Still Thinking

I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World And Me in the fall of 2016 and rejected both the text and its author. Coates’s tone felt too venomous to be constructive, roiling with an anger that frightened me, that set my hackles on the defensive. I much preferred the measured and cool voice of James Baldwin, whose anger translated into something far more cerebral, less poetic and visceral. Coates wrote from the heart. He opened his jugular ink well and released the terror held in his Black American body. The fact that Coates, like James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time , wrote his book as an instruction manual for a teenage boy on navigating the American experience shocked me all the more. It was too violent. Too reactionary. I highlighted one particular episode, somewhere towards the middle of the book, of Coates sharing beers on a New York City rooftop with friends as they watched the smoke from the Twin Towers rise. He explained his inability to feel sorrow for first responders on th...

I am haunted by a party I attended three years ago. For his birthday, my friend Jeremy hosted a Lip-Sync Battle that, for two years straight, made me laugh liquor through my nose hairs. Laughing booze through the nose hurts, but I did not regret it. What I do regret, and what haunts me to this day, is not jumping into one particular performance when the audio-track pooped out. During a captivating sign-language interpretation of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand” by my lovely friend, Jen, the song simply stopped in the third verse, right about the time that “she had opened up the buttons on her shirt so far, I guess that’s why I didn’t notice that police car”. Everyone in the room moaned in disappointment while Jen shrugged her shoulders and sat down. As equally sad, I could have jumped alongside Jen and rapped -- pitifully so -- the entirety of that third verse so she could complete her sign-language Lip-Sync. Why I did not come to my friend’s aid st...

The squirrel keeps coming back. On the fence. He comes in the morning like clockwork. Like the frayed edges of burnt caffeine withdrawal. He comes and twitters his whiskers, whisks his tail like an egg beater into thin air, churning trouble with his beady little eyes and a no good maniacal laugh. And my pugs just lose their damn minds. Behind the glass doors they hollar and bay and cuss. Their eyes protrude further than usual: out to the edge of their snout, out where a glistening snot sprays with each snort. Even their tails uncurl and drop like punctuation digging into the dirt. Not to stop a sentence, but to start a new one. A new one that begins, “Die, motherscratcher.” Meanwhile the squirrel decides to chance it. He shimmies down the fence like a cheap dress after a dollar-menu meal. He shimmies down the fence and grabs an acorn. Then he turns towards the door, fully facing my pugs , who squeal like wrestlers circling the ring, and he just eats the acorn. Takes his time with it, ...