Bread and Bread

On Friday night, I scrolled through a feed of burning cop cars, protesters in cloth masks, and cops in riot gear. On Sunday morning, I looked at pictures AK texted me from the park: Dash next to a glassy green pond. Trees stooped to touch their branches to the water. I stayed home to catch up on work, which meant writing this blog post about my org's work in the context of police violence. (Official Organizational Statements declaring solidarity with Black people have become a thing in the past few days, which is part of what makes this time--this violence, this uprising--feel like a tipping point, like the moment homophobia finally became an unacceptable default mode. Of course, homophobia has not gone away and even most of my nicest straight friends are casually heterocentric. So tipping points are not victory, but they are  a victory, a big wave in a sea of incremental change.) (Official Organizational Statements also bump up against my dislike of platitudes and virtue signal...

Dear Charlie Beck, From what I know about you, I like you. Like that one time you were walking through an Occupy encampment with a KPCC reporter, and the reporter asked you if you smelled marijuana, and you said, "Nope. Sure don't." But this letter worries me a little. First, because my car wasn't actually stolen , so I don't think you read Officer Honor's police report very carefully. But seeing as how it was handwritten, maybe you just couldn't decipher it. (Does the LAPD have a computer??) The thief took my radio, iPod and my car's computer, all of which could have happened if I'd had The Club tightly locked on my steering wheel. Although now that you mention it, I think he or she also took The Club that was sitting under the passenger seat, which I kind of imagined myself using as a weapon if I broke down somewhere scary and a creepy person approached my car. The good news is that you guys are probably out solving real crimes. Right?...

“I heard the cops are trying to give lots of cell phone tickets before the 19 th ,” Nicole warned me at lunch. It could have been something she read on a news site or the seed of an urban legend; either way, I stayed off my phone on the long drive to Burbank, where the plan was to meet Sara at the mall (like middle school!) for a little shopping followed by a mojito (not like middle school, unless your middle school was much more advanced than mine). Sara had forgotten her cell phone that morning, so we came up with a very specific meet-up plan over email: Macy’s entrance to the mall, first floor, 7:30. If traffic slowed me down, she’d just shop in the general vicinity. I was just a few minutes late, but Sara was nowhere to be seen. I hung around house wares, craning my neck at all blondish heads. Various sales people asked if I needed help, and it occurred to me that I looked like a terrorist nervously casing the place. I’d just heard an NPR report about all the people...