Son of a preacher, man.

I'd been single for about ten years in 2012, and after the Internet dating bubble burst, I went back to good ole' fashioned, face-to-face contact with the same limited results. Based on the sound reasoning that I'd made a female friend of sorts at an alumni function quickly after my return from out west, I invited a Korean friend (also somewhat lukewarm) from my dojo to an alumni function downtown that served as an equidistant meeting point between our respective subway commutes from Brooklyn and Queens.

My fair-weather friend agreed to the get-together, which was somewhat surprising to me after she rebuffed other fun invitations, but summer in the city makes even the most winter-shocked South Korean eager to be outside. The theme was a disco dance party, which made my older friend happy at the prospect of enjoying. Something was in the air that night, because soon after she showed up, we started doing shots, and then time seemed to speed up. The music got louder, the bar got more crowded, and after an older man hit on me early on, the younger office guys started showing up from their pre-game bar hops further uptown that led them to our downtown soiree.

It got blurry after that, but I remember a spinning disco ball with lots of flashing lights, and dancing in a group with a cute, dark-haired guy. We took breaks from the dance floor to talk to him on the sidewalk outside, and then we were too drunk to go on. I didn't remember getting home that night, which scared my middle-aged self a lot more than the younger version of me. The city was rapidly changing with this latest wave of gentrification, and a lot of the newcomers didn't know the rules, which made it even more dangerous than it'd been before, in direct proportion to their out-of-towner paranoia. You could see the tension in their eyes walking around.

It must have scared off my friend, too, because other summer alumni party invites got turned down right away with no hesitation. We even emailed each other over the contacts we made that night, with both of us given the same info for the guy we'd been dancing with. She declined the idea of dating him while we were at the beach in Coney Island, silenced by my bodysurfing in the same way a Filipino friend from another dojo would be during my first, successful bodyboarding attempt using his board. He also never accepted an invite from me again, and they'd both been afraid of the murky Atlantic Ocean.

So, my new alumni friend and I struck up an easy correspondence at the same time I'd met another younger guy at a second alumni party that summer. Ryan was in his 20s, though, so we didn't get as far as my other paramour in his 30s did, but I was working a freelance gig midtown that made lunch dates and after-work excursions easy to arrange. He was good company, too, of a sort that I'd been accustomed to for a long time: an intelligent, educated Nuyorican making good after leaving the 'hood. I was proud to see other hardcore city kids get through "The Ivy League" system a lot easier than I did. 

That didn't make life problem-free, though, on account of us being natives. The manager at his landscape design firm was a real bitch who kept hitting on him, years before this recent spate of sexual harassment suits y'all are thriving in began. Every time she knew he was heading out the door, she'd drop work on his desk due immediately, like she'd done for our lunch date he was late for, and now this dinner date he thought she was weirdly trying to sabotage. 

She was a much older, extremely aggressive, non-native blond lady having fun jerking the chain of a young brother on the rise, in a classic RISD "pas-de-deux" of sexual tension marred by intense career competition. Poor kid couldn't tell if he was attracted by all the attention or if he was afraid for his life, when I asked him about it over pre-dinner drinks, which worried me even more. She was a seasoned cougar accustomed to muddying the work-waters with her shirts unbuttoned just the right amount, so that whenever she leaned over his desk, she showed her thickly tanned "creasage" to the newest kid on the block, confused and stressed out as he was by making it to "The Big League" firms of Manhattan.

Based on that disclosure alone, plus the rapturous detail he supplied to me about the technical qualities of the soil in the street planters we passed as we headed toward our destination, I knew he was "hands-off" dating material for me, but I liked the warmth of a humid summer night on the water. We were going to see a Muay Thai fight at the Hudson River piers later on, so even if our dinner date didn't go as planned, I'd still see some action that night. We were finally seated in a really loud restaurant that seemed to immediately perk him up with its Hispanic-flavored appetizers. We got more drinks and with our entrees, I leaned in to ask him some serious questions, as the Mojitos started to give me a fuzzy "halo effect" I could see reflected on his now more-amorous face.

