Donations

a little treat from JULY 5 07

     Last night, I stopped by my work to get some cheap drinks. I walked in, and this giant, fat woman was dumped on the floor, like a deflated blimp. My coworker, Duc took me aside, chuckled and said, "She slipped and fell. She'll probably sue the company." The paramedics arrived soon after I left. The end.
     Today, I go into work and my manager explains the new ALS promotion. Basically, I ask every single customer who comes in if they would like to donate to the ALS, which is a group of people working to find a cure for Lou Gehrig's disease. It costs a dollar, and they put their name on a perfect, little circle, which I then tape to the wall. Somehow or another, this cures Lou Gehrig's disease.
     There are about sixty little circles already on the wall. My manager says, "Each and every one of those are from Arielle. She's been working hard. The district manager is gonna buy her a soda, and she could win the district contest, which I think is a trip to the Bahamas." I decided at that moment, I was going to sell more of these donations that Arielle. I don't know why, I don't care about the Bahamas, it's probably just instinctual selfish ambition.
     I noticed my friend Tyler Doty was on one of them already. That was a trip.
     I sold four in the first ten minutes. A woman came in, paid for one and let me put her name on it for her. I put my own name instead. This happened twice more, so I started putting some of my aliases. I sold about ten in the first hour. It was so much fun.
     The entire day became a game. A competition. I was smirking the whole time, holding my breath as people signed their names. If people said no, I would sigh, and say whatever. To kinda guilt them into it. It worked about three times.
     A cute girl came in. She had a slight burn scar on the left side of her face, so she had her red hair tucked to the side to hide the blemish. To me, it was beautiful. She wasn't emo, just soft and still not self indulged. She must have been fourteen. I asked her about ALS and she kindly said no. Her friend had some kind of case with him, and I asked about it. He said he found it by the side of the road.
     I said, "That's cool, I do stuff like that too."
     He didn't look like he believed me, so I said, "I found a Jack in the Box T-shirt in the street once. It says manager on it, and I took it home and washed it. One day, I'll wear it into Jack in the Box, slam my hand on the counter and demand free burgers."
     The cute girl laughed, and said to her friend as she left, "He's cool."
     Too bad she's too young.
     A lot of different types of people donated. A cute Muslim girl buying makeup named Hina. A drunk Mexican. Boring white people. A disorientated Jamaican. And also, two blimp women, similiar to the one who slipped the day before, they both write checks. I must examine their ID's but not for anything special. I learn that they were born in 1938. Their were grumpy and impatient with me but I was calm because they could inadvertently send me to the beach.
    
INSERT CRAZY RANT AGAINST THIS WHOLE TIRADE HERE.
    I was called away from the register to take out the trash. There were about five crates full of spoiled orange juice, and none of the girls wanted to throw them out, cause they smelt so awful. I could have just tossed them in the dumpster, but I decided to slam them, spraying fermented orange piss all over the dumpster. It dribbled into puddles of pulp and coagulated with the intense summer heat and the other trash. It was awesome, and the refuse has coated the dumpster ever since.
    I came back in to find my manager mopping up near the coolers. He had ordered too much ice and it didn't all fit in the freezer. So he stacked in the fridge. Of course, it melted and cost the store about 50 dollars worth of ice. My manager was a moron, and I took the dripping bags to the back.
    Later, these two women came running into the store, and tell my coworker Anna to call the police. "There is a belligerent man outside walking in traffic and disturbing people!" I had a line of ten people, so I just took note while Anna dialed and the women tried to calm themselves down.
     The first woman had a money card she wanted to buy. Basically, it's like a gift card for anything and she wanted five hundred dollars on it. She handed it to me in cash. Then the "belligerent man" walked inside the store. He was old and dirty, tall, bald, and red faced. Obviously homeless, obviously stark raving mad.
     He stood right in front of everyone and yelled, "Would anyone like to donate money to the pens and pencils and paper?"
     Everyone was freaked out, scared stiff, deer in headlights.
     "Anyone? If you don't do it, we're all gonna die."
     I smiled. My heart was throttling like I was scared, but I didn't feel it. The woman with the five hundred dollars asked me to "quick, hide it." She was totally afraid. I didn't. I continued her transaction, and told the man, "I can let you borrow my notebook if you want."
     He said, "Nevermind. Satan told me to draw the smiley faces or he was going to fight you. But never mind. I'm just losing my mind." And he walked out.
     Everyone tensed up even more. The woman with the 500 dollars started to shout at me, to rush me. "My kid is in the car, hurry up!" She was so afraid. I just laughed, finished her transaction and watched her run out. Anna hung up the phone, said, "They're coming." The women who reported this guy walked outside and rushed back in. "He's back in the road again."
     I don't understand what was wrong with everyone today. This man comes in needing help, and the whole store just freaks out in fear and cowardice. I mean, he was a poor hurting guy, and was no threat to anyone, yet. . .
     Well, the cops showed up and arrested him.
     Jeez, anything that scares someone should be arrested.
     Anyway, at the end of the competition, I sold about 90 little circles. Arielle got way more than I, but she didn't win either. I guess that's what really matters.

