Sharing My Insights for my Decisions

[write4change]

A couple of weeks ago I think, I spouted off about exactly how I felt about some behavior issues. I was observational and specific and so right I was wrong.

How do I know that? Because I have two gurus on this board that I respect and follow pretty consistently and am always amazed how much I learn from them. They are my big hope. They are both guys in their twenties.

I recently added a woman close to my age and experience. I trust these people to keep me on track.

I only wrote one of them about what I had done. I essentially said right or wrong. Silence. That told me I needed to do some rethinking. I work well with simple yes or no so I choose to see that as epic fail and so wrote that back. I then got not so epic and not so fail but essentially you know better and you can do better. So I have meditated on this.

Essentially considering, does the universe really want me to write this or am I being tempted by pure ego.

While that is a true consideration; being really intimate about what I think and feel with total strangers is something I never do all the way and something I have no comfort doing. So while I am committed to being honest, I am also aware about how much lying many of us do by omission which is even more destorting because it allows us to pretend we are not doing it too easily.

So I freely admit I am going to try to kind of slowly seep down to total honesty because I don't know if I can stand to do it.

When I came here I spent a week doing nothing but reading Wade Frazier's thread. It was both enlightening and experiential --- awakening things I had not thought about in years. I liked how he put down a body of work.

At that time he was the only one doing and monitoring his own thread which he does so beautifully. I came here with the agenda of starting another intentional community having lost about million dollars failing that. I considered that the same kind of lesson of learning what you are really up against with FE. Only my agenda did not really stir up the PTB for the most part. I am no longer so sure about that.

I began what I thought would be my one and only thread about that. And I still think it is a significant body of work. I came here with the Atticus stuff and I left because I got the bejesus scared out of me for real life reasons. It was the simpliest way to stop.

I never knew how that all worked out. I was finally told to go read a specific thread with 102 pages that got me the basics. I am still not sure that represents resolution or redemption. And I think those things are important.

I see so many documentaries on the net now--one recently--I think is the bottom line. It essentially says because of JFK we got watergate, because of watergate we got Iran Contra, because of Iran Contra we got Bush and Iraq War I and because of Iraq War I we got 911 and because of 911 we got Iraq War II and so for..... It will be never ending until all of this is known and accountable which for me means not in my lifetime the way things are going.

What I know for sure is that I left for almost a year. Two men I had been doing behind the scenes stuff left about three months after me. The day I returned so did they. They kind of hung out for the week to see if I would say or do anything. One I wrote an explanation; he is Chinese in Beijing. One I have had nothing to do with and regret any and all interaction and it was not romantic in any way to get that out of the picture.

So on a whole my committment is to not do anything that is not out in the open. I have learned to look at things on this site differently. Some of the people who share the most, have fixed their profiles so that they cannot be seen whether or not they are here in any way. They generally want openness and they generally want to be involved in everything but they take priviledges that they do not bestow on anyone else. I am just aware of that.

I have consulted a psychic over all of this and will talk about that later.

I have decided I am going to do three threads. The one on the intentional community, I am still not ready yet. The other two will represent my own personal duality and how I express and will invite those who have these problems to share and deal with it their own way too. One thread will come from the head and will have a lot of stuff. One will come from the heart and I have no idea how that will work out.

I have already asked one person not to post on my threads if they cannot stay on topic and with the flow of the mood. There are now a bunch of different on going threads that have their own flavors and purposes and I think that is all good. I wish to take nothing from the experiences they create. Diversity is everything. But I am basically old, feeling time is fleeting, and I have no time to play play. I want to move forward with the purpose and the discussion. I am really not into clever as much as real reach out and touch me. I will find that difficult and so will others but none the less, that is the purpose and the goal.

I will start with my head because I am so comfortable there. LOL I am going to call it as I promised months ago Living Uncertain with the Certainty of My Gurus.

