NOT A TASTE FOR WINNING, BUT A TASTE FOR FIGHTING
Kets: In the morning I waited for Sasha, Z and our new friend Al to come together for a morning exercise. We took the computer outside to obey our devoted video-friend, Sean, for 25 minutes. Already after two minutes my heart was racing and I had blood-taste in my mouth. We where laughing a lot though, how silly we must look to the construction workers on the other side of the road, how we jump around to the serious sound from the computer. But it feels great. When where done, I throw my sweaty body on the ground and inhale some of the sunlight that is beaming through my eyelids. On the way back to the house I admire the vegetable garden of Als house and I eat some of their raspberries. We make a nice breakfast of the free material from last night.Vegan pizza and a rich fruit and tahini smoothie… Mmmm!!
Hey, by the way, I apologize for so often talking about the food we eat or the simple activities that we do, but I guess that says a lot of everyday life on a tour. I do get to see a lot but I’m not very good at writing down the detailed information about each city – and mostly we don’t really get to see much of them except for few concentrated parts.
After a few hours of driving we arrive to bookspace in Cleveland. “Guide to Culture” has been in town for a few years but recently moved to this new space that was a little bigger, and nicer for them. In a room in the back of the house we saw how they printed books themselves, someone was just cutting the covers and stacking the books in a box.
I shared some grapefruit with the lovely 5-year old kid E. I like that we sometimes have the opportunity to spend time with some kids on this tour..! I don’t want to generalize but… they are so funny! Actually, in the bookstore they had a zine put together by a teacher and his 3rd grade students. At first I thought it would be some boring project where parents could feel proud for a moment while any other readers would be bored out of just holding it. But I opened it and started reading and OH MY this contained some SERIOUS heavy poetry!!
Some of them where funny, some very wise and dark. Some hopefully naïve and pure-hearted. A very sweet project… Respect to anyone who litsen and amplify what kids want to express.
The presentation was good, I think around 40 people showed up and many people hung out afterwards to chat more. Sasha pepped going to the lake at night cause he wanted to swim, but first we went to the house of our hosts and dropped our stuff. They had made us a big and tasty vegan chili with rice. As Sasha says, “its great to be hungry because when its time to eat, you feel that you deserve it”.
We drove to the lake and walked towards the water, but apparently any park or beach or public space is forbidden to enter after dark here in the U.S.
We looked like a black block of rebels but when an idling police car just turned on its headlights, everyone started to run back the other direction like nervous teenagers. Us non US-citizens didn’t really know what was goin’ on so we followed the lead to escape. But what the fuck? Why were we running? Haha, all except for one person who slowly walked back with disappointed steps, we’re acting as if we had just set that car on fire.
Oh well. So we couldn’t visit the beach because of the police car guarding the path but we went somewhere else where we could at least look over the lake and see the lights and skyscrapers of downtown Cleveland from afar.
The confident person told us some recent stories from the city when police had harassed and even killed people. One was of a young black kid that had played with a TOY gun and that cops had pulled up shot him in cold blood. Another of when cops had stood with their knees on an old woman so she, probably broke her back, choked and died. She told us that, as far as she knew, there hadn’t been any riots in the city after these events.