Holding down the shift key (waiting to begin).

Someone IM'd me this morning, to ask why I don't write here anymore. There are a number of things I could cite as explanations; none of them seem worth sharing, but alas... She asked.

For starters, I haven't really had time. Nor have I felt terribly reflective. There hasn't been the sort of me-time required for adequately sorting out ideas and experiences, much less unpacking in them in some worthwhile visual, here. It's called managing the unmanageable. The moments at which I stop myself and just take in my surroundings and how absolutely unique and unlikely it is that I arrived at a given point and place in time, without any reference to next moment, or what I might need to do in that moment... Those are negligibly few. I've become relatively oblivious to details and it's evident in virtually every dimension of my waking hours. Work, friendships, relationships, everything.

And there's a trajectory to account for, as well. Just over six years ago, I moved back to DC from Seattle, resurrected a relationship in relative tatters, and embraced the trainwreck of a life I'd walked away from a few months prior. This is where my dogwalking began, this is where I moved into Casa del Ajo, this is where I began studying at the ISE, this is where I began touring heavily and traveling the world, this is where I ultimately felt so animated by what had emerged therein that I got married. And one New Year's Day, I accepted that much of it had dry-rotted, and I cut myself loose. Everything that stood between the worst moments of my life and my present kinda went the way of vapor.

I began this blog in the aftermath; in the clearing that I woke up to each morning, attempting to document the things I would build there. Brighter Days was built, shoring up my material life in new ways and sort of catapulting me into an altogether different relationship with age etc. A new relationship began, and in turn found me moving from my house on Capitol Hill to an apartment in north Dupont; yet another significant leap in what I'd like to understand as a progressive narrative. There seemed a real unfolding (forward, mind you) worth documenting.

Now, that relationship has come to a rather complicated end, I'm moving out of the apartment, and have the distinct sense that I'm doing nothing terribly well. I read a few pages here and there when I wake up in the early morning and can't coax myself back to sleep. The energy I put into work has the feel of self-preservation (rather than creativity), and creative scope of my actual life feels constrained in ways that I can't really account for. It all sort of snuck up on me.

It's difficult to muster the desire to render concrete those sorts of inklings, in a format like this. I've been slowly working up the courage to recognize that I've ultimately got to begin again; that this chapter, like every other, has insisted upon its own closure and has demonstrated a rather marked indifference to my need to understand the passing my time as progressive. I very well may not be improving upon myself in ways I want to publicly celebrate. I may just be fucking up, necessary as it may be, for now.

So, here's the skinny, kids: I've been invited to live as an "artist in residence" at the Dharma House a number of folks have set up, here in DC. Part of this is deeply personal; at this point in my life, I feel a real need to deepen my practice. The reasons are manifold, and equally difficult to give words. For starters, I struggle -- daily -- with an often crippling self-hatred, and that shit about not being able to love others without adequately loving oneself is no joke. It's done things to me that I never would've imagined possible. Really digging in and working with that is going to be pretty ugly, I gather. So, I want the space to be able to drop everything and deliberately tend to that, as needed; I want to be able to stake out moments of my day as a sort of retreat, and really give myself to the practice. And I want to be surrounded by people willing to gently call me on dodging it. It bares mentioning that those of you (friends) that have voiced support and excitement about this have enabled me to exhale in a certain way. I've inhabited a certain anxiety about both the stigma I might invite by "coming out" about this dimension of my life, not to mention the way the disclosure of this internal struggle might cast my relationships with certain people in a suspicious light (at very least, the transparency of said relations; I haven't exactly advertised to friends that this struggle cuts across most everything in my life.). So far, that hasn't been the case; everyone seems to find their own reasons for being excited about this step.

Additionally, my role in the house will largely involve coordinating workshops, seminars, study groups, etc. that offer a challenge toward radical, organized social transformation among (what we call) "convert buddhists" here in DC, and (hopefully) new points of interrogation for anarchists, leftists, etc. here. We'll see how that goes; there's certainly some transition afoot in radical circles locally, and opportunities abound for a bit of re-making of ourselves.

