Your first squat

[mkirby]

There's probably another thread like this somewhere but I can't find it...

When did you stop living like a normal person?

For me it was getting kicked out of the house and just kind of camping and couch surfing for a while until I got used to it. I've never had a big enough group to hold down a good house squat for any length of time, but some people I know have lived in places like that forever.

I'm just kind of curious about how everyone ended up squatting the planet instead of like...working at radioshack or whatever. We can't all have been troubled teenagers being booted or running away from home...but that's most of the kids I meet. What's your deal?

 

[DFA]

back when I was 15 and stuck in tracy, CA my two older friends had an abandoned shack in their backyard covered in graffiti and makeshift beds.
I had some good times there.
That place housed most of tracy's troubled youth for a good 3 years.
A couple times I stayed there I would walk in and my homie miles would
be trying to liquefy house plants into some kind of mind-altering substance. haha.

 

[Dandeforeshadow]

My dad skipped out when I was tiny, and my mom was an ass so when I was eight I left home and ran across a couple punks who showed me to a sxe squat in Denver (they thought it was awesome that I was a kid with a nose piercing. I wonder why I got rid of that piercing. anyway?). It was pretty cool before it got torn down when I was 12. A lot of times you could go in there and be blasted out the door by the volume of the music they played, and it was always the good stuff not the shit kids listen to today (shut up I know I'm 20, but I refuse to admit I'm in the same generation as those who listen to Justin Timberlake XD.)

 

[mkirby]

Wow. Eight.

 

[Dandeforeshadow]

Wow. Eight.

Eh...well there's a very good reason I don't talk about my homelife from before I hit the streets and the few times I was caught by the cops and returned home. Plus eight isn't that young since technically humans period of infancy ends when they're five years old *sweatdrop*.

 

[Dmac]

i hear you Mkirby, nobody should listen to justin timberlake, less it is his whimpering while ya kick him! i was just over in council bluffs iowa, there is an old holiday inn there that is all boarded up, they put a fence around it, but i could see where holes have been made, man i want to get in there! and soon i will, or will be in jail, getting free meals!

 

[Jeremy Germ]

Ok so check this shit out. My first squat was this old abandoned house way out in the stix with this old hippie dude named Daniel. Well he had this crush on this chick but the chick really didn't like him in return. My lesbian friend, Jade started hanging out with her a lot (I think on a pure drug addict relationship) so Daniel started getting all "emo" and wanted to do himself in by swallowing an assload of pills. Well, at the time I was upstairs reading a book, next to the kerosene heater. He came up and started talking shit on how he was going to kill himself and shit and then we got a phone call on his cell phone from Jade. She told me to stop him from taking any pills. The minute she informs me of this he downs them all lol. SO I call 911 on his ass, (I didn't know what else to fucking do) and he got sent to the hospital. Well the next day, his brother comes by and kicks us out of the fucking house!!!! I was like, man I just saved your brother's life, I don't at least get a thank you or anything?" Just a "no" and "if you not out of here by this afternoon, the cops will be here"

 

[moe]

wow, that's nuts dude.

 

[Mari3L]

I left an unstable home environment when I was 18 and lived out of my car for six months. Things kicked off from there. It seemed that all of my life I had met really cool and down to earth people (all the way through school) but they always left my life rather quickly. We didn't fit in with the rest of the crowd. When I hit the road for the first time back when I was 18 living out of my car I started meeting these people again; literally and in spirit. This is what has kept me on the road and living freely for the past several years.

 

[Ravie]

i started squatting uhhh about 3 years ago. i didnt know what i was doing so i slept in an apartment building laundry room. i was barely 15. It sucked because i was realy sick with a blader infection and stomache flu. so i was freezing, pissing blood, had a fever, had no food, and woke up every hour to down a beer to keep warm. and i was sleeping on a tiny blanket i stole from some dudes camp walking down the road. middle of winter with a dog, a shitty "blanket" and concrete. hard times.

