Another morning’s walk

There is something in their blood, or perhaps more plainly put, a lack of something in their blood that draws them out of bed and to the porch before the sun has broken over the city. The street is still dark with morning shadows, the streetlights have not yetswitched off. These women are alert, sweeping the porch or smoking cigarettes, turning any chair into a rocking chair with a nervous twitch. They nearly never hear my ‘good mornings’. I am not sure if it is my hello doesn’t reach their ears or if life on the porch is entirely consuming and all the rest of the world is in fuzz, a cloud, a fog.

With two sweaters, a scarf and gloves, I feel like I do not belong in los angeles, but here I am trying to stay warm with all this clothing and a quick pace walk to the bus stop. The scaffolding around the new low-income housing being built on Vermont is covered in graffiti. NCTF and WOT have warred over this corner’s temporary wall that it looks like a page of doodles scratched out so many times that you don’t know what the artist was first intending. Its funny, there is an entire length of the block that has more scaffolding, but it covered in advertisements for recent movies and albums, tennis shoes, and the newest AIDS cocktail, which the taggers respect I guess as their tagging stops where the advertisement starts. I believe these children with spray cans will make fine Americans.