Thinking About Crazy Love

My fingers went black and numb thumbing through telephone pages looking for her number, the number I failed to get when I first saw her those many years during the summer before my junior year in college. I was in a special program in Washington, D.C., living and taking classes at Georgetown University and interning at a small newsletter. I was enjoying myself, basking in the heady world of D.C., the political version of Hollywood where I remember catching a glance of Al Gore, when he was vice-president.

One night, I saw her at some event at the Freedom Forum. I don't recall her name and her facial features are long embedded somewhere in my subconscious where I can't reach them. I do know that she was beautiful; in fact, she was fine, gorgeous, a physical manifestation of a tall drink of water flavored with spice. I managed to talk to her. I couldn't tell you how and I couldn't tell you what we talked about. I only hope I didn't sound like a fool. I think she smiled and may have laughed at my witticisms. Maybe, I'll say.

We did have a connection. We had both, at different times, attended a high-school journalism workshop that my hometown newspaper put on.

We parted ways after the event was over, and I left...without her number. I had no game, obviously. And the weight of a wasted opportunity dawned on me later when I had gotten back to the dorms at Georgetown. I knew I had to rectify this.

That's why I found myself going through the telephone book looking up her names and dialing the phone (this was in the age before IPhones, of course). I likened myself to be a Bob Woodward doing my own romantic investigation.

After about an hour, I got her number and I called and we talked. She wasn't annoyed. And I wasn't stupid enough to tell her all I had gone through to get to hear her voice, lest I be accused of stalking. In my mind, I was being persistent.

No, it didn't work out. It didn't even have much of a beginning for it not to work out. I don't think we even went out on a date, though I believe I did ask. My having no game caught up with me, pushing so hard that I seemed desperate. And no real woman wants a desperate man. I learned that the hard way.

Still, the lesson didn't sink in all the way because several years later, after I had graduated and settled into a small town for my first newspaper job, I caught wind of a girl who might like me. I didn't figure all this out until close to when she was graduating from the college where I met her while working on a story about an administrator there.

I got her number and called her. I didn't get her but instead left her a voice mail of me reciting a Langston Hughes poem. She called back, leaving a message. She seemed both flattered and somewhat flabbergasted. I don't think she knew what to do and she was leaving town anyway so she never called back. She fluttered away into that pile I was collecting categorized as lost opportunities.

Back then, I didn't know what I was doing. Some days, I wonder if I know now. But I knew what I wanted and went after it.

When we're young, we aren't always cautious. We're reckless, mistaking our youth for armor against pain and death. And our recklessness leads us down dark paths. But it also leads us onto other more wondrous paths. It leads us to love, or at least the possibility of love.

I think about romantic comedies and how they always end with someone running through an airport or traffic and end up standing in front of that one person, blurting out an eloquent yet jumbled speech about love and "you're the one for me" and "I can't live without you in my life." Then the two lovebirds live happily ever after.

But there's this poetry in how love makes us abandon reason and do some dumb shit. I mean, really dumb shit, like leaving Langston Hughes poems on someone's voice mail or refusing to hear the "no" in a woman's not calling you back after that first or second date. It's the warmth of their lips on yours feeling like a high you can't get enough of. The sound of their voice after a long day at work. Your hand on the small of their back being that home you two have built without the benefit of four walls.

Love is worth all of the crazy at the end and even if it breaks your heart a few times, it's worth going after again until you get it right.

So I guess I'm waiting for another chance to get my hands dirty.

Stressed Out

On a Sunday, I closed the door on a part of my life I had lived for the last 10 years. Turned in the key and didn't look back.
Days before my life had turned into a nightmare I wished I could wake up from. But this was life, not a Nightmare on Elm Street movie. And shit had just become real.
I've lived just long enough to know that things go wrong at the exact moment when everything seems to be going right, when the train is riding smoothly over the rails. Then this crappy thing happens and your world is in upheaval.
I wanted to scream, to pound my fists into some wall until holes appeared, to revert back to a child where I could throw a good old-fashioned temper tantrum.
But I'm an adult and I can't act like that anymore. I had to man up and handle my business. Inside, I was free-falling, not knowing where I would land.
I pushed through, trying to get my work done, trying not to worry about things I had no control over. I pushed to figure out what I needed to do now. I was performing triage on myself, prioritizing the mess my life was in at that moment.
Because you can't fix everything. You have to fix one thing and then move on to the next. And that's what I did.
But in those quiet moments, feelings of shame and embarrassment and downright anger creeped in and my body shook with that avalanche of emotion.
These are the moments when all you can form out of your mouth are the words, "Shit, shit, shit." Or that other word that rhymes with muck.
These are the moments you have those conversations with God. These are the moments you blame yourself for getting in this mess.
You fall deep into a depression but just before you hit that hard rock bottom, you realize you can't stay there.
I, sooner or later, figure that the only way to pull myself out is to pull myself out and reach out to friends to help me. Because these are also the moments when you realize that friendships matter and you can't conquer this all by yourself.
I remind myself constantly that it will be okay like a mantra, repeat it until I believe it through the very core of me, reverberating through every cell and every bone. It will be okay even when I don't see how it can be okay. It will be okay even when I can't find the door through which I will walk.
That Sunday, I closed the door on a part of my life. And I am walking through that other door that was always there even when I didn't see it.

