The setting isn’t pleasant, I know. But sometimes a man gotta do what he gotta do when he wants to think, y’know?

I push this cart around all day, cleaning the halls and classrooms at this college, and boy let me tell you, the stupid. Now, I ain’t no scientist or nothin, barely got out of high school., but these folk have got mayo for brains. And they think they smart! Thousands of dollars in laptops and nice clothes and new phones, but aint a thought between em all worth a good damn.

My boss says to remember that they’re paying my salary, but as I clean up after a “breakout session” or wipe down the lunch tables, I hear them chattering nonstop. And they ain’t saying shit! There are no big ideas, or passionate causes besides getting laid and getting drunk. They think I’m not listening, if they even see me at all. That’s fine though, I can do my work in peace and I can report at the end of the day that I left whatever and wherever spic and span. But you can’t help but feel that energy, all that young energy.

They say youth is wasted on the young, and I wanna tell these kids. I wanna tell em to study, yeah, that’;s what all grown ups tell kids. But I wanna tell them to do other shit, too. Really read. Really listen. Really figure yourself out, because that’s the good shit. That’s when you know you got the world where you want it and you know what to do to get where you wanna go.

I heard that kind of talk back in the day. Back when I had family, parents who loved me and my boys who were trying to figure out what we were gonna do.We were bad, we thought, and the world better waytch out, because we were here to fuck and get money and take it easy.

They ain’t here no more. And if they were, they’d be in my same boat, too old to have a lot of time to put that knowledge to good use.

Every now and again, I find a bathroom, away from the classrooms in a little used corner of this building. I think it’s two stories underground, and the only people I see down there ever are the kind of student that is so deep in the books you couldn’t pull they ass out with a tow truck. It’s a tiny bathroom, one you can lock. I clean it when it has to be cleaned, when I need some time to myself, I go down there. I’ve had to clean it maybe three times in the year or so I’ve been here, signs that someone’s used it, most usually splashed water at the sink and the remnants of some guy who thought they dick was so big they didn’t get up in the urinal and not drip pee on the floor.

I have a little stool on my cart, and I got it because I told the boss that I can’t reach some high spots in the classrooms, but I grab it, go into this bathroom in the sub-basement of the building, lock the door, and sit on that stool, and think. Sometimes I pray, but sometimes I sit and stare at the tiles on the walls until I make my vision go blurry. I keep meaning to bring a little notepad to write some thoughts down, but the boss would be asking me questions about what it is I’m writing, so fuck that.

I sit and think of what could have been. Who could have been.

And if the police could ever find me down here.

This is brought about by an introduction to a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while. Eudora Welty, writer and Mississippian, who wrote a ton of things that have been celebrated as part of the American and specifically Southern Gothic tradition, wrote a small book called On Writing. As I’ve been consuming books about writing and getting my own thoughts out of my head in as productive and eloquent way as I can, I gravitated towards the book for the name, the author, and its size. One hundred and six pages? Who could say no to that?

What roused my ire, though, was something written even before I got to her words. In the introduction, an author of some renown – I’ve never heard of him, but he’s writing the intro to this book, so who the hell am I? – says something that irked the hell out of me.

The one thing most evident in her criticism is good sense.

And tear us what is so frequently lacking in the critics of the day, the era that has been termed postmodern, and that I have elsewhere called post-sensical. It is an overly politicized era…Everything is politics, the professor tells us, and the writer is morally bound to expose this or that injustice. And in keeping with this morality, writers who have gone before us are lifted or devalued by how well they can withstand the heresy-hunting party line: for instance Joseph Conrad was an imperialist, according to this feature of the critical climate, and Faulkner was a racist.”

I couldn’t help but read this with the voice and tone of a plantation owner, snickering that his slaves were “triggered” by daring to question a person’s position on slavery or racism, or some Mad Men chad who is amused by “little women” daring to think outside their station as baby factories.

This has the tack of pooh-poohing every social movement that dares cast people as what they were. Daring to call a spade a spade. Daring to ado the biography of great men that may’ve contributed to the American canon, but were horrible, horrible people. Men like this , who were never in the crosshairs of those bigots, racists and misogynists, want to tell the world that it wasn’t really a big deal. That the work stands on its own and that the new knowledge is immaterial to the judgement of the individual, who surely didn’t anything but just write, you know.

