so much i’m thinking about y’all, and i have no concept of where to start, going into a space where i suppose less cell phone waves are in the air, and you have to go to the public library to get online, has provided enough space for some thoughts to occur. like:
– its the 60th anniversary of the japanese surrender all over minnsota public radio this weekend and we just listened to this radio show about the decision to bomb hiroshima and nagasaki. it was a 50 year old dramatized radio poem and i dare say a lot of it didn’t resonate with me but in the end it was a wish for peace too, from soldiers. i find every two years i have to go back and read hiroshima, and then meditate on my father’s entire military career which has been focused on holding it down in germany as was agreed at the end of world war ii, and now he is in japan. this and other stuff i didn’t know while i was a child and in the mix of it. germany was bratwurst and gummi bears. now i meditate on such a force of destruction as gas chambers and bombs called ‘little boy’ and ‘fat man’…now i know in person germans and japanese and white folk. i think on whether peace is the natural exhale after such acts, such centralized acts of obliteration – 90,000; then 70,000 more…i think of those strapping silly young American boys, many of whom would have called my father a nigger, but they were just getting scraps of hair on their chins and chests when they became killers. forgiveness, japanese forgiveness, or jewish forgiveness, or black forgiveness always astounds me. and white forgiveness! self-forgiveness, poor forgiveness; all these iterations make me wonder how possible it is to forgive and live to tell about it.
but of course, i’m being naive again. war is the most romanticized version of death, cause this shit happens every day. just this past week i listened to two black men from very different circumstances explain the death threats they’d encountered, and one went on to give me a list of shootings that had left him without friends and family. he asked me how i would feel in the situation, if it was really a ride or die situation, cause he doesn’t doubt that i mean what i say, but he says he wonders if i know exactly what the things i say mean.
i know i’m not joking but…at my grandfather’s house this past week i picked up one of his many guns – he hunts still, shoots poisonous snakes and that new rat: deer. and with it heavy and undeniable and cold in my hand i wondered once again, just what are we all talking about, all these different people with different plans who are all striving for self-determination. perhaps its time for a rewind, time we should all learn to shoot and pray.
– on a whole other path of thought, i’ve become convinced i am channeling my grandmother elouise, my father’s mother who died when i was 9. i got this foot-in-yo-back urge to write the other day and all that comes out are stories i’ve heard of her, and i see her everywhere, and i think in my life that maybe i’ve been echoing her spirit in my choices of men, vice, love.
my grandfather said if i keep up this pace of travel i’d never marry. i laughed – hahaha, like i want to get married! i’m free as a bird! but then again, just the other day i was telling some friends about this man i would marry, tho he ain’t studyin me, and one friend said – no adrienne, he’d need a virtuous woman. Virtuous! i don’t know what that means, but i looked at my face in the reflection of a lake yesterday and i don’t think its been virtuous for a while. my list of lovers is shockingly short, my list of kissed lips is adventurously long, still in my heart i’d rather live it (love) than wonder. i think that may have been elouise’s motto also…she never ran from love even when it trapped her in a bottle. can i choose which parts of the legacy to indulge though?
– not to mention, i woke up the other morning wondering about a woman, not that eligible man of virtue…this woman who is older and i am trying to play it off to myself but when i hear from her it makes me giggle like…chale why! i don’t know that i am cut out for all this you know. the idea of myself as someone who travels and is never tied down and never caught up and never turned out is one i cherish. i like having dinner in ny and dessert in the bay and breakfast in atlanta and just a little icy pop in vancouver or whatever. have y’all ever seen that episode of the office where the boss sings his song: free love on the free love highway! that resonated with me! AND YET – seriously my grandfather and my sister and several other messengers have gotten angelic light behind their heads while saying to me in one way or another – be satisfied! be humble! you cannot in fact have everyt’ing and expect life to be irie! lol…seriously though. i am at the point where i could go in any direction given the right invitation.
– also i just had to share this as someone who gets hiccups all the time, from my boy joshua gabriel:
THE CURE FOR THE HICCUPS
Like all human beings, I am thoroughly displeased when I find myself trapped in the hiccup zone. I have heard of many techniques for stopping the hiccups – holding your breath, drinking a glass of water while holding your nose, breathing into a paper bag, etc. We’ve all heard these and I’m sure we can all agree that none of these techniques work in the least. But several months ago, whilst attending the college graduation party of my friend Dan (aka Deadly D), I was told a cure for the hiccups which seems to be full-proof.
When the party winded down, the core group of us gathered round the kitchen table to – how shall i say this? – smoke marijuana. After much talking eventually the subject of the hiccups came up. Dan’s uncle (dang i forget his name) said he had learned how to stop the hiccups for good while working as a medic in the Army back in the olden days. He explained to us that you strike a match, toss it into a glass of water and IMMEDIATELY take a gulp (be careful not to swallow the match). Apparently the sulfur bursts some sort of air bubble in your diaphragm or something like that. Dan’s uncle calmly stated that this technique works every time. I was skeptical, but the next time i got the hiccups I tried it out, and it worked. Immediately. Not one more hiccup. Since that graduation party i have gotten the hiccups about 8 times and every time I have done the match trick and every time it has stopped the hiccups cold.
OK time to go jump in a lake…kisses and hugs and i miss everyone!