Behind me in line were some very cool people. One was an Asian man from London. The other was a white woman with a brown child. The white women blew my mind at some point before I really noticed her brown child when she began speaking to her child in Spanish.

It's easy to blow someone's mind when that mind is momentarily scaffolded with (what they are believe are stable but which are actually) faulted constructs. I guess some of mine at that moment (unbeknownst to me) were that a white woman does not speak Spanish as if with a brown tongue. But you already know so many of these things are but ideas, qué no? It is me that continually needs reminders.

The Asian man began to voice the annoyance that everyone felt. For sure I felt it. I was just about to pass through the turnstiles when she stopped us, the CTA woman. They held us up and a crowd of airport emigrants began to accumulate at the comblike entrance to the dark, subterranean world of the Subway. It was probably 30 minutes or so after I had stood there that the man began to complain. First I heard him asking people around me "How long since you have been standing here?" I could appreciate that. He wanted to make sure it wasn't just his sense of impatience that was agitating him. He wanted to know the full scale of how long this Brokedown was going on.

"But they will give us another option? They will pay for our time, for us to go where we are going, then?"

I smiled to myself. Damn. He had to be kidding. I turned to him.

"Where are you from?"

"London," he said.

"I think I would like to live in London!" I said, hoping to communicate that things didn't really work that way here. He didn't seem to get it from just that, although he remained friendly. And quite confused. I mean, I have seen the MTA set up a bus line at a broken-down train stop. But this wasn't broken down. They kept telling us it was only a few minutes more, so hopes of compensation were...optimistic.

"I guess I'm just used to thinking of this as city life," I said. "This makes me reel back to New York, where I spent a lot of time. Doesn't it always just seem that you're waiting on something or other?"

"Yeah, but..." he said. He frowned. There was an injustice here. "It is their fault?"

"Yeah, well." I sighed. "You know. 'Security Threat.'"

He was persistent in his illusion, I have to say that. He continued to probe, looking for some way to overturn the sentence. But for some reason I was not angered by the man or his agitation. Probably because even in his annoyance, he never pointed his anger at me personally. It was so utterly refreshing. I am not trying to say it was "Asian," mind you. It may have been "London." Or it may have been this particular cat. I have no way of knowing. But I know it is NOT how many people I know get angry...at anything. They point it at YOU as they explain it to you. And so you become one with this resonance, and you are dealing with Fight or Flight and trying to listen at the same time, and everything gets confused. It drives me fucking crazy. I am far too empathetic....no, I am far too sensitive or "nervous" in the sense of the Nervous System's sensitivity, to sit and weather a flood of anger that is angled all over and just shaking like a boxcar full of broken picture frames as it rains down over my face. I get freaked out and end up yelling at the person. Telling them to calm down. It's too much. I know. I'm not saying I'm normal. Sometimes I feel like a tuning fork.

And then sometimes the ground itself shakes and I don't even notice.

The man from London with the neat haircut and spendy eyeglass frames didn't escalate, as we would say in the treatment field. He just wouldn't stop. He couldn't accept that his life had been interrupted in such a way and there was nothing to address, nobody about to compensate, or to make it right. That's why I laughed. What a land to live in, hey? I mean...I'm not saying it as if I have never been there. I feel that way far too often. WTF! Things were going fine as I was imagining them, mentally guiding them! Who put this unexpected change in the way? Get them out here now! I demand an accounting!

Sure, that's me too. I think of that fellow in The Little Prince, the ranting King over the tiny planet, I think it was. We all go there.

"Listen,; I said. And it wasn't a "Listen" that leads into a pointed statement, as one might imagine. I was actually more about to ease into some philosophical frame, some way of enduring the heat and the annoyance and the sound of a clock stripping gears. But that was when the "white" woman interrupted me.

It was a good interruption. The word "interrupted" has such connotations. She spoke when I expected it was going to be me speaking. She interrupted my expectation. But the floor was all of ours.

