Today's title courtesy my father.

On NPR this morning they had a piece on the "20th Anniversary" of the Los Angeles (Rodney King) Riots. They played archived audio from an urban radio station located in South Central, where the DJ's could literally see the riots going on outside their windows. One of the DJ's announced "they have stolen a fire truck, yes, they have stolen a fire truck." You could tell he was pretty well disgusted, and you didn't have to infer much to guess that was he not on the air, he probably would have said something like, "I can't believe these a**holes have stolen a f**king fire truck. What the f*** are they thinking?" Or at least that's what I would have said if I was not on the air.

Another striking thing they described was a group of black youths severely beating a hispanic man...and a black preacher dressed in his preacher garb, holding his bible in the air, wading into the mayhem and getting the youths to disburse.

Which all brought me back to where I was in late April 1992. I was a waiter in a restaurant in Davis, California, called Distler's Rafters. We were near a country club so I served lots of booze to the blue hair set and I had gotten to know some of them.

I was immensely relieved--I had just (finally) received a post-graduation job offer. Mine was from a bank in Los Angeles, after probably 40 or 50 rejections from all manner of employers. In fact, a local Davis bar called The Paragon offered 50 cent kamikazes for every rejection letter you brought in, and I took full advantage of that. (Note to young people: avoid graduating from college into the teeth of a recession--time your birth, or least your pace in college, appropriately.)

My relief at having a post-graduation job lined up lasted for about three days, as the riots started less than week after I got my acceptance letter. My pals at Distler's watched in amazement on TV and reminded me how insane I was to move to LA, how utterly nuts I was to be moving to the urban jungle that was, at the moment, burning down. I was worried, but by the time I moved in early June, things had calmed down considerably.

It was my first time living in the big city, I had my own car (with no a/c), no classes, and a job in a fancy new skyscraper downtown. Little did I know, I was greener than green and knew close to nothing about business, banking, or finance, despite my shiny new economics degree.

I shared an apartment in an urban part of Los Angeles, called Eagle Rock. It was not the inner city, but it was not the nice part of town either. I didn't go out in that neighborhood after dark; out of the question. Within a few days of moving in, there was a shooting on my block and the police were out in force on the ground along with a police helicopter. My friend who I shared an apartment with was out of town so it was me and the cockroaches...and when a chopper is that close you feel and you hear it. The THUMPA of the chopper matched the THUMPA of my heart as I watched the searchlight sweep efficiently over my little neighborhood in the vast City of the Angels.

I thought of my pals back at Distler's, happy in their haze of alcohol and cigarettes, cheerfully ensconced in a their safe suburban bubble, and wondered if I had made a mistake.

That was an eon ago, or perhaps it was yesterday; time flies like an arrow.