Toward that very end, Denman and I will be heading to Chiapas (Mexico) at the end of March, to begin a month in Zapatista territory, mostly studying at the Zapatista Language School. Thereafter, we'll be busing up through the country (with stops in Oaxaca City and Mexico City) , and on to LA and San Francisco. Finally, we'll make our way back across the country via train, with stops in Chicago and Mississppi. If you think we'll cross your path, let us know.

Just in time for all of this, I'll bring this blog to a close, in favor of a proper website that'll probably resemble a bit more of a zine than journal. Once that's live, I'll post an announcement as a final entry here. Until then, be well.

Travel: Big and Small, pt. 5 (aka How I Spent My Summer)

[Rowan Oak, the estate of William Faulkner]
It's curious that I've never quite entirely gotten my head around my love affair with the District. The best I've been able to deduce, it has something to do with this being the first place I've ever chosen to live, which on the surface doesn't seem like a terribly astute observation. After all, nothing is outside of the market, these days. And in turn, the list of things we've been conditioned to file under "choice" (usually without so much as blinking) is nearly incalculable. More to the point, the degree to which most of us have internalized that logic is pretty difficult to overstate. So, I once caught myself laughing at my tentative conclusion, thinking "Well, who didn't chose to live someplace at one point or another? And what about that rite of passage would necessarily give rise to this sort of love affair?"

It wasn't for lack of trying, either. I'd quit a job of four years, left a rather sweet living arrangement, and more or less uprooted my entire life in a short-lived move to Seattle some six years ago. And while a number of factors (personal life, job prospects, etc) saw me making my way eastward again, there was undeniably a sense of exile operative in it all. Just months before I'd left, I'd been part of a guerilla poster campaign the AFL-CIO had hired a few of us to carry out in opposition to Bush's sweeping elimination of workplace ergonomics standards; an action that elicited a rather irate phone call from the White House. When the invasion of Afghanistan began in late 2001, on the other hand, I was standing in a random crowd of strangers in one city, in one state, on the far coast. The contrast, the isolation and sense of impotence was considerable, to say the least.

Certainly, during the years I spent touring heavily, the combination of dislocation and the sheer multiplicity of gifts disparate geographies offer often left me with the sense that the District was not necessarily disproportionately stacked in any way that would compel me to live here. Buenos Aires, Oslo, Stockholm, Leeds, Strousbourg, Barcelona, Bologna all struck me as places in which I could both lose myself and perhaps unearth an as yet unknown part of that self. And that sort of frightened me. It cast into instability and incoherence my unflinching devotion to and romance with place. This place, in particular.

There's a rather understated function to distilling a given scenario (real or hypothetical) down to its actual requirements, or what its realization demands. Growing up, we get a healthy dose of terror over the onset of each forthcoming stage of our lives, most of which has everything to do with the interests of those speaking at these given moments, and very little (if anything) to do with our fulfillment. I've remarked on this in the past a bit (in a previous post), but it bares returning to for a moment, given that it offers something to one's relationship with place; it offers something my relationship with this place.

Back in May, there was a flyer hanging in the hallway of a midtown Memphis coffeehouse, advertising a multi-bedroom apartment with all sorts of amenities -- nine foot ceilings, the works. I don't remember the exact price, but it was a fraction of the north Dupont apartment in which I've recently taken up residence. And in all fairness, midtown Memphis isn't necessarily anything to sneeze at. Indeed, a vibrant little progressive community is emerging there; one we stumbled onto by sheer accident, attempting to track down a veg Thai restaurant we'd googled before getting on the plane that morning. A queer community center, a used bookstore that seems to serve as a space for homegrown artists, and a massive coffeehouse/lounge not terribly unlike Pensacola's End of the Line (for those who've been there) or the Langdon Street Cafe in Montpelier. And that's really just what we managed to poke our heads into over the course of an hour or so. And not unlike Pensacola and Montpelier, the price is certainly right for anyone who isn't finding our economy terribly resonant with their life aspirations.

