Max "Bunny" Sparber

NO SOONER do I think about KA but she reappears in my life. On a whim, I went to listen to a talk about why the Powderhorn Coop Closed (Yuppie greed, mostly) at an informal talk at the New Riverside Cafe. It had already been an odd evening, with a skinhead chasing me out of a bookstore to see if we knew who was the author of the Digger broadsheets. This nearly stopped my heart, as I had stolen a book and thought I was pinched.

At the cafe, I noticed KA at another table with a young man. We got together for a few hours on Wednesday and plan to get together again. She has been in Zimbabwe, living an ex-pat life of hustling jobs, and wants to get back to Zimbabwe as soon as she can raise the money for the ticket. She returned to Minneapolis because her mother's house burned down. We only had a few hours to talk, and it has been two years since the last time I saw her, so we were only able to sketch in the details of our experiences.

Because I have a history of intimacy with KA, it is hard not to think of that and desire it again.

IT S A VERY GREAT RELIEF having reduced my hours -- I spent all day Monday downtown wandering through stores. I want to do the same today.

I spent Sunday evening at my parent's home. It was my mother's birthday, so the family (minus my father, in Utah for a seminar) had dinner together. This is the first time I have seen Joshua since he stole all my money. I was civil, but not very friendly toward him. At dinner, everyone admired my new leather bag and my personal organizer, and Joshua knew immediately that I had stolen them from work, and accused me of it, which led to some embarrassment.

The anarchist scene wound up in the national news recently when it was discovered that the CIA informant who orchestrated much of the plot to assassinate Louis Farrakhan was an agent provocateur at the Anarchist Back Room in the mid-Eighties. His name was Michel Summers back then, a name I vaguely recognize.

I have found myself thinking about KA a great deal lately, About a year ago I received an odd letter from her: love poems she had written to me in 1986, when we briefly dated. The letter was postmarked as having come from Minnesota, but when I called her parents I found out she was in Africa. I wonder where she is now.

It was an exciting afternoon. I got off work early and went to the University of Minnesota campus with JS. A shoplifter's mecca. On the West Bank I got some massage oil, two hats, and an assortment of books. In Dinkytown I found mostly books, mostly for the Emma Library. I would guess that between JS and me, we contributed 10 or 12 new books.

Wednesday I was virtually attacked after a meeting of the Jewish Activist Minyan, a jewish radical group I cofounded. RH, who is rapidly becoming the orthodoxy of the Marxist-Anarchist blend that is the Love and Rage Federation, took it upon herself to reprimand me for the Digger broadsheets that me, JH, and SD have written. She threw all the standard criticisms at me: divisive; mean-spirited; etc. Then she threw some criticisms of her own in: stupid; childish. She felt that it was bad politics to not sign these, although I see no difference between remaining anonymous and using pseudonyms, as most of the local radical scene does. It would also be hard to make the case that the broadsheets attack anything except generalized trends within the left, as no organization or individual has been called by name, except in the case of Extreme Noise, when we pointed out the presence of homophobia in their record selection; an action I would not have described as childish.

The local scene cannot take criticism, that much is clear. The most critical voices are the most marginalized, while the ass-kissers have a virtually uncritical seat at the table.

One of these, JM, represents the violent extreme of anarchist tendencies, and it is no surprise that he is a dominant voice in the Anti-Racist Action, a group that has demonstrated a willingness, or even eagerness, to use violence as a tactic. The month I lived with JM, his political discussions consisted mostly of talking about who deserves to get beat up and why. Eventually, however, it always seems to be another anarchist who gets beat up -- I'm thinking in particular of a fellow named S. JM spread rather vicious rumors about S and two women, M and J, which eventually led to a rupture in the friendship of all three people. M was angry enough to simply want to beat JM to death, but S talked her out of it and went to confront JM directly, to tell him off. JM attempted to walk away, and, from what I understand, S attempted to retrain him. This was interpreted as an act of violence and ended with 12 blows to S's head by a bike lock, many hit while S was lying on the ground, splitting S's head open like an egg.

JM called everybody he knew with this argument: We support women who fight back against abusive husbands or boyfriends. I was simply defending myself. S went beserk. It's a political issue, and the anarchist scene must side with me.

JM threw me out of his apartment a few months ago, when we lived together briefly. He took everything I owned and tossed it onto the living room floor. On top of this pile was the bike lock he used to crack open Scott's skull, a clear threat. JM would later claim that both my brother and my father, at different times, had nearly assaulted him. Absurd. I witnessed neither near assault, but it is impossible for me to believe that two people who have no history of attacking strangers would suddenly decide to do so, and both would choose JM as their target. From what I saw, JM assumes any show of anger to be a movement toward violence (perhaps as a result of his own violent personality), and his behavior toward my family was probably obnoxious enough to make them angry.

