There's two ways, as journalists, you can write this story to receive two different reactions. There's the one way I read it - lone white kid was pounded on by six raging blacks, who've since been imprisoned and drawn the backing of the Rev. Al Sharpton, among others. Now, whenever Al Sharpton gets into the mix, you never know if it's for his own self-serving ego reasons. But, then you can read about it the other way, where instead of leading off the story with the poor white kid, you lead off with how there's a "White Tree" where blacks aren't allowed to sit and where - at the beginning of the school year last year - two nooses were found hanging in a blatant statement of anti-black racism.

I'm not even really all that pissed off about the supposed judicial bias against the Jena Six, although the charges DO sound pretty fucking extreme. No, what I'm pissed off about is the fact that town officials let this go on for so long.

When you're a small town like Jena, Louisina, is - comprised of 3,000-some-odd residents - all you're really looking for is to never, ever, have the national media focus its attention on you. Because no matter the reason, it's never a good thing. The national media - with all their cameras and annoying, bleeding-heart, perfectly groomed New York reporters - will only go to a place like Jena, LA, if there's some kind of tragedy (girl in a well), some kind of religious fervor (dying deaf-mute's spouse wants to pull the plug), or some kind of moral outrage like this. And, when it's as apparently racist as Jena, LA is being portrayed, the last thing they REALLY want is for the angry blacks to come to town in droves with their signs and their protests and their chants and their Rev. Jesse Jackson's rhyming sermons.

This could've all been avoided, though. Had they nipped this thing in the bud right after the nooses on the White Tree, had they nipped it after the first set of racial fights in the school, had they nipped it again after the second set of racial fights in the school ... but they didn't. Up until the final 6-on-1 beating, the principals and the mayor and everybody else simply took a Boys Will Be Boys stance on all this white hate crime against blacks. Then, when they finally want to put their foots down and stomp on all this racial tension once and for all, they choose the one time where it's a fight where the black kids outnumber the white kid. They went overboard in their zeal to quelch this thing, and now they deserve to have all this negative attention on them. Not necessarily because they're racist - although I could easily make the case they are - but because they were really fucking lazy in the discipline of their derilect fucking children.

I'll talk about my eating habits here - especially when I force myself into one of these ruts where I'm eating the same cheap things in order to A. Save Money and B. Slim Down Some - but that's because I know I won't get people overreacting about them. And if they do, they know that it's just me, it's just what I do, and it hasn't killed me yet.

But there are certain people who you JUST can't tell them you're eating Top Ramen and sandwiches all the time, because they'll actually worry about me and decide it's time to tie me down and force feed the airplane into the hangar.

It's hard to make people understand, though. What works for most people is stuff like balanced meals, light snacking, and a variety of nutritious foods including vegetables, baked fish, and almost never boiled noodles in a beef-flavored broth. What works for me is eating crap and not eating much of it at all. Nevertheless, here I am today, the start of the fifth day of this Top Ramen Diet, and I woke up without the aid of an alarm clock at 8am feeling better than I have in MONTHS. Not particularly strong physically, and not with the peace of mind of someone who doesn't have a month to live before he's got to resort to panhandling, but my head is clear, I'm not tired, I'm not dragging ass, and I feel like for the first time since I was living in Renton (at least, those weeks where the poisoned water over there DIDN'T give me the runs) like all this exercise nonsense is actually making a difference.

So, that's me today, and that'll be me tomorrow, and then I'll get up on Sunday and head out to the bar for the Seahawks game, and I'll probably drink many beers, and I'll wake up Monday wishing I owned a TV with NFL Sunday Ticket.