For The Love Of Autumn

A week after my son walked across the stage to get his 8th Grade Award for 2 and 3 quarter years of academic excellence, I checked his grades online to find an A, a B, 2 Cs, and 2 Fs. When I asked him what his problem was, when I told him he was a 2-year-old shitting his diaper for attention, I bet he didn’t feel loved. That’s okay. I wasn’t aiming for warm and fuzzy. I was pissed. Some people will read this and be appalled. I hope they die mysterious and unexplained deaths in the middle of conversations about positive reinforcement.

I’ve been thinking about addiction for more than 20 years. I was 26 when I read Bataille’s The Notion of Expenditure and nearly blacked out. Why do alcoholics and addicts throw their entire lives away in pursuit of a feeling? Is there another more subterranean need, deeper and more pervasive than the need for the immediate rush of the substance, that informs the whole enterprise of addiction in a more comprehensive way? Is coming apart, self-destruction, seemingly so unhealthy, an impulse that seeks “health” of a different kind? A strange, mysterious health not yet defined in the context of our strictly positive notions of growth and development.

Have you ever seen a junkie riding a 10-speed in the early morning hours with a bag of aluminum cans? What’s he doing? Looking for crack, to be sure. But what’s he doing in terms of the overall structure (or de-structuring) of his life? Why?

Have you ever turned from the dishwasher to the cupboard and have a dish “slip” from your hands? Or did it perhaps leap as if it wanted to shatter in pieces on the ceramic tile? Is there joy in shattering? I’m hinting at a fundamental instinct humming at the core of all things that wants to come apart. Indeed, we revel in it. Why do people fuck each other with such wild abandon? Where do they go? What’s an orgasm if not a you that explodes?

I have a strange fondness for people who do the wrong thing: hookers, thieves, Christians, gamblers. God, the poor gamblers. Man, they know they’re going to lose. Of course they are. The big score is merely a thin conscious mask that seeks to conceal the perverse end that really calls them, spiral eyed, to casinos. Suicide. What the hell? Why do you spend more money than you have? Why do your repeated failures usually trump your oaths to be better? You said you were going to the gym. Why didn’t you? Why do you blow your diet every single time? Why did my son completely stop trying and negate his acceptance to one of the best magnet schools in the state?

MY TEXT: Even if it doesn’t feel like it right now, I love you. We’re all going to be fine, even if we’re not fine, especially if we’re not fine.

HIS TEXT: Ok. Thanks. I needed that. I think.

Notes On A Beard Like A Billy Goat

August, 1986. Char Delaney took me and Danny Parker to Welsh Auditorium in Grand Rapids, MI, to see Run-DMC raising hell like a class when the lunch bell rings. Me and Danny were 14. Chris Delaney would’ve been 14 but he was dead. 7 months earlier, a car knocked him to nowhere. His mom’s face was still a mask of grief—the grief that continues to murmur behind her eyes when you’re ordering pancakes for breakfast, surprised to realize the waitress is Char Delaney. Me and Danny were shocked, disoriented, angry, sad, full of lust, ripe, 14. So, yeah, Char Delaney took us to Run-DMC in the place to be.

It was our first concert and Run-DMC was of course the big draw. But we were also eager to see an 18-year-old LL Cool J rock the bells with his 10-foot Giant Radio—believe me, he likes it loud. Too Short and Whodini were cool enough. But the Beastie Boys? Who were the Beastie Boys? (The Beastie Boys would later release an album on November 15^th, 1986, called Licensed to Ill.)

The King Ad Rock, Mike D, and MCA took the stage early, weaved in and out of each other in a constant figure 8, drank and spilled a lot of Budweiser, yelled rhymes with 3 distinct voices that each held its own particular power, and took the top of my head off. Head off. Head off. Head off. It’s like I’m smoking cigarettes. I got a bad cough. Bad cough. Bad cough. Bad cough. Me and Danny Parker gazed at one other, dazed, telepathically communicating that this was the coolest thing we had ever fucking witnessed. I’m like the razor and you are the slit wrist.

The only song I could actually recall—the blown mind rarely engenders memory—when I bought the cassette 3 months later was Slow and Low, a part of their encore that some wise part of me insisted I remember. I’m as cool as Stanley Kubrick when he films in December. I also vividly recall inspecting the cassette, admiring the image of the crashed airplane, and listening to it through headphones jacked in a boom box over and over and over. It had more sweets than Russell Stover. This was the sound for me, how my mind worked and the way life arises.

