Wayward Wrists

He has a habit of getting into fights over strangers. I think it makes him likable. He thinks it makes him stupid. Still, he can't seem to stop.

"Getting beat to shit never gets less terrible," he continues, squaring his shoulders in preparation of setting his nose. It cracks when he does and makes me shiver. I hand him the damp washcloth I got him and he gets his blood on my hand when he takes it. His blood has been on my hands a lot in the three weeks I've known him and I wonder if he's kept track of how many people he's bled on over his immortal years. (When I ask him in two days, after a fight he'd really had no business in, he goes still for six hours and answers the question in writing while I'm asleep: 10,692. Some it was their own fucking fault.)

"I thought you'd eventually get used to it," I say, taking the washcloth back because he's hopeless when it comes to washing his own face. He'd wear cereal out into the world in the morning if I'd let him.

"Not even a little bit." He's speaking carefully now, trying to keep his usual animation to a minimum as I cleanse the blood off him. I sneak a peek down his shirt to check on his ribs and that stab wound when he closes his eyes for me to wipe his brow. "Pain is pain no matter how many times you've felt it. Temporary though, thank fuck."

ABC News (also live in Ferguson)

The Hill

Boston's NPR news station

Pundit Express (using PBS' stream)

The press conference to announce the grand jury decision of whether to indict Darren Wilson is set to start anytime. This is where you can watch it.

PBS

Fox via Youtube

MSNBC

I live in Iowa and I'm thinking that it's time we take to Des Moines again for a support rally. While there, we can also pass the hat to collect funds to send to organizers in Ferguson. Everybody who comes should contact their local media so that the word gets out that the American people will not stand for injustice, racism or police brutality anywhere in this country.

I spent 10.5 hours in Ferguson, Missouri on Saturday, August 16, 2014. I am a journalist, but I was not on assignment from my paper. I was in Ferguson because I felt driven to see it for myself and report on it in what way my resources and experience would allow. What I have to offer you is a another perspective of Ferguson and what was happening that day. There will be more than this post.

There were men standing guard over the memorial on the yellow lines of that street where Michael Brown had lain for hours, just ordinary men who, from all appearances, had taken it upon themselves to ensure that nothing disturb the bottles, flowers, candles, stuffed animals and other things that people had left. One young woman (top photo) reminded me of Christ in the temple on the day he overturned the tables as she approached the memorial. She cleared the liquor bottles away with conviction of purpose, angrily declaring, "He was only eighteen, didn't even drink" and the men who had stood guard joined her. There's a sense of Michael Brown the individual being lost to Michael Brown the cause all among the protests and protesters, but just as present a sense of the desperate reclaiming of him as a boy and especially of him as a mother's son.

Mothers are holy ground in Ferguson in a way. Michael's mother's sorrow seems to be found the most profound, with the rest of his family close behind, and mothers' voices have a space in the discourse occupied by no one else. 

"I have a fifteen-year-old son," a woman named Tiffany told me standing on the sidewalk of the street of the memorial, "so I kind of understand what's going on here."

Another woman, whose face I never found, yelled at the top of her lungs, voice cracking under the emotion and the strain, "WILL IT BE MY SON NEXT?!" repeatedly at officers as she and other protesters marched by them. 

Signs laid claim to Michael and Ferguson at the same time: emphasizing the "son" in Ferguson and calling Michael "our son." I saw most of these signs in the Greater St. Mark Family Church parking lot where protesters had marched in the early afternoon.

"I am a mother of an eighteen-year-old that just graduated and I worked hard to get him through that!" Dolores Fich, a woman who impromptu joined that march (bottom photo), told the crowd in that parking lot, calling for the looting to stop ("Right now we are using Mike as a spectacle! [...] Mike is gone! We can't get Mike anymore!") and for unity. The crowd cheered at her words.

In case you haven't already found it, here's the livestream (I met the guy behind the camera, he had a HUGE hand in getting the police to back off the press) although apparently that's not consistently going well even still