And that's precisely where I think that adolescent terror would intuitively land me; a disproportionate and over-determinative role for the impulse to economize life, as though this or that decision is compelling or worthwhile by virtue of how it enables me to accumulate. Moreover, the manner in which that practice of accumulation essentially constitutes our method of evaluating both the viability and progress of our lives. The idea that one might organize one's decisions, livelihood, financial prospects etc. around a commitment to place, rather than the reverse, is virtually off the table... Largely because it's been structurally eliminated as an option. Which brings me back to my first point: Everything has been absorbed by the market. And it stabs in both directions; we gravitate toward and settle in those places that pose the fewest financial challenges, which in turn vindicates accumulation as an emotional/spiritual/intellectual health index, leaving the general model intact.

In all of this, of course, we're abiding the boundaries of fulfillment, not survival; the operative consideration for most, and the "invisible hand" that gives rise to the utterly vacuous immigration debate dominating the airwaves, these days. Brutal a blueprint it was, central to market economics (as elaborated by Adam Smith) was the principle that capital cannot be free unless labor is free. In other words, if capital can cross borders, labor must be able to, as well. Funny that no one mentions that, no? Odds are the corporate world would shit its pants if it woke up to a world where it was commonly held that if business can cross borders in search of lower wages, workers can cross them in search of higher ones. Ultimately, the racist social dimension of the conservative political orientation that businesses have traditionally counted on is coming back to bite it in the ass. The intuitive and organic migration patterns exacerbated by the acceleration of neo-liberal economic policies in the last few decades have begun to threaten the racial and ethnic dreamland certain (dominant) sectors of our population have concocted over the years. And true to history, the most vulnerable, battered, and disenfranchised are getting the business end of it.

But I digress...

I've been in and out this summer (hence my lack of activity, here). Down south for a family wedding. Up to Montreal for an IAS board meeting. Rehoboth for a spontaneous day at the beach. Baltimore just for the hell of it (and an Iraq Vets Against the War event). And I was only spared a long weekend in Buenos Aires due to pretty gratuitous miscommunication. And yet I wake up rather early each morning (usually to feed the cats) and have to read myself back to sleep for fear I'll wander out the door to watch the sun come up in another neighborhood (or on the SW waterfront, watching planes taking off from National); that I'll lose track of responsibilities (more than I already have) indulging this place, this geography that animates and casts me into relief... That I'll let go of the reins, seduced by a stage set that (by all reasonable standards) should've scared the shit out of me, the moment I opted to live here. Occasionally, these passing flashes of clarity are disorienting. I wonder (sometimes in terror, usually in the middle of the night) why I'm not more inclined to economize life; why I'm not more driven by the things I'll have to leave behind when the time comes.

A friend of mine recently married, and entered his 30th year. Not surprisingly, he remarked on the shift in perspective that comes with both, mostly an effect of age. I (also not terribly surprisingly) resorted to self-deprecation, invoking that I, too, would be joining him in the ranks of the big Three-Oh momentarily, and enjoy (by virtue of my divorce) that oh-so-coveted status of Damaged Goods, to boot. "Yeah, but you've done a lot of shit pre-30, bro", he replied. And I don't think that observation is immune from the juxtaposition of survival and fulfillment; if anything, that tension is spilling out the seams. And perhaps I've taken up in the District out of what it allows me to fulfill, to the tune of Audre Lorde imploring that "We were never meant to survive." And perhaps it's only when I'm abruptly dragged from sleep that survival catches up with me and pulls the air from my lungs for a moment.

No matter. It's enough to pass those moments with Seymour Hersh (his writing, anyway) or the off bike ride across the Ellington Bridge. Better, one thinks, to be tormented by one's precarious relationship with survival, than one's unraveling dialog with living. I can survive when I'm dead.

