"I don't see race"

I actually heard somebody say that, on the bus heading uptown, a big old loudmouth white woman and I mean that in a good way, reminding me of a particularly dear playground friend from when our kids were in elementary school, but saying "fucked" a lot more. I didn't initially suspect she was going to be anything but fun. We were crawling up Sixth Avenue toward Rockefeller Center and past a lively demonstration where I think I failed to recognize somebody mildly famous at a microphone, and I think she felt it was going to take us a long time to get out of there because of the crowds, and she said several times that we were fucked, to nobody in particular, but we were facing each other across the aisle so that it was as if she were saying it to me.

"Not that I think they did the right thing to that guy, that was fucked, but you have to deal with it the right way, not with violence."

The 2009 tree getting hoisted from its birthplace in Eaton, Connecticut.

I can't breathe

I don't even have anything particular to say, really, that isn't being said by anybody else, about the apparent finding of the Staten Island grand jury that nothing wrong occurred when Eric Garner was killed. I'm sad. I don't understand how this happens. I'm not interested in the arcana differentiating choke holds from vascular holds. There's no technical explanation that can justify the death of Eric Garner to me. Every time this happens, and it keeps happening, it is a terrible, terrible failure on the part of the police and the criminal justice system. They're doing it wrong, and somebody should pay; that's how we stop abuses, if we stop them at all.

Eric and Esaw Garner, via New York Daily News.