We are rapidly approaching the Virgo full moon. Time to weed, plan and plant. That way when the moon is in Pisces and the Sun in Virgo, we can think about harvesting. I saw some roses for the backyard yesterday. I like them very much. They are the Walmart variety. They may be susceptible to fungus and Japanese Beetles, but hell, when you clip them bitches back they will bloom again, and again and again. At least that has been my experience. I think I am going to get 4 small bushes for the back. That is going to be about 25 bucks.
Yesterday proved to be very interesting. It started out pretty normal. I woke up, walked up stairs and mom was heading out. She had some stuff to do for the National Diabetic volunteer thingie, then off to Fisk and finally she was going to be at church. Or something like that, I can't remember the exact order. I was busy pouring coffee and logging into my computer.
Shortly after mom left, I posted my resume on Monster and spent some time going through all the e-mails I have gotten from Monster over the last month, since I have reregistered. Sometimes I wonder if it is a waste of time, but other times I think it is OK cause I can just look at the ads and see what I am up for. I always feel like I am lying when I am looking for a job because I can't say that I am working to be a historian or that I am a writer. People feel that you are then divided and not focused. So, I am getting my poker face ready and preparing for bagging a good gig. The morning task of task of cleaning out my inbox and writing a letter to the guy I meet in Atlanta that speaks 12 languages and who just wrote the first 14 pages to his novel was more tedious than I first imagined. It was weird. I meet him at the film conference, it was like we were kindred spirits in a way.
In the middle of e-mail cleaning I received word from WineTastingLesbian that she was not going to Atlanta like I had thought. I wanted to follow her to the ATL, but that would be too much since I have to travel to Memphis to see my grandmother on this coming Thursday. WineLickingLesbo is now going on Tuesday and turns out she is having a hard time with her separation from AngryBlackLesbian. So, WineTastingLesbian, true to form, wanted to go drink. I told her no problem.
After that I contacted a friend from high school, Helen. We talked about our liberal arts majors and the life we live.
At times like these don't you wish you never read that revolutionary shit concerning Marx, labor, commodities and happiness?
Helen went on to talk about careers and how much money she makes as a social worker. How 6 years of schooling is nothing compared to 2 years of training as an electrical technician. Which is the truth. Just as Pepper said. So, God help whoever becomes one of "those" people from the humanities or social sciences . . . you are not really needed. As depressing and cynically as that sounds, Helen and I laughed. She was gardening while her son slept. The thing that she said that startled me was that something like between 50 and 70 percent of black women are not married. "It is because there is so little out there" she said. Then she said, "Not to mention the incarceration issue." I felt the bitter pill. Am I not worth marrying? Am I a scrub? Do feminist just not consider my point of view? I kind of took it, and kind of didn't. I told her that I thought that most black women are looking for a hard thug with an MBA, and then act shocked when he is a drug dealer like an Erykah Badu song or Keisha Cole’s video. That is part of the matrix now, narcotic disappointment upon the rising of Eros in the morning sky after a night of thug passion.
So after a morning of doing that kind of life maintenance, I did a little bit more around the house. I took a shower, which I needed to do. I had had a bachelor moment of rebellious hygiene. I think I need to start dating.
Then I went to the library and picked up a book from interlibrary loan. Jean Price-Mars and Haiti by Jacques Antoine. I needed to review some facts that I found very interesting in that book. Just as I was about to take my application for the mini-job to a nice desk in the library and fill it out, my phone started to ring. It was Wolfie. He left Darmstadt to attend a conference in Chicago. We spoke for some time about things. It was a mixture of German and English. Mostly German because I did not want anyone understanding what I was saying. I talked to him about stuff here. He talked about his life very little. I think he was experiencing a little culture shock. He kept asking how far Memphis was from Chicago and then how far Chicago is from Nashville and stuff like that. He said he did not realize that the US was so small. I think this region is small, but America no. All of America is gigaintic. He just doesn’t understand our geography.
