Author: admin

Nearly 50 yrs into (and sooner than later out of) this life I am starting to gain some awareness of generational wealth and how some cultures have a leg up on others. I’m using the term culture here and not race very specifically. Culture may transcend race. It is true as such that poor southern white culture is closer to black culture than upper middle class culture is to that same standardized black culture. They are not mirrors. There are some things that race conveys that culture does not. The recent incidents with Serena Williams and Jhene Aiko are just the latest reminders that blackness (be it light or dark-skinned is not afforded the individuality that whiteness is within mainstream culture no matter how popular you are, no matter how much money you make, no matter how big the moment. If that were not the case these mistakes wouldn’t happen and if they did happen they’d achieve the level of infamy they rightfully deserve as opposed to a brief aside as they get.

That being said, there are instances in which culture transcends race. My partner is a first generation college student from a small town in the middle of nowhere. Generationally, she is one step removed from the outhouse culture circa The Glass Castle. In spite of that she is a college professor and she did that on her own, accruing the same student debt I did coming into it from being raised by a college educated mother. The cultural difference here is about family. My mom put me out on the street for the last time when I was 18. She gave me a bus ticket and sent me off to college with a ‘Good luck’ and a ‘I’m not filling out that FAFSA’

This is not how it went for my partner or, in the case of generational wealth, for her two boys. Both live at home. Both have anywhere from 10 to 30k stashed away from working. Neither pay more than a few hundred bucks each year for college either through scholarship or due to discounts because she is a professor. So, for them working is pure profit. The overhead they experience is that of vehicle upkeep. We buy the food, pay the bills, supply the games, etc. When they eventually leave the nest they will have a head start. My three boys won’t have that head start because I am not doing that for them. That is cultural. That is also a conversation for tomorrow, because my time is up.

At some point maybe ten years ago I realized that a fundamental pillar of myself had collapsed. I watched it fall and I did nothing. It wasn’t just in the details, it was the details. I stopped focusing on the little things in order to try to see some bigger picture view. As a result those little things added up the way one weed eventually becomes a weed-filled yard and that yard leads to a broken visage and that visage, once beautiful, becomes a dump. In that way I’ve watched my self and soul degrade into a dump. I’ve watched myself become a person who routinely allows assholes to not only walk over me but to get in my head. I’ve become a person who, instead of doing what I want to be doing with my life, is doing an unstable and watered down version of it because I am no longer operating from a stable foundation.

I think about how to repair the foundation all the time. All the while I continue to get older. I continue to grow into recognize death as an increasingly close eventuality. I continue to see my existence as a setting sun vs. dawning or midday or anything that promises long lived days or a positive future. I talk about being surrounded by negativity, but you don’t have to dig very deep into my past to recognize that the last time I wasn’t constantly surrounded by negativity I was 11 years old. I suffered from arrested development about a year later.

I long looked at lists as a way of organizing what was happening in my life and scratching off what needed to get done on a day to day basis. That stop-gap approach got me nowhere. The problem wasn’t the lists but what was on them and how much time I devoted to me and being a better version of me. Not much, to be honest. So, moving forward I am going to put aside a period of time–I don’t know how much–to rebuild myself and to worry about nobody and nothing else but that task.

I’ll start today.

This is Rene’ Jones.

This is Mike McDaniel

Both have been highly touted in recent years as being signifiers of success. Black success. Jones is one of 4 black CEOs in the fortune 500. There have only been 19 black CEOs in the history of the f500 and Jones gets more press than any of them. McDaniel has been hyped for years as the next great head coach. Now he’s being called an exemplar minority coach. Until recently nobody really talked about him being black. It wasn’t until the Dolphins needed to hire someone black in order to fulfill what looks to be a PR mishap based on the Flores firing that McDaniel’s race even became an issue.

What I find interesting about these men is that while being black, they don’t appear at all representative of black culture. That is the larger argument for me. The black people who are being put in front of us are, Black-ish. I use that term pointedly given the fact that the show itself ended because it was getting too black. Often our overarching American culture likes to pigeon hole black culture in a way that highlights the creativity and energy of the people as something sub-general to our reality. In other words, black culture is cool to look at and talk about but it isn’t to be integrated into the mainstream beyond fringe. Consider this: Billboard compiled a timeline of hip-hop performances at the Super Bowl. The timeline begins in 1998 and includes 8 different performances that include hip hip as a side piece to the main performance. In fact the only representations of Black American performance would be the 1998 Motown tribute, the Black-Eyed Peas performance, and the Weeknd performance. Except the Black Eyed Peas aren not black outside of Will.I,AM and the Weeknd is Canadian.

