Attention, please.

Quickly, I'm swinging on ropes across a great ravine, and your attention is the next rope.

Ah, thank you. Life-giving sunlight, your attention, strikes right in the solar plexus, spreads pleasure, propels me another slow, sure, enjoyable twenty feet.

Look, look at me! Hurry up. Thank you.

[I perform a small dance in the air, gyrations. Payment for your trouble.]

Your attention has disappeared. That's fine. I have its ghost. Your foot has come off the gas pedal but the fuel hasn't entirely stopped flowing. I'm still moving forward.

Slowing.

[(There's a trick involved, here, bystanders. You have to pick the right moment to launch your bid for attention. Do it too soon and you're wasting perfectly good fuel. This is assuming some ecological model in which fuel is exhaustible and can be wasted, but you should assume that. If you don't, and you're wrong, you may not make it all the way across to your death. You may run out of fuel and die before your death.

The cartoon character has just raced off a cliff into mid-air, come to a stop and realized its dilemma. We are in the micro-vicinity of the moment to strike. You have between now and your blinking take to the watching audience (the other watching audience, the one that doesn't matter) to launch your bid. If you wait until "reality"/"gravity" kicks in and your limbs just barely begin to flail, your performance will have a whiff of desperation about it. This isn't immediately fatal, it's just foolish. You have a long way to travel across to your death. If you are to hold the desired audience's attention, your performances must inspire trust. Your performances should be assured, seemingly careless, professional without showing it. Your technique must be firmly in place. Then you can allow real life to come into your performances! And you should, you must. You have a long way to travel across to your death. These performances should be worthwhile, should nourish your audience with something real. Your audience is also in mid-air, is quietly struggling, has a long way to travel across to their death. If you are always yelping for attention and then holding up an empty box, your audience will begin to ignore your pleas, however tuneful your yelp, however shapely your box. The trick is to inspire loyalty, lifelong loyalty, create a valuable symbiosis. You and your audience should have a real exchange at each of these desperate crossroads.)]

[(However, you both have a long way to travel across to your deaths so you should occasionally also just have fun. For every four times your bid for life-giving attention involves the removal of your skin and bones and the revealing of your pulsating internal organs, there should be at least one bid that's just flashing some skin or telling a joke or popping and locking for a second. Feel free to adjust that ratio, if you're confident. Play it by ear, if you have a good ear. Don't fuck with it, otherwise - lives are on the line. When in doubt, 4:1.)]

And....

NOW.

Existentialism for Adults

We all did it with joint tar staining the same lips that formed the words, "But why are we HERE?"

As teens.

I ask you, panel of grown wizards, Why?

Children, the act of having and shepherding them, would seem to beg the question more deeply, but I sense that they, may be an answer of sorts, that it quiets the question.  A balm.  That creation itself answers the question of why were we ourselves created.
But I may be wrong.  Please advise.

I look in the mirror and ask the question, abetted by liquor.
I feel it when my dog looks into my eyes and I almost hear words.
I sense a stampede just behind the silver of the office bathroom mirror.
I muse like a starved ape when our race conspires to do something hateful or pretty.

In other words, what in the ever-loving fuck are we doing here? 
Why am I asking Why at 37 years of age?  Why do clouds, literal clouds, seem to speak at times, just a fraction of a percent past my ability to comprehend them, like the pulse of a flourescent light, just beyond my ability to know that it's a pulse, not a continual shine...and yet they give me headaches, those tubes, for the same reason? 

Maybe I just need a new job.  But that seems awfully convenient. 
And if anyone quotes the Bud Dry ad campaign I will fly to you on a jet so swift and jam a used toner cartridge employed only to print the word WHY down your cute gullet.

Why do I feel like a "young soul,"--that abominable concept of knowing existence--while others, like TR, and Higgins from Magnum, seem so old and wise?  And Cosby?  Stevie Wonder? 

In even OTHER words, and rounding out my query, what do you feel in your goodness-given bones (if they are real and hard at all!  If they are in fact calcium and ossified What Not at all!) about why we are here, and why we Are, at all.........................as an adult who has had some time to consider this question, and who is not, unless you happen to be, high?

Mean it.

