Through my interest in and use of the social micropayment service Flattr I came across Aelius Blythe (Website: cheapassfiction.com; Twitter: @CheapassFiction) who also writes free fiction you can Flattr some cash toward. She curates a list of fiction writers who use Flattr, too. After a guilty two months or three of just reading her blog & Twitter feed, I finally downloaded her short story collection Stories About Things. I’ve been reluctant to read fiction on a screen, but given her (and my) supportfor piracy, it seemed the proper way to read hers. I was also reluctant to read her fiction because even if writers are cool people, their fiction usually sucks — and then I’m all disappointed.
But I’m really glad to have read Stories About Things. That’s my standard: “Was reading this a worthwhile expenditure of my time?” And it was. (Who needs fancier criteria?) Aelius seems really at ease writing fiction, happy doing it and if you don’t like it you can go read something else.
I don’t like AmyHempel. Hempel writes these “miniaturist” stories where nothing happens and you’re supposed to feel awakened by the beautiful comma placement (and other sentence-level things). One of her fans, a friend of mine, wrote in the course of praising Hempel that “style becomes the writer’s morality.” Really? Your ethical theory is predicated on the placement of commas? The fan meant something more like voice or authenticity. All the same I like Aelius’s perspective better:
If [WebFiction] gets in the way of enjoyment, put the book down and go enjoy something else.
But before you judge to harshly, remember one thing: You are reading the literary version of graffiti art You may not want to stand in line for $20 tickets to a gallery opening for it. But somewhere in the scrawled mess of spray paint there may be a picture that sticks with you. And it gives you something better than a brick wall to stare at while you’re waiting for the gallery to open.
Stories About Things put Hempel in mind because Aelius’s stories are similarly short. Except I enjoy Stories About Things. And in the same way I enjoy The Police. Really talented and thankfully more interested in being enjoyable and rewarding than in being aesthetically elite. Here’s a good excerpt from Aelius’s collection:
Sal’s grandmother always warned him like this when she caught him looking. His mother said this was silly, and he was old enough not to be scared by fairy stories. If he looked into the sun, she told him, he would go blind, and that was that.
He never understood how someone could say that — “Don’t look at it.” People looked. If they could, they did. Sometimes, Sal thought, if he wasn’t paying attention he could turn off his hearing so when the lawnmower was going while he was reading he wouldn’t even notice. He could turn off his nose too by breathing through his mouth. Touch was a sense that everyone ignored unless it was too bad or too good. Taste was the same. But he could only turn off his sight by closing his eyes, and he couldn’t go around like that. He had to look. He didn’t know how not to. If he could see something, he would.
Another:
The flower has brown eyes, a bright brown, almost-red. They smile. They don’t shine in the sun. They shine at the sun.
In describing webfiction, (something distinct from fanfiction), Aelius lists a bunch of fiction “errors” — starting a story with weather descriptions, or the white rooms the characters are in, or making tpyos, etc. — and considers them all good, because who’s counting?
Part of the reason why I turned to web fiction was because of a sort of disillusionment with regular fiction in which I find many distractions (repetitive plot patterns, dull characters, predictable everything) that just happen to be dressed up better. I wondered for several years why I couldn’t find books that I liked, even though I read so many. But then when I started writing seriously myself and studying writing, I realized that there are certain styles that are institutionalized in writing — it’s how people are taught and styles change slowly so you get so much of the same thing. I think that’s why I can ignore the flaws in web fiction. Because I needed something DIFFERENT, and web fiction is different.
Charles Darwin’s quote (also paraphrased by Bradley Manning) describes webfiction well: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
As for setting some stories on the Internet, Aelius writes that her collection Brave New World (which I haven’t read yet) is
a collection of stories about the natural world. Not the natural world that Whitman or Thoreau wrote about, but the world that comes just as naturally to my generation as sky and woods did to theirs. Our world is made of more than that. It’s made of computer screens and wifi and endless libraries of information all at the tip of our fingers. This is our Nature, or part of it anyway.
I think she has more courage to do what comes naturally to her than I do. Following her on Twitter, where she often remarks about her fiction-writing, inspires me to write more.
(Perhaps I should cut myself more slack. My life right now primarily consists of divorcing, moving in to a new place, a knee injury, and figuring out my budget + wacky streams of income. But I haven’t ever particularly believed in cutting myself slack.)
