Broken as we may be, we move egghead, not finishing out just what part is broken, what part is necessary for operation until we have completed our turns and have the time and energy for introspection….

I’m completely aware of the phenomenal fiction of the 50-50 relationship, the friendship that never really evens out, but the relationship where one puts more into it, the “I’m not into you as much as you’re into me.” I was very aware of it in the romantic space, having gone through that in my history, but what is a romance but friendship expanded and ballooned into something more and bigger?

I have passed my 30th year of knowing some people, of having them in my friend group and circle since my days at my alma mater. These people have seen me through some dark times and good, and each one of them has a specific history and events that we can laugh about and recall with less and less detail as the time goes by.

Because people are scattered hither and yon, I don’t see these people as much as I would like, being great people to hang with, so I see them once a year, if that. I was surprised to learn that someone who I counted in one of my close circles had a rather life-altering thing happen, and I learned about it almost two years later. I’m not saying I’m on the call list for news of magnitude, but it made me think of something very particular.

As a friend, you are owed nothing from your friends that they are not willing or able to give. In my low, depressed days, I wondered out loud if anyone owed me anything, if anyone made space for me that I wasn’t related to. And this reminded me of where I was in that person’s life, which, of course, led me to think about other relationships. Where was I welcome? When did “out of sight, out of mind” kick in for these people, where an email or IM remained unsent as they went about their lives?

But in these late nights I am reminded of something that occurred to me during those darker days; they’re not into me like I was into them. But, here’s where maturity and experience start talking.

That’s okay they don’t.

I’m not owed. I can’t come to expect what isn’t mine to give. That’s self-centered of me, selfish and reductive. How can I expect you, demand you like me and put the effort onto our relationship that I do? And who’s to say that’s what needs to happen?

I’m older now, where I’m aware that some people are here for a season. Some are here briefly. Some are here for longer, but everyone is trying to find their joy and peace, and maybe I’m not part of that. Zora Neale Hurston mentioned, in opposition to racism, that she didn’t understand why white people specifically wouldn’t want the pleasure of her company, but I think that applies to friendships of all hues. I fooled myself into thinking that my presence was pleasurable for some people, and the antics of 20 year old me just don’t hit the same as almost-50 year me.

And that’s okay. I can’t lie and saying hat coming to this realization doesn’t hurt in some way, because we all like to imagine ourselves little stars in our galaxies of interconnected people and histories, but that’s not how things work in the scheme of things. People have shit to do. People want to feel comfy with their people, and navigate their own notions and relationships.

As an ancillary to these thoughts, I decided to take off the announcement of my birthday from social media. I realized something about me; I keep my people’s birthdays in my contacts. If Zuck et al pulled the plug on things tomorrow, I have the birthdays of almost 200 people saved. Why? Because it is important to me to be able to celebrate these people’s existence in my life on a day that, more likely than not, they are in a celebratory mood.

Now, I used to celebrate my birthday alone, wondering who would care while secretly reloading the Facebook page to see who took the time to write a line to tell me happy birthday. I’m done. I’m of the position now that “if you know, you know.” I have simply come to the conclusion that the people who make space for me have that space of their own volition and because they want to, not because of some obligation.

I have long said that I just need three people to remember my birthday; my mom, my sister, and my wife, and everyone else is gravy. Those three remembered, and I have to come to terms with hat fact that this year, some people went missing. That some people who I’ve made room for in my life couldn’t be bothered, and while it hurts, life contains those. Not everything is sugar and spice and all things nice. Sometimes you get reminded that people have moved on and maybe you aren’t the best for them in a world where happiness is in short supply, people’s time is even moire strained, and everyone’s just trying to make it to the next day.

You don’r matter to everyone. In my callous singledom, I would say “it is what it is” but behind that mask of hurt is a sort of relief that my energy doesn’t have to go towards people who don’t make that time. Now, I will love them forever for the time we had, as long as they didn’t do some outlandish shit that caused them to be banished from my contacts. I will be happy to see them and still give out hugs and laugh at old times and ask about their parents and ruminate on events whose details are lost in memory. But those communications, those “how are you? I was thinking about you” are going to be less as I realize that I’m not being sought out in the same way.