Lavender

Mar. 5th

At the same time, something changed in both of us.

She glided on one side of the Paseo Del Río, I stood shoegazing on the other, the turbulent green water between us. It rained like an angel's tantrum, heavy and cold, but not bleak, not melancholy.
Her hair flew back, parachuting in the gale and I could almost feel it stretching across the creek and stabbing into my senses. I could feel the perfume, lavender in scent, invading my olfactory, breaking down barricades and drawing my autonomy to its knees.
I was enslaved to her, the change between us occurring in different locations internally. My insides churned inside-out, mushed into one another. I had become a septic tank, withholding my own sludge. She glowed with intensity, her face reflecting the few rain-flecked dabs of sunlight like a golden idol.
The more my heart beat excitedly, the more it sunk into it's own cavity, shrinking in anguish. The more my eyes grew wide, the more they shrunk with hypothermic limpness.
Not once did her eyes turn to notice me.

Time is a flour mill, forever turning in the wind, crushing memories and history together. The more the gears twist, the more the result is unfamiliar, a strange flower growing until it overtakes entire gardens. What was once there is never replaced, never repeated, not once.

So that was then, and it doesn't matter. This is now and it still doesn't matter. The only experience worth noting is how my wristwatch continues to fade into the anonymous present. It ticks one way first, then flings back into the present, like an oar consistently propelling our craft forward.

She gave me one dinner. I sat back, barely attempting to act casual. This, after all, was just a business date at a seedy place off in some distant nowhere corner. She sat stiff and appeared ordinary, none of that floaty bullshit. No makeup, casual dress, her hands laid out face down, innocently on the table.
She noticed me staring into her crusted, chewed up fingernails. I followed them up to her withered, chipped knuckles, past criss-crossed scars dug across the wrists, to her chest, spotted with sunbleached freckles and adorned with a plastic necklace. Her feet, chipped and tattered, could follow the same pattern. Not once did I glance down.

The more my heart beat excitedly, the more it sunk into it's own cavity, shrinking in anguish. The more my eyes grew wide, the more they shrunk with hypothermic limpness.

It all came to this, a brief cup of coffee, yogurt sprinkled with granola and a hasty goodbye.

Walking.

FEB. 26 2010

When I was eight and she was six, my sister and I escaped from an after school program one day. We walked home about three miles, in the 110* heat of June, stopping outside of Baskin' Robbins. I drank from the water fountain inside and I will always remember how the water was so cold it would hurt my teeth. I liked that feeling alot, especially after eating a cone of ice cream. A brain freeze was a sweet, beautiful thing.
But we had no money for ice cream, so we were asked to leave.
Outside, a woman in a car asked us if we wanted a ride.
"Look, I know you aren't supposed to ask for a ride from strangers. But you're more likely to get hurt from someone else than me."
The woman had a daughter. And she had a point. We had another two miles to go and it wasn't going to be easy. So we hopped in the back.
I remember being kind of terrified, thinking of elaborate ways to protect myself, but it was mostly just if, if, if.
If I had a knife.
If I had a gun.
If I had a chance.
The woman dropped us off without incident. I stole a dime from her backseat, went inside and we watched Veggie Tales.
Hours of cartoon vegetables later, my dad burst into the room, shouting, "There you are! We've been looking everywhere!"
My sister immediately broke down crying, thinking we were in trouble. We didn't even know we were missed.

