Homer's Feather

In the 2012 “House” exhibition in Ephemerata Gardens, the Santa mug, a Kinkaid nightlight, and other tchotchkes were props in our dwellings’ happy cocooning into private, cozy dreams. Others explored the pressing risk of collective vulnerability from elemental forces that could wipe our cities off the earth’s surface. I built a window display case from the neighbor’s remodeling debris and parts of an abandoned bed frame found down the road. Inside a white feather floated above a Hummel figurine modified by artist Michelle Foster with little bindles to look like depression-era hobo children. In 1988, activists with the Street People’s Advisory Council (SPAC) bought a goose from Callahan’s and threatened to kill and grill him unless Austin city officials would meet to address helping the homeless. Although it outraged animal rights activists, the publicity stunt resulted in some office space and funding for homeless advocacy groups. For several months Homer camped on a SPAC raft, the SS Homer, in Town Lake with two homeless men. After fainting at a summer political rally, Homer moved in with activist Lori Cervenak-Renteria where he lived for 18 years before retiring at Austin Zoo. His theme song goes:

Oh, give me a home

So I don't have to roam

Through the alleys and dumpsters today.

Where seldom is heard an encouraging word.

They just wish we'd all go away.

I can't pay the rent

So I live in a tent

Beneath the Montopolis Bridge.

I just need a home,

With a bed and a phone,

A stove and a toilet and fridge.*

The Austin Zoo and Animal Sanctuary got its start in 1990 as the Good Day Ranch, Cindy and Jim Carroccio’s private petting zoo of goats and other livestock. The local paper’s 2002 Day Trips column described “the zoo [as] a natural progression for Cindy's love of animals. When she lived in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Austin her back yard was full of strays and homeless critters.”** Good Day Ranch’s population grew by accepting rescue animals seized from abusive situations, like the crowd-drawing leopards in Reverend Lavender’s traveling revival tent that PETA helped save through the courts. In 2000 the business gained nonprofit status to protect its animals in the long term and have more access to grant money. By 2005 the Carroccios were getting divorced and the zoo’s financial situation was an unorganized mess. The nonprofit board discovered boxes of uncashed checks and $700 cash, bags stuffed with receipts and vet and bank records in the barn.*** By 2008 the nonprofit board had taken over, firing Jim as executive director and replacing him with Patti Clark. In 2009 the nonprofit bought the 54-acre tract of land from Cindy for about 400K. There is a mini-train you can take on a loop through the Hill Country past gazelles and llamas.

Lacking the slick Disneyland aesthetic of places like the San Diego Zoo—intense theming or “landscape immersion,” concrete rockscape waterfalls, and an exorbitant entry price—Austin Zoo strikes some visitors as a rinky-dink knock-off of the real thing. They ask just $8 to get in. It retains the feel of a DIY menagerie, partly improvised out of everyday objects donated by local businesses and families. You can sense the collective effort that composes the sanctuary. The zoo has a strong volunteer base, and you can help with daily chores around the facility, even work directly with some of the animals. They have a sponsor an animal program (“$150 feeds Austin Zoo’s monkeys for one week”) and accept meat to feed the large cats (no pork or horse), hay, fruit, veggies, nuts, and so on. Their Amazon.com gift register features an array of specialty products like a $400 lion bungee toy and chandeliers for parrot play, as well as commodities put to unintended uses: buck and raccoon urine to spray around for tigers to investigate, rattling baby balls for the coatis and kinkajoos. The new Primate Palace is a converted pony barn. The zoo’s homemade habitats include repurposed postconsumer products, like 55-gallon drums the tigers toss around, a castle of milk crates wired together for the goats.

Sometimes salvage animals arrive at the zoo needing intensive veterinary care and rehabilitation. Some of the large cats are retired circus performers or private pets that otherwise could have ended up at “canned hunting” ranches where people pay to kill. A lion from a junk man’s menagerie was so malnourished it had broken an ankle from its own weight. Former lab-testing primates are missing digits or tail tips crushed by cage doors. The Zoo gets 50 requests a month to take in new animals, but they generally accept a dozen a year to stick within their space and funding limits. They say it’s hard to turn animals down.