[Iraqi Labor Delegation solidarity rally, outside the offices of Bearing Point, SWDC]

[Colin Bossen, speaking on the Chicago Couriers Union at Provisions Library]

[Keeping tabs on Zionist assclowns, June 10th]

[Lake Mohawk, Mississippi]

Travel: Big and Small, pt. 4

Upon spending even a day wandering other northeastern US cities (for our purposes, say... Philadelphia and Manhattan), your average white resident of the District is hard-pressed to miss the relief into which DC's apartheid structure is rather clearly drawn. Stroll through Thompkins Square Park (or any other public space in lower Manhattan, for that matter) and you're immediately left counting -- on one hand, mind you -- the spaces in which one might be likely to see black families doing their thing within any proximity whatsoever to white families in DC (areas of NW between Florida Ave. and Oak St. offer some minor exception, with regard to Latino/White encounters; not without their own troubling contradictions).

None of this is to idealize such relations in the aforementioned cities; one needn't scroll back terribly far in even the mainstream headlines to locate the last time an innocent black male was riddled with four clips worth of police issue in NYC, and Philly's just now getting around to raising an eyebrow at its current state governor's role (as DA, in the 80's) in exercising nearly 2/3 of his jury-selection dismissals to remove black jurors from the prosecution of a certain black journalist (to say nothing of sworn testimony from a court stenographer that the judge in said case was overheard -- during recess -- relaying that he was about to "help fry a nigger"). Prison statistics being what they are in the US, we're blanketed in the shit, location be damned. Nonetheless, the contrast is stark. After some eleven years in the District, I'm not aware of any such public encounters; any such tangible indication that the lives of whites and the majority of black folks in DC so much as resemble each other or entail comparable aspirations. The neighborhoods that do presently offer up such routine encounters are almost exclusively those blessed with the euphemism of transition, and the encounters therein rarely stray from par for that particular course, nearest the casual observer can discern.

On some level, I suppose one could draw comfort from the apparently exceptional place DC holds in this regard; it lends itself to (at least) the daydream that this clusterfuck is not necessarily insurmountable. There are places that have not quite drifted into the uniquely sustained and brutal war on dignity overseen in our fair city... It's feasible that, buried somewhere within those places, one might come across some semblance of a bread trail back to something marginally less crushing. On another, It seems each passing minute sees the city further structurally outfitted against any such possibility, with skylines that stifle whatever fleeting thoughts one might entertain as to the value of what they've displaced. And no one's laughed out of the room (or strung up by their thumbs) when talk of "Redeeming the Dream" accompanies "commercial revitalization" and the emptying of the neighborhoods that went up in flames when King got popped.

Restraint begins to feel like sacrilege. And maybe it should.

Something akin to that surfaced in me, reading that the exhibit on The Disappeared had been declined by every major museum in the US, finding its only home at El Museo del Barrio. Even for people conscious of them -- people involved in solidarity movements, even -- eras like the not-so-long-gone military dictatorships of Latin America are often enough understood as distant abstractions -- near speculative legend, even -- despite that their atrocities reached such scale as to make the evening news hum of our childhoods, and despite that our country was as much responsible for them as it is the occupations of Iraq and Palestine, the invasions of Lebanon and Somalia, and the steadily unraveling scandal of State-sponsored rightwing death squads in Colombia.

Moreover, given what a comeback the practice of disappearing "persons of interest" has seen under the Bush administration, and the emergence of Guantanamo detention facilities, CIA Black Ops facilities abroad, extraordinary rendition, and the daily reports of raids on undocumented immigrants (often swifted off to privately-run facilities while their children are still in school or daycare)... Nevermind how many US officials are currently indicted or on trial (in absentia) for kidnapping and other violations of international law... It's oddly conspicuous that the educational function of the modern museum has seemingly evaporated into thin air on this nakedly illustrative bit of history. It's more than merely refusing responsibility for the bloodbaths we underwrote beneath the equator some decades ago. It's a matter of the profound structures of violence and domination elaborated in the now, and the fact that their character is anything but novel.

Not surprisingly, the exhibit was simply jaw-dropping. If we'd done nothing else while in NYC, the trip would've been exceptional and well-conceived on account of the two hours we spent in El Museo, alone. And were we not also aiming to hit the Facing Fascism exhibit next door (which left us both feeling a bit under-whelmed), they'd have had to drag us out at closing.