 

[Turtles]

I started squatttin over the summer. I basivly got bored with life. Im from mass and basicly you dont squat in mass. In Boston everything gets built up too fast and Worcester where im close to no ones ever squatted for more then a month. Its kind of the pits. So i took the China town bus to Philly and started lookin around. I've had a couple but they've always got busted. The best was when we found a bunch of appartments in a building that werent occupied and we moved in. It was cool we had a TV and heat. But the landlord wasnt happy to find 4 of us one day when she was showin it to someone who wanted to buy it. After a few days we went back and someone had kicked the door off the hindges so we managed to get some of our stuff back.

 

[dirty_rotten_squatter]

My first squatting experience kinda sucked because my girlfriend and I were kicked out of it because they didnt know us well enough and couldnt break security culture or some stupid shit like that. from what we heard, they were certain that we were iformants for the fbi fuckin lame, and then the guy that we were kickin it with broke their politically correctness by calling a girl a chick and she went all freak-o on our asses so we got booted, but the started another squat next door haha, got fucked up every night and invited a few train hopping cats to come bask in our palace of greatness and booze, haha.

 

[MIND DETERGENT]

in san francisco, in the lower haight nayborhood, at the old oak and fillmore squat way after it got boarded up over and over again me and 4 others stayed there for about 2 months before it got busted again. it was grimey and soo much fun the best 2 months of my life probly. every morning me and my friend el tofuo would wake up and smoke hella pot and just paint skulls and bart simpsons and demon pig girls on the walls. one big mural was a huge pile of skulls that said pile of dead trespassers undeneath it and above it a 30 foot long FORT DOOM. this kid dannyboy called the place fort brooklyn though. i had the best room in the place. it was at the very top floor in the very back room and the first 10 times i went in there i had no idea but there was a loft up in the ceiling and in the loft there was a little sliding window that looked out over downtown san francisco . in the morning times the fog would cover the tops of the buildings. seriously i had the funnest 2 months of my life there.

now ive had a couple other squats in chicago and other places since then but im always alone and its never as fun. but they are alot more chill and stable which is very good

 

[Raging Bird]

Kicked out of the house when I was 17 and lived in a car, surviving by tablepicking at restaurants and making my own Yogurt...

This would have been far more fun and less difficult were it not January at the time...

 

[Dirty Rig]

Kicked out of school. Started living in a car with my college roommate. Traveled the east coast in his car together. We split ways, I started hopping trains.

 

[nothing_left_here]

been squattin for about 6 or 7 monthes now, been to a few place and its pretty hard in upstate new york to find a good place. my parents kicked me out about a year ago and up until 6 or 7 months ago i was living on my aunts couch until she kicked me out too. so right now im basically on my own lookin for ppl to stay with till i get to california, but if u need a really awsome place to squat, go to ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA. its the best place ive ever been, i was at a squat there in an old grocery store until somebody bought it 3 months later and kicked me and a few others out, definently the best 3 months of my life tho

 

[mkirby]

I've been to that squat!!!

 

[nivoldoog]

It was a old, Bar called galaxy... Electro, drugs, cross gender, gay bar+ And thats before it closed... It got taken over by the youth, and for a couple months a squat party house. Till it got taken over by a "Buy me drinky" korean joint. At the time it was simply called OLD GALAXY..... Man... Hawaii is a dope place to bum

 

[Mouse]

I guess I never really stayed in one place long enough to say I legitly squated but I think the place I frequented most was an empty used-to-be frat house in RVA next to a 7-11. It was pretty clean and my friends and I got our own room staked out and this guy that was a cook for the VCU campus had the kick boxing room (had a punching/kick bag still hanging in the middle. I don't know if it's still around but that place was very handy when I was far too drunk to walk back to Carry st. from the James to crash at my friends houses.

And there was a squat I stayed at in SF a lot near the greyhound stop downtown. we got the guest room (aka the nastiest room in the place) but it was better than sleeping outside int he bay fog all night.

 

[Salem M.]

Well I guess it started when I was 11 and my dad died from cancer. My mom always was at work so I found myself growing up alone in North Dakota where I went and broke into abandoned farm houses and barns to crash out while walking around the countryside. It got more complex in Humboldt I guess, a seven year time gap, I've squatted these abandoned train station ruins and this one news station on the main street, until the owners started coming back around.
Being homeless never helped me much from having a 'normal' life. So what the hells a person suppose to do, other than that, I just crashed around town wherever I could lay my head for more than two minutes.

Not very interesting at all.