In the wake of Adam Yauch’s death, you’ve read a lot of tributes (and rightfully so) about the cultural impact of the Beastie Boys. They were and remain the youthful soundtrack for a lot of us, yes, and a big gob of memory, identity, inheres in those words, those sounds, and the way they happen. You are the privates and I am the captain. Show me a picture; I’ll give you a caption. Life is a mysterious exquisite contraption.

But they were more than sounds in the background. If you lost your coat, check the lost and found. There was something about their frenetic pace that informed our lives, flowed through our veins, got in our heads and fucked with our brains. And, for me, one of their most significant contributions was their emphasis on rhyme before the coherence of content. The songs, as if they had minds of their own, just went where they went.  If the rhyme was on time, who cares what it meant? If you’re the broken leg, then I am the splint and I’m down with gay marriage like the president (yeah yeah yeah).

Like students of Dada and Surrealism who studied the freedom unleashed in the disparate juxtaposition, they rapped the way things come and go through the mind. No story, no action that rose to climax resulting in smooth resolution. Just incidental fun that accrued in a way that stayed relevant and fresh for decades. Suckas might be jacks but they’re the ace of spades. I like my burgers with the works. Hold the mayonnaise. I’m not wishing on tomorrow. Just doing today. Shouting REST IN PEACE to my man, MCA. 47-years-old. It’s a goddamn shame. All flowers gotta fall but I wish some could stay. And I got more rhymes than the horses got hay.

RIP Adam Yauch. There’s nothin wrong with your leg. You’re just B-Boy limpin.

For The Love Of Autumn

A week after my son walked across the stage to get his 8th Grade Award for 2 and 3 quarter years of academic excellence, I checked his grades online to find an A, a B, 2 Cs, and 2 Fs. When I asked him what his problem was, when I told he he was a 2-year-old shitting his diaper for attention, I bet he didn’t feel loved. That’s okay. I wasn’t aiming for warm and fuzzy. I was pissed. Some people will read this and be appalled. I hope they die mysterious and unexplained deaths in the middle of conversations about positive reinforcement.

I’ve been thinking about addiction for more than 20 years. I was 26 when I read Bataille’s The Notion of Expenditure and nearly blacked out. Why do alcoholics and addicts throw their entire lives away in pursuit of a feeling? Is there another more subterranean need, deeper and more pervasive than the need for the immediate rush of the substance, that informs the whole enterprise of addiction in a more comprehensive way? Is coming apart, self-destruction, seemingly so unhealthy, an impulse that seeks “health” of a different kind? A strange, mysterious health not yet defined in the context of our strictly positive notions of growth and development.

Have you ever seen a junkie riding a 10-speed in the early morning hours with a bag of aluminum cans? What’s he doing? Looking for crack, to be sure. But what’s he doing in terms of the overall structure (or de-structuring) of his life? Why?

Have you ever turned from the dishwasher to the cupboard and have a dish “slip” from your hands? Or did it perhaps leap as if it wanted to shatter in pieces on the ceramic tile? Is there joy in shattering? I’m hinting at a fundamental instinct humming at the core of all things that wants to come apart. Indeed, we revel in it. Why do people fuck each other with such wild abandon? Where do they go? What’s an orgasm if not a you that explodes?

I have a strange fondness for people who do the wrong thing: hookers, thieves, Christians, gamblers. God, the poor gamblers. Man, they know they’re going to lose. Of course they are. The big score is merely a thin conscious mask that seeks to conceal the perverse end that really calls them, spiral eyed, to casinos. Suicide. What the hell? Why do you spend more money than you have? Why does your repeated failures usually trump your oath to be better? You said you were going to the gym. Why didn’t you? Why do you blow your diet every single time? Why did my son completely stop trying and negate his acceptance to one of the best magnet schools in the state?

MY TEXT: Even if it doesn’t feel like it right now, I love you. We’re all going to be fine, even if we’re not fine, especially if we’re not fine.

HIS TEXT: Ok. Thanks. I needed that. I think.

The Pause Is Always Telling

I read about this guy, Jeff, over here and it bummed me out so I wrote this. I suppose a mission of mine is to reveal a way for death to enter the lives of people, sparing them the necessity to end their lives in search of death. Nonetheless, RIP Jeff, Skip, and the countless others who leap before they breathe, pause, and take a look around.

*

Put down your gun. Drop the noose.

