"Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began."
number of years as a pearl jam fan: 18 number of times i’ve watched pearl jam documentary: 2 number of times mr. vedder and I laughed in the sunlight while sitting across from each other on our surfboards: sigh.
"The question of repetition is very important. It is important because there is no such thing as repetition. There is always a slight variation. Somebody comes in and you tell the story over again. Every time you tell the story it is told slightly differently."
"Certainly she was losing consciousness of the outer things. And as she lost consciousness of outer things, her mind kept throwing things up from its depths, scenes and names, sayings, memories and ideas, life a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space."
—
- Virginia Wolf, To The Lighthouse (via stoweboyd)
this may be the guiding prediction of my short jouney home to Portland, ME.
"It’s always a mistake to settle on any explanation for anything, because whatever you settle on you will be wrong, even if you’re right. Everything is ephemeral; everything is in a constant state of flux. Thinking past any conclusion you’ve drawn will reward you with a more complex insight and a more compassionate world view. This is something I’m constantly trying to learn and re-learn."
“catalyst for bringing marginalized experiences to light, and for finally understanding that it’s not happening because of who you are; it’s happening because of what you are, and that is something else entirely. Something which all of the people in your “what” have a vested interest in changing.”
Found this as I was literally writing notes on the “personal as political” and feel a great resurgence.
He went out into the hedges, smelling of roses and cut grass from June. When he returned, I learned to make him ice tea, not as strong as mine, but always for the three of us (even if he sipped it later over meditation). I would gaze at the gashes up his forearm, a deep burgundy. Without change of expression he would shrug his shoulders and say “rose thorns.” He proceeded to spread sliced tomatoes across the toasted bread Nuna had made him. She fed him simple lunches and he liked knowing that their summers together were guaranteed. He would watch her eat her own portions and sample anyone’s discarded fresh vegetable, dip them in oil and pepper from the table. She always ate more than him; she had the stomach of a 14 yr old boy after swim practice. We were filled with admiration for how much she savored each bite. He would smirk and shake his head, so proud that his wife was the healthiest woman on earth.
***
Two years ago, I imaged her and I, heartbroken, hoping that after a day of sun he would be there. Sitting in the shade, under the overhang, proud of his roses and thirsty for amusement.
She would make sauce and shut all the doors in the house. All of the children would slowly filter in, complaining of the heat and propping the small screened door open. But no one refused her routine offer of “more sauce?” on any of their dishes. She wanted to keep everyone hot and relaxed.
Now, she was teaching me to be strong by osmosis. I was grateful that I could hear her small giggles and attentive pauses whenever we’d have our private calls. During those long conversations, her wrinkles would dissolve and her eldest son would appear leaning against a brown kitchen counter, gazing at her youngest girl on an unchartered coast.
***
Dar would always raise his eyebrows at me and gaze with deep blues. My own eyes were a reflection of the ocean like his. And when the tides met, his wisdom was imparted on me.
I stepped into her yellow lit kitchen, with Cynthia following close behind me, my father excluded from the three generation gine reunion happening at 21 West Kidder Street. He bowed out through the screen door and left the three of us staring at each other in disbelief and midsummer relief. Her wrinkled skin was darker and more Italian on hot summer nights, my mother’s hair was lighter and her skin seemed painted over the small frame of her body. I stood in dirty jeans and batted my blue mascara lashes at them hoping they’d say I looked healthy—all the while diggin my chipped-polished fingernails into a bag of herbal popcorn the size of my torso.
The next morning, when I awoke under a bed of rosaries and calming white window shades, I immediately bounded with Cynthia to go towards the back bay of the boulevard. It was that moment, when the weather’s fickle angst was conjuring up rain from my eyelids, and Cynthia kept striding ahead, that I might as well have been a squirming thought below her c-section scar. I was born of the sweat of the great women before me, their perspiration leaving others panting behind them. Collectively, the three of us must have traversed that boulevard over 10,000 times, dispelling worry, anxiety and fear into the thick odor of the mud at low tide. We’ve displaced any struggle in the trees that lined the dirt path and found answers bounding over the bridge just above the entrance to the cove. I’ve replayed breakups, job interview failures, first embraces, and some of the greatest losses I’ve ever endured looping around that 3.75 mile trail.
And at the end, I find myself drenched in sweat and lingering by Dar’s roses at the edge of my grandmother’s driveway. My mom follows me, always remarking on my speed. And we both share the same dark, wet skin that smells of salty sea air and summer afternoon just before it rains.
Twenty Ten Cement drenched in sweat and piss. The sighs of workers littering each curb with discarded doubt, stress and fear. Somewhere, someone is crying - a frustrated baby and unkempt Mom wishing for 3 am. A siren. A drunk. A force. A collapse. Bones begin to break inside each robotic body cranking the last breath out. Nuclear lungs flood the air with more exhaust than the traffic emitted. Long legged women with hunched backs split their lips with cigarettes. Wrinkled faces watch their hands scab over and weaken under their own failure to tap the movement.
“They look like me” “Their nothing like me” “I don’t like that technology” “I don’t understand his vocabulary”
Pull. push. pull.
Twenty Eleven
In the blue just before dawn on March 19, the crew of the Machigonne mapped plans to leave the decrepit jaw of the city -the stank of submission still in their hair - they ventured towards the glowing orb that they admired from their toxic trenches: the moon.
In search of this meaningless landscape, they packed bottles of their own breath and enough ink for the whole of 19th century voyages, in satchels worn across their breasts.
On this day, the fullness of that glowing orb was to occur less than one hour away from perigee—a near-perfect coincidence that happens only 18 years or so. The perigean tides of the ultra full moon were the perfect entry point for the vessel of bodies. On the edge of their pupils, the bow of the ship was nearly touching her craters. Although the nomenclature of each crater was declared by the International Astronomical Union since its founding in 1919, the Machigonne had plans to render each magnanimus pit unidentifiable. Cartography would be redefined. Maps would be navigated with instinctive responses rather than declared and constructed boundaries. No locations. No descriptions. No discussions! Pure memory and nostalgia for the future would distinguish the moon from the sticky black atmospheric web it was tangled in.
But with the alluring draw of the moon, comes the distracting seduction of escape. The moon’s pull is known to raise the sea, heightening the nuances of one’s delicate emotions. When they seemed to move closer, one young lad’s face grew pale and his hands felt limp against his companion’s waist. The voyeurs weren’t prepared for the moon’s effect on the tides of their brain.
