Marcuse and the Right to the City

So we’re in crisis. Things are bad. Davies and Marcuse present two takes on the whys and hows of how we got here, and they aren’t all that different. What is different is that Davies is limited to limited criticism of the existing system, he cannot see beyond it. He joins the cautious optimism that we can correct it, that something simply went very wrong in a system that is perfectly all right, and that with the right technical fixes we can leave all of that behind us. Marcuse looks beyond, as should anyone who has lived through the many crises that our economy has rocked, or has asked questions like why inequality is rising, astronomically. So where does he think that we who live in the city actually want to go, and how is it that we get there?

For a while some intellectuals talked about the “Good City.” A biblical reference, an ideal of what could be but lacking in a way to arrive there, utopia.

There’s also the idea of the “Just City.” On its face none of us would disagree with some justice. But this has been limited in its definition to the goal of inclusion. We need a fair distribution of goods, services, maybe we could even manage opportunities. But we can’t rock the boat too much, the system we have is a good one, just needs a little tweaking.

You can tell I don’t like that one! Neither does Peter Marcuse. So what then? What is neither utopian nor rigidly practical and self-limiting? The Right to the City. Coined by Henri Lefebvre, and please do read Lefebvre, he’s been rocking my world lately, particularly State, Space, World, which is sitting half-read on my desk even now. But his Right to the City is the right to an alternative system, the right to construct an alternative vision of what could be. It is a right that must be demanded, and a vision of radical democracy where we all collectively create our communities together with the rest of our neighbors and those who actually live here.

Some people already have this right. The very wealthy primarily. We need to be clear that this campaign is not for them, it is to ensure that everyone has power in this. I agree with Marcuse that this is important.

And where does the campaign come from? Marcuse argues that there are two groups who will drive this, and begs forgiveness for the inadequacy of the titles. These are:

• The deprived. The unemployed, the exploited, the poor. Primarily people of colour.
• The discontented. The artists, the intellectuals, those who see the deep injustice of the world and feel a need to do something about it.

And what is the role of theory in this? Critical urban theory is the glue, it is required to build the mutual understanding of how and why these two different groups need to come together, not to mention the multiple subgroups contained within each of them. We need to come together and fight for our right to the city.

I’m mostly all for it, and I’m sure you shall be hearing more about Right to the City. Marcuse even gave a shout out to the American alliance of that name, having been at the founding of that made me happy. For me, however, it is pivotal that those who Marcuse calls the deprived be the drivers. That those who suffer most from having no rights to their city should be the ones to frame the question and push forward the process of radical democracy that Lefebvre argues is the key factor towards the new city. It is to these demands and this process that the discontented need to ally themselves, and that theory needs to dialogue with in a way that builds each, while building something entirely new and beautiful.

(also published at drpop.org)

Vertigo Crime and Comic Con day 1

Yesterday I headed down to San Diego for Comic Con…there is absolutely no rest for the wicked and it sometimes makes me sad! I drove down with my co-editor in crime on the Switchblade Imprint, the indescribable Gary Phillips. The coversation was smooth, and involved a lot of speculation on the extraordinary New Jersey corruption case that broke yesterday morning, involving the arrest of three mayors, multiple rabbis, and 2 state assemblymen on charges of bribery, money laundering, and even organ trafficking! I’m sure both of us were wishing we had written such a fucking great story, I certainly was…

Comic Con is just as immense, sprawling and overwhelming as ever, sprinkled with characters in amazing costume and an incredible diversity of nerdiness that I really love. But it makes you tired quickly, it is too much to take in. We wandered, talked to people, and then I sat in on Gary’s panel, Vertigo’s announcement of the upcoming work for 2009 and 2010. And was amazed. I love the edginess of Vertigo, they have published Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore and Grant Morrison and…the list just goes on and on. And sitting and listening to all of the amazing stuff they have newly in the works was a joy. I’m just not sure how to fit the pleasurable reading of each of the new series into a life already crammed full with pleasures and much work. But I am sure I will find a way.

