63. Hallway

Previous - 62. Braunstein + Trump

Photographs

Many apartments have narrow hallways which it is a common practice to line with small photos or paintings. My tiny apartment also has a sort of tiny hallway. It is about two inches wider than my bathroom door and is just over a foot long -- or deep. 

Since I can't spread photos out horizontally in such a small space, I stack them vertically. There are group shots of friends and people I've worked with going back to the late 1970s. My pre-bookstore days, bookstore days, and various phases of my programming career are covered in these photos. Today I also noticed that a total of five of the people pictured are dead: three as a result of the AIDS epidemic and two from cancer. (I'm not still in touch with all the other people so I can't say they are all still alive, but these are the only deaths I'm aware of.) 

I think it's remarkable that I can't think of anyone I know personally who has died violently -- as a result of a car or bike accident or crime or earthquake. I know "of" people like this, I just don't know the victims myself. Historically, I suspect this is quite odd for someone in their mid-60s. 

Nostalgia

I'm at Coffee To the People in the Haight. I've worked here a number of times -- they have an excellent waste diversion layout -- but I never noticed until just now that their small tables are covered with political images (stickers and signs) from the '60s and '70s. The causes of my youth all laid out under resin -- or maybe just varnish. I suspect they are not "real" artifacts from the period but reproductions intended for coffee house tables. 

Curiously, it was the ERA table I'm sitting at (that I'm pretty sure I've sat at before) that caught my eye. The next table over, I then noticed, has a larger "What if they gave a War and nobody came..." mini-poster that I recognize from back in the day. Things seemed so simple then: War bad; Peace good. Now we really want to do something about Syria and ISIS but what, exactly, quickly becomes vague. 

It's rather like the situation with the black community and the police. The black community -- everyone, really -- wants the police to address the crime that plagues their neighborhoods... if only they could do that without harming or harassing any blacks or other minorities. It has occurred to me before that the only politically correct solution is to encourage white criminals to victimize communities of color so that the police can then deal with them without offending anyone. 

Now that the Philippines seems to be joining the new Axis of Crazy, Vietnam is looking to be our natural ally vs China in Southeast Asia. Aside from the older generation of the Vietnamese refugee community (especially in the South Bay, here) -- which is likely to become more of an embarrassment over time -- no one in the U.S. really cares much about Vietnam one way or the other. That was just some nonsense that happened a long time ago. (I would hate to have to teach that history in school. And that our "Camelot" was standing knee-deep in that political insanity makes it even worse. "Yes, the great JFK was waging a nonsensical war that was not in the interest of the country's national security because it would have looked bad politically to do otherwise." And that was back in the good old days before U.S. politics went all to hell. No wonder they don't even try to teach civics anymore... at least I think that's true.

Next - 64. Buffy and beyond