In 20 Years

Twenty years ago is ancient history to me, concrete experience now dust to my now. But it was only 20 years ago, when I was a lanky kid into his second year of college, shoulders weighed down by the heavy book bag on my back. On my head was a dirty baseball hat pulled tight on my short Afro.
My eyeglasses were larger than the ones I have now and they fit awkwardly on my face. My face was clean-shaven except for a thin mustache.
I was both outsider and insider then, just beginning to flex my social muscles. I hated the taste of beer so when I went to fraternity parties, I refused to drink. Instead, I danced to the live bands playing in the basement and watched others get smashed.
I was two hours from home, thrilled with the freedom I had, feeling like a semi-adult, away from Mom. I loved staying up until the wee hours of the night. Of course, I paid for it the next day, groggy-headed, eyelids heavy with the sleep I should have gotten the night before but didn't.
I knew then what I wanted to do, even if I didn't know how I was going to do it. I wanted to be a journalist, work for a big paper and do big stories. I wanted to write.
How was I to know how hard it would all be? College was hard enough, the pressure of keeping my grades up, the doubt that crept into my mind from time to time of whether I was good enough to be here, my immaturity at times that threatened the friendships I had forged.
But life outside? I had no idea until two years later when I graduated and had to move out on my own, rent an apartment, figure out the non-existent work-life balance, paying bills, all the real adult shit my Mom told me about but I never did until now.
And in the time between then and now, from 20 to a few days shy of 40, life has changed me and I have changed with it. I have hurt people I said I cared about and I have been hurt to the core by others. I have made mind-numbing mistakes. I lost a job I wasn't ready for and had to rebuild my crumbled self-esteem bit by bit. I have stumbled my way through relationships like some blindfolded fool who doesn't realize he could have taken the folds off at any time.
These days, the glasses are smaller and circular. Little strands of white bleed through my mostly black goatee and mustache. I am still thin but the flesh is flabbier in places. I enjoy a glass of red wine every now and then or a bottle of Corona with lime. I dance more and poetry seeps from nearly every pore of my body. I am the writer I always thought I could be, and I am not finished writing yet.
I found that getting to the places I dreamed about was harder than I ever imagined but the path I took led me to places I never would have imagined and to people I would never want to vanish from my life.
I know now that the hardest thing is to own your life, own all of it. You can't own half of it; you can't just remember the laughter and the joy and the sweet caresses of some long-lost girlfriend. You also have to remember the mistakes and the pain and the heartache. All of your life made you who you are. All of it.
The cracks of my skin make me beautiful.
In the past year, I've been thinking about what turning 40 will be like. I think about what the next 20 years will mean. And sometimes, I get scared. We all do. Because you can't predict what will happen. You can't see the next possible disaster around the corner. You also can't see the next bit of happiness around the corner.
But I figure that I'll own whatever comes next just as I've owned everything that has come before.
If I could tell my 20-year-old self anything, I would tell him, "You're built for this. You always were." And I feel that my 60-year-old self is reminding me of that at this very moment as I write this.
You were built for this. You always were. And you always will be.

Writing my own name

My mirror was smudged and no matter how much Windex I sprayed, I could never get a clear image of myself.
All I could see was what others saw of me and much of that in my childhood was ugly. My box-shaped glasses sat akward on my acne-scarred face. My hair was a nappy Afro mess. And my clothes were no where near fashionable and I still cringe at the rainbow Hammer-like pants I once wore in high school.
But this was more than the clothes I wore or my glasses or the nasty pimples dotting my face. I wished I was someone else because I was not comfortable about being me. I hated me. I prayed to God I was cooler and was the guy girls drooled over like women do over Idris Elba these days.
I wanted to be the man. The man who got all the girls, who knew the smooth words to say to make the hot girl in class I had a crush on smile in my direction.
I wanted to be the man who didn't run from a fight. I wanted to be the one who others were afraid to mess with, whose very demeanor made others tremble like earthquakes.
I was trying to forge out what being a man was all about. My father wasn't around so I searched in church, school and hip-hop for representations I could copy.
The messages were confusing, as smudged as that mirror in my home. Could I be sensitive or should I be Mr. Tough? Hard as a rock. A roughneck, as MC Lyte once rapped.
I sure couldn't cry no matter how hurt I was from the teasing I sometimes got. I wasn't supposed to care that much, was I?
Then one day I smashed the mirror because the mirror was wrong to begin with. I just got another one, one that was clearer, that got rid of the smudges.
And I found that I was fine the way I was, without, of course, the box-glasses and the acne. I grew up into the person I was always meant to be. I had to get another view of myself, a view not fogged up with the perceptions and ideas of others, but one I forged for myself.
Never was I perfect but I wasn't meant to be. I wasn't supposed to be you and you weren't supposed to be me.
Superficial representations of masculinity are just that -- superficial. Trying as hard as you can to do the right thing is what makes you a man. Standing in the midst of chaos knowing that you will not die today is what makes you a man.
And daring to be who you are, with all your imperfections and mild obsessions, regardless of what others might say, is what makes you a man or woman. Being you is the difference between you embracing your humanity and absorbing into a commodified mass-produced death of corporatized proportions.
I am writing my name and no one else. Because no one else fits. Period.

