It’s said that when one creates, they pour something of themselves into their work, a something that can’t be replicated or revisited, a tangible reminder of time and place and circumstance.

I haven’t posted here In a while, but my reticence to do so goes back a while.

I was thinking of divorce, and used my commute from 6200 North to 5900 South every day to write what I was feeling. What I was thinking about, what was happening at home, happening in therapy. I was going through some things.

Then, I lost my notebook.

It was an entry a day for what was about seven months. All scrawled in pen as I rode public transport and had my headphones in. Realizations, recounting, just heartfelt ruminations in my horrible, horrible handwriting.

I didn’t write anything personal like that for another two years.

So, a few weeks ago, the contents of my entire site went poof. And only after a few days of frantic emails and messing about on remote servers and hitting Reload on my web browser, did that work come back.

But in the interim? I couldn’t think of writing again. And even now, as I’ll type this out and hit Publish, I know that I’m taking a huge risk of losing everything again. Not only because of losing things, but the effort, the time, the circumstance. All that would be gone, and whatever I made then wouldn’t be the same, and that flies in the face of what creativity means, to me. A song written after a breakup sounds different than one written while happy. An idea penned at the beginning at the workday hits different than one written after you’ve punched the time clock and want to go home.

So this is me getting back on the wagon. This is me forging ahead, getting the words out of my head and typed out. This is me, the triumph of hope over experience.

This is me.

Well, ain’t this some shit, he thought.

He lay on the floor in his tiny apartment, staring up at the ceiling. A few minutes ago, he felt a sharp pain in his chest and, as he stood up to get to his phone, the air left his lungs and he pitched forward. Somehow, he had the prescene of mind to flip himself around as he he was going down, so here he was, looking at the ceiling fan spin lazily.

Hw wondered, as he lay there, if anyone heard him. The downstairs neighbor wouldn’t be home for a while yet, and eventually someone would have to know he wasn’t picking up his phone or answering his door. As his breath came more and more ragged, he lamented not working out some kind of system with others in case something happened to him. How long would it take for someone to come by? He panicked briefly. Why does it end here, like this?

This story begins, as many of my stories do, down South. But not in my mother’s Mississippi, but my biological dad’s Arkansas. The year is 1984. I am six years old.

1984 will turn out to be a big year for me. In January, I will watch my hometown Raiders win a Super Bowl. I will finally get a sliver glove like Michael Jackson. Later that summer, I will watch the Olympic torch being carried through the streets and watch the World Olympics a short drive from my home. It will, by all measurements, be a year that changes my life.

But a large part of that change occurs that summer. Before the Olympics rolls into town, my mother and stepdad put me on a plane to visit by bio-dad, who I called “Other” (as in “Other Dad”) in Arkansas.

I remember the Delta flight. Mom walking me on the plane, the stewardess walking me to my next gate at Dallas-Ft. Worth, and the puddle jumper that gets me to Little Rock. I remember being excited, nervous, all of the emotions. I did not remember that years before, he had kidnapped me, taking be across state lines from California to Arkansas without my mother’s permission or knowledge. I did remember, fuzzily, the plane ride back, and the Pawberry Punch Delta had, which was basically fruit punch.

But this is the first time I am fully cognizant of the fact that I’m staying with my Other, in a new place. I am told that some of my cousins are coming along too, and these are also new people for me. Cousins from Chicago! Cousins from Sacramento!

I’m there two weeks.

To say that the day in particular is the only thing I remember would be a lie; I experienced a lot of new things in those two weeks. I remember drinking my first beer, shooting with his rifle, the sticky heat of an Arkansas summer. I remember the pornographic magazines and videos laying around the house, but that’s another writing exercise.

I remember riding around with him, the memory seared both in my memory and on the backs of my thighs as hot leather seats know no mercy. To the store, to the monuments of his hometown, like his high school and the three brick foundries in town. I was underfoot for a full week, and I didn’t know it then, but that was more than Other could take.

One afternoon, we go over to my grandparents’ house. I couldn’t have voiced it then, or figured out what was off, but I felt out of sorts there. Later, I could identify it pretty plainly as they just didn’t like me. They didn’t like my mother, and thus, didn’t like me. The issue of my blood could not be denied; I looked like my father, and my uncles, so I couldn’t be disowned. I had my father’s name, so the issue of my parentage couldn’t be questioned. But I wasn’t welcome in that house, and shortly after getting there, and finding none of the amusements Other had at home, like a color TV, music, air conditioning and so on, I wanted to get back to his house.

