some old blogetty blog
The following is a bulk posting of older crap from my MySpace bog . some of it might be funny reading. I havent bothered to separate it because the computer is typing hella slowly ath the moment for some reason and its really pissing me off..read at ya own risk. :)
----------------
Monday, January 10, 2005
Part 2 is coming, but first a weird ass dream
So I dream about this weird concert tour in which I dont actually do any shows, but spend a lot of time riding trains through a Korea that looks like a combination of NYC and Tokyo at night. At a restaurant reminiscent of oakland's Jahva House, I run into my sociopathic former bandmate who picks a fight with me, in which I beat him up pretty badly. I'm later handed a Oxford dictionary thick tome of prints of William Blake- style etchings that he has done ( just illustrations, no tex) depicting an abstract vision of my early childhood,as well as the gestation and birth of my daiughter. I finally escape the nimbus loop of the train, but find myself standing in a downpour on Market and Church wearing lothing but my high school gym shorts, a pair of sweatsocks and a giant burlap canvas-type blanket. I run across the street to safeway to buy food and clothes, but realize that I have no bank card or cash because I have no pants. I am sad for amoment, then kinda resigned and whimsied. Tobelerone and Ginger Ale late night. a bad bad mix.
--------------------
Friday, January 07, 2005
Intimacy and Tomorrow
So I'm up because its the day of a show and I usually have trouble sleeping on the these days, plus i was supposed to email something to someone that I didn't so I've ended up finishing that shit about now, and anticipating the busy-ness of the next week or so with school and baby Bighead and music and trying to make some time for being a fucking human and socializing.
My side is aching cause I haven't bee drinking quite enough water and I gotta watch that shit.There's a yawn. time to roll these couple thoughts on my head.People pop in the dome now and then in that way that I think all of 2 of you reading this know, and I'm wondering how much my Moms coming into town this weekend and the overlapping play party I'm gonna have to miss are playing in....in any instance I been floating in some alternately sweet and hot and disturbing spaces that are I'm guessing related to my trying to _feel_ some shit in a way I ain't been lately-opening it up...without a drink, without the X (though that shit was life altering for the good back in '99...more down the road.)Hitting some stuff that I ain't talked about and I guess, contrary to what I just said, feeling okay about it because this shit is just going into the ether, it seems- but what the hey.practice for the big gameSeptember 1991. At this point ,I'm about 4 years from even admitting outloud that I'm attracted to men. I'm caught up in the beginning of what will be my first "relationship" of any length with a girl we'll call DaMina. A perfectly OK 21 year old coed on most days, angry alcoholic sociopath on a few others. Blessed and cursed, as that goes, with some gangstafied pussy and pheremones that happened to speak to those of a certain protosexist (and still str8 identified) save a hoe wanna be MC with year old dreadlocks who will remain shameless.
Now, truth be told...thats what we doin' here- a dude who'd had sex with more than one woman at the time and wasn't turning dingalings into distant bells mighta hit and quit this space hella quick. But these were the African Medallion years, and It was time to change huh and make her be an angel- like that woulda been a good thing- as the phrase "Maddona/whore" hadn't come into your favorite Postgrad Pimp's vocab yet...Irony was just _lost_on a nigga. She came on to the brother on some "I'm sexually attracted to your dreadlocks" shit, and dropped more anvil like hints that took me about 2 weeks to take her up on. We make out this one evening at my crib, but she decides she wants to go home because it wouldnt be coull she say to do the do the first time over. OK, no biggy.So the next time, the next day, actually, she's over to the crib again (after a party up at Chipolte Skate U.).
A nigga has read a ton of Penthouse Fourum and has a dogeared copy of Couples magazine from may 1980, and he's had one girl, so I guess he kinda know what to do, even with a siista insisting that the lights be completely out.Or do he?You woulda thought I'da known better, or cared more, but thats just the sleepwalk I was in at the time I'm gonna have to say. I chuckle at it now- part of my relationship to the woman as idyll thing I had going on was my self satisfied space of knowing that real gentlemen and good guys who care about the coed theyre fucking will learn how to be good yoni-noshers.
