Hate alone is not enough to nourish. But there’s rage too.

i had to return E’s bke to here yesterday cause i don’t have enough room for it here. it’s a small frame, awkward for me to ride. Oh yeah, she’d also left her keys at my place and was thusly locked out. She took up some eats at an eatery local to her and i said i’d meet her there. i got to her neighborhood and found the place she was at. i was late. So i finished up her dish and we jetted. i was riding her bike and fooling around in the road and stuff and around the corner from her place i was up on the side walk. i see this black impala (read unmarked popo). He slams the car in reverse and stops pretty much in front of me and e. this napolean prick of an officer gets out of the car and excuses himself but “riding on the sidewalk is an offense”. i pony up my id and he runs it. while he’s running my license i see a delivery boy up the road pulling onto the sidewalk. figures. truth is i agree with the law. it’s purpose being preventing pricks like me barreling down a sidewalk full of people and causing a safety hazard. but wait a minute. in brooklyn? at 11:30 on a monday night? besides the fact that i’m sure there’s a bag of something changing hands in front of my apartment at this very hour, is there a real risk when there’s no one out on a 45 f blustery mid-may night. the guy comes back with a summons telling me i can show up at the precinct on such and such to viddy a safety tape. the typical post-confrontation scenarios entered my mind. could i have reasoned with the guy? taken a shot at his crackpot detective work? asked him if this was a productive use of my tax dollars? ask him if he realized that i was walking with a hooker and the bike was stolen? blah blah. but the lockdown was on and i clammed up. oh well. maybe i’ll make the summons date but i’ll be enjoying plenty of nachos, refried beans and buffalo wings the night before to maintain ripeness of air in the viewing room.

Just got back from a family vacation. It’s been something like 18 years since the last time we all went out. Lot’s has happened since then. I’m more than twice as old as I was then. Our family is more than twice the size. Everyone got a long real great and it was pretty tight confines and there was massive deluges which kept us all pretty much housebound. I think it’d be a good thing to repeat once a year or two. Things like holidays are hurried and sort of chaotic with the older kids having other obligations. I guess it took the old guy turning sixty for all of us to synchronize our watches but hopefully we can continue this until it becomes a tradition.

so i worked this evening and being that i still dont trust the Gizzle train (although ive seen marked improvement) i opted for a cab {company sponsored of course - see lebanon, my main memory being about how much it sounded like elevenon. freshman year there was a kid from lebanon named masud which i thought was cool and he had a tattoo of lebanon. enough about me. he said he moved to the city when he was 17 in 1984, alone, very little english and shit. real life shit. none of this american blah blah blah those crazy thises and thoses. sounded like a good guy.
he happened to cut some honda off just as we were driving under the bqe and they honked. he continues on and we continue talking and i see the car pull beside us and two, um, lets be politically correct here….. thugs….. yeah i think you get the picture…. brandish a nice shiney pistole. a gat so to speak. first thought is if they’re in such a big hurry then why do they have time to drive along side us. very counter intuitive.
i chose to ignore and continue the conversation and decide not to react because that would just give the thugs what they want. attention. cause if they wanted to shoot they would have.
i also decided not to inform the driver in case he got spooked and reacted. after we lose the thugs i ask if he saw what they were waving.
sez he /yeah happens all of the time/.
sez iandi /you servived lebanon, those punks arent’ going to spook you, huh/.
sez he /civil war started when i was 9/
america (especially white america) has a lot of learning to do about how the world operates. things can get real bad. our government, media and society are real good at isolating us from the realities so that they don’t lose productivity from us. the less we know, the harder we work, the more they make.
not real succinct but truth is i needed a Jack and beer after that so I’m tired.

So I didn’t fag out. Did the open mic and played Woke Up and Use Me. Messed up the first verse of Use Me but pulled it together. Hands were rubbery so I didn’t attempt the embellishments I’d worked out for woke up. Ef and Nk were there which made it cool. Thought I’d get some feedback from them. It was warm. “At least you got up there”, “It’s not all about the singing.” I got the picture that it was mediocre. I followed a bunch of pretty talented singers so that was differnet from last time when there was some newbies. Also, I didn’t fuck up last time like I did this. But, my perspective was that I was slightly more comfortable this time although, surely, visibly nervous. I could swear people were clapping to the beat of woke up, I thought it was Nk and Ef but she said she didn’t hear it. Anyway, I’m mostly just typing this down to document my challenge to keep this up and nail down some more repetoir. There’s mic’s in redhook on Thursdays. I;m going to try to get two under my belt in a week.

Well it’s time for me to do the open mic thing again. I did it once, almost 6 months ago. I did ok. And it gave me something to talk about. But I didn’t follow up. Haven’t done it since. No good excuse. Sloth maybe. Not feeling real confident right now. Voice sort of sucks. Tried to make a few changes to the songs. Not really working. But I just have to get up there again. Time to live up to the smack I talked about having done it once. ewwww. big deal. Time to get it done.