Narc

Copping weed in a sleepy suburb that's always been more country than city was almost impossible for me growing up, the city even harder for me because of my clean-cut good looks. I joked with my buddies at the corner store that no one even wanted to stand near me during our town St. Pat's Parade because (according to one of them), "You look like a cop!" If being a detective means I'm aware of open container laws, cognizant of my surroundings, and respectful of my neighbors even during a daytime "beer buzz" by still recycling appropriately, then I'm the Sheriff of this here town.

After being rebuffed by do-ragged bangers hanging curbside in the tough gang towns of Rockland run by drug dealers during the 80s, me and my friends turned to the city for our teenage rebellion, but I was quickly becoming a curse to them in their nefarious deeds, in an anti-anti-establishment cancel out. We'd cut class to take the city bus to buy weed near Central Park, only to be ID'ed by a beat cop who laughed at my underage library card (the only ID I had), throwing our small dime bag into the trash with the order to take the first bus back home, which we did, after debating about trying to find the little baggie in the garbage pail.

It didn't end there, either. Me and my friend who'd emigrated from Ghana as a girl tried hanging out in her family neighborhoods of Harlem and Downtown Brooklyn, but without my Hispanic home-girl outfit from back in the day (slicked-back ponytail that made my hair look darker, bright red lipstick, big hoop earrings, and tight jeans), the people in those 'hoods treated me like an outcast on my own native soil, to be shunned and feared as a girl-child not of their kind. 

The pinnacle of my brief career as a country criminal officially ended in the back of a Harlem liquor store with my girl, Donnel. She'd said she bought weed from the guy behind the plexi-glass window with a pull-out money drawer before, so it should be no problem. We laughed on the street before going in that he'd be afraid of me as a "white girl", which was the only way to explain my presence in certain parts of New York City that hoped they'd killed or frightened off the natives a long time ago. I mean, I look this way at 47; you can see from my photos how youthful I've always been.

And it's true; there's a purity and wholesomeness to me that doesn't go away with alcohol, or pot, or cigarettes, or junk food, because I don't let it. I want to live, even in the chaos of this world. And so, with one quick walk to the back of a ghetto liquor store, the nervous demeanor of your average black man livin' on my mean streets told me everything I needed to know about what my choices would be. In his wide-eyed stare, I immediately knew what side of the line that he'd drawn between us I stood on, and it was with the good guys.

"Uh uh. I ain't sellin' to huh." My friend improvised like the slick con she can be, rolling her eyes at him. "Oh, come on, man! I've bought from you before, no problem!" He wasn't buyin' it. "She a cop! You a narc?" He asked me flat out, but my friend pushed me aside. "Look at her! When was the last time you sold weed to a 15 year-old narc?!" And it was pretty incredulous, his irrational fear about a baby-faced teenage girl. But, just like that, I knew it in my heart, that this native New York girl wan't no criminal, and I never would be. As we left the store empty-handed, I could feel my less-principled friend cutting ties with me mentally, diverging in the opposite direction, because (s)he was right about me. I'm no fucking criminal. I AM THE LAW.

Colored

The conversation about race and ethnicity can be a troubling game to the people who confuse it, because they lack proper cultural definitions within an appropriate context. I found myself in such a desert last week, watching a popular news entertainment show that highlights the most offensively outspoken headlines of the day. A prominent white news anchor used the word "colored" in her story about African-American issues and, like the jocks working the radio program that airs on t.v., I immediately took umbrage at her usage of it, too. What the...? Who the fuck is she? She don't know.

And then I remembered similarly odd conversations in my own past, where words can tumble out of control given the wrong situation, at any moment. Take, for instance, my meeting with a professor of English Literature during my time at Oneonta. He'd made some political references to his mostly "Anglo" class (or so he thought) of college students, about his supposed activism in South Africa with famous anti-apartheid movements that led him to flee the country to teach in our small po'dunk mountain town. Huh...really? He was handsome, so I dismissed him at the time for playing the adventurous romantic lead seeking to bed willing co-eds looking for a taste of the East, via one fucked-up African country and this state school educator.

He had a posh British accent that bespoke of his family's rather wealthy position in society through his obvious attendance at expensive private schools, and he had an irritating habit of wearing dopey silk ascots to go along with his condescension towards all things American that extended to decidedly less wealthy New York students, like me. I didn't think that much about him until a visit with my friend Donnel shook it up for me. We were still baffled by the death of her father while he was overseas in Ghana, and the subsequent disappearance of his body kept his whole family on edge, including me. According to their tribal customs, her mother needed to be in attendance to perform ablutions related his burial ritual, and they couldn't get any answers from the government or the state department about the events leading up to his death, leaving us in a paranoid "X-File" state.