So its in the dark, and I'm noshing and feeling proud and whatnot because, like, she didnt have to *ask* my blak azz,and you know, I'd clearly gotten _good_, or at least efficient given the thigh locking and near caulifower ear I got for the first time ever.Then she stopped me."Come up here." about a minute later, I'm a foot inside her with _nothing_on...and half asking (cause thats the only way to do it at that point, I now know) "Um...do you want me to use a condom?"I didnt get a "No" but a "Come On" and we commenced to fucking in a manner I would have described as 'serviceable" in retrospect given my serious lack of experience; Imagine the look on the sa Prize ninjas facewhen she later described the experience as "miraculous".
I wasn't in much a space to challenge her- i started to get later that it wasn't , as you dear reader are no doubt clear by now- that I was some kinda bone in the nose Behind The Green Door stud, but just a muhfugga that tried a lil more than just jabbin her with my dick. What a guy.This night commenced a year and a half of some of the most emotionally intense ongoing sexual engagement of my short life ( It was an every other day type thing) the nature of which leads me to reflect on aspects of what was happening that I couldn't admit, couldnt see because of age, lack of exposure (mabye) and a barrage of shame and simplistic public dialogue from a well-intentioned safe sex community.A couple of D & C had left her scarred up,
I later found and since she couldn't get pregnant, there wasn't much else left to chance, given that straight Black people were even worse about the "HIV aint my problem" shit. STILL, there was a lil more going on here, and it crossed my mind a year or so ago, and that lil bit of "yeah I'm about to get that ass" heat whent up through my chest"Closeness. skinintimacy. some shit I couldnt focus on and try to understand because well, fucking on skin is bad and nothing but stupid or evil people don't use condoms> I didnt feel either way though. What I did feel, as I do now is that urgency.(end Of part one)
-----------------------
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
was about to post some magnum opus type shit last night
about eating pussy and my early 20'sbut my connection reset, and when I logged back on, myspace was doing maintainance. So it'll be here tonight, after the show.
Ryne Sandberg elected to Baseball HOF on third try.
It's about Goddamned time.fuckers.
http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/news/mlb_news.jsp?ymd=20050104&content_id=927213&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp
---------------------------------
Monday, January 03, 2005
NiggaRich with the CharlieFever
I've officially been on "family leave" since december 9 but haven't gotten a check yet because of the lag in the processing of the application. Its been a chilly most time for the bulk of it, but I was thinking it was gonna get hectic with the $$$ becuause one of my scholarships didnt get processed till semesters end, and I ddint get to pick it up before I left for Toronto on 12/14.We'll whadda ya know, I go by the bursars today, and there it is, and now its burning a hole in my pocket....rent paid for two months so I'll be blowing cash on CD's other than ones I'm releasing and buying folks drinks here and there ( you know who ya are if you even read this) so be on the lookout for me woadies.woo hoo! D-Train 12" Mixes and Vodka Tonics!We got the 5 at a time netflix on ya ass now, so I watched Rapamania and The Watermelon Woman this afternoon, so I'll be dreaming about dykes with 70's bush, parachute pants and hightop fades...as If I_need_ bizarro dream fuel.
----------------------------------
Saturday, January 01, 2005
Tuna Casserole and Childrens Tylenol Current mood: amused
Its been a not so restful last couple days, but a happy new year, and the first one in a while that I didnt spend looking at a mass media countdown event.Its also one of the few i havent spent in a basement or close to the floor. people used to shoot a lot in my old hood on new years...lots a broken windows and shit, so my mom always had us get down on the floor ( every other year or so you'd see something on the news about someone being killed by a stray bullet, and you'd hear slugs zinging til mabye one in the morn or so...which often led my kidbrain to wonder where those bullets were ending up since i never heard any broken glass or anything.
For those of you still uninitiated, january 1st is also Imani, the 7th day of Kwanzaa. I spent Imani Mornings from 1987-90 at the home of a former pan-africanist school mate of mine named Rafiki (who would eventually become my girlfriend for a minute r and mabye mother of an unborn kid of mine...we'll never know) and her parents. Rafiki's dad, like a lot of men in the community had a symbolic "revolutionary" ritual performed every New Years morning.
His was "Shooting SuzymaeMaryAnn" which consisted of posting a random headshot of a blonde white model (torn from Glamour or something) on a telephone pole near the back yard and shooting at it with a .38, mabye letting the kids who were present squeeze one off. Needless to say, there wasn't much space for an um...*academic* conversation about the problematics of this spectacle, much less the passive aggression; and i won't front like the only reason I didnt get my turn the year i actually made it down to the yard was because theyd run outta bullets.
