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I saw a calendar in the bookstore the other day that had a particularly real joke. It talked about how you could find a TV really worth watching… once you lowered your standards. I feel like lowering standards in order to accept behavior seems to be par for the course these days. This article on CNN reflects that painfully. In other words, we are at the point where we are accepting BS behaviors and straight up nonsense and standardizing it.

In other news I fear the dude from American Psycho just got White House clearance. Jared Kushner seems every part that guy in recent weeks and sees himself as a cross between Trump and JFK. He is neither. Based on what is being said about him, Kushner is likely the most dangerous man in America right now, because he has the President-Elects ear and confidence and an agenda that is based largely in petty revenge and personal gains.

Finally, a shout out to the Giants. My Giants have not been good, but lately they’ve discovered a way to come together and play like a top shelf team. The 1 pt win over Cincy signals the start of a slate of games that could push them past Dallas and into first place. I’m thinking big, but so are they.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I adore romance. It makes me feel alive inside. More importantly, I love the look on my loved one’s face when I can do something small and romantic–something just enough to upturn one corner of her mouth.

Ever notice how teachers at the end of their career tend to be the best or the very worst of their breed? It becomes a polarizing factor dually giving rise to the notion that teachers should retire sooner or that at the end of the rotation a teacher doesn’t give a damn about the politics and is, finally, about the learning.

 

I wish I’d had more of those teachers in my time. I can name three off the top of my head, led by Herbert Greenhut, the best teacher I’ve ever met. He had a plan from day one and by day twelve it was clear to all of us that things weren’t going to be normal and our comfort zone, though gone, was being remade into something stellar.

 

I don’t invoke such a rise in my students. I want to. I feel like I spent too many years on the job trying to be a good teacher or an influential teacher or even matching some film-born idea of what a teacher ought to be (oh captain my captain). None of that is me. If I’ve learned one thing over the past few years its that trying to be someone other than yourself is a painful experience destined to end in failure. The most you can be is the best version of yourself wherever you go. I’ve moved back towards that in my personal and professional lives and it feels so good.

 

Some Thoughts:

 

1. Failed to upload this last night.

I grew up in Harlem, 135th in Lenox Terrace. Names like Percy Sutton and Charles Rangel were associated with the floors they lived on and whether or not they hooked me up with the good candy on halloween. Sylvia’s was the place I hated having to run to once a week because my mom demanded takeout. Wilsons was the place with the good muffins that I’d get if I did well enough in school. It wasn’t until I left the city that I recognized that what I took as part of my daily droll was in fact a part of black history I should’ve felt honored to encounter. Then Luke Cage came along.

Cage director, Cheo Hodari Cooker first came to my attention for directing NCIS: Los Angeles. This show relaunched LL Cool J and created pivotal black male and female characters who were equals to each other and the other cast members around them. This is an important point, because generally speaking female and minority characters play an inferior role to white male counterparts on TV. When they don’t, the show often becomes about the fact that they don’t i.e. The Good Wife, How to Get Away With Murder, and of course, Empire. Cheo’s characters existed as equals in a world where race existed but the idea of equality was not seen as a focal construct.

Luke Cage flips the script again, creating a world where race is a focal construct but not in the sense of racial balance. Race here is seen from the point of view of black america, where we are constantly striving to better ourselves and to create a space in which to show the rich culture and history of our people and to highlight those who have created it. Most of the people in Luke Cage are black and as such it isn’t so much about being black vs. white but about what it means to be black in harlem.

And he really gets harlem right. He sees the harlem I grew up in, but he puts it on a pedestal that I did not see until long after I was gone. In the hero Cage himself Hodari crafts a streetwise Captain America who pays homage not only to black culture but to the weekend morning kung fu flicks and blaxploitation films that defined early African American cinema. Luke Cage is nothing if not an homage to black culture–both good and bad. Its titular hero is a hoodie wearing non-hero who is just trying to get by and stay out of trouble.

He doesn’t stay out of trouble. What he does is take another step forward in cementing the power of the Marvel-Netflix franchise, and reminding viewers that this is but one slice of a larger canvas filled with amazing heroes and stories to come.

This is one of those nights where I don’t quite know how to start. What I tell my students to do in these situations is to just keep writing, letting the brain declutter until you find that thread of reason and inventiveness that wants to make its way to the page. This doesn’t always work–as a teacher and a writer. Occasionally the tank is dry and all you are left with are the words around the edges of sense that are barely worth sharing.

