So, I was on a bus the other day, leaving the substitute job at Hyde Park High School for the gym downtown. I was in a post-school day psychological zone where I still couldn’t look at a teenager without the urge to call his mother and complain about her child-rearing skills, but too whipped to dial 411.

The usual peanut gallery of a couple of dozen kids shouted the usual epithets at one another in the back of the bus. God bless Hyde Park High School. They’re almost quiet in class, but they make up for it on the way home.

Abruptly, the bus to Forest Hills pulled over and three Boston police cruisers surrounded it. At first, I thought the driver had simply grown tired of the 95-decibel shouting in the back among the high school kids. For a glad, brief moment, I fantasized about watching some kid who had been giving me a hard time in class getting dragged out in cuffs by three angry cops. I would suggest the Japanese cartoon http://www.ex.org/3.1/27-manga_gto.html “Great Teacher Onizuka” for reference.

Anytime near 2 p.m. on a school day is the wrong time to look for criticism of the juvenile justice system from me.

As luck would have it, a suspect (of what, I do not know) had eluded police up the road, and they thought he may have used the bus as a getaway vehicle. The peanut gallery in the back made the typical threatening noises toward the police, muted as briefly as possible while the officers were actually within grabbing distance. Apparently, the police had the wrong bus.

Folks were pretty angry about having the bus stop for the five to ten minutes it took to search. I heard complaints about being late for work, about missing a train, about the heavy-handedness of the police.

I did not hear anyone express the obvious concern about a criminal suspect -- potentially dangerous enough to have six cops on his tail -- riding the bus with them to Forest Hills. Priorities. Go figure.

Tonight I sampled club life sans cigarette smoke in Boston. I’m now convinced that people have quotas of stupid to meet each week, and when they can’t get their share of stupid in by smoking and drinking at the same time, they’ll find other ways to fill their need for stupidity.

Or, maybe it’s just me. I turned 30 recently, and I might just be getting too old to boogie properly.

I went to the Sugar Shack and Big Easy complex downtown. I mentally kick myself every time I walk through the door, because it’s always the same thing. While it’s one of the rare good live music dance clubs in town, the bands tend toward standard anthemic pop covers. Chumbawumba released Tubthumping six years ago. It’s over. Pedestrian techno and pop remixes bracket the bands. Downstairs things improve -- there aren‘t too many places in Boston with a hip-hop room, either -- but no one is there to hear good music. People go there to drink heavily and rub the middle third of their bodies together.

The club attracts bachlorette parties, which sounds like a good thing for a single guy, but it really isn’t. Bachlorette parties are full of women who want to flirt but would be mortified if actually get caught by their girlfriends speaking to an unknown man in a bar. So they laugh and get drunk and dance in a big circle and nervously ignore everyone else. Usually the rest of the women there are on loan from the local Northeastern University fraternity kegger and would be too drunk to fish correctly, much less dance. I sound like an old-school misogynist, and I don’t mean to. I go back there because a really beautiful woman kissed me there once, and I wonder if it will happen again. It hasn’t.

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Jayson Blair has ruined my day.

This self-serving plagiarist and reported coke-head has just made my job hunt about three times harder than it should be.

I’m looking to get back into journalism now, and I’ve been sending out resumes from here to Baghdad and back. I never mention that I’m biracial. I really don’t think it’s germane to the type of reporting I’m looking to do.

But I’ve had my share of difficult days in a newsroom. I've had nothing that would drive me to lie about where I was or what I was doing, mind. Certainly nothing that would drive me to fabricate a quote, much less make a story up. But as newsroom hiring managers start to question their affirmative action practices, I can only imagine young black journalists like myself wondering whether every mistake in the past might be viewed as a Jayson Blair warning sign to editors.

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Posted by admin on Sunday, May 18 @ 22:38:24 EDT (25 reads)

My normally libertarian instinct fails me. I’ve just about had it with Donovan Slack, and his romanticized reporting for the Globe on Boston’s smoking ban.

His work reminds me of the disaffected, angsty, black-clad, Violent Femmes, clove cigarette chic that the people of my generation briefly embraced and then rejected during their “uncomfortable” period in high school.

As he tells it, artists and poets smoke. Suave foreigners smoke. Young lovers smoke. And the smoking ban would make interesting visual fodder for a Guy Ritchie scene.

Donovan Slack, if that is your real name, cut it out.

There are plenty of nonsmoking young lovers in Boston, but you won’t find them at the bars, because the smoke drives them away. Smoking is only a romantic atmosphere to other smokers.

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Posted by admin on Sunday, May 11 @ 22:10:03 EDT (23 reads)