thug augra

After a fun weekend at a friend's house party in Sebastapol, I got home and was having a snack with the front door open.

I saw a car cruise by slowly, doors opened on the passenger and driver sides, pass down the street, with a group inside about 5 deep. One girl in the car was cussing out several young girls walking along the sidewalk.

This is not good, I thought. I went on eating, but I had a sense something was up. I went out on my front stoop and they stopped at the end of the block. I heard voices escalate. 

The car stopped.

Shit.

My next door neighbour also came out of his place.

' What are they trippin on?' I asked him.

' I don't know. ' he said. ' But they've got beef.'

As I turned back to go inside, one girl jumped out of the car and started brawling with another on the street. Their homies shouted the situation on as though it was entertainment. 

'NO! STOP!' I shouted. I ran out the front gate and into the fray to break them up. One girl was pregnant. As I was grappling with one girl to get her off the other, a neighbor across the street I call the Nosy Anarchist Hipster, approached and started with her kumbaya rhetoric.

'WHAT DID I TELL YOU BEFORE?!' I shouted at her. "BACK UP AND MIND YOUR BUSINESS! YOU COULD GET HURT!'

It took her a minute to process what I was saying. I could see the wheels were turning. Ohhhh! This is that authentic dangerous black stuff I know nothing about.

She turned and went back across the street to her place. Maybe to make a social justice flyer for the oppressed or post to her social about how, as a young white woman, living in the hood in solidarity with no one will dismantle racism. Neighbors told me they always had squabbles with her. I learned from the house fire two summers ago she didn't get it. We were monolithic to her, not people. 

At that point my other neighbor had called the cops and came down the street. I struggled with my phone ( Don’t put it on the ground. My pockets are too thin and it will drop. I need my adidas! ) I sprinted back to my place. Mathias, an Airbnb guest from Copenhagen, was at the door.

'' What's going on?' he asked.

' Girls are fighting over a thug or some shit. I knew it! I fuckin knew it! I ran inside, kicked off my flip flops, and quickly switched into my adidas.

' Do you need me to go out there?' he asked. 

'NO! Stay here. It's not safe!' ( Being that Mathias was a young trans man and far from home, I felt it was prudent he stay put ).

I ran back out and tried again to get the girls apart. No one said a word to me or swung on me in the mele. Not one and they were all in their 20s. Part of that is within the street context of today, my age and tattoos convey something other than art. I've lived through many Bay Area stories that are now legend or myth to younger people.

A black sedan pulled up and one of the girls jumped in. The girl I was grappling with reached into the car and got a grip on her hair. Then the car started to move. At that point my brain calculated my proximity to the girl in the car, the girl I was trying to pull back, while and the car was in motion. Hood physics. It was too hard and I considered my own safety.

I let the girl go and the sedan took off north on Peralta. The rest jumped in their car and sped off towards 7th street. Then everything went quiet; that silence after a chaotic situation stops.

I went back to my place. At that point my had adrenaline had spiked and I needed to calm down. I felt like I had been boxing or sprinting or both.

' What happened?' Mathias asked. ' How did you know they were going to fight?'

' Hood awareness.' I said, catching my breath. ' I've been around a long time.'

' Wow. I don't have that.' Mathias said. ' That was crazy.'

I needed air and water. I sat down on the stoop to chill and hydrate myself. Certain aspects of the culture, particularly the hardcore aspect of it, are strictly within the realm of black understanding. We have words and phrases for it: mark, trick, po-po, gat, glock, heaux, pimp, fresh out, meat, 3 squares ( what one gets in jail ), and game. The game can be destructive and all the girls in that fight were deep in it. A disagreement in the streets, however trivial, one could take the life of another. 

I texted Jamaica. 

Jamaica: Did this just happen?

me: Yes

Jamaica: On the block?

me: Yes

Jamaica: Are you okay? Dude, why are you almost getting punched by random heaux?

me: Because they're just kids and I want them to live.

the evolution of dojacat

I first came across Dojacat while living in Miami. Caligula’s Playground itself wasn’t my scene ( except Art Basel which was always vivid because art is my religion ). There was little intellectually to tap into in the MIA, except the art weirdos and geezer punks who came my way at the gallery. They had character, intellect, and style; diametrically opposed to the pool parties, trap rap glam, and hyperfemme kiki landscape of the city.

