The Air Up There, Issue One.

Today, I achieved something.

On the surface, while our social net evaporates, far-right assholes run around with impunity…my little thing makes no big impact. But to understand just what this means, I have to tell a little story.

Growing up, I was the nerd, to surprise no one. I sought validation amongst my peers, I played the friend, I wanted to be liked. Academically, I was the one who had to get As. Those things combined to make my young adult life overly complicated and very contradictory.

Anyway, the things that typically visit people like me, overachieving minority kids who have the pressure of making it big and elevating others and who can’t understand how that never comes to fruition, was in full effect for me. Procrastination and perfectionism crept in, and the result was, well, a doubt in anything and everything I did. Is this good enough? Is it perfect?

Anyway, I’m older, and a number of factors have occurred to dean that inner monologue. First, the creatives I’ve allied myself are doing great things, and it’s hard to be around good people doing good things and not want for more. You really take a lot from your peers.

Secondly, a number of great people I know have died, and it became obvious that, frankly, I’m running out of time. I have some medical issues, and tomorrow ain’t promised. Doing work, whether it be a drawing or digital upload or a zine will exist after I’m gone, and it becomes a question of legacy. What do I want to be known for? What can I do to make things better around me? One of my favorite quotes of all time is from Arthur Ashe; it’s very simple.

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.

I may not be able to affect international policy. I may not be able to solve huge societal issues. I don’t have the ears of the 1%. But what I can do is make my people happy. Comfortable. Safe. Show them that the world ain’t all ugly and morose and hopeless. I can write something. I can draw something.

And my zine is me drawing and writing a thing. And I hope it’s a bit of happy for someone.

It’s a beginning for me.

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Trying not to be creepy.

Years ago, I was awash in gangsta rap and trying to impress people who didn’t like themselves, much less me. I was afforded a ton of opportunities, and I got to do a lot of things that I wonder now just what had to slide into place to get me those chances to do those things.

One summer, I got to do a summer program, and I made a number of lifelong friends there. One changed my life in a small, but significant way.

I was well versed in indie comics, scouring a couple of indie comic book stores for titles that appealed to me. What I was unaware of at the time was the existence of zines, self-published tracts made by people with something, anything, to share.

I was in this summer program, and a young lady there shared hers with me, and I was taken aback. I don’t have it anymore, or at least I can’t find it, but I had worn it dog-eared from how many times I had read it. And it was just so new to me; she had writing and some drawings and was going through the usual teenage shit I was going through and lived in a completely different city and I was smitten. Smitten in the way that I felt this connection, I wanted to do the same thing and maybe someone else would find their same connection with my stuff that I did with hers. Also smitten in that she was short and had glasses, and I’ve always been a sucker for short women with glasses.

So one day I’m bored and look up her name, and we have some mutual friends, oddly, and I’m wondering if I should reach out and tell her thank you, now that I’ve (finally) made a zine of my own. Would that be creepy? Would that be unwelcome? Should I let that sleeping dog lie?

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What is lost.

My father turns 84 today.

But he is currently in a memory facility, living out his days confused, under the pall of Alzheimers.

All I would have to say to him – happy birthday, what did you eat yesterday, who am I – would be met with a stare and a questioning look on his face, a face I will grow into if I live to be that long.

There is no need for bringing up memories, or what ifs. No need for reminisces that have been lost in the sands of time to a cruel bitch named Dementia. We have gone beyond the questions every child wonders of their parents and, if they’re lucky, can ask one day.

“Are you proud of me?”

“Did I do okay?”

And the things that well-adjusted kids want to say to their parents.

“You did okay.”

“I’m thankful.”

Even with a man with whom I have…issues with. A man who told me that I wasn’t family, that I wasn’t important, that showed me that being abandoned by those you love is a very real and very possible outcome in life. I can’t talk to him, can’t ask him anything of substance, can’t tell him, at least, thanks for doing his part in making me physically while damaging what he could mentally.

So I’ll wish him a happy birthday from afar, and mourn what was and could have been, and hope for a day where he can sit and find comfort in muddled thoughts. I can hope he eats well, and something at his facility reminds him of something good, something he can’t quite remember, but knows it makes him happy, and he smiles.

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Fun at the MCA.

Now, I love me an art museum.

In Chicago, we have a world class one, and I have a number of opinions on others in other places (the Louvre is overrated, Milwaukee is underrated, LA’s is my first love).