I Look Like

I could say a lot but maybe you should just listen to what she has to say. She has a voice and so do you.

Still Standing

I remember when I had hit the brick wall my life had become -- when a friend I had written to told me she was worried about me. Until then, my life was a blur, a mindless routine. I had lost my job. My bank account was nearly empty and I wasn't having much luck finding a job, even though I put my car through hell on endless drives for interviews.
My apartment was a mess, and I didn't much care. I subsisted on music and books.
Adding to my misery was the beautiful woman who lived across from me. I had asked her out and things seemed to be going my way and then nothing. She shut me out over some incredibly stupid comment I made. Phone calls weren't returned; knocks on the door went unanswered.
We came and went without acknowledging each other's existence, and I was left with this aching guilt that I had messed up something that could have turned out to be good.
I felt like a failure and I couldn't at that point see anyway I could turn that failure into success. My friend could see that despair in the letters I wrote.
I could see it myself. I was in one of those dark places we all end up in at one time or another.
You replay your mistakes over and over, thinking if you could pinpoint the exact second things went sideways, you might have had a chance.
You don't think too much that maybe this is as it should be, that this was the way it was always supposed to go. You blame yourself because you don't know the difference between taking responsibility and pounding yourself in the ground.
At that moment, they are one and the same. And so you pound joy out of your life. You pound laughter out of your life. You pound the light out and live in utter and complete darkness.
Your life becomes your grave. You stop breathing consciously because your breathing has become less important.
In those moments, I don't think I ever really considered suicide. But does it really matter? Do you have to pull the trigger or take pills to decide you don't want to live anymore, that it's better to just accept the crappy circumstances life has thrown your way and give up?
I think I was in that place for a long time. We all sometimes get in that place. Some stay there for years. Others slap themselves awake.
I was there in that imagined grave for a few months until I found a job and moved out of that dingy apartment. You can say life got better.
But it didn't really. I got better. I got stronger. I realized that my life wasn't over just because things got dark for a little bit.
Sometimes, realizing that you're still standing is the first step to taking control of your life and finding the light that was always there just around the corner.
Standing means you can walk, and walking means you can walk out of the darkness. There is always a way out. Always.

Sometimes

Sometimes, life isn't how you like it. Life doesn't cooperate. Life doesn't do what you'd like it to do.
This is life, uncompromising, unwilling to shift to your high demands, incapable of bending to your will.
Life is that foggy cool morning when you lock the keys in your car and you curse as loud as you can, somehow hoping that the heavens will hear the insistent whine of your profanity and lend a hand. The heavens are deaf and life isn't fair.
And the day doesn't get any better because after paying a locksmith about $50 to unlock your car door, your computer gives you endless grief and the work phone is acting up and you wish the day would end already. Oh, it's Monday, by the way. And did I mention that the weather is miserable.
You take a moment in all of the frustrations building up inside you. You take a moment because you know if you don't, you'll scream and say that nasty thing you have wanted to say to that person you can't stand and this is the exact vulnerable time you're more apt to say that thing instead of keeping your mouth shut and your toxic thoughts from leaking out.
You take a moment because sometimes this life will beat you so that you want to throw a punch. Pound life senseless. Do your best Mike Tyson impression on the shitty day you've had so far.
You take a moment because you realize that life is longer and broader than this moment when everything seems aimed against you, when you feel God himself has decided that this is the day he will transform you into the 21st-century Job.
You take a moment because at this moment it ain't that serious. It never was. This is life and sometimes, life can suck the light out of you. Life can bend you so far you feel like you might break.
You take a moment to listen to the beating of your heart, feel the cold air prickling your skin and watch the greyness of the fog appear to hug the buildings in the downtown skyline.
Life isn't some puppet you pull the strings on. Life isn't some toy you toss around. Life isn't a game that you try to win.
Life is that thing you live as best as you can, pushing past the bad times knowing that the good times are around the corner, that the joy is contained in the small moments.
Life is the rain of cars breaking down and supervisors pissing you off and disease ravishing your body and the prospect of death coming to claim you or loved ones. But life also is the sunshine in the face-to-face conversation with an old friend or the unexpected new friend you just made, the hard laughter that feels like your stomach is caving in, the exhilaration of dancing to the music of your own rapidly-beating heart. Life is the first second of the first moment that you realized you fell in love.
Life is in the living. And sometimes you just have to dive in knowing you don't always have to be in control.

