Mark's Pages

May 27, 2012:

College town. One of the great university villages that spot the landscape like oases: Lawrence, Madison, Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Fayetteville.

Tolerant of street culture. History of Socialist administrations, so that there are public toilets and other resources for the homeless, and if you're arrested here you're more likely to get treatment than prison.

Yet there's an undercurrent of violence barely suppressed, always simmering, ready for random eruptions like lava bursting from vents in the mantle. Centering on the bus station and Taco Bell: cheap eats and cheap exits. There's so much street speed here, so much meth, so many random encounters with tweakers that could go one way or another without warning or sense. Punctuated recently by actual rioting, which pointlessly broke the plate glass windows of historical businesses up and down River Street.

And, of course, I'm a magnet for all of it. Tweakers, cops, homeless, college girls, drawn to me for I dunno why, being tall and white haired I guess. So that I spend only a few minutes at Starbucks although I'd intended to write there all afternoon, heading instead down the coast with the sense of having escaped some peculiar prison without bars.