In 2010 Austin Zoo took in two lions from a private owner that were suspected to be Barbary lions. Their extinction in North Africa is knotted up in Roman, British, and French imperial cruelty. Moroccan royalty who saved captive lions in private menageries preserved a few dozen specimens. This led to Austin Zoo’s first involvement with a breeding program: the Barbary Lion Project, a collaboration between the Rabat Zoo in Morocco and a professor at the University of Oxford funded by the UK-based Wildlink International. The Project’s goal is to selectively breed lions with mitochondrial DNA from the Barbary sub-species gleaned from a museum specimen's bones. By salvaging and amplifying shreds of gene sequences in captive lions breeders hope to reconstruct purebred Barbary Lions to be released on a preserve in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains and reverse extinction. The species is doubly homeless, lacking bodies and a safe habitat. Austin Zoo provided DNA screening to assess if their lions were indeed Barbary lions (measured as a percent of the animal’s genome). They bred two baby lions that drew record crowds on Spring Break. The growing cubs found a new home at the Texas Zoo in Victoria. But Wildlink International mysteriously vanished as an institution, leaving the breeding project in unfunded limbo.*** (Did they ever find out about the DNA?)

What happens when we try to cheat extinction and reverse calousness by salvaging animal lives? In The Chances of the World Changing (2006), a moody documentary directed by Eric Daniel Metzger for PBS, we watch Richard Ogust’s life spin out of control as he encumbers himself with caring for his family of 1200 rare and endangered turtles in their improvised habitats of tanks and tubs. First they take over his loft, then rented warehouses. His “assurance colony” (to preserve species diversity) grows by accepting turtles seized by customs agents and by relieving other turtle conservationists of their burdens. The film meditatively lingers on the turtles’ expressive and colorful faces and shells, their slow floating and leisurely eating. For Ogust, the turtles become at once an ecstasy and a woeful impossibility, their very conditions for preservation leading to insurmountable technical and legal troubles as his collection becomes too big to handle. He hatches the plan to overcome these problems and limitations of the individual by founding an institute.

I in some way wanted to prove to people who were close to me that my having them had some value to it, and it wasn’t all based upon (sigh)…you know, emotional weakness and collection mania and stuff, but that it would somehow be… the whole project would be converted into something of real value.

Another turtle collector shares Ogust’s dream of a collective atmosphere for turtle conservation: “It would be nice to have one giant institute that could take care of everything. It’s called the world, and it’s not working. You can’t build a big enough greenhouse to house everything the way it should be, so maybe keeping fewer things in better condition, more space in smaller areas…” In this daydream the atmospheric institute of the world is broken, and atmospheres maintained by individuals and institutions alike are in constant danger of overburdening their carrying capacity. A third collector commiserates that to ensure the health and manageability of their turtle atmosphere, “we’d have to pass animals by, and that’s the hardest part, is learning to put your hands over your eyes and say, ‘I can’t take these animals even though they need me.’”

In Ogust's world, evolutionary fitness has been replaced by a measure of happiness. Since long-term species survival is out of any individual's hands, Ogust tinkers with making the turtles look "happy" in their homes, an end result determined by meeting their health, food, and social needs. He delivers some of his ward to another collector's outdoor turtle pond where he thinks they look really happy as they slip into the murky water. But his dream of founding an institution recedes as the Environmental Protection Agency seizes one of his turtle shipments. The film obscures exactly how Ogust was able to fund his turtle world, but in the end lack of money impedes his institution.

Institutions in the City of Living Garbage emerge through unplanned, slow aggregation by giving home to undervalued beings. Projects and missions are tacked onto old forms as they are given new capacities and become parts of new processes. Institutionalization of DIYsneylands involves a changing of the characters in the landscape and the professionalization of roles that regenerate landscape patches (as we see with Austin Zoo, as well as Magic Gardens, the Healing Machine, the Bottle Village, and many other landmarks in the City of Living Garbage), but also a constant making do with inherited forms that have taken on lives of their own. While institutions firm up to preserve and save idiosyncratic, vulnerable beings, they are themselves vulnerable. Hoping to save trashed things that have no clear value, they risk underfunding and not being able to pay the rent. They turn instead to an economy of happiness, building just the bare forms of home as refrains in this homeless ecology.