My Word

I was standing in front of the mirror trying to memorize my own words. The words were in the form of a poem I had written years ago but had never committed to memory.
A friend recently asked why, and I had no good answer. She wondered why you wouldn't memorize your own poem. After all, these are your words. They flowed from your mind.
That made sense and so here I stood, repeating lines and lines of my poem like a mantra. I recited them in a rhythm to some invisible beat in my head.
And slowly, I felt some power rise within me, some feeling I had never felt when I read this poem from paper.
The power came from a feeling that I owned the words I was speaking. The words weren't on paper anymore.
They were in me. They had always been in me. They were in me the moment I first wrote the poem so many years ago. And they remained in me as I fiddled with the words in order to capture perfectly what I wanted to say.
Not only are you owning your words, you are owning your truth, your voice, your right to say what you want to say and let it hang there for the world to absorb.
Take it or leave it, you say. But I will be heard.
One of my favorite movies of the last few years is "Book of Eli" starring Denzel Washington. (Forgive me but I'm about to spoil it for you if you haven't seen it). The movie takes place in an apocalyptic future where no one reads and books are rare. But Washington, a loner on some kind of weird righteous path, has a book, The Bible. An evil man played by Gary Oldman wants that book because he knows the power of the words contained in it.
At the end, Oldman gets the book, and when he opens it, there are no words. Washington is blind and he has memorized the entire Bible. The Word of God is in him, and no one can take that Word away from him.
Writers all their lives are chasing to find their voice. They dabble in the words of other writers, taking a little here and there, all the while trying to master who they are and what their truth is.
They're trying to find the words that will say who they are, the words that will synthesize their essence, encompass the experiences they had that made them who they are.
This is a long process that never really ends. But maybe it begins by owning the words you have written. Owning them and not apologizing for them. Owning them and yelling them out on the stage that is your life.
Only you can say what you say in the way that you say it. No one else can speak your words for you. And no one should try.

Stop This Train

Yesterday it was summer. Just the other day it was the beginning of another year and a few seconds from now I will have gray hair and I'll be staring down at the end of my life and figuring out whether I did anything worth remembering.
Time, as one of my friends told me, seems to fly by quickly, so fast that life is a blur and you're desperately trying to catch up.
You sleep too long in the mornings and you fear you're missing something, that the day is now too short to fill up with all the things you have to do or you want to do but don't have the gumption or the guts or the motivation to do.
This past August, I turned 39 and during that birthday week, I was at my mother's house, spending time with her and doing my own little quiet celebration (I've never been the balloon and birthday cake kind of guy).
One night, I noticed a high school picture of me. My face is thinner, hair shorter than it is now, with a slight mustache and no goatee. Large almost square-like glasses awkwardly frame my face. I wince.
I almost forgot I looked like that all those years ago (could it be nearly 20 years ago). I imagined at that moment what I would have said to my younger self. I wondered if I would have given him a preview of all the things he would face over the next few years.
You know, the lost frantic and fun years of college, the conversations you think were so deep only because you were slightly intoxicated, the drunk people who took you to a Waffle House early in the morning one night just for the heck of it, the friend you almost lost because you were too immature to notice your obnoxious behavior, the moment you felt your blackness acutely because for the first time you were one of a few blacks on a predominantly white campus?
Would I have told him about those first couple of years of true adulthood when you moved to a small town that had no bars or clubs and you were the first black reporter at the newspaper you worked at and you only realized that fact the Sunday you stepped into one of the oldest black churches in the area? Would I have warned him about the years where you wondered whether this journalism thing was the thing for him?
Would I have told him about the small dark moments when he felt God had abandoned him and he was all alone and no one understood his pain and he felt he had no friends who would understand him? Would I have warned him about that stupid financial purchase that wrecked him for years afterward? Would I have warned him about any of the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations, the missteps, the small triumphs, the beauty and the ugliness of the life he was going to live for the next 20 years?
I don't think so. Because all of that made me who I am. And here I am, 20 years later, a blink in the eye life has moved so fast. I'm just trying to keep everything in focus but nothing stands still. Because I don't stand still. I keep changing. The world around me keeps changing. Nothing ever stays the same.
Sometimes, I want to have that remote control that Adam Sandler's character had in the movie Click so I could pause or rewind, so the dumb words I said to that girl back there were never said or the decision I made never was made.
But maybe we waste the time we have wishing we could go back to that time before and change things and that if we changed things, our lives would be better. Maybe so. Maybe not. Truth is we'll never know because we can never go back. We can only move forward, hopefully having learned whatever lessons we were meant to learn.
I remember looking at that picture and thinking, dude, you have no idea what kind of roller coaster you're going to ride. But if I'd known, I would have never gotten on. Yes, I might have missed out on the pain. But I'd also have missed out on the joy. And that just won't do.

