Feeling it, I wander out to the only nearby place I can get good hot food without cooking it myself.

I take the car and food to the only nearby place where I can have both leafy shade, and reception for the only radio station that isn’t tired music or trying to claim my soul for Jesus.

These efforts are rewarded, by a cool satiation of hunger; with this story.

***

Guy walks into a fire station.

This is a true story, and it took place in my own country, in my own lifetime.

My own lifetime, my own country, and a moreover a part of it with a reputation for wildly progressive values. A small town just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, called Sausalito. Beautiful, liberal, coastal Sausalito.

The guy has firefighting experience, a lot of it, in the military. He’s young, fit, qualified, ambitious, smart, and capable.

Everything a municipal employer of wage slaves could hope for. It should be automatic. It’s not,

Despite his qualifications, the prospective employee has an obvious physical defect in the eyes of his potential Petit-Tyrant bosses. His skin color is a dealbreaker, for them. In 1962. Not in Alabama. Right by the lovely blue waters of the Bay.

With the red-faced innocent commonplace racism of the day, they tell the man that he can’t have the job because the firehouse isn’t “integrated” yet. He’d have to end up sleeping sometimes on the same cots used by all the other, paler firefighters. That just will not do. They’re not set up for it. Sorry.

The man is justifiably furious, but Martin and Malcolm and Fred Hampton have not been murdered to protect his natural rights yet, so there’s no practical way to fight for them, not even a hope of trying to sue for them or starting a social media group to organize for them.

So he takes the impractical way instead.

He goes back to school and jumps through every hoop they set up for him there, as they are so fond of doing.

Some years later he returns to Sausalito and becomes the Superintendent of Schools there. Perhaps times have changed just enough. Or maybe he just applied for a job that doesn’t require sleeping on cots this time.

It’s pretty much the ultimate tale of Trying to Change The System From Within. (How we miss you, Leo.)

I think the full version is on the New Yorker Radio Hour, or something like that. But that’s all of it I’m going to tell.

***

All things being equal, I’d love for the System to change. But I don’t want to be the Changer, especially not at the cost of having to sit in the shitty belly of the beast indefinitely trying to carve at its guts with the dull little crystal knife of my pale blue words.

I’ve served enough of my limited time in that prison.

I’m trying to buy a ticket out of the maw now, if such a thing exists. I’ve found the ticket booth, but the attendant is on break and there’s only one train up and running here, chuffing ineluctably, daring me to board anyway.