Under the Sun

Why is it that, when you are a writer, people automatically ask you for grammatical advice concerning church programs and stuff? Even today a friend of mine asked for a stamped envelope. He thought I have tons of those around since I am a writer. I could only deliver a stamp.

Out of envelopes.

So . . .

Nothing else going on. It was an eventful day. Global warming is in full swing, it is mid-April and feels like mid-June. 87 degrees today. I set all the plants out and the roses are starting to bloom. I am going to have to spray them for fungus and stuff later.

The Garden Man came by today. He just cuts our grass, but I have the feeling that this chore and others is about to fall to me. There is something about him that I like. Can't figure it out. He is attractive. He just moved to Mufreesboro which is where everybody is moving. People are still buying in Antioch, LaVergne and Mufreesboro, while the rich guys are buying up this once coloured and vacated river bend of a city.

The HOV lanes now extend from the city to MTSU. Man!

I ran into Garden Man on the front sidewalk. He mulched the front of the house today. My mother has been talking about mulch for months. Turns out he only had enough to do half, when my mother thought that the quoted price was for the whole job. There is much a miscommunication between the two of them, the two of us -- Garden Man and my mother -- Me and my mother -- Me and Garden Man's stepfather (my next door neighbor) -- Garden Man's Mother and Me . . . I think the only two that get along are Garden Man's Mother and my Mother. But even there, I see some distance. Some Southern code of sexual and gender specific ethics. We all go to the same church. We all have a past together.

I heard Garden Man arguing with his stepfather, which I do with my father on a regular basis now. Come to think of it, I heard a childhood friend and his father screaming outside the house down the street in the adjacent circle. It is like all three of us are going through the same thing. If it is anything like what I am going through with the "Civil Rights Generation" parental leadership that I have, it has to do with love and money -- I think all three of us are chasing a different dream that goes beyond being a civil servant and having a mortgage. I just don't want to be thankful for what I got, I want a life!

Anyway, Garden Man is taller than me, slimmer than me, and has this wonderfully toned body. He is dark and smooth. His complexion is neither blemished nor speckled. He also has a bright smile and a pride . . . that Race Pride. It makes him a good gardener for our little slice of middle class Africana on the hill. I look at him and know that if I lived 50-years-ago in the struggle I would have jumped somebody's bones -- specifically his in a two piece grey suit and sunglasses. A man smelling like cologne and pomade does complete some budding fetish I am afraid. I think it goes back to the barber shop, when I was six. My first hard on's had to do with this guy rubbing his fingers around my ears to give me an edge up, which was disrupted when he was picking out my "kitchen". I like the way he smelled, and I liked the green water he rubbed on my minute scares, and the extra dabs behind the ears. I sensed that he thought I was attractive, maybe it was him admiring his work, I though he admired me. I saw him sometime ago after years.

He still admires me I guess.

Garden Man tells us all sad gossip. In the house down the way a woman is losing all of the men in her family to all the devilish haunts that snatch down black male babies aged 9 to 92 -- stabbings, sugar, salt, "in-and-out-of-prison" . . . etc. Garden Man is good for telling us what is happening in our neighborhood. How it is changing into something that we can't really recognize anymore. At least on the inside, the houses look the same on the outside, the grass is cut the same, edges of land are manicured and ornate with blooms, but we are aging out. There is no one to really populate it I guess.

People my age just moved away to Atlanta and never turned back. We are filling up with this back draft, this feeling of Third Worldliness is descending very slowly on me, I am not sure what others see, by I see a decline with a gradation that is as slight as bitter turning to white chocolate over the course of a thousand years. Yet, we feel it everyday.

The flight of the urban to the suburbs is bring a different world to these streets.

I wonder if I am becoming classist or if I already am. There is a part of my education and radical roots grounded in 1990's New York that causes me to psychically mutilate my mental body. I grasp at theoretical whips and chains like a monk ashamed that he looked at a ripe young ass in the middle of the street, or licked the bacon fat off of his fingers during Lent. But there is a fault. Radical theories of class do not flesh out true relationship between people. A few words, concerning powers do not tell it all. Great narratives do though. If we still have a use for them. I don't know what has happened to my love of words. I don't know what became of my certainties. I don't know what has become of questions of culture.

