6-12-08 Why Do You Think I'm Living Here?

Mary greets me as I arrive home with her usual peculiar mix of friendliness and class hostility. "Exterminator ain't come yet. I thought you was powerful, get them to take care of it, but you just like me!"

"Yeah," I say, "don't let this pretty face fool you, they don't listen to me," all the while thinking, "Listen, just 'cause I'm white don't mean shit; I'm still poor!"

4-5-08 The Class War Continues

Walking last night home from a thing, recounting a conversation from the evening before to Katie.

"...and I told her that the reason I hadn't been mugged was because I look kinda mean when I'm just walking around, and she told me to show me my mean look. She looks at me and she says, 'You don't look that mean.'"

Katie says, "Honey, you don't look mean, you look poor!"

3-9-08 Liminal

The day was spent walking the blocks around my new place. I now live right on the border between Prospect Heights (beginning to gentrify, but still affordable to certain people who want to live near the park but are priced out of Park Slope) and Crown Heights (decidedly not gentrifying in the least, entrenched poverty, hardcore gang tags and run down buildings everywhere), and as with all borders, war is the order of the day.

Each street shows the scars of battles, in graffiti and garbage and half completed condos. Outposts of money (a Pilates studio, a cute bar, a coffee shop with indirect lighting and a selection of international brews) jostle up against poverty (the apartment building with garbage in the yard, the empty lot full of discarded auto parts lorded over by a single baleful-eyed rottweiler) and the old-guard of the neighborhood (a Jamaican bakery, a hair salon, an auto-parts store), all uneasy, suspicious each of the other, wondering who will take each contested block.

1-9-08 Lions and Common People

My boss forgot I was using her AMEX card to book some travel for her, and dashed off to a lunch without it, giving me the perfect opportunity to wander through the neighborhood during a (yet again) glorious afternoon to take it to her.

The lionesses in front of the Morgan Library are almost a perfect echo of their counterparts who flank the New York Public Library, but in a minor key. They look completely relaxed lying at the door of this strange buidling that seems more mausoleum than house of learning. Maybe they've already had their fill devouring poor people who've tried to get in and now they rest, tails frozen mid-flick, in the strangely warm January sun.

1-2-08 - On Why I Am Well Suited for an Artistic Life

I have been making my lunch to take to work for several months now, and as I am both lazy and poor, I have stuck with the old impoverished standby, rice and beans. I use Goya canned black beans, along with powdered garlic, bay leaf, basil, rosemary, oregano, balsamic vinegar, Angostura bitters, and a seasoning packet that you can buy from Goya that's kind of like Tony Chachere's spicy, salty seasoning (which I have yet to be able to find in my neighborhood), but not quite.

I make this meal at least once a week, either for dinner or for lunch, and I am sort of in love with it. The seasonings and substantial heartiness of it warm my heart, and every time I put it in the microwave to heat it up at work, I find myself singing a little song: "Rice and beans, rice and beans, rice and beeeaanns".

12-20-07 - Perspective

My father and I delivered food and gifts to “less fortunate” (i.e. poor) families today for the Rotary Club. We showed up on the doorstep of this family in an apartment complex near my parents house in Phoenix, and they were watching TV. The man of the house was drinking a beer while the mother of the children nursed a child in her lap. As we left I said to my father, “Hell, I’ve lived in worse places than that, and nobody brought me anything for Christmas!”