Put Your Lighters Up

Gross Negligence

The area surrounding the Orleans Parish Prison courthouse is a gritty sprawl of petty criminals and bail bonds "offices," some more legitimate than the rest. As soon as my Buick flies over the overpass and touches down on Tulane Ave., I feel people looking at me through my windsheild in anticipation, invisible questions on their minds:

"How much power do you have?"

"Are you going to help me, or help keep my son in jail?"

The sun is always blinding there, even when it's overcast, and the first thing I see is the grey marble of the courthouse rising up out of the hovel of Quickie marts and swaying houses, trying its best to look just. I faintly remember two gigantic sculptures of eagles.

Having only been in magistrate court, I don't really know what to make of the whole thing.

All I know is that, if nobody cares enough about you to pay a $50 bond, you can sit in jail for over 60 days on a possession of marijuana charge. Also, police have trouble spelling, and, sometimes, not embellishing on their arrest reports. They also enjoy flinging "probable cause" around.

A curfew on a person subject to house arrest is later if he has a BA in something vs if he's only got a high-school education: profiling barely pretending not to be.

But por favor, don't scoff me off as a gushing liberal. The man is there regulating for a reason (wife-beaters and 17-year-old double murderers for example) he's just not quite man enough for the airs his courthouse puts on.

The Beginning of the Decade

A newly turned 27-yr old has a retrospective moment:

I'm 20 and home from college for the summer. I'm feeling angsty after having read "Please Kill Me," a sort-of illustrated history of Punk Rock. So angsty in fact that I feel like I have to rail against something somehow or be sucked into suburban normalcy before I return to school and be embarrassed under the scrutiny of my misguided-musician crush -- who, I would later discover to be an ego-maniacal ass, but who I saw at the time as the cool guy with 45's and the fatalistic attitude.

So I did what any budding punk rocker would have done -- I threw out all my makeup from the year before: when I had gone trawling to college parties with the rest of em, "shades of seduction" eyeshadow in tow -- before my life was saved by rock n' roll.

Next step: bleach hair to a crisp underneath a shopping bag, buy some t-shirts with favorite band names on them, rip holes in all my jeans (if I can't accomplish it by falling off my skateboard), and spend lots of time in my basement with my $10 record player, ignoring the suburban hell outside.

Though it has been, and continues to be at times, misguided, here's to many more years of railing against shit.

Malls Don't Stay the Same

They expanded the Freehold Raceway Mall. The carousel is still there, thank God, but the sea green paint is now a sensible eggshell, a Borders bulges out of one side, and a Dick's stands as a sort of satellite in the middle of the parking lot.

Soft-Core Scholar

I've always thought it would be really badass to be a scholar. But a scholar of old -- back when that was an occupation one threw oneself into with the same gusto a dedicated teacher or a doctor would. To make it your job to study and acquire knowledge.

There's a certain sense of martyrdom that goes along with it, like you sort of have to be uncomfortable through your knowledge quest -- have to read in very low light n' stuff.

That's why I'm forcing myself to sit upright at my desk for the 5th hour, no ass-pillow allowed -- feelin' that wood grain!

Aristotle and Nietzsche would likely scoff at my cram sessions of tort and contract law a week before exams. Spineless child's play, they would say. They did this sort of thing when they were in diapers.

Here's an exciting law fact that struck me: The only two things in the world considered common property, and thus without an owner, are the "high seas" and the air.

And even those- if you bottle either, you can own and sell it.

Please shoot me if I start writing in legalese.