Quite Early One Morning...

There are so many people on U Street that traffic has been blocked off. Firecrackers go off. Chinese sparklers are lit. A college girl with a Trini accent carries and American flag bigger than she is. I stand in the middle of celebration continually fighting off tears. I could barely speak when my cell finally connected with my father. The rain began to come down in a cooling mist as My Dad ans I spoke with joy and disbelief. Neither of us thought that we would live to see this. And yet there we were, bearing witness together in the same lifetime.

And there I was, standing on U Street, the once burned-out, cracked-out corridor my parents generation set fire to when they killed Martin 40 years ago. Now it's all gentrified and done up, a center of culture and nightlife. But we took it back in celebration. We made it ours long enough to embrace one another in one of the greatest victories this country has seen in the last 200 years.

As I took a pic with my girl, Zee, who is from the same neighborhood as me and who went to high school and college with me, she held me tight.

"I thought you were in LA," she said.
"Not yet," I replied with a smile, a little frustrated by having to explain why I'm still here. It's so far away to them that it's almost like another planet.
"Well good," she said to me. "You're supposed to be here. This is your home."

On that same stretch of street I ran into a guy from the third grade, old crushes, new friends and strangers white, black and Arab who embraced me like one of their own. Seeing the Middle Eastern cat parked in front of the Reeves Center with wife at shotgun and an Obama sticker on his minivan, I was glad to know that this was just about Black people, that the best of this country was tired of having our land run into the ground by stupid rich white men seeking only to serve themselves.

And I thought about the moment when our new president stepped to that stage in Grant Park, holding his wife's hand with his two daughters in tow. I marvelled at the fact that the world would get to see this, that some five year-old in the favelas of Rio, an elderly woman deep within Yorubaland, a father of four in Santiago de Cuba, and I had one less reason to ever believe that anything is possible.

I don't have any excuses anymore. I don't have a reason to every stop swinging.

As we took over ther 24/7 cafe, jamming to the Stevie Wonder mix and forming a Soul Train line that welcome the groups of gay men, white women and all kinds of Blacks folks all happy for the same thing, I talked to DJ Stylus, a dude that's been a degree away for more than a decade. And as we and his lady chopped it up about how the ideal for some little kid in the street is now so far past going platinum or popping bottles, as we looked at how now there's no mother in the worst project in the country who can put limits on what her baby can do, I know that no matter what happens to me, no matter have to face, I will get there.

As I drove home through empty streets and pulled onto my mother's block, there was a space right in front of my house for me to park the car, a space that's never been available at that time of night for all the years she's lived there. There is possibility. There is change. One Death Star is gone. But there are many more to replace it. The rebellion continues, one target at a time. Out ;)

Judgement Day

On this election day, November 3rd of 2008, I am thinking about my sons
and daughters. Whether they are spawned from my own seed or not they
still belong to me, to us, as they are the product of our choices, of
our blood, of the world our individual decisions have contributed to.
This is one of those days when a man of color and the millions behind
him took their shot at toppling the tower of the old guard in the
hopes of beginning to bring this country up out of hell. This is the first revolution that has been televised.

I decided to go with my mother to get a picture of her at the polls.
I took a flick of the front page of todays Washington Post. I will
take pics of people. Even this blog is a document of the time and
place.

I am thinking about a night years from now when a child of mine comes
to find me in my office or living room, his/her hands clutching a textbook and a pad
filled with questions about what this day was like. And though my
vote went into the mail I want to be able to say that I was out there, that I could feel the energy in the streets.

My own eyes watered as I listened to black people sob with joy on the radio for having making this the first time they've ever voted in their lives. I've seen the "I Voted" sticker plaster on faces, pants legs and lapels all throughout this city. For the first time since the Million Man March, I really feel like we're all willing to do out part and our duty in the face of the continued depravity brought about by the current regime. This is a new beginning for all of us, a chance for that child of mine to live in a world that might be a little more free from mediocrity and corruption.

I've tried to be zen about this election, resting in a place where I
was ready for it to go either way. I secluded myself from the swelling masses of souls giving their faith to this 24 hours. I was afraid of what I might do if we didn't prevail. But being out in the ether of my hometown, the always hopeful boy
within me broke through the surface. I , like so many of us , have
been renewed through this continuing journey. My kids are already proud of me, just for being here. Out.

Thandie

The first time I saw Thandie Newton onscreen was in Beloved. And to tell you the truth, she didn't do much for me. There was something serprentine about her features that bothered me.

But that was ten years ago, before I ran the Chronicles of Riddick into the ground, before I saw her turns in Crash, The Pursuit of Happyness and a little known movie called Shade. Just the other day I caught her in The Young Americans, a British crime film that dropped in the early 90s. She's not my typical type as she's so slender (almost to the point of frailty). But there are very few actresses who do femme fatale better than her. And as I watched her in Guy Ritchie's Rocknrolla, a film that brings the writer/director back to form depsite all of his current drama in the press for breaking up with the infamous Madge.

