Palm Desert, Coachella Valley, December 23rd, 2011

It's COMMANDO FRIDAY!

That said, I am glad to have this blog to look back upon. I can tell my future self certain things that I may have forgotten; Everybody else can listen in. Here we go:

Hey Bashu. Things are raunchy. You're living in a van with six people.

six?

yes. Not the same six we started with at all. I can make an amusing map graphic later to show how everybody came together, but long story short, it's me, Bryce, Nate (from New York), Annabelle and Amelie (from Quebec), and Mason (from Oyama).

And I'm learning how to be poor. It's good. We're not really poor. But I am throwing off the vestiges of class. I take showers when I can. I unblock the toilet with a stick. I play accordion on the sidewalk, and if somebody should give me a dollar, I thank them kindly and with happiness in my heart.

we may be poor, but when the A-team are playing their ukeleles, and Mason and Bryce their guitars, and I'm stomping a foot shaker and squeezing the accordion, and we are all singing, we got something we don't need to pay for. It'd be the same if we were rich kids from LA, college students from Calgary. Your voice, your craft, they stand alone.

in Santa Barbara I came out of the library, blinking my screen-glared eyes, and a woman leaning in the door of a bookstore called out to me "Come, play, gypsy, play!". so I wandered over and played her One More Cup of Coffee, and she smiled and said, take any book you like. as long as it's not a new book, she said. This is what you earn. This is what I learn. I don't need a new book. I get what I need.

And if you try sometimes,

you might just find,

you get four boxes of dates as well.

Food stamps, putting a hat out, flying a sign that says "Tips not required to listen, but will help a young traveller", admitting to the world that you could use some help, saying "I'm poor", being happy, giving up the judgments you once had, the pride. I'm about ready to start playing blues, but I just play Fleet Foxes songs instead, cause I feel them, and people give us money and say "merry christmas".

When my friends travelled, I would be at home and think "you don't need to travel to learn lessons." Now I'm not so sure. Some big river of thought has hooked me by the waistband of my pants and drawn me up into its flow. Last night a jittery man called AJ was on Oxycontins and acid and showing me his burns and a previous Bashu might have been scared, or shunned AJ, but this Bashu just remembered that everyone's a person and kept a dialogue going with him.

I want to print out some more chords: Mother Nature's Son, Fleetwood Mac songs, etc. I need to go. I've said enough for now, or maybe not, but the Palm Desert library only gives you one hour of internet a day. good bye, dear friends.

busking and markets, Los Angeles, December 18, 2011

There have been a bewildering array of things happening for us in the last 8 days. among these:

I visited a date farm. I love dates. The harvest time was done but me and Bryce being perceptive hungry young men noted to the farmer that there were still dates on the palms. He said yep, they're no good, too low to the ground, or not quite ripe, or etc. Go ahead and pick em. Me and Bryce nodded knowingly and proceeded to glean like two small cyclones through the orchard, if that's the word for 10 acres of date palms. First we filled our stomachs to max capacity, brought ourselves to tears by the sheer variety and tastiness of fresh dates, and then filled four boxes. A major theme in the last 8 days has been "pass me another date.. no... three. Well, if the bag's open maybe I'll have another few."

But apparently the prophet Mohammed used to subsist on nothing but dates and sometimes milk, so we're fine. A diet of repute.

The desert is dry and a strange place for people to live. Of course many people do live in the desert, but they're strange people. So I'll rephrase: the desert is no place for normal people to live.

We have also been travelling with two extra folks: Amelie and Anabel, two lovely Quebecoise girls with ukeleles. They have brought joy to us and we have brought them to many various cities, and they have inspired me and Bryce to do a lot of busking.

For those of you who don't know, this is where you play music on the street, and usually goes along with putting out a hat for tips. You can make a lot of money from very drunk people, and indeed me and Bryce were walking down the pub-crawl street in Santa Barbara playing a Britney Spears song and a completely mashed young man stuffed a fifty dollar bill in a bowl I had just been eating salad out of. I told him "do you know this is a fifty dollar bill?" and he slurred "buy some good weed man" and wandered into a dubstep club.

Lucrative indeed, but I am finding I much prefer to play music for people who will fully listen to it. If I had to make a few hundred bucks fast, I would go down to the strip wherever I was and pump out the top 40s from my accordion - happily, even, because I really do enjoy entertaining people - but what's been super good is farmer's markets.

Farmer's markets to begin with are supreme. If you don't pay attention, you can end up eating a lot of anonymous food in this life. Yes, it's a chicken, but which chicken is it? The package says "ingredients: carrot", but where did it grow, and did anybody care? If you ask the grocery stocker, they'll be all "what?" But at a farmer's market, you can talk with the person who grew the food, and get excited about it. Being excited about the food you're eating is more important than I could have imagined.