I don’t do contemporary art, for the most part, for reasons I might get into at a later time. Therefore, I haven’t been to the Museum of Contemporary Art in some time, maybe three times in the past 20 years. For comparison, I go to the Art Institute at least once every couple of months.

A friend of mine was in town, and was staying over by the MCA, so we decided to go.

We saw a lot of things, and I maintain that their gift shop is also pretty good, but I was taken by one exhibit in particular that had so much promise and really got across a new meaning of art to me.

So, Paul Pfeiffer does a lot about sports stars and celebrities and wants to examine the connection between us as spectators and them as the watched. The exhibit has a bit of arresting photography and videography; photos of basketball stars edited where they are the only ones in the frame. Videos of the Stanley Cup being hoisted…but with the players edited out. Very arresting stuff.

But what I quickly took a liking to was a work made up of sound. In a work called The Saints, there is a large room with numbers speakers and acoustic amplifiers, and he recorded a stadium of 10,000 people reacting to a soccer match. IN the midst of this huge room, you are the center, you are on the pitch as this raucous, unseen environment resounds around you. We are aware of our great cathedrals of sport, but how many of us are familiar with that sense of being the gladiators competing on the floor of the Colosseum? It was a sense unlike no other, and captured gig tally and in stereo with a number of microphones and played at loud volume, this was unlike most anything I’d absorbed, mainly because this kind of thing is viewed as contemporary art and not, say, avant-garde or other modes of art that are not of the paper/clay/marble varietals.

So, yeah. Sound as art.

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South Side Zine Fest.

This will be a rambling, stream-of-consciousness post…

I’ve been working on stories for a very long time. Stories in comic form, to be more specific, and for a myriad of reasons, I couldn’t get it done. I’d post that I was working on it…and nothing would come of it. I couldn’t get out my own way.

So, I went to the South Side Zine Fest today, mainly to see a good friend of mine who I haven’t physically seen since 2020. I am well-versed in the world of zines; been reading them for years, ever since I became aware of them back in high school last century. (Feels weird to say that.)

Hours later, I’m home with a brain bursting with ideas and a license to make things. The vibe was so positive, so whoelesome. People want to write things down and share them, and that’s a lot more fulfilling than a podcast or a video blog. Having to design your words, deciding what to write and how to present it.

I have a list of things I want to say, I want to share, and as soon as I get done with this first thing, this thing I’ve been working on since the beginning of the year, then I’m going to start wokringon that.

Why now? Why won’t this fail?

Because I’ve seen what it is to be DONE with things. To have them out in the world, and meeting some great people, even as an introvert, is more appealing than the alternative. My boy Jeff would have loved it. I am surrounded by people who would support me. Why wouldn’t I do these things? What is the hold up? While bad people stay winning in this political climate, I can be a bit of good.

So much to do.

Let me get started.

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The world keeps spinning.

He was here a minute ago.

He was endlessly positive, comfy in his skin, funny and smart. He was both the voice of reason and the the first cat to step up to tell you that you really wanted that game, and he would play it with you.

He had a wife. Kids. He was a master storyteller, and told yarns that had us amused and attentive. He had beaten cancer, for fucks sake.

And now he’s gone.

And I’m not going to get over it any time soon. And while now might be too soon for a eulogy, I want to write what I feel through tears and swears, that we were supposed to grow old and talk shit and go places and do things and eat good and laugh long.

I just looked up at the sky. The sun was setting, and it was a beautiful sunset, and he wasn’t here to see it, and that made it all the more impossible to understand that he wasn’t here. How? Why?

He was the best of us, and while the good die young, they leave us behind to feel that empty part of where they would have fit in. And that’s a large piece of empty.

Dammit.

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Out

We hadn’t been there long, in the house my wife and I bought on the Southside of Chicago with our two little girls and big dreams. A couple of years, while I struggled to get a steady job to supplement my wife’s income while still chasing my dream of being a minister and having a church of my own.

Next door was a Ghanaian family. A house full of boys shepherded by a kind mother and a dad who I only saw going to work, never coming home while I was outside in our meager backyard after my daily travails or even going and coming while running errands. The boys were full of energy and yelled and screamed and sang their boy song, but I never heard her yell. It seemed like a house full of love, even though I couldn’t imagine the dad being at home much.

