8/8/04 6:24 PM: "When a girl says she 'just wants to be friends,' it means she wants you to do stuff for her, but she's not gonna put out. Heads up on that one." -- Hyde, That '70s Show

INSPIRATIONS: Part of my job at Comic Book Resources involves looking around the web at stuff. Doing that I ran into the World's Finest fain-trailer on CapedWonder.com. Now, ask me anytime, and I'll tell you how I hate Superman, how I think he's the enforcer of an inequitable status quo, the symbol of the oppression of the western world. But damn it all if I didn't get a tingle that felt like wonder when that thing was running. It hit all the right notes.

So, with that on my screen and (as noted before) the Polyphonic Spree urging me to "follow the day, and reach for the sun" from the confines of my iPod, I return to an old impulse to write something inspirational. The opening section of Grant Morrison's Marvel Boy stirred that kind of gape jawed awe in me, and I refer to it regularly. My only problem in doing so is that I can find very little in my own life to be inspirational or worth believing in, so it's a real uphill challenge to write something that accomplishes the goal. I'm not gonna lie -- to an extent, despite my current concept that faith is a sucker's bet and a borderline delusion, I miss believing in things. Developing ...

HEAVY IS THE HEAD ...: Speaking of writing (segue! segue!) I've still been trading emails with this fan of mine, Chinedum Ofoegbu, who has me really jazzed to finish the final book of The Crown and write some of the bigger stories that follow it. I was reading an article about females and the superhero craze, and they talked about the idea that there was no female Peter Parker, and everywoman heroine who dealt with real issues and overcame. I thought about that, and the idea of writing such a character really appeals to me for a variety of reasons. First, because I do believe I have something of a piss poor attitude towards women, maybe it'd help me reform that. Second, in the "write what you want to happen," god forbid I could actually fix somebody. Finally, it'd be a chance to take some of the almost forty ideas languishing on my PowerBook and let 'em stretch their legs. So I plan to take a swipe at that, hopefully soon.

HOT IN HERRE: I finally got a chance to watch Fahrenheit 9/11, and it made me think (as many things do) that I really could do more, even in my own personal loathing of everybody everything. Then I'm sitting here one night watching The Tavis Smiley Show on PBS (it's pretty good now, he was a little nervous at the start) and there's a segment on a documentary called Every Mother's Son, which looks at three cases (a Hasidic Jew, a Latino and the infamous Amadou Diallo case) of extreme and unpunished police brutality, and the story of three mothers from wildly different backgrounds who support one another and try -- fairly fruitlessly, alas -- to stop this from happening again.

All this together starts to percolate in my mind and really, really bother me. The delusion of equal rights and equal protection under the law. I've never believed in it, I've very rarely seen it. I can look out my window and see the effects. La Brea Avenue is a big, busy street. On the east side of the street is The Jungles, and a wall erected maybe six feet tall (where I live) that separates the alley behind the apartment buildings from the road. On the west side of the street, there's a somewhat posh community of fairly expensive houses. On that side, there's a thicker wall, which stands easily twelve feet high, separating the people from the nigh-highway like road. What's the difference? Well, with CalTrans talking about the negative effect of noise on people, and doing a bunch to reduce it in "certain areas" (read, where homeowners live), it's a stark reminder of who's important to policymakers and who isn't. I am clearly being taxed (sales more than anything else) without equal representation, and definitely without equal protection. But, in the words of my dad, I don't own sh*t, so I can't really say sh*t, can I?

