Lake Street Red Line Stop on a Wednesday Afternoon

Two men singing on the el platform with their permit clearly visible.


One plays guitar and sings melody, the other harmonizes.

They sway.

The harmonizer smiles.

The guitar player has long grayed dreads. He’s thin but not hungry, looks faded and worn but without pain. His skin is graying. His shiny black guitar looks gray under the subway lights.

His voice is anything but gray. Warm and mellow, like honey, like the 1960s folk that bore him. You can hear the hope and marijuana round the edges of each phrase.

The harmonizer reminds me of the old smiling Sambo images. Less bright, less ridiculous, but retaining a bit of the please-the-white-man quality. Still, his voice is pure and adds a dimension to the familiar tunes.

Police officer with his big german shepherd sitting not 10 feet away, staring.

The German Shepherd is watching the permit

The police officer isn’t watching much of anything.

A train comes and the guitar player leans into a concave *beam* to retune.

I drop a dollar into the bag with the permit.

A woman walks past. She is so large her legs sink down, burying her feet and her flip flops.

What I learned from the LOST finale

Black people don't go to heaven. Even if they marry white people.

Things I Couldn't Make Up

Posted sign near the beach I like to go to with my dog:

Rogers Park is a strange patchwork of socioeconomics that changes in blocks, pockets, and next-door neighbors. I live in a huge gorgeous condo that's full of married couples starting families, pets, and retired  people. Across the street is a gorgeous building owned and operated by a slumlord who steals electricity and does all kinds of shady things including renting to pedophiles and drug dealers. The drug dealers don't bother me since I have been known to smoke pot so I have no right to insist the source stay locked away from my lucky white self. One of the dealers seems not to have a phone or doorbell, so to get a hold  of him you stand outside his window and yell his name until he lets you in. I'd be annoyed, but it's so fucking funny and it drives my neighbors so crazy (these are the people who want to disallow satellite dishes because they look  too "trailer park") I just laugh and laugh.
Across the street in the other direction are perfectly decent apartments. Nice brick three-story building, well taken care of, reasonable rent.
Next door is a three-unit condo building with the most amazing patio garden area in the back. One unit is owned by a very nice gay couple in their late 30s. One unit is occupied by a single mother and her three(?) grade-school aged kids. I heard they were renters and not owners, but it's entirely possible people assumed the family only rented because it's a Hispanic single mother. One unit is owned by some shadowy male person no one ever sees or discusses.

The street Howard is a few blocks north of me. Howard is a notorious Rogers Park pocket of general goods stores and currency exchanges loitering people of color. For as much as I complained about growing up in Oak Park, it gave me a lot of perspective on fear, race, class, and people. I'm still skewed way over on "Lived entire life as a little white girl" side, but seriously? I walk down the Howard strip with some regularity. I'm just as likely to run into an asshole, a dog lover, and a person who smiles at me in the nicest parts of Evanston as I am on the crappiest parts of Howard. People are people. Then you cram them through different sets of life experiences, and they engage those experiences in different ways. But they're still people. We're all people. How the hell did the imperialist thing stay so popular with light-skinned people for so long?

Anyway, what got me started on this whole big rant: the name of the fairly new community center built on Howard? The Willye B. White Park and Community Center. Seriously. The message to "at-risk youth?" B. White. I won't even go into that she was a black Olympic athlete, blah blah blah the only way to be black and famous is to be an athlete.

Maybe Molly the Ferret ran away from home to escape the pressures of a patriarchal all-albino society.

Faces

I just posted an elementary school class picture on Facebook. Going to tag the people who are my Facebook friends, I notice trends:
29 students in the class
8 are currently my Facebook friends
3 1/3 African-Americans in the entire class, all of whom are my Facebook friends
3 of my 8 tagged friends are gay/bisexual
2 of my Fb friends were the other huge dorks that annoyed the hell out of me growing up. Both of them are gay
The third tagged lesbian I still see occasionally and I like very much; we could be reality friends.

Ken's photo is next to mine. The pictures aren't in alphabetical order; I'm guessing they're in whatever order we chose to stand in line because I'm also next to my fifth grade best friend, Ken's best friend is on his other side, and there are mini clique clusterings across the page. I've known him for 20 years. He remembers things about me I'd forgotten, times when I tried to conquer the world at age 10 and was too wrapped up in fighting evil to be a kid or be happy or notice what anyone else was doing.