While I was speaking to Wolfie, this beautiful black girl was singing in the foray waiting for her father to pick her up. Her voice was so beautiful that I had a hard time concentrating on what Wolfie was saying so I went outside. The automatic doors parted and the humidity from the air and the dogwoods blooming made me feel as if I was going to collapse into a hay fever clump of negro intellectualism. But it did not happen. We just talked a bit more. The girl who was singing walked outside and apologized for singing, she did not know that I was talking. Her voice was so loud and melodic I guess she could not hear me. I like Tennessee for that. People just let it out, especially young people. That is not the case in other places (it is normal for NYC and NJ, young people just blurt notes out with their headsets on top of their heads all the time).
I went back into the new library and they were rearranging the furniture. I was a bit upset because I wanted to finish my application for the mini-job and look at CD's to check out. Instead, I just picked up my stuff and went scavaging for BBQ sauce.
I got to Kroger's to pick up the BBQ sauce because I was going to cook dinner. I cook dinner in my home, that is my official job. That and gardner/handyman. I cook much better than my mom, I learned it from my dad. So today, BBQ Drumettes. I found a bottle of Hunts Hickory Brown Sugar sauce for 99 cents. And, at that moment as I went down the aisle where the magazines are, I had a moment of zen. It was this feeling that everything was going to be OK in the Cumberland River City. A song is what ticked off this feeling as I hovered over the floor. I can't remember which song it was, but it was either Barry Manilow or Neil Diamond (when I was a real small kid I got them mixed up all the time, they looked the exact same white person to me). I had the sauce in my hand and I could smell the cold flesh wet air from the refrigerator units, and a specific Tennessee smell. It smelt like dew, freshly laid tiles and spring all in the same. I had a moment of euphoria that lasted as I walked out the door and saw this dark sister with a little boy running around her that she did not know what to do with. She wore pink jeans and a mid-drift and heels and she felt good before I could even touch her. I only saw her from the back, then she turned around and looked at me. I looked at her. She had a look on her face, she felt me too. I kept walking. That little kid running around was bad. She was too young to have a child so big. I had that feeling I get. “I am too old to bite for something that looks like so much trouble.”
The inexplicable high I had wore off once I got to the car in the parking lot, my grandmother's large 1988 white Cadillac Brahm, parked far away from the imbeciles that were cluttering up the parking lot (Nashville drivers are infamous), is pristine but on her quarter-to-the-last- leg, surrounded by the low humidity that is not even a decibel, but is there preparing itself for when we move into Gemini.
I then drove to the bookstore on church. While looking through the video section I heard this group called Gossip. It is so unbelievable. The CD is great. The lead singer's voice touched me in the back of my neck and made my shoulder blades tingle. After I picked out a movie for rental, I sat in one of the chairs up front and filled out my application. I love the bookstore, it is where I order books for my dissertation or just to read. It also has a great selection of movies from around the world, and a nice magazine section. By the time I finished all that. It was dark.
I drove home, mom was already back from her long day. I cooked the drumettes and steamed some broccoli. I then promptly chilled the green bouquets with long angular steams that were peeled from the stalk and showered them with honey, red curry and low salt soy sauce (I loved chilled blanched or steamed broccoli). After that, and a nap, I went to see Jarhead at my friends house. It was cool. There is much to be said about the film.
First Jake Gyllenhaal is not really beautiful to me. He has a weird face, nice torso, average ass and these eyes that are made for the cinema. I really liked the film while I was watching it, until later that evening I figured out it felt more like I was watching pledgees for a Vanderbilt fraternity more so than a real war film. Then again that could be the legacy of the first Iraq war. Jamie Fox's character was tough but not hard enough. He was like the head Q on campus. This film was no where near Full Metal Jacket in strength, it was a bit too artsy fartsy. It also showed a different military leadership style, not to mention fighting a war in the dessert. It has got to be insane. And I wonder what the Second Iraq war film will look like.
The thing that got me about this film was that I was a senior in high school in 1989, and by the time the war was going on, I was busy protesting it at Hampton University and doing all kinds of subversive stuff (just meetings and feeling invincible). Insane no? That is a different conversation actually. Hampton. Worthy of some thought and action. Will get back to that.
After I finished the movie I went out with WinetastingLesbian Lesbian.
I will feel in the blanks of that night later. There is so much more to the story.
As there always is.
It starts with picking up He-man. Then meeting WineTastingLesbian and having one Sour Apple and 2 Key Lime Martinis (with a graham cracker rim, insane). The devil of the night is in the observations.
I will share later.
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