Karen Berger created the imprint within DC comics, which I hadn’t known until I met her briefly yesterday and Gary told me the story. To find a woman as the head of such an amazing dark and gritty series of crime, fantasy, and horror made me happy…funny how the genres I love most are very dominated by men. The broad preferences of different genders in reading and writing are patent, I shall save speculation on why and how that happens as I am still thinking through it. But in only the short time I have been working in publishing I have run into a couple of good ole boys and felt treated very much like a secretary rather than a creative partner. It was a bit shocking to me coming from my small world of organizing where such things were at least much more subtle, officially called out and censured. And I was always a force to be respected and feared. To discover it so blatantly in the literary world was much sadder than the shock of being talked down to and patronized when I worked in the bra shop two years ago now on my…er…sabbatical, I hated it as much, but everyone knows that shop ‘girls’ get disrespected all the time. I was somewhat prepared for that, though the fury it inspires was just as grand.

So cheers to Karen Berger.

And cheers to Vertigo Crime, announced at Comic Con last year and the fruits soon to be available in the first two black and white hardcover graphic novels, Brian Azzarello’s Filthy Rich and Ian Rankin’s Dark Entries. Gary is writing a graphic novel called Cowboys, which traces the collision of two very different men, it starts with them holding guns to one another’s heads and disbelieving each others’ claim that they are working undercover. We went out to dinner with a great group of writers, at my end of the table was Jason Aaron who writes Scalped, (which I sadly haven’t read but that should be recitified in the next few days), Jason Starr, author of a number of novels for Hard Case Crime, and Max Allen Collins, who wrote Road to Perdition amongst many another great book…they all have new stuff coming out soon, judging from the previews they should all be read as soon as they are released!

And just one of the interesting tid-bits of conversation that made me think…the claim, would anyone still read Dashiell Hammett if they hadn’t made the Maltese Falcon into a movie? James M. Cain without Double Indemnity? Chandler without the Big Sleep? Max always thought that Kiss Me Deadly was a great movie that kept the name of Micky Spillane alive to readers…an interesting thought and very possibly true, and something I instinctively rebel against, and yet…

Race, Revolution, Saints, Graves, and Clifton, AZ

Santa Teresita de Cabora…that is how she was known to the thousands who loved her, and believed she could cure the sick, the blind and the lame. So we went on a quest to find Teresa Urrea today,  one of the more extraordinary figure of the Southwest borderlands. It was inspired by reading Ringside to the Revolution by David Romo (which you should read, without a doubt)…but when we started looking we found so much more.

Her life defies summary, but I shall try. In 1873 she was born in Culiacan, Mexico, the illegitimate daughter of a Yaqui woman named Cayetana Chavez and the local landowner, Tomas Urrea. She worked with the local curandera…known alternatively as Huila (a Yaqui name) or Maria Sonora (a Yori name, we shall disregard it). While an adolescent she went into a coma, her father ordered a coffin, and the story goes that the night before her burial she suddenly sat up. She said that they should keep the coffin as someone else would die within 3 (or possibly 5 days). She was right, and they buried Huila.

From that time on she was famed for her healing powers, powers both of traditional medicine and faith. She never charged for her service. And the thousands came…so many that Porfirio Diaz feared her powers in leading an insurrection and expelled her from the country…revolution was already boiling along the borders among the Yaqui, the Mayo, the Tomochic. And they revolted up and down down the border in her name, they carried her photograph cut out from the papers next to their hearts. Federales saw her mounted on a white horse leading them, even though she was hundreds of miles away. They were called the Teresista Rebellions, and although I grew up an hour from Nogales, I never knew the Teresistas had risen there.

Diaz said that El Paso was too close, so she moved to Clifton…she traveled, always attracting thousands seeking healing. And she returned to Clifton when she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, she built a house there, and died in 1906, peacefully, she was only 33. 400 people attended her body from the church to the grave.

And yet today no one is sure where she is buried. And that is quite a story.

Apparently in the Clifton area there were three cemeteries. There was the whites only cemetery (known simply as the Clifton cemetery, though now it is officially called the Ward’s Canyon cemetery.) There was the Mexican cemetery. And there was the Catholic cemetery. Clifton is a mining town, only a few miles from Morenci, and the largest pit mine in the country. At some point Phelps Dodge decided that there was copper under the Mexican cemetery, and they wanted it. And so they dug it up and dumped all of the bodies from there into…an unmarked place. Supposedly in the whites only cemetery, though that puzzles me really, it would have made much more sense to have put them in the Catholic cemetery, especially as apparently that now belongs to PD as well. And since it was unmarked…it is hard to say.

