I am Lost ... (![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} lilybutter) wrote,@ 2005-07-24 04:32:00 |
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| Current music: | instant coffee and grim tounge biting irony |
| Entry tags: | adventures, bike punk |
pitt city
PROPER
report
on
PITTCITY
grace k at scotts house, stopping off to tell stories and get 5 gallons of water.
ive been busy traveling arround the past few weeks and i have a million fucking stories about silly crap i saw n did. like i ate dinner with porn stars and got my toes sucked in central park by the art critic of the newyork post and i drank under a bridge with troll kids and i failed to go swiming in the ocean on two occasions. mostly im not gonna tell all theese stories cuz im actually sick of listening to myself and feel like i talk to much. but i want personally to remember stuff and the blog helps... i got a terrible memory really and it gets worse every year... prolly one day when im 40 i'm gonna walk out the door one day and get lost and you'll all never see me again... my temporal window of awareness is shrinking every year... ill be like ed norton from memento in 2015 easily... no shit ... i kinda like it though cuz its relaxing to have all your problems slip your mind so easy.
but enough about me... heres pictures of pitt city and gracie and old broken stuff
you can get this kit for $50 that turns a 50 gallon oil drum into a wood stove...
grace reading 3 text books at once and preparing index card of neat ideas for traumatic injuries
"washboards actually arent that good as intruments... they're more for accompanyment really... crick cricka crick cricka crick...."
gracie is way up in my short list of favourite people. shes early twenties, might go to nurse school, and organises teaching sessions for communitee health stuff. . shes been living on the streets on and off for 4 years, circumnavigated the entire country by freight, mediced for protests, tree sat for forest conservation, and in the past 2 has been doing squatter decrepit building for the homeless stuff. she had the 17 room farm house in beelen for a while but now shes back in pittcity in an amazing 8 unit appartment building thats pretty much just her in appartment 5 and some gasstation attendant in number 3. all the even numbered units are completely gutted and wall and window less. the electricity is gone and so is the plumbing but she had the place set up olde tyme cabin style hauling in water from a few blocks away and heating with a wood stove. the only real problem is that shes in west oakland where about 3 out of 4 buildings are boarded up and some of the streets are so decayed they're accessibe only by foot... since the houses are caving in and the streets cant be driven on to there are crack addicts living in the woods fighting invisible spiders and smashing down graces front door to steal the nothing she keeps in her appartment. on the night i got there someone had turned out the place to hell and made off with broken wooden step ladder, and a screw driver and one compact disc. grace rebuilt her door about three times over and has taken to sleeping on the building roof. one time two crack heads just wandered in to the lobby and were hitting glass pipes and shivering and trying to pick imaginary things up off the floor. i persoanlly somehow ushered them out the door. i'm not sure how i shooed them off but it involved me running downstairs dirty from fixing the electrical wiring in just my underwear and being like; "hi... people live here" and they were sort of startled and confused and they went away. i'd hate to meet one of theese fuckers when they're holding a gun cuz they're freaking out about invisible insects all the time and affraid of the coiled old phone wire on the floor and i got accused of having the snaps on my hoodie be recording devices
standing in appartment 6 (guest matress and garbage and porch) looking in to appartment 8 (laundry room, toilet, jim's storage area)
so its a rado and a flashlight and it powered by a hand crank... but they made the crank so cheap that it broke off from vigorous cranking.
if i was out in some third world dessert village with this thing and id been relying on it as my flashlight radio i'd be well fucking pissed...
id spend my nights writing the manufacturers nasty letters beside a bowl of burning fat... cheap assholes !!!
scott was an early resident of beelen and the first to get the fuck out when the cops started smashing their stuff and dragging them to jail.
now hes about to take ownership of one of those $4000 houses you can get in pitt city....just waiting on disinterested financing people... yay.
i cant remebe scott's girl freind's name..... tofu scramble !!!