One of the really interesting things Aelius is doing is writing authors letters to ask if they know about, if they approve of, their publishers suing their fans over piracy. (I like this exchange she got into.)
So webfiction is the opposite of National Endowment for the Arts writers who want to write comma-perfect books at taxpayer expense, and then charge taxpayers to read them, too! Sharing culture freely is better and artists need to deal with changing technological mediums instead of whining about it and suing people over it.
I feel as if I should say something critical in a token effort at Neutral Point of View. Aelius, don’t start so many sentences with conjunctions, especially “But” and “Yet” — conjunctions kick in readers’ logic modules and thereby reduce emotion. It’s fiction, not Boolean! (Unless you want it to be more logic-y.) Really in a way I don’t want to post any of this, because talking about good things sometimes interferes with them, and she certainly should just continue what she’s doing and not listen to anyone.
Sometime in October or November 2011 I underwent an MRI to better determine the extent of the damage my right knee took after a fall and the incident surrounding the fall, which I can’t really discuss due to a temporary court injunction. Nevertheless I can show you how cool my knee looks under a big magnet’s gaze.
Whoa, it’s, like, all knee and stuff!
Almost a decade ago I suffered a grade three (i.e. full) ACL tear in the same knee, and had surgery to build a new ligament thingy. So that explains the two titanium screws visible in the pics. Two orthopods told me this 2011 scan is not too terribly conclusive, and for now I’ll have to leave it at that.
The skin on this knee bears a big scar from the surgery. I also have a hardcore scar on my other knee from walking into the edge of a truck’s front license plate (don’t do that). My third and final scar is on my chin, just below my mouth. I was bench-pressing and as the spotter happened to look away my suddenly puny pectorals failed and the bar slammed into my chin. Good thing it didn’t fall right in my face! The spotter was really apologetic (after I, cursing, returned from running laps around the gym to lighten the pain). Then I went hom; with blood all over me, I wasn’t Schwarzenegger enough to finish the set. Why not just stick to push-ups, folks?
Tonight a genius idea struck me: my brain MRI pics would look great on a T-shirt. Like so:
T-shirt’s Front
T-shirt’s Back
Except for consciousness, granular things, abstractions, etc., let’s digitize the world!
Literary critic Terry Eagleton used a saying of theologian Herbert McCabe to state the “central doctrine of Christianity”: if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you. The McCabe quote is really important to me. I’m not Christian, though I do believe in God in some vague way I keep to myself. The quote reads to me as a claim that the more effectively you love (which I take to mean pursuing good), the greater danger you risk. Due to my formative, long-ago experiences with manic psychosis — in which I was killed for activism and in consensus reality straitjacketed, pepper-sprayed, tazed, and so on, and all this not just once — I’m comfortable with being endangered for ideals or even killed; after all, to me, these things have already happened.
My experiences help explain why certain friends are unable to persuade me to muzzle myself for the sake of establishment (i.e. non-radical) political causes, though my abilities would come in handy for them, and though they aren’t necessarily bad. The non-radical emphasis on playing socially acceptable, vote- and donation-getting roles strikes me as one way scientific materialism and positivism are incomplete. Politically and socially toxic gadfly behavior, outspoken activism, and self-sacrifice — “where we’re effective is where we get the most pushback,” as Occupy Wall Street organizer Krystof Lopaur put it — don’t make sense from an evolutionary psychology standpoint; of course science might persuade me otherwise — but so far its attempts at explanations for extreme altruism read to me as more than convulted: they seem panicked. Idealism is spiritual. My focus on telling the truth underlies my writing. I don’t feel in sync with non-radical reformers. I feel more simpatico with anti-war protesters who set themselves on fire.
I put this picture here not to draw a comparison but as a reminder:
Especially as OccupyWallStreet wakes people up to new political possibilities, more and more people are calling for a coalition between Libertarian/Tea Party types and the Progressive flank of the Democratic party to promote shared civil liberties interests and to defund the wars. That’s a traditional politics state-of-the-art right now: hey, can these grassroots Tea Partiers and progressives team up in any substantial way?, and meanwhile, let’s increase seats for the less-bad party.
Libertarians should give up on working with Republicans or trying to maintain their own party. Progressives should quit the Democrats. Let’s not worry about party affiliation or about parties at all – certainly let’s not worry about starting futile third parties.
