Exotic tobaccos opened our airwaves then closed them gain almost immediately and the retching was so commonplace as to be given a particular name. We threw it about like a paper airplane and then spent the rest of the afternoon painting circles on the concrete, which, at the time anyway, seemed to represent the movements of the solar system and the enormous distances between objects there, though any discussion of this beyond the elementary smacked of schooling and was punished abruptly with wooden canes and admonitions. The block was elongated and bulbous on one end so you couldn’t see around some of the hedges and when we startled pigeons they rose up into the sky with a squawking intensity that didn’t seem to fit with their otherwise calm, even regal demeanor. I chocked this up to the way they had been portrayed in the movies which played almost around the clock downtown, and if you were lucky, you might stumble on a double feature that quit halfway through the second bill, due to the projector overheating or the escaped marmosets getting in once again. Our patience has limits imposed on it from outside like a fence under construction, or the boundaries of the skin, made up of millions of microscopic replicas of itself, so that you can’t point the finger of blame and incrimination at any one agent but must point it at all of them at precisely the same time. Which is of course impossible given the mathematics on either side of the equals sign, or the barrio as the case may be. We loved to grab terms at random almost out of thin air, or at least from the newspapers that had hit their stride at about this time, had ushered in a new golden age of journalism that looked a lot like the previous golden age, only there weren’t so many men at the center of it with comb-overs and expensive jewelry around their wrist. What you found instead was a faceless mob willing to flow in any direction it was pointed and frequently got confused with an actual mob of the sort that carries with it unexpected implements of destruction like two-by-fours and manual typewriters and those rubber masks designed to imitate the facial features of visitors from other planets, or at least what we had been led to believe their facial features might look like by the experts and the non-experts alike, by artisans and the charlatans and the ordinary businessmen who stood to make a killing so long as we didn’t get too curious.