Feeling Froggy? Dicking around at Santa Rita

Fuck martyrdom, I wasn’t trying to get caught. I ran from the pigs and dodged them until I realized they had me trapped.

Jail sucked, twenty-three hours inside of one is both too long and long enough.

The plan didn’t work cuz we got caught before it was finished, so that sucked a lot too.

And yet…A lot of barriers were broken down on March 4th and that makes me happy. For one, I mean shit have you ever walked on a freeway before and actually stopped traffic?! This invisible boundary that we, prudently, allow to block us from part of our world was transcended and transgressed as 150 or so of us took it over. There is a lot of nay saying about “adventurism” and things of the like, and to a point I do agree that if we are in it to win it our tactics must go beyond simple pleasure seeking. At the same time if the revolution ain’t fun then fuck it. The taking of 880 was an escalation that went beyond the campus, brought together students and non-students alike (in fact I think I saw one or two anti-students) and cost the state a whole lot of fucking money. I’m sorry to all those kids with circle a’s that wanted to do a bit of trashing but honestly, us getting all flossed up on the freeway had the majority of OPD on duty attending to us; use the situations that present themselves.

Any liberal, hating-ass, shit talkers that want to discredit the actions of anyone not identified as white and male really suck. They suck the agency away from those that have brains and the ability to use them and those that have anger and the desire to use it. As if an oppressed person isn’t the most able to recognize the potential consequences of their actions and choose to behave accordingly? Way to enforce racist patriarchy! With the two eyes in my head I saw folks identified and identifying all sorts of different ways and from the beautiful ones I got to meet and speak with there is no reason to assume they were somehow coerced or misled by a tight pants wearing suburbanite.

Even though jail did suck and I broke the first rule of a revolutionary (never get caught) there were a few good things to say. Oh yeah, these things aren’t arguments for going to jail but rather me trying to look on the bright side and glean all the rebelliousness from the situation. There were a helluva lot of us and we were pains in the collective ass of Santa Rita jail. Hopefully comrades in the other spot were too but I wasn’t there so I don’t know. Whether it was a guard having to check on our cell every 10 minutes for a bathroom break, or the graffiti left behind poking fun at the pigs scare tactics or just the plain old simple cash that was being thrown at us in the form of food, shelter, and a bunch of pissed off guards, we didn’t make them happy. So that’s good. We also met each other and had some excellent conversations and told some really fun cop jokes. I count those things as positive.

In the end this is how I see it; I’m really glad we took the freeway, I’m really disappointed we got jailed and my friends got beat up, and I’m really mad that all this hatin’ is going on, even though I’m not surprised. I don’t see our movement as being at a place where all our actions have the potential to truly hurt the state. I see us as building right now and learning. Part of learning is trying new things and sometimes that means getting arrested. I don’t want to get arrested but when I realize I will be it gives me a better chance of doing so on my terms and not theirs. I want to try to make each action as likely as possible to inflict damage and help crush capitalism and authority in general, but I don’t want to pretend I’m in Greece and on the verge of insurrection.


“I don’t care what anyone says but this is what it feels like to really start living.”-Comrade on the barricades one week before March 4th.

P.S. The references in the title are to two stupid, hilarious comments made by prison guards during our incarceration and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s).