8pm
The children are embarrassed about what they don't know, hiding ignorance in carefully constructed verbage. A movie has a reference to a trick of grammar a five year old ought to know, and my middle school friends laugh along to the implied track...never understanding the pun or gesture.
Imploring to the dispassive in all of us, the days pass and pass without great establishing changes. The children bluster and build, bite and squeal. What we don't know is killing us too slowly to notice. What may have been grand or noble about us falters down into collapsed packages of nostalgia.
My sister Andrea used to wait at the steps of the school. Bookbag slung over her shoulder, prim hands folded neatly at prim waist. A conscious effort at being. She was a year and a half older than me. At 10, that's fifteen million years if it's a day. Andrea's soft curless hair hung up on the crunched forehead of her brothers face. I was so very fragile in my willingness to believe. It's not wonder that my teens made me an expert in everything, if only by disposition instead of real fact.
Andrea making up games and reality in a porous display of power should and did lead to Adam's willfully pompous declarations.
The most frustrating thing in the world?
When you tell your sister ten lies a week in order to feel important and smart, and she says little about it at all. Then, you tell her one true beautiful thing, and she does not believe you.
The children I work with now are so far beyond the notice of history they consider themselves to be mere observes of it. They are not playing a role, but instead they are to be the biting barb of closed closeted wit, screaming rhythmic profanity and self-observed rationalizations at the tail en of the universe's decay point.
They seem not to realize that the universe will not allow itself to be observed. Life, it seems, is too busy happening to be looked at. But the children I see everyday are the children of entropic results. To them, the universe is a white universe. Not white as in the sticky clouded membranes and peptides of it's various strand concentrations. Nor white as in the color of the stuff of procreation. But white as in the universe's skin pigmentation, as if the universe could have such a thing. It's a white world, a white galaxy, a white universe. A white wholeness.
Jawan would fall in shock if I told him that most of the world is populated by people with color to their skin. So I tell him. So he falls, so his pain and his confusion find one more glimmer of stratified objectivity.
Andrea convinced me to jump fro a small cliff and break my leg when I was very young. It seems that I am not Superman.
Jawan's only dream is to rap. His only cause and effect is the words that cascade from him into meaning by being circulatory and meaningless. He'll find, I fear, that he is not Jay-Z. What he might break, even if it would be so small as a pinky, would cost him far greater than my broken leg ever cost me.
Being poor and black in America means every price is higher. Every payment more painful. Every expectation is lower as every demand is skyscrappered. Our white ignorance grants us the privileged of placing success on the backs of the successful. Black's ignorance keeps that essential system in place. This is all fine and good for the successful, so long as they never must look never the spotlighted framings to see the dark grey, machine-like poor carrying all the carts, hauling all the boxes, connecting all the comments, and feeding all the strangers with politely gritted teeth.
Andrea and I passed the time by eating all the candy in the package. 40 pieces or so of sugar-laced shame. Dad comes home to become upset, as if his purpose in leaving work that day was to become so. I hung my head in regret, but was baffled as to why I should. Candy was there. Candy is good. I at the candy.
Jawan is 12, but he writes 14 whenever he gets the chance. His family is a fractured wasted thing, beyond the connections and forsaken of sentient cognition. It's a fairy-tale, in short. A washed out nothing that started from broken bridges to become an ink stain. It was built within the depths of the crackling fault lines that run below our society. He never lost. The blind cannot be led astray, because aiming at nothing is the same as not aiming at all.
Andrea and Adam walked home from school. We thought jaywalking was the height of how far we might push things. I swear, I did drugs just because I'd heard it was dangerous. I was a child who'd never held his hand to a fire, but only heard that it was extraordinarily exciting to do so.
Changing the past is, of course, as impossible as walking through a wall. Changing what you remember of the past is only as difficult as walking through a door. It seems to be just as effective. Andrea walks through doors made of stone. A penny for a candy, or to Lossons for cheap plastic things made of foresight and market shares.
The days fall on and on.
Time does not fly. It sings me a song.