Saying Goodbye

I felt like I was at a wake but I wasn't mourning a loved one. I was mourning the closing of a store, one that I had watched slowly dying over a year or more as the book selections got thinner and the CDs and DVDS became nearly non-existent.
And this day was the last day, the sun shining through the large windows into a store where hardly anything was left. The middle of the store was like a desert, nothing but carpet for yards. Men moved empty bookshelves off the floor. I saw red brick where large wooden shelves full of books used to be.
A young girl bounced playfully off a blue wall in the now-gone music section. I didn't bother going by the coffee shop I spent lazy Sunday afternoons drinking a small white chocolate mocha and reading books I had grabbed off the shelf. The cafe had closed two months ago soon after Borders announced it was liquidating its 399 store.
And here I was mourning this place, this thing that had never spoken, this place I had never hugged, but a place where I sought solace after a long day at work, perusing new magazines, rummaging through the new books at the table near the front, and lounging in the too-comfortable seats scattered throughout the store.
Borders was a place of memories collected over years. I made friends here, some long gone and some still very much present. I had deep conversations with people in the coffee shop and read whole books I never bought. Here I looked longingly at a curly-haired law student I never got the gumption to ask out.
And I asked out another girl who unfortunately had a boyfriend but who nonetheless praised my approach of riffing off an Alicia Keys song (and no, I won't tell you which one because I'd like to use that approach again if you don't mind).
This is the place where I met a stranger and had a one-time connection I'll never forget and I still smile when I think of those wonderful moments we had together talking and laughing.
Borders was my refuge from the stresses of the world, the place I got lost in other people's words instead of the ones I wrote for a living. The place I discovered new voices and fell in love again with the ones I had forgotten in the blur of living.
So here I was in mourning as I scoured the last remnants of a once booming store, grabbing six books to buy for a $1 a piece. I breathed in the emptiness and locked into my head what used to be that wasn't there anymore.
And I walked out the door one last time and didn't look back because I have new memories to make.

Ain't Hard To Tell

The beat dropped, and my head started nodding. Immediately, because the beat was like that. And the rapper flowed like water with lyrics that teased my brain with verbal riddles I dissected later. This was love at first sight.
I was in high school, and though hip-hop poured from radio stations, I hadn't paid much attention until I heard A Tribe Called Quest's "The Low End Theory." Music CDs weren't around, so that group's second album was condensed into a small cassette that I wore out over the dozens of times I played it, as I tried memorizing every line Q-Tip and Phife Dawg spit.
No swagger contest. Just two guys rapping about their lives over jazzy horns, funky basslines and boom-bap drums.
There's nothing like that first love, and there's nothing like that first heart break, leaving you bruised like someone beat the crap out of you. Feels like betrayal, like your first love slept with your best friend. But it doesn't matter. You go back because you're hooked to that feeling you had when you popped in the cassette.
You remember where you were when you heard Nas' "Illmatic." The haunting beat on "One Love," Nas' poetic letter to his friend locked up, Q-Tip's monotone the chorus. The bleak chorus of "Life's A Bitch" contrasted with the remnants of hope found in Nas' gratefulness for another year of life and the possibility that better days might exist for his future offspring. You remember you were in college with a group of your friends, the beat bursting out of the tape deck and rumbling through every inch of the car.
You recall every lyric of Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth's classic "They Reminisce Over You." Even now, nearly 20 years after you heard it, and your body instinctively moves to the beat. It feels good, feels just like love. It feels like you're home.
So everytime you turn on the hip-hop station, you search for that feeling and you end up wanting to curse because the music has changed, because the lyrics aren't there, because it's all about hot beats and hotter hooks. A Tribe Called Quest is long gone and the group isn't coming back.
You feel old. You're like your parents saying remember back in the old days when music was good, when hip-hop was like that instead of like this. Remember? You find yourselves giving people younger than you history lessons, telling them the first time you heard A Tribe Called Quest, and you get sad when they look in your face as if saying what are you talking about. This is ancient history to them but very much now to you. Because the moments are here, not 20 years ago, but here, still pumping through your veins, your heart bearing the bruises of being hurt all those times you turned on the radio and the hip-hop you listened to is nowhere to be found.
But Mos Def said hip-hop is us, didn't he? He said it lives in each one of us, didn't he? So why am I heart-broken? Why am I defining hip-hop by what I hear on the radio? When I hear Elzhi bringing a freshness to an old classic, I realize that hip-hop is both past, present and future intertwined. Hip-hop is ever expansive, evolving but also reaching back into the past to pull something new.
And I realize that this is me also. I'm hip-hop in the sense that I'm evolving just as much as hip-hop. I pull from my past, take what's useful and throw the rest away, and make something new. Making something better. Make a better me.
And just like that I'm in love again.

Keep moving

I can't keep still. I am a restless spirit sometimes. My eyes dart. I'm always looking. I'm always moving, unless I'm in front of the television watching mindless reality TV like the entertainingly awful "Basketball Wives."
I'm always waiting to see when the next shoe is going to drop. Such is life.
Sometimes things are going so well you're afraid when the bad stuff inevitably comes. I grew up with the idea that storms are always brewing, that days of sunlight are always interrupted by thunder and lightning. You always have to prepare to get wet.
So it was that this nice sustained period of goodness was going to be interrupted by a bit of crappiness. But the problem I had was that I couldn't enjoy the good times because I was girding myself for the bad.
That's not the way you live life. You live in the moment, dive into it and splash that happiness on your face for as long as it lasts. Because you need to have that happy memory to sustain you in the sad times. You'll have to have something to flashback to so you remember that even in the dark recesses of your deepest sadness, there's a glimmer of hope that better days will come.
Let go of the idea that things will always be the way they always are. Life is a twister and you have to twist with it, riding through the rough spots until you get to the peace that you know is somewhere in the midst of the chaos.
Just a few weeks ago, I found out a bit of bad news about the company I work for (while I was on vacation). But there's nothing I can do. I still have a job. I still have a roof over my head. I still have friends who for some reason like my weird ass.
And I believe that things are going to work out. In the meantime, I enjoy the hell out of life. Laugh as hard as I can. Smile until my face crinkles. Be as sarcastic in my monotone voice as I can. Write. Love. Be.
Keep moving because in this life, you can't stop.

