So we’d had our first anniversary last month at a Stag Dinner in her friend Chicken John’s art space, down the street from the Victorian where she used to live. Pretty cool, and Chloe didn’t flinch at the oyster starter or the second course of squid stuffed with blood sausage. But now her birthday was coming up, on April 1st, and I had to come up with something to top that, without tapping into what we’re saving for going to Bali in December.

That’s when I saw it on my Twitter feed: another underground restaurant, this one by Guerrilla Greens. I hadn’t heard of them, but I figured they were probably part of the East Bay's roving, ever-shifting band of backyard-chickening, rooftop-beekeeping, front-yard-chard-growers. They made me feel old, they were so earnest and gluten-free in their muddy Carharts, foraged lemons rolling around the back of their pickup trucks. But at least a couple of these types could usually be counted on to have worked the line at Ubuntu or done a stage at Saison. I signed us up.

Ok, so maybe I should have seen something weird right then. See, they didn’t ask for an email address or a Paypal account, just my address. In fact, there wasn’t any mention of money at all, which was definitely strange, since usually these dinners are, you know, pretty expensive, especially given that the bathroom's usually down 2 flights of stairs and the main course takes three hours to come out and then it's something like three little pieces of raw goat meat in argan oil covered in flowers.

But I wanted to convince myself that maybe this was something really new. Maybe they were trying some kind of different slow-money business model with kale donated by Novella Carpenter. Not that I wanted us digging into platefuls of cougar-chomped lamb, but why couldn’t there be a new post-capitalism paradigm at work? Underground restaurant, underground biz model, right?

Until I woke up on Monday. Shower, shave, go into the kitchen to steam up an almond-milk double latte for Chloe. Except that the stove’s not there. The refrigerator is gone, too, which is okay because we stopped keeping our coffee beans in the freezer after the guy at Sightglass told us how that shocks the beans. And I usually make the almond milk myself in the Vitamix, so I still should be able to make Chloe her coffee. Except these Guerrilla Greens—and really, who else could it be?—have taken everything with a plug. The espresso machine, the juicer, the toaster, even the crockpot given to us not-really-ironically from Chloe’s mom.

There was firewood piled where the television, stereo, and Netflix envelopes had been. They’d left the iPad, which was nice, but after all, they'd need the Twitter feed to explain themselves. Even without the carefully calibrated fair-trade, shade-grown buzz I’d become so used to every morning, I was beginning to understand.

We weren’t going to their restaurant. Their restaurant was coming to us. We were becoming their restaurant. Their restaurant was inside us.

I picked up the iPad. There, on their Twitter feed, was their paradigm: THE NEW URBAN HOMESTEADING. BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

My hands were shaking. I did my yoga breathing. If only they'd left us some matches, we could still make pour-over coffee.

While I crumpled up old copies of the East Bay Express to get the fire going, Chloe came in from the backyard, a baby goat in her arms and a chard leaf caught in her pigtails.

“This..is...the…cutest…thing…I’ve..ever…seen,” she breathed, snuggling her chin between the kid’s floppy little ears. “I’m going back outside to get us some milk for breakfast.”

“But, Chloe,” I whined. “What about your lactose intolerance?” But she didn’t answer; looking out, I could see her head already tucked tightly against the furry brown side of one of the four dwarf goats wandering through the backyard, nibbling the oak branches and trimming down the blackberry brambles. "Aren't you going to be late for Hot Zumba?"

“It’s like squeezing a hairy water balloon!” she called back, as a family of quails skittered over to the compost pile, followed by three seagulls and five high-stepping pigeons. A snake lolled on one of the three discarded, empty computer monitors which were now filled with honeycomb and a swarm of slightly angry-sounding bees. A bag of clay kitty litter and a bale of straw sat in a back corner. I knew, without looking, that the next tweet would be cryptic instructions for building a cob oven.

I still need my coffee every morning, but besides that, it’s not so bad. I know what to do now. Chloe freecycled a hand-cranked coffee grinder, and we filter it through one of her old American Apparel tank tops. We’re naked now, most of the time; it just feels better, especially after a whole bunch of snails moved into the shower. We sleep on the moss under the oak tree; our futon's under the porch, growing our first crop of enoki mushrooms. Chloe says we should have our friends over for escargots in goat butter next week.

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Guerrilla Greens: Extreme Urban Homesteading