underwrite

ten red bottles

2009-11-04T15:07:00.003-06:00

ten red bottles - for kou nakagawa

baby, it rains for months.

in this fresh white coat

I'm waiting for leaves to fall

as cigarette burns green on my arms.

un-even circles, you wire puller.

great hunting - summer failed to

destroy me so I've used box cutters and burns

to cut the cocoon and I'm

unfolding down a lukewarm river

my thighs are used, I turn like clockwork

fluting out through pipes

into ten red bottles, full of blood

and sleeping on sheets

never, ever mine.

great hunting - they gave you

the same drugs that dulled me down

now neither of us can tell

when we're awake or asleep.

winter kids

2009-11-04T15:03:00.002-06:00

Overground slowly the winter in Moscow settled, felt like home, introspective eyes dropped inward to stone and footsteps. Clarity came above a torrent of movement filling streets, a wide river of crossing diagonal lights in red and white, cut suddenly in coats moving listlessly, looking down and forward up to the splitting sky, a river, shifting focus low drifting on currents of visible breath, a city under snow, something clean in the cold that keeps sweeping awareness up from filthy sidewalks into something pale, chiseled, sharp.

Winter kids crept out.

For their kaleidoscopic run, outdoors in the winter in the blistering cold.

On an empty roof, Ziv watched Ina’s mismatched gloves handle a paint can, shaking it hard with a faint smile and eyes wrapped on her work, the blank canvas of a plain brick wall for graffiti, poetry, art, eigenface, abstract, any color you like. He admired her, the red of her cheeks and the clear 3 pm evening sky; started to shake his own as she pressed down and waited for the hiss.

Nyx stuffed old rags in the doorknob of the squat, under the windows, in the cracks—the cards she showed him on the table, hexagons, lines and breaks. She read the chemistry like a fortune as he played.

As Nil played and drank the cheapest vodka around chapped hands, looking up as wind cut the membrane of watery eyes. Winters cruel and sterile as the towers in Moscow shot up like needles, seven sisters, seven syringes to count over and over.

No sweat as his brain turned with plans and preachings, Ziv wrote all over his arms and legs enthusiastically like a giddy fourteen-year-old, like he used to, clothes pulled up over limbs until he got hands on something of substance. At the library, warming his hands over tea.

Ina’s hands wrapped around a cup of rich black tea with jam as she drank in the steam with her nose, looked out the window in the crushed nook of a café and waited for snow, just because.

They met again and cold crept into the creases of her face but she couldn’t help smiling as he put a hand to her face imagining noir and spun earlier tales helplessly eloquent.

She still cut her hair short to fit under hats and scarves and hijab and whatever else discarded, cut it by herself with the hypnotized eyes of a cloudy mirror. Dark hair fell to the hair smelling like cloves she smoked earlier with Ellie on a fire escape after a show earlier that night.

And Ziv curled up in his cloak dreaming of darkwood.

Nyx blew on the right window and brought letters to life with the steam of her throat—message from a connect. Secrets in the city of glass. She rode the subway whispering to herself: quiet, quiet, quiet as it seemed dirtier this time of year, that substance of slush swishing across floors where it’s warm, putting your feet on heaters, scraping to get by, clients are low and prices are high, no stay, stay we’ll get by she said to Nil, not a lot of new faces but we’ll cross the cold.

Nil’s hands slid around her waist as the blood rushed from his ears to his groin.

Nyx’s white hair mixed with snow as she lay back later in a fresh drift, alone, gloves by her head, fresh snow inhaled through bloody sinuses and a white pill dissolved under her tongue. She looked up.

Nil’s images and words slow, slow around her slender body he couldn’t describe, the figure in his door leaning seductively, eyes on him, arm propped up holding a beer bottle, feet bare on the cold floor. I don’t feel cold, she said. We’ll hide until cocaine weather, she says before sleeping, don’t worry baby.

And Ziv pays homage to those places of the past now deserted, the dumpster and back alleys and rooftops, pulling his semi-automatic in darkness to shoot, practice, pop pop pop not like summer sounds but so crisp, like tapping glass with a fingernail, no one would care if he spaced the shots right. It’s that specific. Afterwards he could rest and count scars like knots on a prayer rope.

Scars like the ones on Ina’s knuckles left from every story she’d ever heard, from gangs and love and running and food frozen solid in the alley, from the plaster cast on the city by the time it’s over, signed by every car’s exhaust, by the water in tunnels melting and freezing over and over, by new Russians wrapped in lipstick and fur and junkies keeping warm around flaming trash bins, from graffiti uncovered by brown paint, from new throw-ups patching the city in white and colors.