I remember him heading out to his truck, and me trailing along, expecting to go somewhere. He climbed behind the wheel, and waved me away from the passenger side.

“I’ll be right back.”

Never mind my confusion; where could you go that I haven’t been going? What new thing are you going to do? I had no idea what was going on. Confused, I stumbled away while he backed his truck out of the yard and Grandma called me to come inside.

He didn’t wave, I do remember that.

I sat on that porch’s waiting for him to come back. Sat on a metal chair, in Arkansas summer, height of the mosquito season, thirsty and hungry. Grandma would call me to come in, but never came out to collect me. Kind of a halfhearted “well, I TOLD him to come in” plausible deniability later when the thirty-plus mosquito bites surfaced.

He left in the afternoon. I sat there til the sun went down, watching the road, waiting for the truck to reappear.

Other came back the next afternoon. I hadn’t eaten. Hadn’t bathed. Slept in fits in an unfamiliar, old-person-smell house.

And acted like the last day hadn’t happened. We went to get hamburgers, and he was his usual self.

Had I been older, I could have found the words. Where did you go? Why were you gone so long?

But most importantly, why did you leave me?

Since then, my personal history is rife with people disappearing on me. Close, personal, intimate friends dropping contact. A woman who saw me through my divorce stops responding to texts and emails. Someone who I shared weeks in a summer program ends up going to the same college I do…avoids me all year. One of my best friends in 5th grade tells me, abruptly, not to talk to him ever again. And eventually, it all repeats. “We’ll be friends forever,” they say, and I tell them to never say never. Because I assume they have one foot out the door as well.

My story doesn’t have the “he never came back” ending, true, but he was the first lesson in my life that, no matter how much you love, hold close…people will leave your ass with no warning. And the way my brain works, I will wonder why, and then figure it’s my fault. I did something. I was a bother. I was in the way. It’s happened SO MANY TIMES in my life.

On Twitter I wrote out that I had abandonment issues’ nd to write it and see it was..cathartic. To admit that I have an issue, and this is the root of it, and this is how it makes me think and react and remember is..well, it hurts and is vulnerable.

But at least I can put words to it. I can remember how I feel about it. And I can remember that it’s not my fault, even if my brain chemistry tells me that it is. Naming the fear, naming the problem, somehow blunts its fangs, I guess.

Devil water. That’s what my mother called liquor.

I have a couple of alcoholics in the family, men with control issues in positions they can’t control. Prolific reproduction patterns, low paying jobs, military service, all things that will mess with someone’s psyche and where mind-altering substances become a tempting diversion. So it was with this that my mother warned me away from the liquor cabinets.

Before he married my mother, my stepdad had the usual bachelor liquor, and brought it, unopened, when he moved in with my mother. At the house right now is a 50 year bottle of Cutty Sark, of Hennessy…and I’m trying to figure out how to bring it back with me…

Anyway, my folks never really drank. Dad had a beer maybe once a year, and I don’t remember wine or New Years Eve champagne. When I visited my bio dad when I was six, he had me try his beer; Coors and Miller, and I remember spitting it out. The taste was horrendous, and even now, I recall that memory with a face wrinkled by disgust.

I was actually out of college when I drank again, and I found things I liked drinking. Screwdrivers. Rum and coke. Then to figure out what I liked, and how it made me feel was the next step. Because I had gone to college in the Midwest and watched my peers get sloppy, SLOPPY drunk, I realized what it was I wanted and didn’t from the experience. That, I believe, is the key. The stigma was still there, but the stigma is specifically against being so blasted out of your mind that you don’t remember anything. I wanted to be in control. I didn’t want to wake up in police custody and told that I punched a mailbox.

So then it came to what I was drinking. Bourbon, whiskey, scotch, vodka, rum, in their myriad of iterations, brands, flavors…and I dove in.

As far as smoke was concerned, I blame Blue Note Records. I blame jazz for making smoking look so damned cool. Forget the Marlboro Man, the black and white photography of Francis Wolff made me want to smoke. But, I knew a ton of people who smoked cigarettes and more than a handful who died of lung cancer, so the sexy of cigarette smoking died quickly for me. But…cigars.

Cigars appealed to me because of the non-involvement of my lungs. The history of tobacco is rife with oppression, but the opening of the marketing and production to Central and South America, now Black and AfroLatino folks are more involved now, so to support and taste those takes on a historic vice is pretty awesome.

The cigar kick didn’t start til I had some disposable income and a friend group who did it.

Or, most specifically, a girlfriend group who did it. A woman I was interested in asked me if I wanted to go to a lounge with her, and we did, and sat in plush leather seats in front of a big screen showing some random crappy movie. But the leather and wood captivated me.

