Back to (black) (II of II): Another (black) woman story.

A few days later, after being by the beach (the new beach by my place is very Mexican; a lot of Mexican families, and little trucks selling tacos and paletas), I packed up to go, and went to go take a piss at the public restroom before biking back to my place, but there was a (black) cleaning woman with the park service standing outside, and I had to ask her if was okay to go in, and she to go in before she cleaned, so I did, and then when I came out again, she had just let someone else go into the men's room, so I started chit-chatting to her a bit, somehow.

"That restroom is so filthy there isn't anything we can do to clean it," she was like. "I tell them that we got to get ammonia and just pour it on the concrete and let it marinate over night and then drain it out, maybe then the piss smell will go away, but they don't, and who knows if it would then."

Then I said something about this coney island restaurant across from the bar that my parents used to own back in my hometown where when it was really busy after the bars let out, every great once in a while someone would notify them that they'd need to clean the restroom, and they'd go in, and someone had purposefully taken a shit on the floor right next to the toilet.

"Oh," she was like, "I've seen that," and she started telling me about this public restroom up the beach where just yesterday someone had shit all over the floor, but not only that, but also had taken a shoe and there were shoe prints of shit all over the wall.

"Now why would someone do that?", she was like. "My manager asked me if they stepped in the shit or what, and I said I didn't know, for all I know they could have taken a shoe, dipped it in the shit, and then thrown it against the wall, because I really do not know how they did that, and maybe they did it that way."

Then I mentioned about this one homeless person at a coffee shop I used to go to where the counterpeople would have to keep an eye out for them, since everytime they'd come in, they'd take a shit and smear it all over the walls.

At that, she politely said that all the homeless people she knows take good care of the restroom, and that day she had interrupted someone washing up in a public beach restroom, but she said to finish up, she's never seen a restroom dirtier after one's left, and usually they're cleaner.

Back to (black) (I of II): A (black) woman story.

The other day at school I went to the financial aid office, since they had sent me an email that I hadn't filed a form that I actually had back in May, and plus I had a few questions from them.

Now, my backpack I had had this summer had gotten the fuck torn out of it because I was carting around so many books (Latin dictionaries, grammars, etc.), so I had stopped through a store and found a good back-to-school sale, and got this big backpack that not only seems durable and big (for my lunch, books, gym clothes, etc) without seeming too big, but also looks kind of nice, and is gray with these small vertical dark green and black and white stripes intermingled.

"That is one nice backpack," the (black) financial aid woman said as soon as I walked into her office, "Where'd you get it?"

Then, we talked about backpacks forever, and also about shoes, and she told me a couple places to go check out since I need some black sandals (they also got ruined in Milwaukee; it wasn't just my backpack), and she mentioned some store where she and her husband got a matching pair for not much money.

"We had been looking for black, but I got brown, because the brown ones were comfortable, and I go for comfort," she was like.

Addendum addendum.

I forgot, again -



After that, I went to the jazz bar for a while, and the house band was cooking. I had passed through there a few weeks earlier, and the band was very integrated, a (white) pianist and saxophone player, the rest (black), and a mixed audience who seemed comfortable with each other - the most integrated place I'd seen in Milwaukee! - and a (black)-and-(white) photo on the wall of pretty much the same band in a field with palm trees behind them, above a hand-scrawled caption:



"ENTERTAINING THE TROOPS: TET OFFENSIVE, 1968."



The high point of the night was when the lead guitar, this bad-ass (black) guy who was smooth and seemed like a lover-musician type who got around without trying to, played this slow, funky solo, that at first went slow, and then went fast...



And when he went to repeat it again, the slow part and then the fast part, he held the guitar up to his face, and one hand was on the neck and the other held the bottom, and somehow the same slow part was coming out, real funky and slow and sexy, and then he lowered the guitar down slowly as he transitioned to the fast part, so everyone could see what was going on - and you could see that he was playing the guitar with his tongue.



People went nuts, especially the women. I've never seen anything like it.

Addendum.

Forgot -

When I was biking to this jazz place one night to hear the house band, I was stopped on my bike at the railroad tracks while this huge train passed bye, and this (white) guy on a Harley in a white sportscoat pulls up with his girlfriend behind him, and asks me if the train is going long.

"Like five minutes," I said, and then he said that it would probably be going on another five, then.

After a pause, I was like, "As soon as it's done, want to drag race? I know I can beat you!", and the guy found that really funny.

Later, when I pulled up in front of the jazz bar (which was like four or five blocks down), I heard someone yelling "Hey!", and I look, and it's that dude and his girlfriend, who had parked and were walking into a cigar bar across the street, and he called me over and said he'd buy me a beer.

I talked with them for a while; they had been married for 10 years, and he had been running a jujitsu business for 25, and he taught the classes ,while she kept the books and did the admin.

He also told me about this trip to Brazil once, and a Brazilian friend took him to a remote village, and this Brazilian guy "who was Brazilian but had a long white beard like out of a kung-fu movie" taught him capoiera.

A last stray memory from Milwaukee.

My one Canadian roommate was watching a tv documentary about the band Rush, and he was like, "Dude, that was your childhood if you grew up in Canada during the 80s."

...stray thoughts on conservative catholics in the U.S...

I was thinking about this the other day, after a visit to a Catholic bookstore when we went to go to that basilica, and then talking with the cassock-wearing seminarian my age in class -

The Catholic hierarchy is trending conservative, and so are people entering seminaries, so that means a lot of a conservative stuff top-down - a return to "tradition" (usually what was happening about 50 years before people were born, so people can get nostalgic about it), which includes Latin, priests wearing cassocks, etc.; and a big concerns with sex ethics (abortion, gay stuff, etc.).

-BUT-

I realized that something odd is happening with white conservative catholics, b/c of the rapprochement w/evangelicals since the concern with sex ethics has made them find common cause... At the bookstore I went to, fully 1/5 to 1/4 of books were by conservative evangelicals (!), which makes me wonder if the flock that is most in-tune with the future of the hierarchy and is all about tradition is actually getting more Protestant-like by osmosis in such matters as -

- biblical interpretation - there's proof-texting everywhere, like that "you created me in my mother's womb" as an argument for why people should be pro-life.

- there's tons of trashy facile pop culture theology, in shirts and bumper stickers etc.

- "lowest common denominator theology" - e.g. the cassock-wearing seminarian said he hears people say evangelical stuff like, "Well, if you think you're saved by Christ, that's all that matters," and he has to set them right.

I would love to get polls on this.