South on the Mexican Border

Living here on the New Mexico/Mexico border again in my little casita on the desert with only solar for power and coyotes for company. The area has become a heavily militarized area, complete with tanks, soldiers, Minutemen, Border Patrol, State Police, undercover narcs with strange license plates on unmarked cars--a war zone against illegal human and drug smuggling.
I, like most village of Columbus residents, live my creative life while trying to keep the over zealous law enforcement officials off my personal radar. The summer of intense heat and "mustard bugs" has ended and now the veggies are springing back to life. Latent parsley has turned verdantly greeen; cilantro is thriving; grape tomatoes, staked next to a trellis by the honeysuckle, are scarlet marbles ready for plucking and halving for pico de gallo.
My gypsy life is lived in this rustic retreat in an intentional community, City of the Sun, founded over 70 years ago by visionaries--some looking for flying saucers and others taking guidance from channelers.
Now I am a freelance writer and photographer for the Deming Headlight and teach English as a Second Language two evenings a week for Western New Mexico University.
Life is good

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FEAST OR FAMINE

Three squares a day is not an option for many vagabonds

(unless they're in jail),

so food is where you find it, as I was to learn several years ago when I hung with a homeless woman who lived in her little red Toyota pickup.

For a while we were a part of the vehicularly housed community in

San Francisco.

Under the reign of then-Mayor Willie Brown, promises were made to community activists to set aside a portion of land

for a permanent camp site for people living in their vehicles.

Of course, like other promises, it just never, ever happened.

Meanwhile, I learned how to make Street Soup from Jo-jo.

Together, on Saturday evenings when the Alemany produce market had closed and vendors vacated their fruit and vegetable stalls, we would scour the parking lot for bits of vegetables left behind on the pavement. She would always shove a discarded plastic bag in my hand and say, "If you want dinner tonight, you'd better get busy and start pickin." So into my bag would go whatever I could find: a couple of mushy tomatoes,a handful of long green beans, onions that had fallen off a truck, some tiny red hot chile peppers, a few new red potatoes, a wilted bunch of parsley, more tomatoes, an ear of corn-on-the-cob, and sometimes withered turnips.

While I was still working the parking lot, Jo-jo would open the tail gate of her pickup and get out a big pot, a gallon jug of water, and a long cylinder propane stove with a single ring burner. After she had fired up the stove and put some water in the pot and balanced it on the burner, we would use the remainder of the water to wash the veggies, cutting off rotten spots, discarding bruises, and then toss them all into the pot to boil for a while. Meantime, Jo-jo would take out her bottle of whiskey (she always had one stashed away being her front seat) and pour us each a two-finger drink in paper cups while we hunkered down on folding stools next to the stove for warmth and the soup bubbled on...

After about an hour, time we were usually on our second (or third) drink, she would announced dinner was ready. By then the vegetables had cooked down into a thick and chunky broth but Jo-jo usually forgot to add salt, so she would rummage around in the back of her truck, unearth an old salt shaker, two spoons, a couple of dingy coffee mugs to use as soup bowls and the perpetual box of stale saltine crackers.

Evenings would turn damp and dark but we were always warmed by the rich broth and the whiskey and each other's company. Over the years I've lost track of Jo-jo and often wondered what happened her but I have never forgotten those simple and nourishing meals.

WELCOME to my world

Welcome to my world of vagabonds

gypsies, hippies, wanders, foot-loose freaks, nomads, couch-crashers, off-beat poets, writers & artists, musicians..

all who live
existing on the fringe of madness...

with a touch of beauty & resourcefulness
in their souls

This is my first journal entry

Despite recent heightened security alerts, the vagabond life continues along in its loopy, zany, rag-tag way..today's dumpster diving has only yielded a stately old steamer trunk & street snags have become rarer than mosquitoes breeding in Golden Gate Park where I am camped. It's a vulture economy living here on the streets even though I'm sheltered in my van (which must be moved at least ONE BLOCK every 72 hours under dire cop threats of ticketing or towing).

Is it the good life you might ask? Well, for me there's NO rent to pay & San Francisco is an August dreamy City, enveloped by misty fog, drippy, slurpy, downright liquid but not warm enough to spawn mold & mildew. By 7 a.m. Kozo & his buddies have parked their shopping carts at the coffee shop off Fulton Ave. "Want to listen to some music I wrote last night?" he asks me. "I played it in one of those concrete tunnels in the park & if only I had some way to record it...well, it just vibrated off those walls & it was so beautiful." Kozo has a twelve-string guitar strapped to the top of his cart, precariously perched on top of a tarp with sleeping bag, plastic bags filled with clothes, food & assorted items shoved down inside while more plastic bags filled with crushed aluminum cans are tied to the cart's sides, ready to be turned into the recycling center for spare change.

I don't ask details of their lives. It's not polite & people are suspicious of other people now days. I mean, isn't the whole country suspicious of everybody now? You never know if your acquaintance (and God forbid he/she should have black hair & dark skin) is a potential terrorist. Just give Ashcroft or the inept FBI a call if you think so, right? But many vagabonds & homeless (some of whom are veterans) live under park bushes, setting up camps outta sight, under cardboard, along secret trails through the dense undergrowth...outta sight, outta mind. They are the "lost generations" of today, many with drug & alcohol problems...invisible bodies, a blight that could potentially scare away tourists with fist-fulls of money to spend...necessary money, we're told, for enriching the City's coffers.

Tourism must be EVERYTHING, I guess...but I'm just a tourist here too, a wanderer seeing the flip side. And there is a raw beauty in being a midnight musician.