Donika Miller's Blog

Let it never be said that Rudius is a whitey company. Granted, our writers tend to be male, middle class, and white, but we're headquartered in Chinatown. I don't mean, "Honey, let's go for dim sum and embarrass ourselves using chopsticks, heehaw!" Chinatown, but like, "The live sea creatures crawling about our feet stink and that miniature old lady just ruptured my spleen with her clavicle" Chinatown. I look down my nose at TheBunny and mrjake's second class citizenship there, yet at least they can identify their neighbors' cultures. All I know is that the black people in my neighborhood mostly aren't really black, but vaguely Hispanic in an enormously diverse and unclassifiable way. Much of the time I'm isolated by language and elevated by skin color (it's kinda cool being the only white chick in a ten block radius. I'm like a celebrity and people give me free candy. No joke), which leaves me open to observe and absorb my environment. To do things like weep openly over an organ donation billboard in the subway, telling the story of a guy who saw his children for the first time ever and his wife for the first time in 20 years, thanks to a corneal transplant.

It also allows opportunities to catch things like this:

See, at first it looked all cute-- smiling baseball guy, promoting what seems to me
to be literacy. But your consciousness is promptly seized by this:

That's quite an explicit editorial, yet it leaves so much to the imagination. Um, Marilyn, Doll,
Lousy Bitch... what's the story here? I've been told I should ask you.

After snapping those pictures with my phone, I strolled back down the subway corridor, approaching two neighborhood regulars staring over the platform edge and muttering, "It's just the head, man," and, "I think that's the tail..." I followed their eyelines to a rat face gaping back at me from beside the tracks. "Gross," I exhaled, "I've been wondering why they don't get run over more often." One guy pointed a few degrees to the left and remarked, "There's the tail. He thinks it's the spine, but rats don't have spines, right?"

I was so embarrassed for him I pretended not to know if rats are vertebrates. I couldn't even conceptualize answering him earnestly without the words 'you idiot'.

Anyway, not a good day in Sugar Hill. Apparently children are dying from neglect and rats are suddenly spineless. If we can't count on the rats, who can we count on?

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