"It's been a long day," she said to the man from London. I felt she was picking up my slack. It was neat. She thought I was tired and tired of hearing this man complain. She was actually completing what she imagined was my sentence. It made me fond of her for some reason.

"Yeah," I said, fading. I was thinking of my Edirol R09 which I had just lost and was just now having to accept was gone. "I just had a $400 piece of equipment stolen from me. I guess I'm still mentally stuck on that. This wait is...well. I'm not even worried about this wait."

"What?" the woman was earnestly moved by my admission. I had stolen the spotlight from the London man of Asian persuasion with my unexpected cymbal crash. Because we can all dig on losing a few bills. Ouch.

"What happened?" she pressed me.

So I told the story of the dropping clip, wherein I had become used to keeping my Voice Recorder clipped to my shoulder strap on this trip. It looked like any other damn device people carry these days, so nobody really took note of it. And right up front like that, I could record all the ticket takers and announcing faces and counter people. It was great. I was watching the meters and everything, getting hot levels. I'm guerrilla on this thing, but I'm no slouch. Tens of thousands of dollars have been laid to waste to train this mind, baby. I'm old school, I'm new school, I'm down and dirty through and through school, say it!

I'm pumping myself up because I hate this part. Mister through and through Gorilla came swinging around a curve at the bottom of the escalator, he stopped, he adjusted Edirol, he got moving, just as he got moving, the Edirol twists on its clip (which breaks under the torque) and pops off. Gorillabrain (me) turns and sees THE BROKEN CLIP on the ground and peripherally notes A MAN WATCHING HIM BEND LOW as he gorillas down to the marble, scrabbles his clawing fingers upon the cold face of the marble floor, gorillabrain WANTS TO BE A GOOD GUY and NOT LITTER so he strains until, with heavy bag sagging down and strap cutting across his carotid artery, he grunts and scoops up the oddly-broken clip, puts it in his pocket, and then leaves behind the EDIROL R09 in his rush to save money on a cab.

When Gorillahands comes back hardly two minutes later in a rush and a zoom, nothing is to be seen.

No case, no Edirol, no plastic. Nada. But the gorilla school graduate has a broken clip in his hand for the whole deal. A clip that he picked up because he didn't want to litter the airport floor. I still have this clip, you know. The rest of that day was filled with bitterness. Not so much for myself and my stupid decisions--though that particular number encored more than once upon the internal stage as one of my hissing self-directed soliloquies in the days to come--but for that MAN. The one who was busy stealing while I was trying not to litter the place. I felt so damn bitter about humanity. That man had no idea how happy my voice recorder made me. He had no idea that I have been using a handheld tape recorder since my 18th birthday, and that it is an obsession of mine to record songs and poems and phone calls and fights and arrests and parties and journal entries, and that it all began when I was five years old. He has no idea what it meant to me to get back a recorder, as I lost mine in the switchover from tape to digital. Once upon a time, you paid $30 for a handheld recorder. $80 if you wanted the best. Times change, formats change, everybody starts talking into a recorder, or recording sounds, and you are looking at a few hundred bucks for something you always had by your side! This man didn't care about any of that, or if he would create a hole in my life with one unfeeling movement. He watched me and waited until I was gone and then he moved in. It made me want to toss my garbage everywhere, just throw down my bags, dig into my pockets and scoop it all out onto the floor, it made me want to spit.

I came back to the closest counter, I talked to every service person there, down to the Mexican cat pushing around a garbage can. It was gone. I talked to someone, found Lost and Found. They told me they close at six. I asked them what I do if I "Find" something after six. Where do I turn it in? They just shrugged.

And that was that. I had to give up. I finally turned away and made my way to the train. I almost wanted to get a cab now, but I'm spiteful.

Which brought me to the Security Threat shutdown of the train only moments later. And this line, to whom I was finishing telling my story. The story of the Lost Edirol, the Broken Clip, and Gorilla Boy.