The difference between life and death is a single breath, a pause, a nimble escape from escape. 

Suicide is an answer, strong and definitive. And the answer is No. No, I won’t do it, not one day more. I reject it. Reject what? I reject THIS in all its variable thisness. The people who love you will try to convince you that your answer should be Yes. They will tell you what’s good about you, how things will get better—they’ll sound like Wilson Phillips on repeat.

If you’re swayed by their comforting Yes, then I’d wager that your initial No was nothing more than a veiled Yes that needed attention. And that’s okay. Soak it up.

But I’m writing this for the people who scream No from the hardness of their bones, for whom the comfort of attention is no balm. It irritates me when people say I have a lot to offer. A lot to offer what? It occurs to me that any contribution I offer to the world serves only to bolster and support THIS world, the world my entire organism resists. If you listen closely, you can hear my cells singing No. I am a choir of negativity.

So no, No people, I’m not writing to convert you to Yes. I do however want to, before too rashly answering (here is precisely where we need the breath and a pause), question the method of suicide as the best representative of saying No, of rejecting THIS in all its variable thisness.

The whole project of questioning suicide as the best way to reject THIS in all its variable thisness hinges on what exactly THIS is and, by saying No to THIS with death, would we perhaps be neglecting the possibility of radically rejecting THIS not with death but with an eye toward Something Else? In other words, is our common THIS a hard fact, given, taken for granted as the ONLY possible THIS, inside of which we experience only ITS kind of variable thisness?

Are there other modes of THISNESS that might open into wild new varieties of thisii?

If so, suicide as a rejection of THIS must then be construed as an affirmation of THIS as the one and only THIS, rejecting in turn the possibility of saying Yes to Something Else.

You’re tired of these abstractions. So am I. So let’s just say you’ve had enough and you want to fucking die. From your perspective of the story in which you are the narrator, you’ve endured hardship after hardship resulting in months and months of terrible feelings which all add up to the definitive thought that, yes, you do indeed want to die. There. There it is: the thought. From that thought arises the consideration of method, the plan of action, and its execution. Game over. You’re dead.

But I italicized “the thought” because I want to question what it means to arrive at a condition of consciousness that articulates itself definitively as “Yes. I do indeed want to die.” Isn’t that thought, my suicidal ones, a product itself of THIS world, the very world you reject, to which you say No?  Maybe it’s precisely at this thought— here—at your most thorough disgust with existence as it is, where it all might turn, where the breath and a pause could provide the opportunity for the sun to set on THIS and, after the long night, rise on Something Else.

You will have noticed the introduction of images—the sun, dawn, night, dusk—beginning to illustrate my tedious abstractions. Well, goddamn it, THAT’S the turn, the opportunity, the escape from the escape, where metaphor begins to replace what we think we know is real. 

The thought: “Yes. I do indeed want to die.” is not that thought only. It is also, at the very same time, a little girl in a black dress who grabs your hand and says Come with me. Is she scary as fuck? Yes! Her face is white as snow and her lips are the color of blood. But you can shoot yourself in the literal head or take a walk with the figurative girl. Your choice.

She leads you to a hole in the world that opens into a stairwell leading deep into the ground. The stairs are wooden. The way is sparsely lit by infrequent candles. You hesitate and she laughs at you. Come on, silly. You descend and descend deep into the underworld until you arrive at the center of the earth. This is where you’ll spend the night, the little girl says. Her dress is now white and her face is full of color. It is very cold here, but do not seek warmth prematurely, nor the solace of daylight. This is the palace of dreams where airy fantasies acquire the substance of earth.

You have many questions but the girl is gone. The cynic in you wonders if this is just a metaphor for depression but then you realize that you’re spending the night at the center of the earth and that depression is an inferior word to describe this fantasy—a fantasy that is already beginning to acquire substance. Do not flee up the stairs. Don’t start a fire. Stay cold and dark until the night is over. Do this. Until you no longer need the sun to chase the dark away because how can it? There’s no way. The sun is merely a baby cradled in the gentle arms of the dark. Learn to love the dark.

And tomorrow will not be just another day. It’ll be another kind of day that happens in a different way. Sadness is sadness but it is not sadness only. It’s blue rain as well and without the blue rain there would be no splashing in puddles, no ecstatic orange flowers, or breaks between the silver clouds for which we look up forever and ever.

