May you live in an interesting age.

I don't care who said it.

It's simply hitting me, for the first time, how much of a curse it really is. See, my week kicked off with my finishing The Year Before The Flood and feeling drained.

Ned Sublette is a hell of a musicologist, and that alone makes this book a must-read: not only does his analysis of New Orleans brass bands and local music kick ass, he also has an even better look at New Orleans Dirty South rap, hip-hop, and bounce this side of Nik Cohn and Alison Fensterstock.

Where this book departs from his previous books, aka, Cuba And Its Music and The World That Made New Orleans, is in the inclusion of Sublette's experiences living in this city for ten months before the Federal Flood..which kick off with his discovery that the house he rented was where a young man had been murdered less than two years before Sublette and his wife moved in.

"Which house do you live in?" she asked. I told her the number. And she more or less said (we were speaking Spanish):

"Oh, that's the house where that boy got killed."

Where that who got what?

Friends, before you rent a home, Google the address first. It took 0.38 seconds to link to a picture of my front porch, transformed into an altar with flowers and handwritten prayers....

...Mr. Landlord kinda hadn't mentioned anything about this having happened when I rented the house. Well, why would he? And yeah, it would have affected my decision to rent or not. It turns out that this is a classic real estate problem, called "notorious addresses".

Mr. Landlord, who was younger than me, was a hard worker who was doing what I hadn't done - devoting himself to the accumulation of wealth. Besides his job in D.C., he owned this and another property, both of which he superintended himself. The next time I spoke to him, the next weekend he was in town, I brought up the uncomfortable subject of the killing and said, as politely as possible, it would have been better if we had learned about this from you than finding out about it on our own. His first response, which I thought odd, was: who told you about that?*

Ummmm, who told you about that? The landlord ought to have known about how small this town really is...and actually, Sublette should have, too, but he got to know that with time and 20/20 hindsight, as most newcomers do. Because, truth of the matter is, this entire city is one huge notorious address - and Sublette takes on the violence and the crime running rampant here, along with an exploration of how the racism woven through the city's - and, indeed, Louisiana's - history culminated in the mass negligence of the population and its needs well before and up into 8-29-05 and its ongoing aftermath.

It'll make you wonder, if you live here, why you are even bothering in the face of all this madness....at least for a while. It's why, ultimately, there is no magic pill for turning life's lemons into lemonade - at least, not one without side effects.

There are no easy answers here, and the reality of that is enough to make me weak in the knees.

That's what this book did.

______________________

About the only thing about The Year Before The Flood that can give anybody any sort of comfort is embodied in the following:

"Be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle."
- Author unknown (actually, I've just been told it's Plato who said it. Thanks, Karen)

Where Sublette's book shines is in the recognition of the community of music as a fount of renewal, rebirth and a reaffirmation of how much we are not on our own.

Postflood New Orleans compared only with two other moments I had experienced in my life: New York during its bankruptcy crisis of the '70's, and Havana in the Special Period of the early '90's - great music cities where there was creativity amid chaos, gloom, depression, and poverty. When you and everyone else in the band have lost your houses and music is what you have to survive with, you're going to play with some feeling. When a trumpet player drives six hours each way from Houston to make his weekly bar gig in New Orleans, the way musicians in Soul Rebels did, you can feel his commitment in every note. And the music was being listened to by people who didn't take it for granted. It had a big job to do to combat the depression everyone was suffering, and it rose to the challenge.*

Let's hope we can keep being inspired by its example in these parts....and that that feeling can spread all over this country somehow.


*Ned Sublette, The Year Before The Flood

The fish had been passed on to my friends Justin and Justine before their owners left town. The fish owners had been reassured that Justin was going to stay, so they felt better leaving the fish with him while they headed out of the way of what looked like a killer storm. Eventually, though, Justine convinced Justin they both had to leave...and the fish were not included in their evacuation plans.

So the fish stayed in their humble tank for what everyone thought would only be a few days.

