eight: Free Speech

She’s silent except for her steady pulsing drum, thumping into dissonance against the noise of oblivion.
It’s easy to overlook her.
In a place like Berkeley, where protest is so common that the University uses it as a recruiting tactic (see “Free Speech Movement Café” in the brochure), there is something to be said about silence.
It’s not her fasting or her praying that is striking; shockingly it’s her cause;
She’s a Buddhist priest, asking for the return of Native American bones in order to honor a death rite of a people whose faith is not her own.
Truly selfless.

seven: Study

In an observation of the public, running four hours, where study participants were required to sort their trash (remove plastic lids from paper cups) and discard it in appropriate receptacles, without being motivated by outside forces, (someone telling them to) 99.9% of people (all except one guy and a can) chose to recycle.
In one case, a non-English speaking woman, holding her refuse, sought translations in order to recycle.
America holds 5% of the world’s population, while producing 40% of its waste.
We only recycle 28% of our own (that’s 11.2% of the worlds) trash.
Here, some are doing better.

six: leftovers

Polite, though clearly desperate, the tattered man bolts into the nearly vacant Thai restaurant and stares down the left over food on un-bussed tables.
“Do you think I could just drink the rest of that soup?”
Without pause, a young waiter clips across the floor and asks him to step aside so he can clear the mess.
Mechanical and preoccupied, the waiter shuffles the routine dance of clearing plates into cardboard boxes.
Frustrated, disillusioned and still hungry the man begins to move for the door when the waiter bolts after him, this time hands full of bags,
“Your food sir.”

five: Slight-of-hands

The rain turns idealized hippy impressions of homelessness in Berkeley a bit sour.
The two guys working at Fred’s deli on Telegraph have seen people pile under their awning for years; they know many of their names.
They buy three overpriced coffees at an upscale café.
They walk back, passing the extra cup into the shaking hands of a tousled Man warming up in their store.
He thanks them, insisting he doesn’t need it, steps back outside to his wet sleeping bag and the unfriendly, piercing night.
Then he gives the hot cup to the coldest hands he can find.

four: Cancer

“I’m truly blessed!” he announces to the empty 7-1, “I’ve had five thanksgiving dinners today alone.”
No response.
Familiar tension between an unwelcome street person and storeowner builds, as he lingers at the counter calculating the best bargain on cigarettes.
Everyone has a “Black Friday.”
Outside, a woman looking considerably more put together than him asks a group of college kids for a spare smoke.
Coldly, they puff past.
Slamming his Pall Malls into his palm, he watches, pulls out a few and hands her the pack.
Wealth isn’t what one has, its what they can afford to give away.

three: Americornucopia

While not 100% conclusive, research shows a strong correlation between music and fighting depression.
Tonight it’s certainly lightening the mood of this block.
There voices halt the bustle of pedestrian preoccupation, a crowd forms and people look each other in the eyes.
The accordion nearly vanished in America at the turn of the century when Eastern European immigrants gave it up in attempts at assimilation.
His is holding its place, humming into her fiddle.
They play strictly for donations and libations, bringing out a little Anarchy in everyone;
There will be no ticket stubs,
The celebration will not be commercialized.

two: Coffree

Its Tuesday afternoon and he’s still buzzing from Friday night.
His first off in months, this one called on account of over-zealous “activists” who’s statements opposing university Fee hikes was pulling his building’s fire alarms.
Budget cuts that are costing me $10,000, gave him some respite.
Laughing at the chaos theory series of events that butterfly affected our lives.
We like each other’s tattoos, though express it rather overtly.
I hint at an admiration for script.
While he makes my drink from memory and laughs when I try to pay,
“Don’t worry about it, you’ve got enough to pay for.”

one: a complement

This week, California College kids, caffeinated with youthful rebellion coalesced in protest over the increasing unavailability of college education.
In a campus coffee shop, someone staged a much less dramatic demonstration.
In America where, 1 in 5 women suffer from an eating disorder,
15% of anorexics are men,
90% of both are between 12 and 25,
and the dieting industry brings in $50billion annually;
Anorexia is the third leading life-ending disease among adolescents.
If bodies were built like mannequins, they couldn’t reproduce.
Here is a bold reminder that admission has no price,
Though showing up for class isn’t always easy.