Hello Comrade!

well, kitten, i have email again. i will be less aloof.

i've had so many thoughts this week. incongruent thoughts, which is nothing unusual. in my mind i've trampled flowers, destroyed the world, raised children, and had sex with strangers. hegel has a theory that is something like two steps forward, one back. it involves evil acts and divine providence. i wonder if george bush has ever read hegel. i'm certain he would love it if he could understand it. this is not a reason to hate hegel, but rather be grateful that he is such an abstract man, burried beneath tomes of rhetoric and tumultrous logic. for if he were at all understandable you would not be reading this email. you would be dead.

i do my homework by the sea. it's true. monday's are my day. my day all for me. no work, no school, no phone, no meetings of any sort. and on monday's, for the few hours before sunset, i'm reading to the breath of ms liberty. did you know that until the depression new york was full of gypsies? real gypsies that speak romany! the kinds with layers of skirts, low cut blouses, miles of bracelets and tarot cards. there were gypsy kings, like godfathers, who made sure they had places to sleep, food to eat, and welfare. and have you ever heard of joe gould? he lived on the streets of the village, ate ketchup and coffee, graduated from harvard in 1911, and claimed to have written the largest oral history of the world, which in fact he didn't actually do. and then there's edward said, you've heard of him probably.... the dislocated palestinian, sort-of, who went to school with omar shariff in cairo and is among the most vocal anti-isreal advocates in popular culture. he was a sexually frustrated teen whose zealous semi-bourgeois parents forced him into too many childhood activities - clubs, sports, music, rigorous school, and the such. he's a fantastic writer.

so anyway. i do this reading by the sea. and last week i got kind of depressed. three boys were fishing. a fat white kid and two skinny black kids. the fat white kid had a thick brooklyn accent and the black kids talked tenement slang. it was hard to tell the extent of their friendship. the fat kid had two coolers, one for bait and one for caught fish. he had two fishing poles - one to cast bait (former living fish) and one to cast tackle (fake plastic fish). the two black kids had gatorade bottles with fishing line wrapped around them and hooks.

the two black kids didn't have much bait, and weren't so savvy at putting it on the hook anyway, so the fish ate it without getting caught. they kept asking the white kid if they could have some of his bait (he had at least three pounds) and he was like, no no no, until he realized that they were going to leave. so he gave them a big pile of something or other that looked gross to me.

i'm playing this out to be a racist story but it actually wasn't, well, mostly.

i think they all really liked eachother and ultimately the boy with the most decided to share, either because he liked them, or because he didn't want to be alone, and probably both.

what pissed me off was when a big fat white *man* showed up with his two dogs. he talked to the white kid about the fishing and suddenly the rat started to say bad things about his friends... "they kept following me so i got caught fishing on the other pier and got kicked off, it was their fault."

[a little note: it's illegal to fish off most piers in new york city. if the cops see you, yer bust.]

[another note: it's a terrible, despicable, habit to scapegoat yer pals.]

so it goes. white guy talked to white boy and said not a word to the other two kids who were nice enough. at that point white boy decided he needed to go fish alone. he gathered his things and started to walk off, when all of a sudden one of the kids with the gatorade bottle rods yelled "I cought something." white boy came running back and cast out his rod just as gatorade boy yelped "oh, he's gone!"

they went their separate ways and i watched the sunset alone. (and frankly, i was kind of happy for the peace.)

back ||| home | words | music | friends | email klever