The children are embarrassed about what they don't know, hiding ignorance in carefully constructed verbage. A movie has a reference to a trick of grammar a five year old ought to know, and my middle school friends laugh along to the implied track...never understanding the pun or gesture.
Imploring to the dispassive in all of us, the days pass and pass without great establishing changes. The children bluster and build, bite and squeal. What we don't know is killing us too slowly to notice. What may have been grand or noble about us falters down into collapsed packages of nostalgia.
My sister Andrea used to wait at the steps of the school. Bookbag slung over her shoulder, prim hands folded neatly at prim waist. A conscious effort at being. She was a year and a half older than me. At 10, that's fifteen million years if it's a day. Andrea's soft curless hair hung up on the crunched forehead of her brothers face. I was so very fragile in my willingness to believe. It's not wonder that my teens made me an expert in everything, if only by disposition instead of real fact.
Andrea making up games and reality in a porous display of power should and did lead to Adam's willfully pompous declarations.
The most frustrating thing in the world?
When you tell your sister ten lies a week in order to feel important and smart, and she says little about it at all. Then, you tell her one true beautiful thing, and she does not believe you.
The children I work with now are so far beyond the notice of history they consider themselves to be mere observes of it. They are not playing a role, but instead they are to be the biting barb of closed closeted wit, screaming rhythmic profanity and self-observed rationalizations at the tail en of the universe's decay point.
They seem not to realize that the universe will not allow itself to be observed. Life, it seems, is too busy happening to be looked at. But the children I see everyday are the children of entropic results. To them, the universe is a white universe. Not white as in the sticky clouded membranes and peptides of it's various strand concentrations. Nor white as in the color of the stuff of procreation. But white as in the universe's skin pigmentation, as if the universe could have such a thing. It's a white world, a white galaxy, a white universe. A white wholeness.
Jawan would fall in shock if I told him that most of the world is populated by people with color to their skin. So I tell him. So he falls, so his pain and his confusion find one more glimmer of stratified objectivity.
Andrea convinced me to jump fro a small cliff and break my leg when I was very young. It seems that I am not Superman.
Jawan's only dream is to rap. His only cause and effect is the words that cascade from him into meaning by being circulatory and meaningless. He'll find, I fear, that he is not Jay-Z. What he might break, even if it would be so small as a pinky, would cost him far greater than my broken leg ever cost me.
Being poor and black in America means every price is higher. Every payment more painful. Every expectation is lower as every demand is skyscrappered. Our white ignorance grants us the privileged of placing success on the backs of the successful. Black's ignorance keeps that essential system in place. This is all fine and good for the successful, so long as they never must look never the spotlighted framings to see the dark grey, machine-like poor carrying all the carts, hauling all the boxes, connecting all the comments, and feeding all the strangers with politely gritted teeth.
Andrea and I passed the time by eating all the candy in the package. 40 pieces or so of sugar-laced shame. Dad comes home to become upset, as if his purpose in leaving work that day was to become so. I hung my head in regret, but was baffled as to why I should. Candy was there. Candy is good. I at the candy.
Jawan is 12, but he writes 14 whenever he gets the chance. His family is a fractured wasted thing, beyond the connections and forsaken of sentient cognition. It's a fairy-tale, in short. A washed out nothing that started from broken bridges to become an ink stain. It was built within the depths of the crackling fault lines that run below our society. He never lost. The blind cannot be led astray, because aiming at nothing is the same as not aiming at all.
Andrea and Adam walked home from school. We thought jaywalking was the height of how far we might push things. I swear, I did drugs just because I'd heard it was dangerous. I was a child who'd never held his hand to a fire, but only heard that it was extraordinarily exciting to do so.
Changing the past is, of course, as impossible as walking through a wall. Changing what you remember of the past is only as difficult as walking through a door. It seems to be just as effective. Andrea walks through doors made of stone. A penny for a candy, or to Lossons for cheap plastic things made of foresight and market shares.
The days fall on and on.
Time does not fly. It sings me a song.
Merry Christmas. Hope you have a great holiday.