The sharpness of lights, no matter what the cold feels clean, barren, assuring, cold iron burns under her fingers, ice glistens like broken glass, frozen water reaches out unevenly in finger strings retracting across the river, ice on trees, ice on wires, ice on rails, the low slinking posture of sympathy in everyone’s step and frosty breath mixing.

And the words said

“i love the frosty breath,

and the confession of wintry steam

ah. i am i. reality is reality.” --

osip mandelshtam, 1936

k-complex

2009-01-15T23:29:00.000-06:00

They fell for it. Lowest of the low. She laughed, leaned back in the creaky fold-up chair and thought back to conjuring that exagerated accent. "Vladivlastok." How convincing. She'd stood up pouring blood and shaking, then minutes later turned the tables.

Now she twisted around, pressed borrowed boots against the back wall, curled bandaged fingers under the seat and thought who's fighting next?

The underground wasn't much different from hospital basements. Sometimes it leaked up into empty lots and concrete with a sky, and that was the fighting pits. Lowest of the low, no rules and no reasons really. Just the place for poor impulse control, and so, teenagers.

After she got a good look at the so-called second in command, she estimated he was about 14 or 15 at the oldest. Back in that garage. With the endorphins flooding from her torn-up skin, it was all she could do to keep from laughter.

"Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do?" His voice broke with frustration. He paced, shorter than her and posture pitiful.

"Well, what do you want? Drugs, right?" She wiped some blood off her face and hands with the back of the dead kid's filthy shirt. "You said. We just made a deal. But, I don't even know what this outfit of yours does. I'm sure it's interesting, but I'd also like my vials back, please." They made a show of blocking the exit before surrendering the drugs to her coat pockets.

Nyx got various tales of the Moscow fighting pits after he'd stopped pacing and slacking. That was business--other than the regular shakedowns of whoever had change for food and cigarettes. Okay, so a bunch of curious thugs fell into my hands thinking I'm some dealer's toy. Does it get easier? "I think you cracked one of my ribs. He won't like that." ...And they fell in line like eager inpatients blasted out of their heads on thorazine. Easy.

It amazed her how eagerly they offered an arm and clean needles when it came to promising victory. She'd say, "I've been working on this new analog, I'm sure it'll make you stronger for the next fight," and they rolled up a sleeve and let her tap the veins of a scrawny or fleshy or muscled or bruised arm, flood them with a formula or placebo. They'd absently listen to her information about half-lives and drug-specific interactions while most likely mental mapping a terrible self-done tattoo to commemorate their latest victory. It didn't matter--she was rarely truthful unless it benefited her.

Their young blood received bits and pieces. Sometimes weak chemical failures, other times a pain flip to laugh through wounds, other times something unethical, unfocused. Unclassified synthetics, she tailored quick-acting experiments--they wanted something fast, that's how they fought. She touched their skin gently. Almost affectionately. She said, "even if you lose, you win" and pushed the slammer down.

Her guinea pigs attracted attention within a few weeks. So erratic. She didn't mind--she liked it here, in the fighting pits, and made headway on developing more analogs using the boys. The good stuff she kept for herself, of course; saved hidden pockets and kept her own rig off limits. Meanwhile, they were all hooked. Probably didn't notice. A short lifespan anyway. She'd leave soon, but until then--who's fighting next?

Yellow grass sprouted between cracks in the sidewalks, cracks in the floor. Barbed wire over torn fences and burnt out streetlights no one noticed because of blood and broken teeth. The temperature climbed up to 29, 40. Spring was coming.

chernobyl/pripyat

2009-01-04T21:44:00.004-06:00

"you're so sweet for a lilac beauty
rounded shapes,
and the comfort of dull whiteness
soft as a used paperback.
gentle bruises fade, melting with
soft winter rain and
blue, blue skies, that forgive everyone.