Getting to Happy

Sometimes you don't want to smile. Sometimes you just aren't feeling it, the muscles in your face stretched thin by the stress you faced during the week.
Smiling can be hard when inside you want to rage, inside you want to punch someone, inside you want to cry or yell or throw a lamp upside someone's head.
There are days when smiling is harder than it seems, when the force it takes to make the tips of your lips go up instead of down doesn't seem worth it.
I remember one day a couple of years ago I was walking in Borders (my favorite place in the world) when an older woman told me I should smile. Apparently, I wasn't grinning enough. I wanted to tell her to screw off.
Don't get self-righteous. I'm sure there's a long list of people you wanted to tell to screw off as well and were tempted to replace the word "screw" with a much more succinct and vulgar verb.
And truth is there are days when you will feel sad and you will get mad at the world. And on those days, you will want to either smack yourself for some dumb thing you did or smack someone else for their stupidity.
This is life and this is the way life is. Smiling when you don't feel the joy that brings the smile isn't worth it. You might as well just frown.
Being able to smile in the face of life's storms is about having something more than happiness, something more than a temporary feelilng.
Being able to smile is about having a foundation upon which you face difficulties. It's about having an outlook that says this isn't going to last. This feeling, this circumstance, is not permanent.
Smiling is only the outer manisfestation of the inner work you have to do, as Terry McMillan puts it, to get to happy. You have to see life as half full and not half empty. You have to see that the darkness surrounding you won't last because there is light; you just have to chip at the crap in your life that's keeping you from getting to that light.
You either live or you die. And dying doesn't have to mean literally. It could mean spiritually. Death could simply mean allowing your soul to perish because you decided that this life isn't worth it.
Again, you either live or you die, and it's a choice you make every day. You live when you push open the walls of your heart and love. You live when you control your reaction to whatever crap life puts in your path.
You live when you feel the pain enough to learn from it and let it go, knowing that whatever the next chapter in your life only begins when you turn the page.
Smiling is a life-long journey of finding your joy, that effervescent thing that makes you you, and smiling comes from walking in the confidence that this is the right path, this is the right moment, this is the right you.

Walking

On Valentine's Day, I was sick. That achey-breaky feeling was all through my body and I could barely get out of bed. Hell, I had to keep telling my body to crawl itself out of bed so I could grab my phone and call my boss to tell her I wouldn't be coming in. My body said, umm that could wait. Let's just lay here for a bit.
Eventually, I did move...to the couch where I stayed for most of the day, fighting off body chills and sinus headache with Tylenol and chicken noodle soup. But I didn't feel like doing much of anything. This day, my body wanted to chill.
Being sick often forces us to slow down. We run through our days and we become blurs to ourselves, never slowing down to appreciate those seconds and minutes we have before us.
We don't walk. We race. Walking is that underappreciated aspect of movement. When you walk, you have to think a little about the steps you have before you, the breeze blowing through your clothes, the space between where you are and where you hope to be.
Walking, taking the journey from no where to somewhere, and sometimes, the weight of life makes the walking harder. But at other times, the joy makes the walking easier. And sometimes, it doesn't matter because the walking is the point.
Putting one foot in front of the other is more than half the battle. It's when we stop walking, when we stop moving, that we stop living, that we give up on life.
Walk, breathe, move. What else are you going to do?

Someday We'll All Be Free

Either before or after has there been a voice quite like Donny Hathaway, a voice so smooth and soulful, a voice that gets you right there, that unspecified, unspeakable, indescribable place that only you know is there because you can feel it.

It's that need for the kind of freedom that Hathaway sings about in this song. It's a longing for something that's not quite arrived yet. He tells me and you to hang on as the world spins and make sure that the spin doesn't spin you right out of existence, knock you on your ass. Because life is like that, the world is like that.

I feel better when I hear this song. Hathaway's voice is so soothing you want to float away with it to whatever world he is occupying because it has to be better than this. He sings like heaven has got to be.

The song reminds me of a poem by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie in which she speaks about wanting to "walk barefoot where barefoot has no name/a place where soul on earth is natural." And she finds that the place she has envisioned is already there inside of her.

I think that's where freedom lies. It's not always external. It's not always actual handcuffs and chains that bind us. It's us.

The time in which Hathaway sang this song was one of immense social upheaval. Blacks were fighting for their rights. Protests over the Vietnam War were heating up.

But the song is relevant today because it is centered around how we react to the chaos in our lives. That chaos could be political and social issues we are passionate about. And the chaos could be your own personal life, the stresses we encounter daily that drive us nearly insane.

