Main Street Horrors

Racism in Berkeley?? Wwwwhhhaaat! No surprises, really, but comedian W. Kamau Bell was accosted by wait staff at Elmwood Café on suspicion of Speaking To a White Lady and blogged about it. Also not surprisingly, Elmwood Café is better at baked goods than social media and deleted early Facebook responses. Naturally, some people are wondering why Bell would see what happened as a sign of racism. Well, I go to Elmwood Café a lot, and not only so I dress like a homeless slob, there is often a (white) man selling a homeless paper on the corner, and a Latina woman selling some bullshit crafts out of a shopping wagon, and all sorts of other stuff. There are generally speaking zero confrontations between café and street since it's not worth it for the staff: most of them are poorly paid students who don't want their heads bounced off the pavement on the rare occasion of an actual belligerent showing up. There are also almost no black people on tony College Ave—nearby Telegraph is the main drag for proles, the "politically" homeless, PoC, etc. So for not one but two to decide that Bell is a street peddler who most be stopped has to be the result of a management directive to clear out the riff-raff.

Bell isn't calling for anyone to boycott the joint, or for anyone to be fired, which is good. He's still a Famous TV Person, and whoever shouted at him to "Git!" is likely still a minimum-wage fuckleberry. On the other hand, I did get a waffle iron for Christmas, so it's not like I need Elmwood Café anymore.

In other main street horror news, today is the release day for Shadows Over Main Street, a new Lovecraftian anthology of small-town horrors. I wrote a bit about my piece,“Χταπόδι Σαλάτα.” here. Check it out, here's the full table of contents.