The English paper was unacceptable, I redid it, and am reconsidering the implication that I would post future essays on here. School is a lot less consuming than I thought it would be.

I don't smoke tobacco and will stop pretending, even if that means my inability to participate in a UCSF study which offered thirty dollars in cash for an hour of survey. I tried smoking a cigarette while waiting for the bus on an empty stomach, and ten minutes later had to request a stop before Forest Hill station, so I could hurl in a stranger's lawn. I sat next to the mucus and tar spotted stomach water, feeling better and naked, until the next bus came.

Forever, and ever, you'll be in my heart and I will love you. Together, forever, we'll never will part oh how I love you. There's a scene in Monterey Pop where John Phillips is talking with Dionne Warwick's handlers on the phone, saying he wishes to speak to Dionne. I say a Little Prayer was one of the top billboard hits in 1967, and therefore the itunes album cover art is some shitty .gif in florescent reds and blues that says Age of Aquarius Top 100, or something like that. I guess at the time fame was a cabal of love and hair that grew flowers, with even the cultivated purity of Warwick and the cultivated counterculture of the Mamas and the Papas on a first name basis.

Smoke was rising from an orange orb above a scattering of single unit California rancho style houses, and we are in the police car, moving through the streets angling and weaving towards it's epicenter. The car stops, the camera looks over the roof and the glow is real.
"POLICE, Your house is on fire!" He knocks on the door and then looks towards a divided window. "Sometimes we just have to kick it in" he explains to the camera, "-POLICE, your house is on fire!" He kicks in one of the windows. "Police", his breath not allowing for all caps, "your house is on fire, get out". The baton hits and breaks each piece of glass, presumably so that the occupants of the house can hear his voice? Maybe there isn't anybody home? "POLICE YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE GET OUT NOW!"

An old black woman in a natal nightie comes down the hallway and opens the door. She is mostly deaf. The policeman reiterates. She rationalizes the situation, and says she must put some more clothes on. The officer searches the house asks her questions to determine if she is the sole occupant, and she answers while putting her clothes on from the other room. They rush out the door, and wait for a second squad car to arrive. Once outside, it becomes clear that this lady's house was not on fire, that the fire was coming to a neighbors house. The young officer, smile not obscured by his prickly mustache, apologizes and promises to replace the windows, free of charge.

In another episode, the Dallas policemen are free of calls, and so they decide to go to a neighborhood where there "is known to be drug trafficking," hoping to pick somebody up. We roll up next to some dilapidated Victorian with a dozen black people hanging about. They pick out a bigger guy with an Afro style haircut, some overly dark patterned golf shirt that I imagine could not have been made outside of the first Bush era, and nondescript khakis. He's standing to be frisked, the camera records the nervous analysis of the officers and, at half volume, the outraged heckling of the neighborhood. Suddenly the dude bolts by the side of the house and the guns are out. He rushes into a chicken coop, in the process getting rid of whatever it was he had on him, and the suspect is apprehended.

Like always, the officers dissect the situation before the video fades and we see the COPS logo and go to commercial. Like always, they mention how some people just choose not to work for a living, and some people have to feed their families. In the America of COPS, we are still a frontier, agrarian nation. Willie Loman is a righteous homesteader. The darkies have nothing to protect and nothing of value, and only exist outside of the borders, to steal and scalp out of disrespect.

Fascist overtones aside, it is a great show. Or at least, one that I can't help but watch anytime I'm home and it's on. Dallas cops get a call about a man selling flowers on the street. The officers explain how little they care for these calls, and we cut to the actual encounter. The man selling roses at the intersection is terrified, it is raining, and the sirening cowboys have arrived. They motion to him and he approaches forcing himself into a minstrel smile that could fit a melon half, saying he's just there to sell some roses. The cops ask him if he feels safe doing so in the rain. The cops ask him if he feels he is blocking traffic. The smile only breaks when he cognitively hears these accusations, and even then it's only for a second. He bows a lot and explains that no, he's just selling his flowers, and we're holding back tears. The cops ask that he continue to feel safe and not block traffic, and then drive away.

I'm in an awful place, like Another Saturday Night, except I wouldn't have a girl under each arm if I were back in my home city, either. I am reminded of my inability to talk to people when I find on the bathroom floor a bookmark I had been using. On it was written my phone number and a brief explanation of the fairly universal circumstances which I felt required I give a stranger my number. I remembered writing it after an orange haired girl sat next to me on the bus, reading the guardian and taking interest in my buttons. It was a long ride on a very full 38, but as the bus cleared she got up and sat next to some dude in a VANS tank-top who seemed like he felt he had no choice but to move to California since he was the weirdest dude in his South Carolina town. I folded the note then and there, placed it where I had been reading, and got off to gorge myself on Indian food.

It's brighter today than it has been in a while, fogless and warm when I left the house at 6:30, but somebody is turning the lights out on me. My class is held in a room without windows, and the power inexplicably turned off for a full 20 seconds, exciting the kids into outburst, A Russian accent said "How Romantic" and Linda fanned the excitement off of herself. In the darkness, I stretched my legs and looked for deliberate symbolic meaning in this action. I threw away about 30 Hot Dogs this morning, and the guy I'm renting from never came home last night. The last I heard from him was this email:

Edwin,
I don't want to have to tell you this all the time because we are
grown men. Stop with the toilet seat. Its loud and annoying. Everyone
else hears it and they don't like it either. Stop dropping the toilet
seats, Edwin. I don't how it is where you come from but we don't do
that kind of shit around here. I find it disrespectful because I
already addressed this to you and you are still doing it. Its getting
on my nerves and its getting on everyone else's nerves. We don't like
it Edwin. You do it early in the morning and late at night. I was
respectful enough to ask you like a man to not do that this morning.
Email this time. Don't let us hear that crap anymore, its selfish and
disrespectful.

Sonny

I'm worried he's drunken himself dead in a ditch somewhere, only because his already psychologically destroyed children would then have to fend for themselves on the streets of San Francisco. I fucking wish I got KMEL on my ipod. fuck mp3s. Secession. Radio es la futura.