So, one last picture of the sleeve in its current stage, post-healing. Tomorrow, I do the collar, which will hopefully tie together the shooting star on my chest with the rest of the landscape. I think it will be brilliant.

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I marched with the Columbia contingent during NYC’s gay pride parade. I’ve never been so cool with marching from the mid-50’s down to 8th and over to the Chelsea piers. The energy was practically palpable, and I felt so happy to hear people yelling with pride that we were representing the best and brightest of queer youth, as opposed to the Gay College Party float behind us with little twinks dancing around in thongs, the irony being that almost none of those little drug addicts has ever attended college.

The only damper to the festivities was seeing a stabbing in front of me that evening. The way the groups split up in the end after the parade is that the rich white guys go to the Dance on the Pier, a $60 event, and a lot of the poorer ethnic people gather in a packed group at the pier and watch the fireworks. The crowd consists of mainly black and Latino men and women, and the smell of weed permeates the air. I decided to go hang out and people watch there because it just seemed more fun.

At one point, people backed away from this area, and so I look over and a verbal spar has broken out between a white man and a black man. I don’t really know what it was about, but the white man swung his umbrella at the other’s head and broke it in half. He turned around with an I-dare-you look of machismo, and the man waited a moment before coming up behind the man, punching him as hard as he could in the back of the head, and then stabbing him repeatedly before sauntering off into the crowd.

The police came–why they weren’t there in the first place, I don’t know–but by that point the white man had picked himself up and stumbled off, most likely in an effort to preserve his sense of pride, the same one that gave him the stupid idea to turn his back on a man whose head he has just broken an umbrella over. I was just shocked; what stupid thing could they have possibly been arguing over that would escalate into something so insane? I doubt the men knew each other. Was it race related? Did one step on the other’s sneaker? I don’t understand. It’s so sad.