Congratulations -

Your name has been selected from a random drawing of entrants to receive a pass for two people to the preview screening of AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH at the Dipson Amherst Theater, 3500 Main St. The screening will take place at 7:00 pm on Thursday, June 15.

You may pick up your pass at Mondo Video, 1109 Elmwood Ave, any time before the screening. You will be asked for identification. Please note that you may NOT give your ID to someone else to pick up your pass for you.

Mondo Video is open daily from noon to 10 pm.

We now order bulk Ox Bow Timothy Hay for Coco. We showed him the bin of it and he went loco for it. He jumped in to graze, but I wouldn't let him stay in it because they naturally use it as a litter.

Off to better news...who cares about the last post. I'm so over sadness! Anyways, it sounds like my summertime employment demands are going to be met. I'm doing a couple of weeks worth of work at $9/hr in a summer home in Canada. I wonder if this will make me a house boy? Originally I was offered $8/hr, but I was thinking $10 and he agreed to meet me in the middle. Nice, I like bargaining. For something more permanent, I want to work for the New York State Smokers Quit Line at Roswell. I'm pretty sure that I would be perfect for the job and it would be great to do something meaningful rather than something robotic and meaningless.

I'm not quite sure what to say about this explosion of an issue that I didn't know that I was starting. What I do believe is that we all care about this city and that we want to see that it does better. I don't know as much as I would like to know about Buffalo. Most of you know more than I about its history and architecture. This site is great because we all have each other as a source of information. I'm always impressed about how much I have learned from the people on (e:strip).

One thing I would like to say is that Utica and Norwood would be a fine place to live for los Chicos. Norwood is another favorite of mine. Utica is like a block away from me and I may have been a bit too alarmist. Utica is still not my favorite choice for me personally, but I would consider it if it was the price I wanted and had all that I needed in an apartment.

Another thing I want to talk about is my experience on Main Street. If it were not for Main Street I probably never would have moved to Buffalo. I think I was destined to live here. My birthday was yesterday and my mother was just telling me how I was supposed to be born at Sisters Hospital, but because I was a brat and demanded to get out of my mother's womb rather than give ample notice that I wanted out, I was born in Lewiston at Mount St. Mary's, the closest hospital to my parent's apartment. It's funny how despite my family living in two different places in New Jersey, Long Island and Rochester that I would end right back up where I started. Anyways, I moved to Buffalo because it had more affordable housing and I didn't need a car because public transportation in Buffalo is way better than Rochester's system. My friends Mary and Adam lived on Amherst and Main. When I found out that there was a subway that would take me downtown to ECC (Erie Community College) I decided to take up their offer to live with them. If I had stayed in Rochester, I probably would not have been able to support myself while going to school. Indirectly it was Main St. that allowed me to get my education.

I got a job working at Sisters Hospital at Aroma's coffee stand where I worked for two or three years. (I'm not so great at measures of time) For a while I would walk down Main Street to get to work on Saturday morning because the subway wasn't running early enough to get me in on time. I didn't know that there was a number 8 bus that would take me instead of walking. It's not that I minded walking, because it was just something that I had to do. It would be so creepy walking from Amherst St station to Humboldt Hospital station when there were hardly any souls to be seen so early in the morning. (I believe it's the farthest distance between any two stations) Nothing bad happened to me any of these times, but it was a popular hour for prostitution. You wouldn't think Main Street was a place to pick up a nice hooker, but it is.

Eventually I met Kenyatti via AOL (classic) and we started dating. He worked at UB North Campus so I would take the train to South Campus and a shuttle to UB North. My first years in Buffalo were somewhat sheltered. I would only travel Main St. up and down, up and down. It was really cool actually to be able to get places by train; I loved it and would do homework on the way to school. I loved school, it was so diverse at ECC and I got a great foundation to my education. Still, I didn't really know any other part of Buffalo because I was perpetually stuck on a dividing line between white and black. I was on the white side and the blacks were on theirs. It was so strange living like that for so long; so close to "them", but so far at the same time. Occasionally I would cross to the other side. I befriended a girl named Aisha who was like 13 or 14 and had a child. She lived in some apartments over on her side. The apartment she lived in near the Central Park Plaza with her mother, brother and child was not so nice. It was sad, it was depressing and in many ways seemed so hopeless. She would come over to "our" side with the baby and we would hang out. Her situation was so unlike my own that the Main Street's dividing line couldn't be more real or painful. I'm not sure whatever happened to Aisha, but I would imagine she is still on her side as I am on mine.

There were other times that I would cross over to their side. I used to think that I could walk wherever I wanted to during the day. It's almost like I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't a racist and I would walk over on "their" side to prove to myself that I was not afraid. I was afraid though, but it really made me uncomfortable to think that maybe I was biased, so I ignored my fears. So it was during the day walking back from the Quality at Central Park Plaza that I was violently mugged while cars passed me by. It was the first (but not last) time that I would be victimized by a stranger. I did not go to buy groceries at the Quality anymore, but I could not escape the violence, which was on my side as well.

I lived beneath a white teenager and his crack-head mother. It was really such an awful experience, because I would hear him beating his black girl friend on a regular basis. One time I woke up terrified as plaster was falling all around me because he was beating her so bad. The police were always called, but they never could do anything. Violence was all around me, not just contained to "their" side. Still the contrast between "their" side and "our" side is so sharp. One time while walking to Eckerd I heard all these gunshots coming from the "other" side and had to turn back home empty handed. In the subway tunnel, gang activity was high. People were occasionally beaten in the stations and on the moving trains. Another time I was coming dangerously close to being attacked by a group of thugs, but a group of girls saved me by scolding them for giving black people a bad name. It was such a relief and I was glad to let the girls know that the majority of the blacks I knew would never do such a thing. I was punched in the face once while just sitting minding my business on the train. Sometimes at Utica station I would hold my breath because I was scared that kids with guns would one day start shooting at each other and I would be struck by a stray bullet. This really was not an irrational fear that I had, but one that came about after countless episodes telling me that it was not safe.

Now I live on Elmwood and the violence has not stopped. Yet I don't feel like I'm going to be hit by a stray bullet and don't walk around with my keys protruding from my fingers so I could quickly gouge someone's eyes out. (Maybe I still should) To me it doesn't matter what race you are if you sincerely are concerned about safety than it might be a better choice not to live in certain areas. However! Nowhere is safe, as I very well know.

So if you have read this much, thanks for listening. There are not any quick fixes to these problems that I am aware of, but I would imagine that poverty plays a very strong role.

I just saw this commercial that took me by surprise. Not sure if you have all seen the Volkswagen Passat Low-Ego Emissions ad. Genius!