"Hang on to the world as it spins around/ Just don't let the spin get you down/Things are moving fast/ Hang on tight and you will last." Because the hope is, our faith tells us, that someday we'll all be free. And maybe it's in telling our souls that that we are free already.

Because the truth is you can't be free if you don't think that it's possible. You can't be free if once the chains are cut off, you still act as if you're still a slave. You can't be free if you don't believe you're free, you don't feel you're free, you don't see you're free.

Freedom is not just a physical thing. It's a mental thing. It's a soul thing. As Ekere Tallie tells us, "stroll barefoot" into your lives "leaving behind thieves and tyrants trying to control it."

Coded Language

Words matter. In church, I learned over and over again that life and death are in the power of the tongue.

And too seldom we don't pay attention to the words we use or the ones that we hear.

Saul Williams reminds us of the power of words in the best sense. Let us take his message into the new year.

Hanging In

This "faith in God" thing can be a confounding, frustrating pain at times. Faith in what? Because the world you live in is filled sometimes with gut-wrenching pain. And it isn't the turmoil in the wider world that gets you. It's the close-to-the-bone crap that levels you.

Here you have Freddie, (played by the lovely Cree Summers), praying to God to save Kim's father, a cop now lying in the hospital from a gunshot wound. And after a night of worry, Kim's dad pulls through.

But he's paralyzed, and that plain pisses off Freddie, much like us when life doesn't go exactly along the straight path we think it should go. Instead, we face unexpected twists in the journey that kicks us all off balance.

And yes, like Freddie, we're pissed. We're angry. We're ready to throw in this "faith" thing. Dwayne, with the ever-present flip-down shades, tells Freddie the story of how he prayed as a kid for a fancy new toy for Christmas and never got it. He got a coat.

But that winter coat kept him warm through a very cold winter. Then he tells her this gem. Sometimes when we pray, we get what we want. Sometimes, we get what we need. And sometimes we just get what we get. God helps us hang in there with what we get.

I always liked that. Because too many times, we waste energy trying to figure out why God is putting us through something. Maybe it's a test. Maybe it's not.

Who knows except God? And maybe after all is said and done, you figure out what God was doing and you learn whatever lesson you were supposed to learn and you become stronger in the end.

But again, who knows except God? Life is life and it isn't fair all the time. Good people get cancer. Bad people live to 100. You can't control what life throws at you.

But you can control what you throw back. Are you going to throw back anger and sadness and bitterness and hate. Or are you going to throw back love? Are you going to throw back peace? Are you going to throw back joy?

Faith can't be too hard that it can't bend in strong winds. Because life isn't going to break you, if you let it. You just have to keep moving. Don't stop.

No Love

I remember laughter, loud and stinging laughter on school buses, and I felt alone because they weren't laughing with me, they were laughing at me. And it didn't matter what it was. It could have been the Hammer-time pants I was wearing that my cousin bought me for Christmas. It could have been my face pock-marked with pus-filled acne. It could have been the speech impediment I struggled with in elementary school.

It could have been any number of things that all tied into who I was at that particular time, young, awkward, not cool, kind of weird, uncomfortable as hell in my own skin. And my skin was thin, and sometimes I cried, not yet to the point where I could get my Kanye West on, that arrogant pain in the ass mojo.

I was me and I hated me, hated being me sometimes to the point that I fantasized about being someone else. Wished I had super powers to crush these bastards and silence the laughter. Leave them stunned at my greatness while I smirked at the awesomeness of the devastation I left in their wake.

That was then, when the sounds of laughter felt like needles pricking my skin, felt like punches against my face. That was then, when the teasing was relentless, and I felt like no one knew my pain. That was then, when I learned to still the tears and put on the stone face, act like this wasn't bothering me, even though it was.

This is now, years later, my love for myself a rebuke to the hatred I endured. This is now, when those bastards have now grown up and carved out whatever life they had. I wish them well. Because they can't hurt me no more.

They weren't perfect and neither was I. We were young, lost in a world we didn't quite understand. We didn't know the power of words to hurt and maim. Hell, we didn't know ourselves. We were just kids who didn't know how to be ourselves because we were too afraid. So all we did was go with the crowd and not against it.

This is now, when the acne has long gone and I don't know where those crappy Hammer-time multicolored disaster pants are. I am letting go because I like me, most of the times when I don't make mistakes, when I don't hurt people in the same way others hurt me. I love the human frailties and imperfections that make me who I am. And every bit of laughter at my expense toughened my skin, made me ready, in a way, to face the slings that would continue to be thrown as I grew older. Some slings pierced but didn't break me. Others crumbled before they got to me.

That's life, but only part of it. The other part are the hugs coming from the other direction, the sounds of laughter from people who share their joy with you and are not trying to stab you in the back.

Truth is, the love I have is stronger than the hate you bring.

No matter what you do, you can't hurt me no more.

Blues for Her

She was a breathless wonder that left you speechless when she walked in, and every word you tried to utter sounded like stuttered utterances. It wasn't even eloquence but coherence that left you, mouth a slippery, slivery mess, throat clogged shut, eyes stuck in a trance.

