Discussion on Poetry at a Bar.

The other week at the student bar I ran into this (older) (black) (female) neighborhood music teacher I know.

She's trying to read more poetry though she doesn't like it, and I was like, "Yeah, I don't like poetry that much, but, you know, some people really get turned on by it and you can tell when they talk about it, and whenever I see that, I'm like, 'I should get me some of that!'".

At that, she began laughing and was like, "Yeah, exactly!!!!!!!!!!".

That also made me think of a story that I haven't thought of in absolute years, about how I encountered this poem on the SAT II and was so moved by it that I wrote the standardized testing company to see what the poem was and who wrote it (you have to remember, this was pre-internet).

As it turns out, it was the Gwendolyn Brooks poem "Piano After War".

When I told this to the neighborhood music teacher, first of all, she was thrilled, b/c she plays piano.

Even more, though, she was surprised that they actually wrote back.

"They wrote back?", she was like.

When I affirmed that yes, they had indeed wrote back, she was like, "That's crazy, and you crazy."

. . .

...yet another time a (black) woman has told me "you crazy" (something I've been told before at least several times)...

Discussion on News from Mexico.

The other week I was in a gentrifying (Mexican) neighborhood in the city, and I popped into this hole-in-the-wall bar that I'd been to before and really liked a lot.

The news was on in the corner, and the handful of people in the bar - the (middle-aged) (female) bartender, the (older) (male) proprietor, and 1 (younger) and 1 (middle-aged) (male) patron - watched the news desultorily, until this segment came on with a(n apparently) (white) girl pulled over in the car and a cop shining a flashlight in her face, and she talks very calmly and at length in response to the cop's questions, and everyone in the bar was just watching the footage intensely.

When the segment changed, I asked them what that was about, since I couldn't understand the Spanish that well but something had happened in Tijuana.

The (middle-aged) patron then said that she had killed her mother and sister, and spoke about it like it was normal.

The (female) bartender seemed disturbed, and the guy was like, "She's crazy."

"Well," I was like, "Maybe she's only half crazy.  She didn't eat them, did she?".

At that, the (younger) guy patron just burst out laughing, and I could that suddenly everyone there liked me.

Turning the Tables on Hecklers.

Like a month ago I was biking home, and as I passed by the one engineering school halfway to my house 3 young guys (1 of whom was holding a pizza box) called out and were like, "Hey, what's up!??!?!?, How are you??!?!??!! Come hang out!!!!!", just being kind of drunk and a bit obnoxious.

So, I slowed my bike and was like, "Good, can I get some pizza?".

That totally threw them off.

So, I was like, "C'mon, be cool, I want a slice of pizza."

So, they looked at each other, and one was like, "Okay," and they gave it to me, but said I had to walk with them and talk since it'd be dangerous to bike.

So, I ate the pizza with them, and found out that they were young drunk engineering students.

They asked me about me, and I told them I taught freshman writing at the top-tier university in town, and when they asked how it was going, I said good, except for the one student who was pushing it and really should flunk.

That made their eyes get really big.

Odd Late Night Phone Glitch:

The screen freezes, and it's just a white box on a black background that surrounds the white letters -

FTM

- and it was late and I was drunk, but I really swear this happened, I wasn't dreaming.

I actually had to take the battery out of the phone to get it working again.

Shocking confessions of a Drunk Italian:

He said that the best part of having a foreskin was that if you held everything right, "you could do shots out of it."

Flashback to this winter: I was so busy.

The other day my one (Asian-Canadian) friend mentioned going to see Inherent Vice with his boyfriend, and how they got a bunch of free tickets b/c the film stopped halfway through and the theater tried to keep everyone happy.

That brought me back to this winter, when I was working 5.5-6 days a week, and sometimes I was getting 3-4 hours of sleep for several days in a row, though I always made sure to take off 1 full day for myself.

I remember, one day I saw a matinee of Inherent Vice, and then afterwards hit up 5 new bars while doing leisure reading.

What an odd, stressful time.  I'm glad it's over.

Evening Sight while Bicycling:

On a quiet boulevard, as I pass a 1950s-style architecture Baptist church, and I catch out of the corner of my eye a raccoon stepping along the edge of a raised bed...

I slowly break and look back, and indeed, it's a raccoon.