I SHOULD KNOW from living in nyc for nearly a decade what a crazy homeless person looks like. I should not mess with them. I should have sympathy. That's not always the case.

This fella who looked like a hungry Nick Nolte with a throat ulcer (you can get there, just give it a sec) lit up a cigarette inside the train. Again, I know that the type of people who do this are usually best left alone. Someone who doesn't care if they pollute your lungs and breaks the law in front of a crowd of people probably doesn't care if they fight you in front of that same crowd, either. But I just had to say something.

"YO, YO, yo!" I said as he lit up the smoke casually. I sort of, um, hate cigarettes, as some may know. I hate that I was addicted to them for so long, that I see people smoking right into their graves, that our government sees fit to subsidize the process, that I will never feel safe from their grasp, but mostly--I hate breathing them in when I don't want to. But this character did not--as Eminem put it--give a fuck about my feelings or my health.

Finally, he looks up at me from under those grimy bangs that stab forward like orange dusty blades. He has this whole "windblown vet" look and says "You have something to say?" and I'm there breathing in his cancerous toxic smoke in this closed car and there's nowhere to get away from it, every breath brings me closer to my grave and I just flip out. "YOU ARE SMOKING THAT SHIT AND I HAVE TO BREATHE IT IN AND EVERYONE HAS TO BREATHE IT IN AND YOU BETTER BELIEVE I GOT SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT IT!" and I'm like cocked over sideways with my head down low by him, my eyes behind black shades only maybe six inches from his face, which is my "crazy vato" stance, I guess, my "full on carbon monoxide and ready to kick some deinstitutionalized ass" stance, but after he looks away all surprised that I took it there, I sort of feel funny, especially holding my bags like some apopolectic tourist on an assault-o-rama for the evening and I sit down, finally, and resign myself to breathing in his garbage. I wish I could just piss on him (I'd be waving it all around splashing his hair down and saying "what? you have something to say?"), but I'm not quite that crazy. Yet. A few more Nicotine hotboxes in Chitown and I just may toe that line.

The black transit cop (woman) and a black kid (young 20s?) looked at each other and sort of shook their heads, smiling. I read it as something like Damn, this tourist vato is ten times crazier than our homeless. I stood up and faced the crowd.

"I BLOG FOR ALL OF YOU!" I screamed, with tears of indignation in my eyes.

Something like that. I may not have shouted. But dammit, I did cry. Okay, I didn't cry either. But I rode on into the night toward the Quad Suite at University Center, knowing that despite their brief judgment, I was changing the world for these people's benefit and one day they would thank me. Or digg me, or something. Blogroll, at least.

Anyway, my phone rang, and it was Kid Oakland trying to mess with my head.

"Hey man, feeling up to some Funky Buddha?" he asked.

"Am I?" I said, utterly relieved that this cat was cool enough to bring the Quad Squad together with some sticky-icky. This "Kid Oakland" had more sense than I thought. I pictured him leaned back grinning up in the crib with a Raiders beanie on or something as Cypress Hill blasted out of the speakers in his laptop.

"Cool," he continued. "Bernita is on her way there, and I am at McCormick place now, but I can head over. Are you close?"

I was utterly confused for a minute. On her way....where?

"Bernita is on her way where?" I asked.

"To the Funky Buddha," he said, and I remembered that this was the name of the club we were supposed to meet at, the place I sent a specialized logo of my site so they could display it on their looping "screenshow," which I visualized as some flipping repeat of tiny and ugly graphics on a big white screen that middle-aged men were staring at in a bored fashion as they sipped on smudged martini glasses in some vast empty room with bad sound. (Hey--sometimes my imagination takes me to Shangri-La and sometimes it just burps and lets me off by the dumpster, there's really no predicting these things.)

So I was late to our first gathering PLUS there would be no Kid Oakland waving a Marley blunt. I actually heard a "pop" sound as I edited my imagination and the blunted Kid O disappeared from view.

"Oh, right. Well, I'm on a train, just catchin' up on some emphysema." I said, not even lifting my glance to Mister Nolte. "I'll give you a ring when I black out."

Finally, I met up with Kid Oakland, who was not high. He did have a bit of a sly smile always waiting to ease out between hot dog bites, though. Maybe not sly. Maybe it was just a smile. It's hard to call Kid Oakland sly. You have to whisper it real quickly, and then when he asks what you said, you just cough. That's what I do, at least.

Soon, I was to meet my other QuadMembers. It was I (Sorry Skippy, got this one) who coined the term "The Quad Squad," and the moniker stuck with a fury. Soon every other email was arrogantly slinging around the term as if it were just the most natural thing in the world. I bet half those whippersnappers don't even get the televisionary reference. Yet and all and still and so, it wasn't enough after a while simply to say "Quad Squad" and let it go. We had to push that envelope. I mean, that's what we do, the new alternative media. We push envelopes and then we write about it. And update. Edits, you know. Links. Don't make me spell it all out. We do lots of cutting-edge things with words and envelopes. Period.

So we did, yes, we took it there. We (or I, rather) began using the word "quad" as if it were the new "F" word. It could serve as a noun, an adjective, an exclamation, a question, an adverb, a doily. (Wanna confuse people? I'll make a shirt that says "QUAD IS THE NEW FUCK" and we can watch the brow muscles swim like a sea of lurching leeches.) Sure, sure. It may seem like a minor point to you, but this is how change happens, bro, and American history is made. One word perversion at a time.

Matt, Bernita, and Kid Oakland. Bernita in this shot throws me the curve that every camera instructor whispers about, but pretends will never happen! Shooting a dark skinned person in a white shirt against a nighttime sky! I realized it at the moment, but hey, Cinema Verite. (This is a good line to whip out on a traffic cop when explaining many things that stretch the limits of their empathy. "Hey. Cinema Verite." Really, try it. Cops love french/anglo rhyming rationales.) No time and no call to arrange lights or people.

Looking at these shots, it's clear that I should have bumped open the F-stop overall (I'll hit that in post(-production)). But really, there's no changing Night's nature, nor Nita's, nor would I. Gazing at the frame, I envy her for a moment. I often wish I could drop right out of people's vision. To become one with the night, after all. How beautiful is that?

I did not--that evening or any evening thereafter in Chitown--become "one with the night." I lay awake thinking for a long time. Long enough to shoot this clip, at least. Longer, even. I became one with the chattering, clanging, rails of the el train. I became one with the stale, cool breeze wafting down from a vent over my bed and to the side. I became one with the thin, stiff, small blanket that was stretched from shoulder to heel like a rubber band. I became one with my doubts and my fears and a feeling out of place in a building that was stuffed full of summer students and it really reminded me of 2913 Water Street, where I dormed for my freshman year of NYU.

Did that memory help unsettle me? Did that feeling make me feel, again, as if I were on the edge of some vast unknown? That I was still green, unformed, and hungry for knowledge?

It did. But it wasn't quite the same. From that feeling, we'd have to subtract the excitement of actually anticipating film school, and add the prospect of meeting thousands of strange (white?) bloggers, all looming at the horizon with laptops like big electric clams clapping in their laps, like wading into the main of a stream of an Orange-highlighted Kossack Crayola Tidal Wave.

No....wait. That was actually what I dreamed about.

Yeah, so. It was like Christmas Eve.

Next, in Pt. 3: Pocho en la Ciudad; McCormick Place, The Convention; Chicanos, Chairs, Caucasians and Caucuses.