the more things change, the more people stay the same.

now playing: super seventies internet radio



so it's after midnight, and another weekend is officially over.

i took everyone out to dinner when i got back from philadelphia tonight - the nik everett group had their first unofficial gig today at a club in philadelphia called finegan's wake in the northern liberties section of town (we were thinkin' about you, mitch), and it went off, for the most part, without a hitch...there was a strange low-frequency rumbling that perpetuated pretty much the entire set, but it was a large room with a large PA (which is to say, it was a loud set), and the vocals could've used some attention from the soundman in terms of their placement in the mix...but, considering it was a benefit, it wasn't bad for free help.

but - the gig has come and gone, everyone has been returned to the place where they shall sleep for the night, and i'm taking in the final few quiet moments before the insanity of yet another week sets in.

before i left today, i took jayda and her (for all practical purposes) stepsister chelsea to the mall. jayda wanted to get her fingernails done (she's such a teenager now), and i told her that i'd take her if she'd get in touch with her mom and make sure that she could retrieve her from the mall and bring her home with her or drop her off back here. the gig ran over (multi-band bills always do), so i called the house a little before seven to see who was or wasn't here, and talked to jayda...she told me that dylan was still here, and that chelsea had returned here with her.

all very good - she asked where i was and how long it'd be before i got back, and i proceeded home.

it was a nice night for the drive - the roads were more littered than i'd have preferred with people with no agenda - nowhere to go and perfectly content to force their lack of agenda on those who wanted to actually be somewhere by driving below the speed limit in the left lane, oblivious to the volkswagen van defying the laws of physics by flying into their rear view mirror at an allegedly impossible speed. i had a couple of instances where i had to do some pretty deft maneuvering to slip out from behind what i like to call "bingo rangers" (folks of a usually elderly nature who - in my fantasy of who they are - travel the nations' highways with their cataract-friendly sunglasses on, driving insanely slow in the left lane on their way to the next bingo hall).

but, i got home and jayda and chelsea were sitting on the front porch and something was obviously wrong. it turns out that there was something of an altercation - not a physical one, but essentially an exchange of "you got a problem?" type verbage with some punks across the street. apparently, the girls were on the front porch, listening to music through the front window, and these kids yelled "nigger" out the window of one of the upper floors of the house across the street. jayda looked at chelsea and they confirmed that they heard what they heard.

now, i don't remember the exact details of what was said to whom and in what order the events that took place actually happened...jayda recounted the whole thing to me, but that was the one incident that i remember very clearly. there were other things (them shining flashlights across the street, stupid shit like that...

a few things to point out, as background: chelsea is, in fact, black - jayda's mother is currently involved in a mixed-race relationship. also, there were three kids involved in this little game, and one of them was mike - garrison's brother...one of the kids who lives two houses away. mike and garrison have been inside our house, we've made them welcome here, we've allowed them to hang out on the porch with the kids well past when i would usually allow anyone on the porch on a weeknight...i'm extremely conscious of noise, and don't want to be the neighborhood asshole whos' constantly raising a ruckus. as such, i typically don't condone anything like that. in fact, if the truth be told...were i to have been here, i probably wouldn't have allowed them to be on the porch pumping music out through the window. no, not probably - it wouldn't have happened, period. i live in this neighborhood because i don't want to hear what the neighbors are listening to, and i'll assume, for the sake of argument, that they probably live here for similar reasons.

but that doesn't give anyone license to be an asshole. "could you please turn that down?" and "nigger!" come from two entirely different motivations.

so i found out about this when i got home....and, just as i was being briefed by the girls on the front porch, the three jackasses come dragging themselves across the street to the sidewalk in front of our house, trailed by mike's mother, heather, and her boyfriend, vinnie.

"sorry", he says.

"sorry? you're sorry? sorry don't get it...you should get your ass kicked," i said to him right in front of his parents. "what is it that gives you the right to say that to somebody, man? do you really think that's ok?" then heather chimed in, and she was livid. she apologized profusely, repeated that she didn't raise her children to be that disrespectful, she couldn't imagine what he was thinking, so on and so forth...and i could tell that she was both humiliated and shamed by what he'd done. i told her that this wasn't about her at all, and i knew that she wouldn't stand for something like this...and that there were no hard feelings between us. we all stood on the lawn and chatted for a while before we left for dinner and to take chelsea home, and all is well between the parents involved.

but mike can kiss my ass. he won't be in this house again, and i don't have anything to say to him. i don't care how sorry he is. i don't care if he's just a kid. i don't care if it was his friends who said it and he was basically the ollie north of the whole caper.

if you're the kind of person who can be swayed by another human being to act like that towards someone who's been nothing but hospitable to you, then i have no room for you in my life. i'd rather fill it with people who have enough sense to think for themselves and who know the difference between a joke and a slur...among other things.


is this where i live, though? have i moved into a nicer neighborhood, really?

i know that by the standards of the world as a whole, this is probably a pretty trivial incident....but what the fuck? i mean, is this never gonna go away? are we doomed to our own ignorance as a race?

i told the girls tonight at dinner that in another half dozen generations or so, as mixed-race becomes more commonplace, that a time might eventually come when the race pools are so convoluted that no one will be able to tell anyone apart from one another....i suppose that this could be a real possibility, but it'll take a lot longer than that. and if we all survive as an entity that long, i'm sure we'll have come up with plenty of other reasons to hate each other by then.

it's one of the things we're good at.