Beyond that, NYC was a blur of bedhead, coffee, vegan restaurants, bookstores, demanding cats, and sore feet. We didn't catch up with nearly as many folks as I'd have liked, but that really just makes for convenient cause to go back again and often.

[This little one fussed at me, and kept tabs on the goods at MooShoes]

[This little one was adamant that no one in her house should ever sleep... Or do anything but play with her]

[The bus ride home was Lindsey's favorite part]

Travel: Big and Small, pt. 3

When I made a veritable day job of walking dogs, I did so having realized that in most meaningful ways, it was preferable to every other work environment I'd taken up, prior. Within eight months, I'd left town to study for two months in Vermont. Just three months after returning, I'd found a subletter for my room at Casa del Ajo and skipped town to play shows across South America, the US and Europe. Thereafter, my work was punctuated (albeit, less and less) by this or that tour, more study jaunts in Vermont, a trip to Palestine, weekend conferences, etc. In short, my job was more or less a mechanism by which I sustained routine (if not entirely constant) motion. Generally, that was in place of any authentic stability, but the jury was still out on such things being altogether desirable at that point, anyway. So, in the end, work rarely felt like work. It was merely what I did from 12-3pm, when I wasn't doing whatever it was that made that particular day interesting.

Upon launching Brighter Days, I found myself wet-headed in the kitchen, filling the coffee grinder earlier and earlier. And the previously optional administrative elements of my work (not to mention my resistance to them) began swallowing up more and more of my day. Mind you, this is down to a relatively conscious decision to fuse my livelihood with the fairly radical reconstructive vision of society that animates most other aspects of my life; a decision I have zero cause to mourn. Nonetheless, what was once a line of work I relished for its simplicity and comparatively undemanding character is increasingly something on which I could spend (quite seriously) every waking minute.

Granted, there's delegation; we're a collective after all. I'm shitty with numbers, and have a proven record off piss poor attention to financial matters. So, I play as little role in such things as I reasonably can. Nonetheless, there's a seemingly bottomless creative potential in what we've set out to do, which leaves me with any number of other tasks. Where a business website might traditionally hem rather closely to the promotional/service template, ours can also serve an informative and radicalizing function beyond what is strictly lucrative or instrumental to our individual material interests. It constitutes both a step past capitalist logic (i.e. the radical possibilities of merely supplanting Use Value for Exchange Value) and an attempt to forge new connections; to render tangible what we see to be the nakedly apparent bridges between the world of a handful of bike-happy anarchists (and the constellation of radical social projects in which it resides) and the worlds of people who stumble on to our website. It's an opportunity to challenge assumptions, pose questions, and foment a sort of cognitive dissonance that lingers long after the banalities of the company-client relation have been resigned to background noise, or abandoned altogether.

Search all you like. There's no such volume in the "... for Dummies" section of Barnes & Noble (or Busboys, for that matter). The same goes for merely experimenting with infrastructure and organization in a self-managed workplace. The actual labor that constitutes the face of what we do is now little more than a footnote, really. And what resides beneath it is by all indications relatively infinite.

Needless to say, Lindsey's arrival on the scene threw a whole other set of variables into the fray. It's not even an equation I've entirely worked out, at this point. Being emotionally available and present, while dragging around this whole other bag of (rather compelling an exciting) unknowns is not the sort of thing for which there exists some sort of kill switch. Life just doesn't work that way, and there's something altogether more demanding than that in the challenge. If there weren't, it'd be a pretty cheap and uninteresting narrative, I gather.

Which brings me back (nearly full circle) to the theme I explored in the first entry of this blog: Becoming; the recognition that one cannot be what one was, that one must forge new resonances, new positions, new ways of orienting oneself to the world with which one is greeted each morning. It's relevant because a few days ago I woke up to a world in which I was someone who needed a vacation. I'm not even kidding. The endlessly multiplying lines of flight (all more or less equally compelling) arising in the creative -- and by that, I mean predominant -- sphere of my life had proliferated to the point of being a single, dulling frequency, utterly indistinguishable from one other. And my orientation to it all had become a sort of averse and passive lockgroove of convincing myself that "It can wait", which in turn became its own static feedback loop.