Anyways, it's also a fantastic place to busk. Markets should be a bustling place, with good smells and sounds. It's nice to be the sounds. We have been visiting farmer's markets all over Southern California with great happiness in our hearts.

Here are some pictures of the original four of us.

Santa Barbara, December 10, 2011

Well,

first off, I wanna go home.

But secondly, that's mostly brought about by three sicknesses at once:

1 is a sore throat and stuffed nose that everybody's been suffering, perhaps on account of the awfully chilly California Coast nights. Snork. Hargle. Gurk. Phlegmblob! Snork! I take this moment to educate you about the magic of rosehip tea: It's free and abundant vitamin C.

2 is a really dreadful stomach mangle brought about by eating bolting brassicas, AKA wild mustard greens in a field in Big Sur. They looked great. They tasted... bitter. and tough. We cooked them with some salt. They immediately softened to the texture of cotton fabric and tripled in bitterness. i regret to say that i, never one to waste food, chomped down 10 or 20 leaves before giving the whole pot up as a lost cause and dumping it. 2 hours later I was in the throes of a full on lurching nausea. I thank my strong dumpster-diver stomach for keeping it down. The moral is, wild food is great. But make sure it's food.

3 is plain homesickness caused by therapeutic staring out the window and almost recognising a black outline. Let me explain.

you can look out almost anywhere on the coast of Vancouver Island where I grew up and see the outlines of mountainous islands, with beautiful names, Texada, Lasqueti, Saltspring, Galiano. It's normal. I don't even know what island I'm looking at half the time but they never move. It's part of my favourite sunsets.



driving along the California coast south of Big Sur, when I looked out the window of Leslie in an effort to not spew, I saw this:


So, yeah.

Eventually we pulled over at Hearst Castle. The van's battery died and I spent a while phoning home and observing a pack of zebras move about Hearst Ranch.

as a last, I will leave you with the observation that the practice of resisting buying persimmons, dates or oranges in BC is very grounding, and the practice of buying them locally grown in California is also very grounding.

Thanks for reading.

Fairview Gardens, Santa Barbara, December 4th

Hi! So much has happened in the past few weeks. I've had almost as little access to internet than I have had access to hot water to clean my body. It's been exciting! Here's a lightning telling of the tale, including our heroes, their urine, 4 thanksgiving dinners, Rivendell and Rafiki and his dog's saddlepacks.

Me and Bryce set out to meet fantastic natural builders. We did not set out to empty their urine from 5-gallon jugs into 45-gallon barrels but that is indeed one thing that Ianto Evans, the originator (with his wife Linda) of the North American cob revival, asked us to do while we were staying on his company's land. It stank in a more bothersome way than I thought it would. That ammonia really goes to your brain.

He also had us do fantastic things with a tool called a "froe", with which we can split wood into shakes that can cover a roof. Fantastic! Me and Bryce were well chuffed about this. Look that term up.

Anyways, his place was called The Cob Cottage Company, in Coquille, Oregon. It was essentially Rivendell, if you would compare our journey to that of the Fellowship's, which me and Bryce regularly do. My goodness. The most beautiful houses. The deliciousest potlucks. The wisest and most effective people. It was all I could do to not cower and throw myself at everybody's feet.

And of course eventually we left.

You may very easily expect to see a post later on in this very blog about us coming back to that place like pilgrims to a holy stone.

First, though, we have to drop a ring into a volcano. More on that later. Anyhow, the rest of Oregon was a chilly and wonderful time. Me and Bryce got a speeding ticket! We went to see the Accordion Babes. They were fantastic, and we bought their sexy accordion babe calendar, which can be viewed at my family's house cause I sent it home to them, starting in January 2012. Me and Bryce and Daveed and Kathryn met back up again in Klamath Falls, headed to Ashland, where we ate American Thanksgiving in a church. This was me and Bryce's 4th thanksgiving feast of the year, and we count ourselves as amateurs, but you can email us for tips (hint, cross the border.)

We became richer by a huge bushel of apples in Klamath Falls, upon finding an apple tree. We do not let these things pass us by. The impressions will come quickly now. Stream of consciousness begins now. Ashland is a lot like Nelson, BC. We met a traveller named Rafiki with a dog named Juju who carried saddlebags. We picked chestnuts in Ashland. We became warmer and warmer as we crossed over a river into California. We found a chocolaterie next to a creamery and bought much fine blue cheese and spicy chocolate. Commando Fridays have been a success, and if I forget I always change by noon. Me and Bryce have played music for everybody we've met. Arcata is one swinging town, I tell you what. I earned a glug of whisky for playing accordion which served to blur an already blurry night of busking, and I remember at one point teaching myself "Down by the bay, where the watermelons grow, back to my home, I dare not go".