Let’s focus on electing civil libertarians at the state, local, and federal level. I would vote for Ron Wyden or Rand Paul in a heartbeat over 99% of the politicians out there because these are men who actually care about liberty – and not just soundbite liberty. Not the sort of liberty that you hear about while chanting “USA! USA!” or during the run-up to the Iraq War or Libya.
We need elected officials who care about simple, mundane liberties. You know, like the right to a trial, a lawyer, to be considered innocent until proven guilty whether or not you’re a US citizen. The right to free speech and dissent and peaceful gathering.
At a Q&A in March 2011 Glenn Greenwald stated that (my paraphrase) the nascent grassroots alliances between Progressives and Libertarians might lead to defunding of the wars.
And a representative tweet of this general hope for an alliance:
Lotsa retweets on this one
(Here’s the info on the above-mentioned NDAA, and the same for SOPA.)
Every family has a crazy conservative uncle; I take mine (who’s a good guy! hope he responds here) as representative of Tea Party sentiment. (With nephews and nieces of my own, I’m the crazy “liberal” uncle.) Though the US military budget costs a bailout’s worth every year (info), a joint goal of defunding the wars might be too tough a sell to his political community. So many Tea Partiers see US foreign policy as great!
Suppose the Tea Party and the Progressives’ different views of the wars could be reconciled somehow, or that the difference wasn’t important. Well, with all the grassroots agreement, where’s the third party or coalition or caucus or whatever to protect civil liberties? I think it doesn’t come about because, specifically, nobody’s funding it; the few substantial donors I’ve met don’t want to fund reach-across-aisles efforts, really, they want to amplify their values by contributing to organizations that amplify their frustration. Few fund empathy; more, I suspect, donate to organizations so talking heads will scream what the donors want to hear when the donors get home from their day at the office and turn on CNN.
This is the point at which I come to a loss, for traditional politics. I don’t have any demographic data anyway (and if I did, would it help? Remember that weird Research 2000 controversy where a bunch of amateur math geeks figured out the pollsters were selling screwed-up numbers to DailyKos when it looked like Markos was going to have Blanche Lincoln primary-ed and really irritate the DNC? Maybe it was just low-level fraud but, man, that was weird).
Then we have really great, fantastic groups and movements such as WikiLeaks and Occupy Wall Street who, as Slavoj Žižek keeps pointing out (as to WikiLeaks, as to OWS), are primarily engaged in creating a new public space where it’s possible to talk about the factual historical record and generate solutions outside of the established political categories of left/right, Republican/Democrat, etc. Where you can say “killing people is bad” without having a JSOC/NSA guy tell you violence is everywhere and noble lies are necessary.
That’s where the real action is. If you watch me on Twitter or offline, it’s clearly where I invest my activism time. How it connects with the 2012, 2014, and 2016 election years is beyond me, and probably beyond most everyone right now.
The NYC OWS has a subgroup working on constitutional conventions and constitutional amendments, which is pretty wild. Great! But although I agree we don’t want OWS co-opted by the major parties, we also can’t ignore the existing landscapes of patronage networks, donors, communities … or can we? That would be really fun, if we could.
You know, you can read this whole, largely data-barren post as an effort to convince myself to be more avant-garde. Suggestion taken.
So call your US House Representative’s local and DC offices against SOPA before Thursday! ███████ politely give them a three-sentence statement: 1) Your name, your occupation (if relevant), and that you’re a constituent (give your state or ZIP code); 2) Two or so reasons explaining why you want your Representative to oppose SOPA (hurts job creation ███████ the reliable technology sector, institutes American Internet censorship not unlike China’s); 3) Say thanks ███████ re-state your point: “I want Representative So-and-so to OPPOSE the Stop Online Piracy Act.” The worker who answers will be polite to you, ███████ don’t have to worry about that.
It’s ███████ a bipartisan issue: currently, among others, notable Democrat Barbara Boxer ███████ notable Republicans Scott Brown and Eric Cantor receive lots of money from organizations opposing SOPA, and notable Republican John Boehner and notable Democrat Harry Reid receive ███████ money from organizations supporting it. So ███████ now there’s a good opening for you to contact your US House Representative as the issue’s still in play.
While working on a freelance infotainment assignment during the small hours of Thursday night, er, Friday morning, a friend alerted me to the presence of free tacos nearby. After engulfing a few, I happily tweeted:
This started innocently enough.