Besides, I needed a new belt. Which obviously meant going to NYC. More on that later.

What. The. Fuck.

I feel old.

Travel: Big and Small, Pt. 2

Small business ownership (or self-employment, take your pick) offers, if nothing else, convenient means of rendering one's passions a tax write-off. That is, of course, if one's line of work has anything whatever to do with one's passions. Being a worker-owned, ecologically-sustainable "workplace" (as it were) means that our collective romance with liberation and... Well... Bikes, becomes an excuse to withhold money from Uncle Sam. Back in March, we donated over $500 worth of services to the annual fundraising auction held for the Washington Area Bicyclist Association, and this past month, we kicked $200 to Visions in Feminism (and indirectly, Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive).

And this past weekend, we took our first collective road trip to Trexlertown Velo Swap, in eastern Pennsylvania, an an effort to acquire gear on the cheap. Sadly, this was derailed due to poor highway signage in the region (despite our getting up at 6am to make the morning scramble). By the time we found our way there, it was pretty well picked over, but I did manage to score a set of 170mm Dura-Ace track cranks and bottom bracket for about half of what they'd have set me back, otherwise. Devin and Seager settled for soft pretzels from the concession stand.








After a brief stop at Seager's family home in Bucks County, we shot east to Philly, where he and Devin browsed record stores, and where I stuffed my face at Gianna's Grille. Worth noting is the vast improvement in their vegan dessert case. Holy fucking fuck. Boston Creme-style canoli with chocolate shavings and peanut-butter drizzle... Easily one of the best vegan items that's ever found its way into my mouth.

[Vegan junk food... Canoli not pictured]

[Seager, seconds after Devin informed us he'd "miscarried" in a cafe bathroom]

I'd really forgotten what a charming place Philly is. For starters, it seems to have retained a stable working class at its center (whereas that section of the District's population is largely on its eastern periphery), which makes for a really classical urban feel one imagines older US cities to have. Seven years ago, I was in and out of the city every so many months; whether it was helping gut the newly acquired IWW HQ, a stopover on the way to NYC after hearing the Diallo murder verdict, the RNC protests, or the nearly weekly legal strategy meetings or court appearances I had to make, thereafter. And I'd sadly forgotten what a genuinely gorgeous city it is. Perhaps most noteworthy from this recent visit were a series of vaguely cubist murals that have been added to the sides of a number of houses/buildings around South Street. Stunning stuff that I stupidly neglected to photograph.

[City of Brotherly Love, outbound]

[Benched]

Next stop, NYC.

Either it Matters or it Doesn't.

Yesterday, I made my morning pilgrimage to Sticky Fingers, and bumped into a character (who will go unnamed for now) I used to do organizing with. He was rather polite and friendly with me; odd given that he'd been central to a number of efforts to insulate to local A-circling anticapitalist youth ghetto from accountability for its often overt racism and nakedly racist and colonialist subtleties -- usually by slandering, attacking, and silencing yours truly (or others) when challenges to said practices were mounted.

Yesterday, he was sporting a tshirt in support of Daniel McGowan, an environmental activist from the Pacific Northwest who recently plead out on federal charges resulting from an "ecoterrorism" sting. Granted, the FBI raids on these people and the movements they're a part of are dubious, overzealous, and nearly indefensible given that they're explicitly non-violent, and given the very real violence of the industries they're often targeting (carbon wasn't declared a federally regulated substance for nothing, kids).

But given the low level of confrontation in our morning encounter, I wanted to ask, "So, I'm curious... How many shirts do you own supporting Arab political prisoners? Or Latino detainees? For that matter, can you name an Arab or Latino political prisoner?" But I bit my tongue, opting instead to evade playing into what I'm sure is the caricature such people have constructed of me.