All of this is to say that Black remains a negative in American culture and a part of the reason is because it is and always has been shadowed by another version of blackness–a black-ish version characterized by Carlton and Urkel and everyone else capable of passing as a non-aggressive version of what we call black in America. All of this exists to preserve the idea of the aggressive black male because, in some way, we need that to be a part of our cultural identity as it always has been.

I haven’t done one of these in a while. The idea is to use this day of the week to look back into the past and see where I was on another day of the blog. I like looking back months and especially years. Today I’m looking back at 1876. This was the first iteration of the blog many many years ago. I was still watching Banshee on Cinemax… There was still a Cinemax (isn’t it gone?). I wrote about the balance of relationships and posited, “I fear many relationships are torn apart by a failure to communicate and if we could all just reiterate what we want and need–without getting angry or defensive about the need to reiterate–a lot more relationships would be happy ones.”

Years later I haven’t figured this out even a little. I am a fairly poor communicator in my own union. I’d argue I am bad to the point that it hasn’t blossomed into a marriage because of the mistakes in communication that I’ve made. I write women far better than I understand them in RL. I don’t write women particularly well. This was seven long years ago. I hold on to the idea that we become completely new people over the course of seven years. Yet I see that I have not drifted very far from the anchor of this old post. I try more and more to teach the boys how to act and be men, as I suggested I ought to do back then. I’ve done fairly well with two of the 3 of my blood and 1 of the 2 not of my blood. I’m told I’ve impacted the thinking of one of those two in a positive way at times. The other appears immune to my charms.

I continue to work on balance. I continue to work on being a partner and a lover and a father and a man and all of it demands a lot of me. I’ve shed roles along the way, but the ones I list are the ones I intend to keep and learn to be better at.

Used to be that writers channeled reality into a form that people recognized and empathized with. I’ve long worked towards doing this by telling our stories in different worlds. I work in fantasy and science fiction, but nothing is so strange as the present reality. I wasn’t around for the cold war. I missed basement bunkers (the first iteration) and bomb drills. Now I am living through the end of a pandemic and the beginning of a hot/cold war which is likely a year away from spiraling into a much larger global conflict–one that will be impacted deeply by our own elections.

I am living through a reality where sitting congressmen are openly attending white nationalist conventions (or at least those run by the people who run those organizations and hide behind the mask of far right ideology). I am living through a reality I would’ve never guessed at and I don’t know what to do with it or what do write about it.

I used to write about characters all of the time. I used to be able to pull them down from the ether and tell their stories, and I truly believe this is a part of what made me love writing and what separated me from other writers and made me my own thing. I need to reach the ether again. I’ll start trying now…

Kaitlyn Kapshaw

When she sees ads begging people to move to Ohio, she thinks about Cleveland. She thinks about the small house she lived in with her mother in Glenwillow after her father left and before Stan. She thinks about the way she used to love hanging out with the boys at Andy’s and eating ice cream and smiling and kissing all the handsome boys. She remembers how fun it was not to care about anything. She remembers thinking about going to college and how amazing it would be to meet other girls who thought and felt the same way she did about life.

She knew liars even then. She knew girls and guys alike who would hug you and talk to you like they were your best friend and then, later, share a cigarette with another person and talk shit after every exhale. She knew girls who made up stories about her; about what it meant when she kissed the boys and say that she did other things with them. This was before she even wanted to do those things, mind you. The wanting came after the doing, but that was her fault, mostly. She thought about that too when she thought about Ohio.

Still, she missed the state. It home where Phoenix could never be. Phoenix was hot but emotionally cold. The people were distant; her campus a small city of strangers who had none of the interests she’d hoped for when she left home.

There is something very wrong with me. My sense of smell, once deadened, has become hyper-engaged to the point where I smell everything and most smells upset my stomach–a stomach which is moments from vomiting all the time it seems. I am sick. It feels like what people describe after getting Covid-19. Parasomia. What is unclear is whether or not it occurs during or after contracting the ‘rona. So, I need to figure that out relatively fast. I also need to go test, so I don’t go spreading my stuff around.