So to do the research, to find brands to go with, to figure out what I liked and didn’t…it has become a definite feature of summer evenings spent outside. It’s not even a weekly thing to do; I seem to have missed out on the compulsive side of these habits..

THat’s just my journey, and I felt like writing it out.

It’s been an incessant part of his life the last…how long has it been? He really doesn’t know. He doesn’t remember when he got here, but does remember those few moments before he got here; the pain, the dimness, the…what was it? It was like time slowed down, and he became aware of a growing pain…

But he beeps are incessant in this hotel room. He assumes it’s his heartbeat or pulse of simply reminding the healthcare professionals huddled around this bed that they’re on and working. His hearing is shot; he can’t make out what they’re saying and he can’t read lips, but their brows are furrowed and every now and again one of them looks at him and looks back to their colleagues.

He wonders how he looks to them. He can’t really move, and his peripheral vision doesn’t let him look around too much. He is sure he has all of his appendages; he can see his feet and his fingers, and feel the hundreds of tubs lying on him, conveying liquid to or from his body. Man, they weren’t kidding then someone described the human body as a sack of skin holding all of these gooshy, wet things together.

He can’t talk; there is a tube down his throat that hurts like a motherfucker, and as he thinks about it, one of the machine’s beeps gets a bit faster. One of the nurses pauses and looks at him, and he hopes that she can see his eyebrows arch in a concilitory way. Sorry, my bad. Just started thinking about these tubes is all, and maybe the ol heart got a bit spastic.

He is suddenly and keenly aware of a change in the atmosphere, in the room, as the medical people sense someone approaching them. They all turn expectantly to someone in the hallway he can’t see. His curiosity is piqued, but the physical strain of simply being awake for these…few minutes?…cause him to suddenly become droswsy…and he falls asleep to a steadily slowing beep.

…

She gets to the desk in ICU, directed by the nice security guard at the front door. The smell of the hospital still creeps her out but she’s here..for him. Hoping she makes it in time, hoping that she gets to see him..hoping. And because she hopes, and cannot actually do more than that, she is somewhere between hopeless and angry at her powerlessness.

The nurse looks up as she approaches, notices her air, and steels herself for a confrontation.

But, after a quick exchange, she and the nurse quickly exhale, and no conflict is had, and she is pointed down the hall to a room where she is told “all the doctors are there, so you can’t miss it.”

She hears the doctors first before rounding the corner. As she approach they hush and look at her. They know from her look and her walk that she is coming to check on him, and they steel themselves for…what? A conflict? A necessary interaction where fuzzy truth will be sprinkled with platitudes? Or one were the bare truth will be given with the minimum of bedside manner and no sugarcoating?

“Mrs…?” says the head doctor, extending his hand.

I sent someone’s laptop off for repair a while ago, and they emailed me today to find out what was going on with it.

I checked, and the repair’s BEEN done…but Fed-Ex has had it, and it hasn’t moved since eight days ago.

Where is the laptop? Dallas, Texas.

I explain that the laptop’s fixed and on its way back, but it’s stuck in Dallas.

She writes me back with “WHY?”

It took everything in me not to explode on this chick. Oh, because most likely, FedEx workers are huddled in their homes without heat or safe water, their electricity is out, and they are worried for their families’ and their safety as a their local government leaves them to die, in a pandemic, during a winter storm the likes of which the region has not seen.

Someone that willfully ignorant of what’s going on amazes me.

Whether downtown or in another state, I sing the praises of the one night hotel stay thusly…

The relative anonymity of it all leads to behavior normally reserved for the internet and interactions with people who work service industries. Walking into an opulent hotel lobby, checking in, getting those door keys.

It is my opinion that a lot of the actions of those we as a society frown upon have their genesis in actions people would rather not know about, or at least, not know the minds responsible.

Lest you jump to conclusions, no I am not speaking chiefly about the loud caterwauling of sexual congress although that can be one part of it. The decadence of ordering room service. Of being in a climate controlled suite, you alone, or you with a willing partner, being not only physically, but mentally intimate as well. Can’t pick fights in such a close proximity. So tempers are softened, and care is taken, in a little world of your making. And there’s something..raw about that. Raw and revealing.

I am a child of the US Postal Service.

Not that I am the literal progeny of a United States mail delivery system, but everything I did before I left home was made possible by the USPS. Combine, my parents spent over 50 years under their employee. Every candy sale, every field trip expense, and much of my overpriced course packs in college was thanks to those paychecks.