I asked who my taco benefactor was. Friend points him out: that guy over there talking philosophy. One of my BA majors was in philosophy, so I go over and talk up my taco benefactor on the subject, which we quickly hone in on Hobbes.
In 1651 Hobbes wrote in Leviathan:
I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
The conversation gets mildly heated and a bit more interesting when he says he voluntarily chose to fight for the US military in Iraq. I asked him how he reconciled his philosophy studies with, you know, invading another country that didn’t do anything to the United States. My taco benefactor tells me that, metaphysically speaking, he thinks of reality as permeated and constituted by violence.
Kill them before they kill us, he says, because otherwise they will kill us — that sort of thing. I bring up nonviolence, Martin Luther King Jr., Zen Buddhism, etc. and win temporary favor with him by acknowledging the US MIL culture is at its best educated, sophisticated, etc., not easily rendered by broad brushstrokes (speaking of rendering things, the CIA renditions innocent civilians extra-legally, knowingly; then there’s the torture). My taco benefactor is assuaged enough by my token respect for military culture to carry on the conversation outside over a cigarette, but I carefully bum one (rare & for social purposes only) from my friend, not from him.
He (Chad Wood) tells me he worked as a communications analyst for the Joint Special Operations Command. JSOC, you know, black ops. Said he was integral to missions that led to the capture of AAM (Abu Ayyub al-Masri), for example. Said, a few times, “I don’t know if I should trust you” — I’d made my activism supporting WikiLeaks clear from the outset and that I was adversarial to his beliefs. In fact, I let him know that a few hours prior I’d been calculating bus fare to attend a protest at Fort Meade to support Bradley Manning, who was, like Chad, a military intelligence analyst. (It turns out the bus fare cost is prohibitive; the USA really needs some high-speed public transit.)
Chad philosophically justifies US aggression and treating people as expendable by reference to the grand historical project of democracy. Look, I like Madison-Jeffersonian democracy, too, but the approx 120,000 dead civilians in Iraq (due to the War since 2003) aren’t the price for that. It seemed to me Chad argued for the goodness of US foreign policy by an attempt at inference to the best explanation: Look around, he argued, things are fine, aren’t they? Don’t you think there are some really smart people making sure you and I can have this conversation, and that we should let them have their secrets? I’ll let Howard Beale reply to that one:
Well, if there’s anybody out there that can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me that man is a noble creature, believe me: That man is full of bullshit.
He pointed to a truck at a stoplight. He said if he saw such a truck overseas, a computer could give him the last 8 months on that truck in seconds. Exact maps of its past movements, actually. I asked him if they do that on domestic soil. He shook his head No.
He told me the NSA (No Such Agency National Security Agency) has a guy called “Crypto ******” — Crypto something; I didn’t catch the second part of the NSA man’s name, and when I asked Chad to repeat it, he wouldn’t. I do recall that the other, second part of the name was a dactyl (metrical foot: three syllables, stressed on the first syllable) and alliterative (starts with the same sound) — I think it was “Crypto Codekeeper” or “Crypto Keykeeper” or “Crypto Keymaster” or “Crypto Codemaster” or something like that. This guy, Chad said, arrives at top-secret meetings with a briefcase containing physical tape — like cassette tape — that’s used to communicate one-time cryptographic keys and is burned as soon as possible. This guy, Chad said, will be watched for the remainder of his life.
Chad also said he worked with CIA black sites. I’m not sure if he meant worked at them geographically or worked with them remotely (or both).
He posited a “hypothetical”: Why not a submarine vampire-tapping the communication cables that cross the oceans?
Another “hypothetical”: Why not a building here in Fort Worth — or any other major US city — with 6 elevator shafts and only 4 elevators, the other 2 used as antimissile silos or for other interesting purposes? I asked which building. He said I should have asked which buildings, plural. He didn’t specify any.
He said Obama personally authorizes dronekills (or at least the significantly controversial ones) and in general, the extrajudicial assassinations (my phrase). Said it’s public record that the Commander-in-Chief authorizes them, but that he has the experiential knowledge that it’s so.
Said AES-256 OTR properly done cannot be brute-forced yet and contains no backdoors.