I need to do additional research to confirm, but it does seem like the symptoms I am experiencing are leftovers from having the virus. I was sick a week ago and didn’t think much of it, but it is possible that I got hit with the ‘rona and didn’t realize. That is the thing about highly transmittable diseases–you are probably gonna get hit. I think about that in terms of the Zombie conversations, the Walking Dead, etc. In that show the virus infected everyone but only when your ability to combat it is overwhelmed (bite, etc.) do you go zombie. Could be I am at a low point myself and as a result I am experiencing the damaging after effects of this virus.

I don’t like it. It is really uncomfortable to experience smells this way and even worse it appears I am experiencing phantom smells as well. That serves as an unpleasant reminder of how much our brains shape our reality. Hopefully it goes away very very fast, because it is driving me crazy.

Okay, this war has triggered some real disappointment in my soul. Not because it happened–A three year old could see that coming. What bugs me is the politicization of the war and how it reflects on the crumbling state of intra-American discourse. Sheep. We are largely sheep. Sheeple. Too many dogs leading part of the flock in one direction while the rest split to the wind with no real leadership. Scary times.

Scary people.

I’ve been thinking about a type. A type typically defined as being racist. These are the Americans stuck in the distant shadow of wars a type cast in the 80s by American flags rock bands and trans ams. Another type cast in the 10’s of Big trucks, bald heads, and long beards carved out of the image of Gulf War special forces. They are in fact the same type but entirely reflective of a highly sanitized memory of a time and what was cool about that time projected forward into a mashup of that and what works in the present social structure as cool and what works works to forward a dominant political ideology based on a unconsciously submissive working class. What is it going to look like in 20 years? Not sure. Not sure at all.

I know I should be freewriting, but this Russia situation has me twisted. Not so much what Putin is doing–you expect a dog to be a dog. However, what Fox News is doing is straight up atrocious. Yes, I get that I just said you expect a dog to be a dog, but this dog has so much power in our sphere that it is causing a large number of Americans to rethink their reality. We have quite literally gone from worrying about Russian influence to ‘Why do we hate Putin?‘ He goes on to make some pretty damning remarks, one of which is as purely anti-American as it gets.

He says, “What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? “

First off, the ‘what is this really about’ is a trigger phrase. It indicates that we ought to be questioning the reasoning of everything and everyone BUT him. So, I ask you, dear reader, to question him. What is it really about? Why does he want to protect Putin and in such throw barbs at Americans or at the perception of so-called fringe Americans, or as they put it, ‘democrats’. I fear that Fox News is driving a divide into our nation because it fills their pockets and egos and quest for power and keeps those who listen afraid and docile and buying what they want them to buy and voting how they want them to vote and believing what they want them to believe and ONLY what they want them to believe to the exclusion of reality. It is more likely that a Fox News viewer believes that Clinton ran a sex ring than Trump cheated on his taxes. That level of confirmation bias driven logic is disturbing at best, criminally negligent at worst.

As a father and a partner and a citizen I am worried about our country. We can say over and again that ‘we’ve been here before’ or ‘it’s not as bad as it’s been in the past’ but we cannot neglect the power that technology has to reach people and provide them with an extremely closed off view of reality. It is easy to login to ONLY your apps and your newsfeeds and decide on your reality and when someone not from that sphere challenges that reality they INSTANTLY become the enemy. Add to that the power to generate law at the local level and we are struggling to maintain a nation that is, in fact, democratic and not Autocratic and that one who controls many tends to be the corporation with the most power to manipulate perspective.

This Tuesday is 2.2.22. crazy odd right? No, I am not going to try and work the #2 into the freewrite in some way. It doesn’t really work and feels corny even for me. Instead I am going with John Fox’s blog on magical realism. He writes, ” (6) Write about a character who can taste people’s emotions through the food they prepare.”

There aren’t a lot of jobs suited to a person with my particular abilities. The visceral reaction it causes me makes it difficult to hold what is commonly known as a ‘poker face’ It is clear how I feel about people and how they are feeling about me from the moment I encounter them. That is what made it so strange that Barner Systems would think to hire me as their HR executive. My job is hiring people. Everyone who comes through the company sits down with me first and that meeting determines whether they get hired or they don’t. If I was a better liar I could use that position to my advantage, but lying isn’t my strong suit. In fact, it gives me actual hives. That’s why when I sat down with Anette Hargreaves I was worried for my life.

My ability allows me to sense peoples emotions and intentions. It isn’t in the cool fashion–the Professor X slick mindreading. No, I taste what they want and feel. It hits my tastebuds like food entering my mouth. Anette tasted like Durian fruit.