Like Jerome and me.

It is going to be a hot summer.

We used to say: "Let's make this summer hot."

Summer will be here before we know it.

Translation: "Let's go to the club and spot trade on the subway."

Still looking for work in Nasvhille. Kind of sick of it.

It was the late 90's. It was a time I thought was permanent.

It has not gotten any easier or clearer as to where I should plant a seed.

Me and my best friend Jerome.

But I know of a couple nice places to have a beer and that is alright.

I wonder what happened to him.

On the Backside of the Vernal Equinox: A View From the Patio

Well, the past couple of weeks have been interesting. This view from my patio is what I have been observing for sometime now. The birth of spring on these once wood stick hills. Eons ago these former mountains were below the ocean in a mass of rock that was undefinable, then they rose, and fell eroding with the retreat of glacierial edges and at other moments being tropical in scope. Now it is a world of tornadoes, where the warm mass from the Gulf of Mexico hits the shield of cold air cascading towards the coast from the Artic. They get caugt up more than once. A childhood friend just loss her house in Gallitin. She is a mother and a wife. I guess I missed that when I was in New York.

During the deadly storm, I was 40 miles away in the center of town. I stood in a bookstore because the radio said that funnel clouds had touched ground in Belle Meade. I was on Church Street. My friend the SpirituallyReformedConfederate (it is a mean alias, but that is what he is in a way) said that his friend saw a car go through the side of a bank's wall. People were killed while sitting in their cars as they were thrown every which way. The tornado landed in the area of Rivergate Mall. Why do tornadoes go to malls and Walmarts? Do they taste like chicken?

I guess the first thing that has happened is that I kissed WineTastingLesbian on the lips at Play on Wednesday night. I was not expecting it, and it was not a hot passionate kiss. It was a peck. And, it was a peck with a foretold promise of something more. I felt this in my spirit after we danced at theby the bar. I grabbed WTL by the waist and I felt her soft skin and firm body and as I danced with her I felt in her bones that she had been with men before and enjoyed it. She looked at me and said "You didn't know did you?".

I responded "WineTastingLesbian, I have known this about you for some time."

Truth be told, I did not know that she was that soft and her body felt that good against mine. It was that feeling of being a good match, a perfect match. She was working these distant but frictioned and rough grinds with her waist -- not aggressive -- but she knew how to grab my stick and shift my gears --figuratively.

So, I don't like this bisexual thing of not telling anybody what is going on. It makes me feel incomplete. So, I elected to tell my good friend, my good movie watching buddy. She is saved. And her future husband who she loves and who is much younger than her and saved also was there. I told her while he was eating pound cake in another room after we watched the first FRIDAY (amazing) and the 80's film BETTER OFF DEAD (those writers were on drugs). She looked upset after I told her that I had kissed WTL. I forgot her religious standing is starting to show in our relationship. I feel judgment and animosity to what she perceives as sexual ambiguity. There is something sad about not being able to tell your friends things. I have known her for 20 years, but for me to say "I kissed a girl" the foreboding of her face was long menacing and judgmental.

Gosh, red state living.

WineTastingLesbian is my drinking buddy. And there was something homoerotic about it honestly. Not dick and ball homoerotic, but male bonding homoerotic. Those first steps. I drink martinis with her. I talk about women's asses with her. She points out the men that are staring at me (I am totally oblivious to these acts). We agree on hot bodies sometimes, other times she picks out effeminate men for me that are not my type . . . blah, blah, blah. All of this is all the stuff I do with my straight male friends. Sometimes I kiss them too. And now I have kissed her. But the repercussions of this are different. She hugs me like a woman who wants to be held now, not just cordial platonic hugs from way back then.

3 weeks ago.

So we will see.

AngryBlackLesbian asked WTL if we were having an affair some weeks ago.

A woman's intuition?

Maybe.

I kind of like this feeling in a way.

It has been a while since I have been around people that are a bit more honest with how they feel about others sexually and not so caught up on identity politics or what moma thinks.

Well, I still worry about what moma thinks.