These are buffelgrass times that we’re living in — and our job is to turn all these weeds into resources.
We’re doing that in a literal way at our brickyard in Tucson, working buffelgrass brought for big cattle into high-strength adobe for sustainable, beautiful low-income housing. This isn’t mutual aid: once our pilot projects prove viable, we’ll lobby the city to help us build housing at scale, for a fraction of the cost of commercial construction and a whole lot more benefit — social, ecological, and esthetic. (Here is a piece that sums up what we’re doing.)
This is only the tip of the weedbag, though. When public pressure has no effect on the top — and we honestly don’t know when it will again in our country — we can work with local government to help those whose lives have been cast off by capitalism, and thus fix what’s broken… sometimes even using ginormous mistakes as construction material.
The corporate takeover of farming and manufacturing destroyed rural economies, creating deep hardship that our tin-pot wannabe dictator turned into false grievances. Building the muscles we need to declare independence from big corporations could potentially help prevent future slides into fascism. Who knows? For now, anyhow, it’s great fun to get our hands dirty.
And here is a note about “boilerplate.”
If you just got an email and feel like you need some kind of welcome: Welcome! It’s good to have you “here”! “Here” (your inbox) is where you’ll start getting messages. You can also visit “here” (our website) to read other messages, ones from before. Right now there’s only a little bit “there” (“here”).
Here is a website about what we’re doing: BarrioBuffelworks.org. What we’re doing is making bricks. While we’re glad for you to be “here,” we’d really like you actually here! You’ll see from that tool there are many places around us of interest — Mission Garden (wow!), the Sonoran Glass School (wow!), Desert Survivors (wow!), and of course Tucson’s 4000-year-old birthplace, mislabelled in the tool as something else.
We’re also very near the blackish mountain under which Tucson started. Indeed, the word “Tucson” comes from “Cuk Ṣon” (pronounced chuk-shon),” which means “black base” in O’odham. Cowboys called and continue to call it “Sentinel Peak” or “Picket Post Butte” or even, weirdly, “A Mountain,” as if that was all that could be said about it. That’s certainly not all that can be said about it! For example, it’s covered in buffelgrass! We shouldn’t call it “A Mountain,” we should call it “A Black Mountain Covered in Buffelgrass and Under Which Tucson Started.” That would not be complete, but it would be something, and better than just “A Mountain.”
None of that’s actually “boilerplate,” a weird word for text. We like weird words. Everything we send out, pretty much, is weird words adapted from something or other — our brickyard’s website, maybe, or something else that we’ve written, or (mostly) something we haven’t. Everything that we post will be written by people — actual human people who like playing in mud, all of them, which makes them similar to, in fact, most human people.
There will, one day, be a masthead.
Still none of this is “boilerplate.” That was a tangent. There will be many tangents. The urge to tangent is a hallmark of human people. (What a weird word, “hallmark.” So, for that matter, is “tangent.”)
The actual “boilerplate” begins here, now, with the word “housekeeping.” (Hunh? This is no house! What we’re building is houses — this isn’t close! Can anyone live here? No!)
Anyhow, to find our emails you might have to check “spam” or “promotions.” “Mark” our email “address” ‘not spam.’ If “things” aren’t in “spam” or “promotions” (“folder” or “tab”), there is something gravely wrong.
There is, indeed, something wrong, gravely. That’s why we’re pulling weeds and digging dirt and making low-income housing from that — rather than so many other things that we could be doing.
That was a tangent. You can always “see” “everything” here on “this website.” But we’re over here, at our brickyard, sometimes.
This concludes our welcoming boilerplate. Please “like” the post you received to help it spread through the ecosystems it’s part of. You can also share it with friends, of course.
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