2010 Nukkka

CBA will have all year to perfect these ...http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local-beat/chicago-gang-signs-colors-hand-gestures.html

The Brown Hornet

Prelude:  Can we talk about racism without tripping over ourselves?  No drippy comments about how bad racism is?  In other words, if you choose to throw down on this topic, please SHOW me why it's bad/neutral/peachy.  Don't TELL.  My guess is that we all think it's low.  So can we say something other than boilerplate?  Can you?

RACE AND RACISM IN MY PRETEEN YEARS

I first thing I remember is the Brown Hornet, Cosby's play-within-the-play on Fat Albert. 

The Brown Hornet was the cartoon the FA characters watched in their clubhouse in the city dump (more than simply making us feel sorry for the gang, the implication is that the kids themselves are (perceived as) no more important than trash). 

They gathered religiously to watch the Brown Hornet, the one figure they have to idolize (parents in FA are all but nonexistent, but unlike Peanuts, there are speaking adult characters--most are portrayed as conniving).  The kids run in a cloud of dust and squeaky-shoe sound effects to make it to the little clubhouse TV.  The Brown Hornet materializes out of the static--there's always a sense they won't be able to tune him in.  Now, the Hornet is not infallible--he barely pulls off the escape/rescue, and his eyes betray a sense of "How did I get this job?"  He gets caught in compromising situations.  His spaceship is a bucket. Still, he eventually wins the day, smashing shit up.  The clubhouse kids howl in approval. 

What it made me consider, at age 5, was that these kids were watching a black guy.  Sure, I was watching a black show, but I was white.  Here were blacks watching blacks.  Nothing profound here--it just made me realize that the majority of what I saw on TV was white.  That I was white.

Many years later when the Cosby Show started, I would struggle with the idea of a black doctor dad, a black lawyer wife and well-adjusted black kids, supportive, non-jealous black grandparents, living in the heart of the city.  The only black grandfather was Marvin Gaye's dad.  What I struggled with was the idea of appropriation.  I mean, rich whites raised blacks out of generosity, right?  Diff'rent Strokes, yo!  We wouldn't have blinked at a shite show with similar characters (hello Silver Spoons), but with the Cosby Show--the biggest draw of its time, I was thinking, whatchoo talkin bout Bill?  At about the same time, American blacks were busy appropriating staunchly white icons such as Mercedes (nice hood ornament, cracker--it'll look great as a necklace), Fila (tennis!!), Adidas (Germany!  And tennis!), and calling each other nigger.  Er, "nigga."  But you get the idea?  Sure.  Meanwhile, the Cos was appropriating white roles in his show.  No more dry cleaner kings, no more families living in alleys, no more quiet anger...  Cosby is a brilliant dude.

And now Tina has appropriated "pussy."  Wheel in the sky, keep turning.

I was pretty idealistic as a preteen.  I wasn't really racist until high school.  More on that in later post.  What I knew from my parents and Jesus most adults was that:

1) it was wrong.

2) it made sense not to judge others based on the color their skin.

Still, the blacks and Mexicans I knew as a kid (few) weren't dressed as well as most white kids.  The minority adults seemed sad.  Therefore, in my young eyes, there was something going on here.  Like we weren't supposed to not like them as much, but there was no practica application.  My parents didn't have a lot of black friends, if any?  Why?

Nonwhites I knew as a preteen:

Stacy Fitzpatrick, who lived in a trailer.  He was ok, then suddenly mean.  His clothes were dirty.

Fuzzy, who worked bagging groceries at the local market.  He bought a Michael Jackson zipper jacket (red) after Thriller came out.  He was later convicted for molesting children.  He was awfully friendly.  He liked to joke with us at the store, an adult who acted like a child.

Emeka (see below).

Louise, who worked at my preschool.  She taught me to tie my shoes.  I liked her.  She sat on the stoop and watched up play with those heavy stainless steel trikes and hollered at misbehaving kids.  We had eggplant one day for snack and I said 100% innocently that it was the same color as her skin.  I had no idea about Italians calling blacks melezzane.  Oh brother.

I was in the 3rd grade when Emeka Mbachu (a-MAKE-ah  mm-BOTCH-oo) made the scene.  His dad was from Nigeria (which, along with Niger, were considered hilarious country names for kids just learning to spell, but which wouldn't have been funny at all if Chris Turner hadn't pointed out the word nigger) and was in Sewanee for seminary (the result of aggressive colonization by the Anglican church for the century prior, not exactly paying dividends for the Episcopal Church today). 

