November 18, 1981
In winter with the snow, I’d be up at Pauly’s place (well,
girl’s friend mother’s) in front of a fire, smoking pot and wonder why I was
there, old friends are like that sometimes, serving as substitutes for others.
Old friends and fires and Christmas around the corner.
There is sadness in the air that makes me feel colder, the
stillness and silence of a rain in the ghetto seeping into me, depressing me.
The cars that pass splash the puddles with loud dramatic
slaps and the water covers the tin trash cans still uncollected at the curb,
trash overflowing and condemned to get swept up by tomorrow’s street sweepers.
The world is gray; I am gray. This isolation (self induced)
produced moments like there where I sit on my door step and watch the surface
world move, the silly people covering their heads with sagging sheets of
newsprint, darting from doorway to doorway. The hurried and angry milk man
darts from his truck. The wet newspaper dropped on the previously dry sidewalk
sags with the weight of words.
Isolation is a condition here, learned by habit, learned by
living in oppression. Down Eighth
Street , the whistles of the factories blow,
calling the wetbacks hither. Two months ago, the police raided them, the
seventh raid of the year, but no one raids the houses here, the ruins of the
past now stuffed with three and four families, thirty or forty people at times
living in two squalid rooms.
Strangely, they are no where near here now, and I wit and
wait and wonder about their lives and how they feel, and if they have hope, and
if they feel as gray as I do now, or angry, though I suspect they do not wish
as I do that this rain was snow instead.
(Don't ask me why I wrote this in my college journal for feminist class, but I did)
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