I’m not into you like you are me.

And that’s okay.

-So, my birthday has come and gone. I am 49 years old now.

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, because Jan 1 means nothing to me. What does mean something is my birthday, as I try to improve on the last year.

I have things I want to do, and the run up to 50 should be…something. Interesting? Tiring? They say God laughs at plans, but it doesn’t stop us from trying, does it?

I battle brain chemistry, inertia, history, and a lot more to move forward, or feel like I’m moving forward. I’ve cast off some people who’ve had access to me, people who clouded my outlook with a lot of negativity. That’s good.

I move forward in time with hope, a hope not yet dashed by the state of the world or my place in it. We’ll see where I end up when it’s all said and done.

Over this weekend, I went to a wedding for a good friend of mine. This person is a fellow creative I’ve known for over 25 years, and his career trajectory is pointing up. He was marrying a wonderful woman who we think the world of, and the ongoing theme they were telling us about in preparation mirrored what I think anyone who is getting married understands.

There are certain parts of a wedding that are important to people. Some people spare no expense with the photograph. Some want the fairytale setting. My man was concerned with one thing: the music. He wanted the music to be on point.

In his line of work, and among his friend group, he’s met a ton of musicians and music business people. It is a testament to him that these people respect him and happen to show up when he calls for help.

So, the night before the wedding, after the wedding rehearsal, he invited us over for pizza and record playing. 18 hours before the wedding was scheduled, we went over to his house to kick it.

We walk in, and he’s introducing us to people, some of whom I remember, some I don’t, and I notice one cat is standing at the record player, clearly in charge of it and playing from a thick stack of records. My man introduces him. I won’t say names, but it is a cat whose music I’ve loved for 20+ years. Dude is gracious with the nice to meet you how you doing, and I have to fight my fanboy impulse REALLY hard.

My friend worked with him in the past, so he knows him, but I had no idea he was showing up.

We end up sitting for hours, vibing out to great music, DJs by this Grammy nominee.

Fast forward to wedding day. It’s being held at their house in their backyard. At some point, I idly wonder if anyone else from the roster of artists my friend has dealt with is going to show up. Spoiler: yes. So now there are TWO people whose music I’ve loved at my man’s wedding, and I am starstruck. Two Grammy nominees, and I’m trying not to stare. I’m trying to be cool and not run over and gush, and lose my shit. Gotta play it cool.

What makes the wedding, besides all of the love, was my man’s focus, which was the music. The DJ he got is internationally known, a Chicago icon – and JUST SO HAPPENS to be a friend of his. And that man rocked for HOURS.

When we got home. my wife and I were talking, and she said that I bring interesting people into her life. My friend group runs a huge gamut, but at the end of the day, they’re great people. Most of them know people, or are people to know themselves. I didn’t mean for that to happen, it just so happened I found these people, or they found me, and we clicked and vibed and boom.

I think what’s notable here is not really that the people I know know good people, or famous people, or even semi-famous. I think what’s notable is that these people’s sense of self, of integrity, of being sold people attracts others who see that and want to be around that. I pick well, and my life is richer for it, and I am eternally grateful and thankful.

The setting isn’t pleasant, I know. But sometimes a man gotta do what he gotta do when he wants to think, y’know?

I push this cart around all day, cleaning the halls and classrooms at this college, and boy let me tell you, the stupid. Now, I ain’t no scientist or nothin, barely got out of high school., but these folk have got mayo for brains. And they think they smart! Thousands of dollars in laptops and nice clothes and new phones, but aint a thought between em all worth a good damn.

My boss says to remember that they’re paying my salary, but as I clean up after a “breakout session” or wipe down the lunch tables, I hear them chattering nonstop. And they ain’t saying shit! There are no big ideas, or passionate causes besides getting laid and getting drunk. They think I’m not listening, if they even see me at all. That’s fine though, I can do my work in peace and I can report at the end of the day that I left whatever and wherever spic and span. But you can’t help but feel that energy, all that young energy.

