Bob's Teaching A Class

We're at the Viroqua public library. Bob said, "A LIBRARY!" and I went, "ooooh." Criminally nerdy.

Big day for Bob and I. Worked at Mark Shepard's farm picking squash. Mark is a former Dreamtimer who now owns a fairly badass joint off of highway 56. One of the Dreamtimer's set us up with this gig, bless her heart, but she didn't tell us the job paid squat. Squat for squash. The job paid 1 dollar per bushel picked, with 20 bushels per bin. There were a total of 12 bins. There 6 of us Dreamers. If we did all 12 bins, at 20 bushels per, it would come to 240 dollars, 40 dollars per person. Mark said he and Duane the geezer could do one bin per hour. We managed to clear a total of 2. In 5 hours. Mark kept dropping subtle hints that we were behind, saying, "You guys should have a lot more done."

The job sort of sucked. Working sucks. I could never be a medieval serf if being a medieval serf is anything like farming. You stand around in mud and weeds, it's cold and cloudy, and everyone around you is an Anarchist with more hair. And you're just picking shit off of vines and cleaning it and putting it into bags and dumping the bags into bins, and then a guy with a tractor takes the bins. Plus there were several hundred slugs on every fifth squash, which was mildy revolting. Jessica, another Dreamtimer, called me a delicate flower. She said farmers should plant fields of me. Bonnie and Chris, the anarchist couple agreed I was "prissy." Chris chastised me for labeling certain botanical organisms "weeds," and said what people called weeds were relative. Then he said people pull weeds too quickly from their lawns. He said people should let weeds grow for a time, since grass will just take over naturally. I said, "like gentrification?" Everyone stared.

Then I got really hungry. Haven't ate much. Kept talking about sandwiches. Chris gave me detail instructions for how to eat bugs and plants as an alternative. All I wanted to do was talk about Turkey sandwiches. Priceless material. Rich. Great for the Doc: six Dreamtimers working on an Anarchist farm in the gorgeous environs of the Driftless.

Except Bob didn't bring the camera. He said, "we're not filmmakers today; we're farmhands." I told him that was going in the blog. Then I said I was going to wring his neck. He told me he would brain me with an acorn squash. we all laughed.

We left Mark's but not before making plans to stay at his farm this Saturday. Mark is an Anarchist Financial Genius who knows a lot about what he calls, "Creative Borrowing." We would need graphic organizers to explain it.

We spent the rest of the day setting up our profile of the Youth Initiative High School: http://www.yihs.net/ and the Pleasant Ridge Waldorf School. We're in with both schools. They love us. We kept referring to our documentary as "Off the Grid." It's just a metaphor, but it works. It sings. Not having the camera actually paid off. The headmasters of both schools didn't tense up. By the end of the day we were in the main adminstrative office typing up release forms, emails, I was checking my ebay status of the Bruce tickets I'm selling, and Bob was helping a student with a project. Chinese Films. Bob went into a mini-Post-Doc thesis about "the difference between Fifth and Sixth Generation Chinese Filmmakers and the World Cinema Market." Then he offered to be a substitute for the film teacher on Friday. What the hell is going on here?

So that's our story for now. Bob's teaching and I'm a delicate flower.

Until then,