preparing
a wall
Downton Abbey
/ / /
8 December 2021
Latham NY
Category: Politics & Activism
Yesterday, while sitting in a grocery store cafe and working on some projects, I suddenly had the idea to pare down the number of contacts in my online address book. I can’t say why exactly, other than the general shrinking of scope I’m attempting with my life as a whole.
At one point I had about 3,000 names in my contact list, but over the years I’d reduced that down to about 650. Last night I exported the remaining contacts to ensure I could restore them if necessary, then deleted all but the people I thought I’d like to contact again, plus a few deceased folks whose birthdays I’d still like to observe and thus left them on the list so they’ll show up on my calendar. When all was said and done, I was pleasantly surprised (well, maybe not that surprised) to see that I’d reduced my contact list to about 150 living people, aka Dunbar’s number. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar believes we can retain relationships with about 150 friends and acquaintances. Beyond that, it’s too many people to effectively maintain any kind of regular communication with.
As you might know if you’ve been in my orbit for a while, my philosophy of humanity’s survival is “small intentional communities of mutual aid.” I’ve been arguing for years for the idea that our time is better spent trying to make a difference with the people we live near and can actually know. The more we try to deal with massive problems on a massive scale, the more we realize our relative powerlessness and the faster we become dispirited, or else our activism becomes mostly hashtags and memes. But if we stick to working at a hyperlocal level, we can make an actual difference and build real relationships. You may disagree and that’s fine. This is what I think, though, and my past 20-plus years of labor, political and community organizing are the reason I think it.
As I look over the 150 people remaining in my address book, I realize of course that they’re spread over a wide geographic area — multiple states, multiple countries. They’re not an expression of this idea of hyperlocal community building. If I was more ruthless and pared the list down to people with whom I have some sort of active relationship, I’m sure it would drop down to the low double digits. Once I move to Albany and start renewing old relationships, and making new ones, I expect the overall total will end up stabilizing around Dunbar’s number again. Some people will move into my life, others will move out.
I do want to use this current list of humans to try to increase the number of people with whom I have contact each week. Not counting incidental contact in stores, I have face-to-face conversations with maybe one person a week, sometimes two. If I expand the circle to people with whom I have text or phone conversations, it’s maybe a half dozen on a good week. And most of those communications are very brief and surface-level.
Yesterday a friend called and said he had just a few minutes to talk but he wanted to use those few minutes to contact someone he cared about. I thought that was a great idea. Despite my general phone-phobia, I think I might try it.
I’ve spent decades winnowing people out of my life. I’ve always been good at walking away and never looking back (except in the case of my most recent long-term relationship). It’s time to get better at keeping people in my life, instead.
Leave a Comment1986: Steve and Mike and I found
a Northern Sun catalog
& ordered anti-apartheid pins.
We wore them on the rugby shirts
that were in fashion then.
We listened to “Biko” by Peter Gabriel
& watched Cry Freedom.
It never occurred to us to wonder
why there were just two black kids
in our school.
When your house is glass
everything is a stone.
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16 May 2021
Greensboro Bend VT
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 track=1396482614 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]
2 CommentsIt’s useful to remember that when we people like me call for the abolition of the police, our proposal is not “leave the world exactly as it is except without the police.” The idea of police abolition goes hand in hand with the idea of communities taking care of the basic needs of their people. No baby is born to a life of crime. Instead, babies are born into a world without adequate shelter, food, education, leisure time, arts, communal structures, play, and all the other things that make life worth living or even possible in terms other than mere existence. As long as we continue to allow our society to work at the whim of corporations and the wealthy and the powerful, there will always be a need for an armed force to enforce those whims. When I say “get rid of cops,” I also mean “take the money we use on cops – whether here inside our borders or via our armed forces – and use it to build a better world.” Of course we can go even further than that, past the need for states and borders at all. But imagine, for a start, if we used the money we spend on tanks and rifles and flash-bangs and bombs and drones and rubber bullets to instead house the houseless (and everyone else), feed the hungry, clothe the naked, educate all who want it, provide a basic income, get rid of the idea of landlords, allow people to have leisure time and to develop their minds, bodies and spirits as they see fit. Then we can deal with the few folks who’d be left who simply can’t or won’t be members of such a society. And we can do it without cops.
Leave a CommentThe Lord’s Prayer (Revised)
Our Father, who art in heaven,
are you there or not?
Thy kingdom has seen better days,
& if this is thy will then you’ve got
some ‘splaining to do, Lucy.
Give us a break, wouldja?
A bunch of old gray suits are trying
to steal our daily bread.
Maybe we can’t live by bread alone,
but without it we’re toast, if you’ll
forgive the pun. Also forgive us
our trespasses & our shoplifting
& our “missed” rent payments.
Lead us not into temptation, for we are
sorely tempted to string up these motherf—
excuse me, Lord, bad guys.
For thine is the kingdom & the power &
the glory & whatnot, but we might need
to take matters into our own hands for a while.
Amen.
/ / /
Jason Crane
27 March 2020
Tucson, AZ
The Covid-19 Blues
less than a buck in my bank account
not much food in the fridge
not many brains in the White House
the orange man, he don’t care a smidge
too many people still partying
too few people at home
too many rich men in Washington
passing too few bills in the dome
it’s time we looked out for each other
it’s time that we did for ourselves
it’s time that we stopped hoarding TP
and food from the grocery shelves
it’s time that we aid one another
do it the mutual way
keep going that way forever
on a move to a sunnier day
the thing that I’ve seen in this crisis
the thing that is giving me hope
is that all of our rules are just fictions
we don’t really need them to cope
we don’t have to keep paying landlords
we don’t have to scrape and to bow
we can come together as comrades
we can make a better world now
/ / /
Jason Crane
17 March 2020
Tucson, AZ
100 seconds
jumpin jack flash
gimme that frackin gas
horse shoes & hand grenades
as the men in my family used to say
nobody plays horse shoes anymore
but we still chuck them bombs
are we on foot or horseback?
sneakers laced or boots strapped?
pull me up I’m sinking
like the old cartoons with one, two,
three fingers in the air
all I can say is we gotta be there by now
with the clock at 100 seconds
& just time for one more drink
/ / /
Jason Crane
18 February 2020
State College PA
An Ode To The Retail Workplace In This,
The Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand Nineteen
Fuckety
Fuckety
Fuckety
BOOM!