To preface this in a book penned by Eudora Welty, what least wasn’t a virulent racist and seemed very not so, was surely a choice. How dare we judge people on the standards of today! My thing is, good people are good people, and shall be so by any measure of time or morality. All of these celebrated writers had opportunities to be good people, to not be racist assholes or petty “alpha” men or cheerleading colonialism. but I’m supposed to discount that they weren’t? The chance to be a good person, to disavow all of these things that had real consequences for other people, was possible! Sure, it may have been hard to hang with Hemingway and not be a raging asshole, racist, womanizer, or whatever because of peer pressure, but it was POSSIBLE to not be.

I’m not giving judos for shit you’re SUPPOSED to do. Your creative output is one thing, but how you lived as a person certainly influences how I engage with the work and, indeed, colors my opinion of you. Those who were never the targets are free to kvetch about how unfair this is, or how I don’t get it, or rail about “kids these days are so sensitive!” but, at the end of the day, these people were never the targets of these bad-acting people who made celebrated art and thusly, their opinions are for shit.

So, this is the intersection of health and taste and culture and the alchemy of cooking, and it’s probably less important than I’m making it out to be, but I’m gutted.

The first time I tried to make red beans and rice, a staple of Black American cooking, I didn’t have the right pot. Preparation requires a pot with a secure lid, insulating the beans in a cycle of steam and submerging in flavored water that soaks into the beans, crating a delicious and viscous amalgam of flavor. Add in pieces of andouille sausage or a turkey wing, and you have an additional hit of flavor.

So, my first attempt was…unsuccessful. I will not go into detail as to how hard the fail was in this space.

So, I got another pot. Tested the lid. Was ready. And since my wife doesn’t eat rice or beans, I had to adjust my recipe from a family to just me. I had it. I thought I did, anyway.

This would be the first try in trying to incorporate beans and rice into my diet, a move that would be welcome to my blood pressure numbers and my kidney health, things I have to look out for now. A dish I have fond memories of, tasted everywhere from Southern transplants to Nor’easter pretenders.

The secondd try didn’t go as planned either. The pot I thought was ready for the job…was not. The results were inedible, and I had to find other evening sustenance.

I am in the middle of my cooking era, an era I didn’t have as a kid. My mother is a master cook, but wanted me out of the kitchen and out of her way, so I didn’t learn her brand of food alchemy. As I got older and wanted to make some of these things myself, I was woefully behind.

There’s a couple of things I’ve figured out how to make, and with repetition I feel that I’m pretty good at. I’d like to add red beans and rice to my repertoire, but until I get the right tools, that’s not happening. The saying is that a poor workman blames his tools, but you can only hammer in nails with the butt end of a screwdriver for so long ebfore you give up and just have to get a hammer.

Wish me luck! I’ll get it done sooner than later.

One of my favorite joints by the artist Common is a collaboration with the producer Hi-Tek, called “Tekzilla“.

Common tells a story of a run-in with a rival while he’s out alone at night. What speaks to me is that he’s alone, by himself, “rapping to myself cause there was no one to rap to”. That sense of being by yourself, of moving about the city alone resonated with me because that was me on many occasions.

In darker mental days, I wouldn’t want to go home, dreading what was there, or not there. So I’d get off from work and try to find something to do, somewhere to go, all trying to postpone that trip home.

Being an introvert, not trying to talk to random strangers. Walking dark and lighted streets, dipping into bars and late night eateries. This also got expensive, as you can imagine.

Walking the streets, riding the rails, jumping on a bus going in a nebulous direction..because I didn’t want to go home and face what was there and whatever that meant.

At some point, you realize that the barbs aren’t meant for you personally. That the sting of accusations and passive-aggressiveness and whispered “I heard that” isn’t personal. It’s brain chemistry gone awry, trying to make sense of what ceased to do so a while ago. Neurons firing but not connecting, synapses blown through overwork or misuse or circumstance.

I got roundly attacked by a relative recently, and I was hurt and confused. A huge block of text delivered to my phone, stating that, in so many words, that not only was I a shit person, but I’ve BEEN a shit person for a while, and even though my mother has defended me in rooms I’m not in, she’s wrong too, because I wasn’t shit, am not currently shit, and won’t be shit in any future.

Taken as a one-off, the still river proves deep. I was forced to examine my interactions and history; had I done something I didn’t remember? Was some machination taken the wrong way?

But the abuse continued to other targets, and my incident wasn’t isolated anymore. Lashing out, bringing up old incidents, reopening old wounds. Suddenly, my situation wasn’t viewed as an isolated incident, but a pattern. A new pattern this family member had gone to where no one was safe and everyone was an enemy. Old slights were magnified. Outright lies were pushed, and this family member is, as of this writing, estranged from most o the family and writing huge text missives about how and why they feel all alone and no one understands and they feel burdened and have to do everything while making up situations where this wasn’t true in the first place.