665 - second person blows

2008-12-19T18:07:00.000-06:00

acid rising
it's not drugs but you need those too, trust me, still using tin foil from a junkie as the pounds fall off and something's dripping in the back of your swollen throat, the coke nose a testament to some escape you can't afford and the gradual thinning of blood.
IN WINTER you wrote too many poems about love, last time, with that same title before knowing it, those two line couplets you poured sloshy teenage angst into and wrote on bathroom walls and carved into the bottoms of desks like someone was asking for it, looking for it. so much faith, no proof.
at least it's cold but that means looking down, down at your feet, nodding off, waking up, not remembering, more missing frame headers, sugar drains out the back without noticing, shivering, less energy, nodding all the time when blood drains from your hands and feet because of beta blockers, racing back to the heart.
I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I'm hungry. it's ok, the acid's rising with--
the first thing when you wake up is spit. remember that? going under iv, coming back up, the first thing you do is spit. reject coming back to the cold reflexively and spit. high acid, low patience.
smoking, craving fat, destroying membranes with the worst food you can find, fat takes longer to digest even though it's more painful.
angry and poor, full of acid. coffee helps stay awake because sleeping is cheaper than eating, smoking, drinking coffee, acid rising like bile. you're tired and wired. you want to spit venom, vomit, put a vendetta on everyone. you forget.
the first thing when you wake up is spit. when you sleep you remember twenty years past being alone with a pair of scissors. cut off the clothes and cut off your fingernails and toenails. blood everywhere. they found you. you kept biting through the years and biting down through skin, scar tissue, scabs until infections, fingernails torn to red crescents tearing open skin to destroy.
the first thing is that metallic taste in the back of your mouth, like chewing on razors, you want to chew and feed upon yourself, cut up your tongue, your skin, raze tattoos, shed that and adapt.
I'm hungry, hungry, hungry.
time whites in again and splits up before moving smoothly. nodding out and going under. going under. just hold your breath and go under. second-person reprise, white-knuckled suspension waiting for the grace of suicide weather. hungry.
there must be some mistake, he says bent. I already, already paid.

human after all

2008-12-06T17:14:00.001-06:00

the library

2008-12-06T15:38:00.000-06:00

In this case he'd been looking. Between rest and avoiding fevers, he searched cafes and approached others questioning vaguely. No success. After a week he found the door nearly at random, ran away instead of touching. An hour later he was back with Ina. Wired and hungry, second-hand raindrops pouring through some slit in the ceiling or floor or something. Panting exhausted, freezing, it was worth it for the only reliable source of information on the unreliable map. Ziv scraped the door with his fingertips.

"I haven't been here in ages," Ina breathed, closing eyes against the water. "Better have a fire, coffee..."

"Don't speak a second." Ziv heard shuffling footsteps, no feet lifted or dropped.

"Is it urgent?" A voice rasped. Ziv felt fingers close around the opposite doorknob.

"Just your two faithful oprichniks waiting in the rain without food, without knowledge or a place to stay, yadda yadda, I'd say it's urgent in need of guidance from a fiddler such as yourself and whatnot and such..." he rambled, purposely pathetic until the door cracked passively. They slipped in without hesitation.

Relief seeped as they passed the door, a warm blanket of candlelight and incense. Ziv sealed the entrance as his eyes adjusted. Ina stepped ahead, rain spreading eyelashes like spiderlegs, sniffling. The Librarian was already seated back at the table, reclining to finish last drops of tea. They crept up to the table and sat.

"Nice to see you together again. It's been awhile, hasn't it?" The Librarian's voice was thin and low. He pushed his chair back and cleared a few stray books off the table. Disappearing behind a shelf, he reappeared moments later with the original teapot and cups. He was lean and muscular, prison tattoos up arms, old by Underground standards. Somewhere in his 40s. A long time to survive by no name and no number.

"It has, but you already knew." Ziv relaxed. The scent of old books unwound his brain, but the scent was mostly exaggerated by incense and heat-thickened air. Truly, the Library only stocked a few shelves of old books and newspapers that rotated shifts. Most of the information was quickly transcribed to some digital format with an analog shadow, circuits on disks on wires. A few no name, no numbers must be Library Assistants, cautiously plugging away new stories and old texts unseen. Reverse termites, Ziv imagined. But this didn't concern him. The point was proof in anonymity, reliability, neutrality. Behind the door, they spoke plainly with faith.

“Coming with news and inquiries I'd imagine?"

"Both, yeah. If there's any gaps on the incident last week you need filled I'll help. Though the sequence of events is shakier for me." Ziv shot a look to Ina and she picked up.

