School Yard Fights

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them… The ability to have somebody to tell your story is so important. It says: ‘I was here’.
— Maya Angelou

What is explained can be denied but what is felt cannot be forgotten.
— Charles Bowden

Radical — a person who advocates thorough or complete political or social reform; a member of a political party or part of a party pursuing such aims.
• synonyms: revolutionary · progressive · reformer · revisionist · militant ·
• chemistry: a group of atoms behaving as a unit in a number of compounds.
See also free radical.
• the root or base form of a word.
• mathematics: a quantity forming or expressed as the root of another.

Sixty days. A year. Five years. A week. A day. An hour. Right now.
That’s the curse of addiction, those needles, inhalants, the entire barbarity of cheap booze shilled by the chosen ones, the money changers, all amortized and bundled debts in trans-capital, sold next to the playground, the trees cut down for billboards pronouncing sexual prowess and football hero-dom with the flick of the Mike’s Hard Cider or a fucking Bud.

They are young, high school, seniors, boys and girls, running hard, 8 am, along Salmon Creek, a place where I burn the body in a course of hard bicycling waiting for a bald eagle to baptize my day. Great blue herons, red-tailed hawks, egrets, meadowlarks, red winged black birds, and dozens of other species capturing the soul before facing off the empire.

Yes. I think that what is more important in Mexico is education. It’s for the children to be able to go to school. Of course, hunger is also a very big problem. But the one that really, really, really for me is very painful is education. And there’s very little money spent on education, on good teachers, on schools, on even rooms where children can go and work. And I think this is the worst problem in Mexico that has to be taken care of. And it has not been taken care of. I remember when I came to Mexico as a little girl, I loved my teacher, La Seño Velázquez.

Universal travel: plenty of haves and a shit more have-nots

It’s thirty years of consumer orgasm and vocational thinking, educating to push away anything good and deep and critically thought out, those great books and thoughts that distract one from making money, hand over fist, or struggling trying to do something in the social services.

Here I go again – the at-will piece of human detritus that I am, according to Oregon’s great employers, twice now, non-profits, sacking me because I pushed the state’s vocational rehabilitation careerists outside their pathetic Little Eichmann lives by pushing for my clients – adults with developmental-intellectual-psychological disabilities – to get as much out of the state’s bureaucracies that are filled with middling folk who do not give a shit about people.

So his motorcade comes to Portland and clogs traffic. The mainstream news yammers on about where he might end up for pie or a smoke or which trendy place Barack might get an artisan beer or vegan cheese sandwich. All the rotten facts about his bullet and missile proof Cadillac. How the Murder Incorporated Entourage will have secret service, local SWAT, special forces and a slew of private mercenaries around to protect this GQ guy? America, 2015, and that 3 billion dollar Obama smile, in stumptown.