It’s unimaginable really, especially given the relationship Mexican families have with their dead. It fills me with a kind of fury. But segregation even in death is enough to do that. And there’s the lovely story in the Roadside History of Arizona (full of interesting facts, though nothing about such things as strikes, civil unrest, Mexican saints or etc etc)… in 1904, 40 orphans were brought to the town by New York nuns, happy that they had found good Catholic families willing to adopt them. Sadly, the children were white, the families Mexican, and the good whitefolk of Clifton couldn’t have that. Vigilantes took custody of the kids, and every court up to the Supreme Court supported them in their efforts. Vigilantes are nothing new around here, nor is government support for them.

And so here is the cemetery that was once whites only

You can see Morenci’s open pit in the background. We thought that Teresa’s grave had been (provisionally) identified and marked, we wandered up and down, and found nothing. The graveyard is on a steep hillside, with many of the graves themselves forming the terracing, and the ultimate disposition of bones over years of torrential summer rains an interesting thought. Below is one of the spots I thought they might have dumped a load of calcium and dream rich dirt.

It contrasts with the more worthy sections…

Even Mr. Greenlee for whom the county is named is buried here. Under a small pyramid of rock. I don’t think he would have appreciated PD’s idea, it makes me doubt that they managed to bury an unnamed load of Mexicans here. But perhaps they did, and the outrage was great enough from both communities (united if only in this), that that is what forced them to relocate graves properly when the towns of Morenci and Metcalf were claimed by the pit as well.

We navigated at temperatures of 103 or so…and even hating the idea of a white’s only cemetery (though it isn’t quite at this point…), it was still haunting and some things were impossibly sad, like this, hid amidst great marble headstones

6 years old, chiseled by unskilled hand…and then I found this one a few steps away

Born and died the same day. And you realize how hard and bleak and terrible life could be, for everyone. But heartbreaking as they are, the Chapmans got to keep their headstones. Teresa Urrea has been erased.

So we headed into town to ask where the grave could be found. We started at the courthouse, moved to the recorder’s office, and there met Berta who was amazing and took us to the library over her lunch break, where she had started a file on Teresa. And all of a sudden I started liking Clifton again. I have photocopies now of the original article from The Copper Era (nice title, no?) from January 18, 1906, announcing her death. And a handful of others published in local papers, and one with a picture of a grave they think just might be Teresa’s.  We returned to the cemetery, to the grave we thought just might be the grave in the picture of what just might be the grave of Teresa Urrea. It was missing the wooden cross though….And we left our flowers, red plastic roses, and fresh white calla lilies, deciding that she would be understanding if we hadn’t found her, and anyone else who might be buried there would be happy.

And then we headed into downtown Clifton, up to Morenci…but more on that later. Another stirring tale of racism, labor strikes, evil mining companies…exciting stuff!

And last thing, a brilliant fictionalized book about Teresa is by Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird’s Daughter.

Michael Jackson…

My thoughts on his death are so conflicted and complicated and he’s been on my mind a bit since I saw the exhibit of his stuff up for auction from Neverland…it was unforgettable. And unsettling.  I’m in Chicago for a conference and am staying with friends, funny how different people’s reactions have been. We went to a bar to see another friend of theirs play, and he played Billie Jean on his base just before they started the second set, and sang and we sang, and it was fitting.

This is Michael Jackson as I like to remember him, and I think it is heart breaking how he ended up… He was incredible. No one danced like him, no one sang like him…Thriller is unbeatable as an album. And now he has entered the halls of legend.

Tom also took me to the cemetery where the Haymarket martyrs and Emma Goldman and Lucy Parsons are buried…but more on them when I have had a chance to upload photos.

Jellyfish and other wonders

Cnidarians. Schyphozoa. Hydromedusae. Science is full of these amazing Latin words that evoke the world’s riches, and the words are no more beautiful than the creatures they name.

You can watch them, well…I could watch them for hours. A graceful inhaling-exhaling dance through the water, a ripple of translucent flesh that catches the light as they pulse effortlessly through the world’s oceans. They are a wonder of gelatinous color and texture.

Though many of them are almost invisible in the ocean. They have no internal systems, breathing through the diffusion of oxygen through their skin, absorbing nutrients through the lining of their gastrovascular cavity. They do not have a nervous system but a nerve net.

