I thought things in the city were supposed to be convenient. So how come I can't find a place to write. I'm getting tired of hanging out in my shoebox. With the fluorescent lighting. What masochist decided to put fluorescent lighting in these tiny apartments. Gotta fix that. So I guess I'll chill here on the stoop next to the garden. Although the people that ride by kinda look at me funny. They do that anyway. Especially the older people. i was thinking about that today, as I tried to explain to my class in english that I was both sad and proud today to be an American. September 11th. I was thinking about how these older people's parents might have been killed by americans. Might have had everything they owned destroyed by firebombs. Good chance of it really. Osaka was burned to ashes, as was a lot of Kansai. And even though many Japanese now say that dropping the bomb was necessary and that their government was out of control, how would you look at the people, the race of people so unlike you, who bombed your schools, your post offices, your neighborhoods, your parents houses to the ground. Maybe they would rather not be reminded of these things.

I won't even mention how we are perceived throughout the world now, except to say that today, on September 11th of all days I saw a kid wearing a t-shirt with an American flag on it. The shirt said "Evil Empire". And today of all days, I felt a bit of shame.

[ Doesn't "security" seem like a very different word now? A petty and ignorant word pregnant with violence. A patient is secure. A prison is secure. And the things we do in the name of this phantasm. Digging a larger and larger moat until we have dug a sea around us and we stand alone, on an island quite secure, that we have made for ourselves. ]

But I also feel proud. When I think about that nightmare I woke up to that morning on TV, and the pictures... fuck. Those people jumping, holding hands. How could they show that to me? Why was I made to see that? I feel somehow related to those people. To that list of names. And I feel proud to be related to them, though I never knew them, and maybe if they had just been mugged and killed wouldn't have ever I don't know, even really cared? Just a number? But to know that they died because they were Americans. And to have died with so many for the same reason. Is this just obvious, or stupid, or superficial? It makes me feel... I don't know. That they died for something important. And that I share in what that is. Ahch. Now I sound like somebody trying to write all nice and poetic. Fuck it. Viva MacDonald's!