Tucson Conversations

Great curiosity and a greater memory were necessary, Tertullian, De testimonio animae

The sometimes self published poet Laurel Speer was one of the last independents I had a traditional correspondence with, and it was Laurel's essays to me that Karina, eating her own zeitgeist, tossed in the trash, which ignited my blazing saddles warfare with-- as much as I want to use invective, it is a judgment how often one can rail with "muthafucker niggers" all the time before people stop reading-- but suffice it to say, like one of John Gardner's murdered anarchists, I look at black culture with a jaundiced eye, even with the security guard calling me at 11 during the election returns because a tenant heard a noise-- the disabled with ability to matriculate should stay out of public housing, whatever else-- Laurel's daughter is disabled, so unlike the suburbanites on P&W's site, my emotional pain did not seem to faze her when I copped to it, on our typing paper exchanges. She did not deign to advise me, lecture me about drugs, and I did not offer my opinion about her poetry. She is a better columnist, and if she and I were to have a public debate, which I know she likes to do, she would probably write, is this scurrilous online attitude working for you?

But the larger question is about the limits of tolerance, and what comes after the destruction of civilization if annihilators succeed before we destroy the environments from which we evolved, and we threaten ourselves with silence. Most literary writers seem threatened with it, at some point, as the flesh shrinks, we are not at our most dynamic. I do not want to email Eugene Robinson with pride in informing him of my bigotry-- what I'd like to know is why the American black mindset is so schematic, so fatalistic, so pretentious, and with all that so predatory, willing to make me expendable because I am the weakest link. This is also why I need to find a way out of Riverside. If I had listened to my parents, to Jerry, whose memory I've abused with unfair license, I would still think Martin Luther King had justice on his side. Now I see de facto segregation as the better form of sanity, and in my heart, that homosexuals need an exorcist, which could be the hyperbole of bisexual trauma, but nuance is, shall we say, on going.

I have had kinky fantasies, nothing worth writing about, as I am conservative even  in masturbation, but after what I've been through, imagination and reality often crash with unexpected results. The sloth who hit on me, Eddy, she did not make me realize that lesbian games were for me. Being exploited by inner city trash made me sick, and made me understand my own father's racism when, like any teenager, she wanted to sow her oats. Now I do papa one better.

Having seen a couple of Walking Dead episodes, the series isn't just a blue collar form of empowerment, it is a Southern cautionary tale for urbanites, one that I'm unsympathetic toward, though power chairs would have trouble with homestead terrain.