It just got me to thinkin' ya know, about where I was, where i been at the end of a couple different years...and if then, I woulda thought for a second I'd be doing anything like what i am now....snacking on tuna casserole, feeding my 3-month old daughter baby aspirin drops (she got a fever and she still smiling!), watchin' Buffy DVD's, makin' power moves in da industry and contemplating my sluttiness, all at the same time.
I been juggling shit for a while and still really feel like there ain't enough hours in the day for all the people I wanna spend time/share myself with, wishing they all lived in the same city and thinking that if I had just a leeeetle more money that it would all be a little easier...and then realizing if I did have _my way_ that mabye the energy around it wouldn't be the same, y'know? would i give a shit if i didnt have to fight for my right to party as hard as i do?I last saw Rafiki's mom Kwanzaa 2002 and she died in the spring of 2003. lung cancer. chain smoked for years. sweet, wonderful woman.I miss her terribly. Rafiki moved outta the state, but her dad's still there, but I don't think he's shooting becky sue lately, with all the kids gone and grown.Its really not quite the same show.I hate thinking about how empty that two flat is now....there was some life there...knotches and names on the walls in the cupboard for how tall we got every year, from at least 16 decembers. I hoped i woulda seen him last week to give him a hug...one of those few people I'm glad to see at the holidays, one of them people from them spaces that are pieces of me that i thought i had figured out and done with that come back between, keypecks, sniffle gurgles and the flavormemory burnt macaroni and cheddar..
-------------------------
Sunday, December 26, 2004
Yay Black Capitalizm Current mood: awake
Kwanzaa is a a non-heroic non religious cultural observance that is culled from a number of traditions in west african harvest festivals. It was begun in 1966 by Dr. Ron "Maulana" Karenga.I began attending Shule Ya Watoto ("School for Children") a afrikan-centered educational institution in Chicago's north lawndale neighborhood in 1974 (age 4) and my family began celebrating Kwanzaa that year.
This year marks my 30th Kwanzaa as a part of the Shule's extended community.As anyone can whose grown up in a religious or cultural nationalist movement, it comes with its ups and downs. I made my first really formal break with this community about 10 years ago, around the time I was coming out, not long after beginning divorce proceedings from my son's mom. This was shortly before Million Man March times, so there was a lot going on psychologically and emotionally, and not a lot of space for say, taking my people my people with a huge grain of salt.
With a little distance, the community I experienced all those years ( and its atendant overlaps with the emergence of hip hop culture, my college years, and sucking dick and such) seems like most of those I navigate today...created out of reaction to social/cultural/economic opression, creating some amazing institutions and artifacts as well as scuffing up some of its constituents along the way. When youre busy being mad, its hard to see that the road to hell is paved with good intent, and that the people who at that moment seem to be working really hard to fuck with your game are only doing the best they can.
Remembering that has cooled me out a lot, and has led me towards more acountability for my feelings and actions; I'm getting better at remembering That I don't have to be anywhere I don't want to be, and that remembering to take care of yourself is a constant process.my mom has a table set up selling her usual kente-and-stuf at the Market days at the big weeklong Kwanzaa gig at Malcolm X College, so we sat and talked about a lot of this stuf...which was cool in that we've started to get each other recently ( more on that in coming posts) I've been fascinated by the whole presumption-of-intimacy thing, and how people who haven't seen you in years ask "what are you doing lately?" without really meaning that they wanna know.
I know better know. It used to eat me up, mostly I think, because I was wanting to be accepted so badly in the middle of pretending I didnt give a fuck. today, decided to play it out like I was in a movie, and created an interesting talkaround the most benign happenings in my last couple of years of life; this seemed to satisfy most of everybody. I didn't seem like I smoked crack, I'm not "obviously" homo, my mom trusted me with her shit and isn't afraid of me, and I'm clearly not making more money than any of the older adults givin my boho fits, so i guess I'm OK till next December.Or at least til someone Googles my first and last name. then the questions will get kinda sideways. Jyeah.