On the opposite side, there was a huge vacant lot, where wild grasses grew and feral cats stalked birds and other small critters. On the other side of that lot was a couple who we happened to meet in our first couple of weeks in the house, after we’d moved our stuff in and was still figuring out where things went. He was tall, she was short, and they seemed nice enough. My wife listened closely as they talked to us about the neighborhood; the school in the next block that wasn’t very good, the apartment building across the street who had comings and goings at all hours.

But me and the husband started talking music, and everything I shared about my love for jazz, he’d mention a name or an album that I was motivated to find, or listen to. I loved Miles and Crane, and when I said so, he looked at his wife in a gesture I later took to mean as permission, a “can I?” She smiled at him and nodded, and despite my wife’s subtle nods, I was pulled into a conversation about music in heneral, and jazz specifically, that had me reaching for a piece of paper to write down the names and titles he had mentioned. He laughed ant my looking around, and said that he’d give me his number so he could just text me the stuff he was talking about.

Anyway, we didn’t hang out after that; just texts inviting me to go record shopping or something he thought I’d like. Once, apparently, they went somewhere, and the wife dropped her phone on the street while getting into the Uber. He texted me to ask me to pick it up and to keep it when they got home. Hours later, we answered the doorbell to a visibly relieved wife, thanking us over and over again for finding her phone and keeping it.

Truth is, Chicago wasn’t working out at all, job-wise or church-wise, and a friend ours advised s to look at Florida. The tax situation was great, and there was a small church, just built a few miles away that needed a pastor. God surely was speaking to us!

So we moved. I had my head down with the details of moving; furniture, moving trucks, utilities accounts, and I didn’t tell anyone that we were going. The Ghanian mom saw me one day amidst boxes and packing tape, and asked, and told us to go with God and all the blessings and all of that goodness.

I didn’t see the other couple at all. DIdn’t really think about them, really. In the summer, they would sit outside on their back porch and drink brown liquor and smoke cigars, and I would wave and yell hello, and they’d wave and say hi back. This was winter though, or fake spring, and they were nowhere to be seen. I had bigger things to do, like shepherding my family to a future that was warmer and with bigger upside.

He did text me once when we were gone, to ask what was up with the For Sale sign. I told him that we had moved, and while we had no issue with Chicago (we actually did) we found a better situation in Florida. He texted me back that he was sorry to see us go, that he wished us all the best of luck.I thought that was it.

A bit after this, my real estate person told me that we had a buyer. In our haste to get south and to make it so the agent could show an empty house, we moved a lot of stuff into the unattached garage. We had to go get it, so we told the girls that we were going to put them at their gram’s house for a few days while we took care of things without them underfoot.

We got back to Chicago in an empty uHaul truck amidst a heatwave. We stayed in the hotel during the day while the sun beat down, enjoying adult time and rest, then as the sun started to dip with the temperature, we headed to the old house. Only a couple days, we told ourself. We had forgotten what all we’d stashed in the tiny, one-and-a-half car garage.

I don’t know why I was surprised, and I don’t know how else to react, but I look up while hauling a rug to the trash and I see the couple sitting out back, sipping and smoking. I said nothing. No hailing, no “hey, just cleaning things out”, no nothing. And they didn’t try to get my attention, say anything at all to mark our return or point out the inevitability of us leaving again.

A friend of mine who plays a lot of online video games told me of a thing he finds funny and so awkward. Every now and again, he pairs with one or more players who seem to get along well, who experience a good run of success or memorable play, and inevitably comes the time where it gets late and someone begs off. “I have work in the morning.” “My girl’s been calling me for a while, I should go deal with that.” “I’m hungry, and them chips and Mountain Dew ain’t cutting it no more.” Everyone will say their goodbyes, languishing in a session that was successful. They’ll go offline, their indicator going from green to dark.

Ten minutes.

*bloop*

They’re back online again.

And here I was, back “online” after leaving, albeit without the good-natured farewells.

I never caught their eye as I toted things back and forth to the uHaul, but I know they saw me. They decided to remain silent as I had, smoking and sipping while faint snippets of their music reached me as I climbed into the cab of the truck to get to the hotel; we would hit the road early in the morning.

I heard Miles’ trumpet and Trane’s sax serenade me as I pulled away.

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More bookstore ruminations.

I’m a sucker for all things South. I admit that, and can do so in print or in pixels. A cover of some barn or plantation house or cotton field piques my interest. A location referenced, whether it be Jackson or Vicksburg or Nashville or Charleston makes me reach. “Y’all” is a soothing tang of a sweet glass of Kool-Aid that welcomes me to flip to the back cover.