But then eventually we got to San Francisco, which is an excellent place to sum up-



our travels are a success so far. Me and Bryce left with the aim of learning how to be better peasants and people. We keep meeting people who are making this work and who are willing to show us. So we keep asking. Travelling for travelling's sake could be a full happy adventure, and we do it then and now.

But I'm feeling like this is the travel of a tetherball, which spins wide and wildly but is always pulling itself back to center. Except we won't bounce when we come back to center. We'll stick there. So maybe a tetherball with spikes. We are a morningstar, ladies and gentlemen.

Right now we're in Fairview Gardens, Santa Barbara, a farm, a place that grows good food, in the middle of suburbia. It's heartening to say the least.

Corvallis & Small-town Oregon, November 19th

Heyo.

Me and Bryce are in Philomath, a small town in Oregon. We stopped in order to call Kiko Denzer and the Cob Cottage Company, both of whom we're planning to visit, and chat with, in order to find out the best way to live. That is as close as I can get to our true reason.

Anyways enough with all the deep shizzle! While Bryce was calling his mom (Hi Pam!) I found a newspaper that said "Accordion Babes!" on the front and opened it up to find an article on a band that's playing tonight in Corvallis for 6$, called the Accordion Babes! Can you guess what their band looks like?

YEAHH!!!

Now we're really livin.

Anyhow, I thought I'd include a little piece on travelling in a veggie oil van that I may have left out: Finding Oil.

You may (if you're crazy) have looked behind restaurants and seen dumpsters marked "Grease only", and accordingly stayed well away. If you're totally pants-on-head nutso, you may have opened it up and seen the scene inside and let the lid slam shut and gone to clean your hands.

If you're me and Bryce, you sample it (by pouring it and watching the texture, not tasting it, though I have an amusing story to tell you sometime). Then you go in front of the restaurant if it's good, and say excuse me, we're travelling from Canada ("oh! you're CANADIANS!"), yes, and we were wondering if we could have some of your deep fryer oil and they either say, "that's gross, what? OK." or, alarmingly often, "no, we sell it to the biodiesel guys." Companies also want it, because they can process it and turn it into biodiesel, then sell it for tonsabucks, and they put stickers on the dumpsters that say "saving the environment! don't steal our grease or we'll fine you 500 dollars".

Anyways, me and Bryce have spent a lot of time staring into inky black greasy voids recently and talking with fast food managers. It's all a very humbling way to travel.

Songs we are about to learn:

Britney Spears - Criminal
Red Hot Chili Peppers- Snow (Hey oh)
The Doors - Love Her Madly
The Flaming Lips - Do You Realise

seattle, november 18th

Heyo!

So today we went to see Sunray Kelley, an honest to good ness wizard on top of a mountain. We squeezed apples into cider with him, and he showed us some of his magic, in the form of houses which he has built. Here is one of them now.

he planted the apple trees four years ago, and he is incredibly clever. Once a long time ago I intruded on one of my father's friends, an artist, while he was in his studio. My father's friend was reclined all the way back in an old chair, staring at the ceiling, smoking blue smoke from a pipe, 100% lost in his thought. I backed out without saying anything. I still remember thinking "that's an artist" as a kid.

Anyways, Sunray reminded me of him. Another house, that doesn't have any good photos of it online, stopped me solid and spun me around, a towering ramshackle house four stories high. The best representation of it I can give you is this, which isn't quite it:

a bottle of cider to anyone who remembers that house (the quote should help).

Well, we left there loaded with bags of apples and bottles of oh lord that's good stuff. Now to Portland.

I don't want you to think our last time in Portland was completely taken up by singing at riot police, though that happened. The first and last thing we did was stay at the house of City Repair, a beautiful reworked house in Sellwood Village, SE Portland. This is the epicentre of a lot of serious community-building stuff, but also just a great place to be. Me and Bryce ended up staying there four days, as David and Katherine went to San Francisco and Nate to California. We learnt many skills, such as brewing ginger beer,

and I traded my little red accordion, Madeleine, for a big calico accordion called Lola's Junk. more on this later, perhaps. Suffice it to say after two years of playing accordion and constantly being asked if I can play this song, I now am able to. But that also means I'll be learning this one.

we're going back thru Portland, anyhow. Right now I'm in Seattle at my splendid cousin's house, and it's very warm and dry, and this motivates me to make a list, because what nicer thing could there be to sum up a lot of things.

