051805

 

San Antonio, TX

Wednesday May 18, 2005

     8:46am  I just woke up.

                   I ate breakfast. My mom's kitchen is dirty again, but I'm not going to clean it today. I ate a big bowl of cereal and went out to the back porch to smoke some weed and a cigarette. I don't know what I'm going to do right now.

     9:35am  I'm about to leave the house. I'm going to walk to the Walmart. I'll take the nature trail.

                   It's cool. My ball's almost worn out. I'm going to get to deposit it at the collection I have going on Braun Road. I'm going to take off now.

                   I had a good little smokebreak at the Exxon. I'm going to walk to the Walmart now. I don't have any money for busfare, so I hope I have a transfer with the letter of the day when I get to the Walmart.

     11:39am  I'm already in the park at the top level over by where the antenna is. I'm going to go down the cliffs. Then I thought, oh fuck, I have a paintmarker on me. When I tagged the platform with Victor the Liberator the other day(5-5-05, 9:15pm) I had run out of white marker after I wrote Victor the Liber. I had done the rest in red, which faded away quick. Since I have a silver paintmarker I can go fix it.

     11:52am  I came to the platform and retagged my tag. I fixed it. I smoked some weed and I'm going to take off walking now. This tape is almost over. Good thing I brought an extra one.

     12:31pm  I'm just now getting to Walmart. I don't have the letter of the day, damn.

     12:35pm  Domingo hooked me up with a cigarette at the smoking cabana at Walmart. I appreciate it, brother. Everybody gets credit, thanks.

                     Greedy #8738 told me no when I asked him for a transfer.

     12:53pm  John hooked me up with some change for busfare. I appreciate it, brother. Everybody gets credit, thanks.

     12:54pm  John told me he was a Navajo Indian. What's going on? He's telling me about Walking Two Moons. John, "He was the Indian who jumped off a 747 back in the 50's and said I hereby discover America. Which made about as much sense as when Christopher Columbus did when my people were here." Let me tell you about my little mission, John.

     1:03pm  Got on the 610.

     1:29pm  University Hospital.

     1:31pm  Marylou hooked me up with a cigarette at the hospital. I appreciate it, Marylou. Everybody gets credit, thanks.

     1:39pm  Haha, this one bus driver, Margarita Sanchez I think her name is, she came up to me and asked me, "Do you live in the woods?" I told her my stuff. When I asked her to do me the two favors she said, "I did think you were crazy. You look like a homeless person."

     1:49pm  I got on the 92. I'm going to go donate plasma. I saw a guy sitting on the bus. He had a little pamphlet sticking out of his shirt that said Depressed. I think, "Hey, my story has kept people from killing themselves." So I hit him up for my story and he shook his head no, that he wasn't willing to listen. Damn the ignorance in this world. Have you always been that ignorant?

     2:14pm  I just got off the bus in Balcones Heights in front of Cristan's. Aww, they're fucking closed. That sucks. I thought I'd get to eat there before donating. Oh yeah, I told this one 60 year old lady on the bus my story. This Mexican lady. She was all ears, hell yeah. It was fucking cool.

                   I just took a picture of Luis's Tire Shop.

     2:29pm  I went to the Taqueria Puro Jalisco.

                   Gina wanted to make sure she got credit for sticking me earlier. She did a good job, hehe.

     4:34pm  I'm out of the plasma place. Oh yeah, I got twenty bucks today, not fifteen. I'm going to go pay back the Taqueria Jalisco. Oh yeah, they might be closed. Oh no, they're open. That would've been cool.

     5:14pm  I'm at the Crossroads Park and Ride. I'm going to wait for the 505 now. Oh hey, I'm going to go tell those kids my story. They just got off the bus.

     5:20pm  I'm telling Melissa and her friend my story. What's your email? dreamtomakebelieve@yahoo.com

     5:24pm  I just got on the 505 at Crossroads. I told these two kids outside my story before I got on.

     5:43pm  Mr. Garza hooked me up with a transfer. I appreciate it.

     5:45pm  I just got off at the Quarry Mall. I hope I make it back in time to catch the last bus back.

                   I bought my bottle and I'm walking back to the bus stop. Cool, there's the bus. Perfect.

                   Oh shit, I don't see it anymore. Where did it go?? I could've sworn I saw that fucking bus.

                   This sucks, right when I got to the road I saw the bus coming. So I started walking towards the stop. I turn around to check where it is and it's gone! It must've taken a turn or something. That sucks.

     5:58pm  Cool, the 505. I thought I had missed it.

     6:03pm  I got off on San Pedro. Just like yesterday.