The Sewer (non-fiktion)

The Sewer

Our feet sucking through the mud, we stomped through the swampy muck, this raw sewage drained from all the nearby farms, a trench and a tunnel, a big pipe, going through it and the dirt road going over it.
We were hunting frogs, me, my brother Junior and the neighbor kid, Mike. Mike had a small, lime fishnet for extracting goldfish. When we spotted the bulbous yellow eyes floating out of the syrupy grime, we called Mike and he scooped up our writhing, squirming prize.
The further down the sewer we went, the darker the drool became. Oily swirls and floating chunks of I-dare-not-think-what twisted in the ripples we caused. You had to duck your head or risk scraping your scalp against spools of cobwebs. Looking down at your shoes, filled with this goop up to your ankles, terrified of snakes or worse, sometimes we’d jump. What was that, what was that? Then, we realized it was our own splashing. Our own ripples.
We kept the frogs in a Tupperware container we took from grandma. We were careful as surgeons not to let them out when adding to the collection. Junior had the net now, and Mike had trekked to the other side of the tunnel alone. I scanned the brown murky mud and parted the reeds near the entrance, looking for any creatures trying to escape in the opposite direction.
Mike leaned his head into the tunnel and called that he thought he saw something. Something big. Bring the net, quick!
Junior wouldn’t let me take the net and soon it became a fight. I was small and gangly and Junior was 200 pounds, at least, and he was gonna kick my ass. Again.
I was tired of it. Junior was so big and stupid and always trying to push me around.
Rage surged through me and I did the most stupid thing possible. In my tiny mind, I became like Riki Tiki Tavi, the mongoose, a rodent that kills king cobras in India by biting deep into the neck and never letting go.
So I bit Junior on the nipple. Sunk my teeth in through his oversized Phoenix Suns shirt and chomped down. Did. Not. Let. Go. Junior pounded on my back with his fists, the whole time Mike watching from the side, rolling his eyes and telling us to cut it out. I wouldn’t let go and Junior wouldn’t stop hammering me.
But everyone has to breathe sometime and I let out a big exhale, enough room for Junior to shove me back and run off down the dirt road. It was a mile to my grandmother’s house and he ran the entire way, shouting, “I’m telling, I’m telling.”
The Tupperware of frogs knocked over, the net in the bushes. Nothing mattered. I ran off down the street after my brother. As I got to the door, my mother was there, asking what happened and I told her she should punish me so, so, so bad. I was crying. Guilt, or fear, but probably both.
Junior’s nipple was swollen and plum purple. My mother tried to stifle her laughter. Everyone was confused about the nature of the fight, but they figured we had it worked out. It was over and I wasn’t punished.
I went back to Mike, still baffled, but more bored and he said all the frogs got away. I looked down at my ankle, sticking out of my mud caked shoes and browned socks. A leech was suckling on my Achilles’ tendon.

Stealing the Communist Manifesto

When searching for the top ten list of the most stolen books, I got many differing accounts. Some say Bukowski, Thompson, Palahniuk. Some say Kafka, J.K. Rowling, the Bible. Some sources don't even list titles, just authors. Then there's some book called Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman, which doesn't surprise me. I think the decade has a lot to do with it, which explains the variation, but a statistic like this is hard to prove in the first place.

Somehow I thought the Communist Manifesto made that list. I thought, if there's any book you have to steal, it's got to be this one. It has a typical red cover and two yellow price tags. The book costs $2.

Thousands of revolutionaries built empires on the spine of this trashy paperback. Some of them had to steal it. They were rebels, right?

I took the copy into the dressing room, buried under a pair of jeans and stuffed the book into my pocket. It fit perfect.

I took it out and took off the stickers. If an employee suspected anything, I was afraid they'd find the stickers, so I peeled the yellow tabs back. Wondered where to stick them and thought, leaving them in the room would be suspicious as well.

So I bent down and slapped it under the dressing room bench. Beneath it were hundreds of stickers.

Burden

non-fiction
When I was a little kid, I used to pick up cigarette butts and put them in a bucket and throw them away. I was a little groundskeeper.
My dad smoked on our porch made of astro-turf and he'd throw the butts right on the green and then there was little melted footprints all over, little UFO treadmarks. I'd pick the butts out of the cradles they made. I'd pick up these beer cans of extinguished butts where hives of cockroaches would crawl into and drown in their drunkenness. I'd fish through ashtrays.

I had a mentally retarded neighbor named Keith that did the same thing. Cleaning up everything.
Keith was a twin, but sometimes one of the twins don't come out entirely OK. Keith was one of those twins.
He was confused, and he thought his purpose in life was to clean up the earth.
He'd crawl the streets on the way to the bus stop, crouching down for plastic wrappers and pop tabs and receipts and cigarette butts.
He'd mutter to himself.
Keith kept the trash in a grocery bag at his side. I never knew what he did with the bag when he was done with it.

