F 7-18 11:59 AM
It's payday!  Oh, goody.  This classroom is filled with cacophonous crashings as these idiot kids raze their wood block constructions and return the blocks to their shelves.  Fifteen minutes until lunch.  Where shall I go?  This seems to be my consuming question the last week or two: what, where, and when to eat, or what, where, and when I ate.  Today's possibilities are El Taurino, The Bounty, McDonald's or skip lunch.  Tonight I think I'll go up around Jones' and Formosa, maybe Dublin's, to see baseball game and Tapia/Romero fight.  We're going to have some serious Sustained Silent Reading here after lunch.  I'm going to read another twenty or thirty pages of Annie Proulx's wonderful novel, The Shipping News.  I guess I'll get in the car and drive 'til I find what looks good as far as lunch.  Go up Hoover here to Wilshire, eeny-meany left or right.  At the ten minute mark I've got to stop and eat or I won't have enough time to get back before the bell rings. 
Shit.  What else?  Tomorrow I'll see "Contact" at the matinee.    I brought my basketball to school today so I could use the air pump here to inflate it.  I gave it to Jessica, and she took it to the ballroom to get the job done.    This morning the entire student body was assembled to serenade Principal Perez for her birthday.  Now I'm at The Bounty sitting at the wood bar among the maritime decor.  Ordered an Amstel Light and a Monte Christo.  Harry Carrey is babbling on the TV from Chicago. I have a half hour to get my food served, eat it, and get back.  Paintings and photos of great old three-masted sail boats hang on the wall.  Birds of paradise die in a vase.  Nine other customers are in here.  I'm the only one without gray hair.  Mirrors on the walls mimic port holes.  Geez, what else?  I munch a pretzel, sip my beer.  On old man cackles.  "Here he is!  But he's looking good!"
"It's dark in here," grumbled good-naturedly in response the old man who has just walked in. "How's your golf game?"
"I don't give a shit," the other laughs.
The Cubs are in the middle of a rain delay.

Th 7-17 12:20 PM
Room thirty-three.  Leo Politi Elementary still.  Not much has changed since I last wrote here.  All I can think about is lunch vs. the flab around my belly:  Great Thinker, I am.  I wish I didn't have to work tonight.  I would drink and carouse.  As it is, I will only be writing and watching a video called "The City of Lost Children."  It has unusual costume and set designs.  One of the characters is a brain in an aquarium. 
Pollo Loco for lunch?  El Taurino.  Next week when I have money, I'll eat at one of those Korean Barbecues.        How will I ever write three pages?  We read a play this morning about a toymaker who fools a mean giant into leaving their town by convincing him he has a disease.  What else?  In The Shipping News, Quoyle had taken his job as a New Foundland reporter.  I like it.
What is it about the last name Lemus that afflicts its bearers with lame-assedness?  This kid Lemus in here is a lameass.  The coffee was the color of Colorado floodwaters.      This is book 17.  Here's a drawing I copied crudely off the cover of a schoolbook called Poetry Works. 

It's a picture of a frog eyeballing a butterfly.  What else?  Ten minutes until lunch.  There's a so much stupid kid chatter in here, you can't hear yourself think.  That's a line from John Keats.     "Okay," I bellow, "Who's gonna be the first person to line up for lunch?  The first person will beeeeeeee.....Ana!  The second person will beeeee....Ronald.  The third person will beeee....Thuy."  Like that. 
I'm in Pollo Loco.  I got the four-piece with corn and rice and a classic chicken burrito with iced tea.  Ten-dollar fast food lunch.  That's me.  I got my book with me and a half hour 'til class starts again.  The old LA homes smell like kimchi.  The barber shop says [Korean Writing and a drawing of a barber pole].

