"Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends."
-- Maya Angelou
.By Alex P. Vidal
NEW YORK CITY -- On our way to a four-hour trip to Mashantucket, Connecticut on July 28, I met Jerome.
A Chinese mestizo-looking, Jerome Yap Ramos was my seatmate in a crowded bus. He sat near the window; I was in the aisle.
I was at church youth group when my mom called to tell me we were moving from the Northern California town I’d known my whole life to a desert township an hour outside Reno, Nevada. She didn’t even have the decency to tell me face-to-face.
Better I was with God than with her when the news came down, I suppose. When I imagine parenting a girl like me at 15, I’d probably have done the same thing. Let the youth pastor deal with that teen tantrum.
It was like shuttle diplomacy, with the former second baseman bouncing between warring camps. In early 2016, with a bitter primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders sapping Democrats’ energy and resources that could have been trained on Donald Trump, Faiz Shakir tried to broker a peace.
The energy is long gone from the cavernous Maryland convention hall when Kevin Brady strides onstage on a Friday afternoon in February. Short, cue-ball-bald and easygoing, he’s as far as it gets from the morning’s entertainment at the Conservative Political Action Conference, when President Donald Trump amped up an electrified crowd. “Are you ready to tear this tax code up by its roots?” the 11-term congressman asks in his flat amalgam of South Dakota and Texas accents, to mild woos from the half-full crowd.
In Thailand, it’s called gai yang — or grilled chicken — and when I moved to the Land of Smiles almost three years ago, it was one of the first Thai phrases I learned to say, along with “can I have …” and “please.”
Guy Prandstatter is surprisingly affable for a person who’s managed to piss off so many people. But he’s also unapologetic about why they’re angry. For too long, he believes, anyone wishing to set up as a tattoo artist has had to endure a grueling, unpaid and, he claims, sometimes abusive stint as a shop apprentice. Prandstatter says the process discourages many deserving prospects from breaking into the business and, the way he sees it, makes the tattoo industry ripe for disruption.
I began my day packaging some specimens — spiders, scorpions and some other arachnids suspended in alcohol — that needed to be shipped. Then I got a call from a man who had found some strange insects biting him after he’d gone to a park on the Upper West Side. He was really surprised because he’d been going to this park for the past 10 years and had never had this problem. So he called and asked if he could come over.