Nonetheless, it begs certain obvious questions. One can nearly hear George Galloway's now infamous Scottish-accented "What a silly person you are!", and his outrage at a SkyNews anchor who publicly mourned Israeli casualties of the invasion of Lebanon last summer, while not being able to name a single member of the Palestinian family that had (just weeks prior) been shelled by Israeli tanks, during a beach picnic in Gaza. The equation is the same: Certain bodies weigh more heavily on our collective conscience than others. You can scour the Brian Mackenzie Infoshop, and you won't find a "Free Dr. Sami Al-Arian" shirt, anywhere. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone there who knows who he is.

Days ago, police uncovered what is being described as the largest weapons cache in "years" in the southeastern US, in the hands of a rightwing militia that Democracy Now! reports was planning attacks on Latino immigrants. The charges brought against these (white) men? Conspiracy to make a firearm, and being a drug user in possession of a firearm (entailing a maximum five-year sentence). Lucky for them, there is no Guantanamo for white people. Were they not white, they'd be hooded, diapered, and air-bound for some Black Ops facility in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia right about now (likely to be tortured and held incommunicado for years), and we wouldn't be reading about it on Yahoo! News.

In this discourse that is so inviolate and sacred for anticapitalist youth-culture, one is sort of left wondering where our similarities stack up... With the Sami Al-Arian's of the world? Or the white-supremacist insurrectionists counting their lucky European genes that they're not buried in some Egyptian dungeon, water-boarded? Either it matters or it doesn't.

______________________________________

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Raids that resulted in the arrests of six alleged militia members and the seizure of hundreds of hand grenades and bullets were "much ado about nothing," a defense lawyer said Friday.

A cache of ammunition that was confiscated — 2,500 rounds — wasn't that large, and the scores of homemade hand grenades that agents seized could be made with powder from fireworks and components readily available in military surplus stores, attorney Scott Boudreaux said.

Even prosecutors say the ragtag group called the Alabama Free Militia had no intended target and was simply stockpiling munitions, said Boudreaux, who plans to meet this weekend with his client, Raymond Kirk Dillard, 46, of Collinsville, a supposed major in the paramilitary group.

"Frankly, I don't think that's a big deal," said Boudreaux. "It seems to be much ado about nothing."

Jim Cavanaugh, regional director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the raids eliminated a huge threat. The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks extremist organizations, said the weapons seizure was the largest in the South in years.

"The arrests and the seizure of such an enormous arsenal are a compelling reminder that extremist groups continue to operate in otherwise peaceful communities filled with law-abiding citizens," said Bill Nigut of Atlanta, ADL regional director.

Five men were jailed without bond on federal charges of conspiring to make a firearm after the raids, conducted early Thursday in four Alabama counties. They included Dillard; Adam Lynn Cunningham, 41; Bonnell Hughes, 57; Randall Garrett Cole, 22; and James Ray McElroy, 20.

A sixth alleged member, 30-year-old Michael Wayne Bobo, was charged with being a drug user in possession of a firearm.

Don Colee, an attorney for Hughes, said all six men were due in court on Tuesday for a hearing where a federal judge will determine whether the government can keep them in custody.

Dillard lived in a small camper without electricity or running water in northeast Alabama, and neighbors said McElroy lived in a makeshift tent nearby. Bobo lived with his parents in an upscale subdivision in suburban Birmingham.

A court document indicates Dillard, unknowingly met with an ATF informant at a flea market in Collinsville about four months ago, told him he was organizing a militia and later accepted him into the group as a sergeant major.

The informant was at the home of Cole, an alleged militia lieutenant, about two months ago when he saw grenades, according to the document, a sworn statement by ATF agent Adam Nesmith. Investigators found more weapons as they monitored the group through the informant and with video and audio surveillance, Nesmith said.

During the raid, agents recovered 130 hand grenades, a grenade launcher, about 70 hand grenades rigged to be fired from a rifle, a machine gun, a short-barrel shotgun, 2,500 rounds of ammunition, explosives components, stolen fireworks and other items.

U.S. Attorney Alice Martin said the fireworks used to make the grenades were commercial grade, not the type sold in retail stores in Alabama.

"Even to possess these fireworks without a license is a felony in Alabama," she said.

[Actual story here]