As I looked around, I saw that somehow my tale of personal woe had nullified the rising feeling of indignation. There was sort of a "why aren't you more angry" type of thing, and my response, communicated nonverbally, was that it just didn't pay. That this sort of detached disappointment I felt was a preferable choice. And on the heels of that, and the importance I had given the recorder in my narrative, it didn't seem so bad that we had to wait a few minutes for a train.

Or maybe I just distracted the crowd! It worked, either way.

The little brown girl spoke to me, that was when I really noticed her. She was standing directly behind me, at her mother's side.

"Oh, is it like an iSound?" she asked excitedly. She referred to the device I lost/had stolen.

I think that's what she said. I don't know. It seems everything has an "i" before it lately. Macintosh has tapped into the ego of the USA and the stone cold facts underneath our national and personal identities and packaged it up nice for us. It all makes such sense. Damn straight, right? Of course it's "iPhoto." Because it's MY damn photos. Can't argue with that!

I wrote a song when I was 19 that was a little "hit" among my friends and tiny crowd of listeners back in the day, it was called Dangerous Friend, and it was a particular shade of a voice, or a couple voices at play. And one that swung in in on a certain group of chord changes was this "I, I, I, I, I, I." I thought of this old song of mine when I saw all that "iLife" stuff coming around a few years ago. The song spoke of a dark aspect of the human self (tho sometimes necessary for survival) that personified self-interest above all else, others, empathy, a greater picture. It was a voice that came from pain (a selfish focus if ever there was one) and it was a voice that perpetuated pain. That was the beauty of the song. It spoke of Father and Son, and of the passing down of this voice. I've always wanted to record this song formally. It has a longevity that has allowed it to survive the mighty culling of songs I've excised from my catalog in the 19 years I've been recording my music--due to seeing them as immature, or being bored of them for other reasons. It never died, this song, yet somehow escaped all my fumbling recording sessions. Friends would ask me "what album is Dangerous Friend on?" And were surprised when I told them I had never recorded it. I think now I have the means to record decently, finally. I think so. Ideally I would have a Mac Pro, not an iMac, but those are finer distinctions. I do have a few mics that work, and a new TASCAM digital interface to bring in sound to the Mac. I even have congas and junk these days. Maybe it's time to get that one down on wax. Or...data stacks. I could even title it iSong.

The girl's interest and excitement over technology mirrored my own in a different way, and I liked her right away. She was also a beautiful little girl, and not only did I see my own little girls in her eyes, but myself in her own situation, as my mother was white, is white. I felt bad that I was out of the loop with the iSound, though. I wasn't quite as hip as her.

"Um...I haven't seen the iSound," I admitted. "But it was pretty high-end."

The girl's mother began speaking to her en Español again, and I turned toward the train, in my Patient Citizen stance. I laughed at myself for trying to keep myself looking cool in the eyes of the little girl. What a character. It was pretty high end.

My poor Edirol R09. Now in the hands of some brutal and heartless stealer. I could see him, hunched over the table with headphones on, listening to my sincere confessions, and a random sheet of "ticket please"s and ambient sound washing over him. Thief. The Edirol R09 uses batteries pretty quickly. I could only smile a bit knowing that the thief did not have the accessories that were in my bag separately, like the power cord and extra memory card. It was a small consolation, but in these moments, you take what you can get.

Then the cops let us into the dark tunnel and the trains. Soon, I would meet the Nick Nolte character and my wistful, calming crowd-directed stories would explode into a nicotine-repellent burst of vocal outrage at I became GORILLA-VATO. Luckily, the Asian cat from London would be nowhere around to see my personal and social meltdown, and would retain the folksy Zenmaster image of me that crowds have come to love.

I know! I'm getting to the rest. Kid Oakland eats hot dogs for breakfast, pretty girls on bicycles, the other chocolate city and the marshmallow convention center (where bicycles are not allowed). El Pocho en La Ciudad.

I thought we'd hit it today. I didn't know the train would hang me up. Again!

Next, in Pt. 5: Pocho en la Ciudad; McCormick Place, The Convention; Chicanos, Chairs, Caucasians and Caucuses. I SWEAR!