Three months later, Justin and Justine came back to a small miracle: though the tank was grungy, all the fish were still swimming. Life was good...

...except, in the coming year, my friends decided to pass the fish on to the little guy's preschool teacher, who wanted a tank of fish for her classroom. The transfer to the school happened a couple of months after the kid began his first year in his current school, and he and his class learned about the care, feeding, and enjoyment of fish in captivity beyond Finding Nemo.

The next year, the tank was in the classroom again - minus the fish. I heard about the mishap in which my son's teacher, in trying to clean the tank, accidentally caused the deaths of the fish.

In horror, I blurted out,"But...those fish survived Katrina!"

It may have contributed to my son's teacher refraining from getting any more fish for the classroom for the next couple of years (well, my outburst and the crack that developed in the tank), but she decided to give it another go this year. Although the little guy has moved on to a different grade, a different classroom, and a different teacher, he still comes back for visits - and he helped his now-former teacher with preparing a new fish tank for a new set of fish.

All of which promptly died shortly after their introduction to their new home.

No matter there...even if I had to repress some sick giggles at this latest twist of fish fate, as well as the impulse to call my son's former teacher Darla the Fish Killer...she purchased another three fish. Two goldfish and one pretty black fish with telescope eyes.

I came in today to find a distraught teacher. The poor black fish was slowly dying of ich. This would make the fourth fish in a month's time meeting its demise in her classroom. I had to scoop out the dying creature and hold a short fish funeral in the bathroom.

I don't know if any of us can take much more of this ichthyian carnage, so please help me pray to whatever gods might help watch over the remaining goldfish in the tank....more for our collective sanity, actually, than for the physical health of the fish.

Dear Parents,

If you are not 30 years old or younger it is mandatory that you read this book:

Growing Up Digital by Don Tapscott

Our kids learn differently from us. You will be glad you read it!

1) AAAAAAHHHH!!!! I'm over 30!!! How the hell did that happen????

2) How lovely. I have an assignment on how interactive learning works.

Let's see if I can pull at what I learned through interactive media today:

I checked out one of my favorite blogs to see what was new and found this paean to removing one's prejudices and making the world a better place in the process, no matter what your sexual orientation is.

There's even a plea at the end for emotional considerations of all that you love when embarking on new relationships. Don't make Jen Kwok cut you.

Needless to say, I have a new addition to the blogroll, and it was in the archives of this latest that I found one of the funnier Britcoms ever and spent a good chunk of time watching it in a vain effort to put off getting rid of the soggy pile of detritus in our backyard we haven't been able to bag due to the weekend downpours:



So bad, it's good, even this godawful episode and its commentary near the end...

...and it was through the YouTube links on one of the episodes that I found some instruction on how not to behave at a funeral and what happens when one enters Google into Google:



So, after all this accumulation of pop cultural knowledge, I can probably somehow assist with helping my child through the minefields of 21st century learning, right?

Yeah, I'm better off operating a streetcar.

click on the image to enlarge
Ohm Sweet Ohm, by Simon Patterson

powered by:

Just contemplating the fundamental interconnectedness of all things and how we try to make some sort of sense or order out of it...which may get me telling my nonsensical fish story - or not.

Suffice it to say, I finished The World That Made New Orleans and am a quarter of the way through Ned Sublette's The Year Before The Flood, and both books are making me want to go back to his monumental Cuba And Its Music again. There's a man who lives by fundamental interconnectedness.

I hope I can make this event at the Mother-In-Law Lounge on the 24th, but it's on a Thursday, in the midst of high holy day choir rehearsals for li'l ol' me. It's not like I'd be missing Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur or anything like that, but it's pretty close. But hey, at least there's a Garden District Book Shop event on the 23rd and this one at Octavia Books on October 10th.

Stay dry. It's a wet day out there.

Eight years ago today, I was working glass using the two thousand degree-plus heat of a glory hole, listening in disbelief as I worked at how the news on the radio was completely transforming our world. I ran inside, turned on the nearest television, and saw the south tower crumble.