"We came nowhere near any assassination, by the way," she said boldly with guarded posture. "So I don't even know if you'd call it botched. Ziv was shot as soon as we got in character. And the rest is a mess...hence us coming here."

ataraxia

2008-12-06T15:34:00.000-06:00

He read in explosive bursts. His insatiable thirst for knowledge redacted any previous doubts. Relevant, authorized or compensatory, his fingers followed the logic in words and phrases across pages and pages. Without provocation, he found his mind looped around riddles of ethos and proximate judgment. Synods, triunes, icons danced in imagination as he read history, wrote literature and synthesized thoughts like math. Contemporaneous reckless indifference refused to diffuse around schisms and phylogenetic orthodox hormones. Back! he thought--misconduct, heretical bacterial volumes wrapped in brown leather inflected his membranes with excessive force, yellowing paper slipped its essence through the liturgy of his own neurotransmitters. No scope of wrongdoing could erase the hymn charging his altruistic oxygen. He metabolized. Resident cells encoded an enzyme of theosis as he sat with unbroken sanctuary, concentrated hermeticism swinging the jurisdiction through a templon of ions down to his own, ataraxic religion.

Sources used:

Legal – Police Brutality Complaint

Scientific – Mitochondria Encyclopedia Entry

Philosophical – Eastern Orthodox Christianity Article

?

2008-12-06T15:31:00.001-06:00

the red line

2008-11-22T13:22:00.000-06:00

I remembered on platforms that people saw their breath. Steam rolled from lungs and windpipes into the sub-zero stillness underground. They waited, watching cars pass inches away without blinking, waiting to trade one misery for another. Outside, the cold sunk through bones like a grave and inside everything melted to secondary hell. Passengers exited, entered, created space. More visible surroundings amplified the filth of a stale winter. The train creaked and sank along two jolts and two jolts and two jolts. Two short, then two long vibrations lower.

We rolled to the next station. Dark dirt, mold grew like coal dust on dim lights along ceilings and frosted concrete. Stained gray and rubber doors burst open. Someone stepped in. Two tones. Doors closing.

He stepped to the inside of the car.

I’ve said to look at shoes and fingernails first. His toes spilled out of old shoes once white, then gray, now black. His hands were lined with grime. He didn’t lift eyes but spoke slowly.

“Food,” he said, “or water.”

The air paused to take in his presence. Our train car suspended, then jerked back and forward to electric currents. White sparks illuminated black walls repeating in a strobe-light second out of the corners of our eyes. Someone reached in their coat pocket and offered a few dollar bills. He waved them away.

“Only food,” he said, “or water.”

teeth

2008-11-22T13:19:00.002-06:00

Blinking the dream away didn't work. Reflexively, he chewed in rhythm to some internal instinct in click clicking of teeth like glass, then sudden crunching, chipping, chewing shards of nerve endings and bone which wore away and shattered eroding against gums. He sat in quiet horror, disconnected from human pain but aware of the vivid, focused texture and distinct noise of squeaking grinding broken teeth against teeth. Layers of porcelain cells grew thinner and a wave of fleeting disgust contracted up his spine to open his mouth, a rush of blood and saliva tempered with jagged chunks of dead teeth pouring and dripping out slowly in gaps and pulses. Dropping the mixture through fingers, his tongue felt another flood of sharpness slide through lips and noisily, still chewing and crunching, crushing, crunching. His hands were trembling in the aftershock of foggy, unfocused fixtures and then he was empty and ran his fingers gently over unwounded gums, bare, smooth, clean.

continuum

2008-11-22T03:06:00.003-06:00

I dreamed of water. I lived in a pool at the bottom of a black and white tiled mansion. Vastness, and he was there again confessing love and running. They started shooting at him as ran and chips of old ceramic tile exploded behind his feet. I slid out of the pool dizzy and light, coated and soaked as saturated hair fell over my face. Long hair. I shivered and pulled the black nozzle of a gun out from somewhere. I tried to stop it. I shot back, felt the kickback graze my bones, but they had more guns. In the back of my buzzing brain I felt fatalism and the familiarity of a reenactment. I shouted at him. No noise! We ran up black wire staircases in spirals, shooting at the walls, around corners. He slipped and fell stories down, soundlessly into the pool below. I jumped. We sank together underwater and I let in a long breath, filtering oxygen from the water to my lungs. He stared into my eyes helplessly. The tiles at the bottom of my pool patched black and white, shimmered on the surface of the water seen from below. I waited for him to drown. He shook his head. I grabbed him around the waist and pushed off the bottom with a bare foot. We broke the meniscus simultaneously. He gasped. A shot rang out and threw its burst of force against my shoulder. I felt warm liquid against cool and held him closer without looking back. No more shots. His head split and blood soaked red over blue into the water. I zoomed out.

archiving

2008-11-17T19:41:00.003-06:00

What's been taking up most of nights and weekends, lately:

If there's one good thing that's come out of Prose Forms, it's been getting a jumpstart on the long piece/s I'm hoping to someday write/compile about Italian and Sicilian culture/my family history/etc. (it's pretty vague right now, as you can tell). I've collected various instances that I'm trying to work with, but mainly, the assignment shot off in the direction you see above.