More? Well, there's a duo of motorcycle cops (I'm gonna go outside and photograph them one of these days) who sits half way up the hill with radar guns, at least four hours a day most days (including, I was surprised to see, today -- Saturday). Judging from the siren squawks (which often wake me up, even over the yelling and chaos of the Jungles), they have to tag at least six or seven tickets a day. With a minimum fine of $35 each time, that's not bad money. However, when, say, night falls these guys are gone. Like when my backpack was stolen out of Pete's truck on the corner of Coliseum and Rodeo (a corner they sometimes pull people over to, and can see from their hidey hole), there wasn't a cop around for miles. Mayor Hahn said, when I was at lunch with him, that there's about 300 "response units" (i.e. duos of cops, mostly in cars) available at any one time. Now, when my car was broken into on that Friday night, I could have driven up to Hollywood Boulevard at that exact same time and found no fewer than a dozen cop cars (two cops in each) and half a dozen bikes, mostly looking at young people cruising and in some cases hitting on them (and, of course, in some cases shaking them down for being young and ethnic and stylish, a misdemeanor all by itself after dark in Hollywood). That's almost thirty cops, almost ten percent of the city's available police response units ... doing what? At how much an hour? But Hollywood is safe. That's what's important. Not the Jungles, not even the good side of the street across from the Jungles. That's equal protection. Uh huh.

Then there's the fun of military recruiting. I remember being hounded by Army and Air Force recruiters half of my time at Lincoln High in Tacoma, WA. Ft. Lewis and McCord AFB were right down the road, and military types had the run of the city, so many people bought the spiel that it was a good deal. In Fahrenheit 9/11 Michael Moore follows a couple of Marine recruiters who avoid the moneyed part of his own home town in Michigan in favor of hitting a mall where Black and Latinos were more prevalent. Subsequent interviews with kids around the right age showed that they thought the military was a smart option -- money for school and travel being the main motivations. The fact that they would have to kill at the command of their wicked Pentagon masters at a moment's notice never seemed to come up. Of the entire US legislative branch, federal Senate and House of Representatives, only one has a child serving in the military who's been sent to Iraq. One. Protecting their own.

So, no, I don't vote. The same Democrats I'm always hearing I should vote for get their campaign contributions from companies polluting the air and mindstate of my community, and protect their kids from the same death they send my neighbors' kids to. "Whether you vote for the lesser of two evils, you vote for evil." I don't want any part of it. Not in my name.

SING SING SING: On a completely different note, I've been helping my karaoke compatriot Cowboy Jon with holding this really long note in a Tim McGraw song called "Live Like You Were Dyin.'" You have to hold the note about four measure. Jon, naturally, can do about three. Which ain't bad. But my co-worker Dana and I are trying to help him with his breathing and nailing it. He's still too likely to push easly and have nothing left as it goes on, but we'll see how it goes.

I've been working on my songbook and songs (now more than 1200 songs, heh, despite still missing some real favorites) and I've started researching a group called Uncle Kracker, who are apparently from Memphis. Stealing their music for my own evil purposes fills my heart with joy, after all the Black music that got stolen in Memphis by white people. I've also picked up "I Miss You" by Blink182 (finally) and gotten into "So Far Away" by Staind, which has a little of the inspiration I want in my life. Music is still a clean, undiluted joy in my life, and I seek it like a lover's arms.

SLAM: I have also been returning to poetry, slowly but surely. I've done workshops two of the last four weeks, and read in open mic the last two weeks in a row. I still look cross-eyed at some of the people there who have, economically or through the transitions of last year, did me wrong but my predatory and profit-seeking instincts are strong enough to turn them into distant static. Glad to be writing, again.

HAUNTED: What I'm not glad about is how much thoughts of the past keep popping up in my mind, their images stark like preview shots from the Robert Rodriguez/Frank Miller Sin City flick (had to work in this shot somewhere). While on my way in to a concert in Leimert, I saw my first fiancee Nikia (who looked like she put on some weight), trading numbers with a guy who looked like he may have had a double digit IQ. Other than once or twice, she always did like rougher hewn sorts, which is all right, but sheesh. It made me sad in a way, but not enough to, you know, talk to her.

