This morning I sat on a set of stairs leading up to a skating rink, smoking a cigarette, and underneath these stairs a man found his temporary shelter.

When I volunteered for Camp Merry Times they refused to refer to the children as "cancer kids," rather, they were "kids with cancer."

Friday, my roommate and I walked home from St. Vincent de Paul and turned, on account of the construction, down 21st instead of 17th as is my custom. Deep in converstation we almost forgot to bring to the front of our consciousness the sight before our eyes: a man and a woman sifting through garbage for the valuable tin and plastic cans, redeemable for nickels and dimes at your local ghetto's recycle center.

I saw this same act in the garbage cans surrounding the goose sanctuary on Lake Merritt, just after chatting with a coworker who is homeless during my walk around the water.

I was asked for change by a man residing with the birds but refused because I only had a twenty.

The theme of this blog is simple: my time here is prying my eyes open; yet it is not without resistance.

Reading about unjust systems in the novels of Dostoevsky and the essays by Marx may bring one to the crest of action; but witnessing the systems themselves can substitute for no mental imagings spurned by essayists.