So to see I have a soft spot for the Postal Service is probably expected.

It is the expected thing to collect stamps, but I could never keep them, because I was taken by the mystery of sending and receiving mail.

YEs, I was that kid waiting on the mailman. I was the kid who ran in from school and went straight to the mail slot to see what was there. Considering how little mail I got, I have no idea why and how I was so attuned to the sound of the mail slot opening, but I was. IN those days, a long distance phone call was heavily regulated by Pacific Bell and AT&T, so while mail was slower, Mom and Dad always had stamps. I had plenty of paper. I had time. LET’S WRITE SOME LETTERS.

February is National Letter Writing Month, and I suggest you get out some paper and write something down to someone. Or, write it down and burn it. After I get over the fact that my handwriting is poop, I think of my friends, bored and picking up the mail and expecting bills and junk and getting a poorly handwritten letter! It’s like delayed happiness, delivered by a government employee!

Get out your pen, and scribble some clever turns of phrase. Put it in an envelope, slap a stamp on it, and drop it in a heavily vandalized mailbox. You won’t regret it.

My mother is an excellent cook, and when I grew up and out the house, I would always make sure to get back to wherever home was to partake and figure out how to bring food back with me. Thanks to Southwest, I could leave Mississippi at 8am with a duffel bag full of frozen food – sausages, greens, black eyed peas – and have that in my freezer in Chicago before noon.

But one thing my mother never did was teach me how to cook. I was amiable, but my childhood was spent outside the kitchen, except to consume vast quantities of food. She was old school, with the big Sunday dinner and the big pots of cabbage and greens to serve as sides through the week. But she never showed me how to do the alchemy she was so good at.

As I got into my 30s and 40s, Mom started to openly regret not teaching me how to cook. Over the years, I’ve cobbled together a decent cooking acumen so I won’t starve, and taken classes to learn more, but there were still those dishes Mom made that I had no idea how to make, even though I’ve eaten them thousands of times.

One such dish was her gumbo. Gumbo would take all day, and was made in a pot big enough to bathe a small child. She put andouille sausage, two sizes of shrimp, boiled chicken, and imitation crab meat in hers, and made sure to fix herself a small pot of okra for her, since Dad and I detested okra. When Mom made gumbo, it was an invitation for the entire family to come to our house, and I got to play host, which I learned I really enjoyed.

At any rate, recently, I’d gotten the urge to try to make my own gumbo. Because Momis Mom, she was unable to give me exacts. No “one cup of this, two tablespoons of that” here. “A scoop of this, and a pinch of that”, which, as you can imagine, aren’t measurements n the side of your Pyrex dish.

We tried last year, and..it was almost a disaster.

The key to a good gumbo is the roux, which is basically flour and fat mixed together. If you screw up the roux, or burn it, you have to toss everything and start over; there’s no coming back from that. And after a false start and an emergency call to my sister, we got it together and it came out pretty okay.

But fam, we did it again today, and I couldn’t WAIT to tell my mother about it. That we had two kinds of sausage. That our roux was good and not too thick and not too thin. That everything was done. And we put some butter and garlic on some French rolls and put em in the broiler for a minute until they were toasted and could be used to sop up the roux that somehow escaped our greedy mouths.

Mom was very happy to hear it, but she reminded me of a saying that has followed me since childhood.

“You know why your gumbo was good?”

“Why, Mom?”

“You put love in the pot.”

I hope y”all put love in your pots, too.

Very few things make me..contented, or as..right, as having peace in my home, or just peace around me. My wife is asleep right now, hopefully dreaming good dreams. The people I love most in this world are all probably asleep right now, except perhaps my sister, who is a known insomniac.

But my peace is why I’m still awake. My brain won’t shut off, going through what-ifs and the events of the past few days. I am worried, angry, tired. I am surrounded by people who feel the same way I do, some in very different ways. Some have adopted a dark humor, others are grim and write screeds on their social media that amount to “I told you so, but you don’t listen to me.”

I want peace to reign in my house, where I can text my peoples and they have a joke for me, or an invitation, or recommendation for a new food spot or music or a good book. Not contingency plans for the worst of times. I want news of joy, not recaps of what is and what that means for what could be.

My mother is a big fan of saying, “What’s good don’t last always, what’s bad don’t last always.” But I remind her that the Jews stayed in the wilderness for a few generations before Moses got them out the paint, and while they EVENTUALLY made it out, the woods were all a few generations knew. I’m not convinced I’ll see us getting out of this wilderness.

I’m worried, angry, and sleepless on the Southside.