Random Things

The Tiny Me in OSHA-approved Hi-Vis Gear Who lives in my brain and pulls all the levers: Boss, it's the fascism. You're completely gunked up with cortisol due to the fact that your entire daily life is now underscored with a haunting awareness of the rapid erosion of your rights, dignity, and any and all social safety nets, and you're also bearing witness to the most vulnerable people immediately being persecuted. This creates a natural stress response that basically means you're going to continue having memory and organizational problems, as well as emotional imbalances.

Me: BUT I HAVE A BULLET JOURNAL AND I MEDITATE NOW.

Ugh.

Call me crazy, but by the time I'm done with it, I want my camera to be near worthless.

I want it to be so used and loved that when I press the shutter button for the last time is disintegrates into dust.

I want the camera to need you to bang on its circuit boards to boot up like the Millennium Falcon.

A camera is an artistic tool, not an "investment."

True story.

I also love all of the self portraits of him in action... with both eyes open.

When I was 16 we would hang out outside and inside the library. We ranged from a group of 20 to a group of 3-4 people on any given day, because us 16 year olds also hung out with whatever other kid was around the area. (Mostly younger siblings and then their friends.) We never did anything wrong, never mind illegal. We were never loud in the library and were always polite to the staff. We sometimes got a little loud outside on the street when there was some contest thing going on, but not very often. We mostly hung out and talked about stuff going on in our lives.

Then one day someone called the cops on us.

And the cops showed up all ready angry, then started yelling at us for doing nothing. They couldn’t even come up with a real reason to be there yelling at us, other than to demand to know if we were a ‘gang’. When one of my friends started crying, I turned to tell her that it would be ok. The cop grabbed me, screamed at me to not look away when he was talking to me, then demand I get in the cop car and go down to the station. It took almost an hour for my mother to find out where I was because I didn’t have a cellphone at the time and the cops had just fucking kidnapped me. For comforting a friend while they screamed at us. And you know what happened?

We never hung out like that again. None of us. We all got banned from the library for a year. Again, all of this for literally no reason. They told us we were ‘misbehaving’ for simply hanging around outside being kids. And then we had no where to go. Some of those kids were forced back into their abusive homes. I literally never saw half of them again. Ever. And I lived in that town for several years after that.

The opening number would have been this: The camera looks down onto a small, charming storybook village from centuries ago. It swoops around and finally down behind the royal palace and into the village streets.

Stop taking away our rainbow, Don’t tell me it’s all in vain. Why would you expect a rainbow? I think you enjoy the pain. You chip away long enough At every dream we’ve made, Things soon will go wrong enough That more than dreams are going to fade. Don’t say they just last a minute, That rainbows are only air Don’t tell me there’s nothing in it- We’ve got to have hopes to share. The longer we love each other, More and more it seems Love isn’t enough. We need some dreams.

(highlight) The first reading of the movie script had, among others. Martin Short as the Baker, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the Wife, Neil Patrick Harris as Jack, Mary Steenburgen as his Mother, Kathy Najimy as Florinda, Janeane Garofalo as Lucinda, Cynthia Gibb as Cinderella, Rob Lowe as her Prince, Christine Lahti as the Witch, Daryl Hannah as Rapunzel and Michael Jeter as the Giant.

The second segment is Gaz has a tea party with all of her favorite video games. Like, the actual cartridges sitting in little toy chairs around the table. The gingerbread is a little bit dry.

...

A store employee confronted the man after he was told that someone was behind the closed meat counter, packing their own steaks. The 70 year-old man later said he “showed his gun, ‘Just to say I’m not stealing. I need you here to help me to get a couple of these steaks. I’m not going to hurt you.‘“

The employee’s memory of the event is that the man actually pushed the gun into his throat, at which point, the employee says, “I decided to comply.”

When the police arrived at the store and removed the gun-toting amateur butcher from his truck, the officer asked him why he thought the police might have been called after he had threatened an employee with a gun, to which he replied, “I don’t know. I have no idea.”

When we got out of elementary school and on into middle school, we had a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT cop who had exactly the same job ONLY HE WORE A GUN WHEN HE CAME TO TALK TO US. And he had lots of “I’m not sayin’, but I’m sayin’“ lines that he would toss out whenever he started talking about what our lives were going to be like in prison after he, himself, busted us for having drugs.

When we got to high school, we had a THIRD, COMPLETELY DIFFERENT COP. This one didn’t come once a week to talk to us about drugs -- he had an office in the school, he was there every day, and he would patrol the halls with his gun on one hip and his canister of pepper spray on the other. Once a week in health class he would come in not to talk to us about the evils of drugs, but rather to let us know that ANYTHING WE DID OUT OF LINE, he would be there to take us down. He told us often under what circumstances he could use his gun on-campus (basically “Any time I decide you’re a threat”) and he had slightly LESS euphemistic things to say about what the big men in prisons would do to tiny little teenagers like us IF and WHEN this cop PERSONALLY ARRESTED US and testified against us in court.

You might wonder what major American city I grew up in where I went to a public school that had such major discipline and crime concerns.

Short stride.