My brother and I raided our parents' basement for the purpose of preserving paper. I found 4 folders full of documents and photos on my grandfather (father's father). He died at the age of 90 when I was in the 3rd grade.

Most of the documents I'm going through right now revolve around his 1944 office with Warner Brother's in California. The paper seems to be some variation of a carbon copy since most of his personal copies are thinner than bible paper and brittle as glass. My parents don't care about the condition of things, so obviously the documents are in a state of decay and disintegration. They were piled on top of each other and left in a plastic bag.

I'm going through them one by one and typing out the contents, then archiving them in heavy, acid-free sheet protectors. The stack above is probably about 1/8 of what I have done so far. The paper is so thin, I can't tell how many documents there are or how long it will take to finish.

2008-11-15T21:23:00.002-06:00

"...By far the worst is the hamburger lady, and because of shortage right now of 'qualified technicians', e.g. technicians who can work with her and keep their last meal down, Screwloose Lauritzen and I have been alternating nights with her, unrelievedly. If you put a 250-lb meatloaf in the oven and then burned it and then followed that by propping it up on a potty-chair to greet you at 11pm each night, you would have some description of these past two weeks. Which is to say the worst I seen since viet napalms. When somebody tells you that there is a level of pain beyond which the human mind cannot retain consciousness, please tell them to write me. In point of fact this lady has not slept more than 3-5 minutes at a stretch since she came to us - that was over two weeks ago and, thanks to medical advances, there is no end in sight; from the waist (waste?) up everything is burned off, ears, nose etc - lower half is untouched and that, I guess, is what keeps her alive. I took one guy in to help me change tubes and he did alright, that
is alright till he came out, then he spotted one of the burn nurses (pleasant smiling zombies) eating a can of chile-mac at the desk, and that did it: he flashed on the carpet. It is fucking insane is what it is."

-part of a letter sent by Al Ackerman from Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. 1978

Throbbing Gristle - Hamburger Lady (Missing Frame Headers)

hole in the earth 2

2008-11-15T18:45:00.001-06:00

He didn’t have to answer. Who cares.

They’d moved back underground, to this place, after the analog started hitting hard and he stopped sleeping. “If I can dream, I don’t want to sleep,” he recalled himself saying vaguely. Now he struggled to smile or blink. He’d lost the drive for pills; she’d have to inject him soon. Every time. He knew she didn’t mind.

This place. A rusty, abandoned meat locker under god knows what was making those noises. He was glad he’d lost his sense of smell. He knew she didn’t mind.

Nil rubbed at dusty skin, clumsily. The word accumulating dropped in his consciousness like a pin.

Frames flew by and he forgot to look at her. Now she stood at the far end of the room, slim back to him, cooking something, not eating. He didn’t know if it was food.

The analog she fixed to stop dreams and nightmares built up quick. Before he knew it, he’d gone from cool to reactionary. Not that bad. He tried to avoid “to kill”. But it was summer then and the heat bubbled blood and it was hard.

Now he hadn’t slept for weeks, for a season, and the autumn chill didn’t touch his numb sense of temperature. His reflexes became quicker as the world slowed, like moving through water; he dozed and snapped up, relaxed, tense, effortless. She had fixed him for fights and delighted in the swift messy results, hands clasped in front of her bony chest. Or sit there—sometimes he’d snap into awareness and find her sitting there, beside or across, sitting staring, just staring at him watching the way his breath sifted, lungs filled, the way his pulse jumped, his twitches and contortions.

2008-11-15T18:33:00.004-06:00

hole in the earth 1

2008-11-14T19:12:00.001-06:00

Nil’s hands released. He crouched, flanked by rusty corners, head down. He held still, then slipped off balance from the shifting of his feet, from the ripped sole of his left boot, gray and shredded leather and his hands released. Bowed, pills spilled to the clattering floor. “If you knew what I know,” someone said. He didn’t gasp, thought of grasping capsules, disturbing the drop of gravity to shift said pills out of marked states read somehow in the name of divination. “I don’t know.” He stared.

