So Sunday's part of the music festival was very good, too. Sonya and I went down about two-thirty or so, and walked all the way down Tom Lee Park to the AutoZone stage. There, we saw Clarence Carter do his thing. He's a dirty old man, y'all. And blind. I had no idea. He was cool, though. The audience ate him up.

Then, when Clarence was through, Me, Sonya and about two-hundred teenagers pushed our way against the stage to see Better Than Ezra. Sonya managed to grab the rail in front and I was right behind her.

BTE was excellent, opening with Good, getting the entire crowd to pogo during Desperately Wanting and having a dance contest during I LIke It Like That that culminated with an ass-baring breakdancer winning the crowd. All the while the kids around us were moshing and crowd-surfing like mad.

Hell, I was in the pit when most of those kids were still in elementary school. Throwing them off was no problem. Sonya tossed an elegant elbow from time to time and seemed to have the respect of those standing around her. Whenever a crowd-surfer would come near me I'd grab his (or her) ankle and pull them towards the stage, where a set of beefy bouncers were waiting to jerk them out of the crowd. It was too sweet; the bouncers actually dribbled the first guy they pulled over the rail.

Once BTE was over Sonya and I grabbed water and sat down by the bathrooms. You see, there are permanent toilets in Tom Lee Park, but they're locked tight during Memphis in May. Festival-goers have to make do with port-o-lets. However, someone had left a nearby water hose attached and running; the crowd wasted no time filling water bottles and soaking themselves to beat the cloudless, windless heat. Sonya and I sat on a bench and caught the random splashes. It was nice - and a nice way to end our part of the festival.

Overheard on the Trolley

This woman - a fat, short toad of a woman with an ass like a shelf - was talking to the trolley driver at lunch today.

"Mr. Trolley Driver, do you treat white people different than black people?"

In the rearview mirror I saw the driver - a black man - raise an eyebrow. "I treat everybody the same," he told the woman.

Later on I heard this woman say, "you know I'm a mental patient, don't you?"

This same woman said to the tourist sitting across from her, "I hate all white men."

"Really?" the tourist - a white man, himself - chuckled.

"Yeah," she continued, "black men are nasty but white men are really nasty. If I ever lose my weight and get down little and sexy again and a white man says something to me I'll have a knife for him."

And I think crazy people should be locked up and shot full of drugs, I thought, but I don't tell people about that on the trolley. Maybe that's the difference between sane and crazy.

So I was driving to grab some dinner this afternoon, and I went by this housing project on Vance. They've been closed down for a year or so, but when they were occupied they were a hot spot for all manner of crime - and just a few blocks from tourist-heavy Beale Street, too. They've actually demolished about half the buildings, but they seemed to be in the process of renovating the other half.

Is it just me, or does this seem stupid? Will open, grassy spaces reduce the crime rate? Wouldn't houses be better than the same old projects? I don't know about your town, but in Memphis the crime starts and grows in the projects. There has to be a better way.

And I'm at the drive-thru at Wendy's, window down, and this guy comes up to the window and says, "hey, man, I just got out a jail and I ain't got no gas in my car. Can you help me?"

"I got nothin' for you," I said, rolling my window up.

I mean come on. Dude had just gotten out of jail, so he'd already proved that he can't be trusted to run around free. So he'd been living off my taxes, in my jail, and now he wants me to give him some spending money? No way. The panhandlers that piss me off the most are the ones that don't even try to give me something for my money. Sing a song, play the harmonica, tell my fortune...anything, just don't act like I owe you some money. I don't. Nothin' for free, buddy.

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