I almost forgot! I saw a girl with a liberty spike mohawk this morning on the way to work. It made me smile. I'm sure that wasn't the intended effect, but there ya go. I wondered if she really gets up every morning and puts her hair into liberty spikes. It seems like a real pain in the ass to do every day - but then again I'm also a guy, and so not used to getting up more than five minutes before I have to be leaving for work. c'est la vie. I also wondered where she was going...if she was going to work, where did she work that they didn't "have a little talk" about the hair? If school, was it high school or college? Not too many colleges on my morning work path. Maybe she lost a bet or something and that was what it was all about? Nah. Too many punk-rock stickers on her car. Hardcore, old school punk, the kind of music with safety pins and mohawks that hangs out outside the record companies doors, smokes cigarettes and sneers at you. The quixotic kind that thought that Do-It-Yourselfism was a form of anarchy, rather than an antisocial form of capitalism. (I know, I know, lay off with the flameage, but do most punks and anarchists follow that train of thought through? No, they just reinvent the barter economy and you know it.) Anyway, I was pondering all this, thinking it would be a delightful mystery with which to occupy my mindless time at work, when she turned into the art institute parking lot. Damn. Kind of a let down, really. You expect that sort of thing there. I wanted it to remain unexplained, but also I wanted there to be someone with a liberty spike mohawk just living out their days and nights on the streets of Dallas without being a part of some larger protective enclave in which atypical behavior can flourish. I wanted to see this girl working at Jack in the Box, or Arby's someday in the near future, sneaking cigarettes on her way out to clean the dumpsters, going to all-ages shows on the weekends, planning to go back to school but having too good of a time right now to worry about it, drawing little doodles with a not-insignificant but still raw talent on pieces of scrap paper at Denny's at 3am and leaving them there next to a pile of cigarette butts and a half-finished cold cup of coffee. I want these people, and all the other little subculture types you know of but don't see outside of youth and college, to be represented in our general populace. Where are the people with primary and secondary colored hair in real life? Where are the punks, the goths, the freaks, the hippies, the emo kids, the swing kids, the neo lounge set, the industrial types, the beatniks, the riot grrls, and all those other people who break up the visual monotony of businesspeople, rednecks, and gangsta morons? I know Dallas has less of these people, but this is in general. The only entertainment I have when people watching around here is playing "spot-the-stripper", because apparently Dallas has the highest concentration of "gentlemens' clubs" per capita of any city in North America. I'm pretty sure that's what the article said. It might have been the world, though I doubt it (Amsterdam and Bangkok), and it might have just been the US, which would make sense (Laredo and all those other sleazy border towns), but I think it was more. This game pales rather quickly. I don't like it much, and since Dallas also recently beat LA out for number one in plastic surgery, it's a dificult game to play. (What's real and what's for sale?) Where are all those other folks? What's happening to today's youth? I'm disappointed, frankly.