The large groups of them found in the oceans are called blooms.

There are males and females, but they don’t really mate. That would have been another wonder to behold. Instead they release eggs and sperm (in a multitude of different ways), which combine and form tiny polyps. Attached to a surface, these polyps grow, and they reproduce asexually…releasing tiny jellies or medusas into the great watery world. It’s extraordinary. What happens to the polyps after this? Do they ever long for freedom?

Medusa of the water, I love that image…another kind of mermaid. One with snakes. One that flowers, stings, kills, eats its own. Moves through the oceans, sometimes with a will, sometimes without.

And some of them are fixed…the upside-down jellyfish:

They have traded their freedom for a symbiotic relationship with the things that live in their tentacles, generating nutrients…

I’ve had a nature documentary sort of weekend really, we went to the California Academy of Sciences, the amazing new(ish) museum in Golden Gate Park, we waited ages to get in but it was entirely worth it. They have nautili. And peacock shrimp. And sculpins and lumpfish. And giant sea bass and these sea horses with amazing leaves to camouflage them and an albino alligator and a lion fish and a COELOCANTH! Holy shite, the prehistoric fish that they thought had been extinct for millions of years before one popped up suddenly in the 30’s some time. Or was it the 20’s? Amazing either way. The Coelocanth is sitting in formaldehyde of course. And a lungfish, the fish that can breath in air and water, a key for how evolution could have happened and the emergence of life from water to land. And a giant salamandar. Several feet long, one of the more amazing things I’ve ever seen.

And then the Aquarium on the Bay, which I also loved…I’m going to learn to scuba dive. It’s decided. And there have been other adventures, but more soon.

Chortling Chinchillas and Jabberwocks

So I was having a conversation with a friend about the word chortle, I really love this word… I would like to chortle, I think I might from time to time, but generally speaking it always seemed to me something that plump people do, a deep belly chuckle that involves a lot of happy stomach jiggling. Or babies who are always round and, well, rather fat, and do a good bit of chortling when not drooling or crying. Being tall and thin, it seemed rather beyond my abilities…though I swear I never giggle.

I was happy to find that apart from people with large bellies, chortling is also a technical term used to describe some of the communication between chinchillas. Just look at this:

I don’t know the genius who is responsible for this sign, nor quite how to explain the presence of chinchillas at San Francisco’s aquarium on the bay, but was very happy about both.

Still, the word chortle seemed to require a bit more investigation. So investigate I did. And was astounded and amazed to find that the word was actually invented by Lewis Carroll in the immortal poem Jabberwocky (at least, that’s what wiktionary says).

Now I have been in love with this poem ever since I first read it at a very tender age, it is perhaps my favourite poem of all time, though my love for it is slightly different then my love for the poetry of Akhmatova, Neruda, Heaney, and even Poe. And it’s a bit…well no, I am immensely excited and happy and well nigh overjoyed in the amazement to find it was first coined there in 1871

‘O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ He chortled in his joy.

I never knew. The Merriam-Webster dictionary says it can also mean to sing or chant exultantly, but I think they’re utterly wrong, and obviously not as in tune with the great Carrollian mind as I am…how could they say such a thing after writing that the etymology of the word is “probably a blend of chuckle and snort?”

But I think this much discussion calls for the complete poem

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

And I am newly reminded about the importance of using frabjous much more regularly. Of whiffling and burbling and the sound of snicker-snack. I do often use galumph, having once had a cat who used that as his regular mode of transport. And I know this is an out and out nonsense poem that has since had reams of very learned sillyness written about it, but ’twas magical the world it created for me as a kid. And the doors it opened in language. And the frumious bandersnatch remains one of my favourite creatures ever…I’m still hoping to meet one, though not in a dark alley.

And it only adds to the happiness of chortling chinchillas.

champagne…

I’ve had rather a lot, so I believe I can be held accountable for nothing below…

That said, I had possibly one of the worst days ever.  To start with. To end with, I had macaroni and cheese, champagne (purcharsed wth hedonism in mind, always a good idea), and several episodes of Black Books in the company of Celine and Sophy. And it was the best possible of all possible endings. And I am rather happy at the moment.

