the islands continue to shrink

"When I was older, I learned what the fighting was about that winter and the next summer. Up on the Madison fork the Wasichus had found much of the yellow metal that they worship and that makes them crazy, and they wanted to have a road up through our country to the place where the yellow metal was: but my people did not want the road. It would scare the bison and make them go away, and also it would let the other Wasichus come in like a river. They told us that they wanted only to use a little land, as much as a wagon would take between the wheels; but our people knew better. And when you look about you now, you can see what it was they wanted.

"Once we were happy in our own country and we were seldom hungry, for then the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds lived together like relatives, and there was plenty for them and for us. But the Wasichus came, and they have made little islands for us and other little islands for the four-leggeds, and always these islands are becoming smaller, for around them surges the gnawing flood of the Wasichu; and it is dirty with lies and greed."

Black Elk, speaking in the 1930s of his childhood in the 1860s

so far east it's near west

Chinatown. don't be put off by the pagoda-style Bank of America.
Broadway today was all about the creatures overhead.
even those bastards from the park:

elysia

Elysium \E*ly"sium\, n.; pl. E. Elysiums, L. Elysia. [L., fr. Gr. ?, ? ?, Elysian field.] (Anc. Myth.)

1. A dwelling place assigned to happy souls after death; the seat of future happiness; Paradise.

2. Hence, any delightful place.

Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc. via dictionary.reference.com

yeah, this is exactly what Los Angeles looks like in the middle of November. but there's a roar overhead that you might not expect.

it's our plague.

we've got unchecked populations of a prehistoric -looking pest, commonly called the Ghetto Bird.

apocalypse? now?

what do they do up there, circling and circling? they taking notes? apprehending? rescuing?
only protecting east-siders from themselves.

the vote is leaking

there's been an election, I take it.

Ralph Nader taught me something useful this morning before I was even awake. the transcript is already on democracynow.org, so what you have below is much more than fractured memories:

"...this country is a mockery of obstructing people to vote, going back to the post-Civil War era. Now they have new ways to do it through these machines, through not distributing the machines, through challenging people's voting credentials. There's no other Western democracy that requires registration. In Canada, if you are counted as part of the regular census, you vote, period. "

Notice you can obstruct people's right to vote, you can do what happened in Ohio and Florida, and because both parties want to be able to do it, if they're in power, at the state level, there's no prosecution tradition here, as there is, say, for procurement fraud. So nobody goes to jail. So, every two or four years, it's going to happen, more and more and more."

thanks for saying it out loud, Ralph.

one optimist I know went to vote yesterday and his polling place wasn't even there. no forwarding address. everybody knows that if you're a politician with a mind to obstruct a few votes, there are few better places to start than those with a high minority population- and Los Angeles is swarming with high minority populations. maybe an actual Canadian will have a different perspective for us:

"Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died"

Leonard Cohen, 1988