Territoriality

The comments on yesterday's blip occupied me today as I cleaned up 'my' stretch of beach.

So much pain in those familiar faces, layers of anger and fear in a generation whose parents were raised by the razor strop, as in my mother's family. Picking up shards of glass I was suddenly back in the Ram Jam Club, the Locarno Ballroom of my teens. The tribal war cries of rival gangs "Tongs ya bass," running for the exit, pushed aside on the stairs by pimply youths gushing blood from facial wounds from weapons just like this. The girls stabbing with metal hair combs sharpened to razor's edge, the chill of just the sight of an open razor.

So many of the men of my generation on the march yesterday bore such scars on their faces, including the man who became my blip. Perhaps he was even dancing in the same clubs all those years ago, then fleeing for his life

At my sit-spot - strangers furtively drinking out of sight of the police, drunken arguments, using it as a toilet. I felt that same sense of desecration that they must feel. Every badge, symbol, standard carrying a weight of meaning and emotion invisible to me. Just as my precious sit-spot does.

There but for the grace ...
Such improbable good fortune to have a little more room in my heart for love than my forbears.
Soundtrack. Danceable :)

# am posting - finally! Phew - it's been a while.