2012

*Austin Avian Rescue and Rehabilitation, “The Story of Homer the Homeless Goose,” http://www.austinavianrr.org/homerpage.htm.
** Chronicle Gerald E. McLeod, March 29, 2002, Day Trips, http://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/2002-03-29/85377/
***(http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/new-day-for-the-austin-zoo-1/nRWPS/ Andrea Ball, “New day for the Austin Zoo: Animal sanctuary overcoming problems, board says” Jan 6, 2011)
****Being Lion, http://beinglion.com/barbary-lions.php. The author is “a Barbary lion that grew up human,” longing to have its body back. She is an animal-person, feeling transspecies as some people feel transgender. “Even though I take many shapes that seem solid, seem to be built of fur and muscle and bone and claw, when you zoom in to see the essence, it is always Water flowing” (http://beinglion.com/being-water.php).

Happiness

Happiness bubbles up in Ephemerata Gardens in fleeting things that happen.

The season's first tomato or strawberry drop of blood on the vine. Gathering food grown here, cooking and eating and sharing it, sometimes doing the dishes humming an uncomposed song. Prickly pear cacti bloom yellow bursts echoed by the sunflower patch. 

Chickens catch a purple plastic snake and chase each other around. Monk squawks fly over, the birds rarely landing on the alley power lines. Gangly juvenile Yellow-Crowned Night Heron come down to the baby pool of water. Also, cardinals, blue jays, and butterflies eat the figs. Dragonflies and toads in the greywater pond.

Sunsets hit the top of the pecan in a golden glow while the rest of the yard's already shadowed. Sitting in the shade.

Happiness is not an object or pursuit here but a relational event of light, color, sounds, foods, life forms pulsing in the landscape--qualia of life held together in a harmonious sensory expression. A collective curling up of a smile or jiggling of laughter. Also, happiness is shot through with an all consuming love between lives, a kind of clinging that veers into sadness and loss. It is a way of being for the world that plays on becoming part of a living machine, where you are not liberated but attached and made responsible, eaten alive. Happiness becomes a collaborative sculpture planed down by multiple artists with different aesthetic visions.

There are surprises like fat green caterpillars eating the sprawling tomato vines that I should kill, but don't. Vince's neighbor next to the Cathedral of Junk kills butterflies since he doesn't want caterpillars eating up his yard. Longlasting bumpy brown clusters of fungi on the composting diapers. Snow on the bottle wall raised beds. Happiness is not a state of being but little melting crystals, totally uncontrollable. I can't say if the other entities involved are happy about being in Ephemerata Gardens, or even other people who visit. The elderly woman with her granddaughter aprovingly called it a "bushy garden" with everything overgrown. She held my arm as we maneuvered the perilous gravel walkway. Her light touch also made me happy, and her exclamations: "Oh! A cactus flower!"

Tinkering and wasting time here makes me happy, finding a use for salvaged things nobody else wanted. Telling jokes and stories to visitors, performing for and teaching them. I'm happy when visitors leave a cash donation, like a tithe. Last weekend we earned about a hundred bucks from twenty visitors to our micro-tourist roadside attraction (realizing Disneyland expects this from each visitor). We "sold 'em a look" of the "House" exhibition.* Money is a clotted form of sharing gifts with each other. More to the point, making something out of nothing makes me happy. 

Happiness over nothing, just a nice breeze or watching my son dance to the alley neighbor's Mariachi music. He claps when the song is over. "Yaaaay!" Happiness happens when things like minds, bodies, objects, and events all line up in a brief refrain that suddenly glows while its fading.** This coinciding is hemmed in and even intensified by blanketing unhappiness, suffering and hardship, lurking malevolant forces, or the tenderness of knowing mortality. So happiness is not necessarily about innocence, purity, or naivety. 

There is even melancholy happiness, like poppies on the pet graves every spring. Cold winter moonlight.

In Bhutan, happiness is a metric opposed to the bland measure of Gross National Product. Bhutan surveys citizen happiness by sex, age, region, occupation, education, and other factors to quantify Gross National Happiness. The Center for Bhutan Studies developed the sociological survey tool to measure habitual subjective states as a national development aid. Money ("sustainable economic growth") is just one of four elements that are supposed to guide national development (alongside cultural values, the environment, and good governance). International conferences help to transmit the concept of this alternative development mode and measure of national growth. Over half of the people in Bhutan are farmers, and in 2010, their mean happiness--5.8 on a 10 point scale--was just slightly above the least happy people in Bhutan employed by the National Work Force, while Civil Servants were the happiest.*** Women experienced anger more than men, and in general were less happy.