Alright. Let's get down to it: food, family, faith....all the really good stuff. Here, he faltered a bit as the evenings' sheen wore away, like I suspected. Just talking about his hardened single mom from Puerto Rico brought about a dampening effect, as we dived down into the reality of our respective situations. I'd come from a broken family that did time in the projects coming up, too. I knew that without a very solid foundation, and if our careers suddenly "went south", we didn't have anything or anyone to rely on besides the stuff that got us to this point in time, and I needed him to feel that pressure a little bit, because I was way past the age of random hook-ups. He started responding to it, opening up beyond the bland office demeanor we used to pass through midtown offices, but I could see his confidence was fading.

By the time we got around to religion, he was almost done talking to me. I spoke haltingly about my traditional Catholic upbringing, and I could tell from the chill falling over him that "The Ivory Tower" we attended was still unreceptive to people of faith. Oh, well. I stopped talking so I could listen to him describe his mothers' descent into the extremes of Evangelical Christianity brought on by the stress of single motherhood, including demonic possession and public displays in the churchs' aisles while writhing on the ground speaking in tongues. Huh. I did not have that kind of upbringing. Candles, yes. Stained glass, yes. Beauty and discipline, si. This shit you sayin' to me? Uh, hell, no.

I truly did not know what to say back to him. He told me as his mom worked her way up the small, storefront church hierarchy, she'd egged him on to make up phony scenarios that would promote them even higher within the parish, by babbling gibberish and making a false conversion. "I lied about it", as he laughed uncomfortably in the face of my genuine experience. Yeah, I hesitated, but your moms...."Oh, I know!" He said it too loud and too quick, which meant he wasn't over anything. "She's totally nuts!" Right, but, that doesn't mean your spiritual life is over, I gently advised him. You're Hispanic. Catholics can always come home. And I meant it. He was my Brother-in-Christ. He was more insistent on putting all religions in the same category as UFOs and Bigfoot sightings. This brush-up with sincerity? He disliked that even more. It had happened to me more than once at RISD, so I knew the deal: the door was officially closing.

When he saw the stage version of my real-life warrior act down at the pier, I knew we'd reached the end of our destination. Now it was his turn to be silent over post-fight beers at a makeshift cabana by the water. "So, that's what you trained in, huh?" Yeah, my man. As the sun set over the river on a romance that was never-to-be, he suddenly seemed to want the evening to go on, with another round of beers and a renewed sense of energy, in pursuit of a feeling that left quickly with so many fighter men milling around the bar, dressed in tight t-shirts emblazoned on the back with a trendy design motif: two big, graphic angel wings with the feathers articulated in a highly realistic, line-art style. And just like that, it was time for us both to go home. Alone.

Happy Feast Day to Our Most Blessed Mother, The Holy Virgin, 
Our Lady of Guadalupe. Forever She Reigns as Queen of Heaven.

Alley Cat

The backyards of brownstone Brooklyn are a magical hidden world that the rest of the world doesn't readily know about, and before the massive explosion that brought about its gentrification by so many white Americans to our fair city, that was just the way we liked it. The apartments were beautiful and affordable, though not to my newly-established boyfriend from upstate New York. He was saddled by credit card debt elicited by his manic phases of unrest and urgency that told him he needed to do something now nOW NOW! It didn't dig him out of his depressive holes, but rather kept him there with something more to be upset over, which got him back on the binge cycle of drinking all-nighters that kept his diseases well-fed, if not happily cured. 

But, my aunt's old apartment by Ocean Avenue was sad to be in, and the neighborhood was too far a commute to Manhattan. I told him I would pay any monthly rent he couldn't afford, and for the next year, we had full use of the entire first floor of a garden apartment in central Park Slope, for the now mind-boggling low fee of $950/month. It was deemed an extraordinary luxury by some, and a horrid "frontier" land in the ghetto by others, depending on the individual's agenda. After we pulled out the fridge to clean it and found hypodermic needles, one could presume either a diabetic lived there or a heroin junkie, again, according to the bent of your imagination.

We didn't care. The neighborhood was great, and the apartment was gorgeous; a classic "railroad" style place where each room opened into the next to the garden in the back, separated by old wooden pocket doors that closed off the bedroom from the living room. The kitchen opened up to the garden by sliding glass doors, and by the reactions of our guests, I knew I'd struck gold. My dad joked about my lack of a green thumb because of the tree in the middle of a concrete area that died before we got there, which meant that some envy had taken hold. We hung sparking white Christmas tree lights on it that lit up at night, and as the evening wore on, the magic took hold until there was nothing else but happiness around the patio table.