One day I got real sick from picking up those cigarette butts, those cans, those roach motels.
"They check in, but they don't check out."
I lay in bed, sick to death and vowed never to do that again.
The task to clean the planet was too large a burden for me to carry.
I figured, let the world be filthy.

Now when I get sick, I don't reflect like that any more, I don't think about it.
I keep going. No rest.
I wonder, if I'm still carrying any burdens.

My First Computer

non-fiction

I remember getting my first computer, the excitement I had, all of it. I loved it because it was all mine.
I got it from my mother's friend who had an autistic child who watched a lot of VHS tapes. It was used, but free and I loved it.
It was a Windows '95 or '98, not sure which, but it was heavy, a monitor that weighed more than me. I remember bringing it home and assembling it in my room and how I just loved putting the pieces together myself. I loved opening and closing the disc drive, the hum of the monitor, the special sounds it made on start up, the loading screens and the little words that said, "IT IS NOW SAFE TO TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER". I wanted to keep my computer on forever, but my mother wouldn't let me. I had to turn it off every night.

I wrote novels on my computer. I'd open up the Word knockoff I had and just type and type and type for hours and I didn't care what came out. I wrote a story that was a Paperboy knockoff and one called 20,000 Pennies Under the Duckpond that was about guinea pigs and hamsters that lived on a farm and had to find some money. They were terrible stories and I never finished them, but they felt so good to write.

I had Juno, which was like AOL only so simple and pathetic it only allowed you to check email. You couldn't even get on the internet with it for anther three years. I'd check my mail all the time, but I never got anything so I'd email myself. It took forever to get them.
I'd hack onto my mom's Juno account and email her friends long-winded stories I wrote, mostly re-tellings of faerie tales so they were funny. Or at least so I would laugh. I wanted my stories to be like the chain emails that my mom forwarded to me and I forwarded to myself.

Fuck solitaire! On my computer, I played hours of games (that came with it somehow) like WinBreakOut '95 and I'd install dollar-store floppy disc games. A few times, if they sucked, I'd erase them off the floppy disc and reuse it.

But what I remember most is it had awesome screensavers of pipes and a maze thing and I loved customizing those. I'd change them every hour and then wait for the computer to start them up. It came with these themes, like the Jungle Theme and the Space Theme and it would change all the colors and the cursors and the sounds when the computer started up, loaded up and fucked up.

Really, all I liked to do was mod the shit out of it. It was mine and that was a powerful feeling, knowing I had something so useful all to myself. I felt privelegded. My computer could do anything! I mean, it didn't have internet or any music on it or anything but it still felt amazing to me.

But the computer didn't have a lot of hard drive space. So what did I do? What any kid would. I went into the :C drive and deleted any files I thought I didn't need. Such as old games, themes I didn't use and . . . system files.

After that my computer didn't work anymore. I totally fucked it up and lost everything. But somehow, I didn't really care.

The other day, I bought a new computer for a C-note. Got it for a song, really. It's an eMac with a thousand features that my old '98 never had, even if the eMac is a couple years outdated. It doesn't have a very big hard drive but I'm not about to delete anything I shouldn't.

Anyway, I got kinda giddy again, buying it. I started to feel like I used to, like my computer was the best thing in the world.

But then it faded after a day.

Still, I'm gonna keep my computer on all the time, deep into the night.

Existing No Longer

This is true.

I was six. My best friend Ryan, who lived at one end of the trailer park, me at the other, were playing one spring afternoon.
I proposed we go on an adventure through our neighborhood.
'You know,' I said. 'A real adventure. Like Indiana Jones or something.'
So we asked permission from our parents and they smiled, condescendingly, but still adoring. Asked where we were going and when we'd be back. And said yes.
Ryan's mom packed us a lunch. With Capri Suns. I remember this because she only gave us one apiece and I loved Capri Suns as a kid, except they were too expensive for my family budget and they were small. Unsatisfying. I craved them, constantly.

We left.

I remember, I brought my Burger King Halloween Bucket and Ryan brought his backpack so we could save any treasures we found. I don't remember what we put inside them, maybe pennies, or bits of broken plastic or strange insects. In my head, things get muddled. Sometimes it's everything. Sometimes it's empty white, bucket. I'll never be sure of the truth.