-------------------------------
Saturday, December 25, 2004
Beatboxing for Lou Rawls Current mood: thoughtful
You Cant Go home no more
you cant go home no more
the past is dead, dead and gone
you ain't gon' sleep in grandma's arms no more
-Lou Rawls"You Can't Go Home No More" (Blue Note, 1989)
My mom and I made four stops today on the ChitownChristmas Tour. My brother's home near Altgeld Gardens, my aunt in Pullman, another aunt in marquette park and my sisters home down the street from my moms.I don't think I could write anything here that your typical weirdo freak who doesnt have much contact with his extended family would write, so I won't waste time on talking about how they all annoy me...because they don't really.
Holiday time in general depresses me, and I'm more depressed in a general sense because I haven't seen my son ( he's 10) in a long while and I expected him to be visiting family here this week but he's not. he's in Alabama with his mom and his stepdad's people. which is cool. Its just that with that understood, this is the first time I really have had nothing to return to Chicago for beside meeting my immediate family. I've made arangements to stay with some really cool vegan anarchists folks I met back in '02 when I did a show out this way, its a very different space.
The maternal grandmother moved to vegas, so there's really no space to cordinate meeting on holidays here anymore. I'll be visiting him in DC in February. Cool, yet there's still this space I'm working to get through and over that this city is really completely gone for me, and I need a way to say that outloud that I havent found yet. the 27th cant come to soon.
-----------------------------
Thursday, December 23, 2004
waitin' on vegan pumpkin cookies, bish
The day started out much like it always does when I'm back visiting the folks , dropping of a cousin or nephew at day camp and figuring out what I wanna eat. the mississippi sausage special at sarah And lee's looked good, so I had her start cooking and went across the street to walgreens to grab some cash- and found out I only had $13.29 in my account because I paid my cell phone bill. Most of my plans for the week are dashe4d of this moment, so I decide to get what loot I can in cash back, and head back across the street to get my breakfast. niggas need grits right now. More in a few hours.
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Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Its cold and I'm tired (post Toronto) Current mood: tired
So I'm trying this out to see if I'll actually be able to keep up with it, and to see if I can actually post anything that interesting on a the daily. here Go:a lil' depressed. a lil excited. hella numb from this cold-ass weather. a lil' sad about some of the stuf I found out about myself this week, and thinking I should be doing this when I'm more awake.More in the late AM. peace yall.
----------------
Monday, January 10, 2005
Part 2 is coming, but first a weird ass dream
So I dream about this weird concert tour in which I dont actually do any shows, but spend a lot of time riding trains through a Korea that looks like a combination of NYC and Tokyo at night. At a restaurant reminiscent of oakland's Jahva House, I run into my sociopathic former bandmate who picks a fight with me, in which I beat him up pretty badly. I'm later handed a Oxford dictionary thick tome of prints of William Blake- style etchings that he has done ( just illustrations, no tex) depicting an abstract vision of my early childhood,as well as the gestation and birth of my daiughter. I finally escape the nimbus loop of the train, but find myself standing in a downpour on Market and Church wearing lothing but my high school gym shorts, a pair of sweatsocks and a giant burlap canvas-type blanket. I run across the street to safeway to buy food and clothes, but realize that I have no bank card or cash because I have no pants. I am sad for amoment, then kinda resigned and whimsied. Tobelerone and Ginger Ale late night. a bad bad mix.
--------------------
Friday, January 07, 2005
Intimacy and Tomorrow
So I'm up because its the day of a show and I usually have trouble sleeping on the these days, plus i was supposed to email something to someone that I didn't so I've ended up finishing that shit about now, and anticipating the busy-ness of the next week or so with school and baby Bighead and music and trying to make some time for being a fucking human and socializing.
My side is aching cause I haven't bee drinking quite enough water and I gotta watch that shit.There's a yawn. time to roll these couple thoughts on my head.People pop in the dome now and then in that way that I think all of 2 of you reading this know, and I'm wondering how much my Moms coming into town this weekend and the overlapping play party I'm gonna have to miss are playing in....in any instance I been floating in some alternately sweet and hot and disturbing spaces that are I'm guessing related to my trying to _feel_ some shit in a way I ain't been lately-opening it up...without a drink, without the X (though that shit was life altering for the good back in '99...more down the road.)Hitting some stuff that I ain't talked about and I guess, contrary to what I just said, feeling okay about it because this shit is just going into the ether, it seems- but what the hey.practice for the big gameSeptember 1991. At this point ,I'm about 4 years from even admitting outloud that I'm attracted to men. I'm caught up in the beginning of what will be my first "relationship" of any length with a girl we'll call DaMina. A perfectly OK 21 year old coed on most days, angry alcoholic sociopath on a few others. Blessed and cursed, as that goes, with some gangstafied pussy and pheremones that happened to speak to those of a certain protosexist (and still str8 identified) save a hoe wanna be MC with year old dreadlocks who will remain shameless.
