I went back to California instead of Mexico this winter. It was so good to be with family. I took a bunch of footage with Agnes. Goldsmiths loaned me a Black Magic and we woke up before the sun came out and took the vespa to the bluffs to film. Fidel ran beside us.
Outside the peoples store, in the plaza, it’s the way Jesse says you can’t own the land. Chloe, who just finished making and cleaning up after the free food programs evening meal, calls out I love you dad. Oscar is inside with Diana and Anwen. Diana says I miss when you would play music when we were closing. Every night was a dance party. Oscar and I have been sharing music over text. When I first moved to town and Anwen was a young girl, she came up to me during a gathering in the park downtown and invited me to see the nudibranchs, leading me to the mouth of the lagoon where small translucent creatures with bright streaks of neon running through them collected in the shallow pools. I was so honored she had invited me. Like how I’m so honored Oscar cares about my taste in music. I had just seen Ilka in the library and we ordered a few more copies of a book we made of her photographs. I think a healthy food coop, a plaza and a library is the bare minimum for a decent life. The food coop is a model for work that feels much better than then the other ones that are popular today. The shifts are 5 hours and most people work 2 or 3 a week. There’s no boss and the elders guide the younger, with openness, patience and good humor. It has its own ways and aesthetics born of the diverse personalities within. I might describe it as an aesthetics of compromise. Every holiday season Peter decorates it with objects, mostly from the freebox in the plaza outside. The other collective members make small adjustments, often to comedic effect. This year someone changed the dogmen of the apocalypse to the dogma of calypso.