An opera singer did her warm-up scales almost every afternoon with the window open in the building behind ours on the next block over, and thick ivy covered one of the walls that had a simple bench of concrete blocks under a bower of grapevines from next door. Without the partitions of so many walls, the whole city block is basically one big garden that no one can see from the street. Back there, it was a different world; gardens sprouted lush vegetables every year, as the bees and butterflies fluttered around huge sunflowers in the summer sun. Like our beautiful neighborhood with great rents, it felt like a secret we had earned as hard-working New Yorkers. It felt that good and that right, to me.

My friend from RISD had a place in Brooklyn, too, in a different neighborhood that's also well-considered, though less of a garden district. He'd gotten a kitten to ride out the loneliness that comes with the single city life and long hours at the studio. He'd found work at MTV Studios: a factory of drafting tables where he was one of hundreds of production artists who painstakingly filled in the minor details for the then-popular "Beavis and Butthead" show that caused him painful embarrasment as a classically trained draftsman. The creator, Mike Judge, could give a shit about the fine art of animation, and basically told them that at meetings. Oh, well. Looked good on the resume, though.

His parents still lived in Mass., as well-to-do Armenians who owned a successful car dealership. They spoiled Ed and his siblings rotten, but that's first generation affluence for you. Any problems could be solved with money, right? That's the American Dream! It wasn't, of course, but who were we to tell them that? They went on ski vacations every year, and turned out functional illiterates who could draw alone in a room for many hours. Done deal. Back in Brooklyn, we agreed to babysit Ed's kitten while he flew home for a holiday, with the warnings that me and Dave were solid dog people, and that a lot of cats roamed through the gardens, getting into loud fights almost every single night.

He tentatively agreed to drop off the cat with a backup plan of a kennel, in case the deal went bust, and it did, no surprise to us. He'd assured us that the animal had been well-socialized and could mix it up with other cats, but within a half an hour, me and Dave ran back to the kitchen to the sound of a deathly kitten scream, finding it being clawed through a window screen by a big orange tabby street cat with a really angry look on its face. That kitten won't make it through the night, here. We called him up with our concerns, and once again he was back at our place in a quick cab ride to drop it off at the kennel. Within a few months more, Ed and my other RISD friend Lisa would leave the city for southern California, never to brave the streets of New York again. Ain't that the way of it, though?

Oooh, Oooh, Oooh, Oooh,
Black and orange stray cat sittin' on a fence
Ain't got enough dough to pay the rent
I'm flat broke but I don't care
I strut right by with my tail in the air

Stray cat strut, I'm a ladies' cat,
A feline Casanova, hey man, thats where its at
Get a shoe thrown at me from a mean old man
Get my dinner from a garbage can

Yeah don't cross my path

I don't bother chasing mice around
I slink down the alley looking for a fight
Howling to the moonlight on a hot summer night
Singin' the blues while the lady cats cry,
"Wild stray cat, you're a real gone guy."

I wish I could be as carefree and wild,
but I got cat class and I got cat style.

I don't bother chasing mice around
I slink down the alley looking for a fight
Howling to the moonlight on a hot summer night
Singin' the blues while the lady cats cry,
"Wild stray cat, you're a real gone guy."

I wish I could be as carefree and wild,
but I got cat class and I got cat style.

Cotto Cooks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_water

When I worked out of the Brooklyn Public Library in Park Slope, I was often beset by the usual characters one would expect lurking idly about during the day, in a space designed for heavy public usage. My friend named "Cotto" was just such a person. He sat next to me huffing and puffing away to attract my notice, shuffling in his seat and looking around, until I finished writing my piece and my headphones came off. Now! He hit me up for my earbuds as soon as I laid them down to the right of me, next to his workstation. Sure...I was a little hesitant about loaning them out, since they're designed to go directly into dirty waxy ear canals but he looked decent enough, so I said "yes".

He thanked me and went back to his work, while I finished my day writing publishing-related emails and copyediting. After we were both done working on the public-access computers (just around the same time, wink wink), we easily struck up and conversation as he handed my little earbuds back to me. He was filling out a test online for a type of hygiene certification that was his boss' direct orders to him because (as he told me), he was a "chef". Aha! I always brighten up around other working artists, since we're rare in the real world. We have a lot in common creatively, and we share the same types of problems out in society. I told him about my website that has "food" built right into its subtitle because I'm on par with a low-level cook, even though I'm not certified to do professional kitchen work, which would be a whole other life trajectory that I do not have time for.