I am interested, nay, vested, in stories about my adopted homeland. The unique people, places, and things. The coming to terms with a region that has, from its beginnings, have signaled low intellect, great food, thoughtful and kind people, and mosquitoes the size of small birds. A region replete with its risks and joys, consequences and politics, sauces and crops.

I am hungry for stories of all kinds. The coming of age story. The retirement story. The big city story, of Memphis and N’Awlins and Little Rock and Richmond. The small town, with red dirt and unpaved lanes and the general store run by an affable old guy or the city girl come back to run it after a time being the black sheep of the family. I need that in my eyeballs.

And, eventually, maybe I’ll write my own story. Of the city boy who visited a small corner of his mother’s Mississippi, and all of the family and Walmart’s and Jitney Jungles and Piggly Wigglys that were involved.

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HELLO FREN

I like to think of myself as a good judge of character. I don’t surround myself with bad people, or people who need to be convinced that morality, openness, honesty, and empathy are good things to have in their package of humanity. I don’t have people in my circle who stress me out, or make me question their intelligence, or cause me to make decisions that impugn my own morals and what I believe is right and important.

While I am thankful for all that, for having these people being comfortable parts of my life in the abstract, I am also very happy when it’s not so abstract.

In the past month alone:

-I bought two tickets to the Kendrick/SZA tour stop in Chicago, and my wife couldn’t go, and I knew who to call. A good friend of mine, as deep in the music as I am, was my first call. We had an absolute great time, and there’s a special kind of circumstance to have someone in mind when things happen.

-I was invited to dinner with another friend, and we ended up eating at a tapas spot. While we sat and talked and drank and people watched, she came up with a thought that became an essay that she sent to the New York Times and, well, it got published. In it, I am mentioned, so I can say that, in a small way, I made the New York Times.

-I’ve mentioned that I enjoy my back porch, and sit there whenever I can. What is amazing to me, and wholly appreciated, is when friends come by and share that space with us. Easy conversation, loud laughs, drinks and cigars and music. It is the kind of thing that makes great memories, and to have a roster of people who’ve come over and who wants to come over is a blessing.

-Some time ago, I went down a rabbit hole and found the existence of Carolina Gold rice, a historic foodstuff that was said to be a foundation of the antebellum era. I talked in mixed company about such, and, unbidden, someone sent me some! I cooked it the old way and loved it; you can do it like a risotto or bake it with salt and pepper. Just me going off on a tangent was enough to inspire this friend to investigate it for herself and decide that I should have some.

Friends are blessings.

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Hero origin story.

So, today, I had a Christmas Story moment.

At a bookstore close to where I work was an author event. Damon Young, author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker, was in conversation with Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy and a number of other books, to promote Young’s latest book, an anthology of Black American humor, called That’s How They Get Ya.

The event was delightful; there was a reading, there were jokes, there was introspection. While waiting for the event to start, I read the introduction and a few more pages, and I had to try not to laugh out loud in the store. It was funny, it was poignant, it elicited a response I hoped my work would.

After the reading and Q&A, there was a line to get the books signed. I got in line to get my book signed by Damon, and , well, I’m not proud. I had a total Christmas Story moment. Minus the shooting your eye out, of course.

Basically, what I wanted to ask was tangentially related to how I work. He name-checked a lot of people who contributed to the anthology, willingly praising them as the best of their genres. “Who would I want to do short stories? She got that covered. Why would I want to do poetry when he’s one of the best at it? Let me find my lane and stay in it.” I wanted to know how he persisted amongst his friend group who were so great and talented; why write at all? How can you manage to put pen to paper when it wouldn’t measure up? What if you don’t know your lane?

Instead, I asked something in such a way that was not what I asked and not what he took the question to be. It wasn’t quite “you want a football? How about a football?” but it was damned close.

But, what he did tell me wasn’t completely useless.

When surrounded by greatness, you elevate your game. Some days, you ain’t got it, he admitted. But some days he makes art worthy of the company he keeps.

And that’s what I’ll take with me.

To Kiese’s credit, I mentioned the town where my mother was born, grown up in, and lives south of the Jackson, MS he knows, and he knew what I was talking about IMMEDIATELY. “Oh, she in the COUNTRY!” I thanked him for putting his words down; I’d never read something like Heavy from someone in my age group, and to know that there were cats writing with the same cultural markers, of the same time period I came of age in, and with such force and deftness made me want to write.

And write I shall.

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