THE APOCALYPSE WAS IN '91 ... WE'LL SURVIVE THIS

TACTICAL

Sometimes, I think I am doing disabled wrong.

I have the past few weeks preparing myself for school by waking up earlier and getting out and about my day.  Not that I was lounging around or anything, but with an 8 a.m. class, I need to be used to being ‘on’ in the wee dark hours of the morning.

As much consternation as is going to go on as a result of the recent Presidential election, for the minority and marginalized groups in America, it is still going to be business as usual.  There may be some added spice to things and I worry a bit about some emboldened yobbos harassing me and my blended family in public, but the disappointment is not without understanding that this is not a real surprise, at least, to anyone in a marginalized group, ESPECIALLY black folk.  I recall in the weeks prior to the election, being approached by a woman that trains where I work and asked about what were my thoughts on the contest for President.  Maybe the President-elect had said some heinous thing (among the many that he uttered on the campaign trail) and I know that the comment was one where it was predicated on my acknowledging how disrespectful the utterance was.  I remember that I said that there were a lot of angry people in this country and that they were responding to his politics.  That was as close as I came during the campaign season to letting it be known what I thought was going to happen.

The referendum that identity politics and blaming the “others” are acceptable again couldn’t have been made clearer.  That is where my concern comes from.  All the closet trolls will be out and it's going to feel like “The Strain” or “The Walking Dead” at times for traditional minorities, where a cat can be out and suddenly find themselves among a horde of reactionaries.  I am reminded of being an adolescent, late 70’s-early 80’s, skirting around the fringes of towns like Dearborn, Warren, and Hazel Park, and  the other inner-ring towns outside of Detroit, and knowing where I was and what I was risking.  So between “code-switching” and a list of other tools that have been used to navigate the white male supremacy social power structure, minority groups now will have to learn and build upon the lessons of the past to ensure that they won’t become marginalized after this current turn in the political climate.  At any rate, this is about all the current event/politics conversation that I have for ANYONE right now.

THINGS THAT YOU EXPECT FROM A DIARY

I have never been one to think much about “what could have been”.  Whenever I have spoke of past relationships, it has been a place of analysis, not regret or with second guessing.  If anything, my reexamination of my “so-called love life” was to reset and the foundational self-esteem that I would need for the subsequent journey that brought me to where I am in my life.  It has been about 10 (!?!) years of blogging, and in that time I would have like to believe that I have grown and re-established who I want to be.  Having said that…

There is a hotel opening up in town that is predicated on being able to attract business based on the fitness traveler model… you know, people who fit in the workout and their careers by making fitness a priority.  Seeing it open up after a couple of years it took going up in construction, I thought of one of the two other possible destinations other than Omaha.  I never mentioned either of them prominently prior to this entry because neither of them was self-generated destinations.

See, the motivation behind my leaving Mookie Dee and Michigan was to take control of my own life.  The irrationality of being unable to find a life back home had been something that was a part of my thought processes from my early burglary years.  I have memories of playing basketball with a neighborhood friend and we would “invent” ourselves as star players in cities without pro teams, playing against each other until dark.  The fact that I still remember vividly how we would have our “franchises” in untraditional cities because we both saw our lives being lived elsewhere.  Even then, as a pre-adolescent, Omaha was a place that I could see myself as calling home.

For me to discard an ideation that had long been a part of me… it would have taken more than the slimmest hopes that I find myself elsewhere, compelled by the hope that love would be attached to my finding a destiny.  And what would it have taken for me to go in another direction, other than the Metroplex, other than to Omaha...