Yellowed paperbacks. . . . . a beatnik oeuvre on rural picnic tables, raising your head and looking around as if to wonder as if "this was it" with the wagons rolling to a stop and everything providently left out in "Drop City". When life comes down to the cruddy scrapings of old tapes, thrift-mart clothes, and semi-marginal urchins walking around in a 1980's apocalyptic Californian world of skateboards and cracks running along the pavement. When your middle-school portrait has a scuzzy little grin as if to say "yeah, what are you gonna do about it?". Tough girls and tomcats and secret anxieties behind closed doors, when "the blues" was once described as the ring and scum that collects around the bathtub drain and you find yourself leaned over, just staring and staring.

The difference between altruism-- trying to be "a good person"-- and striking a pose as if to say that you aren't going to be "taken for a sucker". Yes, with fist-pumping punk rock abandon as you make your "dream speech" in the privacy of your bedroom, hoping "that everything is going to be alright" forever. Thrown punches and victimhood and the selflessness of an Anne Frank expression, but what did this icon of the human spirit know about such wasted & woebegone times as these? There was activism, such an understated thing as the Reagan juggernaut took the world "to the brink" in the glam, sleaze, and greed of a decade that was absurd as it was bleak for most Americans if they didn't have their noses down in cocaine and episodes of "Dynasty".

Her family were like counterculture locusts spread afield by the winds of the shrieking American eagle taking flight with military-industrial contracting, even as heavy manufacturing was spun off to South Korea and drought fell over the land. The trade imbalance was blooming and the Japanese were eating us for breakfast. Yes, with the business code of bashido-- the ethic of a Samurai and the Shogunate of Sony electronics.

Lean times for the spongy.

But if you kept a small smile, and didn't think too much about the future it wasn't so bad. How the message coming out of her mouth was being contradicted by the warmth, sadness, and uncertainty of her eyes. If she's a geek, then "what the hell have I?" It's the pathos of the small things-- like a wrapped chocolate in her pale, little hand.