My Country 'Tis Of Thee
With his jailhouse mentality he may be seeing it as a sign of weakness but be that as it may I apologized to the golden toothed motherfucker today because the opportunity presented itself and I selfishly wanted to see if such an act might indeed be good for the soul. I presented my case and suggested that in the future should something similar happen it would be best not to linger around my porch afterwards. Also the whole story of the egg throwing was presented to me by various sources and the true culprit was pointed out to me (one of the haircutters over at Maurice's Impressive Hair Design), and so I was made to look hard at my flaming behavior towards golden tooth and there really isn't any reason he should have taken both barrels of my wrath. He is in theory the kind of person I have a great deal of sympathy towards but over the years he has so worn thin my capacity to feel that sympathy that in all truth I'm glad I apologized but I'm also glad I called him a motherfucking bitch. His younger sister has always made an extra effort to be respectful towards me and his younger brother is a good boy I have written about many times and so I try to consider golden tooth in the light of his siblings and I have caught glimpses of him as that scared little boy growing up in the eighties with that new and improved crack cocaine cutting its devastating path through the inner cities of America (My Country 'Tis Of Thee...), and a mother more in love with it than him, and the things you read about happening all around him, I mean all around him: his fellow children armed with semi-automatic weaponry, not pretending as we did as children, but actually putting loaded gun barrels up against the head of another child and pulling the trigger, once, twice, three times, flinching at first blood but not so much after that first one, after realizing no one is more powerful than you, giver and taker of life. A sobering reality to say the least. A reality where school work is for the weak, because if you're black, and you think school work is going to get you out of here, you are just stupid wrong, because the white man is not going to let you out of here, is not going to let you succeed. It is your destiny to sell crack cocaine to your father, and when your mother gets out of jail and back to whoring herself for nickles and dimes you can sell to her as well. So much hogwash, and yet which one of us cannot admit to seeing some truth in it? How could I not apologize? How can I not be ashamed of heaping more garbage on a life such as that of he with the golden teeth?
The last three library books were all winners and I am recommending all three: This Much I Know to be True, by Wally Lamb, and The Diary of a Yuppie (a reread) by Louis Auchincloss, and Bagombo Snuff Box (some previously unreleased short fiction) by Vonnegut. With a nice preface.
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With his jailhouse mentality he may be seeing it as a sign of weakness but be that as it may I apologized to the golden toothed motherfucker today because the opportunity presented itself and I selfishly wanted to see if such an act might indeed be good for the soul. I presented my case and suggested that in the future should something similar happen it would be best not to linger around my porch afterwards. Also the whole story of the egg throwing was presented to me by various sources and the true culprit was pointed out to me (one of the haircutters over at Maurice's Impressive Hair Design), and so I was made to look hard at my flaming behavior towards golden tooth and there really isn't any reason he should have taken both barrels of my wrath. He is in theory the kind of person I have a great deal of sympathy towards but over the years he has so worn thin my capacity to feel that sympathy that in all truth I'm glad I apologized but I'm also glad I called him a motherfucking bitch. His younger sister has always made an extra effort to be respectful towards me and his younger brother is a good boy I have written about many times and so I try to consider golden tooth in the light of his siblings and I have caught glimpses of him as that scared little boy growing up in the eighties with that new and improved crack cocaine cutting its devastating path through the inner cities of America (My Country 'Tis Of Thee...), and a mother more in love with it than him, and the things you read about happening all around him, I mean all around him: his fellow children armed with semi-automatic weaponry, not pretending as we did as children, but actually putting loaded gun barrels up against the head of another child and pulling the trigger, once, twice, three times, flinching at first blood but not so much after that first one, after realizing no one is more powerful than you, giver and taker of life. A sobering reality to say the least. A reality where school work is for the weak, because if you're black, and you think school work is going to get you out of here, you are just stupid wrong, because the white man is not going to let you out of here, is not going to let you succeed. It is your destiny to sell crack cocaine to your father, and when your mother gets out of jail and back to whoring herself for nickles and dimes you can sell to her as well. So much hogwash, and yet which one of us cannot admit to seeing some truth in it? How could I not apologize? How can I not be ashamed of heaping more garbage on a life such as that of he with the golden teeth?
The last three library books were all winners and I am recommending all three: This Much I Know to be True, by Wally Lamb, and The Diary of a Yuppie (a reread) by Louis Auchincloss, and Bagombo Snuff Box (some previously unreleased short fiction) by Vonnegut. With a nice preface.
- jimlouis 5-25-2000 4:15 am