What I can talk about is my own life. I’ve struggled as of late to produce any valuable writing. I have lost my muse and am left to chart new entry points to the well of stories. My new plan is to sit amongst people and take stock of the lives and movement around me. While writing happens locked in an office, ideas come together on the streets, where people love, cry, argue, and misbehave. So I am taking it upon myself to explore AZ and take advantage of what the city has to offer me. I suspect I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

See, while NYC is unparalleled for its stories, people often come to AZ as an escape. Phoenix is the Vegas you actually settle down in. It exchanges slots for poorly imagined mcMansions and youth soccer leagues. On this quiet lamplit streets live people who are often running away from something or towards a particular vision of the American dream. I wonder where they came from and what about here–this sedentary life–is so compelling.

Some Thoughts:

1. Watched Saturday Night Live for the first time in a decade and it really was outstanding. Dave Chapelle reemerged and brought a Tribe Called Quest and Chris Rock with him. He was funny and poignant on the subject of the election and did a god job to ground things in perspective. Never doubt the healing properties of a good laugh.

Downstairs the Franchise Boys are entertaining friends, raising the number of boys making noise to six. Upstairs Luke Cage is on the TV and there are a dozen chores to be done before I get to the grading. I don’t stop anymore, because when I do I freeze up, Han Solo locked in carbonite waiting to be set free. So I don’t stop. I keep moving forward. I keep doing, listening, learning, and willing myself forward.

Buddhism teaches me how to pause, to see the world around me, and to reflect on the moment. This moment I live in doesn’t keep me in a positive headspace. So instead I keep moving forward, ignoring the moment and hoping to arrive at a better moment; hoping to find and do things in life that invigorate me and make me want to stay in a moment that is about to happen as opposed to falling back into broken memories of a moment that has already passed.

Some Thoughts:

1. I have a blog coming up about the Luke Cage series, but I’m not done yet.
2. I’m still here.

It is time to admit that students don’t spend all their time thinking about my class. More to the point, they have so much going on in their lives that my class needs to be a series of encapsulated moments in their lives that relate to their lives, impact their thinking about their lives, but doesn’t put them in a position where they have to devote a significant portion of their mental energy trying to sort out what they are supposed to do.

In short, due dates and assignments need to make more sense.

The other night a student emailed me asking why there wasn’t a place to submit her presentation online. I reminded her that the presentation was an in-class experience that could not be submitted online. Unfortunately, the due date of 11:59 PM sent a very different message. It is an easy fix, but a philosophical shift as well. See, I discussed this issue with that student in class two days prior. She nodded, accepting my instruction, and then proceeded to do exactly what I said not to do. She didn’t retain anything from that conversation. She isn’t the first.

Students have multiple classes all asking different things at different times, meshing into a canvas of work they’re responsible for turning into a sensible schedule. On the other hand the teachers I know try hard to limit the number of preps they are responsible for in order to avoid that same sort of chaos.

What if I tried to bring these two worlds together in order to create a sensible and responsible set of scaffolded assignments that let a student know from day one the type of rhythm required? Every Monday you do X, every Wednesday you do Y. At the end of the month, Z. The schedule allows for it, but I’ve never thought to build things out in that fashion–fitting my essay and assignment schedule around a standard sequence vs. building around activities, events, etc.

It may make life easier for everyone invovled.

Some Thoughts:

1. For the first time, I genuinely don’t think I will make it to post 3650. My passion for writing and all things is as blood seeping from a wound that I cannot stitch.

Last check, over 15,000 Americans voted for Harambe for president. In other words, more people than live in the average small american town felt that a dead ape was the way to go. That tells me a great deal about where we are as a culture. I learned more about that in a conversation I overhead at the campus coffee shop.

boy one: Concert was cool. It was real, you know?

Boy 2: Yeah, but the area was sketch.

Boy one: Its central phoenix. Of course it is.

A week ago that conversation would’ve rolled off my back, but the idea of an entitled kid going down to the hood to connect with a musical sound born out of that hood and then turning around and insulting the hood that created the sound seems all too American right now. In other words, I am ready to open my eyes to the vast diversity and depth of my own relative minority status in this country. I am not talking about me as a black man, but me as a free thinker who looks at and speaks towards the long game and the implicit understanding that we are all trying to rise and become something that reflects what we believe to be the ideals of the founding fathers.

