A friend of mine asked if I was artwork at my desk, instead of working from home or being off. Because I work in a technical industry, and I yearn not for the mines, but of reams of clean paper and time to write and draw, I said this. They did not realize what I was doing at all, which leads me to believe that they too were yearning for something they had not yet found and didn’t really read what I wrote.

I’m at my desk,
oppressed
by the technology which tests
our resolve and makes us dress
but I must confess,
while I profess to be my best,
I understand that need causes stress
and a childlike state is how I’d regress out this mess.

Rather proud of that.

A professor friend of mine told me that one of her students died in a car accident recently.. The student was in a car with three other young women, and one died, one was unscathed, and the other two were injured.

She said that all four were Chinese, having come over to go to school, and the one who died was a senior in college, due to graduate in June. They all lived together, all from the same area/town/city in China.

The professor went to a memorial thing for the one who died, and it was in a room with ten chairs, arranged in a circle. Clearly a small, intimate gathering, she hugged a couple of the people there and left, not wanting to take up space.

I shudder to imagine; thousands of miles from home, from family and what you knew. Thrust into a foreign land, trying to learn the language and get by while studying to make something of yourself.

Then, all gone.

I cannot fathom how that feels to have ten people show up to cry for you. And, a world away, your parents and family and childhood friends mourn, knowing that they won’t see you again.

I am trying to be more purposeful in the media I consume, and try to drag myself out of the doldrums of watching others create and not doing myself. I am trying not to scroll IG or Pinterest, tagging things I want to draw that other people already have in an attempt to learn or mimic or re-interpret. I am trying to be more…driven to make.

My habits, as far as visual arts go, have been honed over a lifetime on the internet watching other people make awesome things. As far as the literary arts go, I’m usually reading a book and can’t easily pull out or analyze what I’m reading to inspire my own writing.

Then I read this, and it reminded me, much like when I listen to some great rap bars or an exquisitely turned simile, what I want to do with my own words.

I sent it to a few friends, and one called it “chaotic”. That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the style, but it at least evokes a reaction more pointed than “this was all right” or “I ain’t reading all that.”

 Love for a poet resists justification like a canyon resists being captured by an iPhone camera. There’s a fugitive hugeness.

I mean…yes. I get it . Why don’t my words come out like this?

Some might call this a hallucination induced by modern fandom, an effect of the parasocial phenomenon that’s been observed ad nauseam.

I would think of these words…eventually.

But this paragraph here is the pinnacle of this article, which, I will admit, I was not intending to read because of my avarice to its subject matter:

It’s the common mistake of talented people to believe it’s they who possess the talent and not the other way around. Talent is a tenant that collects rent. I don’t say this to undercut her abilities. It’s the opposite: She is talent incarnate, manifestly representative of its boons and its Faustian bargain. Talent reduces you to a host. Your best stuff visits you while you fumble haplessly for pen and paper to take dictation. Your worst stuff? It’s when you try too hard. When you interfere. It’s a cruel arrangement. You are a secretary at best, a captive at worst.

GotDAMN.

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.

Woke up with the thought to run around the city a bit, but decided to go back to my old neighborhood. After my divorce, I got myself a one-bedroom apartment in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago, a densely populated area with a ton of retail and public transport options on the north side of the city.

I ended up walking about 4 miles today, and as I always notice when I’m up there, I enjoy the vibes and what I’m able to do while I’m in the vicinity, but the reality is that those kinds of resources don’t exist on the south side where I live.

I had a list of things I wanted to do, but three were most important. One was to find a bottle of bourbon we can’t seem to find on our side of town. Two and three were more of my vices, namely, going to Unabridged Bookstore and visiting the Chicken Hut, both on Broadway.

I lived in that neighborhood for three years, in the days before Apple Watches and even Fitbits, and while I have no idea how many miles I walked, I stayed fit. The Belmont el stop was about three quarters of a mile away, there was a Walgreens two blocks away, a record store down the block, and a Chipotle on the corner. It was kinda perfect.

People who live there are very jaded with regards to having access to the stuff they have access to, but the old adage of “you don’t miss it til its gone” is pretty stark.

I walked into Unabridged with joy in my heart; I really enjoy bookstores in general, and I really enjoy that they cycle in art books and graphic novels, and their numerous placards explaining why a staff member likes some book or another litter the shelves. It feels like it’s run by people who like books, want you to like books, and will probably be first on the chopping block when neocon assholes decide to target independent bookstores that won’t bend to this anti-intellectualism/anti-“DEI”/anti-queer wave that’s permeating political America.

Anyway, I took my time there, and ended up buying a book and a tote bag with a great pen-and-ink drawing of the distinctive front of the building the bookstore is located. What happened next really made me happy…and sad at the same time.

Outside the front door, is a bench. An actual bench. An actual space where I could sit and rearrange my bags. There is a growing paranoia in urban areas that free seating attracts homeless people; how dare he homeless want to sit down! How dare they be outside! The side effect of this was that no one could sit, no one could rest without buying something in an establishment and basically buying the right to rest.