There was talk of her father's assassination at the hands of some rival gangs with competing economic interests in their home village area which, given the general instability of many African nations, made more sense to us than we cared to admit. After he died, their financial circumstances drastically changed, revealing how deeply in debt their hereto presumed successful international businessman father was. During their foreclosure, our friend drove us past their house after school, to find deputies putting all of their furniture out on the front lawn, in full view of the entire neighborhood. "Just keep driving." Donnel said to us, crouched down in the back seat of the car. It was really disturbing. They moved to a smaller town home, and her mother began working as a low-end healthcare aide in a nearby nursing home to make ends meet, while we pursued various theories and connections to Ghana and Africa, no matter how bare or small.

During her visit to my college, I told Donnel about my English Lit professor with the supposed activist connections. Perhaps he could introduce us to a few of his contacts? We were desperate for any leads, and truth be told, I wanted to get a better look at him in private, to better feel out his intentions towards our student body. And so, one day after class, I made an appointment to see him in his office, a normal practice for any student seeking help, but totally rare for me. I'd never been to a professor's office before, and it was nerve-wracking to me, especially given the content of my errand. After I sat down in our semi-closed door meeting, I simply told him the truth. My friend's father had died mysteriously while in Ghana, and no one would talk to them about it. What to do?

He gave me a nasty look, then pointed to a map of Africa on his wall. You see, South Africa is there, and Ghana is here. See how faraway they are? Yeah, thanks. Asshat. But, you spoke in class about African geo-politics. Do you have any advice for my friend and her family about an agency that they can contact for guidance and support? He launched into another hipster diatribe about Apartheid and his status as a "Colored" man, because Indians (from India) were grouped in with "the blacks", and here he made a disgusted face like he smelled doggie doo-doo, which signaled to me that he was more upset about his classification as a minority in a faraway land than helping out poor black folks and their friends.

It was an astonishingly douchebag thing for him to admit to a student, especially since India has an extremely poor history of human rights, given the rigidity of their caste system of "Untouchables", but I was too stunned by his attitude to respond. I just wanted to get the fuck out of there, disturbed by the look of his purple tongue moving weirdly around his mouth while I had briefly talked. Back at my dorm room, I went over the exchange with my best friend from high school and college roommate, Karen, who was also navigating the rocky shoals of predominantly male academia as a history major; classes that often found her as the only female student in attendance. Here again, my heterosexuality counted heavily against me, as I described the shock of seeing a Chow Chow-colored tongue for the first time.

"You only went to see him because he's good-looking!" Well, yeah, but, no. I honestly wanted to help Donnel and her family, mired as they were in dire straits that I knew from my own mother's single parenting experience, a.k.a "My Mom Fell Apart Again": now performing a disastrous series of nervous breakdowns that we, as children and teens, were supposed to bear up under the weight of, and I wasn't sure how much more this family could take. She understood. Karen's parents (both dead for years now) were locked in horribly passive-aggressive co-dependence that saw her and her older brother begging them to divorce each other in lieu of an early grave, but you can read exactly where that got them. Nowhere. The stakes were so high for all of us to make it out of the messes they made for us, as a generation. They really needed my help.

After that, we took to calling him "Mr. South Africa" for his prettily-waved hair that was highlighted with a gay purple rinse, flatteringly cut just above his shoulders for that nouveau-hippie look, with his bevy of stylishly expensive ethnic-print clothing that fluttered around him like his many-layered Euro scarves, as the Indian answer to our naive prayers, while every AmerIndian on campus was probably just as interested in girls and hooking up as he was, because I howled at the midnight moon with them as a young pack member. It brought me back to talks around our kitchen table with my father growing up, as he explained to us that we're considered coloreds by society for first being Acadian, already a small ethnic minority, and secondly for our familial associations as Métis people.

I called my grieving friend from a pay phone on campus to tell her the bad news that I didn't get any information from the professor we could use (other than people around the world still hated us, which certainly wasn't new to us), and I never felt as frustrated and helpless as I did then, hanging up after a very brief conversation with my normally loquacious friend. I felt like I had totally failed her, in the face of some guy's arrogant assumptions about our society, but I was only 17 and a freshman. Now, I'm an expert in the media's weird and wild "Minority Reports", so old and out-of-date that they still think we're a bunch of simple black-and-white cookies they can split evenly in half, without the juicy red filling that beats at the heart of every American experience. It's time for a palette change.

Hard Times

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._J._Simpson

For many years, most of the American public has known that OJ Simpson should have been given a "Guilty" verdict during his infamous murder trial, but all of us were denied justice on that day. We watched in mute horror as Judge Ito delivered his ruling during a live televised event, and just like the day we learned Elvis Presley died alone on a toilet from a drug overdose that was a long time coming, we were mute with shock and horror from the news of it. I remember the room I was in was almost split firmly in half, giving it the hard-fought appearance of a race war that was finally won, as the blacks cheered on from yet another bad decision made supposedly in their good faith from the powers that be, racially mixed as so many of us are here, which makes the cynicism behind their race-baiting tactics worse still.