Ephemerata Gardens and Bhutan are trying to engineer affective atmospheres where happy patterns can happen. We're serious about happiness. Characters in these landscapes are potential parts of circuits of happiness. Feelings are quantified or listed as artifacts, becoming self-reflexive to enhance or preserve harmonious relational patterns between selves/societies/ecosystems. Like in Disneyland, there is almost a coercive element here: you should feel happy, you will feel happy in this magic kingdom. 

2012

*In the 1950's, Ray Bivens of the Black Hills Animal Farm roadside attraction taught Tinkertown's Ross Ward to "sell 'em a look!" "They'll pay everyday to see the same old bear and you won't need to buy a new bear every day either." Ross J. Ward, "I did all this while you were watching TV," published by the Tinkertown Museum, p. 2.
**Sara Ahmed, "Happy Objects," in The Affect Theory Reader, 29-51, ed. by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, Durham: Duke University Press (2010), pp. 36-7.
***2010 survey http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/docs/2010_Results/PDF/National.pdf, p.19, women's anger p.65.

Biomortar

Ephemerata Garden’s back wall mosaic grotto is starting to crumble, and I can’t find any mortar. We used up the last of the half-ton I bought three years ago from a bankrupt construction company to repair the Garbage Gyre mosaic and patch up the greenhouse bottle wall. Sinking foundation on the grotto’s left side is causing the façade to crack, and a Chinaberry seedling that got in the crack on the alley side of the wall is speeding the process.

Given cement scarcity since last year, I’ve been making do by bolting parts of the façade to the substrate. Limestone and clay mining operations are at a slow dig with their limited solar energy rations, and the coal kilns used in the calcination process work within strict carbon emission regulations. All available cement is first allocated to government agencies for infrastructure repair, and to public sector institutions like hospitals and schools.

In Philadelphia, the Magic Gardens’ caretakers are experimenting with bacterial biocement using castoff concrete chunks pulverized with sledgehammers. Following Ginger Dosier’s method,* they mix the powder with Bacillus pasteurii and urine to make a very slow setting mortar suitable for repair work. The nonprofit Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, instituted in 2002 in response to the art environment’s threatened demolition, preserves Isaiah Zagar’s mural works around South Street and organizes events focused on folk and self-taught art.

I was encroaching on somebody else’s land and we had to buy it. The owner came back and wanted to sell it. He didn’t care about the land, just about the money, so we paid him three hundred thousand – where you gonna get that kind of money? So Lawyers for the Arts made me into a nonprofit organization and raised the money. It became a wonderful thing for me. It scares the shit outta me too, now I got some kind of responsibility. We’ve been very lucky about code. [When Zagar started Magic Gardens] the area was a derelict area so there wasn’t a big problem. But now, nobody could do anything now. It would be impossible to do now. He bought it for 70K and sold for 300K in ten years – maybe because of art. Maybe art has that power.

When I first talked with Zagar by phone a dozen years ago, he was busy repairing one of his mosaics with a volunteer. He had become an ant at the center of the hectic nonprofit nest.

Everything is vulnerable to the weather. Any kind of thing like this has got to be eventually taken over by an entity to preserve it. To actually pay people to preserve it. Preservation is the key – but you can’t always do this. Vandalism is a big thing. People will feel that what you’re doing is ungodly. “Squash it, kill it, kill it!” But I’ve certainly been very lucky… In the nonprofit there are administrators, I have an executive director, someone for education, for outreach, a daily manager, garden guides, people who tell my story to 35-40 people on a tour. It’s very mysterious to an artist who is still living. 

Art is a collaborative social-economic venture that can inflate an excess nonprofit value within a rarified atmosphere assembled by aesthetic practices themselves. Aesthetics and cement can hold together bits of broken ceramics, cast-off glass bottles, bent bike wheels, sensations of unity, and derelict urban areas, but these borderless compositions are materially fragile and in a sense require undervalue or abandonment to firm up. Some other form of wealth rises up out of conditions of poverty or making do. Preserving fragile art environments often depends on unpaid volunteer labor at the same time it makes jobs for a few administrators and skilled restoration workers. But when cement prices inflate, mosaics struggle to take shape or stay in good shape. Philadelphia's seasonal heating and freezing has its toll on the Magic Gardens' mortar. And there are vandals who kill someone else's sense of beauty for cruel fun or righteousness.