I HAD TO CALL IN SICK to work yesterday. Somehow, my alarm became reset and I woke up already late. Because it is becoming difficult for me to work at the office supply store, I decided to take the day off and go to the Mall of America. It was the adventure I had hoped for on Sunday, with me moving quietly into stores and stuffing my pockets, then leaving without being noticed. I managed to steal about $170 worth of stuff: sunglasses, tapes, vitamins, a wooden fife. If I had worked, I would have made about $40 in eight hours. Instead, I walked away with more than four times that in one-third the time. It was exhilarating.

I have been a little lonely lately. I have been thinking about calling KK, who is a friend's ex-girlfriend. I think that she has a crush on me, and her boyfriend just left for Washington to finish school. I nearly called her tonight but I was so tired that I was afraid I would just babble.

Between work and politics, I don't have very much private time, which I find frustrating. Tomorrow I will ask for a reduction in my hours at work.

A QUIET DAY. I woke up late as the result of a party last night. I didn't know many of the people, and those I knew I didn't know well. Last night's hosts were not well-prepared enough to have provided alcohol, perhaps because they were underaged, but a guest brought marijuana and we passed it around. I was nicely stoned and good-humored, and was flattered to be invited to the party. But the dominant theme of the party was youth, and I'm afraid that I might have seemed like a strange old guy leering at teenage girls.

I picked up a hip flask yesterday, afraid of another dry party, and filled it with Black Label scotch. A good choice. Nobody else seemed to be able to stand its taste, and the drunk I got from it was very nice. Crisp, almost like being sober. Ordinarily, I like to be able to find a corner at a party and talk with people, but this time I felt out of place. I do not know people my own age anymore, and am not entirely comfortable with people 10 years younger than me.

I spent the day today shopping, or shoplifting, more properly. I had originally intended to go to a Jewish book and gift store in St. Louis Park and pick up some tapes of Jewish music and a new hat, but I only got as far as Uptown. I spent an hour at a used bookstore stuffing my pockets with books, and then I discovered I had run out of room. This was a problem, as I wanted to get a copy of Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology for a library of Jewish radicalism I have been developing at the Emma Anarchist Community Center.

I broke down and paid for it. Then I decided to catch a bus to the Mall of America. The Mall was a disappointment, as all the stores had closed early. I had wanted to spend three or four hours walking around and grabbing stuff, but I settled for a movie. I also need to look for new work, as I am growing very tired of work at the office supply store. Everything there that I want I've already taken, and the hours are murder while the pay is small.

THIS IS A PROJECT I am going to hide deep in the shadowy byways of 50000000 Sparber Fans. It's not meant to be public, although neither is it really meant to be hidden from the public. I don't mind if these blog entries are read, I am simply not looking to broadcast them.

For quite a few years I kept journals, beginning on Jan 1, 1995, which is when I will backdate the blog entry to. At the time, I was 27 years old, and had been through many of the defining experiences of what I will tactfully call my wasted youth, but had not yet begin what I will dub my productive adulthood with an appropriate little pat on my back. These journals covered a brief but thrilling period of shoplifting, an early and unsuccessful foray into becoming a professional pornographer, an ill-advised move back to Los Angeles, and my four years in Omaha, when I worked as Hebrew school teacher, took over a newspaper, and began my career as a playwright. You know, your normal coming of age story.

I rarely read these journals, and often find them unbearably painful to look at. I did not mature quickly or easily, and looking back at these journal entries takes me back to years of my life that were filled with terrible confusion and disappointment, and some behavior on my part that I am not especially proud of. But I can't bring myself to throw the journals out, either. They are stories from my life, told at the moment of their occurrence, and it would be a shame to throw them out just because they embarrass me now. Revisiting your past can be an instructive and humbling experience, at least in part because it is so harrowing.

I will not transcribe every entry, and may not transcribe entries in entirety. This will be the edited version, but the point of the editing is just to throw out the chaff. I sometimes got obsessed with jotting down what I had purchased at thrift stores. I see no real need to reprint those, although I may do one for posterity.

And so here I go, back into my own past, which I was very glad to escape from.

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THE PETTY THIEF'S JOURNAL: January 1 - June 9, 1995

Detailing five months in the basement of a house inhabited by alternateens and drunk punks, wherein Bunny badly pursues two women, starts to write pornography, and obsessively shoplifts.

January 1 | January 3 | January 7 | January 8 | January 28 | March 8 | March 9 | March 20 | April 3 | April 11 | April 16 | April 19 | April 22 | April 25 | April 26 | April 27 | April 29 | May 1 | May 2 | May 3 | May 5 | May 6 | May 11 | May 12 | May 13 | May 16 | May 19 | May 21 | May 22 | May 24 | June 2 | June 7 | June 9 | Postmortem