Saturday, June 2004 Adrien Vlach (NASCO) writing Its been a year since I first Came to Buffalo. I came with my predecessor Jim Jones to see my first NASCO Properties house and coordinate my first NASCO Properties meeting. I remember the living room (then a dining/all purpose room). It was set up like this top secret central activist headquarters. There were bulletin boards and dry erase boards bearing messages everywhere, plus magazines, a computer, a copier, etc… The attic was an attic, the kitchen was a basement, I showered in the “kitchen” with the hose attached to the “kitchen sink”, and Nicole slept in a nook on the staircase. Even then much of this house was fancier than any co-op I’d ever seen and my awe of the building was diminished only by my awe of the people. Having cleaned up from Midi Prom, I write this now, surreptitiously, in a new bedroom on the third floor (no longer an attic). A year later, the house is so much more grand, but more than ever, it is upstaged by the brilliance of its occupants. It is easy to fall under the spell of this place. Like a mythic HOME, like Rivendell, its all full of thought, beauty, effort, and warm hearts. You can literally see, hear, and taste the personal investments that define this space. But what it also is… Is a pitcher plant, or a lovely siren’s call. This co-op is a bottomless well of potential that attracts dreamer and in that it is a trap. Trapping dreamers isn’t necessarily a bad thing but, for now, the trap is fraught with frustrated, guilty, and anxious feeling of responsibility. I knew full well what it was, but still I have fallen in. I’ve had Kevin, then Mark, then Emily, then Monica to illustrate the danger. These, the people I’ve worked wit the most, worn thin and weary wit h the burden of this house, A schedule that won’t be met, a job that doubles and redoubles and pangs of responsibility and guild that go unabated after personal sacrifice upon personal sacrifice. Kevin was the first and hardest to watch. He has always reminded me so keenly of myself at my extremes. At my brightest and darkest moments. He is honest, loyal, driven by his dreams, and almost incapable of saying no. HE seems willing to take responsibility for any problem, any task he believes in, and carry it – whether he has any fair claim to it or not. I think that he has high expectations of the world but mostly of himself, and as is the way with those of use that assume too much, that choose to carry the weight of the world on our own shoulders, and deep in our own hearts, he probably experience life as a series of failures sprinkled with miracles – one, ten, a hundred intentions missed for every one realized. Like a moth to a flame he was drawn to this place. This infinite well of potential. This mire of expectations. Can I infer the boom and bust cycle of intentions, effort, disappointment, depression, avoidance, and gilt? Its are current cycle that I have known so well that I have to wonder if I’m simply projecting, when I perceive it in others. Perhaps Kevin is less familiar to me than I imagine, but I doubt it. Kevin and Emily - two peas of a pod! How I want the best for them! I could write about so many of the people that have shaped this place, and perhaps someday I will, laying bare my observations and assumptions, but Kevin (and Emily, who shares so many of his quirky traits) exemplifies best the bittersweet underpinning s of this cooperative. There is great love and sacrifice built into these walls. This is an organism salvaged from Ruin BY and FOR people that, as a matter of course, put their own needs last, helping others, supporting causes, undertaking great projects, and rarely demanding reward. This is the co-op of the givers