This is what happens when a woman whose physical beauty is perfectly aligned with substance. She ain't Jessica Simpson bimbo but Nia Long and here you are hoping to be Larenz Tate on the microphone, all wanting to be the blues in her left thigh trying to be the funk in her right.

And this is good funk, the funk Parliament Funkadelic sung about, the funk that's hard to describe but you know it when you see it and you know it when you feel it. And you feel it when she walks into the room. You feel it when she smiles that smile at you.

It doesn't even matter that at this moment, you don't know her name. But you know that you will, that some invisible force will jumpstart your feet to walking over to her. Who cares if you have no idea what you will say when you are face to face with her? Something will dribble out, a simple hello to start off with, a witty phrase, anything to get her attention.

Because when she walked in, the atmosphere changed. There was a charge, and your blues turned to jazzy joy. Plans fell through and you decided to improvise, be spontaneous, and see where that took you. And you hoped all that took you to her and her to you and maybe this improvisation might lead to some beautiful music.

You stopped breathing when she appeared (you really didn't; it just felt like you did) and you weren't going to take another breath unless that breath brought forth words to say what you needed to say to her.

Because she was a breathless wonder that left you speechless, you had to say something. Is that all right? Yes, that's fine.

Chasing Me

You know the cliche. Time stands still. But it's true as well. Time stops. It pauses in the moments that seem like agonizing hours between what you want to say and what you do say. And sometimes, particularly in the matters of the heart, you struggle with the words. You manage to stumble and stutter because the words you're about to say, the ones that are about to leave your lips, well you can't take them back, no matter how hard you try. Those words, "I love you," are stuck out there, hanging in the air between you and the person to whom you said those words.

And also hanging there is the aftermath of those words, the consequences of that "I love you." Obligation attaches to those words. Responsibility and commitment are behind those words, and if you don't mean them, you don't say them.

You don't say them because you fear your heart crushing if she rejects you, walks out the door, leaving your face twisted in pain. You stepped up and she stepped on the love you held out ever so gently.

But that's the risk you take when you dare love someone. You risk pain to get joy. It's like the quick shock of pain you feel when you put your shoulder back into place. You have to get through the hurt in order to feel the relief that comes immediately after.

Love is that thing where you just have to dive in and hope you don't drown. You have to push through the fear and have faith that this thing you put your soul into will survive, even when you know that there are no guarantees, that 10 years from the moment you said those words, this thing could fall apart. Hell, it could dissipate in the seconds after you say those words.

"I love you." Those words rarely pass my lips to any woman. I'm like all those sorry-assed men in romantic comedies, the ones with the walls built up over years of hurt and who are about to lose the "one," the one they're supposed to be with for the rest of their lives if only they could muster up the courage to say "I love you."

Closest I've gotten is "I like you," like you enough to kiss you, like you enough to hold your hands along busy city streets, like you enough to hold you in my arms on crowded dance floors. But not enough to turn like into love for the rest of my life.

I haven't crossed that threshold yet. So I look at this scene in Kevin Smith's highly underrated film, Chasing Amy, and am chilled at Holden's speech, even though I've seen it dozens of times over the years.

This is no cheesy Jerry Maguire/Tom Cruise "You complete me" speech followed by the "You had me at hello" from Renee Zellweger (God, that was cheesy and vomit-inducing dialogue created by the folks who give you Hallmark cards but I have to admit I was moved the first time I saw it).

No, what Holden (played by Ben Affleck who apparently can be a decent actor when he's not masquerading as an action star) gives is a dangerous, impossibly eloquent declaration of love in a way I wish I could if I were ever in the position of trying to convince a lesbian to go straight for me. And he knows what he's risking. He could lose a friendship. This could completely blow up in his face, and homegirl might just come to the conclusion that dude's a nutjob who has a "puppy-dog" crush as well as a frat-boy fantasy of making out with a lesbian.

The fact that it doesn't all come shattering down on his head (at least in that moment) is not surprising considering that this is a movie after all. Miracles happen all the time in movies, no matter how implausible they might seem.

But what gets me everytime is the unbelievable honesty and sincerity captured in that speech, the "oh screw it and go for it" bravado that Holden displays.

Sometimes in this life, you have to damn the consequences and do what John Mayer says, say what you feel. Say it with so much force and soul and guts and everything else that the other person has to hear you, has to see you and feel you. You have to spit, spill, leak it out so whatever you have inside of you fills the cup of life.

Yeah, that was hokey but that doesn't mean it's no less true. And it doesn't mean you pour out your soul to just anybody. That person has to be worth hearing your truth.

You'll know it, just as Holden knew it, that this moment, this pause between saying what you feel and saying nothing at all, could change your life in unimaginable ways and that the risk was worth it.

Because in the end, not saying anything when you should be saying everything is your voice wasted.

The poet Audre Lorde once said this in her poem, A Litany for Survival: "When we are loved, we are afraid love will vanish/ when we are alone, we are afraid love will never return/ and when we speak we are afraid our words will never be heard nor welcomed/ but when we are silent, we are still afraid/ so it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive."

So speak.