I also ran into possibly my most psycho ex, Roslyn out in Leimert randomly, around Kwanzaa. She was super excited to see me, and I tried to avoid her. Then, months later, I run into her even more psycho mom (who did karate in the original Dolemtie movie), which shocked and disturbed me. While at the mall, getting some supplies, I almost ran into reluctant ex Shonda (we only broke up because dating her meant hanging out with her friends, who I didn't get along with so well) in Wal-Mart and then having the other psycho ex candidate Charmaine honk her horn as I got into my car. To quote Black Thought, "the ghetto is red hot/ I'm steppin' on flames/ yo it's inflation or the price of fame ..."

But as I've noted, the shadow of my ex-wife performs a gymnastics floor routine in the periphery of every step I take. The more things go well and my life improves, the more thoughts of her pop up. This morning I had a nightmare where she told me, emotionally, that she missed me but hadn't called or anything because I'd made it clear I didn't wanna see her. I responded, "If you're suffering, I want to be a part of that. So you could contact me, until you stopped missing me, at which point I'd bugger off again, and it'd be an ill cycle." Nightmare-ex-wife (wow, I'm really super motivated to not even type her name, that's funny) got all emotional and luckily the alarm went off before I had to talk about it anymore. I gotta scrape up some money and go check back in with my therapist ...

So I was sitting here, listening to "For Once In My Life" by Dionne Farris (from some obscure soundtrack), and its words rang so empty to me. "... for once I have something I know won't desert me/ I'm not alone anymore/ for once I can say 'this is mine, you can't take it'/ long as I know I have love, I can make it/ for once in my life I have someone who needs me." The idea of it is so ... crazy. I mean, everybody is pretty screwed up. The idea that somebody is gonna put up with that forever, in this day and age (in the western world at least), is insane. Who has the patience? Heck, I get sick of me, and I have to be here. "Forever" isn't a concept for humans, as we are all temporary beings. Heh, that brings up another song lyric -- "no other course, no other way, no day but today."

The refrain that keeps coming back to me is George Michael's "Freedom '90" -- "all we have to see/ is I don't belong to you, and you don't belong to me." I assure you that we are all in this by ourselves.

ATHENIANS: So here I am trying to not think about my ex-wife. But it's Olympics season. My ex-wife is a gymnastics coach. Do you have any idea how much the Olympics are a problem for me right now? I almost have to stop watching NBC and sports sections of the news, but then the wrestling show starts using Olympic riffs in ads for its "Summerslam" pay-per-view event. Every balance beam, every floor routine is like a wide hand smacking me upside the back of my head. Argh ...

RUTHLESS CAREER B**CHES: So I said I hung out with my dawg Kyle, and he talked about his problems with women, in particular a brand of sister who's very material minded (mortgages, remodeling, stuff like that), very curt and not terribly affectionate. Guess who that reminded me of -- the woman I lived with, not the one I started with in 2000. Anyway, so I tell him he's gotta get away from law practices and universities, because all he's meeting are (his words, not mine) "ruthless career b*tches ... or wanna be ruthless career b*tches."

I have no beef with women on a mission. I have a beef with them talking about brothers like a dog when they're a lot of their own problem. You don't see me here criticizing my exes -- you see me criticizing myself for choosing them. The kind of woman Kyle is having a problem with are not what I wanna be around, and I am happy to say it to their chiseled, over-made-up, retail-enhanced faces every chance I get. It's not like they were gonna sleep with me anyway ...

THE JUMP SHOT: Looking pretty good from mid-range. That's all I have to say about that right now.

BACKED UP: This just in -- my dawg R/Kain Blaze tells me my 100 GB drive is not dead, just has a bad firewire enclosure. So my 40GB of MP3s will be returned to me, which is a real blessing. It'll look like a new drive, to go with the new iPod, the new car, the new karaoke CDs and the prequel version me. That's another costly one, but worth it, well worth it.

DEAD PRESIDENTS: Waiting for my CBR boss to send checks and the madness of Nerd Spring Break has me still on rations -- no new iPod case, "I got a couple of past due bills, I won't get specific" (apologies to Kanye West). Managing, though.

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