A very odd moment at a grocery store bar.

Last Saturday night I rolled into the Whole Foods bar just as they were closing up, and the bartender sold me a bottle but said I couldn't drink it at the bar, though I could at the cafe.

I sat on a stool at the window watching the world go by at 9pm at night, and here and there a person was eating at a table in the brightly lit but otherwise spare and desolate cafe area behind me to my right.

Suddenly, Blondie's "Atomic" comes on, and a bit into the song I look over, and there's an older, well-dressed, broadly-built Asian-American woman with a floppy purple hat and glasses on just hunched over a dark brown cardboard box of food, stuffing her face out of it, and I notice behind her that the glass walled room is a teaching space for visiting celebrity chefs.

At that very moment, I was overwhelmed by a sense of visceral disgust, and a feeling that our country is doomed.

What has our country come to?

Once it produced "Atomic", and now just look around.

Reflections on the Baltimore riots.

I couldn't put down my smartphone when the Baltimore riots were happening.

What got me was the Baltimore Sun map of where stuff was happening, since I had had the good fortune to bum around Baltimore a bit after a conference there a few years ago, and so I knew some of the city's basic geography.

Unlike with Ferguson, the action spread downtown, with incidents in Mount Vernon (yuppie center with Johns Hopkins buildings and a major art museum) and down towards the Inner Harbor (sports stadium, convention center). 

Plus, I hear you could see major smoke from right downtown.

That must mess with your mind, to see a city so fragile like that; it would majorly freak me out if there was windows broken out in my own city, maybe at a 7-11 near the art museum or the yuppie neighborhood or the convention center or whatnot.

On top of all that, Twitter suggested that the fire department was maxed out and no-one was picking up 911 calls.

What I find interesting, too, is that whenever anyone talks about black youth anymore in any city, these kids are throwaways, condemned to bad schools, unsafe neighborhoods, and minimum wage service jobs.  Everyone thinks they just are somewhere else.  

Then, some link up on social media and the next thing you know there's broken out windows in a yuppie neighborhood.

No-one expected these people to ever show up on their doorstep.

The past 2-3 years I've noticed just how self-satisfied and complacent the people who are doing well in this economy have been, honestly like they live in this just growing bubble - like here in the city, for example, there's been a proliferation of expensive restaurants with $50 plates, and I'm continually surprised by not only how many people patronize them, but how oblivious those people are that most people can't afford to live like that.

Oftentimes, when I'm at a new restaurant bar, I look around at diners, and I just see them stuffing their faces with the latest squid ink delicacy or whatever the fuck's the expensive flown-in-by-jet gastronomic trend of the week, and I notice that they're there and fat and consuming and have no idea of how they look to other people.

A brick through a window at a restaurant like that must be a real wake-up call to the people who eat there.

This week I had to participate on a faculty evaluation panel at the art school, and I asked around during break for people's perspectives on the Baltimore riots.  Everyone seemed very uncomfortable, and no-one even wanted to acknowledge that they existed.

The next night, I was at a downtown bar and a(n Irish-American) (mid-30s) business guy and I struck up a conversation...  He was a Republican from the city who had moved out to the burbs, but was culturally Catholic and community-oriented and we got along very, very well.

He said since the moment Baltimore happened, he knew it could happen here.

"A Freddie Gray here?", he was like.  "We had a Freddie Gray last week, and the week before that, and the week before that."

"We're this close," he said, holding up his fingers with just a half inch between them.

We then started talking about where in the city it would happen, and he said there was already problems with flashmobs in the tourist areas downtown on some summer nights.

I kept thinking about the convention center and stadium areas, since they border on poor African-American neighborhoods, and I raised that possibility to him.  He thought it was possible...

Overall, though, I wonder how violence like that will play out in the country as a whole.

I think the Baltimore rioting has already made public violence more of a cultural possibility, and other riots will now happen more easily; acceptability of public violence comes and goes historically, and since I've been reading more about revolutionary groups in the 70s, I've been wondering when and how it would come back into style in the U.S., since it has seemed at a low ebb, and most violence has been just random or criminal person-on-person gun violence, and not mass or government-directed unrest.

I also wonder, though, to what extent there'll be "push back" politics benefitting the GOP, and white flight from the country's reburgeoning urban centers.

I also also wonder to what extent Citizen United has exacerbated this problem, since it's made representatives less responsive and thus created less of a productive outlet for dissatisfaction and anger.

I also also also wonder how much of this is weird repercussions of the net and cell phone connectivity, just like ISIS recruiting kids through chatboards and bullshit like that.

Give random individuals a way to connect now, it seems, and stuff happens where you think it shouldn't.

Marvellous espelling mistake...

...that I saw on the awning of a Latin American restaurant here in the city:

STABLISHED SINCE 1980

. . .

Since Spanish speakers always add "e"s in front of consonant clusters - like "espelling" - whoever made the awning must have thought that the English word he was always hearing people around him say was actually "stablished"!

Love it!

Conversation with an art school student: Shifting arousal.

During break from my sex class a few weeks ago, one of my best students - a (white) (mid-20s) former butcher and current service industry worker who's for some reason in art school - came up to chat a bit more about the issue of how arousal from some other aspect of existence can get channeled very quickly into sex, an issue that for some reason had come up in class discussion.

After we chatted a bit, I then shared a thought that I've had since last summer, when I noticed how couples would always sit and make out on this scenic ledge overlooking the quarry park.

"It's like why people make out in front of vistas," I was like.  "They can't handle the sublime."

"That totally makes sense," she was like, "A lot more than my own personal explanation, that it was a reason to get someone alone so that you could make out with them."

Odd dream: Overdue library books.

I'm looking at my online library account, and as I scan down the list, I see numbers like "33" 41" and whatnot indicating how many days they're overdue, and I suddenly realize that somehow I had forgotten to renew my books and they all got way overdue.

Reflections on Education, Work, and Fun.

What my one professor friend who teaches modern Czech literature says she tells her students at the beginning of every semester:

"And don't think you'll have fun in this course, because you won't, unless you're a masochist."

Two reflections on precarious teaching:

1) If you crack down on student performance, students can give you bad reviews and the dept. can frown on you in a race to the bottom.

2) You're half-incentivized to improve courses; you want to do a good job so you get re-hired, but it's not like you'll take risks or spend time massively redesigning a course, since it's not clear how long you'll be there like would happen if you were a tenure-track prof.