debate does anyone want a ride into town? Kiki? I was hoping she’d say yes.
So we ride down the gravel highway to Hill City, burning dead dinosaurs and looking apocalyptic as fuck. When we get to old Hill City, we are once again the anomaly in that tourist town of puttering geriatric motorcyclists who stare into the everything like impotent photonic vampires. Oh yes they try, fellow worker, they try suck the essence out of life and into their eyes, but, husks that they are, they never get past the surface of things.
I realize the IWW convention is coming up and I should contact some of YOU, fellow workers. So we get to a place that has Wifi and it turns out to be an “America’s Fudge Tour Must See!” Mickey Mouse operation. Like if you’re ever touring America to eat fucking fudge. Jesus Christ.
So we get coffee and sit in there looking like if pigpen from peanuts was split into two independent dust balls, who then dropped acid and got radicalized.
“So getting to use the internet is great and all.” Kiki remarks
“Yeah.” I say as I write an email (to y’all).
“But if you’d rather, we could go and fuck around somewhere.”
“Huh what’s that?”
“You know, find somewhere out of the way and...”
“Kiss?”
“Uh yeah kiss.”
I look across the table at this fang toothed fairy.
“Hmm yeah ok that sounds good.”
“Really?”
“Yeah ok, but living the way I do, I can’t, you know, only kiss one person.”
“Yeah, well living the way I do, I can’t only kiss one person.”
“Ah very good.”
Behind a little fence off mainstreet in a grassy cut, we drank coffee and I kissed one person. Cuddlepunk. Runaway from Texas, through alcoholism and sex work, to off-the-grid communities, to revolution. What a story Kiki. It’s an honor to be a part of it. Let’s get back to camp to your tent. Sometimes revolution verbs as fine as music.