Sunny day. Overhead looms the freeway, with its supporting pylons coming down in backyards or on streetcorners. Kind of a big concrete thing, squatting up there in the sky, crossing it side to side. The Foothill Freeway, in fact, extended into southern OC around the turn of the century. The land it needed to cross was by then completely covered by suburbia, and homeowners objected strenuously to having their houses bought up and torn down. The solution? Make the new freeway a viaduct, part of the elevated autopian network being built over the most congested parts of the Newport and Santa Ana freeways. Values for the homes below the flying concrete would plummet, of course, but they would still be there, right?

Now it’s a perfect place for white-collar poor folk like Jim to live, in apartmentalized old suburban homes. The cars above aren’t even that loud anymore. And the shade of the freeway can be pretty welcome on those hot summer days, as the real estate agents are quick to remind you.

Jim goes back inside, feeling blah. Hung over, confused. While he eats his cereal and milk he thinks about Arthur Bastanchury. Good old Basque name, from shepherds who came to OC when James Irvine used his land to raise sheep. Arthur still looks a little Basque: dark complexion, light eyes, square jaw. And they have a good long tradition of active resistance back home in Spain. Not to mention terrorism. Jim doesn’t want to have anything to do with terrorism. But if there’s something else that can be done—some other way … He sighs, eats his cereal, stares at his living room. His living room stares back at him.

Books everywhere. The OC historians, Friis, Meadows, Starr et al.

Volumes of poetry. Novels. Stacks and stacks, anything anywhere.

In the corner under the window, the Zen center: mat, incense, candle.

CD disks all over an old console, on a bookcase of bricks and boards.

The desk is buried in paper. The couch is tattered, bamboo and vinyl.

Paper everywhere. Newspapers, mail, scraps.

A poem is a grocery list.

We eat our culture every day.

How does it taste to you?

Oops! Someone’s forgotten to do the dishes.

No one minds a little dust, either.

“We believe that the truly staggering amounts of money and human effort (which is what money stands for, remember) that are being invested in armaments represent the greatest danger of our time,” Arthur said to Jim later on the night of their poster blitz. “Nothing that we’ve tried in the legal channels of American politics has ever slowed the military-industrial complex down. They’re the biggest power in the country, and nothing can stop them. We wanted to stay nonviolent, but it was clear we had to act, to go outside politics. The technology was available to attack the products without attacking the producers, and we decided to use it.”