They say youth is wasted on the young, and I wanna tell these kids. I wanna tell em to study, yeah, that’;s what all grown ups tell kids. But I wanna tell them to do other shit, too. Really read. Really listen. Really figure yourself out, because that’s the good shit. That’s when you know you got the world where you want it and you know what to do to get where you wanna go.

I heard that kind of talk back in the day. Back when I had family, parents who loved me and my boys who were trying to figure out what we were gonna do.We were bad, we thought, and the world better waytch out, because we were here to fuck and get money and take it easy.

They ain’t here no more. And if they were, they’d be in my same boat, too old to have a lot of time to put that knowledge to good use.

Every now and again, I find a bathroom, away from the classrooms in a little used corner of this building. I think it’s two stories underground, and the only people I see down there ever are the kind of student that is so deep in the books you couldn’t pull they ass out with a tow truck. It’s a tiny bathroom, one you can lock. I clean it when it has to be cleaned, when I need some time to myself, I go down there. I’ve had to clean it maybe three times in the year or so I’ve been here, signs that someone’s used it, most usually splashed water at the sink and the remnants of some guy who thought they dick was so big they didn’t get up in the urinal and not drip pee on the floor.

I have a little stool on my cart, and I got it because I told the boss that I can’t reach some high spots in the classrooms, but I grab it, go into this bathroom in the sub-basement of the building, lock the door, and sit on that stool, and think. Sometimes I pray, but sometimes I sit and stare at the tiles on the walls until I make my vision go blurry. I keep meaning to bring a little notepad to write some thoughts down, but the boss would be asking me questions about what it is I’m writing, so fuck that.

I sit and think of what could have been. Who could have been.

And if the police could ever find me down here.

This is brought about by an introduction to a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while. Eudora Welty, writer and Mississippian, who wrote a ton of things that have been celebrated as part of the American and specifically Southern Gothic tradition, wrote a small book called On Writing. As I’ve been consuming books about writing and getting my own thoughts out of my head in as productive and eloquent way as I can, I gravitated towards the book for the name, the author, and its size. One hundred and six pages? Who could say no to that?

What roused my ire, though, was something written even before I got to her words. In the introduction, an author of some renown – I’ve never heard of him, but he’s writing the intro to this book, so who the hell am I? – says something that irked the hell out of me.

The one thing most evident in her criticism is good sense.

And tear us what is so frequently lacking in the critics of the day, the era that has been termed postmodern, and that I have elsewhere called post-sensical. It is an overly politicized era…Everything is politics, the professor tells us, and the writer is morally bound to expose this or that injustice. And in keeping with this morality, writers who have gone before us are lifted or devalued by how well they can withstand the heresy-hunting party line: for instance Joseph Conrad was an imperialist, according to this feature of the critical climate, and Faulkner was a racist.”

I couldn’t help but read this with the voice and tone of a plantation owner, snickering that his slaves were “triggered” by daring to question a person’s position on slavery or racism, or some Mad Men chad who is amused by “little women” daring to think outside their station as baby factories.

This has the tack of pooh-poohing every social movement that dares cast people as what they were. Daring to call a spade a spade. Daring to ado the biography of great men that may’ve contributed to the American canon, but were horrible, horrible people. Men like this , who were never in the crosshairs of those bigots, racists and misogynists, want to tell the world that it wasn’t really a big deal. That the work stands on its own and that the new knowledge is immaterial to the judgement of the individual, who surely didn’t anything but just write, you know.

To preface this in a book penned by Eudora Welty, what least wasn’t a virulent racist and seemed very not so, was surely a choice. How dare we judge people on the standards of today! My thing is, good people are good people, and shall be so by any measure of time or morality. All of these celebrated writers had opportunities to be good people, to not be racist assholes or petty “alpha” men or cheerleading colonialism. but I’m supposed to discount that they weren’t? The chance to be a good person, to disavow all of these things that had real consequences for other people, was possible! Sure, it may have been hard to hang with Hemingway and not be a raging asshole, racist, womanizer, or whatever because of peer pressure, but it was POSSIBLE to not be.

