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...

THINGS THAT I THINK I THINK

ENTERTAINMENT ISSUE! (or why it can be hard to watch a movie with me!)

Last Saturday I went to the blues concert headlined by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings at Stinson Park.  The location was changed because of the flooding along the Missouri River and I rode my bike there and hung out beneath the ‘hot, tropical sun’ from 4 p.m until the concert was over at 10:30 p.m!  Again, it was a very convivial atmosphere, with people of all ages, couples and families all together having a good time.

The opening acts were rather pedestrian and of course I am going to comment about the ethnic composition of the crowd.  I wonder if blacks still identify with blues music as the blues receives scant support from the community.  Most of the blues fairs I have gone to in my lifetime have all been attended by a majority white audience and this was no exception, even with such a well-known act headlining a FREE show.

Sharon Jones is a strong performer.  She carries the additional sobriquet of ‘the female James Brown’, given to her because she brings so much energy to her show, and she did not disappoint.  I tried to get a good picture of her but she DOES NOT STAND STILL!  She was all over the place and the crowd in front of the stage fed off of her energy.  Though my bootleg camera did not take a good picture of most of the dancers, the folks did semi-goad me into moving awkwardly with a woman who ‘called me out’ and was enjoying herself.  Even without having any rhythm of my own, I did surrender to the moment, joining in with the other awkward bodies attempting to sway to the music.

Or should I have said the feeling.  That is really what I was doing.  Everyone was having a good time and I went ahead and let myself go with the flow and I had a good time, too!  The ride back was an adrenaline rush too, because I rarely ride through that area of town, even though it is the proverbial stone’s throw away, I was riding ‘thataway’ until I got home.

REALLY..?  I DON’T REMEMBER THAT IN HISTORY BOOKS!

I have never been a fan of the DC Comic Universe and since I got out of comics just as the fan/geek/nerd culture blew up, I can’t compare it against any other publishing company other than Marvel Comics.  Nebraska came by last night and treated me to a show and there were several issues I had with the movie, 'Captain America: The First Avenger'.

First, it is already being given a ‘pass’ as it is a fantasy retelling of an alternate history that never occurred (at least not in this reality string), and one of the things that makes fantasy believable is how it well it integrates the possible with this reality.  Star Trek, which unlike many of the science fiction entertainment vehicles that predated it, actually PREDICTED technology that was to come after it (or did anyone forget that the space shuttle FIRST appeared on that show and the maiden shuttle was called ‘Enterprise’, in honor of its source of inspiration?).  The communicators and tri-corders are nothing if not the cell phones and I-Pads that are in use today. In short, the science as well as the social constructs on the show that it presaged was the multicultural society that we are moving to today.  UNLIKE the world that was supposedly being portrayed in the movie ‘First Avenger’, which had scenes that had no basis in the social fact of its time.

I am not going to give anymore of a ‘spoiler’(but my man Chauncey is the one who could really ruin the movie for you, if you want!) than that because that isn’t where I am going with this.  But if we are going to gig the Tea Baggers and the viewers of Faux News for play loose with historical facts and making up some history out of whole cloth, then fair is fair, and you have to call bullsh*t wherever it pops up.  Such revision is as dangerous as the make believe history of a Sarah Palin or anyone else of conservative ideology (or religious… this is a blog of the un-Christlike opinions of those who profess to be Christian and/or conservative).  For instance, when I saw Idris Elba cast as Heimdall in the ‘Thor’ movie, I was so like WTF!!  This is the kind of treatment that drives and fuels the philosophical beliefs of supremacist groups.  ‘Multicultural washing’ history does not make it any more true than the teaching of intelligent design over evolutionary theory, and it does as much damage as socially as ‘ID’ does to science.

Putting ‘ethnic-face’ on a few characters is as lazy as a Tea Bag historian and is another step down the slippery slope of the kind of culture controls that my main man George Orwell wrote about… sure, there were other writers who wrote about the bleakness of the future, like Huxley did in ‘Brave New World’.  But for me, ‘1984’ is as accurate as it gets (and don’t get me started on Alvin Toffler!!).  What I used to wonder when I first read the book in the shadows of a world still gripped by the Cold War.  China was still a inefficient, 2^nd rate power both economically and industrially, and Europe was… well, it was as it is, beset by internal issues and facing the consequences of governments social commitments to its citizens.  I did not see where the three powers of Eastasia, Eurasia and Oceania began or where the constant wars between the superpowers would be fought.  But I can easily envision the mineral-rich African Continent becoming a battlefield and yes, I got all that from watching the ‘innocent’ re-imagining of history done in ‘Captain America: First Avenger’. 