Very Bad Poetry 3

Again, Vanessa & Jeremy threw the best party of the year with Very Bad Poetry Night 3: Rhyme Hard With A Vengeance. 

And Chris Heart came out of hiding to perform more work from The Peaches Chronicles. Enjoy.

By The Silver Stream

Hi. I’m glad you’re reading this blog post on your computer or mobile device. I mean what are the chances? 7,000,000,000 people in the world and here we are, you and me, in just this way. Hold that thought while I strike a match.

So I read all morning, which, for me, is a way to transcend or create some distance between me and what’s generally conceived as my “actual” surroundings. When I’m submerged in text, I’m not aware of my chair or my desk; you get the picture. And then I went running, which, on the contrary, brings a definite urgency to immanence, to my body and the way it feels as it runs in the world.

But now I’m writing, harder to define, a kind of middle ground where I’m both here AND there, with you. You’re reading this. I wrote it. We’re mashed together in the meaning of this language. What could be more intimate? My fingers typing on your eyes.

Are you with me? Before it burns my fingers, let me drop this match in the dry forest. But you’re there, reading this on a computer or a mobile device. Are you? Of course you are. But you also see the fire starting, the match’s flame passing first to one brown leaf and another, another, and then some twigs and sticks.

You see this, don’t you? I know you do, but where? If you’re reading this on a computer or a mobile device, where’s the fire? Oh but nevermind all that. It’s reached the trees already, spreading quick, and—my God—the flames! They’re so high! A flowing orange ocean of flickering forked tongues lapping and licking the blue sky, flooding the green forest like a tidal wave. It happens so quick. Your eyelashes, singed. The natural forest burns down. There’s no nature left.

No nature. Let the denotation slip and the fun begins. No nature. What are we left with? The forest floor and the remains of the trees are blackened, a wasteland. But there we are, sitting next to a silver stream that winds through the ruin. You ask “How is it that I am both reading this and sitting next to you by this irreal silver stream?” and I reply “The imagination achieves its subtle substance only after the natural world is burned away by rage and despair.” You watch me like I’m shoplifting. I shrug my shoulders.

“You’re not real,” your reflection says, the one in the silver stream. “You and Black Hockey Jesus are merely shadows of the silver truth that flows.” Your reflection points at my reflection. My reflection shrugs his shoulders; he is thinking about candy.

“So,” you begin to sum up, “I’m a shadow of a reflection in a silver stream that flows through the blackened remains of the natural world in a blog post I’m reading?” It’s kind of like that, yeah, but also not. Trying to figure it all out is just nostalgia for trees. Relax. You’ll be done reading soon enough and then you’ll return to the stability of your literal self in the concrete world.

But for now—look—it’s snowing! Stay a few more sentences. The white snow falls gently on the blackened remains of the natural world. This is where we always are, by the silver stream. Goodbye. Thanks for reading. Come back anytime.

1988 Ice Cube's Opinion Of My Son's Teacher Manipulated Research Project

About a month ago, my son showed me his initial findings for a school research project on police brutality. Adam Greene, driving to work, started weaving on the highway when he went into diabetic shock. After four cops—it took four because of his threatening seizure—yank him from his car, wrestle him to the ground, and subdue him, a fifth cop struts up to the scene and kicks Adam five times in the head because fuck Adam for resisting arrest when he’s seizing in insulin shock.

Here’s the video. My favorite part’s when super cop kicks the window. Comes from nowhere. Just a window kick for emphasis: GET OUT OF THE VEHICLE OR I WILL BE FORCED TO KICK SAID VEHICLE INSIDE OF WHICH YOU REMAIN LODGED!

My son was appalled, a response I deemed appropriate. I also thought it was pretty cool how his 8th Grade teacher permitted the class to explore the shadow of law enforcement.

But then I went to the presentation and watched my son and his group provide the two major findings of their “research”. 1). Police brutality is not a big deal. It’s only a big deal when evil media powers need stories to make cops look bad and 2). Here’s a list of things you can do to not make cops mad and potentially brutal.

I grabbed a flamethrower and burned the school down. Not really. But the presentation and the findings of the “research” were obviously manipulated by the teacher and, fuck, to what end do you trick the students into believing they’re engaging a topic when their findings are prefabricated? I saw my son flinching every time that roughneck son of a bitch kicked that man. A month later he was teaching a group of parents that cops had really stressful jobs that made them really super anxious and their victims could’ve avoided their victimization had they known a few simple tips to avoid pushing cops’ buttons. 