We went up to the middle of the park and then doubled back, trespassing through our neighbor's backyards.
I was so excited. Ryan seemed nonplussed, but went along with it.
He was kind of a boring kid that liked pro-wrestling and shitty cable television.
I didn't have cable or my antennae didn't get reception. Essentially, no TV at all.

He had a Sega Genesis, I had a Super Nintendo. But he had cooler games, somehow.
I had Kirby's Avalanche and Rampart and Jurassic Park.
He had Sonic the Hedgehog and Jurassic Park too, only in his, you could be a velociraptor and eat people.

We had the same shitty, faux-mullet blond haircuts.
Ryan lost his baby teeth first.
I bit my nails. I think he did too.
We both liked Power Rangers.
My favorite color was green. His was red or blue.

I first met Ryan when my mother met his and we went over to his house and I played in Ryan's room. Within five minutes of knowing Ryan, we were crawling under his bed and suffocating in the huge piles of clutter. We were instant friends.

And it seemed perfect, crawling under bushes and hopping fences in stranger's backyards. TV was boring anyway. These adventures were the memories I'd always treasure. Somehow, I knew that already, as I created them. I knew the moment was special.

We hadn't been hiking for twenty minutes before we propped ourselves up behind someone's air conditioning and quickly ate all our snacks. I was still hungry. I remember that.

The place we rested was shaded and tranquil. A little tangerine tree, painted white. The hum of the air conditioning. The suck, suck, sucking sound of the Capri Suns.
I wanted to stay there forever.

And yet . . . I was disappointed that this was all our adventure had been so far. A twenty minute walk and a mediocre meal.
We hadn't even gone anywhere new or exciting. We were behind a trailer that was next to my babysitter's. I knew where I was.
And still, I went back to the peace I felt, however mild it was. For several years, I'd often revisit that place.

And then we heard footsteps and the home owner yelled at us and we ran off.

So far, we hadn't fought any monsters, like the ones in my favorite video game, A Link to the Past. No Octoroks or Moblins or anything. Just shady, crab-grass infested backyards. We hacked at bushes with sticks.

We went to the far reaches of the trailer park, a place I'd never been before. The very last trailer home was lopsided against a cul-de-sac and the front yard was completely filled with a giant prickly pear cactus. A forest of prickers and green discs.
We threw rocks at it, tearing up the fruitless crowns, bleeding out its juices all over.
I got paranoid that we'd get caught again. But we didn't.
And something about destroying that prickly pear was incredibly surreal.
I vowed to come back one day and finish its destruction. I really did. I don't know why.
And I returned once, many years later, and it was gone.
Maybe it never existed.

It's hard to say what happens to memories so long discarded. Maybe we never went on an adventure, maybe we didn't drink Capri Suns or get yelled at and maybe Ryan didn't exist at all.

It had been an hour or so. We were already exhausted little explorers.
We came upon an empty lot, the large concrete slabs where abandoned trailerhomes used to stand, until they were excavated and dragged away. Existing no longer.

Ryan found a dead bird laying on the slab and dared me to touch it. A dead morning dove, curled up in withered defeat. Existing no longer.
I said, no way.
Ryan reached inside the ribcage and pulled out an organ. Right through the skin. It was easy.
'Look,' he said. 'It's a heart.'
But who knows, it could have been a liver or a lung or something. All I know is it was a quarter-sized ball of red and violet and it leaked.
He dared me to touch it.
'No way,' I said.
Ryan threw it at me and I screamed.
He put the entrails in my bucket and we took it home.
We got back to my room and went through our treasures, which honestly, had to be the most worthless shit ever. I don't remember any of it. None except the organ, kinda drying up, kinda sticking to the side of the bucket.
Ryan left it at my house when he left, and I had to clean it out.

That's the end.

The thing about retelling a story, is, in the gaps of the temporal lobe, we fill in the holes.
With age, more gaps formulate. More are filled.
Some true, some lies, but it doesn't matter. Whatever changes occur, we make them the truth.

Since this is the first time I've told this story in 13 years, there were many gaps to fill.
I actually sit here, wondering, if any of it happened the way I think it did.
I think it did.
I nearly forgot it happened at all.
But retelling the story has changed it, the way you cannot observe anything in nature without yourself influencing the observed. I've changed this story beyond repair. In a way, the original events never existed. In truth, this story exists no longer.