But he certainly did have available time, and from what he told me, it was definitely worth it, at least at first. He was working (at that time) in the kitchen that serviced the VIPs who came to see the Jets play football at the Meadowlands. Whoa! That's a big name to drop 'round the way. Good for him! Finding quality work is the biggest challenge a real working artist has. He said his boss was very strict while running his kitchen ("Top Chefs" usually are, since the competition is fierce and their reputations are always on the line), and he was "riding him" at work about his cleanliness. In order to keep this plush gig, he had to do coursework for a certain type of kitchen certificate, if he wanted to keep his job washing dishes (read more about Cotto's bottoming-out phase here: http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/10/dirt-weed.html).

It was a start. I gave him one of my black "Illumination" stickers with my email address written on the back, and told him to keep in touch with me. He was new to the neighborhood, and very excited to show me the place he scored through a bodega contact about ten blocks from my apartment building. After our first meeting for coffee, he told me that his rented room didn't have a kitchen, and he was worried about losing his skill sets as a chef. Could he use my kitchen? Okay, why not? I was in the middle of an eviction case and in serious limbo. Who knows how much longer we'd have access to it? Besides, I hadn't eaten all day and I was feeling lightheaded from hunger. It was worth a shot. He seemed clean and respectable, even buying me a Chai Latte at the local hippie cafe in the 'hood.

We went to a nearby grocery store, and that was when Cotto quickly began losing his bearings. The old Nuyorican neighborhood had slowly changed from gentrification, with the typical influx of rich white out-of-town hipsters and "wanna-be" art fags, which seemed to throw him off, plus the layout of the store had changed with recent renovations. Where to go? Also, he had no shopping list, preferring to dazzle me with his limited memory. I wasn't that worried, because his food was free for me with my kitchen use serving as his fee, so I tagged along as he aisle-surfed. We left, bought some wine, and then he hesitated outside the store again. I forgot something! And that wasn't something a pro would do. Ever. Without a firing. Huh...

He also made a relatively simple Italian-American dish called "Fettuccine Alfredo" that I could have made in my sleep, if I cared enough to do so, which I didn't. Let him try to "dazzle" me with his prowess! I happily played the role of "Sous Chef" to him as a kitchen second (I like being an amateur, at times), thinking he'd enjoy being the lead guy after working at the bottom of a creative hierarchy, like those in the top kitchens of New York. I chopped as he added ingredients to the pots and pans on the stove, but my kitchen quickly threw him as a new environment for him to maneuver around. I turned my back to empty off my cutting board into the garbage for a mere second and when I turned around, Cotto had a bizarre wide-eyed look about him, as we watched one of my tea towels go up in flames.

Oops! He'd used it as a pot-holder in lieu of my actual potholders within easy reach of the stove (it was a small apartment kitchen), which caused him to let the corner of the small flammable towel drop directly into an open flame. Uh, that's more than a ten-point deduction, dude. I calmly put out the fire in the sink within another couple of seconds, and before he knew what to do, I had another tea towel in his hands so he could get back to work. The dish came out lumpy and overly rich, with chunks of congealed cheese clumped together in sodden clumps, which was his ultimate finish for me as part of any ongoing "Demo Team" I might have. No "personal chef" work for you, esse! Besides, after we ate, he noticed me as I laid down on the floor with my feet propped up on my couch, where he took up residence as my house guest while I sat on the floor, and he began to notice my beauty, with first one comment followed fast by another that betrayed his dawning nervousness about me and my excellent home.

After my housing deal went bust and I moved into his "Casa Crack Shack", we had plenty of more time to get acquainted, which we did quickly as I lead our conversations. Turns out, Cotto had to pick a training program as part of his release from prison, so he picked "cooking" at random, though as he told me, he "never really wanted" to be a chef. This, as he played his video games, chain-smoked, and then blew part of his city funding for school on more tacky "hood rat" shit, like shiny new gadgets and other things dumb stoners really like, but that's a story for another day. 