Places we've slept in the last 5 nights:

Wednesday: side of the road outside Sunray's place in Leslee, on Mount Vernon, Washington

Tuesday: Portland, City Repair's house

Monday: The same. Hm. well actually me and Bryce slept on the floor there for quite a few nights. So we owe them some chores. But here's a list of what's been in my pockets recently.

1. date pits

2. carrot tops

3. american money

4. some discarded metal pieces for craft

5. a flashlight

as we came to Sunray's it started to snow. I hear down in California it's hot. They say California used to be an island that collided with the continental states. we'll see.

Commando Friday tomorrow morning! HA!

Portland

OK. So we have been in

Lake Chelan, by the side of the road, sleeping
Yakima, eating in a Spanish-speaking taqueria. David tells me that anywhere that`s agricultural, Mexicans are usually working, and where there`s Mexicans working and living, there`s Mexican food. So pretty fantastic.
Columbia Gorge, playing a song
Hood River, staying on a friend`s family farm. We watched Lord of the Rings and it reminded us of us.

Now we`re in

Portland.

http://occupyportland.org

leaving from Penticton

Ho!

Here we are in Penticton. We spent time in Squamish, cooked a dinner, had it with friends, and that is like a red wax seal on a goodbye letter to Canada, so good. We then drove to Penticton where Bryce's family lives. He has met my family several times over so I guess it makes sense that I meet his, and also eat their food. Mmm. Lots and lots of homemade pizza.

David and Katherine are two people travelling with us. David's a cheesewright and also many other things, and Katherine's a nanny and many other things. We are going to beat it down to San Francisco in 6 days to be there by the 16th, on account of David's got a family reunion. It's the only deadline we have, and I find myself comforted by it.

Besides that, our trip is sewn rather loosely, like a burlap sack. It may tighten into a recognisable fabric as we see places, understand where we need to go to learn, work, earn money, buy food, work, be paid in food, warm up, cool down, fall in love with places, with people, with dogs, with gypsy caravans, etc. I'll let you know the vibe.

Nate Kaplan is also travelling with us. He's a magical man whose most recent occupation was brewster, so I'll call him that. We spent the evening last night drinking magnificent illegal closet-brew and filtering veggie oil for Leslie, Bryce's van. It's an greasy hallelujah of a process that involves a lot of pouring and squeezing. Feels far better to do than sticking a nozzle into your tank and you don't even see the gasoline ever. If we're going to be burning it for 1500 km, I'd rather get it on my hands first.

plus bryce tells me our work is valued at 120 dollars an hour, calculating from the price of the equivalent amount of diesel fuel.

Me and Bryce have been in the following places over the last few months:

The Ecovillage in Shawnigan Lake, the Cowichan Valley.

Occupy Victoria in Centennial Square, Victoria, sleeping in a tent.

Pat Henneberry's house on Mayne Island in the Salish Sea, building a cob.

Quest University, in Squamish, up the coast from The Vancouver City, building a cob.

My family's house in Nanoose Bay, mid-Vancouver Island in the Georgia Strait.

hitchhiking inbetween all these places and playing copious amounts of accordion and ukelele. We have been playing this song a lot, if you listen to it imagine us walking along the side of the road belting it.

All in all it's been a good fall,

I can infer it'll be a good winter.

first post!

So, here we are. The B-Team is me, that's Bashu Naimi-Roy, and Bryce, that's Bryce Ehrecke. Both our names begin with B, as it is plain to see.

We are about to start a journey adventure to California in Leslie, Bryce's veggie oil powered van. It's really expensive cause it only takes extra virgin olive oil. Just kidding, you get the used deep fryer stuff from the black dumpsters behind the restaurant.

I'm sitting at home waiting for Bryce to arrive, pick me up, and we'll drive to Squamish. That's where our friends at Quest University are doing their stuff. Julian's there. He should be coming with us but he's studying. We too are studying to become better people. Julian is presumably learning how to fend off black bears or some other such practical thing.

I hope you enjoy reading this blog. I'll drop in posts when I get to a computer. We are going to visit a bunch of places where natural building, organic farming, and permaculture practice is going on.

I'm something of a reluctant man. There are many good things here. The knowledge that I'll be back is some comfort.

My hope is that when we come back, there will be cause for a new blog to be started, named, The B-Team makes their Own World.

And the best way to learn how to make your own world is to go see other people's worlds.

So. Follow along.

p.s. As a side note Commando Fridays will be in effect for the duration of this trip so if you wish to really get into the deep groove we're in, shuck thine underwear from Friday morning till Saturday morning and know that wherever we are (Mexican roadhouse Amazonian jungle hammock etc) we'll be doing the same.

p.p.s. bryce is the redhead on your right, I'm the one in the vest. Jen Erika and Zack make up the rest.