Bad Luck < Reaganomics

Mr. Walt with his youngest daughter.

My grandfather was an automobile naysayer. He was born in 1893, and much preferred the reliability of his own two legs to a 4-wheeled automobile. We called him Grandpa, and everyone else called him Mr. Walt. 

 

When a white family decides they like your land, and they determine that they are especially fond of the timber on your land, and you are a black man, you may lose your land. After Mr. Walt and his brothers "lost" the land their father worked so hard to acquire, he relocated to New Orleans with his bride for a fresh start. Their odds at survival in New Orleans were fortified by the fact that his bride did not bear any children. Whatever means they managed to come by off the farm and in the city were plenty, because there were only two mouths to feed. They weren’t blessed with babies, but they looked good: nice clothes, dignified shoes, and clean hands on Sundays.

The Best Eye Doctor in Beverly Hills

zero point with tear in space (2012)

 

Originally published on "catnip and mint" June 2012

 

Rodney King died. But before he died, he was beaten up. And as a result, the City of Angels beat itself up and burned itself down. A few weeks after the beating, I sat next to Rodney King in a doctor's office. I needed new glasses, so my grandmother sent me to her optometrist for an exam. "He's the best eye doctor in Beverly Hills," she assured me confidently. 

 

I drove my Chevette Scooter to the doctor's office in Beverly Hills after school. I parked in the garage, and took an elevator up to any floor, and walked through a dimly lit hallway flanked by nondescript doors on either side, all leading to specialized medicines of the ear, nose, throat, eyes, and heart.

paper on paper

 

the blacker the berry (2020) by starshine astral travel agency

 

this collage and these words will be included in for the culture, a beautiful new magazine by cookbook author Klancy Miller. For the Culture celebrates black women and femmes in the food industry; look for the first edition later this month.

look at california

 

N'Gina Guyton: Lady. Boss.

Of Soil and Water Farm

         N’Gina Guyton is an artist dressed up as a boss. She owns South, one of Sacramento’s most beloved restaurants, as well as The Quinn and The Good Saint, a shop for thoughtfully curated vintage and an event space, respectively. I am visiting N’Gina at the site of her newest project, Of Soil and Water Farm. This piece of heaven is right outside the city of Sacramento, and today N’Gina is dressed in teeny tiny shorts, tall rubber boots, and freshly cropped, bleached hair. 

          When I write that South is beloved, I am not being hyperbolic. Since they opened their doors in 2014, there have been lines of locals waiting patiently for N’Gina’s family recipes: fried catfish and chicken, kale so tender you want to write it a love song, and cornbread, as well as banana pudding parfait and fried green tomatoes. It’s hard to imagine the food scene in Sacramento before South, frankly.

wake up, mama.

“Once asked, “And what is your religion?’ artist Gottardo Piazzoni hesitated, then replied, ‘California.’”

--Crocker Art Museum curatorial notes

A strange wind blew through California this last March revealing a great many things. We see that Gavin Newsom is poorly equipped to lead. We see that government leadership within the two parties has fallen capture to corporate interests and an unholy trinity of pharmaceuticals, media, and technology has emerged. We see our government demonstrating that they are effectively captured and controlled by a corporate greed death mentality that's been destroying everything for generations already.  This mentality extracts the planet's resources and makes us sick. It medicalizes, drugs, tracks, and monetizes everything. The corporate greed death cult's mentality has created fertile terrain – in the physical, biological and the psychological senses of the word terrain – for “the virus” to hurt and kill far more people than it should be able to.

 

The unholy trinity that is attempting a coup of the nation and the world will attempt to convince everybody, including everybody who is actually healthy, that they are constantly and everywhere at risk of getting sick and dying; thus, the need to be scared and hide and sanitize everything and not behave like humans anymore-- that is, until they provide us with their preferred treatment. We can see the overarching challenge is, as the writer-philosopher-thinker Charles Eisenstein frames it, that humanity is stuck in a story of Separation for the last couple thousand years—basically the entire Judeo-Christian era. This story repeats itself inside every societal value and moray, and informs our inner voice almost exclusively: "I am separate from everyone and everything. Life is a zero sum game and a struggle for resources. Winners and losers. Me versus them."  

 

You can see the younger generations straining against these binaries that have defined the parameters of our thinking, and thus living, and they yearn for a new dream that isn’t so heavily defined by the story of separation. It's not how we are supposed to be living.  It's not how we evolved to live.  And many of us, deep down, know this already; many more are remembering; and still many more continue to slumber within the nightmare.

 

We need a new dream, one that is centered on an affirmation of life. Too many humans have forgotten that we can change the dream; we can change our story.  What is happening in the world right now is an unveiling and unmasking of the nightmare.  It is also a call to remember, if we choose to listen; to re-humanize ourselves, to reorient and rededicate our selves to life affirming practices, beliefs, and structures. Let's harness the collective frustration stirred up by these strange winds and anchor a new story and dream together. We can even dare to dream up a new political party; for the sake of this discussion moving forward, I will call this the California Defends Childhood party.