I’m not giving judos for shit you’re SUPPOSED to do. Your creative output is one thing, but how you lived as a person certainly influences how I engage with the work and, indeed, colors my opinion of you. Those who were never the targets are free to kvetch about how unfair this is, or how I don’t get it, or rail about “kids these days are so sensitive!” but, at the end of the day, these people were never the targets of these bad-acting people who made celebrated art and thusly, their opinions are for shit.

So, this is the intersection of health and taste and culture and the alchemy of cooking, and it’s probably less important than I’m making it out to be, but I’m gutted.

The first time I tried to make red beans and rice, a staple of Black American cooking, I didn’t have the right pot. Preparation requires a pot with a secure lid, insulating the beans in a cycle of steam and submerging in flavored water that soaks into the beans, crating a delicious and viscous amalgam of flavor. Add in pieces of andouille sausage or a turkey wing, and you have an additional hit of flavor.

So, my first attempt was…unsuccessful. I will not go into detail as to how hard the fail was in this space.

So, I got another pot. Tested the lid. Was ready. And since my wife doesn’t eat rice or beans, I had to adjust my recipe from a family to just me. I had it. I thought I did, anyway.

This would be the first try in trying to incorporate beans and rice into my diet, a move that would be welcome to my blood pressure numbers and my kidney health, things I have to look out for now. A dish I have fond memories of, tasted everywhere from Southern transplants to Nor’easter pretenders.

The secondd try didn’t go as planned either. The pot I thought was ready for the job…was not. The results were inedible, and I had to find other evening sustenance.

I am in the middle of my cooking era, an era I didn’t have as a kid. My mother is a master cook, but wanted me out of the kitchen and out of her way, so I didn’t learn her brand of food alchemy. As I got older and wanted to make some of these things myself, I was woefully behind.

There’s a couple of things I’ve figured out how to make, and with repetition I feel that I’m pretty good at. I’d like to add red beans and rice to my repertoire, but until I get the right tools, that’s not happening. The saying is that a poor workman blames his tools, but you can only hammer in nails with the butt end of a screwdriver for so long ebfore you give up and just have to get a hammer.

Wish me luck! I’ll get it done sooner than later.

One of my favorite joints by the artist Common is a collaboration with the producer Hi-Tek, called “Tekzilla“.

Common tells a story of a run-in with a rival while he’s out alone at night. What speaks to me is that he’s alone, by himself, “rapping to myself cause there was no one to rap to”. That sense of being by yourself, of moving about the city alone resonated with me because that was me on many occasions.

In darker mental days, I wouldn’t want to go home, dreading what was there, or not there. So I’d get off from work and try to find something to do, somewhere to go, all trying to postpone that trip home.

Being an introvert, not trying to talk to random strangers. Walking dark and lighted streets, dipping into bars and late night eateries. This also got expensive, as you can imagine.

Walking the streets, riding the rails, jumping on a bus going in a nebulous direction..because I didn’t want to go home and face what was there and whatever that meant.

At some point, you realize that the barbs aren’t meant for you personally. That the sting of accusations and passive-aggressiveness and whispered “I heard that” isn’t personal. It’s brain chemistry gone awry, trying to make sense of what ceased to do so a while ago. Neurons firing but not connecting, synapses blown through overwork or misuse or circumstance.

I got roundly attacked by a relative recently, and I was hurt and confused. A huge block of text delivered to my phone, stating that, in so many words, that not only was I a shit person, but I’ve BEEN a shit person for a while, and even though my mother has defended me in rooms I’m not in, she’s wrong too, because I wasn’t shit, am not currently shit, and won’t be shit in any future.

Taken as a one-off, the still river proves deep. I was forced to examine my interactions and history; had I done something I didn’t remember? Was some machination taken the wrong way?

But the abuse continued to other targets, and my incident wasn’t isolated anymore. Lashing out, bringing up old incidents, reopening old wounds. Suddenly, my situation wasn’t viewed as an isolated incident, but a pattern. A new pattern this family member had gone to where no one was safe and everyone was an enemy. Old slights were magnified. Outright lies were pushed, and this family member is, as of this writing, estranged from most o the family and writing huge text missives about how and why they feel all alone and no one understands and they feel burdened and have to do everything while making up situations where this wasn’t true in the first place.

