Unearthed Tomb

This blog has sat vacant for three years. Like a tomb—built for the absence of life. I thought I should have a blog long before I wanted to have a blog, and so this blank page represented the should, the meaning to. The soon I will, I hope.

Over the years, I wrote dozens of first blog posts, most of which I liked. The problem was always the second entry, which I felt the need to pen before posting the first one, in order to assure myself that it was, in fact, possible to be consistent. I struggle sometimes to be consistent. In keeping with that, the second post never came easy. Mostly, it didn't come at all.

I don’t have a second post written as I publish this. I hope that, flawed logic aside, that will be the key to my success.

I am a writer, and so I’ll write about writing, about reading, and about being a writer in the world. But what I have to say about being a writer in the world blurs continually with what I have to say about the world, my world, the world I perceive and in which I live.

So I will write about: my son, my childhood on my family’s farm, country music, bluegrass music, female country singers singing about killing men who’ve wronged them, thoughts on heritage as a justification for preserving the legacy of slavery, thoughts on Northern white notions of superiority, thoughts on gentrification, thoughts on activism, falling in love, being in love, building love, my wild fear of commitment, my joy and distaste for being alone, mass incarceration, drugs, the war on drugs and its slaughter of people I love, shadow economies, borrowing and lending as a community substitute for bank accounts, teaching spoken word in Philadelphia, the power of free-writing, the way kids leap to life when asked about things that actually matter, the power of performance, of embodying the words you’ve written and truly owning them, Greensboro, North Carolina, and the experience of, for the first time ever, relaxing into being somewhere maybe-permanently with no existential crises to speak of, building a home, becoming hopelessly, torturously smitten with another city overnight, poverty and wealth and the paradox of living in poverty while having access to wealth, global warming, the apocalypse, the drive to write, the quest to write, abandonment, betrayal, cheating, loving, leaving, forgiving, understanding, Ecuador and my family there, how America is perceived in America and how America is perceived elsewhere, my giant dislike for America, hip-hop, the Poeticians and how we built it and what it did and how it ended, my intense love of story and narrative when getting to know people, when sharing secrets, in hip-hop, in poetry, how I am uneasy within just “moments,” how I want there to be a conclusion always, my dear love Georgina and how I lost her, found her and lost her again, the apparent rarity of a diverse and wide-flung social network, how I hate the suburbs, the tension between being a politically passionate person and not doing politics in the world, violence and how to reconcile it when people I love have enacted terrible violence against others, how to make sense of legitimized violence (i.e. military) versus not, image-laden glances at the world, small poems, beautiful things, fears for my son, love for my son, awe at my son.

Thank you for coming along for the ride.