I made my way over to the Beloved Community Center on Arlington Street this morning to see the conference Rev. Nelson Johnson held with members of the Latin Kings.

I’ve had an interest in street gangs since spending some time with them last year for a story and reporting on several gang-related homicides in Greensboro. I didn’t encounter any Latin Kings when during my reporting - which I was told by gang cops and gang members had something to do with their not having a terribly strong presence here and with their history of morphing from violent street gang to pseudo radical political movement and back, depending on where and when you find them.

I took some digital audio at the conference and it came out all right. I’ll post it later on tonight, after I edit out some of the obtrusive background noise.

But first impressions of the conference:

1) Jorge Cornell, the 31-year old King who was the focus of the conference, claims that he is the “Inca,” or leader, over all of North Carolina’s Kings. He says they number in the hundreds in North Carolina. There’s no official home office through which you can check any of that, of course, so I guess it’s up for conjecture.

Some of his rap was a little weak, but he was more charismatic and articulate than some of the gang leaders I’ve met. He had a few great lines — the best coming when he was asked why people join the Latin Kings.

“A sense of brotherhood,” Cornell said. “It’s like what you’ve got at these colleges…fraternities.”

Cornell railed against the media, politicians and 287 (G), which allows for cooperation between local law enforcement and U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement.

Cornell described his problem with 287 (g) this way:

“Let’s say you got your ordinary Latino gets stopped at a license checkpoint. Now we all know that if he’s an immigrant, he can’t get a license in this state. So therefore they’re going to lock him up. They’re going to run his name in the system, it’s going to show that he’s an immigrant, and they’re going to deport him.”

Well…that sentence is true if you change a few words, but not as it was stated. An “immigrant” — like many of the members of my family who came from Puerto Rico legally, can and have obtained licenses. They can drive wherever they like and have nothing to fear from license checkpoints. If, however, by “immigrant” you actually mean “undocumented person” then yes, they’d have trouble getting a license and, like anyone else operating a vehicle without one, could be arrested. If they’re in the country illegally, they could certainly be deported. But to take that set of facts and decide that it amounts to a targeting of Latinos for being Latino…it goes a little far, to say the least.

My father is a first generation American — like Jorge, a Puerto Rican American born and raised in New York City. His father and mother raised nine children in poverty in a mostly Latino neighborhood. They certainly consider themselves “your ordinary Latino.” None of them are undocumented. And while they have their concerns about how to create a path to citizenship for undocumented people (so do I for that matter) I can’t imagine any of them would take kindly to the suggestion that “your ordinary Latino” fears license checkpoints because they know they’re going to be deported.

Cornell continued:

“This state shows clearly that there is no place for Latinos. They don’t want us here. They’re trying to accomplish what they couldn’t accomplish with African Americans. They brought them here in…how do you say? Cuffs? Shackles. That’s how they’re sending us off. In shackles.”

This is the sort of in-group/out-group talk that is as fascinating as it is confusing. I know plenty of black people who would be plenty offended to hear the American slave trade and the legacy of strife it’s given our country compared to deporting an undocumented guy who entered the country illegally and is driving without a license. But there are also plenty - black, white and Latino — who do see it as interrelated and do understand both peoples’ struggles as intertwined.

I don’t think there’s any question there’s some racial profiling of Latinos going on in many places. As a white guy, I’m in a bad position to judge how closely I think that’s related to historical systematic enslavement and genocide. I’ve occasionally felt a little uncomfortable because I don’t get it when an entire theater of non-white people around me is laughing at a Tyler Perry movie, but I’ve never directly experienced any true racism. I am, however, always interested to hear the discussion among people who have something on the line.

2) There are few specifics about what “peace” really means to the Latin Kings who are calling for it, how they hope to achieve it, when a gang meeting might happen or what it might look like. Cornell did say that there are sets of the Bloods and Crips and other gangs who are in talks toward a peace agreement…but having read that sentence you now know as much about it as anyone who attended the conference.

3) The reporters at the event (mostly TV folks) reminded me a lot of the straight but sort of clueless journalists you see trying to interview Dylan, The Stones and The Sex Pistols in documentary footage. They’re tripping all over themselves trying to use the slang, they’re confused about what the person before them represents, they’re asking questions that sort of scrape the surface of the difference between their world and ours but are not really asking any of the questions we all want to.

Toward the end of the conference the N&R’s Allen Johnson changed that, standing up and pointing out that while the Kings at the conference claimed that theirs was a peaceful political movement, a validated member of the Latin Kings is now one of Guilford County’s most wanted and we’ve seen a lot of gang crimes and gang violence from MS-13, another Latino gang that often claims that they’re more an ethnic fraternity than a criminal organization.

Cornell responded to that by essentially saying every group has its bad eggs, but he was looking to build peace.

Let’s hope he’s serious.

Bought David Sedaris’ new book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, over the weekend.

