Paper beats Rock

The boy said he couldn't fight. That he'd go home with a bloody nose every time, until he started using words.

Going nowhere fast

It's a waterwheel or that thing Astro walks on 50,000 feet in the sky. Escalators are close but not quite, elevators are too claustrophobic and also don't really work. Return to sender mail, boomerangs, cartwheels on a mark, the car in the "Ferris Bueler's Day Off" before it crashes through the window. Jete's. Walking into a room- forgetting what you went in there for- going back to where you were previously. Round-a-bouts, circular doors in New York city, the old "agree to disagree" conversation. M. C. Escher's staircase drawing. The back of shampoo bottles; rinse, lather, repeat. Water molecules

Bus ride contemplations

I 'm sitting across the aisle from Dick Tracy with Tourette's. He's not dressed like Dick Tracy, He really is Dick Tracy, he's still wearing his name tag on his plaid printed jersey shirt.
I'm thinking about getting an apartment in Freemont
I'm thinking about getting a dog and naming it Fantastic Mr. Fox or maybe just Kevin
I'm thinking about getting a garter tattoo and then I think about getting one around my belly- a dashed line that says Mason Dixen
I think about Colonel Rommel and about the first Yankees to go below the Mason Dixen Line
Dick Tracy just made a sign language gesture for squirrel and then airplane and then mouthed a loud shout
I think about recycling- how when I was the only one doing it I thought "whats the point?" and now that everyone is recycling I think "no one will notice if I don't"
I think about how nice it would be to be 70, retired and close to death
I think about how people keep saying life is short, but to me it seems quite long. very long.

ROY G. BIV

Gay pride parade, sitting on the news stands on pike and 5th. Yelling at the parade to get their swag thrown in my direction. We yell for candy, we yell for beads and coupons. I caught a dollar bill thrown up in the air, a Frisbee, and three 20% off Alaska airline tickets. Leaving the rainbow march, clearly marked by the rainbow- necklaces and stickers and multi-colored pinwheels in my hair. Skittle girls walking through the city get honked at and cat-called.
We catch a bus, #358 to get home, it's packed, hot and stuffy with washed out, dreary people in khaki's, navy's, and whites. I stand in front of a tired women and her son. The sun peeks out from a cloud and hits my necklace and metallic pinwheel, sending thousands of colored sequined reflections on the people and the walls and floor and ceilings of the bus. The boy sees the magic and follows the rainbow spangles up to me and stares. His mother feebly whispers to him in Spanish. But he continues to stare, his podgy little mouth open, too weary to fuss, she holds his plumpish belly next to hers. I pull out the pinwheel and hand it to him. His eyes bulge with excitement but his lips stay in the same open shape. He taps his mother who had just rested her head back and closed her eyes. She whispers sweetly into his ear again and this time he looks at me and mouths the word "thank you". The rest of the ride he watches his new toy in wonderment not knowing what makes it spin or stop. And each time it does one or the other he twitches with joy at how unpredictable it is for him. We come to our stop and as I walk out she touches my hand, she has warm, listless eyes and pink lipstick on, she looks like she works hard. "thank you" she says through a thick accent. I smile and take my rainbows with me off the bus.

This is the Standard

We were at the top of the Standard downtown, downtown- on the roof. Sharing a triplet of mini cheeseburgers and drinking mint mojitos out of plastic cups. Billy was talking about how i knew too much about weed, more than a good Christian girl should know, and that he thought i was a secret drug lordess- growing a field of it somewhere in Thailand, and we were sitting in the middle of the 5th plague of Egypt.

Those birds swarmed the sky like they were locusts. Millions of black birds, different shapes and sizes but all black. As if every bird in LA came to rally around the columns of business and commerce.

"I think they are lost!" Carissa suggested, "Trapped by the sky scrapers!"

Circling and circling in a giant silver spiral like spawning sardines. Whipping, whirling, and chirping. Our necks started to hurt from the weight of our heads facing the Aves apocalypse. The feathered rapture, it was the inverse of the starry night sky- black on white. It was lovely, bewitching. Carissa said, "you guys, this is a miracle, and we are never going to forget this"