Now Ken is working to fill the world with good and caring for everyone around him. Yes. Yes, yes, yes.
How?

Night Babble

My head's been so much better lately that four sleepy headache days in a row seem bad. They're not even that terrible. These used to be considered my good days. I'm getting spoiled.

Walking dog at 12:30 AM on a Monday night/Tuesday morning, a police car turns the wrong way down my one-way street to park in front of the drug house. I wonder if it's official or unofficial business. A man dressed the way the preppy kids dressed in junior high (Adidas athletic pants, Abercrombiesque perfectly worn baseball hat) jogged down the street and I thought he looked a little off to be going for a run but you never know. Then he ran up to the police car and I thought, "In my neighborhood, black men run toward the police."

Birdie's going to be near Rockford in just over a week. I want to see her and want to make seeing her work.

I have every right to be annoyed by Neighbor Guy. I might do better in the future if I allow myself such annoyances as they come instead of thinking it's all in my head until they build and I want to strangle the person.

I like mangoes a lot.

I'm craving meat, but it seems a bit crazy to cook at 1 AM. Is there some wonderfully instant way to make bedtime ground beef munchies? All I wanted earlier was fruit, so I suppose my body is due for an actual meal...

Racism: 0, Demeanorism: 1

Racism just lost another point in the Great Internal Battle Created By A Life In America No Matter How Absurd I Know It Is Or PC The Community That Raised Me Considers Itself To Be.

There was a man sitting in a car on my corner.

There are frequently people sitting in cars on my corner, and thanks to the building across the street from me, these car sitters usually have something to do with the drug-dealing and generally terrible management of that building across the street from me. Some days I imagine the people are police or otherwise government-affiliated and watching the building for evidence. Some days I imagine they are involved in the dealing of drugs (how often does one family do its laundry? it's a big family and the kids come, but two days in a row seems more hassle than would make sense and they spend a lot of time in the car...). At least one registered sex offender (victim under the age of 10) lives in the building. I want to kidnap all the children living there.

And tonight, as I walked my dog, there was a man sitting in a car on the corner. My first instinct was that he was waiting for someone in my building. I thought about asking him if he wanted me to buzz somebody for him. Then I stopped and thought, ack! I can't do that! What if he's waiting for the drug building!
Moments later my neighbor from my building walked out and got into the man's car as my dog and I went back through our gate. I felt infinitely smart and instinctual.

Punchline, ladies and gentlemen: the man in the car tonight was (and probably still is) black. But he looked like he was supposed to be there, no sketchiness attached. After 27 years of the United States of Quietly Cultivated Racism, it's at least one point for Good that I could see a black man doing something usually associated with sketchiness and follow his demeanor instead of his skin tone when making my snap judgments.

Goldie

I took the #70 Division bus tonight from the red line stop at Clark to Paulina. Clark and Division is at the edge of the Gold Coast (super-rich neighborhood), turns immediately into Old Town (still rich, a little younger and cuter, Second City is in the 'hood but on North), and then something was clearly wrong. New shopping centers and developments bore the name "Old Town" but I was pretty sure we'd passed Old Town and it didn't feel like Old Town. We were still on Division. There were mismatched new buildings scattered around huge empty lots, random blatant "green" developments, a big garden that looked like it had been planted on top of a parking lot with a sign advertising its Tuesday and Thursday markets and another sign tied to the fence that read "It takes a village to raise a tomato." The whole stretch felt like a ghost town with haphazardly placed well-intended left-winger projects band-aided over the holes. The bus was back among the affluent and into the hipsters of Wicker Park when it finally dawned on me where we'd driven:
Cabrini-Green.
If you're not from Chicago, that may not be much of a punch-line. Cabrini Green was a notorious housing project. [For more info, have fun with the Wikipedia site and Chicago Housing Authority site.] Six years ago, when they began tearing down the buildings of Cabrini-Green, I would have been much more aware what lie between the red line and Wicker Park and probably would have opted for a different public transportation path. But in 2008, I sat across the aisle of the #70 from a redhead who spent the entire ride on her cell phone flirting and talking about ultimate frisbee. A woman in her 60s got on a few stops before we crossed the Chicago River, still in the heart of the ghost town, but she started to get off at the next stop because she couldn't pay the fare. "Does anyone have one ride on their transit card?" Someone swiped for her to get back on the bus. The area is certainly safer, but what happened to the thousands and thousands of people who used to live there? Where are they now? The CHA hasn't accepted new applicants for housing since 2001. Totally fucked up. It's like the entire plan for Cabrini has been to make the world nicer for Rich White People and worse for Poor Black People. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I don't love the Chicago Tribune or their reporting, but read this anyway.