Dark eyes slammed shut. Blue and black capsules, he knew. He didn’t care. “If you knew what I know?” A door opened.

“I don’t want any more drugs. I think I can smell my cells burning off,” he didn’t say.

“No---“ she said, elongated and high. “No new supplies for you.” She skipped in and rested something on the ground gently. He tracked movement through vibrations across the steel floor, in darkness. A frame or three skipped and his eyes snapped up to the sound of creaking leather, a bag set on the floor and her creasing boots.

She slid from a graceful stride to her typical flat-step walk. Around the bag, in the middle of the floor. He leaned back on his heels, slipped down to a cold seat; feet pushed pills away as fingers fumbled for a cigarette somewhere. His sleeveless shirt stank of shedding skin. Fingers found the curled paper and he looked up from the tips of eyes through oiled hair, wiry arms, scabs, like a filthy serpent. Breathe in, breathe out smoke.

Her feet kicked up rust dust as the pace became more determined. She circled the bag with white hair spun out like a swing, suddenly lunged with a burst of breath as “ha” and freed two mismatched blades. She turned to him, grinned. Held the blades claw-like, one curved and one straight, crude workmanship to brandish at a weapons dealer. But sharp.

Now what?

He was still doped. He felt his jaw reflex relax, circuits flip from voluntary to involuntary, barely able to suck the cigarette leaning between chapped lips. In ratty leathers she posed, blue eyes gleamed smugly. She tested the weight of the blades, sliced through air and danced jagged. His eyes followed a frame or two slower, breathing in, breathing out smoke. She stood and stopped.

“I wonder who I nicked these off of?” she exclaimed, tilting her face quizzically.

November 5, 2008

2008-11-08T18:29:00.000-06:00

I drank a white russian and watched the blue sweep across Eastern states. Laughing. Then, a victory fuck. I wasn't in Grant Park, and I wish I had been but the situation was too volatile for the risk. One loose screw and they'd riot--we got off work at 3 to get out of downtown.

But the mood in Chicago was amazing. It was yesterday, it was today. I'm really, really happy for the moment. Watching something like that, for the first time in years didn't fill me with fear.

This morning I broke the V for Vendetta glow and thought about it.

Problems: conservatives are incredibly fucking angry...stupid, after dealing with 8 years of the GOP and "whiny liberal" accusations, 12 hours of a president-elect causes pants shitting. Also, I think the country will divide ideologically, even further, and hopefully, hopefully not erupt. Although if it keeps going, that's inevitable.

But at least...

I don't have to go to bed every night wondering,

If the draft will be reinstated, if people I love are going to WAR, if our leader is going to make an ignorant blunder that costs even more lives.
If I have to move to Canada as soon as I can. How my life would change. Emigration rates from the US.
If I have to hear even more horror stories about reproductive rights going backwards, if my birth control skyrockets, if my disease makes me too sick to work. If I have to carry a pregnancy to miscarriage to prove I'm fucking sick.

I'm not afraid. I don't have to worry for awhile.

Hopefully, the next few years will give the Republicans a chance to excorcise their fucking crazy evangelicals into a 3rd party no one cares about, and go back to Libertarian-lite politics that rational people, such as myself, don't have to vote against because of extreme social conservatism. HOPEFULLY, we'll swing back to the middle.

Things are set to crash and while I'm ready to tough it out and I'm sure other people see a long road, Obama will become the liberal effigy he's been put up to be, for better or for much worse.

I'm used to it, I forget other people aren't used to it. They want to ride those 10 generations of white Americans and get the piece they feel they're entitled to. Pushing people out of the opportunity their 10 generations had doesn't occur to them. I'm willing to go with a long road, I'm used to Chicago, I'm used to the cynicism, I'm used to machines, I'm used to the secret handshakes of being a blue state. I'm tired and broke--but I'm surviving and I can cope. I'm used to it. Others just plain aren't. They want that bullshit in a red single serve with a cherry on top. Are they galvinized? Will they be in 3 years?

But tonight I'm still happy that my generation can share something other than September 11th. I'm happy I can say President Obama and not stumble over a tired WASP surname, again. I'm sighing with relief. I'm not afraid of war or theocracy.

I don't have to worry for awhile.

arbitrage

2008-11-05T22:30:00.000-06:00

The Nikkei's in trouble! ^_^