/ / /
Jason Crane
26 December 2019
State College PA
not all first-person poems are factual, he told the FBI agent
I am equivocal about violence
as I sip my English Breakfast.
I’m trying it without sugar
so it’s not as if I don’t take risks.
I’m grappling with years of lukewarm pacifism
pitted against the idea of protection.
I don’t have to make hard choices;
no cops are going to kick in my door;
no ICE agents will be waiting for me
when the school bell rings.
The other day I slashed the tires
of a deserving citizen with a dashboard swastika
using a knife I mostly wield on summer sausage
or tricky packages of batteries.
Luckily the rush of righteous endorphins
drowned out the Catholic-Buddhist twinge.
“Do unto others before they do it to you.”
/ / /
Jason Crane
3 December 2019
State College PA
Walnut Spring
it’s a black gravel path
through a lovely wood
why does it remind me
of an oil spill?
could be the sound of a plane
overhead or
the distant artificial surf
of the interstate
even what we try to protect
we end up destroying
we can’t preserve an island of forest
in an ocean of asphalt
perhaps what’s needed at first
is more destruction
fewer cute wooden bridges over
barely flowing streams
more horizons lit by the fires
of burning cities
one acre of wetland can store
a million gallons of water
how many bottles is that?
///
Jason Crane
23 October 2019
State College PA
Interrogation
The other day at my job —
wearing my corporate uniform,
the one with the logo on the left breast —
I helped, in a small but real way,
to send two boxes of syringes to
Guantanamo.
I felt sick to my stomach.
What would they be used for?
I imagined a hard-eyed CIA officer
injecting a syrupy liquid into the arm
of a gaunt man in an orange jumpsuit.
I saw the man’s Raggedy Andy head
loll back like his bones had turned
to jelly. The officer leaned in close
to ask those questions, those same
unanswerable questions,
for the thousandth time.
Sabotage was the first word
that came to mind, standing there
in my corporate uniform,
the one with the logo on the left breast.
Could I misdirect the boxes?
Throw them out? Lose them?
But the cameras are always watching
& my number is attached to everything
like a fingerprint. Plus I need the money.
So like a good company man
I sent the syringes to the island prison,
there to be used to protect my freedom
to keep working, to keep wearing my
corporate uniform, the one with the logo
on the left breast.
///
Jason Crane
4 October 2019
State College PA
I’d like to teach the world
I’m under a tree like the Buddha
but only for 45 minutes
it’s my lunch break
also unlike Siddartha I’m in uniform
corporate logo over my heart
another on my sleeve
there’s a parking lot & a playground
carved into what used to be a field
heaven forbid kids should play in a field
I’m drinking a Coke so I should probably
shut the fuck up
if I live as long as my grandpa
I’ll make it till 2069
by which time the collapse will have started
maybe I ought to spend less time writing poems
& more time learning to grow food
we should teach the world to sing, sure
but a little farming wouldn’t hurt
///
Jason Crane
Bernel Road Park
Centre County, PA
3 September 2019
More than this
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
—J. Krishnatmurti
Every time you say “but everybody has to—”
or “that’s just the way it—”
I know you don’t understand the point
I’m trying to make.
It’s OK. You’re not alone. Nobody else
does either. I’ve explained it
so many times to so many people.
As simply as I can put it, the idea is this:
Almost nobody would be doing
what they’re doing with their lives
if it weren’t for capitalism.
If we didn’t all have to work to survive,
to put food on the table,
to keep a roof over our heads,
to put gas in our cars to take us to work,
so we can work to survive, etc.
If we didn’t have to do all that,
we’d do other things.
We’d hike or read or paint or
make music or play touch football or
learn to knit or to cook or to juggle or
we’d spend time with our kids or
our parents or our lovers or our friends.
We’d make little communities where
folks watch out for one another.
We’d pool our resources. Stop driving
the planet & all life on it
over a cliff. We wouldn’t launch missiles or
make armies or have borders or
watch people starve or die of exposure
while food rots in the fields &
cities have thousands of empty houses.
People would still do bad things sometimes,
because that seems to be human nature or
the outcome of occasional bad wiring.
But in a world without so much scarcity;
without so many people living grinding lives;
a world without billionaires and millionaires
or aires of any kind; fewer people would feel
so trapped that their only choice is to steal or kill
or shoot up or put the barrel of gun in their mouth.
You can’t look at me with a straight face
& say this world is how it’s supposed to be.
You can’t look me in the eye
& tell me we couldn’t do better.
Every time you say “but everybody has to—”
or “that’s just the way it—”
you are explicitly accepting the boot on your neck,
the chain around your ankle,
the darkness on a limited horizon.
So that’s my point. I just don’t want to do it
anymore. It’s killing me. It’s killing all of us.
After 45 years I want off this hamster wheel.
I’m going to do everything in my power
to escape. To live the next 45 years (or 4 years or
4 months or whatever is coming to me) as freely
as I can. There is more to life than this. Because
“this” isn’t life at all.
/ / /
Jason Crane
2 June 2019
State College PA