At the time, I was working two jobs: as an admin for an art gallery and as a content writer. I had another side hustle managing Airbnb in a house I shared with two young millennials and two pit bulls. During my time off, I would chill at the beach with dogs, write, or watch make-up tutorials which included the vintage make-up artists like Mary Greenwell and Lisa Eldridge. I also liked Vogue snippets featuring contemporary pop stars I had never heard of.

I had hit 50 by the time I came to Miami. I’ve never been a benchmark person - by this age I'll do this and by that age I’ll have that. My first consideration is to live an interesting, non-linear life and that comes from being an artist, not necessarily a goal-oriented one. Fuck racist America and fuck capitalism. I’ll be the black chick in Tikal climbing the Temple of the Jaguar, fighting an opponent in Thunderdome at Burning Man ( that was awesome and I got my ass kicked in two rounds ).

I also love experimenting with make-up. In my teens I was punk and that involved kohl black eyes. I studied Siouxie Sioux’s make-up and mimicked that. In the 90s I was platinum with a brick read lip. By the early 2ks, buffalo souljah dread.

At the time, Dojacat was in her early 20s with long pink hair. What struck me is that she looked a bit like a younger version of myself ( with freckles even! ). The colours that work for her skin tone would work for mine. Let’s check it out!

She was charming and had some useful tips. Aesthetically different because we’re a generation apart, I appreciated her pop vamp mixed with soul.  After that I checked out a few of her music videos. A year after that she did a collaboration with the hood womanist City Girls called Pussy Talk. That was a big hit in Miami ( where the City Girls are from ). Later I would learn that Pussy Talk was also a hit in Europe.

I knew Dojacat was out there, but with young, modern artists I tend to be selective. I’m drawn to those who circumvent the autotunes antics unless they're performative and conceptual like Tyler the Creator or Stromae. I liked a few conceptual Grimes videos, but she sounds like a cartoon robot. There’s a distinction between being an artist or being a camp pop star. Bjork is an artist. Britney was camp. Dojacat started camp, then in one moment she became an artist.

It happened with a Roberto Cavalli dress she wore to an event and it was stunning. Drop dead, glamour stunning. I have a propensity for fashion and fashion history ( hello, art school!) and that dress with its mix of pop culture in the moto jacket bodice and showgirl with a flowing skirt of green feathers was bananas. I knew it was inspired by Thierry Mugler's 90s design. In that moment Dojacat was adventurous, grown, and dressed. Style itself is a hard thing to achieve; that comes from fearless character. Anyone can follow the copy cat trends, not everyone is brave enough to circumvent them.

I think ours must be the last rock n roll generation left alive. I was baffled as social media turned into wabbit season; young naked women in wabbit ears, tiny clothes, and make-up inspired by either anime or strip culture. The same girls nattered on with empowerment propaganda while pandering to the male gaze of strangers. This was a contradiction to me. 

For young black women, Dojacat flipped the wabbit season script by putting well-tailored and chic clothes on.

From Dojacat’s Cavalli collaboration, she ditched the crop tops and began a period of maturity and style evolution. She collaborated with haute couture and avant garde designers I like. On IG she would play with her face and form - vacillating between beautiful or ugly, femme or butch, creating different characters and iterations of herself. The black girl Bowie of her generation.

Recently, after expressing my adoration of her, a friend showed me an  photo of Dojacat with a shaved head.

‘ Yesss!’ I said excitedly. ‘ She’s challenging the norm.’

‘ I knew you’d like that’  Jamaica said. ‘ So unattractive.’

‘ She’s not doing it to be attractive to you or anyone else.’ I said.

In another IG post, Dojacat wore black lipstick and a t-shirt that said ' I’d rather be eating ass'. I cracked up. Some of her peers and fans didn’t appreciate her image or sarcasm.

Comment: ‘ Why would you want to look like that?’

Why not? I replied. Imagine doing nothing that panders to the male gaze and not using the word ‘hot’ in one’s vocabulary unless referring to tea or french fries.

Then - boom! Doja was photographed, front row between two Gen X queens - Janet and Erykah at a fashion show in Paris. Black folks started referring to them as the Three Black Witches and the image went viral.