AS FAR AS HOW I’M LIVING..?

Well, it is not luxiuous or lazy.  The new medication that I am on is taking a little bit of time for me to get used to, not to mention the added stress of the Debt Ceiling crisis.  In fact, that is part of why I trend on race, as it is something that is more easily understood than the fiction that is the monetary system.  You have got to wonder how long it is going to last and what role it is playing in our ‘have – have not’ societies.

No, I did not weigh down Nebraska with all the stray thoughts I had colliding in my head... saved most of that for the journal!  Anywho, I hope to see you all later (visiting blogs)… unless, that is, I see you first!

TOPICAL THOUGHTS... KIND OF...

GABBY GIFFORD



A lot of people are going to utilize this tragedy to push politicized agendas when there is ALWAYS going to be something to for someone to latch onto. Hell, I have been listening to reports about the areas of her injury that was affected and it made ME think about what is going on with me. I don’t think of the words or have the ability to verbalize the words that I choose at all times and that could be due to something malfunctioning in my speech center, one of the areas that may be injured in the Congresswoman.



But when I began thinking about what went down in AZ, the name ‘John Wilkes Booth’ flashed in my mind. Not that it was an exact ‘match’ but what it said to me was that I needed to de-politicize my perspective and look at this in a way that I could gain my own comprehension prior to what I would read after everyone started their shouting (although this morning I did Face Book some stuff along with David Dust’s entry on the shooting featuring Keith Olberman’s commentary from MSNBC).



Now I do think the climate has changed in politics. But is politics not the reflection of society? That is where I see the larger problem and why it is beyond the simple heated politics of the day. Because I likened the incident to the Squeaky Fromme attempt on President Ford or maybe a closer incident to examine, Mark David Chapman. This was a Travis Bickle… who simply would not take it anymore.



But what does he feel compelled to take? What does he feel is being forced upon him?? While it is fair to say that elements of political discourse may have given this person some direction for him to vent his emotional turmoil, what made him this way to begin with?? I don’t think that stupid Sarah Palin and her mock ‘targeting’ of the Congresswoman was the only reason for Jared Loughner to have committed the acts that he did. This was the fruit borne of a seed planted a long time ago that grew just as billions of other seeds have bloomed into what we call humanity.

AND THE POOR GET THE PICTURE

Yeah… Mark David or Travis… people who found themselves on the fringes of society prolly as a child and never found a way to be included in the way of the world. Blaming the politics that are a part of this tragic incident is to miss the bigger picture of the pressure being exerted on those beneath the ceiling of the top wage-earners in society and the lack of connection among human beings in this increasingly technocratic world.

What I can’t be sure of is whether or not the kind of behavior that is studied in places like the BAU on ‘Criminal Minds’ and other places that determine what we choose to buy and what we choose to wear, is unique to human’s as a species. I mean there are mother lions who go on to be ‘cub killers’. Can we actually say that we know enough about how we behave to venture a guess at to where the causes for stuff like this lie in the perpetrators?

Look, it did not take my injury to know that less thought is given about people who not only don’t fit in but don’t want to fit in either. That has been an underlying tangent to my journey, that there is not a place for those who float in-between the many segments of society. What happens when someone finds themselves falling through each and every layer of cheesecloth and finds themselves as truly isolated as person can be?


One of the problems that I had with dealing with Mookie Dee and at my Dad’s house was being isolated around people. That wasn’t anything new… I have long felt that way, even among my blood relations (irony or no this news may be, but things with my step-folk were not that way… got a message from my step-sister that verifies what I know about those relationships) that I was going to fall in the cracks and creases… I accepted that and moved on. Maybe because I was/am highly socialized so that my furstrations with socialization did not spin me towards such mayhem and I never fell into a sociopathy that I acted on.  But there were plenty of unidentified pathways on my road that did not lead to Omaha, I know that much. 


The blog that I found about the writing of a 17 year-old nerd is how nostalgia looks when you are among the well-adjusted and  you look back. But what is it when you never find a place in the world even as you are urged to continue persevere fruitlessly? Kind of like the ‘raisin in the sun’ thingy, isn’t it??


I don’t even think that this is a case of our collective need for understanding striving for a hand-hold to stop the spinning that helps drive the media frenzy. The delicate balance of ego and insecurity that comes from complete self-awareness, something that only a select and I mean a very select few humans dare to walk, thrown in disarray when something like this happens. And it isn’t that we don’t know why these things happen but that we do.