And another thing! How can so many people be so deeply and disgustingly racist in so many ways?
I am small, blonde and female, and even if I'm wearing old sweatpants and a stained t-shirt, I walk down the street or into a store and IMMEDIATELY get the benefit of the doubt. Cops do me favors, I've never been accused of stealing anything or loitering, no one crosses the street when they see me coming. I am grateful for these things, but I did nothing more to deserve them than any other human being. I just happened to be born blonde and female in a world that values that.

I don't expect any major paradigm shifts from a silly blog post, but if you could think for a minute about the difference between living with and without the constant benefit of the doubt (and the really sick part is we've gotten to the point where it's not just white people doubting everyone else, but everyone else doubting themselves in varying ways and to varying degrees, too).

Please? Do it for the little blonde girl.

Party Animals

There is a turtle in my bathtub. I put him there. He is my brother's, but my brother left for college and never really cared for the turtle in the first place, and my mother hates animals. The turtle's terrarium thing (big aquarium with wood chip bedding and two plastic bowls that are supposed to look like they're made out of rocks) is still in my car, because five minutes after I drove away from my parents' house with the aforementioned turtle, it started storming. Then the tornado sirens went, and the radio news kept saying for people in areas moving ever closer to me should all abandon their cars and get into basements. Two seconds later black clouds swallowed everything and branches flew past and rain came down in sheets. I kept looking at the businesses along North Avenue for reasonable shelter and to the sky to see if it turned orange or green (it usually turns weird colors before an actual tornado touches down). Between the wet and the fact I was a little white girl with turtle in tow in the shittier parts of Chicago's west side, I decided not to stop unless the sky turned, and it didn't. Now, I am in my apartment and refusing to leave until the weather clears and my dog is freaking out (as per usual...he had a particularly rough night last night with the thunder) and the turtle is in my bathtub, hiding under his wood thing. It's a party.

Grandly Fussy

You know when there's a person you really love but you're spending too much time with him/her and you just need a little space? That's how I'm feeling about myself right now. I'm annoying the hell out of myself and could really use a week's vacation away from me. I am a self-centered co-dependent. I'm a serial monogamist at heart, but I replace the significant other character with a platonic BFF. I am not an easy person to live with, particularly for me.

My brother graduated high school on Sunday. It's an extremely diverse and segregated school. Watching the kids go from alphabetical order into their groups of friends was like watching a fresh deck of cards being shuffled on rewind. I understand the desire to surround yourself with friends who are like you, but your racial/cultural background should just be one of the aspects of who you are. At my high school, it also dictated your interests and aspirations, and that's fucked up. The cheerleaders were all black. The drill team was all blonde (even the ones who weren't by genetics or peroxide had blonde souls). Most of the other official extra-curricular activities were white, except for the specific ethnic groups (i.e. Latin American Student Association). Chorus was mostly white, but there was a gospel choir full of black singers. This shit is stupid. Having a cultural identity is a good thing, but then why the fuck can't we reshuffle ourselves before dividing off into other groups of likes and dislikes. All the writers. All the artists. Split up by favorite color, favorite zoo animal, birthdate, ideal pillow firmness, favorite time of day. Divide by likes and interests instead of skin color. And then let me be selfish/self-centered and go through and find the intelligent, creative, open-minded, sarcastic writer-types and hang out with them. Maybe I'm fooling myself, but I truly believe that we'd have a much easier time finding strong human connections if class and color didn't seep in and separate us out. Fuck JDate, I want CreativepersonDate.

I need to be writing crap for class tomorrow, but I just want to have my temper-tantrum.

I am hanging my little white head in shame. I'm trying to write this "updated folktale" for my fiction class, and it's based on an old Yiddish folktale that I am resetting on the South Side of Chicago. The adaptation is going quite well, but there's a part where I need this wise old grandmother character to tell a story within the story, and I can't get her voice for shit. So I actually emailed a sort-of-friend of mine from my magazine class who is a very decent writer and grew up on the south side and begged for help. From now on, you can call me Whitey McJew-Cracker. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go scorn people with any trace of melanin.