Black Lives Matter. And we have to share that truth so that it is our truth. Not a truth caked over by Whiteness, that veneer of “allowed” truth, of connotation and caveat papier-mached upon truth so it can pushed onto the table among other truths. We’re fucking people. We can only be people. So it requires no justification, no asterix arrived at because of the struggle it is taking to get us there – though our hideous history has made that mark on it so indelible. Because it is true, wholly and completely and utterly. The equal, just, and fair treatment of Black people here in America and everywhere is essential to our humanity. Pretending otherwise is the sickest moral oblivion.
We are not where we should be. But that needs to be our road. And mentioning it here – especially if the other option is not mentioning it here – is my way of taking a step on that road with many, many more to come and no turning back.
Better yet is to join me in supporting financially those organizations like www.bailproject.org that are making a difference.
***
My reward for writing this is looking back at old entries, old truths, old faces. Ye olden days. Sometimes I think I want to climb into that refrigerated air of my youth, I feel the summer…the monsoon in my present.
My present feels like Alabama, gravid trees swaying, something southern and burgeoning and throbbing and yet behind a screen door.
I’m out on the lanai, Blanche, out for the first time. And that’s something, after so long laying fetally around air vents, registers. The mediation, chilling, of the outside world…even just the sense of that world, can become addictive. You stop wanting experience, rough drafts, first tries. You want the good shit, the light that’s taken a hundred thousand years to reach you, so you know you’re beautiful in it. It’s a given. The sugar and the black center of the flame and the Wonder Bread and the clear. You get so that you stop being aware of texture, of seasons, of the difference between violet and indigo. Weakness becomes a kind of honorific. Every hair that falls, every frangible bit of tooth and bone, each pained grip a victory for the disconnected.
Because it is too much to know all at once.
The source is scary, to tell you the truth, Cindy. You are loved there and wanted and all the artifice you call your body and your mind is there and you are forced to see yourself without the absences you play at. Your excuses deflated, your god’s refusal to be mocked with petty rhetoric, your loneliness can no longer be affectation. It is stolen when you are at the center of all things and this is why we can’t just be good. Because sometimes our evil, our inertia, our devil, horny and sick and riddled with disease, our isolation prime is the only lattice we have to grow on. To hate oneself is a powerful propelling force. I find, Cindy, Tom, that I am able to do the most astounding things.
Like lift my body out to the lanai, and take a drink with you.
“And you tell her to give in, to the demons that possess her.”
Read this secret message and come home, come home, come home.