But we watch, not out of fascination, but wondering how long a firework can go off, spewing sparks on all and sundry, finally giving way to becoming an inert husk. How long does this go on? Who else gets hurt?

Guess we’ll see.

The piece of white paper sits on my drawing desk. Untouched, full of promise.

How’s the light? I adjust the blinds to aim sunlight at my drawing surface. Or, adjust my desk lamp to be warm light, or do I want cool?

Where are my supplies? What do I want to use? I have so many kinds of pencils. Water-soluble, colored, graphite from 6H to 6B. If I wanna do watercolor, I have my brushes. Oh, I need water, duh. And where is my pencil sharpener, these pencils are dull as hell.

Maybe I wanna work in ink. I have so many pens! Felt tip, writing, calligraphy, chisel. Sharpies, in four different sizes, but all the trusty black ink. I have these new Japanese pens too, that I haven’t used yet. Huh, when was the last time I bought from JetPens? Maybe I should use the stuff I bought from them first.

Nah.

Oh, deeper in this drawer is this gouache sticks. I have no idea where I got these; I’ve never even used these. But I have them, maybe I should do something with them? 12 colors. I have to watch a few videos on YouTube to see how to even use these. What does work made with these look like? Is it my style? Is it any more than caricatures or scenery? I’ll get to that eventually, but maybe not now.

Wait! I gotta have background noise. I would put on Youtube, but I don’t have Premium, so ads will keep popping up, and I don’t want that. I could put on some vinyl, but I’ll have to get up to turn the record over every now and again. I can play music from my computer, and use my phone to control its I can skip songs and play what I want. Great! Finally something I can move forward with.

Where was I?

The piece of white paper sits on my drawing desk. Untouched, full of promise.

I mean, it is.

What other human emotion do people actively run away from, lest they get some of it on them? Emotion; people also run away from disabled people, lest they catch the disableds themselves. But grief, as an emotion, is so unique and human, yet we really don’t understand it or know how to really deal with it.

It’s a scar that never goes away, never crusts over, never ceases to be. The analogy I picked up on was that grief is like a rock in the bottle of your life. As you get older and do more stuff and have more things happen, the bottle gets bigger, but that rock remains its same size. It’s not as big as how it was when it popped up, proportionally, but it also isn’t getting smaller in a real way.

Anyway, I’m thinking about this because I find myself around people going through grief, and I don’t really know what to do. “Let me know if you need anything” doesn’t cover what is needed, really. I’ve heard a lot about just..DOING things, mainly because the person who needs the grace and help isn’t really thinking straight.

When my stepdad died, I cam down home, and I’ve never seen my mom the way she was. They had been married more than 30 years, and she forgot his middle name for the forms we had to fill out. I’m glad I was there to help out with the legal and paperwork and funeral details and stuff, but that rock in my bottle of life ain’t smaller. It’s still a lump I deal with when something reminds me of him, or a realization that he would have liked to see what I was seeing or hear about what I was doing.

Every now and again, I go back to the words of one of my friends who had her husband die unexpectedly and painfully.

From Maya

People keep asking what they can do for me and for <their kid>, and I hardly know what to say. Mostly I just want people to take their shock and grief and disbelief, and use it to make their own lives better and be more prepared. Get life insurance. Don’t put off seeing the doctor. Spend extra time with your family instead of working so hard. Vaccinate your kids for HPV (<his> cancer was not HPV-related, but most head and neck cancers are, and you can vaccinate your kid against cancer, so why not do it!). Organize your freaking passwords. We knew this day was coming for over six months and we were still almost entirely unprepared. Even the dying think they have more time. Please learn from us, please please please. None of us are leading the charmed life we think we are.

So, in this newest case, my friend’s wife is going through it, and I would like to think that, if I shuffle off this mortal coil, my friends would want to make sure that my wife and mom are okay. But what can I do, right now?

Words without action is meaningless, and all the good wishes in the world don’t mean anything if no one is being helped. I’ll figure it out.