But we watch, not out of fascination, but wondering how long a firework can go off, spewing sparks on all and sundry, finally giving way to becoming an inert husk. How long does this go on? Who else gets hurt?

Guess we’ll see.

The piece of white paper sits on my drawing desk. Untouched, full of promise.

How’s the light? I adjust the blinds to aim sunlight at my drawing surface. Or, adjust my desk lamp to be warm light, or do I want cool?

Where are my supplies? What do I want to use? I have so many kinds of pencils. Water-soluble, colored, graphite from 6H to 6B. If I wanna do watercolor, I have my brushes. Oh, I need water, duh. And where is my pencil sharpener, these pencils are dull as hell.

Maybe I wanna work in ink. I have so many pens! Felt tip, writing, calligraphy, chisel. Sharpies, in four different sizes, but all the trusty black ink. I have these new Japanese pens too, that I haven’t used yet. Huh, when was the last time I bought from JetPens? Maybe I should use the stuff I bought from them first.

Nah.

Oh, deeper in this drawer is this gouache sticks. I have no idea where I got these; I’ve never even used these. But I have them, maybe I should do something with them? 12 colors. I have to watch a few videos on YouTube to see how to even use these. What does work made with these look like? Is it my style? Is it any more than caricatures or scenery? I’ll get to that eventually, but maybe not now.

Wait! I gotta have background noise. I would put on Youtube, but I don’t have Premium, so ads will keep popping up, and I don’t want that. I could put on some vinyl, but I’ll have to get up to turn the record over every now and again. I can play music from my computer, and use my phone to control its I can skip songs and play what I want. Great! Finally something I can move forward with.

Where was I?

The piece of white paper sits on my drawing desk. Untouched, full of promise.

I mean, it is.

What other human emotion do people actively run away from, lest they get some of it on them? Emotion; people also run away from disabled people, lest they catch the disableds themselves. But grief, as an emotion, is so unique and human, yet we really don’t understand it or know how to really deal with it.

It’s a scar that never goes away, never crusts over, never ceases to be. The analogy I picked up on was that grief is like a rock in the bottle of your life. As you get older and do more stuff and have more things happen, the bottle gets bigger, but that rock remains its same size. It’s not as big as how it was when it popped up, proportionally, but it also isn’t getting smaller in a real way.

Anyway, I’m thinking about this because I find myself around people going through grief, and I don’t really know what to do. “Let me know if you need anything” doesn’t cover what is needed, really. I’ve heard a lot about just..DOING things, mainly because the person who needs the grace and help isn’t really thinking straight.

When my stepdad died, I cam down home, and I’ve never seen my mom the way she was. They had been married more than 30 years, and she forgot his middle name for the forms we had to fill out. I’m glad I was there to help out with the legal and paperwork and funeral details and stuff, but that rock in my bottle of life ain’t smaller. It’s still a lump I deal with when something reminds me of him, or a realization that he would have liked to see what I was seeing or hear about what I was doing.

Every now and again, I go back to the words of one of my friends who had her husband die unexpectedly and painfully.

From Maya

People keep asking what they can do for me and for <their kid>, and I hardly know what to say. Mostly I just want people to take their shock and grief and disbelief, and use it to make their own lives better and be more prepared. Get life insurance. Don’t put off seeing the doctor. Spend extra time with your family instead of working so hard. Vaccinate your kids for HPV (<his> cancer was not HPV-related, but most head and neck cancers are, and you can vaccinate your kid against cancer, so why not do it!). Organize your freaking passwords. We knew this day was coming for over six months and we were still almost entirely unprepared. Even the dying think they have more time. Please learn from us, please please please. None of us are leading the charmed life we think we are.

So, in this newest case, my friend’s wife is going through it, and I would like to think that, if I shuffle off this mortal coil, my friends would want to make sure that my wife and mom are okay. But what can I do, right now?

Words without action is meaningless, and all the good wishes in the world don’t mean anything if no one is being helped. I’ll figure it out.

An author I absolutely love said wrote something in a book (can’t find it right now) that mirrors a feeling that I’ve had before, and to see it outside of my head, in black and white on the printed page, made me feel all sorts of things. Chiefly among them is the notion that other people can feel this thing that I feel.

In this book, there is a detective who has a motley family of adopted kids, old friends, people who love him. He’s a regular dude, except that he knows how to move and has enough life experience to know how best to approach a problem.

