Still Thinking

Dear Senior Burns, I lost my faith in the power of words a long time ago.  People who play music are allowed to sit on their own porch and enjoy the guitar. Photographers are allowed to take photographs they show nobody. Painters apply to canvas and stash them or give them away fine and willy nilly. But to write words means to make money. Words are not to be enjoyed, they are to be monetized. That's the modern ethos. Words are to be bound and sold. If not, they are worthless. Leaves on autumn grounds to be walked over or thrown away. I've tried to fight this ethos at every bend in the road. And, man, it's an uphill battle. Too few believe in the value of words anymore. Words as morsels of life is a bygone notion.  Would you believe, Senior Burns, that writing this nonsense to you right here actually rekindled my love for words again? More than anything else in years. How silly is that? How small must I be to find pleasure in something so simple? We're not doing anything...

Two conversational topics, we are told, should never enter the work-place: religion and politics. You might as well add to that list “mortality” -- people work too hard making a living to be reminded of their death. We don’t talk about these things because they get sticky. After all, we might disagree. We might have varying opinions. You might want to give more weight to something than I want to give weight to it. What happens when the weight you feel outweighs the weight I don’t feel? See? It’s too tricky. We might even decide we don’t like each other as much as we thought we did when we both agreed that all these schmucks ruin their black coffee with vanilla flavored liquid PVC. Man, those were the days! Back when you and I agreed on what mattered most! Pure black coffee without the frou-frou nonsense! But that all had to get spoiled when I found out you think / believe / want / pray (or don’t) for and to ______________. And now my coffee doesn’t taste the same around you. My coffee...

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...