one thing today

I wonder if my father - who was married with two children - was scared when he was drafted. In my dream I choose to enlist and then panic and wonder if after you sign up and change your mind you go to prison. the first thing they did to me was blow tiny clear bubble like granules up my nose. they burned. and then I walked down an empty city street at night carrying a sealed brown burlap sack that sounded like it had grain or wooden beads in it. then I went into a tattoo place and had to choose one that was gonna take seventeen hours to do. by then, I knew I had made a big mistake and didn't know where I was gonna go or what I was gonna do. the thought of being in the army has always terrified me. when my number got called up ... I had to be at least 118 pounds to pass the physical. I weighed 108, thanks to a season of  Black Beauties and a fab overnight giant diuretic. 

  Am in the fancy Starbucks place. In a fancy leather chair by the plate glass window, overhearing a womans phone conversation … you don’t have to see eye to eye about everything.  Everyone walking by outside looks as brisk as the day, kinetic as the changing leaves … all different kinds of walks and paces … swerving bike riders … a five way intersection … motion at its most that fits with the music playing … piano and organ and some thumpy thump thing we didn’t have a century ago … a painter painting on an easel across the street … crowds on corners … long haired girls in sweatshirts that fit The Rock … tall young dads … sips of energy … amazing that everyone I see is going somewhere … the gym, to buy food or cloth, a book, a bucket, doctors, sofas, so many choices, possibilities … color … funny, how some days are just …

 

  All human consciousness is narrative. One cannot remember a memory as it is; one tells a story when one tells a memory of the past, because every narration is already an interpretation. Each act of remembering tries to establish an order among heterogenous, chaotic data and does so through imagination. We describe an event of the past by arranging it in a series, by passing it through a plot, and by recounting it selectively. Each time we tell the same event we produce a different story. What is remembered is therefore always a story, never the past ‘itself’.                                                                                                           ...

the coins in my pocket  sound like a crackling  bag of nickels or a movie crowd getting out of a comedy with a  loud happy ending you want to go  back in and see again the very same night

  I'm  reading a new six hundred page bio of James Baldwin and he describes attending a church service in Alabama at which King preached - and he notes how glorious the experience was. And it made me remember the time when I did a radio show for the Salvation Army and realized why the Black church was so important, almost like the equivalent to therapy for Whites. Black families can and do abandon their members. The Black Church does not. And when my father died, a reverend I hardly knew who was interviewed on the program sent me condolence and a peace lily.  It had an impact. and I love the image William Styron depicted when Baldwin stayed with him and his wife in conn for an extended stay ... "this little black figure would walk across our land blanketed with deep snow and come inside and after dinner with a drink in his hand he'd pronounce to our very liberal dinner guests - we're gonna burn all your mother fucking houses down." and they were enthralled. balls.