In this particular scene I’m thinking of, he was hurt badly in a fight, and one of his kids asks him if he’s okay. He’s broken, hurt, can’t talk, and he says something that really resonated with me.

I’m paraphrasing here.

She asked me if I was okay, and the fact that I couldn’t answer and reassure her made me the saddest I’ve ever been in my life.

I figured out a while ago that I am highly empathetic. I cannot stand when evil wins, or when people are hurt. I have a physical response to hearing someone cry in pain, and, when I was younger, I couldn’t stand the thought that someone didn’t like me, so I did a lot for people who, frankly, didn’t deserve it. I wanted to be liked so bad I twisted myself into someone I couldn’t recognize.

Anyway, I pride myself on my hugs. It’s a thing I have a lot of practice at, and I believe in full, squeeze hugs. I know how it feels to be hugged, and to be able to give hugs gives me and who I’m hugging all the dopamine our systems can handle. I like to make people feel comfortable, seen, loved.

Anyway, this past Friday, I left work and happened to check my work email one last time, and someone I work with had emailed me. I could tell during the workday that they were having a bad day; sometimes, that shit happens in our line of work. Nothing goes right, your co-workers are assholes that day, your manager is on some bullshit.

They asked for a hug.

And I was gone.

And that thought, that I wasn’t around when I could have made a difference, completely gutted me.

Postscript: The next time I saw them, I gave them a hug, and everything was right with the world for ten seconds or so.

Story time. Peace to Michael Harriot.

So, as it would go, Dad wanted a new car. Mom kinda didn’t, but was willing to go along with it. 

Our family history with cars is rife with great memories. My mother had a cream VW Bug, which was the earliest car I remember. Dad had a muted-tone lime green Ford Torino, which was huge, and definitely not the “muscle car” Wikipedia says it was. Mom’s Toyota Corolla got stolen twice. and Dad bought himself a midlife crisis car in the Honda Prelude.

This is not a story about cars, so let me refocus.

Fast forward to my folks living their retired life and Dad, having been through the midlife crisis with the Prelude, was now wanting to lean into his old man age. He wanted a Caddy or an Oldsmobile, Mom said. A big-ass boat to maneuver the country roads, a collection of gleaming paint and chrome and leather pulling into the church parking lot or WalMart or making the sojourn to Jackson about an hour or so away.

Mom didn’t see the need for it; their Toyota Avalon did the job in getting them around and whatnot, albeit not in the style Dad might have wanted. But he was old and felt he deserved some shit that he wanted, so Mom demurred.

So Dad went car shopping, the story goes. And he went up the interstate to the car dealerships along I-55, the major highway that connects Chicago and New Orleans. He spent a couple of days going up and down that corridor, between home and Jackson, to the dealerships that might have had his preferred chariot in stock for a fair price.

He came home one day, excited. He’d found a car! Mom doesn’t remember what it was or the specifics of it, only that he’d found his dream car at some lot. He described the car with loving adjectives: – comfortable, luxurious, stately – and she listened.  Only thing was that he wanted Mom’s okay, having learned his lesson. Because earlier in my life, Dad bought a van without telling Mom. It was a good purchase, and one we never regretted, but Mom resented Dad buying it and not telling her until he took her to the lot to pick it up.

But there was a detail in all this that he felt he had to tell my mother.

Flying above this car lot were three flags. The United States flag. The flag of the state of Mississippi. And, the Confederate flag.

It was more than enough that the state flag, at that time, featured the Confederate flag IN IT, but the owner found himself the Stars and Bars and flew THAT, too.

Dad was pretty blasé about it. It’s the way they do things, he said. The salesman was nice and treated him well enough. He got great financing.

My mother was born and raised country, and saw and experienced what every Black Mississippian would have growing up in the post-WWII/pre-Civil Rights Movement South. She’d seen her share of rebel flags and knew what they meant, and, as she told me, they didn’t mean anything different 50 years later. 

Dad never got his car; he died not too much later and Mom is still puttering the Avalon down the dusty backroads. 

But the lesson was clear. Don’t buy from people who will take your money, but don’t like you. Whowon’t hire you. Who will do what they can to make you spend your cash, but will talk about the imagined stink of your breath or the invisible stain on your clothes before you get out the door.

Who wouldn’t hire you, who doesn’t see you as an equal in any way, shape, or form.

This is also a post about Target, and any number of companies out there who are extensions of personal values, values that, oddly enough, will devalue you as people, but not as an income source.