Next week, Mon - Fri, I'm blogging on Jewcy.com - 20&30 year olds read there. I'm 53. People my age come to my bookstore readings, mostly. The Jewcy folk want me to focus on Social Justice. I'm going to do that.

This airplane has wifi and they're giving out free trials. My battery is running down. They don't have plugs on the plane.

I can't get prison out of my head. The hundreds of boys I saw and the 50 or so I spoke with in Juvenile Hall, San Francisco. Unsolicited praise from one of the City Youth Now people who hosted me there, sent to the woman helping figure my bookstore and book fair travels:

"Michael was just superb.  He really connected with the kids, was patient with their many questions, very  anecdotally interesting --which brought his book alive to the youth-- and he was curious about just who the kids were (as they were about him), which they found flattering I think.

We were overjoyed to have him come to juvy hall.. and are grateful you helped make that happen."

Okay, so you know, she's right. I did connect with the boys there, electric. Going clear, when you know. They were 15 to 18 years old. I've said, they could have been the brothers of my five "bigger boys." They'd done an average of two, two and a half years of prison, I think. I put down the statistics a couple of blogs ago. 40% will end up back in adult jail. 60% of them will be "dependent on [the] system", meaning homeless, assistance, jail.

I'm putting this picture here again, because it moves me so:

EDUCATION: "Crime can be prevented if schools teach juvenile offenders to read" - Children & Youth Services Review, J.S. (2207) - from City Youth Now 2008 Annual Report, Pg 10. I assume they don't mean being able to read "Don't Steal" signs and such. More, like, a passion for writers like me? Or Iceberg Slim?

from Page 4: "The youth we serve come from low-income families, often with histories of child abuse and neglect, gun violence, incarceration, and/or substance abuse."

So let's be more honest, even - which I know from our five "bigger boys": also from single mother families, or a woman who has raised them as their mom. Maybe they have 3 or 6 siblings from 3 or 5 different men who passed through. Did their mom's read to them? Their dads by and large weren't around for that. And I'm not blaming anyone - the system is broken. Ending this poverty and oppression is much more complicated than "fixing our schools." That's just what I'm thinking as I'm over the clouds. It doesn't rain up here.

Zero people (as in 0, ling, ephes, nada, not a unfamiliar soul yet a few of my SF friends) came to talk with and hear me read at Books Inc, the bookstore near the Opera building, later that same day. Prison was electrifying, Books Inc was saddening. They'd pasted a poster for my book in their window. They'd made a huge display for another author coming later in the week. His book had a cute dog on the cover. Books about us Americans taking care of doggies and kitty-cats are big. And memoirs about beautiful women, especially with their photos on the cover. BIG! We have a dog at home, our pug Mr. Jenkins. He traveled across America with us when we piled 7 of us in an SUV and headed off to explode the limits of the ghetto for our bigger boys. Maybe we should have stuck a photo of Mr. Jenkins on my cover? Race frightens us, class frightens us. We hide it behind curtains we are expert at not opening, our obsession with jails and warehouses we sort-of want to also function as "schools" and "public housing" and "juvenile halls" & "criminal justice" systems.

I know it can be different. mip'nei tikkun ha-olam, fixing those vessels of sacred light one at a time.

I'm on the way to NAIBA, in Baltimore, Eastern Seaboard Indy Booksellers.