The fires that contributed to the buckling and collapse of both towers burned hotter than the ones I used to craft small vases that day. The fires ignited within us all sent troops to Afghanistan...

...troops that are still there, after all these years.

MY CHILD is in Afghanistan right now. Thanks to the previous administration's amoral and illegal actions, not only do I have to worry about him being killed in battle, I have to worry about how he'd be treated were he to fall into enemy hands.

Which, to be honest, I've always had to worry about, but in the past, my govt. operated from a higher moral ground and hadn't given the fucking green light to torture as acceptable. No reason for the Taliban to be restrained in how they would treat him - all they have to do is point to one of the MANY locations and instances where the US said, oh this is ok. It's not like we gave them the winning hand in the propaganda battle by dropping to their level or anything.

And it just ... I'm as disheartened as anyone that Obama seems set on escalating, rather than ending, the war in Afghanistan. I'm as disheartened as anyone that for many of us the world doesn't seem significantly different than it did a year ago. But you know and I know that we can sit here and be disheartened or we can do something about it.

Put something in the tip jar and label it for the First Draft care package. Make your suggestions or contribute to the package in other ways here.

Let's also work a little harder to bring 'em all home.

Update, 11:43 AM: Adrastos on 9-11:

The misuse of 9/11 by the Bush-Cheney administration compounded the tragedy and has, sadly, dimished the impact of that awful morning 8 years ago. We've become numbed to the video and made cynical by the way 9/11 was used by the GOP. Joe Biden summed it up neatly in 2008 by describing every sentence coming out of Rudy Giuliani's mouth as consisting of: "A noun, a verb and 9/11."

The people who were murdered that day deserved better.

Anudder update, 11:52 AM: Athenae outlines how unified we really were immediately following the attacks in NYC and DC and the crash in PA. We all should have behaved better.

What region am I talking about when I talk about the following?:

• For there to be real, lasting change in the way things are done here, basic human needs must be addressed - economic needs, employment, infrastructure, living conditions, health care, education, justice...then even larger issues can be effectively dealt with.
• Failure to address these things leads to an atmosphere where hope is in short supply and people have no choice but to shrink inward or lash out violently in ways that are justified only to the perpetrators and their ilk. Because the violence is much more out front than the private feelings held inside, the killings get the coverage in the media.

It could be New Orleans, certainly, or most other major cities in this country...

...but this is where it's coming from:

• ...reformers think the conservatives who run the education system should be forced to respond to its academic shortcomings. Professor Bakr thought a far wiser approach would be to try to embarrass the Saudi government about how poorly graduates cope with the world, to ask aloud what it is about the curriculum that means that Saudi Arabia in particular and the Arab world in general produce so few scientists and contribute nothing significant to the world's technological advances. That approach echoed the concerns of most Saudi parents, and would be a far more effective form of pressure than criticism seen as an assault on the culture and the religion.*
• In working for reform, Hamad drew a parallel with soccer. Saudi Arabia played soccer according to the same rules as everybody else. So Saudis need to learn that their society, too, can afford the same kind of open debate and discussion allowed in other countries. "If you teach people that you are totally different, you are totally special, you don't belong to the world, the world has a kind a conspiracy against you, everybody is waiting for the opportunity to attack you. What does this bring you?" Hamad said. "You are making an explosive mind, a very hostile mind. So how can you have a democracy in such a situation? You have hostile minds and at the same time you want democracy. You cannot combine these. The first thing is that you have to use the educational system to spread different values, human values."*

If parents here are so het up about Barack Obama telling children to stay in school and be true to themselves, don't quit and don't give up hope - well, go move to Saudi Arabia and subscribe to Wahhabi Islam. Sure, there won't be socialism there, but there certainly won't be any tolerance for pulling one's children from school if, say, the king there decides to address all the school children.

