CURRENT MISSION

Short Answer: Tiamat is like a huge, extended family. We are a group of people who help each other out.

ABOUT ME

www.livejournal.com/~Tiamat_IC for a full FAQ. ATTENTION: There are THREE Tiamat houses! For Tiamat Edgewater, contact ersatzbanana@gmail.com. For Tiamat Lakeview contact brigidcpierce@yahoo.com.au. For Tiamat Lincoln Park contact awibs@hotmail.com. Or mass email all three. DO NOT REPLY VIA THIS SITE. WE DO NOT CHECK IT VERY OFTEN.

Short Answer: Tiamat is like a huge, extended family. We are a group of people who help each other out. We are non-religious (ie not a cult) friendly, moderately liberal, and generally live and let live. A lot of us live in a "Community House" - think Grandma's house on Thanksgiving. It is not a hippie commune - the house is substantially cleaner. We do have personal property, although we're pretty cool about sharing it. We are mostly not income sharing. This is largely because we are in a city, not on a farm, and thus most of our means of survival comes from separate jobs. We do spotty catering and personal chef work, and put people up in a hostel/bed-n-breakfast kind of way, and the income from that is shared. Unlike most ICs, you do not have to live in a Community House full-time to be a member. A member is anyone who is *welcome* to share our space. Some members, called core members, are financially responsible for defined portions of our space which they regularly occupy. Others travel and live here when they are in town. Others are simply frequent guests. To be a participating community member you need only be an active, loving, giving part of our adoptive family.

PHILOSOPHY

Purpose of the Community:

A community is a group of people who work together, helping each other survive and be happy. The purpose of any community is the protection and care of the young, the old, and the sick, while compensating all the able, working adults by sharing burden and providing caring companionship. The community is the largest and loosest level of this kind of comradery and teamwork. The next ring in is family in its truest sense, and the closest, most intense version is the core of marriage underneath the religious and sexual frills.

A membership to Tiamat IC is a commitment to this purpose of shared work, protection, care, comradery, and companionship. As a member you will be freely offered the same in return. The biggest way we offer material assistance is in the matter of living spaces and entreprenuership. Thus, one of our major purposes is to have houses and grassroots buisnesses that are largely for the benefit of community members. Non-materially, the purpose of the Community is to provide a network of people to whom you can turn to for help with whatever you wish. Note that a membership is NOT a lease, nor a “right” to any physical thing. All property and material items you may be offered use of are privately owned/leased by one member or another under various State laws and City ordinances, willingly lent for use by other members of the community, but never for mutual ownership/lease without a separate legal contract as ordained by the appropriate State and/or City. This is a social entity, not a material transaction. Any money exchanged is a voluntary donation to the community as a whole or an individual member, a gift or favor.

We operate on the basis of acknowledged rational anarchy: “Government” and “rules” as an omnipotent entity that must be obeyed are a farce. One is always free to break the “rules” no matter how sternly they were set forth. In that sense, all responsability is personal; it becomes impossible to shift blame. One cannot say “They told me to do it,” as a form of excuse after considering a command rationally and deciding for oneself to go along or not. Contrariwise, if one wishes something done, one has to step forth , assume leadership, and initiate action oneself. There is no selfless, benign “government” waiting at one’s beck and call. We acknowledge this state of affairs and do not waste time keeping up a charade of a “government” or “rules” or “rights”. We operate on a suggestion-and-general-accepta nce basis. We have patterns and social norms, enforced under the sleepless omniprescence of Judge Lynch. Mean or vastly offensive behavior will be judged with human subjectivity and can result in the withdrawal of our friendship and help, which is all any community can really withdraw. We cannot legally keep you or your property, and vice versa. Severe incidents may result in a large number of community members electing as individuals to go to the police of the appropiate State, County, Country and/or City. Incidentally, this is not hypocritical to the theory of Rational Anarchy; to go to police is simply to utlize the services of the bullies and thugs we hired when we conciously chose not to evade our taxes.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

None off this website, but lots of visitors have been put up, and we have visited many places.

Interests

People! Food, art, music, theater, psychology, video/computer games, cats, veganism

• cats
• arts
• theater
• dining
• breakfast
• traveling
• survival
• music
• emergency services
• law
• psychology

Music, Movies, and Books

Vast and varied. Required reading for some community principles: Stranger In A Strange Land + The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Learned how to love people.

Countries I’ve Visited

Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

Australia, Brazil, Mexico, United States