World Cup Diary - I Support Bloomfield FC

The world needs grandiose art rock bands, really, it does, we might all sit around slagging off Radiohead as being studenty or some such shit but we end up listening to it and dissecting it and digging it, of course in the States we don't even have a band like this so we kinda adopted the Arcade Fire, Canadians for fuck sake but Canucks with strange taste in clothes but great taste in music and instead of making mindless drivel they take themselves probably a tad to seriously and write shit that they hope has some meaning and influence on the world, hell Wake Up might be the best anthem written in the last 25 years, Win has great hair and Regine, his wife, is Haitian or something and i dig all that voodoo shit ever since i got laid one night while the Serpent and the Rainbow played silently on a big screen telly and the girl's mom was asleep upstairs, and for those interested we were both consenting adults of age, just us college kids didn't have money for a hotel motel holiday inn...

So what's this have to do with the World Cup? nothing really, Gulfboot summed up round one better than i ever could so i suggest you check there... each night i walk, usually to the same coffee shop and since it is World Cup month i've been drinking Italian Soda's which really fucking kick ass when it's shitty hot and humid, it's a decent walk, enough to let me think and decompress and let my tiny mind kinda stretch out, many times what you see here is a product of those walks, it's where i work shit out, i guess probably 250 or so nights out of the year, through the blood red sunsets like the one tonight, to snowflakes or drizzle, wind and the rustling of dead leaves, dodging dog shit and judging the cities promise by the sound and flow of traffic, i listen to some tunes or sing the ones i know by heart, i look in bar windows and restaurant windows and study the faces, some of which i see 250 nights out of the year...

Guys like the Brothers Gin, two salt and pepper haired guys, you can tell they're brothers by looking at them, they sit outside each night in the summer drinking Coors Light and watching traffic and never getting laid it seems and sometimes they argue or sit in silence or talk in hushed tones to each other but they are brothers and no matter what they'll stick together... There's Stax, the teenage kid who seems to always be on the street, a kid that i hope makes it for some reason if for no other than it seems he's on his own, fending for himself and trying to fit in while mom or dad or grandma seem unconcerned of his whereabouts, i've watched this kid grow up the last few years, watched him finally get a girlfriend, watched him grow six inches and i bet he has no idea that someones noticed... there's bartenders who wave to me and tattooed hipsters milling around and it's my barrio, the place where my sons were born, the place where Daddy became the King of North Oakland, even if i was a neighborhood off...

and each night i take this walk i watch these people, people i see everyday, people i move past like a ghost but i know that somewhere in a window or from a bar stool, some guy who doesn't know me, a guy i never see, sees me walking on by and thinks, "there's that tall fucking weirdo again with his ridiculous sideburns and greying beard, always drinking shit from that same coffeeshop, occasionally smoking a cig, sometimes looking stoned out of his gourd, i wonder if the guys in AA or NA or Sex Addicts anonymous, bet he lives in some upstairs efficiency apt., a place that's hot in the summer with water stains on the ceiling tiles and a leaky tub, probably lives alone, maybe in the witness protection program for all i know, looks like he's fucking talking to himself half the time, fucking sorry bastard, this walk is probably the best part of his day after he gets home from a dish washing job and tries to stay sober or sane or whatever".... I love my neighborhood.