Really, he asked me, if I’m so interested in this stuff, why don’t I join up? “The ultimate Assange is already working for the NSA,” he said. Get involved, he said, and get better health insurance than hippies currently have. I’d have access to all sorts of cool technology, he said, and since I’m an ace humanities guy, they’d even have stuff about metaphors and narratives for me and all that kind of stuff!
On Saturday October 15 2011, Stay Wired! Coffeehouse & Computer Service (Website, Twitter, facebook, 2918 W. Berry Street, Fort Worth, TX 76109) hosted an awesome party, organized by Ted Wick and Travis Hildenbrand as the production team Canadian Caveman. Cover was $6 and beer upstairs was free (tips suggested).
Kari talks about burlesque history
The night’s main attraction proved to be Christopher Walker‘s CYBERPUNKS Burlesque. Here are the members’ names in the order pictured above, left to right.
KARI KALVIG, Associate Artistic Director
LUCY GUNN
MYSTICAL TEMPTRESS
MISSY LEMURE
NEVAEH ROGUE
AMBER ROMANCE
MAGENTA D’LITE
MAX VALENTINE
The burlesque troupe performed twice, once before the bands, and a second time after either one band or two had played (I can’t remember for sure).
Nevaeh Rogue was extremely confident. Definitely the star.
NEVAEH ROGUE
Mystical Temptress was a very fun performer, clearly having a good time.
MYSTICAL TEMPTRESS
Max Valentine was entertaining as well. I think he has a pretty good job.
Singing, Rebecca never met a tied whole note she didn’t like; her voice glid well over the dreamy, reverb-heavy atmosphere Brian brought with his guitar. Darby’s drumming created the right stoner-rock framework, and Sybil’s bass, strong as a piano’s bottom strings, undergirded it all.
(Maybe it’s captious to criticize, but the addition of eccentric fills from Brian and Darby would bring greater detail to their soundscape.)
Thanks for the Burnett’s Whipped Cream Vodka, Sybil!
You can hear DJ NOiCE in this video compilation (video montage? I can never keep the lit-crit terms straight). This was the first time I’d ever used my (DSLR) camera to record video, and the first time I’ve ever edited video by computer. What strikes me about the video is how much uninhibited fun everyone’s having.
Travis is a talented drummer. But all and all what this instrumental band did was stare at the floor and play progressive rock to one another. They were talking to themselves, but at least they seemed to enjoy it.
Downstairs by the coffee bar Hyung-Joo Kim tore it up on cello for passersby. He’s a graduate music student at UT-Austin.
Stereo Type Writers faced a diminished crowd since by then the burlesque troupe had left. It was also their first real gig; each member earned a dollar. They deserved that $3, though, since they persevered bravely despite minor equipment problems and overall venue exhaustion. Their straightforward music was at its best when their enthusiasm radiated. Kevin Brown’s confidence on his fuzzily distorted bass drew my attention the most. It’d work well for this group to find an exciting singer who, not bound by an instrument, could move into the crowd.
The weekend was also the 28th birthday of Stay Wired!’s leader, John Campbell. His birthday and his role as host earned him plenty of applause, which he totally deserves.
Birthday Boy John Campbell
Stay Wired! holds an open-mike night every Thursday; arrive at 8:30 p.m. to sign up for a slot; it ends at midnight or so. Events such as the Oct 15th party happen on many weekends. Awesome, right?
The Celestial Jukebox by CynthiaShearer. Multicultural small town tries to get along; when I first donated to Occupy Dallas, the site made me think of the grocery store in this book.
descant Summer 2007 (Volume 46) issue, which includes “The First Death of 2057” by me. A short story about punishment, capital and otherwise, in the future.
The City & The City by China Miéville. Detective story set in two cities in the same place; it’s taboo for one to observe the other; quite fitting.
Night Shift by Stephen King. The earliest short story collection from this horror-meister. I figured if you’re reading in a tough place these stories, for some, might actually be comforting, simpatico.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Dystopian novel about a world where people don’t read. On Nov. 15 police destroyed about 3,000 books from NYC’s Occupy Wall Street Library (video; article).
Bag: water sealant for the bookcase and various new batteries.
The books went into the tent above; the guy who received the donations told me they’d probably use the bookcase elsewhere. I wonder who read the books and what they thought and if it made a difference.
Occupy Sesame Street comment, in the voice of Cookie Monster:
Yes, there always going to be rich and poor. But we used to live in country where rich owned factory and make 30 times what factory worker make. Now we live in country where rich make money by lying about value of derivative bonds and make 3000 times what factory worker would make if factories hadn’t all moved to China.