I am going to dinner soon with a young black man producer to catch up on what has happened here for the six weeks I have been mostly gone from my office.

[write4change]

Okay. I am back and we have spend essentially talking about the same problems of community but in a different way. We have been doing this since March. I am going to write up a professional proposal addressing as many things as I can see. I am writing this to show another way things can happen. I have no dog in this fight as I am committed to going to Texas as fast as I can. I am doing this because I want to see these people succeed.

and maybe you can see things and give me advice that I don't see. I hate acts of futility so I want to do this as well as I can.

The place that I have my office is in downtown LA. It is an old paint factory since 1913 which is embedded in the floors. It is at least half a city block. It was purchased in 2003 by an elder Korean woman who did not do her homework. She thought she was buying a big factory project that needed cash and would rent forever. What she did not know was that all rules and regulations concerning paint were changed in 2003 to be implimented in 2006. I had not bought paint for a long time so I was quite shocked to find good paint was 37 dollars a gallon. It is typical for me to do the research on the whys.

For EPA purposes filters added, chemicals removed, waste disposal etc. were all totally changed. All patented formulas practically had to be recalculated and repatented. Smaller firms could not compete especially with local sales and they collapsed of were sold. This one did a planned collapse with just cutting everything off from the foundations and disappearing. No paint factory and no hope of a tenant without massive build outs to code.

Enter Burning Man people. These are not people who have had long time leadership in Burning Man or real responsibility for creating the impermanent city for 50,000 every year. The original "visionaries" have lived a peter pan lifestyle for over 25 years making things to sell at Burning Man. They do not follow the ethics or the guidlines of Burning Man that is posted on their website. They are very careful about what and how they imply but I did not know the reality until things did not add and I started doing the research.

Are these people bad people? I can't really tell. They are 3 men and two women all in their early 40s to mid 50s. The men are all highly mysognistic but were raised that way and consider it normal. They live in LA because they never "fit" back home but are all from Texas, Tennessee, and Kentucky. One of the women is a super religious fundamentalist and believes what I consider to be magical thinking most of the time. She has labeled me defiant. The other woman I like a lot and consider her to be very authentic and highly capable. She has a great relationship with her mother who is my age and I love her mother.

I am told the woman fundalmentalist was really wrecked on a public reality show where her husband turned out to be and was convicted of being a child molester. This tough karma caused her to loose everything. It was her vision to lease this place with an option to buy and have a place to make their stuff cheaper than they have been renting all these years. Their primary source of income seems to be creating weird vehicles and finding old kinds of vehicles to restore and sell to all the rich people who go to burning man and spend a small fortune pretending they are seeking enlightenment while they are really playing sophiticated dungeons and dragons.

The oldest man lives in San Francisco and has the most money and the most interest and kept hands off for about a year loosing a lot of money. He has done multiple projects similar to this. They had three tenants for almost most of the first year. The monthly rent is about 50,000 so they weren't just bleeding, they were hemoraging. He brought in the second woman from Seattle who would not stay unless she became a partner. I have no idea what each partner % is. I only know the oldest has the controlling interest.

Thanks to the second woman, we now have about 80 Tenants. Some have 5000 sq feet and some have 300 sq feet. We are considered and artisan community of people who make their living producing art. We have some that produce big things and unusual things for the studios and corps like Cirque de Soleil. We have an unusual florist, I love love her stuff and have learned a lot just watching her. She really sells living miniture landscapes. We have a woman welder who produces really unique furniture. We have a man who takes old MGs and other like cars and converts them to totally electric cars. I had been here six months before someone took me on a tour. I was truly surprised at how big this place actually is and how diverse the people.

Most of the tenants love this place and want to see it go. Many would do major build outs on their own if they were allowed. Most are realists. Those who have been here over a year get the picture. We are failing because the five on the lease can not get their act together and decide on a mission statement of what they are doing and why. Believe this matters.