Now, truth be told...thats what we doin' here- a dude who'd had sex with more than one woman at the time and wasn't turning dingalings into distant bells mighta hit and quit this space hella quick. But these were the African Medallion years, and It was time to change huh and make her be an angel- like that woulda been a good thing- as the phrase "Maddona/whore" hadn't come into your favorite Postgrad Pimp's vocab yet...Irony was just _lost_on a nigga. She came on to the brother on some "I'm sexually attracted to your dreadlocks" shit, and dropped more anvil like hints that took me about 2 weeks to take her up on. We make out this one evening at my crib, but she decides she wants to go home because it wouldnt be coull she say to do the do the first time over. OK, no biggy.So the next time, the next day, actually, she's over to the crib again (after a party up at Chipolte Skate U.).
A nigga has read a ton of Penthouse Fourum and has a dogeared copy of Couples magazine from may 1980, and he's had one girl, so I guess he kinda know what to do, even with a siista insisting that the lights be completely out.Or do he?You woulda thought I'da known better, or cared more, but thats just the sleepwalk I was in at the time I'm gonna have to say. I chuckle at it now- part of my relationship to the woman as idyll thing I had going on was my self satisfied space of knowing that real gentlemen and good guys who care about the coed theyre fucking will learn how to be good yoni-noshers.
So its in the dark, and I'm noshing and feeling proud and whatnot because, like, she didnt have to *ask* my blak azz,and you know, I'd clearly gotten _good_, or at least efficient given the thigh locking and near caulifower ear I got for the first time ever.Then she stopped me."Come up here." about a minute later, I'm a foot inside her with _nothing_on...and half asking (cause thats the only way to do it at that point, I now know) "Um...do you want me to use a condom?"I didnt get a "No" but a "Come On" and we commenced to fucking in a manner I would have described as 'serviceable" in retrospect given my serious lack of experience; Imagine the look on the sa Prize ninjas facewhen she later described the experience as "miraculous".
I wasn't in much a space to challenge her- i started to get later that it wasn't , as you dear reader are no doubt clear by now- that I was some kinda bone in the nose Behind The Green Door stud, but just a muhfugga that tried a lil more than just jabbin her with my dick. What a guy.This night commenced a year and a half of some of the most emotionally intense ongoing sexual engagement of my short life ( It was an every other day type thing) the nature of which leads me to reflect on aspects of what was happening that I couldn't admit, couldnt see because of age, lack of exposure (mabye) and a barrage of shame and simplistic public dialogue from a well-intentioned safe sex community.A couple of D & C had left her scarred up,
I later found and since she couldn't get pregnant, there wasn't much else left to chance, given that straight Black people were even worse about the "HIV aint my problem" shit. STILL, there was a lil more going on here, and it crossed my mind a year or so ago, and that lil bit of "yeah I'm about to get that ass" heat whent up through my chest"Closeness. skinintimacy. some shit I couldnt focus on and try to understand because well, fucking on skin is bad and nothing but stupid or evil people don't use condoms> I didnt feel either way though. What I did feel, as I do now is that urgency.(end Of part one)
-----------------------
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
was about to post some magnum opus type shit last night
about eating pussy and my early 20'sbut my connection reset, and when I logged back on, myspace was doing maintainance. So it'll be here tonight, after the show.
Ryne Sandberg elected to Baseball HOF on third try.