Do These Pigeons Ever Leave Der Wienerschnitzel

7-16 continued
Sitting at Der Wienerschnitzel on Olympic and Third.  Bummed.  Don't give a fuck about eating right.  I'm sitting outside, ten yards from the boulevard, sucking up fumes, absorbing pigeon viri.  Couple of African-American gentlemen are yukking it up at the next table.  They arrived in a new white tow truck.  Got the Dodgers and the Marlins on my yellow flashlight/radio.  Ragged sparrows stand vigilant in the wings.  The pigeons are bolder; they land right on the table.  What makes that eye so unnaturally red?  Like animatrons.  I have to leave for class in a few minutes.  It's only a few minutes away.  I've got to fuck with the overhead projector today, dig up some scissors.  There is no bathroom here or there.  I want to wash my hands.  Do these pigeons ever leave Der Wienerschnitzel of is this their land of milk and honey?  or rather crumbs and fries? 
I am enjoying The Shipping News.  It makes me long for a rustic setting and existence.  Ah, but I was almost there, and I was a freak.  I stopped at What's Brewing?, a coffee-house on Wilshire and Highland, and ordered an iced cappuccino from a pretty girl with an accent.  I'll have to treadmill tonight while I watch "The City of  Lost Children".  Then I'll write my one page, or type it, I mean.  The pigeon just shat on the table.  Looks like chili.  I've got to stare at Jim for an hour.  I went to the ATM, and there was only $38 in my account.  There was $400 the other day, and I haven't made any withdrawals.  Did a check clear late?  It doesn't add up.  One day soon I will go to a bar, the Formosa, I think, and get wasted drunk.  I'll puff some tonight.

7-16 W 11:40 AM
Dang.  I forgot to bring a new journal, so I won't be able to write more than the one page that's left in this one.  Neither do I have my book, The Shipping News.  Both depressing discoveries.  A half hour still until lunch and an hour after that until P.E.  Maybe I should drive to my house to retrieve those things.  Ten minutes to get there, ten minutes back, and twenty to eat.  Should I eat Der Wienerschnitzel?  Pollo Loco?  Grilled cheese?  Should I get jelly?  Skip lunch?  Something I haven't thought of?  There's a Vietnamese kid in here named Thuy who for several days I thought was a boy, and come to understand now is in fact a girl.  Bummer this.  Now what do I do?

7-15 Tu 10:37 AM
What's there to write about?  I'm sitting at the same desk in the same room where I wrote this yesterday.  Shirelle put some leftover baked chicken in a Tupperware bowl for me to eat.  A woman just walked in, an Asian woman.  She's new here.  She had some questions, but I told her I was new here, too.  I asked her name.  She said, "Suki."  I want to see the movie "Contact", based on Carl Sagan's book about  alien contact with Earth.  Maybe after work tonight.  I need to call DMV about my license.  Louie won't do any work.  I gave him some vocabulary to do, and my speech about how a strong vocabulary will open doors, but he's not interested.  I said, "O, do you want to join a gang?"  He said, "I'm already in a gang."  I said, "O, which one?"  He said, "DMK."  I said, "What's that mean?"  He wouldn't tell me.  The other kids hypothesized, "Drugs.  Murder.  Karjacking."  I asked, "What do you do?  Spraypaint walls?"  "No, that's taggers."  "Rob liquor stores?  Beat up old ladies and steal their money?"  He laughed and shook his head and said no to each postulate.
There's a girl named Marcela in this class who refuses to speak or read in an audible vocie. If you're willing to read lips, she'll form the words that way.  I ask if she talks at home.  She nods.  "Do you talk to your mom?"  Nod.  "Dad?"  Nod.  "Sister?"  Nod.  "Brother?"  Shake.  "No brother?"  Nod.  "Was some teacher really mean to you for talking?"  Shake.  "Are you afraid you'll be exposed to vicious attacks, your soul laid bare, if we hear your voice?"  Shake.  I say, "Marcella, I know you're a smart girl.  I've seen it in your writing.  I don't think that you're so selfish that you will keep us waiting to hear you and never learn anything else again, because we aren't moving on until you respond to the task.  It's not fair that the other kids answer questions and not you."  So I said, "Okay.  Forget sentences.  All you have to say is 'Do' as in 'Do Re Mi', and we'll move on.  She just mouths it.  We go around the room.  Each kid says, "Do," but when we get to Marcela: Nothing.  I say, "I guess we won't have time to watch the movie."
Well, now it's three o'clock.  I'll call Jackie Fane when I get home.  I'll write.  What else is there to do?  My life is pretty boring.  I need a new battery for my camera.  I want to go to a movie.  I want to sit in a cafe.  I want to go to the beach.