So I got to sit on that bench, unbothered and unfettered, and I thought about my present. Here I was, years removed from my home being a few blocks away, years removed from Obama and a new uncertain for me in a ton of ways. But my present is also populated by being cognizant of circumstances that made my present possible. Why are there so few benches? And to my wonderment, why can I not have this where I live now?

I got up after taking a breath, and went to Chicken Hut. Chicken Hut is on the corner, and specialized in roasted chicken served with a side, some salsa, and hot pita bread. My half chicken with fountain drink costs $18, and I sat and watched a Spanish broadcast of some soccer game. The fountain machine had Pepsi, and I had multiple cups of a fruit punch/pink lemonade mix.

It was the same meal I had had many times years ago, and when my parents came to visit me, I proudly paid for their quarter chicken with rice meals. It was a link to my past, and it was completely nourished my stomach and my soul; sometimes the good guys win, and in a neighborhood where the Chipotle is gone and a number of avant-garde spots have popped up, their success makes me happy.

As I rode home with my wife’s Chicken Hut order, traveling down Lake Shore Drive through downtown, I am thankful for the opportunity to do what I do, move how I move, and how I got to this point in my life.

I think I understand people a little better in the past two weeks.

Amidst the chaos, confusion, and gnashing of teeth of everyday living, I understand people who want to escape into…anything else. Heavy social media curation. Bingeing movies and shows.

I used to be “how could you put that energy into that kind of stuff while all of THIS is going on?” and just now come to realize that “all of this” will still be going on. After the doom scrolling, and the show is over, or the vices have run out…the present reality is still there. It cannot be fully escaped.

But for 30 minutes or an hour or on a lazy Saturday, that reality can be ignored, and that’s what lets you keep your sanity. To be drawn into fictional lives, to acquit yourself of the mundane, unimportant, bothersome parts of societal relations with others similarly affected…is the only escape some people have.

That said, I am not a fan of the “sports radio” treatment of current events. I am not a fan of the constant rehashing, analysis, and “long time listener, first time caller” interactions from Everyman On The Street. I understand that reactions are an industry unto themselves now, but it’s not an industry I want to invest any time in, no matter what the reaction is or what we’re reacting to.

I think what sums this up can be equaled to a kind of conflict stress. Every day, we are bombarded with YOU WON YOU LOST THINGS SUCK YOU ARE UGLY YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE SKETCHY GET MONEY WATCH THE GAME WATCH THOSE PEOPLE by a ideological media for who this is all a game of clicks and numbers, and who am I to blame anyone for trying to sit out of that as long as they can?

I was outside having a smoke with my wife when I remembered a fond memory of Sundays when I was a kid. Let me tell you..

We would start early with Sunday School. To my mom’s credit, she hated being in church all day, and Sunday School was 9-10:30. She thought it important that I get a little God in my life; plus, she didn’t really like the minister, who was our example of What Not To Be As A Man Of God. So we’d go, leaving Dad at home, and get our God on, and come back.

If there wasn’t a football game to attend, we’d go shopping. We’d take a trip out to Cerritos to Fedco, which was a goverment-employee membership store about 40 minutes away. On the way there, we would turn on KLON 88.1 from Cal State Long Beach, as they played jazz and blues on Sundays. We’d go and get groceries, and.I would be turned loose in the book section as my parents shopped.

We’d leave there and maybe go to Cerritos Mall, or maybe Lakewood Mall for a while, and then back home with KLON playing their music. I’d be in the backseat as we would talk. We’d have great conversations, and I remember feeling…free. Happy. Content.

We’d get home, and Mom would cook early dinner, and we’d eat around 3. Any amount of goodness would away; Mom was, and still is, a master in the kitchen.

Afterwards, I’d help clean up, and they would adjourn to watch TV. I would turn on the little radio in my room and tune in to three radio programs that evening. The first was a spoken word program, kind of like the Moth, where people would tell stories. Secondly would be the Dr Demento Show, where he would play all and any mater of comedic songs and radio bits.

Thirdly, the 24 hour radio news channel would, for an hour, play two 30-minute episodes of old time radio shows. Those shows would vary, but I probably got my love for audio engineering from that show. The Cisco Kid. Green Hornet. The Jack Benny Show. Buck Rogers. I would sit only bed and draw or read, aware that Monday lay on the other side of sleep, but in those days, Monday just meant school, not a soul-crushing job or mandatory interaction with middle management.

As I got older, my bedtime was relaxed, but early on, bedtime was 8pm, and sometimes, I would smuggle my clock radio under the covers, turn the volume down REALLY low, press the speaker against my ear, and listen.

I wonder what it would take to get that peace back, of a routine that centers me, calms me.

Sitting outside with my wife listening to jazz is doing a good job of it now, though.

Sit and think with a drink about how I’m gonna win.

I may have waxed poetic about this space before in this space, but allow me this indulgence..

Flash back to 2020, and I was sent home at the beginning of Covid, as the world paused.My wife and I had a small porch in the back, but the area was small. We nestled next to our grill as we sat outside and read and talked. We both realized that outdoors was a great place to be, as we began to get used to this new reality of working from home.