Motherfucker was having a SEIZURE.

Good God I hate the police. And I know this is where some sane and rational commenter (WHY ARE YOU READING MY BLOG?) will say But Black Hockey Jesus, it’s not possible to maintain law and order in a civilized society without police. Do you have an alternative to police? Are you some pot smoking hippie anarchist with his head in the clouds who thinks we don’t need police?

NO. 

Nonetheless, I reserve the right on my blog to despise their huge ego small dick having asses. There’s no possible room in my worldview to like a cop. When I pause to consider the psychology of a person who, when considering the vast cornucopia of potential careers, chooses (usually with elated zeal) to guard the borders of legislated experience, I reach for my imaginary flamethrower. Let’s call it what it is: The George Zimmerman Syndrome. Dude wanted, DREAMED, of being a cop. Why? Because, in an out of control world that lacks foundations, he lusted to assert brutal power over Others, to reel in experience from the fringe, and create for himself a semblance of control via power. Cue Trayvon Martin. POP! “There’s one in the chest, little nigger! Now where’s your Skittles WHAT?!?”

If you can get a few drinks in a cop who has the capacity to be honest (few), he’ll admit that he’s on the edge of his seat, waiting for his Trayvon Martin. You think they signed on to write speeding tickets? To direct traffic? Bicker with tweeked up hookers? Hell no. What gets them up and in that uptight uniform is the potential rush of kicking someone in the head and calling it justice. Oh my God but I hate them. Two of my best friends from high school are cops. Fuck you, Bryan and Dan; we used to be lawless. 

I know these ideas are unpopular. The rest of the parents beamed and clapped. I wanted to ask the kids about their presentation’s failure to address the culpability of the police but I didn’t. Just sat there and listened, stewing and imagining from beyond the borders of legislated experience.

*

Tell em:

Not My Kids

I’m a son, but far from only a son. In fact—sorry mom—I rarely exist, openly conscious of my sonhood. I’m a lot of things, a lot of roles, a lot of people, but I’m not sure I’d commit to locating myself in any static figure(s). Rather, I seem to exist more in the immediate project of my desires and, quite frankly, those desires usually constellate around things like chocolate cake and pussy. I’d love to tell you that I seek wholeness or enlightenment or upstanding citizenship. But chocolate cake is really good.

I can’t speak to my parents’ (I’ve had 5) impact on me. It’s entirely too simplistic, silly actually, to believe I can understand myself, derive myself, articulate my character via one to one correlations between then and now. Dad did that. So I am this. Ideas that claim to have that much explanatory power are clean and tidy and even make sense – sense of a certain kind that excludes a million other ways to make sense in addition to concealing the ultimate nonsense that informs everything we “know”. When we know we don’t know, we’re free to think, believe, and change our minds without the threat of fundamentalism and terrorism.

I am a mess of destiny. My parents played a role, of course. But a little girl in Houston, Texas grabbed my crotch in a pool when I was 6 and she played a role too. I have a memory of being 2 at my Aunt Sue’s and sitting by a little stream. Perhaps that stream is why I run. Perhaps that stream is why I babble. I could go on and on (like a stream). Do you see? To dwell overmuch on parental roles and parental guidance puts the burden of my entire destiny completely on their shoulders. And to tell you the truth, I didn’t really listen to them all that much. They sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher.

I’m complicating myself in order to extend the same complication to my children and I need to interrupt this sentence in order to announce the supreme arrogance that inheres in calling them “MY” children. We need to relate to these crazy little people more like Indians relating to the land. When all the greedy white men started stealing and/or “buying” land, the Indians scrunched up their faces and said “We don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” (translated from the original Cherokee). My kids aren’t MY kids. They’re weird little bundles of fate that belong only to themselves, subjects to worlds and worlds of influence, of which I am but a factor.

Do you walk around feeling like you belong to your mom? Like, you’re your mom’s thing? Well then your kids aren’t yours. Soon, they won’t even like you.

These thoughts, this unhinging of the child from the parent, is not an attempt to let myself off the hook. Rather, they’re the only way I, in my greedy white mind, can clear a space for Neil to co-father our children. My evasion is a hospitable invitation, a welcoming gesture into the fabric of our family. The fact that I didn’t invite him is an illustration of the size of my significance and proof of his belonging. The children are enormous piles of messy destiny and they will become who they are above and beyond my ideas about them. My only job is to love them to death while making room for others to love them too.