Suffice to say, after generations of a paid education with special ESL classes, free cell phones and public utilities, mass transit, welfare, Section 8 housing, incarceration, rehab, drug and alcohol addiction recovery programs, medication, healthcare, psychotherapy, institutionalization, and crime, we New Yorkers managed to completely piss away millions of dollars on one very sick Puerto Rican guy whose greatest feat of cooking will be passing out underneath a palm tree somewhere near a turista beach cabana back on his warm tropical island home, waking only after one particularly large coconut falls hard on top of his big round head, finally rousing him from his comatose-like slumber brought on by his raging manic obsessive schizoid bipolar identity disorder (because he likes skipping doses to bring out the psychotic in him: much easier to commit crimes that way), preferring instead to "slow-roll homie" his way late in the afternoon to shake down the wealthy Americanos who are already a couple of drinks into their Puerto Rican beach "vacay", paying for his spot beneath the tree by helping the cabana cook crack open a couple of conch shells for the grill, because that's all he can really do. Really. He's that sick.

The real deal: https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Public-Policy/Social-Security-Income-%28SSI%29-and-Social-Security-D

The scam: http://www.disabilitysecrets.com/mental-impairment-claims.html

Sick House

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownstone

As soon as I moved into a cheaper, smaller fourth floor walk-up in the 'hood, I knew it was trouble. Like my mom's typical "old lady" development, I could feel people tensely watching me behind their paranoid peepholes. It was also unnaturally quiet in the middle of the day for a New York townhome with multiple family dwellings, because gentrification has its own set of difficulties for native New Yorkers like me to contend with. Where were the laughing kids playing in the hallways, or the savory smells of homemade food that's always on the stove? Pampered white people bring economic stability with them, but with a serious fee that's often too steep an emotional price for us to pay for them, because they fucking hate actual hardcore urban living.

I can somewhat understand it. After returning home from out west, an old workplace "frenemy" of mine from back in the day took a picture of me with a rare shocked look on my face, as I took in the midtown skyscraper landscape anew with fresh eyes. This ain't like back there. What's even weirder for people like me is that after I get into the groove, I rock this town like I was born to it, which I am. That shocks a lot of people, especially out-of-towners who think they know what city living is all about. No, you don't. Unless you helped build and power this town like me and my crew for several generations, you don't have that kind of claim to this land, and that is actual soil underneath all this new concrete, "homey".

Same thing with rich white folk who've been transplanted here by their corporate firms from afar. I think they think we can't tell how stressed out they really are, because they think it's "uncool" to show the toll that this town takes on everyone, but their bulging wide eyes give it away every time. You feel it right away, too, just like every time I visited my mom's old person's development: I knew every set of retired, bifocal eyes took a look (or two) at me from underneath their old-fashioned lace curtains, as I walked it back and forth from her apartment to the parking lot (waiting to mess with me in that extremely hyper-tense way that older city people have), like the kind of curtains that Irish ladies who take tea at the exact same time every single afternoon (because they HAVE TO conform to some kind of a ritual, wink wink), ones that they put up as soon as possible to maintain that strict sense of privacy they feel entitled to in the plush suburbs.

Not so in the city. We live on top of one another atop some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. To me, it's a mostly happy communal lifestyle, but for those poor unfortunate people from wherever the fuck they come from, it's too much scrutiny for them to take. These are the type of people who lie for a living, and the kind of accountability that comes with close living is something they don't know how to process very well. As much as I will always love "Brownstone Brooklyn" (always, peeps, always), I also hated the tense, jittery prosperity that drives out people like us for cheaper points north periodically, though that's part of our lifestyle, too.

It's like you can feel their nervous juggling acts through the very walls that have absorbed the small vicious fights they try to have quietly so the neighbors can't hear, unlike the raucous drunk Micks who've inhabited these types of low income buildings for years. I don't like either type of dysfunction (the rich kind nor the drunk kind), but at least some drunk fuck is an easy mark for us natives: just add booze, and start the countdown to crazy. Easy to beat. Weirdo neighbors from other countries took to fantasizing about my "downfall" like the easy target of New York wealth and privilege they wanted me to be, or so they mistakenly thought.