Smirk

(non-fiktion)

My friend, maybe he did it for the attention, but he shaved off his eyebrows.
He said, it's capitalist.
He said, he was stopping the brows from merging and fighting.
He gave a lot of bullshit answers. No one really understood why he did such an impulsive thing; me least of all.
Everyone laughed. They painted on his face with paint, to make him look like he had eyebrows again and they all laughed. Then they painted a Hitler mustache and all laughed. He wiped off all their makeup and everyone laughed.
I didn't; just not my humor.
After school, we went shopping in Target for a half hour. Just meandering around, just losing ourselves in the aisles of consumerism, mostly empty, slow. Everyone we passed gave my eyebrowless friend a raised eyebrow, a glare, or a confused stare. He laughed, getting the kick he wanted out of it. I laughed too. It was some enormous inside joke, but hung outside like a fat neon marquee.
It was disturbing to look at him, to think about looking at him. It was because his every expression that day was eager, gleeful, happy and he didn't have little lines of hair to compliment him. He was this completely open person with his grinning, stupid laughing. His eyes weren't darkened or as covered anymore, and seeing his eyes so broad and piercing was unsettling. He didn't have a forehead, it was more like he had a fivehead.
It's weird, but I admire him for it. It took courage, on some level. It's a big fuck you to society, in one way or another.
He looks like a doll or a puppet, but not quite, because even those have more facial features than he does. He looks surreal, like something in a dream, or something a coked out artist would sketch.
We went to a Starbucks and stared out the window at some birds, people staring back in. It felt like we were in a zoo, caged in as a living display case for gawking idiots; but I felt alive and free, careless and eager; who had the freedom, society, or us?
I demanded my friend go and buy me a soda. I gave him a container of pure pennies. He spent a full ten minutes at the counter buying me my drink, as the cashier slowly got over my friend's appearance; then as he counted the pennies, then she nervously recounted them. He couldn't stop laughing when he came back to my table.
On the second day with his new style, we went bowling. Some cute female employees were flirting with me until they noticed him. Then they straightened up, shut their mouths in confusion, they gave us our shoes and didn't talk to us again. I didn't mind, it was worth the laugh.
By the end of the week, I was somewhat used to it. Not enough though, and watching him trying to express anything, anger, humor, even depression was like watching a pathetic rag doll try and imitate life. It was hard to even pity him, let alone sympathize, but I managed it. His emotions reminded me of a movie I once saw about a robot who wanted to be human. It was like this, except in reverse. I think he wanted to be a robot. Schizophrenic. Dead.
I always like it when my life becomes a little more surreal. I wish more things like this happened to me. Often life seems to bland, uninteresting. . . . hairy.
My friend wants me to shave off my eyebrows too.
The funniest thing is, I actually considered it.

Shade

There was this time that I was really bitter at the entire world. I hated everyone, and only tolerated the people I loved. It was mostly political. I don't tolerate stupid people, and I just felt everyone was incompetent and inefficient.
Then I spent an entire Saturday, sitting in the shade of a tree with a friend. He is so different from me, especially politically. But after talking to him for five hours, he unintentionally reminded me that people are people. That everyone in the world wants the same things, the only difference is how each individual gets it.

I've come to love that feeling, the feeling of being reminded that everyone is the same.

I've been reading a lot on body language, graphology, art, comas, drugs, and diaries. It's all pointing me back to one glorious conclusion. That we are all very complex, deep, emotional, and intricate things. There is no such thing as a simple human being, just an incompetent one. Everyone really is a magnificent system and the only exceptions are those that shove monkey wrenches in their own gears.

I saw the movie Bobby today. It's about the Robert F. Kennedy assassination. It was an amazing film, really something spectacular. It follows the lives of 24 characters who are working, living, or visiting a hotel. The story weaves in and out of all these people's lives similiar to Traffic, Crash, and Magnolia. It deals with racism, just like Crash, but in a different way. Crash said everyone is racist and evil, but Bobby said that racism is wrong because everyone is human. A much stronger, less aggressive point of view.

Bobby dealt with almost every possible stage of a relationship; good friendship, work, middle aged, old aged, middle-old aged, and young. And of course, in the end, all of it was meaningless, which makes the strongest point.

RFK was not in the movie, except for his propaganda speeches. I really should have hated this movie because of the politics, but I love it because it focused on the people themselves, and put the politics on a backburner. It said that people are more important than wars, or elections, or assassinations.

It reminded me of that shady feeling I got. This time, I haven't been feeling bitter to the entire world.
But love for the entire world is always a necessary reminder.