Originally Posted by Mike
So I live in downtown Long Beach, right near the "heart" of the place, where you can see the Queen Mary cruise ship permanently docked at the harbor. If you looked at a picture of the area maybe six or seven years ago, you'd really be impressed at how nicely they've cleaned the area up. There's the Pine Avenue strip, which leads down to the Pike, where they have a little outdoor mall type place with fancy architecture and whatnot.
Anyway, there are black folks everywhere at the Pike and on Pine Ave above 5th street. They also tend to congregate at the AMC down near the drinking spots. Don't worry, I wasn't going to say anything about black folks being loud in the theater.
My girl and I went down to Gameworks today. It's a big chain arcade place with a bar and food and whatnot. If you know what Dave & Buster's is, it's like that. We play the Derby Owner's Club game - the one where you race horses. While walking back to our apartment from there, I hear a noise.
You guys probably know the noise, I hear it all of the time in the corporate environment: the little blipping that comes from a Nextel phone with the direct phone-to-phone feature. Nextel: Done. So I heard the noise and the first thing that went through my head was, "Well, it's 7:00 PM on a Saturday night. I'm wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a cartoon on it and khakis. I'm in a city." Normally, the feature on those Nextel phones would be called "walkie-talkie."
So I turned to my girl and I said, "Oh, did you hear that? A blackie-talkie!"
Shameful.
