Monthly Archives: December 2009

chrismukkah.

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Two turtledoves.

They’re everywhere. On the dining room table. In the bathroom. On the front door.  In the stairway. Over the support beam for the house in the basement. On the top of the television. An at last, on top of the Christmas tree.  They are locked at the lips. If turtledoves have lips, then they would be kissing. What’s missing is the mistletoe. That might be too pagan ritual. The upshot is that the basement, the center of all familial activities of mirth and merriment, there’s a crystal punch bowl filled with nog. I don’t really like nog … well maybe if it’s spiked.  That’s unlikely, but I can drink it and pretend. In addition to the two turtledoves, blue, white and silver crepe paper and streamers cover almost every surface. Curious, I think. I scan the room look for Elijah or the Israeli flag. Chitlins are treif so I guess the smell of hog would keep Elijah away. Maybe.  Well, wrong holiday. However, there are the fragrant smells of the sweet and savory variety:  turkey, dressin’ (not to be confused with stuffing), cranberry sauce, sweet potato casserole, german chocolate cake, seven layer cake, pecan pie, sweet potato pie and macaroni and cheese. Yet, it still smells like ass. I stand next to the tree, which is a fresh pine. The pine cuts the smell of ass and food.

Anyway, two turtledoves. They apparently were a means of commerce in the ancient world. Like coins. Shekels. Joseph paid the innkeeper two turtledoves for the stable that housed them while she gave birth to savior of man. Continue reading →

‘post-racial’ hubris.

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Someone sent me a link to yet another piece of writing admonishing Tiger Woods and its inevitable knee jerk comparison to liberal disappointment with Obama.

Le grand sigh. I think my greatest complaint stems from the following paragraph:

Both men are of mixed race. Yet the majority of the country, including black Americans, sees them as black. That’s not a bad thing. Except when such men of intelligence and talent, men who have such influence and power, can’t help but succumb to the age old twins of greed and power. Although each has risen from ordinary beginnings to be at the top of their field but now things don’t look so good for either of them. Woods income is as tied to endorsements as it is to his talent. And Obama is so caught up in party donations and the power that those who donate have, he can’t allow himself or his party to do anything to thwart those donations. If Woods had been smart he would have kept his head down, played golf and taken care of his beautiful family instead of publicly destroying them. If Obama had enacted campaign reform as the first order of business real change could well have happened. But money and fame go to the head and any other result seems to be a fairy tale, a dream, an impossibility. Somehow money corrupts the moral compass, whether for one’s self or one’s party.

Let’s be clear: Woods is an athlete, not a world leader. And believe me, I’m no shill for Obama, but his job is a little different from an athlete who’s amazing, innate talent earned him the right to be a cog in corporate beast. The author’s presumption lumps Woods and Obama into some black monolith. Dowd did the same thing with Desiree Rogers and Woods in a vapid column last week.

Post racial America seems to lack discernment. And anyone who’s paying attention to the struggle for health care reform knows that the blame is shared, mired in the intrigues among insurance/pharmaceutical corporations, lobbyists, AND Members of Congress.

Health care reform is not the same as the Green.

UPDATE:

Actually, language and logic is what really bristles. ‘If Woods had been smart he would have kept his head down, played golf…’ The sentence seems innocuous except that in our complicated racial history, a white person suggesting that a black person self-identified or otherwise, should ‘keep their head down’ is a flash point to language from the segregation era. It’s just bad diction here. Certainly, the immediate turnoff when we compare marital transgressions to perceived failings in leadership to pass legislation begins with, ‘Both men are of mixed race…’ Yikes. And? So? I don’t presume that this author is racist, but the language and logic speak to a problem some of us are sensitive to when engaging white liberals. A blissful unawareness of the racist attitudes embedded in the language. It’s like that time when Joe Biden said Obama was ‘clean and articulate’ and the New York Times wrote an op-ed to explain to everyone why that’s a non-starter with Black America.

Bartleby.

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I read Bartleby, the Scrivener in the eleventh grade. It was required reading for IB English I at my high school.

For the uninitiated, Bartleby was a scrivener, a writer, if you will, who worked for a real estate lawyer. Our modern tongues would define his position as ‘administrative assistant’, or ‘paralegal.’ And while the narrator of the story itself suggests that Bartleby offered no indication of any emotion to his circumstance, I’d submit that underneath the veil of ambivalence, Bartleby hated his job. Bartleby was bored out of his mind. Bartleby only offers a very controlled and passive response to all the directives issued by the boss, ‘I prefer not to.’ We watch this détente between boss and employee unfold over a period of time, and the slow degeneration of Bartleby, the office relocates and Bartleby, the everyman working in the offices of a boom economy, condemned to banal tasks of recording mortgages, deeds for would-be moguls, all the while passively resisting any work that demanded more of his mental mind.  The story concludes with the discovery that Bartleby lived in the old offices and died bereft.

Yeah. Continue reading →

My Mental Health Break

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via youtube.com

I’ve listened to this track an embarrassing amount of times since its release nearly four years ago. The playful mixture of the score’s optimistic poppy, bubble gum feel, its lyrics of angsty, millennial frustration and Jem’s mellow crooning, can calm a stomach full of butterflies and silence a potty mouth.

Oh wait… maybe that’s just me.

Anyway. Jem is truly outrageous.

Algophobia

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flickr image. by 68esc

Fat girls named Precious. I think it begins there for me.

In the 2nd grade, I was terrorized by a fat girl named Precious. She wore pink berets and ribbons in her hair. She was her mother’s first born. She was her mother’s only child. They lived across the street. My mom insisted that we play together because she was in want of new friends. Precious went to my elementary school.

Precious was a bully.

I didn’t know how to fight back yet.

I got transferred to a different school. Precious moved away. I don’t know what’s become of her. I’m not sure if I care. She was a bitch; a precocious, insufferable, spoiled bitch that had everything. I had government cheese.

So I may be the last black person on the planet that will go see Precious at the theaters. Continue reading →