dashing!

Some of the nay-sayers out there may not believe this, but I volunteered this weekend past. Yup, v-o-l-u-n-t-e-e-r-ed. You see, some of my associates in the area don’t know the necessity of extravagance and have shacked up in a Westside ghetto “to do good.” One of these bohemians unfortunately signed away 2 years of his life to watch them be wasted trying to enforce genuinely pointless tasks on children with much more pressing concerns than cloud formations and times tables. One can only hope that someday we wake up the great scourge that is public education and the racial and economic segregation it openly promotes and propagates. But I digress....Anyhoo, this old pal asked me to work on his initiative with him and in a fit of sobriety I said, "Yes."

Awaking early on Saturday, my muscles twitching with excitement, I arrived at the westside school that functioned as the meeting point. My first inkling that this would blow came when I saw a large crowd of white people hanging out, happy as clams, outside the school. And, judging from the speed of passing traffic, so where the neiborhood residents. Anxious to get out of that scene I went inside in search of food.

Working Boy: I understand you are going to serve us breakfast.
America Corper: yes.
W.B.: Excellent, I’ll have 3 momosas, a V8 Splash and a melon ball. Honeydew if you have it.
A.C.: We got something even better than all that stuff! How about some dayold artesian bread from a hippy bakery and TANG.
W.B: I think I’ll just have coffee then.
A.C: Naturally decafinated, shade grown coffee?
W.B: Oh good lord.

Sufficiently screwed on the breakfast front I wandered around looking for some cleaning product to drink when I stumbled across the orientation for the day’s events. There I heard enough liberal hooey, granola munching propaganda and secular humanism to kill an organically grown horse. Did you know, at least according to one of the short-haired old lady hippy leaders, that community gardens pretty much solve everyone’s problem? It’s true. Starvation, gentrification, illiteracy, power hungry evangelicals, whitey. There's nothing conservative, sacred or different that a community garden can't stop! Thoroughly rallied we were assigned to our groups. This is when things took a drastic turn.

Without so much as a segment of cantaloupe to settle my stomach, I watched in horror as I was placed in the worst clean up crew of them all. You see hippies are very, very bad people. Like idealists and east coasters, they are worthless grant grubbing scoundrels that waste poor people's time and energy on their myriad of year-long pet projects while they're “finding themselves” in their 20’s. But, and here's the rub, the hippy is not without her draws and, oh let’s say, liberalities. One could even say, perhaps, it was these very liberalities that brought me to this futile endevour that very morning. And it was there, between two folding tables, that I watched in pure horror as I was placed in “group” consisting of 3 other male members two of whom were idealists.

Standing there amongst the poseurs, I watched bushel, after bushel of sandal wearing ponytails skip and giggle their way to far off, remote community gardens filled with hot springs, steam showers and those anything goes hippy dress codes. I’ll never volunteer again.