This mortality makes evident that mosaics, junkitecture, and other urban forms in the City of Living Garbage only survive through aesthetic behavior or the relationship of care and repair between artistic characters and landscape patches. Agencies and institutions are epiphenomena that mysteriously redistribute the behaviors, supplies and moneys, and affective attachments required for preservation; their support and continuity is itself vulnerable. When the 1994 Northridge earthquake severely damaged Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village in Simi Valley, California, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) pledged close to a half million dollars in restoration funds (while the Watts Towers, another self-taught architectural art environment on the National Historic Register with the Bottle Village, received nine hundred thousand). FEMA responded to controversies surrounding the worth of the Bottle Village, including a petition to block the funds introduced by City Councilwoman Sandi Webb, by rescinding the restoration money, claiming that it was inappropriate as the Bottle Village had not been regularly open to the public for years.** Webb was joined by Representative Elton Gallegly in the call to bulldoze the Bottle Village, “an eyesore 25 or 30 years ago that has gone downhill dramatically ever since … How in the world can we spend half a million dollars on something no one wants” when so many real world problems need money thrown their way?***

Grandma Prisbrey wanted and needed her luminous Bottle Village where she lived with her collection of 17,000 pencils. Volunteers with the nonprofit Preserve Bottle Village continue to give occasional tours, organize events like weeding parties, and rally small injections of money from individuals and private foundations. Their mode of survival is more about preserving Bottle Village by asking people to help physically create it, more than by donating cash. In 2010, Disneyland offered support by including the Bottle Village in its “Give-a-Day, Get-a-Day” program whereby volunteers earned a free day at the theme park by donating a day of work to a nonprofit, including Prisbrey’s DIYsneyland. A group from the Anthropologie store took a tour as part of its “Inspiration Day” for drumming up design ideas. By 2016, the Bottle Village had still not received enough funding for a major restoration, and Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens stepped in to help with preservation efforts—sixty years after Grandma Prisbrey started building. By 2020 masons and mosaicists had repaired the remaining 14 structures, just in time for the 8.2 magnitude earthquake that hit, like the weaker 6.7 magnitude quake in 1994, only eight miles form Bottle Village. Rebuilding is still underway, but five of the buildings are large piles of glass shards and masonry that the engineering assessment deemed “beyond repair.”

To Isaiah Zagar, the five destroyed structures are mosaic shards for a new composition. His team plans to pulverize Prisbrey’s old hand-mixed mortar to use as the grit for biobricks. The broken glass from bottles dating back to the 50s and 60s**** will be used to mosaic the bricks’ outer sides, and a new building will be constructed out of the resulting modules. They are learning to cultivate their own B. pasteurii colonies to make the restoration project more independent of money; the other main ingredients are our everyday urine stream and worthless cement chunks like highways after earthquakes. Zagar talks about how things like mosaics, mushrooms, and  B. pasteurii spread as spores with roots in particular cultural landscapes, something that's "in the air, they spread in the air ... For the mural projects in Mexico, the roots are all in the Renaissance. Diego Rivera – he loved to see the murals and mosaics in the churches. He dug it. ‘I can do this thing, I can do it. I can give it a twist,’ and then others followed him." The roots of preservation and reconstruction are more ecological, with the model of a landscape that never stops making itself out of its own life forms. The roots are also biotechnical, and artists and self-taught biologists are saying "I can do this thing" and giving their own twist on scientific bioengineering.

If you have any B. pasteurii or know how to culture them, please get in touch so we can repair Ephemerata Garden’s back grotto. The Cathedra of Junk could also put the biocement technique to work in its constantly growing amoeba of mortar, bottles, and junk.

2024

*Mike Larson, "Professor Uses Bacteria to Make Eco-friendly Bricks,"  Engineering News-Record online, July 7, 2010, http://enr.construction.com/products/materials/2010/0707-EcoFriendlyBricks.asp 

**FEMA eventually dedicates close to 20K for an architectural engineering assessment for rebuilding and preservation. 

 *** Quoted in Patricia Leigh Brown, “Reading the Message in the Bottles, New York Times, February 6, 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/06/garden/reading-the-message-in-the-bottles.html
****See wonderful letter to Grandma about bottles at http://www.myspace.com/bottlevillage/blog: "Nowadays, most of the bottles are plastic and they are EVERYWHERE! ... We have these big gray 'Recycle Cans' and I know you'd get arrested for messing around with those cans... Well Grandma, all that stuff and all those bottles you got from the dump; it's hard to find today, except maybe on eBay."