So we contracted to expand our back porch. Construction took two days, and after it was done, we had gone from a small area to something more expansive, something we could fit chairs and a couch and an umbrella. We spent that summer outside when we could, in between Zoom meetings and me running into the office, being an Essential Worker.

We call it the best investment we’ve made, and we have spent many evenings outside, sipping drinks of various alcoholic content and indulging in cigars. I bought a small speaker and now things were on and popping. Since then, we’ve had friends over and made a ton of great memories. A lot of great conversations. More than a few musical premieres – the Kendrick diss records were first played out here to our delight – and we hid under the umbrella for more than a few light rain showers.

It is also a great introspective spot, to read and think. And tonight, while enjoying my cigar and reading an issue of the Bitter Southerner, I took time to think on two articles in Issue #7, published earlier this year.

In one article was the story of documentary photographer Paul Kwilecki, who spent his life in a rural Georgia county and took pictures of its 623 square mile area; its people, its woods, its buildings. His images are considered. vital to understanding not only that place, but the rural South. He’s not a household name, and he’s an ancestor now, but there is renewed interest in his photographs and his writings. He attained a bit of commercial success, so he didn’t die penniless or anything, but he was a known introvert who lived very much inside his head. I identified with that.

In another article with cover subject André 3000, written before the release of his flute album New Blue Sun, he says the things us fans have heard a million times about the work. How he’s exploring, how he’s excited to do something new. The interviewer asks him about his legacy, and if this impacts his p[lace in the hip-hop pantheon. And he says a thing that resonated so hard with me.

“A lineage lets me know I’m human. My life meant something. My trying times, my fucked-up times in this world has meant something. I wasn’t just here.”

Kwilecki was a man who spent 60+ years documenting his hometown and its environs, and is largely unknown outside the region and in a very specific genre of photography. But he existed, and contributed. He wasn’t just here; he MADE things. He left a legacy. He did great work worthy of study, and it sounds like he was satisfied with that.

We all know Dre 3K; also an introvert, but his music reached every corner of the globe. Two very different men, different impact, but both men created a legacy. Both men were not “just here”.

And every day, I’m trying to do the same. Leave a legacy, if not of work, but a cadre of people who can tell others that I was here. That I did, or said, or was something that lives on after me.

Don’t be “just here”.

I am only human, so I abhor stressful or uncomfy situations for the most part. I learned early on that I have a tool in the box that lessens the emotional pain that would come before inevitable split or breakup or traumatic experience.

I’ve learned it’s called emotional disconnection. Gradually, you stop caring. Not about the person, but about the situation. You start looking forward to the end. You become deadened to present circumstances and you focus solely on physical survival. Eventually, when things fall apart, then you’re not as invested, not as involved, and it’s easier to extricate.

Anyway, I’ve emotionally divested from my bio dad a while ago. After being hurt so many times by his actions and inaction, I withdrew. I wanted him to live his life, safe and happy and whatnot, but I couldn’t continue to involve myself with a man who made me doubt my own worth. Was I worth love? Was I worth being listened to? Was I even a good son?

And then the dementia kicked in.

And like that, all avenues for resolution closed. I was left to speculate what he meant, a loop of interactions playing where I could only imagine his intentions and motivations. Because the door of answers had closed; at any point during the day, my father would proclaim that he was just a few blocks from his childhood home, that people around him had worked with him or gone to school with him. All things that were not true, but his brain had told him the truth.

At a few points, though, clarity kicked in, and he remembered. When visiting recently, he remembered me. He remembered who my mother was. He remembered my mother’s brother. And just when things were going really well, he turned to the wooded area that surrounds the facility and proclaimed that he had run those woods as a child.

Anyway, he stayed with my sister for a while before she got him into the facility, and she was cleaning up that room, and found a note he had written to himself.

Text reads (in my father’s pretty decent handwriting):

“Think I have missed appointment for my eye dr

Don’t know what to do now.
May God show me a way because I really need it.”

A moment of clarity from a man who hadn’t experienced it in a very long time. A note of sorrow, a feeling of helplessness, torn out of a notebook. A sense of vulnerability, of fear, amidst his brain fog of mixed memories and electrons not connecting anymore, losing more by the second.

I read this, and I cried. I was dedicated to his care, keeping up with my sister as she served as the local caregiver and working through the issue of his business and resources as those he supported moved on from him or waited in the wings for the windfall they were sure was coming as soon as he stopped drawing breath.

He wasn’t the doddering senior I had convinced myself he was, at least not all of the time. Every now and again, he felt fear. He felt unsafe, uncared for, confused. And once again, I felt that I had failed him.

That’s a bad feeling.

In a few weeks, I’m flying back to Southern California where I grew up, and I am nervous.

Why am I nervous? I think it comes down to the fact that I’m there for a finite time, and I want to do all of the things. See my people, eat the food, be outside. Do the things, see the sights, drink the drinks.

What I want to do and what I have time to do may be two different things. I have a list of people I’d love to see, but I’m not sure I’ll see them all. And that sucks; I come 2000 miles to see and hug on certain people, and there is potential that I won’t get to.

I suppose this is completely a first world problem that I’m traveling and have these issues at all. Still a tough pill to swallow.