it's the ball-bearinged wheels i hear first. a slight, pulsing rasp on concrete, the sound growing louder until it's just behind, then the veering swoosh around me: boy on skateboard... baggy olive shorts, a grayish long-sleeved t-shirt, snipped off at the elbows. crude, hand-written text on the back: BITE ME. a flash of brown hair, glint of beads on wrist, then the sound diminishes as he weaves through citizens up ahead, one of them yelling: "Sidewalks are for pedestrians, punk!"

take 27 years and two lifetimes out of me and that punk could be me. i turn into Brewed Awakening and the hum of conversations on theology, discrete mathematics, jurisprudence, and begin my day with the usual caffeine fix.

this is my friend Candace's beautiful prose poetry. i love evocative writing... it's like high-def TV for the brain. awoke this morning from a dream of my rat, but the details elude me now; all i remember is a feeling of Nikolai having a distinctly human persona, like that of a child.

more than three-point-five months now, since this weblogging community began. and the ripples continue to grow, reaching for some far shore which none of us can see...

i won't count the original crew of TAs and cast of TIC/AIC students in my class, for obvious reasons, but here are the ripples that freeradicalized has generated so far (in varying degrees of creation): laura ... candace ... yoshiko ... nikolai ... my cousin aaron ... my aunty cherry ... my cousin maria fe

and here's a list of ripples generated by you, the first ripples emanating from that first stone on this lake (i know i'm missing people here, so let me know, please):

• tom --> his mom, his sister, matthew
  
• kass --> damien
  
• quad --> bigi, alexis
  
• spark --> andrew, nathan
  
• trev --> bean
  
• ozzie --> steve
  
• cole --> molly
  

uh... hello? is anyone home here at this company? they've developed (and are initially giving away for free, via WIRED magazine), a scanning device called a CueCat that they're touting as "the biggest computer innovation since the mouse." armed with this device, "you will swipe a cue [on a barcode on a magazine ad] and be taken directly to a specific Web page... giving you the information you want instantly. No more wading through dozens of Web pages or typing in long URLs. Just the information you want with a single swipe." uh, yeah. what do these e-marketer types think we are... un-thinking sheep with infinite consumerist appetites? i think not!

beware of clever, cutting-edge ideas kids, they can come up and kick you in the butt. here's Scott Rosenberg's typically spot-on review and commentary, in today's Salon.

in the meantime, life goes on in The City. as i was going back home to Berkeley that one day after the Magritte exhibit, i saw this homeless person parked at the top of one of the exits at the Montgomery BART station. in the photo it looks like he's bending down in abject supplication, begging for some coins. but in fact he was positioned like that, as if he had fallen asleep reading his book and holding up his "spare-change" (Pepsi-Cola) cup. i snapped a pic, put some money in the cup and walked down the steps to the subway. he didn't as much as waken from his stupor and realize that alms-givers were passing by. remember kids, life may be tough now and then for you, with whatever you're doing and going through, but keep it all in perspective. at least you're not out on the streets on your own (yes, even you Tomas), at the mercy of the random angels and devils of humanity.

{ net.casting }
^