The problem was (is), it took (takes) years to "push out" someone like me, because that doesn't actually happen unless I want it to, and they didn't (don't) control it; other savvier, harder, native New Yorkers had (have) to artificially rig it through a crooked homegrown system, and by the time it did (does) happen, my ousting had (has) lost all the luster that they used to spark with, over glasses of cheap white wine and overly shiny eyeballs that I never want to neighbor with. Not once. Because this native girl grew up with tea, tenseness, and mental patient standoffs like it was part of her landscape. "Sick house" or not, in our fair city of Gotham or out in the countryside, it just doesn't matter, Micks. I know it when I feel it. Don't you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nursing_history 

Welfare Burger

True punk-rock spirit, as evidenced back in the day. Keep on it, man.

It's hard for our brothers and sisters around the world to tap into our common consciousness, beset as they are in this world by the woes cast upon them through continued war, famine, and injustice. That's why it's so important for us to speak up whenever we encounter wrong, difficult as they may be to do at times, because we often traverse the worst adversities when we are at our loneliest low points in life, but just like that old Christian poem "Footsteps"*, it just seems that way from the outside looking in. It is then when you are carried by The Lord Our G-d, as His Most Faithfully Beleaguered in Faith. As so often happens in my life, outsiders see one reality when in truth, it's the exact opposite of what they presume it to be, and that very deception is what leads them down the wrong path.

I meat a bleary-eyed Ecuadorean the other day on the street while he was waiting for the bus. I'd noticed him from the other side of the street before, because he stared at me like I was levitating across the sidewalk in front of his apartment building, instead of me hatted up and running an errand, sans makeup. In fact, when we crossed paths, I explained to him that I spend zero dollars ($0) on my appearance. But, but...he sputtered, swaying a little on his heels, I'm so pretty! Now that you've gotten to know me better, that sounds funny, right? Like, asking Jesus when he got his last pedicure while he walks around poorly shod in a pair of old worn sandals, but I was charmed by my new friend.

After all, that's what he was raised to believe in. Pretty girl = easy street, just add (+) one man. Done deal! Of course, that's an absurd way to think, because I'm not a prostitute for hire based solely on my looks (not that I mind beauty as a visual artist because it's part of my world) but in many American cultures, beauty is mythologized to such an extent (especially if you're a drunk, divorced, red-eyed Central American grandpa waiting on a cold Northern sidewalk for a public bus that's on slow rollin' country time), that talking to someone like me seems like, how can this be true ?! Oh, it be, brother man. I assure you of that, esse.

You see, when you're out there in the real world, you don't just get a small slice of pie from the same place over and over again (my G-d, the horror of that!), you eat "the whole enchilada" as they say, and that's exactly how me and my crew play this game called life: like it's winning just to be here, because we come across a lot of "walking dead" out there; bombed-out, brain-dead folks just wandering listlessly throughout their days, so unconscious and unplugged from the world as it exists, waiting to die. A nightmare...and so, when we see something we don't like, we say something, because speaking up is an action that leads to other actions, even if at first it's just misguided thoughts (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/06/say-something.html). It's all part of your training.

Most of my peers have already reached the type of early success that puts us in direct proximity to junior staff who need constant mentoring and teaching because we're tradespeople, and giving back to underlings is crafted into our lifestyles. I teach every day that I'm alive, even if it doesn't fit into your misconceptions about relegating learning to some far away classroom staffed by someone else, even though that someone else is probably someone I went to school with, here in New York, and I can also out-teach any day of the week. My creative hierarchies necessitated me into learning many many abilities so well just to stay competitive and on the job, that I can teach you in another language (in your native language, since you can't speak mine), using whatever tools you have handy.

After you do that for many years like we have, you develop a sophisticated routine centered around schooling. And so, when my Coloradan ex-boyfriend decided to take his act on the road by lecturing the Asian liquor store owner down the block from us in our Denver neighborhood, I couldn't have clapped harder for him in appreciation if I tried. It was one of my most favorite characteristics about him: that he used his power and prestige as a high-earning white man in our society to tell people what they avoided hearing through deliberately planned abusive neglect, by feigning continued ignorance about well-known facets of our American lives. On one such afternoon, I guess Kent had enough of the hypocritical bullshit, because he told me that he finally told the Korean owner what was up, and I was enraptured.