It's about Goddamned time.fuckers.
http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/news/mlb_news.jsp?ymd=20050104&content_id=927213&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp
---------------------------------
Monday, January 03, 2005
NiggaRich with the CharlieFever
I've officially been on "family leave" since december 9 but haven't gotten a check yet because of the lag in the processing of the application. Its been a chilly most time for the bulk of it, but I was thinking it was gonna get hectic with the $$$ becuause one of my scholarships didnt get processed till semesters end, and I ddint get to pick it up before I left for Toronto on 12/14.We'll whadda ya know, I go by the bursars today, and there it is, and now its burning a hole in my pocket....rent paid for two months so I'll be blowing cash on CD's other than ones I'm releasing and buying folks drinks here and there ( you know who ya are if you even read this) so be on the lookout for me woadies.woo hoo! D-Train 12" Mixes and Vodka Tonics!We got the 5 at a time netflix on ya ass now, so I watched Rapamania and The Watermelon Woman this afternoon, so I'll be dreaming about dykes with 70's bush, parachute pants and hightop fades...as If I_need_ bizarro dream fuel.
----------------------------------
Saturday, January 01, 2005
Tuna Casserole and Childrens Tylenol Current mood: amused
Its been a not so restful last couple days, but a happy new year, and the first one in a while that I didnt spend looking at a mass media countdown event.Its also one of the few i havent spent in a basement or close to the floor. people used to shoot a lot in my old hood on new years...lots a broken windows and shit, so my mom always had us get down on the floor ( every other year or so you'd see something on the news about someone being killed by a stray bullet, and you'd hear slugs zinging til mabye one in the morn or so...which often led my kidbrain to wonder where those bullets were ending up since i never heard any broken glass or anything.
For those of you still uninitiated, january 1st is also Imani, the 7th day of Kwanzaa. I spent Imani Mornings from 1987-90 at the home of a former pan-africanist school mate of mine named Rafiki (who would eventually become my girlfriend for a minute r and mabye mother of an unborn kid of mine...we'll never know) and her parents. Rafiki's dad, like a lot of men in the community had a symbolic "revolutionary" ritual performed every New Years morning.
His was "Shooting SuzymaeMaryAnn" which consisted of posting a random headshot of a blonde white model (torn from Glamour or something) on a telephone pole near the back yard and shooting at it with a .38, mabye letting the kids who were present squeeze one off. Needless to say, there wasn't much space for an um...*academic* conversation about the problematics of this spectacle, much less the passive aggression; and i won't front like the only reason I didnt get my turn the year i actually made it down to the yard was because theyd run outta bullets.
It just got me to thinkin' ya know, about where I was, where i been at the end of a couple different years...and if then, I woulda thought for a second I'd be doing anything like what i am now....snacking on tuna casserole, feeding my 3-month old daughter baby aspirin drops (she got a fever and she still smiling!), watchin' Buffy DVD's, makin' power moves in da industry and contemplating my sluttiness, all at the same time.
I been juggling shit for a while and still really feel like there ain't enough hours in the day for all the people I wanna spend time/share myself with, wishing they all lived in the same city and thinking that if I had just a leeeetle more money that it would all be a little easier...and then realizing if I did have _my way_ that mabye the energy around it wouldn't be the same, y'know? would i give a shit if i didnt have to fight for my right to party as hard as i do?I last saw Rafiki's mom Kwanzaa 2002 and she died in the spring of 2003. lung cancer. chain smoked for years. sweet, wonderful woman.I miss her terribly. Rafiki moved outta the state, but her dad's still there, but I don't think he's shooting becky sue lately, with all the kids gone and grown.Its really not quite the same show.I hate thinking about how empty that two flat is now....there was some life there...knotches and names on the walls in the cupboard for how tall we got every year, from at least 16 decembers. I hoped i woulda seen him last week to give him a hug...one of those few people I'm glad to see at the holidays, one of them people from them spaces that are pieces of me that i thought i had figured out and done with that come back between, keypecks, sniffle gurgles and the flavormemory burnt macaroni and cheddar..
-------------------------
Sunday, December 26, 2004
Yay Black Capitalizm Current mood: awake
Kwanzaa is a a non-heroic non religious cultural observance that is culled from a number of traditions in west african harvest festivals. It was begun in 1966 by Dr. Ron "Maulana" Karenga.I began attending Shule Ya Watoto ("School for Children") a afrikan-centered educational institution in Chicago's north lawndale neighborhood in 1974 (age 4) and my family began celebrating Kwanzaa that year.