At the same time, there is still a lot of work to be done here on the education front. And if courageous reformers in Middle Eastern countries recognize the darn near revolutionary role an education has in the development of citizens, an education which can be used effectively to help change their worlds, then why not fully recognize the teaching profession for what it is: a lot of hard work invested in molding our futures, as the way we treat these children today will determine how we are all treated tomorrow.

Update, 1:45 PM: Maitri compares what Obama said with what Reagan said. Get schooled, parental objectors.

Anudder update, 9-9: Nordette looks at what happened when Dems protested an incumbent Republican president speechifying at a public school.

One mo' time, 9-10: Mominem's comment: There is actually a great deal of socialism in Saudi Arabia. The government takes care of many things for its citizens from their enormous wealth, including health care.

My response: Whoops, that's true. Then these folks protesting the reiteration of a basic work ethic in this country are REALLY screwed.

Not that they'd call it socialism in Saudi. It is the royal family taking care of its subjects...but, as a subject, if you protest their way of doing it, doom on you. You are seen as ungrateful and against the state.

As if I'm not seeing that here. But at least under this president, nobody is going to be hauled into prison for saying it.

*Neil MacFarquhar, The Media Relations Department Of Hizbollah Wishes You A Happy Birthday

_________________

And speaking of education, subscribe to the dead-tree edition of the Times-Picayune and keep Sarah Carr on the local schools beat. I'd link to her latest online about how well school vouchers are really doing in Louisiana, but I'm still loath to send traffic nola.com's way.

Please...somebody...tell me how objectionable the President's remarks are going to be come tomorrow. I mean, is this hold-your-hands-over-the-little-one's-ears-and-eyes sort of talk, or no?

That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education – and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.

Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, "I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust – a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor – and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?

Such a subversive message. No wonder it sounds like "punishment" to some parents' ears.

I only wish more of us could be punished with this message regularly.

Everybody have a happy, safe Labor Day. Put away those white shoes and get out the winter whites.



Trust me on this. You'll thank me for it. You will.

You know, too many are bandying Hurricane Katrina about as a metaphor these days....comparing this, that, and the other situation to it to supposedly associate the massive destruction the storm wrought four years ago with the clusterfook-in-a-teapot Cash for Clunkers has been, or the psychological effects of being out of work in a time when this sort of thing just shouldn't be happening.

Thankfully, C for C is over and Mara Liasson apologized for using Katrina as a metaphor...but the latest one still remains, which might mean, if we aren't careful, people will start being treated for a different kind of RSD - not the Recovery School District, but Recession Stress Disorder.

Whatever do we do to counter these sorts of comparisons? Where do we draw the line? And if we are drawing the line, why is it constantly being stomped on and passed over? Is it a name versus a number? A country's failings in the face of nature versus human beings taking matters into their own hands and killing a bunch of people to make a point? What happens if we compare say, a massive natural disaster with, oh, 9-11-01?

"The Tsunami Killed 100 Times More People Than 9/11" is the tag line.*

Thankfully, the World Wildlife Fund had the sense to reject it... perhaps because the visual punch of this proposal was so shocking, all those planes headed for the towers driving home what the human toll is from a disaster such as the 2004 tsunami that devastated Indonesia.

A "brutally powerful" planet, indeed.

A terrible, terrible metaphor in bad taste as well.

Do we really need to be doing this kind of thing to get people to stop using Katrina as a metaphor? If so, I certainly don't have the heart that can do that...but I can keep telling these people to give this sort of nonsense a rest and exert their metaphorical creativity in a different way.

_________________________

*from Poplicks' latest, which also informs us of the Nelson Mandela air freshener and of how Florida prison guards roll with Take Your Kids to Work Day.

September has sprung, and the little guy is into his second full week of first grade. The expectations are different, and not just for him. I was given, through that mode of conveyance known as my son's book bag, the assignment of, for ten minutes each day, having him go through a bunch of fact family flash cards with addition and subtraction problems for numbers up to 12. I have to sign off on his sessions on a paper that goes back through the book bag conveyance to the teacher every Friday, at which time the little guy will take a timed math test on the sums he's supposed to have learned.