I’ve been reading a chapter or two a night, stretching it out. But it’s tempting to finish the whole thing in one sitting. Good stuff.

Even some of the stuff I’ve read previously in magazines — “Brother, Can You Spare a Tie?” for instance — has been reworked and melded with other things for publication in the book, almost always for the better.

Go pick it up - or get the audio version, because hearing Sedaris perform his own stuff is great.

My favorite George Carlin bit.

I’m going to miss that guy.

Somehow I really want this photo to be real.

The world is a very strange place — and somehow that’s comforting to me.

This morning I found myself climbing over a chain link fence behind a church to get closer to what could have been a live grenade that was found in High Point. And hoping the police wouldn’t catch me doing it.

This afternoon I was shaking hands with David Lauren, son of Ralph Lauren, as he opened RL’s new distribution center in High Point.

Some days this is a very strange job.

Great, strange Chuck Klosterman essay in this month’s Esquire about Norman Mailer, the demise of boxing, fight or flight and, to my great delight, my pet theory that people are rude (and have been getting ruder for decades) because they’re sure you won’t punch them.

From the piece:

“It is impossible to deny that the culture is coarsening. Everyone concedes this — even the people who are happy about it. It is now acceptable to say almost anything, about almost anyone, in a public space, and for no reason whatsoever. There is no line to step over, because such lines no longer exist. And I think those boundaries disappeared the moment people really, truly lost the fear of getting punched in the face. Americans have understood this intellectually for decades, but I don’t think we accepted it in totality until now. Adults are now so insulated by technology (and so protected by modernity) that the possibility of a physical consequence for any action is a psychological nonfactor. We have removed interpersonal fear from day-to-day behavior. Today, boxers are the only people who get hit for fucking up.”

People always think I’m crazy when I say this, but it has always seemed wrong to me that all sorts of behaviors that once would have been thought to be incalculably rude have become almost commonplace in the society but it has become almost unthinkable that you would hit someone for any reason. As someone once said, civilized men are coarser than barbarians because they know they can be rude without having their heads split open, as a general thing.

Even recreational boxing — when I used to box, it was like telling people I enjoyed rape and murder as hobbies. Boxing (and maybe wrestling) are the human sport urge to physically excel and dominate stripped of its dressings - no balls, no goals, no pretty uniforms. Just two people deciding which is physically superior. And for some reason the very idea of that scares the hell out of a lot of people these days.

Nine weeks ago Amanda and I began the Get Healthy Guilford Challenge to eat more fruits and vegetables, exercise more and, hopefully, lose ten pounds in ten weeks.

We began a blog called Cheesefry Nation to share our progress (or lack thereof). It’s been excerpted in the News & Record’s Life section, which has added print readers to the online folks who’ve been giving us tips, encouragement and the occasional scolding.

With one week to go I’m one pound from my goal - ten pounds lighter. I’ve lost about two inches off of my waist and am back in the pants and suits that were fitting too snugly before. I’m feeling better, sleeping better and looking better.

But I’ve decided that when the ten weeks is up, whether I’m ten pounds down or not, I’m going to keep it going. I’m going to try to lose another ten pounds in ten weeks. Because I can, I should and what made this ten pounds hard (to the degree it was hard) was trying to change bad habits I’d accumulated over the course of many years (too much fast food, soda instead of juice or water, eating too much meat and not enough everything else, eating in front of the TV). I haven’t completely licked all of those - though I do have the soda monkey off my back at long last. But I’ve licked enough of them that I think the next ten pounds would come much easier. That would put me down to what I think was my best all time weight — around 200 lbs, much of it muscle. Getting that muscle back will be a major part of my next ten pound leg of this thing — and I think it can be done.

So I found out yesterday that I won the Walter Spearman Award for writing by young journalists, which is given each year by the N.C. Associated Press to one writer in the state.

I’m told I’m the first writer at the N&R to win the award — and it’s nice to have done it my first year out. I looked back on my work over the last year recently for a different awards submission and realized how much really good stuff I’d done. Some of it feels like a long time ago now. Some of it — like the gangs piece that won me this award — seems like it was just yesterday. We’re still at the beginning of this year — but I already feel like I need to catch up and knock out some even better stuff this year.

Amanda just found out she won first place for Environmental Reporting from the New England Press Association for a series she did last year. I predict this time next year she’ll be picking up some North Carolina awards too.

All right — now back to fighting off the flu.

Greensboro blogger Ed Cone points to a story about a Virginia legislator trying to outlaw truck ornamants that resemble…well, bull testicles.

No, really.

I’ve yet to see these things on the road, but apparently a lot of guys (and gals, potentially) with pickup trucks like to hang them from their trailer hitches.

The offending pair:

The legislator says he doesn’t want to have to explain to his granddaughter what these things are supposed to be. To which I say — hope she doesn’t have a dog at home, pal.

Absolutely in bad taste — but if Virginia’s going to begin outlawing that, the legislature is going to be mighty busy…