That was DOPE to me. People do not get seated in the front row in Paris if you’re a twerking pop princess in tiny clothes. Nope. You get a seat there if you have style and character that others find compelling.

This was also meaningful because in this moment black and brown beauty, across generations, was being celebrated, as it should. And the colored girls sing, doo de doo de doo...

It’s cool to see Dojacat’s kind of creativity and weirdo black beauty have an impact on both the culture and the mainstream. When I was young, the beauty standard was always white. We had to look to ourselves and our peers. Every tip and secret was analog and shared by word of mouth then; inspiration from the pages from i-D, Interview, and Paper magazines. By the early 2ks, the Kardashian clown circus ushered in a new beauty aesthetic that was ethnically ambiguous - a rip off of the black girl body. It’s everywhere now and the mainstream, who don’t naturally or genetically match such a form, are either manipulating themselves to as close a proximity of it or resent it. It is so pervasive, in Miami I saw girls in their 20s and 30s with lip fillers and Dominican implants. Dojacat works with what creation gave her.

When someone tells me Dojacat’s weirdness or, as one homie put it, ‘art shock’ black beauty reminds them of me, I give the happy clap for the weird sisters and kiki drags of today. The Polystyrenes, Paulines, and Graces of a new generation.

Now my selektah! Can you feel the vibe? 

old black punk shit, with love

Joachim was known in the scene as Joe or Joe Dread. I never called him by that nickname. When we met he was 28 and I was 31. By then he was starting to go bald and trying to keep his dreads intact as his hairline receded. My nickname for him was ‘Bozo Dread’ because his hair reminded me of Bozo the Clown.

Joachim and I were in and out continuously for a year or two. I couldn’t keep up with the 24/7 wacko cycle he was on. Drinking, drugs, weed, and more drinking. He could drink anyone, anywhere under the table and walk away upright.

By 31 I had simmered down with all that, becoming more mature. Getting high alone was a bad sign to me. I snapped right out of it and into being more ‘straight edge’ ( punk slang for someone who’s a teetotaler or clean ).

The summer between 1998 - 99, one of Joachim’s best friends, Carlos, was getting high at Shammy’s mom’s house and just like that, he overdosed. Carlos was only 27 years old. Shammy’s mom panicked and didn’t want the cops or anyone in the house. They tried to revive him, but Carlos died that night on the front lawn.

Carlos, Joachim, and Jeffrey (aka Jabba the Hut) had a punk thrash band when they were, I don’t know, 14 or 15.  As I knew it, they were a mess, making noise while stumbling over cans of Old English and day old pizza. They could actually play, they just lacked focus and discipline.

One night, Carlos, Joachim and two of their homies came to a friend’s house party on Croxton, rolling in like a squad of the young, black, and beautiful.  They were cool with an underlying energy of power and presence.  At one point there was a bit of a ruckus outside. Carlos and Joachim were the first to intervene and diffuse the situation.

Everybody freeze! On your knees, butt naked please! Before any of you guppies get heart.

When we were kids our parents had been friends; part of the same social circle of beatniks, revolutionaries, and back to the land hippies. Joachim’s mom, Cherise, had taken us in a few times when we’d flee from my dad. I remember one night, Pop sat silently at the kitchen table with a knife as he stabbed repeatedly at its surface.

 RUN!

Joachim was mixed like me. It was a radical thing then for our parents to be mixed couples at the time. When I was born in 1967, only 16 states had repealed anti-miscegenation laws after Loving vs. Virginia. Prior to that, California repealed the law in 1948.

Cherise was an earth mama Lola Falana with a beauty mark near her upper lip.  She had a picture of me at 6 years old with a 3 year old Joachim sitting on my lap. Twenty-five years later, in the late 90s, Joachim and I met through mutual friends. I didn’t make the connection until I met Cherise at her house in West Oakland and saw a face from my magic bus childhood. Wait What? No way.

Ironically I did not like Joachim when were kids. I thought he was crude and obnoxious. I liked his cousin Phillipe with his pretty green eyes.

I met up with Joachim and his mom at Carlo's funeral, which was heartbreakingly sad. When he died, Carlos was with Hannah, a young sister maybe in her early 20s at the time. They had a 4 year old daughter together. When I saw Hannah with the baby, I broke down. I had given them whatever I could to help them: a dresser I had refinished, food, some cash.