I remember reading an article on Thandie a few years back, not long after Rob J and I rolled past her on the streets of LA when she was glowingly pregnant with her daughter Ripley (who she named after the led character in the Alien movies. If Bonet is my hippie girl, then Thandie is my dominatrix, cool and manipulative as she becomes drunk with the knowledge that she has you where she wants you. But if she wants you it means that you're something definitely worth having. It's that Scorpio thing that I know so well, all-consuming in its magnetism.

Perhaps one day I'll get five minutes with her on the shores of La-La land. Maybe I'll get her for a part in one of my films. Any assassin sent to clip me on the sneak will be a Black woman with a British and eyes more seductive than toes against a crotch beneath a table for two. Until then there's always the movies. I heard she kill it in W. That's up next. But first I got my notebook and some pens. I have to keep telling my next story, which Thandie might actually be perfect for. Out.

Crash

The downside of getting older is that there are fewer and fewer surprises. You go into battle armed with the experience of what you've already survived, a living journal of dos and donts. You also have those who have been there before you, those who have a pretty good idea of where you are because they've been there. You hear their words long before they begin to make sense, until you surrender to what makes sense.

My father always knows what to ask me. He can find his way through the complex safe door behind which I try to hide things only to confess them to a select few that changes every few years. I am watching the my local 20-something fleet drift in many different directions, completing a cycle that began on my 27th birthday. As we grow into adults we either learn to keep better watch over the decisions we make or become slaves to them. It's just that simple. I'm rejoining the people in the world who made the same choices I did and learning how to love the rest from the growing distance between us.

Last night I watched the first three episodes of Crash the series, an hour-long drama on Starz that has very little in common with Paul Haggis's critically-acclaimed opus. It starts out with these four different stories, two of which are interrelated by a car crash and follows them on what will obviously be an overlapping trip meant to remind us of how worlds intertwine. There are things I like about it and things I don't. In the the end I'm leaning towards making it watchable, which means it could go either way from here on in.

But the scene that struck me the most was one where a white wife directs her repressed sexual feelings towards an African American character into a cowgirl seduction of her self-involved husband, her hunger for something beyond her fed by satisfying something trivially domestic and unquestionably fleeting.

Something about it reminded me of the long-term relationship that was hardest for me to sever but easiest for me to put behind me, one of the few open-and-close cases in my not so long log. Though I have no regrets about what did and didn't go down in our liaison, I missed the unapolegetic way in which she craved me in the darkness before we got up early, how she wasn't afraid to do what it took to get and keep the party started.

Looking back I think I was the first man she couldn't put a leash on, or who at least matched her in a need for control. I think our long ago collision ended up reminding us both of who we were and who we weren't. Going any further would have led us into a darkness that I know my soul would have never fully returned from.

Such emotional outpourings are a thing of my increasingly distant past as I wade through waters of the needy and the greedy and the lost souls who think all their problems will be solved with a diamond ring and six trimesters on a four-year plan. I wonder what it will feel like the next time, once I'm freed from this rock where the birds pick at my liver daily, where I am demolished and rebuilt like blocks in the hood that go condo. It's the forbidden dance that I was born to do. Like riding a bike you're never really out of practice. You just need the two wheels and a reason to get there.

The White Boy Shuffle

Let it first be said that I am nowhere close to being a beast on the dance floor. I've spent more than ten years crafting a series of dances that keep me safe from immediate clowning and ridicule when cutting a rug. But there are some poor souls who are far worse off than I. And many of them happen to be Caucasian.

After appearing as a guest on my Spelman schoolmate and general homie Shani Jamila's show, Blackademics(www.wpfw.org, DC's 89.3FM) I found myself in Adams Morgam for a quick bite with her and The Sondai at Bukom. A West African joint that embraces many cultures throughout the Diaspora, I once stood on its stage at 16 and read poetry with the infamous Kenny Carroll back when it first opened. Almost 17 years later it's still standing and menu is pretty alright. But this is not about Bukom. This is about the White Boy.

It's reggae night. The band is on the display window stage going through every standard known to man. There's that booming bass, the simple by hynotic guitar line and cool vocal stylings of the rasta who wears his sunglasseses at night. Back in the day any white boy in this kind of place would have known the rules before he came to the door. But this dude and his date were just way out of pocket.

It's painful watching him throw his head back when he thinks he's in a groove, attempting to wind his stiff hips to an audience of one as if the entire room isn't watch. I mean who messes up grinding when you're really into it? As Shani and Sondai were forced to look on, losing their appetites as this guy paraded right in front of our table for more than a half hour, I was lucky to be seated with my back to him. Yet even then his very energy was calling to the rude boy within me, a he who wanted nothing more than to smash my water glass over the chap's head and watch him fall to the ground like a sack of bricks writhing in pain. At least then I would have had a clear view of the band.