centro food not house in beelen. grace went to court and tried to get the media behind her to leverage her tresspassing charges in to the right to buy the end house for $4000 in delinquant taxes. ACCORN were on her side to lobby to gett he tax assesmnet fair and sala udin, chair of urban redevlepment for hill,oakland, and beelen was being petitioned to support the renovation of end house as a urban renewal/historic preervation thing. it was looking good 12 months ago when it was then revealed that the actual owner was infact the guy who allowed grace to live their sweat equity. the guy who technically owns %80 of beelen bought the whole thing under the names of different women he took on as misstresses and sometimes as wives just so he could buy shitty property in their name and triple up on rent revenue/ resales revenue/ and insurance fraud (renting out property after he'd sold it to devlopers or just burning it down) but sort of keep his name clear. grace narrowly escaped a year in jail for being a squater. the kids at centro were paying the same dude something like $400 a month rent for their 6 bedroom townhouse here... he booted them all cuz the pittsburgh city paper and the news and the courts were putting to much preasure on beelen. for a while grace was ammasing a court case for them but they were all young kids going to school for various things and didnt want to get involved.right now centro is empty but punks break in to it every so often to pick through the piles of clothes and bike parts left in there.
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shes also fucking flat out nuts. chumming arround her includes a bunch of endless speaches about how she would totally overhaul paitient and doctor relations, she chucks empty bottles at rich peoples house and laughs at nuthing and goes running off through parking lots with no shoes on and she talked me in to letting her shove a paramedics breathing tube down my throat after she proved it could be done on herself. she carried a dead chipmunk in her pocket for a week that she gutted and stuck a squaeky toy inside of. she takes about 3 hours to get motivated to leave the house cuz xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
this is what i wear when im hooking up illegal wireing or escorting freaked out crack heads back out side.
i pulled yard and yards of wire out of the gutted appartments to try to hook up grace but it was all shit. i had to find some good stuff elsewhere. i ripped out everysingle othjer fuse box too so only grace's one outlet would be live. i didnt want any power going to any of the other shitty wiring. so the chance it was my fault is extreemly low... heck, i was disconecting electricity.
I love that house. i turned her electricity back on cuz im a fucking electrican and former building maintenance fucker (did you know that ?) and she 's been iving there through the entire winter without it and she was running arround with the 15watt lamp i set her up with on a 20 foot extension cord seeing what her appartment looked like with light at night. and i kept saying " i shouldnt have done this.. this blows your whole oil latern fetish..." and she was like , "no !! this is awsome !!! i can find everything !!!! look !!! i can hang the light on the wall and light the whole kitchen !!1 or i can put it on the table to read !!!" we then plugged in a toaster out of the garbage but that was boring...
and i love pittcity too !!! with its weird carnival punks scene and the daft boys who grace is freinds with o the south side... i went and dumpstered BEER from a distro center with them and i hung out with the newly less drunk and conversly less assholish jonny mutherfucker and we dumpstered and case of redbull and he slammed 4 in a row and was sprinting down alleys screaming "im fucked up tweaking and its legal !!!!!!!!!!"
pittcity is just dirty and crappy and thats why i like it there. life kind of sucks all day but it gives you something simple and uselffull to work on. which totally suits my ever shrinking memory and attention span.
so its cuz of all this that i decided before i left that i would move to pitt city. my plan was to bite my security deposit and be in pitt by middle of august. i was going to live in appartment 7, gracie would be my next door neigbour, i'd fix wireing and plumbing all day, get lunch at the soup kitchen, maybe go hit church once a month and see if the hymes come back to me, and get introduced to all the crazies in the woods so they wont shank me when im walking thought the crapped out wrecks of hilldistrict late at night.
like i've been secretly crushing on moving to pitt city for 2 weeks now and i would have been back in filthydelphia often to work for lolitadeluxe's projects and visit my mates. but i woulda been living with an angel amidst the dirty kids and building a fucking giant beautifull of building and keeping it simple. you have no idea how happy and stiked up i was on this plan.
well an hour ago i just talked to gracie on the phone. shes fine, shes staying with her freinds up in freindship county where the communitee center she works at is. and she had two backpacks of her most important stuff with her. she seems unphased... or more like post phased cuz she herself says she had other things on the go and other worries, this ordeal has just been one more in to the pile...
but it seems saturday night arround 8pm the entire 8 appartment building plus the two floor warhouse full of scap leftover from a building demolition comapny that stored salvage there. .. the giant old beutifull wood building, all grace's books and household stuff, maybe the scraggly cat who lived in the rafters, maybe the lost and quiet slow gaited gasstation attendant in appartment 3... everything was gutted and gone from a 4 alarm fire that took several trucks 3 hours to snuff out...
can you beleive this shit...?!?
how bout that.
