I spent the day today at Dreamtime Village, resting and preparing for the coming week and basically hanging out. Two of the men took me into La Farge with them to the post office and grocery store, both of which I'd been meaning to visit.
I walked around the village this afternoon to get a better feel for the place and succeeded: this place has a real post-civilizational feel to it. The people who live here don't dominate it; they just share the land with the other critters. The weeds and bugs can have anything the people don't currently care about maintaining, whether it's a plot of onions or an old Bookmobile. There's an old school bus full of milk crates of files... who knows? The old school building was pretty intensively decorated by the artists until its roof started leaking and the asbestos started coming out of the walls.
I was having trouble connecting with anyone until the teens came home from Madison where they'd been participating in the annual dumpster-diving festival. Zon And has lived here most of his life and is a budding computer geek, so we talked computers for a couple hours. Another teen has a room here but lives most of the time with her father. The character of the place really changes with kids around! It's so much less sombre.