Your Community Needs You to Get an MBA

Sit at your Keyboard and Bleed

Hemmingway might have done this too much. In the end, it took him with it. Usually, when I do this, I can't ever show anybody. It's just too much. The human capacity to observe and think and process, and comment may be too strong for a social creature without serious constraint.

We murder each other a little bit every day. Now that you can have any gun you want no matter what condition your head is in, lots of people actually murder each other a little bit every day. Maybe they're just doing exactly what I do, but with another tool. Maybe if Hemmingway had used a gun instead of an Underwood Portable, he'd be alive today.

Sometimes there's a lot of drinking that goes along with this process. Sometimes writers use things a lot stronger. I completely understand this. My writing when I drink is usually really shit. Gigantic long sentences, not perfectly created, that is recoverable when I'm sober, but only if I break them into more digestible bits, but then when I discover what it is I was trying to say, I end up not wanting anyone to see it.

I feel bad for pappa. He knew his best work was already done, and he couldn't live with it. He tried living off mojitos, odd-toed cats, and the passion of Cuban women, but it wasn't enough. With his spark spent, he had nothing to live for.

I repressed my spark for what seemed like a hundred years. What it's gonna do now that it's out sometimes worries me. I try not to bleed onto my laptop. It runs down my arms, into my lap, and down my legs onto a puddle on the floor around my feet. It doesn't hurt. If anything, it feels like the relief that comes from lancing a boil. Life can be a festering boil, welling up alongside your normal organs and skin features. Everyone has them; we cover them with lace or scarves and pretend they don't exist while the bile and putrid dead blood build up inside them, ready to erupt at any moment.

I write at night to drain the puss and bile and dead blood from the boils of my life. Sometimes I let you see it if nobody you know has their name in it. I don't even write anything terrible about people, just how human they are, how they try not to be vulnerable, but they are because they don't have a choice, and the world beats them for it.

If I do this right, then maybe people will see themselves in it. Maybe not tonight because I'm rambling, but on nights when I do it well, nights when my muse has mercy on me, maybe I can write a bit of truth that helps someone hurt less.

I'm not Pappa. My ideas about being a man are very different from his, at least in public. In private, yeah, I'd like to get drunk and box somebody because I love them, just to see who's the stronger man. If I hit you as hard as I could in the face, what would happen? How would you look at me? It's not dangerous. Boxers hit each other in the face all the time, and nobody dies. It's a test. I hit you in the face. You hit me in the face. We continue till one of us doesn't want to do it anymore. Something about being human makes us want to do that. Isn't it odd?

This sense of doubt whenever I try to create is probably the justice of my life. I had it too easy as a kid. I didn't have some of the worries about daily life that a lot of people have, so now whenever I try to be what I really want to be, it terrifies me, like a ten-year-old trying to creep out to the end of the high dive board, so he can have the exhilaration of jumping off but doesn't have the balls to do it.

Sit down at the keyboard and bleed, but don't say anything horrible. It's harder than you know. Pappa took his own life because he couldn't write anymore. He ran out of words. God made me so that the words came out really slow and pretty mangled when I was a child. There's nothing worse than when a child thinks he must be stupid, like they say. It was a gif, though. I didn't have words then, but now I have too many. I'll never run out.

I know why Pappa did what he did. Don't you think I know? Words aren't what the think they are. Most things aren't. Memes are bits of ideas. They want to replicate themselves and spread. We don't have any choice. Sit at your keyboard and bleed, goddamnit.

A Meeting

 When we met, I was already making moves to close the doors between me and the world.  She didn't recognize me, but I recognized her.  Those eyes. That smile.  Her colors reminded me of sunshine and chocolate.  

I was fifteen, and she was twenty.  Most of the students never really talked to me because I watched the football games with my Dad and Dr. Harmon.  I saw her, though.  I remembered.  

I would see her again through the years.  Where she worked.  Where she worshiped.  A child came, then two.  I stopped seeing the father with them.  He was missing out.

Bringing me someone new when I was trying not to have anyone or anything that I had to hold on to was probably cruel.  It seemed so.  Maybe she was a lure.  Trying to bring me back into the world when I didn't want to.   

"Sometimes, I wish there was more help."  She said.  That wasn't really very fair, was it?  A mother of two, trying her best alone, with those eyes.  "Sometimes, I need help."

"I can help.  I think.  I mean, I wasn't planning on this, but I can help.  I think."  And my plans to leave the world were put off.  "Keep pushing until those girls are through college," I thought.  Then my obligation will be complete.  "How hard can that be?"  I thought.  

Standing With The Innocent

For the record, I'm a straight male, over fifty, living in Mississippi.  Going by demographics, I shouldn't have these thoughts, but I do.

There are fewer than one hundred thousand LGBTQ citizens of Mississippi.  Of that number, fewer than one hundred citizens under the age of eighteen are seeking medical treatment for Gender dysphoria, a medically and psychologically recognized condition.  Less than one hundred.  We have football teams with more kids on them.

Despite their small numbers, the Mississippi Republican Party is presenting over thirty bills to limit or control LGBTQ people in Mississippi, including a bill making the medical treatment of Gender Dysphoria among young people illegal.  Illegal.  Parents will go to jail if they seek this help for their children.

Considering their small numbers, you have to wonder what's really going on here.  Why does this small group of Mississippi kids warrant a law controlling their medical care?  Considering their small numbers, it's impossible and illogical to conclude that they present any sort of sociological or medical threat.  Gender Dysphoria is not a transmittable disease.  

For whatever reason, transgenderism represents a hot button for the GOP.  Despite their small numbers, the GOP would stamp them out if they could.  They find transsexualism and drag equally despicable.   Having spent the weekend at a drag show, I find this confusing.  In a room full of people, six drag queens performed, and not a single person was harmed.  Maybe the GOP doesn't like people who dance and dress better than they do.  

Because members of the Mississippi GOP know that segments of their base find Transgenderism repulsive and dangerous, they have chosen a path whereby they write laws hurting transgender and transsexual people, not because they pose a threat or because they are an actual problem, but because bullying these people helps them win points with their base.

Yes, I am accusing the Mississippi GOP of bullying transgender youth, and they're doing it to win the favor of the worst part of their base, not to solve any real or impending problem in our state.  What's despicable about this is that these kids are already getting bullied at school and among their peers, and now the state of Mississippi is officially taking the side of the school bullies who torture them.  Transgender kids already exhibit the highest rates of suicide of all American children, and now the State of Mississippi is adding to it. 

These people, the Governor, and others are trying to win the approval of, already vote straight Republican, so these bills only serve to stoke their enthusiasm and maybe raise a little money for the party.  For twenty years now, the Republican party has been completely comfortable with reaching into the worst parts of America for support, and in the last ten years, this has doubled.  

I stand with the transgender youth of Mississippi.  I do not understand them.  I've never really spent much time with them, but they are few, they are attacked, and they are hurt without hurting others, so I stand with them.  The State of Mississippi may have trouble showing love for these suffering children, but I do not.