Just who did they think they were fooling? You, my lovingly devoted public, and they did so in great numbers, with as many resources and skills that you don't (still) share their access to. For years afterwards, we listened to local media legend Howard Stern (a.k.a. "The King of All Media")  interview the parents of Ron Goldman live on-air, as they fought a public battle in the civil courts to block what we knew often followed a guilty celebrity's second step towards their personal recovery, through lucrative contracts that give coveted media outlets sole access to his story, aired on cheesy cable t.v. biopics designed in conjunction with television executives invested in recouping their "losses" through enrichment from his trials.

In short, everyone involved in money-making ventures became complicit in his crimes, too. We were aghast throughout this nation watching L.A. burn in riots, marred with public looting, and destroyed with repeatedly brutal police beatings aired on the evening news over and over again in pointless repetition (since so many of us remember the civil rights wars of our painful pasts), only to see our fellow Americans once again dragged through the mud by the deliberately commercial manipulation of their pain, over a shameful history that we also share with them, but how to reach out in such times of mayhem? And that was the point, too; it forced you to see sharply separated halves that were falsely colored strictly "black or white" by the same biracial people made to backup O.J.'s cover-ups with payoffs and bribes, because there wasn't anyway profit to be had from the truth.

Today we take a stand to air out our joint closets in this springtime of our many youths gone by, in the eternal hope that we can be made whole again is His Coming Glory, which you can. That's the "Good News"! We don't have to ever go back to the pain and darkness again, fresh as we can be made with our accurate human accounts the world over. We have everything to share in common friendship, in continued harmony and brotherly love, as we close doors to those pasts that can be made to rise like so many skeletons in so many closets, in the false hope that the dead tell no tales.

That is not true, my dears! As any scientist, academic, or scholar (even amateur) will tell you, bones cannot be made to lie. They only tell the truth, because just like our genetic pasts, the blood will out our stories in the event of our absence anyway, if such were to be the case. How? I'm so glad you asked! Well, just as we always suspected, O.J. is a complete fucking criminal, and he did what we, the well-informed public, always knew he would: he got caught committing another crime, trying to get back his own memorabilia, from the very same corrupt people he'd already sold them to, with a disastrously illegal break-in. And just as he stole our real stories from us way back when, we can right it with this truth, in an epic bon mot of how those "powers that be" worked: O.J., ever the star, complained about his access in prison to broad-based cable television, seeing as his jail is on a tight budget. They can only afford basic cable there. Too bad!

"Awww!" Come on, chime in everyone! That's too bad. In the aftermath, we have him where we were meant to be for his crimes, in atonement. What can he do to escape his final punishment? Give up the goods, man! Tell us about your football-based brain injuries covered up by men far more powerful and wealthier than you, as a young player looking to buy his way out of hard times, taking yo' po' family from the ghetto along for the ride, right? Tell us about your concussions, go for those MRIs, spill about the CTE brain disease that made your psychosis and violence far worse than it had to be, with every hard knock you got on a football field full of African-American men, fronted with cash and watched by a mostly European-American audience in the stands. Talk to me. Talk to yo' mama who made you gladly...and then? After that? Talk to Your Father. Talk to your Loving Creator who made you in His Image, and repent. The time has come. The time is now. Amen to you. We are Legion.

http://time.com/4205318/people-vs-oj-simpson-fx-prison/

Eliminate any incriminating evidence believed to be found at the scene of the crime, then blame it all on a detective with a supposedly checkered past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fuhrman  
Destroy more evidence: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1998-07-30 
Blame it all on racism, and watch the world burn from a safe distance on t.v.

Us? We wait. And wait. And then we waited some more, working as we do at our daily labors. And then, finally, in the end, we always win, armed with nothing more glamorous than the truth. That's how.
http://www.wmcactionnews5.com/story/7082028/oj-simpson-tells-police-he-was-reclaiming-sports-memorabilia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Denial 
http://www.today.com/news/frank-gifford-suffered-chronic-traumatic-encephalopathy-cte-family-says-t58231 

Benign Neglect

Diversification and preservation often accompany a purposeful, deliberate kind of neglect. Witness the relatively intact architecture and perfectly preserved cars of Cuba, a nation that was in extreme isolation from us. What would new wealth have done to its iconic architecture? Probably given us one badly done renovation after another. How many beautiful brownstones would we have lost in New York City, if Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant were rich white neighborhoods? 

And so it follows in nature. The front lawn of a certain old house in the historic Hudson Valley has an intact lawn; not the artificial one made with an abundance of pesticides and aggressive weed-pulling, but an incredibly rich and diverse tapestry that holds hundreds of plants, weeds, and wildflowers one doesn't typically see untouched in the suburbs, simply because the current owner does not tend to it with the same kind of care he would to his own lawn. It is often through this kind of neglect that the most beautiful wildflower flourishes. 

Welcome to September, dear readers.

Religious Signs, and Other $ Matters

Jesus and Mary, Co-Pilots in Suburbia.

Oh. This Acadian will keep her money, then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acadians