Enough parentheses.  Emeka was a huge black kid.  If you wanted to win at football at recess, you picked Emeka first.  Whoever won the coin toss to decide first pick won the game.  Hand off or pass to Emeka, and he would carry three kid into the end zone, laughing the whole time.  He was always smiling.

Given his loose grasp of English, we would sometimes provide him with whispered answers to the teacher's questions.  "Three times three?" Mrs. Majors would query.  Emeka wanted to provide answers.  Someone would whisper to him, "Emeka--'shit.'"  And he would blurt out, "Shit!" proudly and with a smile. 

Mrs. Majors would then paddle him, which we loved to see, because the sight of a larger male being paddled by a shorter old woman was comical.  Did his African blackness and her Mary Kay peachness contribute to the sight gag?  Maybe.  And he smiled through the paddling.  He wore some kind of diaper, I'd seen it when he stood up after (finally) being tackled. 

One day my dad came home from a National Guard weekend trip. I was 8 or so. On an early morning training excursion, one of the Guardsmen had fallen asleep at the wheel of his Jeep and crashed it into a tree. he died. He was the father of one of the few boys at school who was black. James Beasley. In later years, it would just seem to figure, a la Scorcese flicks, that it was the black guy who fell asleep at the wheel.

See how much media contributes to our perceptions of the world?  Where's Tipper?  I owe her an apology.

I wish I could say that it gets easier from this childhood point of grappling, but it doesn't.  I talk about, or around, racism with those close to me.  It is endlessly fascinating, how race gets tied up with culture (Jews, e.g.) to the point that one is indicernible from the other.  How one's phenotype, not genotype, determines how we perceive them (Tiger and Obama on one side, Colin Powell on the other.  And Michael Jackson somewhere in the middle, someone who took control of his color, unsuccessfully).

That's enough for now.  I feel a little ill. 

Morning Calm

It is early. You've just spent several hours asleep. The time has come to begin your next day.
Is this sacred time? Should it be? Could it be?

In the past year, I have started my days in one of three ways:
1) Waking at 5:45am, dressing for a run, running several miles with my dog, pausing for an hour to throw the ball for him, doing push-ups and sit-ups when he rests, return home, shower, begin work by 8am.
2) 5-minute snooze button, as many as 10 times. Montage of mild depression. Finally settling on feeding the dog, or smoking a cigarette, as the motivating factor to get upright.
3) Mad scramble to get dressed and get to the airport/appt/etc., compressing what takes 45 minutes on a relaxed day into 20, leaving home without key items such as phone, breakfast, belt.

Which brings us to Korea.

The majority of the South Korean adult population participate in a ritual known as Morning Calm. They rise with the sun, venture outside or to a sheltered indoor location in inclement weather, and commune with nature and each other. Martial arts practice, stretching, squatting and chatting quietly, yoga, fishing. Then they go to work and create products that are squeezing ours off the shelves. Kia, Hyundai, LG.
I'm not saying SK has it figured out--far from it. But their morning ritual beats the typical American version of shower/breakfast/coffee/traffic, or kids/maybe-shower/pack lunches/maybe-coffee/feel unwhole, or any combination thereof.

One objection that's sure to surface: "BUT MY KIDS. YOU DON'T GET IT."

Ah, so.

To which I will respond with questions. Can you not conceive of any way to find any time for yourself on any mornings, ever? Has life, or your perception of its boundaries, become so utterly compressed that you cannot find a shred of good time for yourself, or negotiate some trade-off with your spouse (presuming that either of you see how fucking awesome it would be to gather yourself out in the dawn light)?

(Keep in mind that I am trying to get back in the mode of Morning Calm myself--I am miles away from it now. But I am looking out for us, and sick of our excuses.)

Begin again,
Jumpy

Cock Rock Thesis

Taking into consideration the first wave of anthemic, erotically charged music in the West, troubadourism, I fail to see how eighties pop rock was in any way offensive to women. All DLR and Stephen Pearcy ever really sang about was how much they worshipped poontang.

DOMINO

Ok Suave House: come-to-Jesus time.

Are we too old to clear the air? Too foggy?
What's on your mind?

Jumpy wants to know