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In the city of angels and demons, everything looks perfect. What’s shiny and within your reach, dare not reach out and touch. It will crumble in your hands. Merely observe. Survey the beauty, the chaos. Watch it happening. I promise no one will notice you. And you may feel outside of it all, displaced. You may feel superior. You may feel ineffectual. Just exist. Look at life happening around you. See the man reading his paper, the bus boy making his way through the maze of people with a stack of dishes. Hear the clinking of glasses, the rustling of chairs being moved around the wooden floor. Wait in line. Stay calm when your order doesn’t arrive. Smile when they screw your order up. Watch people knock into each other like penguins. See it unravel, the numerous story lines, the noise, the scattering. You’re in a vortex. It may even start to consume you. But there’s a moment when you look outside. All of this is happening around you, but you don’t hear it anymore. There’s a girl. You see her lips moving, her expressions, her vivacity; you see her inner fire. You can’t hear her, but through that glass door, you manage to catch a glimmer of her soul. It’s your little secret. No one knows you’re watching. She doesn’t see you, or anything else around her. All she sees is what’s in front of her, and all you see is her.

She speaks intently, her gestures sharp and passionate. She focuses on someone. Whom? Who engages her so? There is intimacy, it seems. She is comfortable in her domain. She is queen. The unknown party shares their sandwich with her. She bites into it carefully and quickly, pondering her thoughts as she chews. Satiated, she hands it back, continuing what seems like a description of conflict in her life. She seems proud, and speaks with fervor. I decide she is having lunch with her significant other. I strain to see outside, then stop short. I decide I don’t want to know after all. There is beauty in this exchange, and the catalyst is an arbitrary matter. I remain transfixed on her interaction, and feel like I have found my place among the rubble. There is safety in the unknown. In a world of disorder and hidden agendas, you can still encounter presence of mind. You can still find those with a zest for life, with passion, interspersed among all else. There is beauty among the chaos.

america, fuck yeah.

An inappropriate title for an inappropriate holiday. Not that I'm complaining about getting an extra day off my soul destroying job, but it's as Ms. Stroud from Dazed and Confused once said, "this summer when you're being inundated by all the American bicentennial fourth of July brouhaha, don't forget what you're celebrating, and that's the fact that a bunch of slave owning, aristocratic white males didn't want to pay their taxes."

Not much has changed. I suppose any reason to get shit faced works for us.

So my friends who I love, well they're in a band. A great band. A band called The Flower Thief. No, I'm not talking about the 1960's film by Ron Rice depicting the beat poets inhabiting San Francisco's North Beach...I'm talking about the three man band called The Flower Thief. Well they booked a show...on fourth of July...at Canes in Mission Beach. Not only do I hate Mission Beach, but I especially hate Canes, which I consider to be the Sports Arena of small venues. It's gross and old and should be burnt down with torches. I most especially hate Canes in Mission Beach on fourth of July, when I have to sit in shitty traffic with all the other yokels out to celebrate "America's birthday," according to many a bikini clad bitch parading the streets with a dopey Uncle Sam hat perched on her head. Sorry Christian...

So not only did I sit in traffic, but I had to hunt for parking. Oh how I love the opportunists who come out of their holes on these special holidays. Those who decide to make an easy buck by exploiting others for parking. An elementary school parking lot was opened up to serve as a viable option for those shit out of parking luck, FOR A WHOPPING $100. Monsters...

So after an hour of searching I found one last parking space at the Mission Bay Aquatic Center, but I was still about 15 blocks away from my destination. No problemo! There's plenty of dodgy foreigners with those pedi cabs to haul you around. I got a little Russian number to take my cousin and I to our final destination...for $20. Fuck.

In all honesty, the going rate was only $10, but my cousin was generous enough to give the poor guy a nice tip, seeing that he was probably sweating his balls off lugging around drunk people all day.

So we get there and find out the show is over. We missed the band. They were done. Long done. Shitty...suuuper shitty.

But we DID get to see Jacqueline Grace perform. Oh, you haven't heard of her? That's weird...

Maybe that's because she's a big fat joke. Picture what would happen if you cross bred J.Lo (before she made it) with Christina Aguilera and just to add insult to injury, Britney Spears' costume design, particularly from her fresh out of rehab come back tour. She had on heels, a white bustier, a red girdle, and a plastic blue pencil skirts that accentuated all her stomach folds. She also had on an air force hat, with glittery red lipstick. And the ultimate accessory had to be the $20 bill tucked into the a-cup of her right titty. I liked how she kept saluting the three people in the crowd like she was a pinup girl visiting soldiers in Korea. She wanted to look sexy and patriotic, I suppose, but she looked more like a flight attendant in a low budget porn movie. Or a cigarette girl. She looked not unlike the beaner version of this:


But instead, she just made me feel like this:

Her fan base consisted of her mom and two tia's, her manager, and her cousin Ricky's friend Irene, who had nowhere else to go that day. Her band was the rest of her family. There was the old dude on the congo's, the cheesy bald guy with wannabe Versace sunglasses on bass, the poor guy who can't catch a break in the music biz on drums, the ex-meth addict key board player with the leather page boy hat and a sleeveless denim button down, and some gal wearing stacked soda flip flops and a fake smile on vocals. And the music was shit. Jacqueline calls it a "surprising blend of hip-hop, dance with a pop-rock edge. " Shiiiett. That is surprising. I call it chode laced with more chode.


Needless to say, we broke the hell out of there asap and drove back to North Park to start a real fourth of July celebration, with a bucket of fried chicken, paddle ball and a J on my lawn on the corner of El Cajon Blvd. Konichiwa, bitches.