Cherise sat between Joachim and I in the pew. We were on one of our break-up cycles; at odds with one another. We bickered in whispers and talked shit.

‘You two need to stop!’ Cherise said. ‘ You’re at a funeral! Get it together. Just love one another. Carlos is gone. We only have one chance.’

One chance? One chance at what? What is she talking about?

I had to think about that. As we left the funeral home, I got over myself and decided to try and work things out with Joachim. 

The following weekend we had a BBQ at my place on 53rd street off San Pablo. I had two housemates at the time who were gone for the summer, so I had the place to myself.  A rag-tag crew of Joachim’s punk homies came to hang out. I went to the store and when I returned, I found a white girl in the kitchen with him.

She wasn't a punk girl, but what we called a ‘gray girl’ back then. A gray girl was East Bay slang for white girls into black dudes. When you mix black and white on the color spectrum, the result is gray. At the time, such a term was meant to be an ironic, smart-ass diss. I don't think such a slang term would be tolerated now.

The girl was young, but looked hard and loose. She had the kind of face one gets from grinding life out too fast and doing too much. 

‘ Oh, I’ve known Joe for awhile.’ She said. ‘ We ran into each other on Telegraph and he invited me over. He said it was cool. You’re friends.’

You don’t say?!

This is the kind of manipulation Joachim would do to test me; to see how far he could push it, and what my response would be. Alright, homie you and your little friend better be cool.

Well, they were not cool.

Everyone was hanging out on the deck in the backyard. At one point, I notice that Joachim and the girl are conspicuously absent. I went into the house and found them in my room where he was making his dorky moves on her.  Joachim was essentially a nerd, but somehow circumvented such mystique to tough guy. He would call me ‘fair lass.’ How many black dudes in America talk like they learned English in the Shire? Homie must have read Tolkien in middle school. Well, he could be quite charming when he wanted to.

I proceeded to disrupt the shenanigans and create new ones.

‘ That’s it. ‘ I said. ‘ Both of you gotta go. Right now. ‘

The girl ran like it was a memory; like she’d made the same mistake before. As the saying goes, heaux never die!

That was it for Joachim. Whatever he had at my place I threw at him or out on the street. Also a plate ( I remember the plate flying, but not where I got it. I must have gone to the kitchen to get a plate? That would have been intentional ). I just missed his head as he went out the front gate, gathering his stuff into a grocery bag.

In life, women are either yellers or throwers. In my youth, I was a thrower. I had anger and defensive issues. Batter up! Smash! I destroyed stereos, walkmans, plates, cups, artwork, and mugs. At my age now, I check myself and I’m more pragmatic.

Wait. Stop. Don’t break that thing! That’s a cool thing!

You could say I was passionate then, but I was just a hurt person, shouting like Karen Finlay: ‘ You fuckin asshole! Bastard bitch!’

My neighbor across the street saw the domestic disruption from her window. She came out onto her front porch.

‘That’s right, girl!’ she cheered. ‘Fuck him! Kick his bitch ass out!

I remember thinking how black the whole situation was. My neighbor didn’t have any context, but somehow knew what was up, like an old blues song.  A ‘ he done gone and did her real wrong ’ song. That scene with Angela Bassett in Waiting to Exhale is legendary for a reason. I notice how black women whomp at that scene every time while the men get a bit skittish with their internal ' Damn. I better be good to her or else. ' 

I was once at a hotel event in Detroit with my aunt and a couple at a table started fussing. Their voices escalated and others at the table joined the fray. When I saw chairs go up, myself and other guests where I was seated, grabbed our drinks and ran towards the kitchen. Security broke the couple up and the event was shut down. I learned later it was the wife that started that fight. She had had it with hubby’s shit and was not fucking around. Black folks gossip is an oral tradition. I got the straight scoop! 

Joachim had left a sweatshirt behind at my place. I threw it in the fire pit and watched it burn. Hail to Queen Angela! 

‘Damn, Lisa. That’s harsh. ‘ Someone said.

‘ Fuck him.’ I said. Watching the sweatshirt disintegrate like my love.

