Well there it goes, my old fancy. I loved loving you.
Goodbye happy childhood sneakers. (P.F. Flyers)
Sayonara transistor radio with your “top forty” (you got me through the 7th grade when bullies pushed me down the stairs because I was blind.)
Toodle loo bell bottomed polyester lime colored jeans from the tenth grade that, you guessed it, got me pushed down stairs for being blind and fashion clueless.
Get the Hell Out “Catcher in the Rye” as I never liked you. Holden Caulfield is a dick.
Write if You Get Work, you ableist high school math teacher who made fun of my crossed eyes.
I could go on but won’t.
Just doing some spring cleaning.
**
When people say “Black Lives Matter” they’re affirming the goodness in Blackness. Those who bristle at the phrase (which is more than a phrase as its a cry of the heart) are asserting in no uncertain terms that oppressed people can’t proclaim “the good” for the word doesn’t belong to them. “All Lives Matter” means white people get to imagine goodness so Black people won’t have to bother anymore. Just so, the disabled say our lives are not second rate. We ask “where did you get that idea and why is it so important for you to cling to it?”
**
I’m power washing the radar forest of moldy abstractions.
**
Meanwhile:
What is it about being alone in a strange hotel that drives me always to think of my dead twin brother? He died shortly after we were born. I did not know him. Yet always in places of loneliness he seems to be with me as he was, early morning, before sunup in the Sheraton in Frankfurt, Germany. Was I tired? Did this make me sentimental? Did I have Madame Blavatsky on the brain? Is he always with me? Will genetic research prove it? Am I really living for two? I had wild dreams and woke and felt him. It’s a sensation known to everyone I think—that your private dead are there when you weren’t especially thinking of them. Even in a sterile, megalithic business hotel there was a mysterious and unanticipated shiver and I wondered how many other rumpled travelers were with me.
**
We speak as though fear and certainty are co-determined. Goodbye to that also.
Planet of the Blind 