In all honesty, I hated flash cards when I was his age. I haven't done the ten minutes every single day with him - especially since we went to the hospital for tests last Friday when he couldn't walk on his right leg without pain (he's fine, but 4+ hours of going here, there, and everywhere in the building for one test after another left us both frazzled) - and when I do show him the cards, I don't sit there and keep moving them out each second. Perhaps I'm being too soft on him. I'm going to taint his discipline database for the rest of his school career. Perhaps I'm not using the right stuff to help him learn math.

Perhaps I don't want him to hate math....'cause Lord knows I did, for a looong time.

At least he has a love of reading, though his most recent reading choice has me conflicted and has my husband positively livid with indignation.

"Tell them (aka, his resource teachers at school) he needs to return that book," Dan said last night. "It's not appropriate for him."

You'd have thought, from Dan's reaction, that the little guy had picked out The Anarchist Cookbook, The Joy of Sex, or The Story of O, not Happy Easter, Biscuit!

I mean, it's not like Biscuit the puppy attends the Last Supper and, as the story progresses along the lines of the New Testament, finds Jesus all resurrected and happy to be off the cross in the book. It's just the little puppy and the girl who owns him looking for colored eggs all over the place as forest animals frolic alongside them. It has flaps under which the eggs can be found. It has simple sentences. For some reason, it counts as an "accelerated reading" book.

"Are we going to have an Easter egg hunt, Mom?" I was asked as I read the book to my son last night.

"No, honey, because we're Jewish," I said. "And in actuality, your (under semi-public auspices charter) school probably shouldn't have had those egg hunts your preschool and kindergarten teacher organized in previous years."

The school's argument concerning activities such as the egg hunt was that it was a "cultural exploration"...which is fine...but if they really want to kick cultural exploration into high gear, I wanna see It's Holi in Delhi, Biscuit!, or Fast During Ramadan, Biscuit!, or Biscuit Explores Santeria and Voudon. They cannot go only halfway on this.

With the increased proficiency in the little guy's reading skills, however, comes the realization that I might have to watch what reading material the kid digs into in our own home. And I'm not just talking about profanity-laced material scattered here and there. I'm talking about comics.

Make no mistake. I have an affinity for well-done newspaper comic strips and for the work of pre-Comics Code artists, for more recently-done graphic novels and for what graphic artist Art Spiegelman has termed "comix", a mingling of the comic arts with a compelling story that goes beyond that of your standard graphic novel. So did my husband, until the horrible thieving movers we hired in 2002 when we moved up to NYC from here stole all of his collected comic books, along with his 1920's era saxophone, half my CDs, and our TV, stereo, and VCR. I still feel a twinge of regret when I think of his vanished collection and bygone sax.

So there are Spiegelman's Maus volumes on our shelves, as well as In The Shadow of No Towers, Watchmen, a few other comics volumes and books on comics history, and now, most recently, Josh Neufeld's A.D.

Where I am stuck as far as A.D. goes is whether or not it is appropriate for my going-on-seven-year-old to dig into at this time.

I set myself up for this last week when I picked up my signed copy from the bookstore just before I picked my son up from school and left the book on the front seat of the car. The little guy climbed into the backseat, peered over the front, saw the book, and instantly grabbed it and started flipping through it.

"This is about the hurricane, Mom?"

"Yes, honey," I said uneasily.

flips through pages, studying them intently

"Mom, Katrina was not a very friendly storm, was it?"

"No, it wasn't, kiddo," I said sadly.

We came home, and I snagged the book from him and placed it on a high shelf in my bedroom bookcase. "Can I keep reading the hurricane book, Mom?"

"We'll see. I haven't started it yet," was my attempt at dodging his request. As the week progressed, he asked me a couple more times if he could crack A.D. open. The book has stayed on that high shelf...until today.

