Now is the winter of their discontent, but I figure we can still go to the Gap on rue de Rivoli

I've got no shame, or fairly little, in admitting I'm homesick. Probably all the birthday messages at once is what brought it on. Maybe knowing they get that extra hour or two of sunlight back home because it's a bit further south - maybe knowing that now the snow has fallen, what light there is will be doubled by reflecting off it. It could be because I know that whether I'm there or not, Time is, and I may not be approving of what he's doing behind my back, and perhaps the people back home will be shocked to see what he's done here. My job has given me acne, for example. Not lots of it, but some. I'm 20 fucking 9 now and I have more acne on my face at the moment than I had in my whole marvellously clear-skinned adolescence put together.

Anyways, enough complaining. We're planning Paris Take Two this weekend so the F-word was a little disconcerted to hear that the riots have started again after the cops killed those teenagers on the moped. In terms of the shopping/visiting/maybe a spot of opera sort of visit the darling and I have in mind, I don't think it'll have much impact. Last time the rioters only popped into the 20th and 18th arrondisements for a little visit and the disenfranchised seemed to be happy to fuck up their own neighborhoods instead of those of the dominant. No surprise there really. I remember watching reportage about Rodney King riots - I was very young at the time, twelve I should think - and wondering why all the black people were getting upset in their own neighborhoods instead of all those famous places in L.A. where surely everybody would pay more attention. One of my brothers helpfully pointed out that if they did that, they'd get fucking killed.

I've never been to L.A. and my knowledge of their police force is based on the Rodney King trial when I was twelve and then the novels of James Ellroy, but I'd imagine the same applies except much more so in France. I don't know if people fully appreciate how not-isolated and how precedented French police killing brown teenagers and getting away with it without even having to pretend to be sorry is (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961 - yes, still haven't updated the browser, fuck off, you). Having spent far too much time for my tastes in Parisian suburbs I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty I'd riot too if I was a brown French teenager living in one of them and the police killed another couple brown teenagers in broad daylight, but I wouldn't dream of doing so downtown unless I had a deathwish.