This year marks my 30th Kwanzaa as a part of the Shule's extended community.As anyone can whose grown up in a religious or cultural nationalist movement, it comes with its ups and downs. I made my first really formal break with this community about 10 years ago, around the time I was coming out, not long after beginning divorce proceedings from my son's mom. This was shortly before Million Man March times, so there was a lot going on psychologically and emotionally, and not a lot of space for say, taking my people my people with a huge grain of salt.
With a little distance, the community I experienced all those years ( and its atendant overlaps with the emergence of hip hop culture, my college years, and sucking dick and such) seems like most of those I navigate today...created out of reaction to social/cultural/economic opression, creating some amazing institutions and artifacts as well as scuffing up some of its constituents along the way. When youre busy being mad, its hard to see that the road to hell is paved with good intent, and that the people who at that moment seem to be working really hard to fuck with your game are only doing the best they can.
Remembering that has cooled me out a lot, and has led me towards more acountability for my feelings and actions; I'm getting better at remembering That I don't have to be anywhere I don't want to be, and that remembering to take care of yourself is a constant process.my mom has a table set up selling her usual kente-and-stuf at the Market days at the big weeklong Kwanzaa gig at Malcolm X College, so we sat and talked about a lot of this stuf...which was cool in that we've started to get each other recently ( more on that in coming posts) I've been fascinated by the whole presumption-of-intimacy thing, and how people who haven't seen you in years ask "what are you doing lately?" without really meaning that they wanna know.
I know better know. It used to eat me up, mostly I think, because I was wanting to be accepted so badly in the middle of pretending I didnt give a fuck. today, decided to play it out like I was in a movie, and created an interesting talkaround the most benign happenings in my last couple of years of life; this seemed to satisfy most of everybody. I didn't seem like I smoked crack, I'm not "obviously" homo, my mom trusted me with her shit and isn't afraid of me, and I'm clearly not making more money than any of the older adults givin my boho fits, so i guess I'm OK till next December.Or at least til someone Googles my first and last name. then the questions will get kinda sideways. Jyeah.
-------------------------------
Saturday, December 25, 2004
Beatboxing for Lou Rawls Current mood: thoughtful
You Cant Go home no more
you cant go home no more
the past is dead, dead and gone
you ain't gon' sleep in grandma's arms no more
-Lou Rawls"You Can't Go Home No More" (Blue Note, 1989)
My mom and I made four stops today on the ChitownChristmas Tour. My brother's home near Altgeld Gardens, my aunt in Pullman, another aunt in marquette park and my sisters home down the street from my moms.I don't think I could write anything here that your typical weirdo freak who doesnt have much contact with his extended family would write, so I won't waste time on talking about how they all annoy me...because they don't really.
Holiday time in general depresses me, and I'm more depressed in a general sense because I haven't seen my son ( he's 10) in a long while and I expected him to be visiting family here this week but he's not. he's in Alabama with his mom and his stepdad's people. which is cool. Its just that with that understood, this is the first time I really have had nothing to return to Chicago for beside meeting my immediate family. I've made arangements to stay with some really cool vegan anarchists folks I met back in '02 when I did a show out this way, its a very different space.
The maternal grandmother moved to vegas, so there's really no space to cordinate meeting on holidays here anymore. I'll be visiting him in DC in February. Cool, yet there's still this space I'm working to get through and over that this city is really completely gone for me, and I need a way to say that outloud that I havent found yet. the 27th cant come to soon.
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Thursday, December 23, 2004
waitin' on vegan pumpkin cookies, bish
The day started out much like it always does when I'm back visiting the folks , dropping of a cousin or nephew at day camp and figuring out what I wanna eat. the mississippi sausage special at sarah And lee's looked good, so I had her start cooking and went across the street to walgreens to grab some cash- and found out I only had $13.29 in my account because I paid my cell phone bill. Most of my plans for the week are dashe4d of this moment, so I decide to get what loot I can in cash back, and head back across the street to get my breakfast. niggas need grits right now. More in a few hours.
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Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Its cold and I'm tired (post Toronto) Current mood: tired
So I'm trying this out to see if I'll actually be able to keep up with it, and to see if I can actually post anything that interesting on a the daily. here Go:a lil' depressed. a lil excited. hella numb from this cold-ass weather. a lil' sad about some of the stuf I found out about myself this week, and thinking I should be doing this when I'm more awake.More in the late AM. peace yall.
posted by juba at 11:54:00 PM
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