Still, it doesn’t quite erase the nature of the day, it just puts it into perspective. And I’m feeling rather Ecclesiastical about everything…dust to dust and all is vanity and such like…I can find nothing else to salvage the day’s lessons, the year’s lessons really. Everything crumbles, things fall apart, the center cannot hold…and etc. You spend your life building things and then they just vanish like a breath of air. It was pretty tragic when I lost faith in the current enterprise, but it wasn’t terrible. An intellectual enterprise, and really, if it falls then the few of us involved suffer of course, but it’s not the worst that could happen. Really. Some of us even deserve it. For me, it was simply a loss of happiness and enthusiasm, and I miss them but I’ve cut emotional ties. But today? Oh no, today I realized the loss, or better said ultimate futility, of my work of many years, of blood, sweat, and tears. Of all of my ideals and so many hours and the grey hairs I claim as mine, and the foundation I hoped I had help to lay, and real people who I both love, and acknowedge to be fucked already, and so…well, it’s devastating.  Of course, had it just been me building things, playing with a set of tinker toys, it wouldn’t bother me. Sadly, it wasn’t just me, this isn’t about me at all, and other folks haven’t moved on to the champagne course of fuck it all, so it’s much more tragic.

And there’s nothing to do. That’s the worst of it all. This might be the banner day when I lost faith in absolutely everything and had to start all over from scratch. I dunno, maybe it’s not that bad, I might decide in the morning…but I thought I’d write just to memorialize it in case it’s true. It’s definitely a turning point. Though a point I was already headed to.  And it’s far too much about me, drinking tends to do that. People lost their jobs today. And other are putting on the warpaint, when that shouldn’t be necessary. And something has been lost which may well never be recovered. Me? I am, quite simply, heartbroken. And I am as far as ever from seeing the way to making things better.

A funny police helicopter story

I spent all of yesterday and most of last night doing the final reviews of a 400 page and very tangled manuscript I’ve been editing for months, and I finally poured myself into bed after 1 am, feeling rather shattered though I had that nice sense of achievement because it is done, and was secure in the happy knowledge of just how GOOD it would feel to rest my weary bones.

And then the helicopter started up. Again. Every day this week. And the voice on the megaphone shouting -  come out with your hands raised – and it went on for hours and I lay in bed hating everything and everyone.

And so I woke up this morning late, unrested, and mildly cranky. But it did remind me of a funny story.

It belongs to my friend Carlos, truck driver, and definitely used to think he was tough…when not driving a semi he drove this souped up car with hydraulics. I’m not terribly impressed by hydraulics myself, but was pretty excited to experience them while cruising, rock en español and rap blasting on the radio…

At any rate, there was a helicopter circling his apartment in the middle of the night, as they tend to do in South Central, and that didn’t wake him up, but the blinding light that shortly filled his entire room did. It was the helicopter. And he heard the megaphone screaming out come out with your hands up. And it didn’t stop. And so after some sleepy and very confused thought he decided that inexplicably they must have come for him. So he went out onto his balcony in just his boxers with his hands behind his head, unable to see anything at all because of the spotlight and his heart pounding and his mind racing to try and figure out what exactly he could have done or who he could have been confused with to have been in such a position at all.

And then he heard the megaphone – “We weren’t talking to YOU! Get back inside!”

They were after the guy in the next apartment, and they got him too, and for the life of me I can’t remember why, which is a sad ending to a good story, but so it goes.

Harleys bearing gifts and Greece’s Popular Uprising

First, yesterday on my way to take the much depleted boxes of PM wares back to SAJE, I passed hundreds, if not thousands of people on motorcycles, most of them Harleys. It was an incredibly impressive sight, a massive line of bikes two by two, broken up only by the traffic lights. I asked one of the guys what they were there for, assuming it was a funeral, but they were all off to deliver toys for a toy drive. Which I thought was a beautiful thing, The noise, however, was incredible.

And what is happening in Greece is a beautiful thing as well, popular insurrection! It is NOT rioting and NOT just anarchists running around causing trouble for everyone and NOT looting, it is a spontaneous rising of a broad segment of the population against low wages, unjust conditions, police brutality, and government impunity…There are actions going on at Greek embassies around the country and the world, take a minute to find out what is really happening, it is an exciting and hopeful time.