The lease option is 3 million dollars which is up in 18 months. Everyone is contemplating exit strategies. Korean lady thinks she is going to get all these tenants and will make money, raise rents and be able to sell for a profit. She is wrong because if this is going down current tenants will demand thing be brought up to code. To bring this up to code even at 3 million would be astronomical.

However, the prices being quoted to my experience have little to do with reality. I have no idea where people got their magical money ideas. And a lot of money has been wasted something we talked about extensively tonight. There are three major problems--past, current, and on going. They are plumbing and bathrooms, air conditioning and internet.

We will take the internet as example problem. This whole place is wired completely for what used to be state of the art land line phone service. No one I know is using any of the land lines at all. There is a huge closet at the top of the stairs containing all those wires and in the beginning the DSL lines. The closet in my office is now considered the media room. When I rented this office they told me they would need access for the media but it would be moved in three months. 9 months later they are telling me to remove everything from the media room closet and that microwaves affect the wifi.

My research tells me 18 months ago they had an unknown IT guy to the wiring for wireless for the complex for 10,000 and he then left and there was no back up and they limped along for months. Things got so bad they called in Time Warner and Comcast who would only do bandaids and would do nothing without major rewiring of their own for what I am told is a small fortune. So they hired another unknown for another 10,000 who at least had a business but will not come back and do anything on this wiring after 90 days. This is a blue print for this guy who really has an agenda and wants my office to redo the net again. He has already started and the complaints are he pulled out all the labeled wiring of what went to whose office and is totally whatever about it.

All this major wiring is in the interior roofs of these buildings which require huge ladders etc. to reach. It is not a simple job. This is what my grandmother calls penny wise and pound foolish. If you know nothing about what you are doing you better go to contract with a specified price and specified service and back up. In this situation, you get what you pay for.

One of the things they paid for was to have state of the art video cameras all over the outside of the entire complex to prevent theift. The only thing people would steal are these crafty vehicles for doing strange things. There is no evidence that there has been any thefts. What I was told was that it was discussed at one of their meetings that I left with the guy I went to dinner with at 12 AM and we returned at 2:30AM. We went to an all night diner. They actually asked him what we were doing. None of the tenants even knew that they had done this.

What I know about LA and I have paid my political dues is that you can get approval for a one deal project pretty easily. One of things I learned is that downtown LA today has a population of 33,000 and in 1955, it was 75,000. That is how empty these buildings are and their owners can afford to keep them because the taxes are at 1976 levels of prop 13. It is commercial realestate that made out like bandits. So all this talk about lofts and gentification etc. in many areas are more myths they want people to buy into than truth.

Our discussion was talking about cracking numbers to see simple feasibility. 80 goes into 3 million about 38,000. So could we all become tenant owners based on percentages. The answer we believe is that not all the current tenants but probably could do it with the right vision, mission statement, and community coalition. The question again is: are people willing to compromise their egos to have something rather than nothing. I still have a lot of research to do on feasibility but what I am showing is that there are lots of situations like this urban than need intentional spiritual communities who also need to make a living and a life at a reasonable price. But it can't be done with magical thinking and peter pan leaders.

One of the big expensenses is 6,000 a month in electrical could we build that out solar. I don't know. I know some of these people have 50 amp plugs if that is the right terminology. We certainly have a ton of roof.

[CD7]

Wow writeforchange! Im an artist so this idea sounds great..would love to be in a community of creators! To have everyone create their surroundings, the things they use..etc etc The red tape logistics always gets in the way doesnt it!!!

Would really love to see a community tht exists differently...COMPLETELY different from our current model. NO MONEY, everything (well most) recyclable, self sustaining in every way...Ahhhhhh to dreammmmmmmm........

[write4change]

Can't go to no money in LA but we can go to how we use out money differently and how to experiment with codes and regulations etc. Other places have done it--but not so urban which is much harder to do. To get this done, it has to be under the radar. Thanks for reading.