What I am seeing instead of what I am is a country that is largely dominated by individuals who want to push their agenda under the guise of Americanism but is largely based in capitalism and imperialism–everything other countries have accused us of being for decades. Yeah, we were that but we often hid behind the guise of being something better. With Trump it is out there, naked and revealed and, well, dangerous.

Why do I see danger in Trump? Because he is a man who has and will continue to be a bully. Now the bully has more power and a congress that supports his play. Moreover, he has no understanding of the role of ‘his underlings’ in determining law. He believes that he and his cabinet determine law, start and end wars, and command the free world. When he meets resistance he will publicly insult and cajole. When people don’t fall in line he will bully and alienate. This is not speculative this is what he has already done leading up to the election.

So yeah, I’m worried. I just don’t know what I am supposed to do.

Barring a pre-xmas miracle Donald Trump will be President-Elect as of the morning. I am so totally baffled and ashamed of my country right now that I don’t even know what to think. Trump, best recognized as every version of that rich kid bully who never gets his in the movies, came out as a big plans guy–an outsider who held is ideas close to the vest, promising to surprise us when he is ready. He appealed to a significant portion of the USA and that portion came out to brexit vote.

I don’t know what happens next. Even the smart people I know are rather uncertain of what is going to go down with him as president and both the house and senate controlled by his party. The opposition balked at the ease at which Obama was able to get his measures passed. Now I wonder what is going to get passed under this watch.

I am drained and emotional and done.

Feels like anti-christmas in town. On the one hand the people in my orbit are acting like nothing is different. On the other, the media is howling like wolves at the moon. All of this bleating and worry and false excitement is built up around the media’s version of the Super Bowl: Election Day. Finally there will be a legit 24 hours worth of news to deliver, as opposed to running the same story every ten minutes and sandwiching a lot of fluff between.

Fake Super Bowl/anti xmas/bad easter always provides a host of close political races to wet our appetite for the big finale late in the night. This year’s Clinton-Trump race has been categorized as historic and exciting and a real nail biter without any sense of whether it is going to be real or not. I suppose the hype makes it real the way the hype makes the Kardashians real.

As I type away my last pre-election blog I am left wondering: How big of a deal is this, really? I mean the right congress could mitigate either side. Maybe that is just the campaign fatigue talking.

‘It’ll be good’ is one of those statements that should be viewed with the same wariness awarded to ‘trust me’ and ‘everything is fine’. You know, the kind of wariness reserved for encounters with poisonous snakes and Wells Fargo bankers; the sort of thing where you back away slowly, careful not to make any sudden moves. You don’t want to turn around either, less you catch a fang in the ass. That’s why when I curled up on the couch at 2 PM this Sunday morning I should have muted the voice in my head that said, ‘just get dressed and go to the store. It’ll be good.’

I wanted a new cleaning remedy for the dog-worn living room carpet. I read that Vodka’s bacteria-slaying properties made it an excellent, if unconventional, choice for a cleaning experiment. I was out, so the choice was stay home and endure the lingering hint of Yorkie accidents or get off my lazy butt and do something about it. I’ve been on a new page lately. Everything is in high gear for me in terms of mindfulness, self-reflection, and action. When the voice said what it said I decided to listen.

It didn’t even take a block to regret my decision. A sound started in my tire as I rounded the corner. A wet ‘thwock’ followed by a repetitive thump that matched the cadence of my RPMs. This couldn’t be a good thing. I slowed, turned, and parked before inspecting the tires for damage. The bolt stuck in my tire was what the Big O salesman referred to as ‘a huge one’. It burrowed into the groove of my tire with only a fat round washer to prevent it from punching all the way through. I got to the tire store relying on a 17 MPH coast and hazard lights that made more people angry than they raised concerns.

Now I am at Fry’s thinking about how the universe works. Turns out both front tires—only a year old—where about to give. The tread was completely worn out and it looked dangerous to even a novice like me. Still, I would not have looked and would’ve wound up in a worse situation. See, the universe tells you things so long as you’re willing to listen. These messages are largely indirect, coming in signs and portents. My pocket is lighter from the experience, but I am learning to listen.

Now the goal is to listen to the signs and portents in the rest of my life. There are messages out there that I have chosen to ignore. I can’t let that stand. I’ll listen, see. It’ll be good.