My Briefs, Quotes 2

L.A. has this cemetery called Hollywood Forever where you can actually have your picture engraved on your tombstone. yes, in Hollywood even the dead have head shots.

there are some chicks in L..A especially that have so much plastic surgery that when you see them you see that they're so obviously fake that you really wonder if they're transsexuals.

as i've said before, in L.A. in a neighborhood like my former one with a big gang presence, you would see a lot of graffiti tags. and in L.A. with the Dodgers and all a lot of folks were into baseballl. yet you never saw a school or any outdoor wall with a spray painted box for stickball.

why is it that so many people bring pens to bathrooms, yet when you're at the library, DMV, post office etc, no one has a pen? Should we combine them and have note paper, forms, envelopes in bathrooms everywhere? i bet voter registration and Census form fill outs would increase.

Ghetto Speak

certain ghettos and slums (yes there's a difference) have pretty names yet they've been some of the most notorious neighborhoods in our cities: Cabrini green. Highland park in L.A. where i used to live. Inglewood. Echo park. guess they're trying to raise those property values somehow. the most notorious in L.A. tried to shake their reputation by changing their name: from South central L.A, to South L.A (!).

THEN There are those areas that sound inner city but add a "ville" or a "manor" to their name and somehow become these upscale suburbs: "BronxVILLE". "Pelham MANOR." and even "Bronxville MANOR".

like i said i lived in a pretty strong ghetto area with big gang presence. lived in a pretty basic apartment complex but it actually was named: the "Shadow Oaks'" because of a big oak in front where the squirrels ran amok. they tried to be like NYC, where you don't just live in a snobby sounding neighborhood like the "Upper West Side," but you live in a snobby sounding building like the "Dakota", the "Beresford", the "Century".

anyway in a neighborhood like mine with so many gangs and gang graffiti tags, you would often see buildings with names like mine, then underneath the name would be a gang tag. so it was almost this weird subtitle system we had going, because my neighborhood was in America of course, but it had a strong majority of Spanish speakers so much of the neighborhood had bi lingual signage and language, then there was the gang subtitle which probably read something like "Avenues' turf" (one of the big gangs), or "Crip's country'" or whatever.

kind of gives new meaning: when we were in high school we would paint on the walls of the field "Eagle Country" for our teams. now i think that i was tougher than i knew in school as i was really gang tagging haha.

You Can Take the Popeye's out of the Ghetto, but...

sometimes you wonder if certain entities are inextricably tied to one another. for instance i used to live in L.A near technically a separate suburban city, Glendale. it was right outside the city but separate. actually pretty high living: fairly upper income, nice area, urban but suburban.

however near its border with L.A. (and not a really run down area of L.A.; you'd have to go one area over to where i lived), was a Popeye's fried chicken. now we all know of the stereotype: yard bird, urban decay, black, gang whatever. and again its area wasn't run down.

but you would go in the bathroom and suddenly it was summa cum slum: graffiti, gang tags (i think), filthy like a bad gas station shitter. it was like the inner city somehow pin pointed and found the joint and only the city's sole fried chicken joint inside this whole city but wasn't strong enough to fan out.

also: if these graffiti authors are literate enough to bring writing utensils to the shitter, how come the education rates in the slums are so low?