Capitalism great system. We won Cold War because people behind Iron Curtain look over wall, and see how much more plentiful and delicious cookies are in West, and how we have choice of different bakeries, not just state-owned one. It great system. It got us out of Depression, won WWII, built middle class, built country’s infrastructure from highways to Hoover Dam to Oreo factory to electrifying rural South. It system that reward hard work and fair play, and everyone do fair share and everyone benefit. Rich get richer, poor get richer, everyone happy. It great system.
Then after Reagan, Republicans decide to make number one priority destroying that system. Now we have system where richest Americans ones who find ways to game system — your friends on Wall Street — and poorest Americans ones who thought working hard would get them American dream, when in fact it get them pink slip when job outsourced to 10-year-old in Mumbai slum. And corporations have more influence over government than people (or monsters).
It not about rich people having more money. It about how they got money. It about how they take opportunity away from rest of us, for sake of having more money. It how they willing to take risks that destroy economy — knowing full well what could and would happen — putting millions out of work, while creating nothing of value, and all the while crowing that they John Galt, creating wealth for everyone.
That what the soul-searching about. When Liberals run country for 30 years following New Deal, American economy double in size, and wages double along with it. That fair. When Conservatives run country for 30 years following Reagan, American economy double again, and wages stay flat. What happen to our share of money? All of it go to richest 1%. That not “there always going to be rich people”. That unfair system. That why we upset. That what Occupy Sesame Street about.
2011 article from Rolling Stone: Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? Bankers commit economy-destroying crimes — actual crimes — and remain on the loose; meanwhile, many anti-Occupy folks (especially cozy liberals) are interested in nitpicking park regulations … WTF?
Occupy Dallas footage uploaded to YouTube (by someone else) on Nov 19, 2011:
On October 11 2011, with the help of a friend’s warehouse club card, I purchased 392 20-oz bottles of water (and elsewhere, some gas) using donated money entirely, for the purpose of bringing bottled water to the Occupy Dallas (Twitter) group. I was going to make a table of the ten donation amounts, complete with mean, median, and mode, but my other friend who’s a whiz at statistics told me that with such a sample size, I’d be making a complete fool of myself to post anything other than gross and net. Here you go: $100, $100.
Even the Honda Fit groaned under this water’s weight
Occupy Dallas is part of the larger Occupy Wall Street (Twitter) movement protesting genuine grievances, primarily income inequality and the unethical merger of governments, mega corporations, and big banks. I’ll throw the surveillance shadow state in there as well. If you’re so cozy within your white picket fence that you don’t see a problem, gander at these graphs from Business Insider.
The 99% aren’t asking for equality of opportunity or results.
Still voting Republican? No? Okay, good. Because the right-wing works by convincing enough people who have the resources to take off work and go vote that they, these voters, are the 1%. You too will own yachts! Actually, no, you won’t. Most you might be able to pull off is maintaining your white picket fence (if you have one), or rather, maintaining the bank’s white picket fence — banks own more home equity in the US than individuals do. Meanwhile the Democratic left, that is to say, more or less, everyone else taking traditional politics seriously, gets divided and disorganized arguing over how to best compromise with the 1% to achieve minor reforms — until populism such as Occupy Wall Street gains a loud enough nonviolent voice to bring about real change.
Hi y’all! You are also the 99%!
I stopped at Pioneer Plaza (the Dallas Occupation is now moving to City Hall Park) and, as a cop watched, hastily deposited my quarters into the parking meter. Activists at the Occupation then ferried water from my Fit to the supply base faster than I could pull my camera out. Peeps were thirsty. :-(
I had a minute to chat with the woman I understood to be Whytney (pictured left?), a leader there who is, I think I overheard, the chief operator of the OccupyDallas Twitter account. (Also: thanks to OccupyDallasCOS, OccupyDallasEMS, and CinnabarSweets for helping me out with some logistics.) I asked for, and quickly received, a list of other items — chairs, C-size batteries, walkie-talkies, shelving, ice, and more — that the 500-or-so people of Occupy Dallas desperately need. Working on that list now, y’all; I’m gathering donors.
Speaking of donations: hopefully, you’re now asking yourself how you can pitch in. There are plenty of ways.
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