Kent liked to buy some booze to put into his little biker backpack that they make just for riders to squeeze liquid into their mouths during a ride (yeah, not the best use of it, but you don't know his full story and it is massively bad), so he could meander around town on the many bike paths that line the area in an inter-connected web that's the envy of older cities, though the common practice of compulsive over-exercise to cover up a serious mental disorder as it is used out west is a whole other article entirely. Suffice to say that he was familiar with the lay of the land, as he'd lived in town for many years, spending his days driving through he streets that he didn't bike, as a Master Electrician with his own junior apprentice to school in the trade.

I guess he figured he'd had enough of the shit show we'd seen play out unfairly in society over the years, because he and I talked about the judicious use of "mixed residential" zoning laws that are the mark of enlightened urban planning in newer cities like Denver, escaping the common traps most older cities succumb to, like the bust-and-boom, up-and-down patterns that characterize the instant ghettos and gentrified private parks with silver key access that define New York City life. We'd seen our native cities go down fast that way, like he had with the council flats in England, and I did with the projects in the city. Urban planning had created instant ghettos that insured encircled and entrapped cycles of poverty that no one could escape from, let alone a terrorized impoverished people who'd descended from the cruel mistreatment of corrupt plantation owners from centuries past.

We had enough, and it was reflected through his band's song titles about injustices that I felt keenly in my life, too. Kent told me back at our place that as he was walking back to the cooler for a cold drink, he couldn't help but razz the wealthy owner into embarrassment. We'd seen him cruise up to his immigrant business in the 'hood with a brand new Benz curbside, strategically placed as it was right across the street from public housing that was clearly demarcated as such with bolted-on plaques across the front row of old brick townhomes, across the street from his ghetto liquor store. Who the fuck did he think he was? What right did he have to come here and pick off the "po' black folk" with instant access to the very poison that killed them and their brains, by walling himself behind a plastic partition like some pussy?

Kent and I had seen him roll up in his fancy car in our urban neighborhood with his clean little prep school boy, all nice and pressed in his fancy private school clothes, but what right did he have to set up shop across the street from the poorest folks in town? Huh? Kent said he just stood there towering over this little guy and his small prep school kid. They played the whole smiling " haha...no speaky engrish" game with him that they'd been taught by the very people they bought the place from, with one very important caveat left unwritten but certainly lived out loud for the whole block to see: American assimilation is possible in one quick generation, you just have to sell out the more beset "minority" beneath you on the totem pole, even though there's no fucking way any Chinese-American can be a fucking minority, when China and the Americas are this fucking big. 

Nice try, though. "Kunta-Kente"**, you're my straight-up superhero, man! Don't ever change, bro, no matter how hard they grind you down. You're beautiful to me, baby. "Papa" this! We did, you know that, right? We really did show that small town what living is all about, be it with this century's immigrants or the very next ones. Still have your passport with your little boy Visa photo? That shit's adorable, kid, even if you did have a rough go of coming and going whilst traveling back and forth from "The Motherland", because someone (ahem, you know who) fluffed your fucking birth date on your kiddie passport, to give you a ride every time you exited and entered the country of your own free will. Who would do that to their kid going into a new country, you know? We do! Don't change a thing, baby. You're perfect just the way G-d made you to be. Amen to you, brother. This one's for you and yours today, baby. We're all red on the inside: http://taylorseafood.co.uk/ and http://www.taylorfoods.co.uk/

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=welfare+burger

* http://www.onlythebible.com/Poems/Footprints-in-the-Sand-Poem.html

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunta_Kinte

"This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land"

Long Beach, New York (photo © Marie Doucette)

Long Beach was once a rather quiet haven for native New Yorkers. It has become a major destination, with lots of exciting changes. In addition to the Quicksilver Pro, there was a volleyball tournament, plus a sand castle competition. It was somewhat overwhelming.

New Yorkers can't help but feel a little rueful as these areas develop anew around us. We have always known our area rocked big time, and now you do, too. Hidden gems are being "discovered", one by one—we may fear losing a foothold on the land of our roots, or being priced out of popular areas, as so many newcomers relocate here to enjoy the safety and relative prosperity of the American good life alongside us.

Let's encourage and support our extremely talented pool of designers, architects, and urban planners as they find solutions to accomodate every sector of our population. I know they can do it, because we deserve this wealth of beauty that surrounds us. Have a great start to the week, and don't forget to vote in the Primaries tomorrow!