All posts in prose

This has been a weird sort of two weeks for me.

Brexit‬ made me feel angry and powerless to help my friends of African and Indian origin who were facing unjust persecution in a land they loved, and then ‪Alton Sterling‬ and ‪‎Philando Castile‬ were murdered in the land of the free so I found a small release for my powerlessness – I could donate to their families, throw money at them and feel… less impotent.

Then I realized, wow, I’m a piece of shit; here’s this amazing device for intercontinental connection and voice, and all I’m using it for is as speedy means of deriving some sort of self-satisfaction from helping the needy, wow. There loomed above me this heavy rain of a question about myself that was hard to weather.

In the meantime, I ended up being front and center as Continue Reading →

All of my UK friends of African or Indian descent have expressed to me how the racism they’ve faced in the past couple days amounts to a couple years’ worth. They’ve been verbally abused, told to go home, spit on, &c.. All of them.

People hate being told how racism is still alive in such “progressive” times, but are lost for words when things such as Brexit unfold and suddenly there’s an uptick in racism. “My word, where did all these racists come from?” the lady next door exclaims, shocked. They were always here ma’am, you don’t notice them because they don’t target you.

(I mean, I’ve lived in Texas and Georgia Continue Reading →

I suppose that if war, genocide, suicide terror, &c. were distilled down to haiku, if like a pond in summer, or leaves in the wind, our red-splashed bodies in the dirt meant nothing beyond who we are but human consciousness located in nature in a prescribed syllable count, then, and only then, I suppose what would be left would be the realization that the paths of obedience lead us here.

The first casualty of taking a life isn’t the life taken, but the taker’s former disobedience to the belief that killing isn’t a pure wrong, and that some things are somehow ‘worthy’ of it. This rubbing out of disobedience, whether it be in small groups or large armies, is in essence simply stated as, “Soldiers are trained to kill.” The simply stated is made obvious when “trained” is replaced with its synonyms of “passive” and “obedient.”

Word of advice, if you’re a minority and you don’t seriously invest in your own education on a day-to-day basis then you are oppressed. You are oppressed; no ifs, ands, or buts. And I’m not talking about a religious education, I’m talking about a scientific one – there’s a difference between an education that lets you navigate the world and one that lets you understand it.

There’s a reason why slaves who taught themselves how to read called it “stealing back their own bodies.”

You feel like an X-Man.

From a minority’s point-of-view, you don’t actually realize that you’re smart (different) until later on, and when you do you see that the smartest choice to make is to not be smart (different). Let me explain.

First off, I don’t consider myself particularly developed in one area of intelligence, I consider myself to be naturally above average in most forms of intelligence.

I’m black and I grew up poor. Very poor, and thus I grew up in the worst of neighbourhoods and the worst of intelligence enhancing environments. Though we were technically well-off where I came from (Rwanda), when I emigrated with my sister and mother to America we quickly joined the American lower class/working poor. My mother being a single-mother usually worked two jobs just to feed us, clothe us, and to put us through school. On top of that, we moved around a lot, but usually stayed in the same state, from one apartment to another (I think this is because my mother couldn’t pay the rent on more than one occasion).

There was no such thing as money left over to spend on books and movies. The only books my sister and I ever received from our mother were a bible, and an ancient kid’s encyclopedia (that she most likely got for free from someone/somewhere). We had a television set but never had cable, and we got an old computer when I was around 13 with no internet, which I didn’t seriously pay attention to until I was a junior in high school. (We only got the computer because our mother was married to our step-father at the time, who’s a failed CS major. Every time I peaked at his CS books or asked what he was doing with the computer he said it was too complicated for boys like me and to stay out, so I did, more so because he was an asshole.) The only options really available to me and my sister most of the time were to stay inside and draw (we’re both considerably above average in the naturally artistic departments), or to go out, explorer the world and get in trouble with friends.

Although at home I had quirks like Continue Reading →

Though it’s mostly for show, I technically have an elephant trainer’s/ caretaker’s license from Thailand. One could go so far as to call me a Mahout.

The best I can say is that “training” elephants is a complex subject, but living and working with them is… holy.

There are many methods to training elephants and I chose my mentors based on theirs. Most elephants in Thailand are Continue Reading →

After your body gets a handle on the extreme military-like conditions your stupidity is forcing onto it, it’s amazing and then unbearably boring.

It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.*

1. Above all, you learn how to nap wherever possible no matter how. You make sure to secretly always be in possession of a sleeping-mask, you sneak out of parties to nap before returning, you learn how to catch naps in bathroom stalls, all cars start resembling portable beds, &c..
2. Your sense of time is nonexistent. Although you only sleep two hours a day (via six 20-minute naps), each nap feels like eight hours of sleep and every four hour segment feels eleven hours long; every day feels three days long (equally filled to the brim with darkness and then light) and every week feels like a short February. You would think this would make you lazier, but in reality the opposite’s true: with them being your only means of time-keeping (from your body’s perspective) every nap equates to the end of a day and so you become psychologically conditioned to finish everything on your plate by the time you have to sleep (you’re slowly forced to always be focusing only on the tasks that matter). This eventually has you completing a week’s worth of tasks in two days time, half a week’s if you’re lazy Continue Reading →

Bless the women who braved pregnancy. Who told us they’d be there for us before themselves, and were tested time and time again to stand by their words and did so. Bless the women whose minds failed them like poverty and are only allowed to see their babies for a couple of days. Bless the women who stay for the kids. Bless the women with dead children, for days like today remind them of their loss. And bless the men who stepped up to that roll. All others, step down.

All businesses trying to profit from that strength, step down. You can have New Years, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, but don’t dare touch the hands that forged Santa’s signature before we knew better.

My mother got diagnosed as a bi-polar, then as a schizophrenic while I was in my last high school years.

The best way I can explain it is that it’s comparable to running through a unending and self-repeating gauntlet of emotions every day of your life: confusion, fear, sadness, disgust, shame, pity and self-pity, anger, envy, indignation, tolerance, patience, surprise, appreciation, hope, and then back to fear again.

Confusion:

How would you feel if you and your younger sister came home in 2008 to your mom telling you she’s on Obama’s head team, and that since she’s been on this team the FBI and CIA have been following her everywhere (while residing in Canada)? How would you feel the next day when you walk in on her treating the living room as if it was bugged, asking her what’s wrong, and being led to her bedroom and she quietly telling you that the people in the TV were watching and listening to her every move? Now, how would you feel if the day after that you came home and found that she had packed all her clothes in suitcases because Obama was apparently sending his men to pick her up that night?

Yeah, confused is the gist of it. So you do what anybody would do, and take her to the hospital to figure out what’s wrong. Continue Reading →

Long time coming. In September my sister and I decided that April 10th would be our dad’s “Birthday” and official day of remembrance. Dad died in April of 1996. He was as short as me and a food chemist who worked for Coca-Cola, which was at the time sponsored by Heineken. I already knew this. But I, we, recently learnt he loved fish, fine cuisine, swimming, bringing fresh fruit home from the market after work, and that he was probably born in January. That’s it. Now you know as much about our pops as we do. Happy Birthday Dad, thanks for giving up your life so that your wife and children may live on. Bless to the man with no tombstone.