I look through it now, and it has a good amount of material and scenes in it that weren't in the online version that was serialized on the Smith website. The book itself is well done; as graphic novels go, it's one of the best ones out there.

But it makes me so very sad and brings me close to tears, the slices of lives it captures. What people lived through and are still living through - it's there, between those covers. Ready when you are.

Ready when my son is, too...but not right now.

Big thanks to Big Red for the vid, and big thanks to Save Charity Hospital for keeping this issue alive.

And lately, I've been contemplating many health care issues in this town that go beyond the physical buildings that stand empty here. Treatment of terminal diseases, chronic pains, and conditions such as substance abuse could sure use some serious tuning up in this town....and not like the one described in the passage below:

What if I had not been born in Minnesota, the land of abundant lakes, ample treatment centers, and endless forgiveness? What if I lived in a state or a country or a time - like now, for instance - where after the second or third treatment, they said, "Gosh, Mr. Carr, you seem to be having trouble getting the hang of this. Is this really a good use of the hard-earned tax money of the citizens of our state?" The state of Minnesota, along with the Feds, paid for at least three treatments, gave me general assistance while I was in the booby hatch, and, when I got custody of my children, issued me food stamps to feed them. A few years later, I got cancer, and it paid for all of that too. God bless the welfare state, God bless Minnesota, God bless the milk of human kindness.

Not a bad investment, in retrospect. Not only did the state not have to bear the burden of permanently placing the twins in foster care, but I had been a very good candidate to graduate from jail to prison, which is a very expensive proposition. As a citizen with the wheels glued back on, I have probably kicked back more than $300,000 in federal and state taxes. I'm hoping they drop a little of it on a loser like me. Insurance companies now treat rehab like a tune-up, funding a couple of weeks at most. But some are sicker than others. Redemption comes on a schedule known only to God, and as a civilized people, it's probably best to put good money after bad, hoping that the lightning eventually strikes. Am I right, or is that just me?*

The abovementioned former addict and cancer survivor was in and out of rehab five times before a six-month treatment program finally helped him get seriously started on changing his mind set and his life...among many, many other contributing factors.

Hey, if our state looked at the money they'd be getting in taxes from working people who are not in jail and compared that to what it'd be paying for keeping those same people behind bars, maybe, just maybe, something would give...like, you know, the state could give us back more beds for psychiatric care, more funding for drug treatment, more resources for care of chronic pain and illness, more and better quality care.

Only because it seems that trying to quantify all of this in hard and fast numbers is keeping us sicker and killing us all much, much faster.


*David Carr, The Night of the Gun

And then, as if things weren't surreal enough today, a sequence of photos amazes, then shocks and saddens me.

Details from G:

Both Mister and I had unsettled sleep last night, me as usual, him as usual, I said, after a neighborhood shooting. Mister and I were in the back yard, chatting at the grill, The Girl inside with a cat or 2, when we heard gunfire, close, more than 1 gun, at least 2, and I stopped internally counting at 12 shots. We crouched down, for fuck’s sake. Then ran inside. The Girl asked if that noise had been fireworks and I said, No, gunfire, yes. We looked out the window and saw two young men running away. Both had guns. They weren’t running scared. They were loping, relaxed, loose-limbed.

The police finally came, one SUV driving all through The Crime Scene. While one cop got pissed-indignant about the crime scene with people and fellow officers, I just hoped Mister, out there in a bright yellow shirt with a camera and a smart-ass mouth with authorities didn’t cross that path. He did. It came out okay. In some instances, being a white man is barely enough.

It was chilling. Senseless. Demoralizingly sad.

I yelled at a cop that I’d seen two guys running. He asked if I thought they’d done it. I said, I saw them running with guns, that’s all I know.

If having a better functioning justice system ain't an argument for more transparency and accountability in the workings of City Hall, I don't know what is. All I know is those guys should not have been that supremely confident that they'd get away with murder... and neither should anybody else who has intentionally caused another's violent death in the past four years here.