Ephemerons

After the Crash we started renting out the little house in Ephemerata Gardens as a bedroom. Our roommate--a School of Business grad student working on alternative and private currencies--chipped in to leak-proof the roof and get the house rewired with help from an electrician and carpenter through the Austin Time Exchange Network (ATEN). No gas or running water, so we share the kitchen and bathroom in the house propper. Three neighbors on our block have similar relationships with informal renters, including a simple pitched tent. At first Susan jokes it feels like permanent camping. Within a month we'd all adapted. In the winter she sleeps with a few of the stray cats as auxilary heaters. In the summer we all lounge in the Cool Room, the only one with A/C, to keep the power bill down.

We had been using the little house for Museum of Ephemerata exhibitions since the "House" show in 2012. Next came "Plantae Kingdom," then "Islands" and "Screens," and finally, "Money!" which is how we met Susan. She laughed off our "Ephemerons," a fanciful local currency that doubled as our guidebook (printed in 3 point font legible with a magnifying glass). Boutique bills--of course they never caught on like Ithaca Hours or Linden Dollars. They are a survival circus currency for moments of crisis when time is not money, but life itself. You could only buy Ephemerons with Austin Hours.

The Crash of '17 stimulated hundreds of cities to try similar micro-currency schemes. Countless books published before and after the fact explained in gory macroeconomic detail the convergence of three factors that led us into depression and the reemergence of "script" economies. First, Bank of America finally went under, dragged down by its response to the mortgage crisis a decade earlier, and the Feds couldn't bail them out. Then oil prices spiked insanely overnight, affecting everything from food to gas prices (they had to tack up cardboard 1's to advertise double digit prices at the pump). And the hurricane that ploughed across the east coast topped it all off. China's huge relief package in strong Yen, alongside people's informal economic responses across the US, saved perhaps millions of lives and pulled dozens of cities out of bankruptcy.

Against expecation, no zombie hordes emerged to riotously burn and loot. Various Occupy organizations, meshed with community gardens and food security banks, had laid down DIY disaster response to provision cities to some degree during the worst weeks of food scarcity. Power and water shortages were scarier. FEMA functioned as more of a hub to coordinate hundreds of little organizations. Homeless youth became key organizers in triage response, working through the night with volunteer architects and doctors, tirelessly biking loads across town. For a whole year, it seemed like nobody had a paying job, but everyone was swamped with all kinds of volunteer work: community gardening, constructing and fixing houses with carefully salvaged materials from demolition, teaching and learning.

"The homeless" became a fuzzy category. Motorhomes were everywhere, the far side of Wal Mart parking lots like neighborhoods on wheels. The trucker Rusty Davis became famous overnight for his biodiesel rig with a built-in bedroom at the back, moving free food and medical supplies up the coast even before the waves stopped crashing. Austin and other cities turned a blind eye to the squatter zones of tents and less temporary junkitecture that cropped up in brownfields and along the tracks. While these had started forming well before the Crash, they swelled and aglomerated afterwards, not without bad stories of violence from within or poor-bashers that terrorized the camps at night. Police usually sided with the camps, or ignored these incidents. Again, youth self-organized as gaurdians and dispute arbitrators while also taking on the role of ambassadors to the code inspectors and reporters who came nosing around.*

Sometimes they meet in Ephemerata Gardens. Susan has been inviting teens from Austin "Freetown" to get them in the Austin Hours/ATEN loop. They can use skills like electronics repair or sheer labor power to earn different kinds of money to purchase camp supplies. Her idea is to push a local/macro currency mix through city services, especially Waste Management. This takes some of the pecuniary pressure off the strapped city budget while giving unskilled workers access to a little macro-money to buy things like sewing machine needles or new rechargable batteries that aren't for sale in the local currency market. 

We harvest most of the salad lettuce and stir fry snow peas and brocolli leaves and crowns for a meeting. Pass around the dry figs. Someone brings strong homebrew cider made from dumpster dived bad apples. Free food is everywhere these days, as if it alone was out of the austerity loop. 

2019

*See Linda Stewart's Fast Crash: Youth, post-monetary services, and urban unplanning (Duke University Press: Durham, 2019).