     6:08pm  Here's the #4 going downtown.

     6:32pm  Oh shit, I forgot I was on the #4 and thought it would loop around back to Travis Park. I didn't get off at St. Mary's and Martin. I ended up all the way past downtown, so I gotta walk a little bit back.

     7:09pm  What was your name, brother? Josh. See, I rode the bus too far and I was walking back to Travis Park. Right in front of the St. Mary's Church by the riverwalk I saw Josh and asked him if he had any weed. He said yeah sure, to follow him. See, because earlier Tattoo had offered me these tiny nuggets for $5 and I said no. Then Josh told me that he was on his way to go smoke out with his friend who works at the Hawthorne Hotel close to the library. We went over there because his friend was getting off. We thought we might score some free food, but somebody ate the last hotdog. We're sitting here in the hotel lobby right now waiting for his friend to get off.

     8:15pm  I'm leaving these apartments where I got smoked out. This dude I ran into knows this gay guy who works at the Hawthorne Apartments. We went and smoked at his apartment. He even sold me $4 worth of marijuana. It was a lot more than what I would've gotten at Travis Park.

     8:43pm  I was walking back downtown. Right now I'm going to go pillage the McFarlin Tennis Courts. There's two cops parked there and watching me talk into my tape recorder, cool.

                   Oh yeah, I scored one ball at the tennis courts. It was fucking cool, when I got to that practice wall where the balls get stuck sometimes, I scaled the fence. I saw one ball that wasn't really stuck in the corner, but stuck in some chain links of the fencing. Like the person hit it really hard with their racket and it stuck in the fence. I had to climb up there and push it out. Then I had to walk all the way around inside to go retrieve it. I am sure the cops saw me climb up there and shit. They gave me the peace sign when I walked by, cool.

     8:49pm  I caught the 88 over by Flores. Five-points. I'm going home.

                   Be sure to type up on page 121, that's where it starts. The really good part right there.

                   "Never before did any civilization create the means for literally destroying not a city but a planet. Never did whole oceans face toxification, whole species vanish overnight from the earth as a result of human greed or inadvertence; never did mines scar the earth's surface so savagely; never did hair-spray aerosols deplete the ozone layer, or thermopollution threaten the planetary climate."

                   There's some good stuff on page 129.

                   "Faced with such contradictions, how might we see behind the trends and counter-trends? No one, alas, has any magic answer to that question. Despite all the computer printouts, cluster diagrams, and mathematical models and matrices that futurist researchers use, our attempts to peer into tomorrow—or even to make sense of today remain, as they must, more an art than a science.

                   Systematic, research can teach us much. But in the end we must embrace—not dismiss—paradox and contradiction, hunch, imagination, and daring (though tentative) synthesis.

                   In probing the future in the pages that follow, therefore, we must do more than identify major trends. Difficult as it may be, we must resist the temptation to be seduced by straight lines. Most people—including many futurists—conceive of tomorrow as a mere extension of today, forgetting that trends, no matter how seemingly powerful, do not merely continue in a linear fashion. They reach tipping points at which they explode into new phenomena. They reverse direction. They stop and start. Because something is happening now, or has been happening for three hundred years, is no guarantee that it will continue. We shall, in the pages ahead, watch for precisely those contradictions, conflicts, turnabouts, and breakpoints that make the future a continuing surprise.

                   More important, we will search out the hidden connections among events that on the surface seem unrelated. It does little good to forecast the future of semiconductors or energy, or the future of the family (even one's own family), if the forecast springs from the premise that everything else will remain unchanged. For nothing will remain unchanged. The future is fluid, not frozen. It is constructed by our shifting and changing daily decisions, and each event influences all others.

                   Second Wave civilization placed an extremely heavy emphasis on our ability to dismantle problems into their components; it rewarded us less often for the ability to put the pieces back together again. Most people are culturally more skilled as analysts than synthesists. This is one reason why our images of the future (and of ourselves in that future) are so fragmentary, haphazard—and wrong. Our job here will be to think like generalists, not specialists."

                   Man, I totally forgot how badass this book is.

     9:21pm  I'm at the Walmart. I'm going to call and see if my mom minds picking me up.

     9:47pm  My mom pulled up.

     10:24pm  I counted all the tennis balls I have. I've got a drawer here in the garage room I sleep in. The bottom drawer is full of tennis balls now. I've got 28 fuckin' balls. I've been stockpiling them.

     11:10pm  I think I'm going to crash out for the night. I took a shower. I sat down and put lotion on my feet, because my feet are all dry. I'm going to crash out now.

Next day..