But cooler heads prevailed. As I was out and about for the first time in a few days, I was glad to be in the company of beautiful women and to have graced the mic in the same radio station where my Dad once had a show so many years before. As I came home with the taste of hot wings still on my lips and a rack of episodes of Clone Wars to watch, I found myself reminded of all that's going on behind the scenes.

I have these ties with Jamaica right now, througth the music, through my novel and through the plate of chicken right in front of me, though they don't you give you plantains that the spot down here close to the crib. I miss Fulton Street. I miss Kris and Rich and Negarra and Ifaniyi. But looking back only turns you into salt and those I know that those I hold dearest will see me again. It's all about timing. It's all about destiny. Out.

Pre-Flight Arrangements

I am standing in the darkness on a suburban street. The key enters the lock and I climb inside the cockpit of the ride I will most likely own in the very near future. I am measuring out the trunk space and storage capacity. I am making sure that the tape deck works so that I can have access to my Ipod. The seats feel good. The engine has been rebuilt. I can attach a bike rack to the rear to carry my baby on the exodus ahead.

I don't want a car but I need one. And as I have no intention of getting a car note before I own a house. She will do. My last automotive lady and I traveled up and down the East Coast a countless number of times and even to the Midwest. She was small but got 40 mpg back when ten bucks filled the tank for a week. I will have to give her a name. It isn't time to go yet but it's getting closer. And I can't wait.

I got my absentee ballot over the weekend. The one downside of moving when I did is that I won't get to walk to my old polling place on Jefferson and step into that booth. But with all the election shadiness I'm bracing myself for, maybe that's a good thing.

The Season Two finale of Mad Men was spectacular. The latest episode of Entourage was what I expected but nonetheless a needed boost. If Vinnie Chase can win then so can I. Still, like any saga there's always something else. The story wouldn't be interesting if there weren't another problem to solve.

I saw the full trailer for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button last night and it looks pretty good. David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac) and Eric Roth (Munich, Forrest Gump, The Good Shepherd) have thrilled me far more times than they've disappointed for me. It wasn't until I checked last night that I saw that Roth is older than my parents and has been writings scripts since the late 70s. That's a career. I've got real work to do. Out.

Insomnia

Sometimes this place feels like jail. As I can so thoroughly remember the five rooms that I called my home for seven years, having most of my possessions confined to one room is a little restricting. I sleep on a twin mattress as opposed to the queen that I was familiar with (though the platform full before it was my favorite). There are no bodegas, only supermarkets that never have seven-day candles (though heeding Ifaniyi I now know that I don't need them as much). Every other face I encounter outside of these walls triggers some memory, some set of experiences that remind me of both why I wanted to leave and why I desperately craved something that would make me stay. I did not understand that despite appearances I had chosen a life before I came here, one where I would need to follow orders, for my own sake.

The number eleven has been chasing me since my twenties ended. This is the eleventh year since I began real adulthood. At this time in '97 I was shelving books at a Barnes and Noble for a living, facing out titles by authors I wouldn't even touch now. As I did my job there and at Comp USA and at the temp gigs that would follow, I never ended up being anywhere very long.

And some kind of way people always remembered me. I was working the counter on two different days when both Andre and Big Boi, came up to me, dapped me up and gave me their phone numbers long after I'd interviewed them for magazines. I interviewed the late Maynard Jackson, arguably Atlanta's most important mayor to date, from the break room at the back of the Noble while the music manager, a geeky kid named Gary, looked on in wonder. To him I was talking to a god. To me he was just another subject.

I stood at the edge of a different river yesterday. It was murky and brown and far more still than the place where I went to pray for more than five years, the secret Negarra, Konata, Edwin and I shared. But that pulse all around me felt the same. The results were the same. The outcome will be the same. The next Grand Lodge will be even more secluded and tranquil than the last.

I woke up this morning reminded of the gifts I've been given that most don't have, weapons I've been armed with to help me on a walk through the valley of the shadows of mediocrity and fear. Though I often tremble at the thought of change, I don't think I'll ever stay in one thing for too long. Outside of my family and loved ones the rest is about going where I'm needed, even if I don't fully understand why.

I haven't slept well in these last few days, as I've gone to bed wondering if this set of scripts and this set of dreams will be pan out better than a life in books that was plagued by both bad choices and bad timing. I know that I'll once again end up in a hood different from where most of my friends are and that the existence I will seek will be off most of their radars. But it's all part of the plan, all written in the script. When it's done I will take my bow, hoping that the audience believes that I played my part well, anxiously awaiting my role in the next script that comes my way. Out.