Below is an update from the liberated City Hall of Ag. Demetrios, taken over on Thursday:

AGAINST PROSECUTIONS AND DETENTIONS <http://katadimadim.blogspot.com/2008/12/blog-post_15.html>
SOLIDARITY WITH ALL WHO HAVE BEEN ARRESTED AND ARE PROSECUTED FOR THEIR PARTICIPATION IN THE POPULAR INSURRECTION

The events that have taken place so far, both inside and outside of Greece,
following the murder of 16-year old Alexandros Grigoropoulos from the
special guard Epaminondas Korkoneas, show clearly that we are in the midst
of a popular insurrection. Ever growing segments of society (high school and
university students, workers, unemployed, immigrants, detainees, poor)
decide to come out in the streets and transform their rage for whatever
oppresses them in every expression of their lives into action (dynamic
mobilizations during which there are mass clashes with the forces of
repression and attacks on government and capitalist targets, occupations of
public buildings, open assemblies, counterinformation actions).

Within the frame of this insurrection, the City Hall of Aghios Dimitrios has
been occupied since the morning of Thursday Dec. 11, so that it may become a
place of counter-information, meeting, and self-organizing of the residents
of the wider region and for the collective formation and implementation of
actions. A main component of this occupation is the daily popular assembly
with participation of up to 300 people, a process that functions in contrast
to the entrusting of the management of our demands as well as of our
struggles to whichever “representatives,” elected or not. A process that
tends to be implanted deeply into the consciousness of its participants on
their role as political beings.

Without a doubt, this popular insurrection is clearly turning against the
very structure of the current regime. Therefore, it follows that the
subjects of this insurrection will face the repressive fury of the defenders
of the system (the state, the businesses, the comfortable). Already
there have been about 200 arrests around the country (often accompanied by
violence and trumped up charges). Some of the charges, misdemeanors as well
as felonies are: resisting arrest, disobedience, disturbing the peace,
attempting to free detainees, use and possession of tools and explosives,
attempt to inflict serious bodily harm, etc. In some instances, the state
has prosecuted minors under anti-terrorist statutes (Larissa). Nevertheless,
for us it is obvious that all these charges are political in nature. And of
course the “not at all” predatory state (in conjunction with the “not at
all” profiteering business people) has the audacity to prosecute so-called
“looters”.

By participating in the popular insurrection both inside and outside of the
now liberated City Hall of Ag. Dimitrios, we express with our deeds our
solidarity with those arrested and procecuted for their actions in this
social struggle. The struggle for their release and the cessation of
prosecutions is absolutely connected with the very insurrection and must
constitute a main demand.

A few lines above there was a reference to the defenders of the system.
Unfortunately this category also includes those segments of society, which,
while objectively belong on the side of the oppressed, whether by their
opposition to the social struggle or whether by their silence (a result as
much of the brainwashing from mass media as from the growing tendency to
abandon collective claims and pursue individual solutions) end up playing
the game of their oppressors. It is necessary that we realize what is the
source of our problems and that all of us “below” are already on the
crosshairs of the system, therefore it is to our advantage to join this
insurrection.

DROP ALL CHARGES FOR THE EVENTS OF THE LAST SEVERAL DAYS

IMMEDIATE RELEASE OFF ALL DETAINEES

THE SOCIAL STRUGGLES ARE NEITHER LEGAL NOR ILLEGAL, THEY ARE JUST.

RALLY & MARCH

Tuesday December 16, 2008, 7:00pm

at the liberated City Hall of Ag. Dimitrios

some love from the streets

I got some today…as I biked along 31st street towards Grand, an older black woman yelled at me “JESUS LOVES YOU!”

And I wondered, why does she think I don’t know that?

The fact that I don’t believe in Jesus is an entirely interior characteristic (except for that one carefully concealed tattoo). So I started thinking about what made me look like someone down and out and in need of some saving! Did she think I was going to the new Planned Parenthood clinic that just opened there? Did she think any white girl on a bike in that neighborhood was looking for some kind of fix? Did she think I was lost…on the physical or metaphysical plane? I know I wasn’t dressed like a hooker, at least not today.

Hmm. It reminded me of a sunny Sunday morning when I was on my way to the farmer’s market, and some cholo straight up offered me pot, crystal, AND a good time. These things make me worry.