gordonzola (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
gordonzola) wrote2004-03-03 07:18 am
gordonzola) wrote2004-03-03 07:18 am
Entry tags:
Block 3
On the last description of my walk to work I ignored the Safeway. I was going to write something about the UFCW strike in the Southland, but since it just settled, I think I’ll leave it for now. After that strike disaster, I doubt if the Norcal locals will be out after all, but who knows. My workplace, non-union but worker-owned and run, had just started an optional payroll deduction for the UFCW strike fund when the union voted to accept the last contract offer.
Where the Safeway sits used to be the main farmers market for this part of the city. Of course by that I mean like the Alemany farmers Market, not the Ferry Building one. You have to admire capitalism sometimes the logic is obvious. "People are already buying there food here, if we buy the land and put in a grocery store, we’ll pay the farmers less, charge the customers more, and make all that profit in the middle!" The rest is history.
At an anti-Gulf War ’91 rally that tried to march from Dolores Park to Duboce Park, the cops closed off Duboce St. right before we hit our destination. It was the calmest rally of that two-demos-a-day week, mostly because all of us were so tired.* Still, when they moved in to make arrests, a large contingent broke through the police line and ran into the Safeway parking lot, causing mass confusion among cops, rent-a-cops, shoppers, and car drivers.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jactitation and I escaped arrest and ended up across the street for a breather, right in front of the Art Shade shop that’s in that Deco, altered-to-fit-Market-Street triangular building. When I looked up I realized Irish Matt was standing there.
He was in full white boy non-flashy hip-hop wear. Down for the Cause gear with a just slight nod towards his punk roots: baggy black pants, black slightly puffy bomber jacket, black angled Oakland A’s hat with the ‘s blacked out so it stood for anarchy. I knew Irish Matt from his ’88 anarcho-tourist days of chasing the Democrats and Republicans around to their conventions and chasing neo-Nazis wherever they turned up.
When I moved to SF, I got involved with Bay Area Anti Racist Action,** the group he was organizing for awhile with some other East Bay anarchists. It was centered around the punk scene because that’s where the Nazis and the people who wanted to fight Nazis tended to hang out. But in 1990 everyone of youth that I respected politically was listening to Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions rather than the (Canadian) Subhumans and MDC. I ended up drifting from the group because it was oriented towards street battles and beat-downs of stupid white supremacists. We did have some good times rousting the Nazis from a planned "White Workers Day" May 1 rally on Haight Street and an appearance at Union Square a few days later though. I do think that is the way to deal with Nazis, for the record, but I didn’t have the heart for non-spontaneously violence, even when people obviously deserve it. Besides, the action was mostly across the bay and you know how that is for the West Bay peoples.
When I lived at 16th and Valencia a few years later I ran into Irish Matt and didn’t recognize him. He’d dropped 30 Lbs. or so and was selling heroin on the street. Somewhere along the line he had gotten into needle exchange organizing and became a junkie. Or maybe he was a junkie all along, I’ve been dense to that kind of thing before. He ended up in prison for a bit before getting clean. I still run into him from time to time. He works just up the street from the Art Shade Shop has a kid and a sweet wife and seems to be doing well.
Usually when I see someone, even if only infrequently, my mind doesn’t fix them in one location. And usually if I pass by the same place every week, my memories are jumbled and diverse. Maybe it’s because I rarely walk on the south side of Market at 14th, but for some reason I always picture Matt there, smoking a cigarette and smirking, laughing at how we got away from the cops yet again.
*Spawning the memorable Rhetoric Factory slogan "We’re tired and we’re cranky and we don’t like the government!"
**They changed their name to Bay Area Revolutionary Action one month, but changed it back when everyone admitted they had been too embarrassed to use the more militant name.
Where the Safeway sits used to be the main farmers market for this part of the city. Of course by that I mean like the Alemany farmers Market, not the Ferry Building one. You have to admire capitalism sometimes the logic is obvious. "People are already buying there food here, if we buy the land and put in a grocery store, we’ll pay the farmers less, charge the customers more, and make all that profit in the middle!" The rest is history.
At an anti-Gulf War ’91 rally that tried to march from Dolores Park to Duboce Park, the cops closed off Duboce St. right before we hit our destination. It was the calmest rally of that two-demos-a-day week, mostly because all of us were so tired.* Still, when they moved in to make arrests, a large contingent broke through the police line and ran into the Safeway parking lot, causing mass confusion among cops, rent-a-cops, shoppers, and car drivers.
jactitation and I escaped arrest and ended up across the street for a breather, right in front of the Art Shade shop that’s in that Deco, altered-to-fit-Market-Street triangular building. When I looked up I realized Irish Matt was standing there.He was in full white boy non-flashy hip-hop wear. Down for the Cause gear with a just slight nod towards his punk roots: baggy black pants, black slightly puffy bomber jacket, black angled Oakland A’s hat with the ‘s blacked out so it stood for anarchy. I knew Irish Matt from his ’88 anarcho-tourist days of chasing the Democrats and Republicans around to their conventions and chasing neo-Nazis wherever they turned up.
When I moved to SF, I got involved with Bay Area Anti Racist Action,** the group he was organizing for awhile with some other East Bay anarchists. It was centered around the punk scene because that’s where the Nazis and the people who wanted to fight Nazis tended to hang out. But in 1990 everyone of youth that I respected politically was listening to Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions rather than the (Canadian) Subhumans and MDC. I ended up drifting from the group because it was oriented towards street battles and beat-downs of stupid white supremacists. We did have some good times rousting the Nazis from a planned "White Workers Day" May 1 rally on Haight Street and an appearance at Union Square a few days later though. I do think that is the way to deal with Nazis, for the record, but I didn’t have the heart for non-spontaneously violence, even when people obviously deserve it. Besides, the action was mostly across the bay and you know how that is for the West Bay peoples.
When I lived at 16th and Valencia a few years later I ran into Irish Matt and didn’t recognize him. He’d dropped 30 Lbs. or so and was selling heroin on the street. Somewhere along the line he had gotten into needle exchange organizing and became a junkie. Or maybe he was a junkie all along, I’ve been dense to that kind of thing before. He ended up in prison for a bit before getting clean. I still run into him from time to time. He works just up the street from the Art Shade Shop has a kid and a sweet wife and seems to be doing well.
Usually when I see someone, even if only infrequently, my mind doesn’t fix them in one location. And usually if I pass by the same place every week, my memories are jumbled and diverse. Maybe it’s because I rarely walk on the south side of Market at 14th, but for some reason I always picture Matt there, smoking a cigarette and smirking, laughing at how we got away from the cops yet again.
*Spawning the memorable Rhetoric Factory slogan "We’re tired and we’re cranky and we don’t like the government!"
**They changed their name to Bay Area Revolutionary Action one month, but changed it back when everyone admitted they had been too embarrassed to use the more militant name.