Joachim being himself ( drama queen, loverboy, a person of contradictions ) called the house and told someone he was at a bar in Temescal. The same person ratted me out.

‘ She burned my sweatshirt? Bro, I love that sweatshirt! ‘

Then I remembered something and hatched a plan. The homies asked for a ride to a show that night at a dive bar in downtown Oakland. They got in my truck, I dropped them off with the yada yada I’ll be right back, went to the bar in Temescal, and in front of everyone there, broke Joachim off of my army shorts that he was wearing.

‘You’re an asshole!'  I said. ' Give me back my shit! ‘

‘You’re crazy!’ he said.

‘ I sure am. Give me my shorts!  Who do you think you're fucking with?!' 

‘ I don’t have any other pants! ‘

‘ Fuck you! ‘

He took my shorts off and handed them to me. This seems petty and petulant to me now, but those were my German army cargo shorts;  punk utilitarian gear that I liked to travel in with pockets for stuff. There was no way he was keeping my shorts after pulling that stupid shit with a skanky little heaux. Wrath logic.

The people at the bar were cracking up as the end of things played out. Joachim followed me out to the street in his boxers.

‘ I should call the cops!’ he yelled.

‘ Call em, Joachim! I want to hear that conversation! You’re the one with a record and probably an outstanding warrant. Fuck….you hurt me!’

‘ So, be hurt! ‘

Say what now? Be hurt? That was the last straw right there. Who says that?

After sobering up, Joachim caught up to the consequences of his actions. He called me for days, leaving long messages on my answering machine. He was known to have an entire conversation with your answering machine. One night I was laying in bed listening to him natter on, his voice filling up the room.

This nigga….I couldn’t take it anymore and picked up the phone.

‘ Dude, if you don’t stop calling me, I am going to crawl up your ass and rip your heart out. ‘ ( I said that verbatim. There she goes again - the hurt person with the violent imagery! ).

He paused for a long time. ‘ Damn.’ he said. ‘ Chill. I just want to talk to you.’

Click.

One fond memory I have of Joachim was after one squabble at a kick-it house. I was over it, so I left and went home. Later that night I heard some racket outside my bedroom window. I looked outside and saw Joachim climbing into the bathroom, which was next to my room.

What the ….?

He came into my room with flowers in his hand he had stolen from someone’s yard. I sat there in disbelief for a minute, then cracked up.

‘Forgive me.’ he said.

‘Joachim…,’ I said. ‘Dude, I am not going down this path with you.’

Ten years later I was in Arizona and I got a call from Cherise that Joachim died from complications of cirrhosis of the liver, exacerbated by a life of extreme self-abuse. He was only 41 at the time.

After his memorial, a group of us went to Mama’s Royal Cafe for brunch to remember him and share stories. His time living in the punk house on 8th street, the girl he loved that he married 6 years earlier and their son Jude (named after The Beatles song). He loved Jude and had visitation with him, but wasn’t present, Cherise was. Joachim did not have the capacity to be a husband or father.  I met his ex-wife, a young woman whose parents were Japanese butoh dancers. They owned a little sushi cafe in the Mission at the end of Clarion Alley.

They were lovely people; part of a Bay Area avant garde scene.

We had stopped by their house in Berkeley to pick Jude up for the weekend. Jude’s mother didn’t say a word to Joachim. I could see in his face that he still loved her, but she had given up on him. That is the most tender expression a man has. 

We would spend the occasional weekend at Joachim's dad’s house in Sebastopol. Michael was white, a hippie doppelganger to Art Garfunkel. Growing up in Philadelphia, he came across a picture of a girl with flowers in her hair that inspired him to move to CA in the 1960s.

Early one morning over coffee, while everyone was still asleep, Mike and I sat in the kitchen and talked. I listened to him reflect on when he and Cherise had Joachim and hanging out with my parents. 

‘ I wonder if things could have worked out for him if I had custody.’ he said. ‘But I didn’t do it. I didn’t want to hassle with Cherise about it. Things might have been better for him if I did.’

That I knew to some degree. Cherise had gotten into using when we were kids, which was why Ma ended drifted away from their friendship in the 1970s. Ma was super straight edge as much she loved San Francisco rock and outlaw country singers. Getting high made her feel anxious. The one time she dropped acid when I was little, she cleaned the bathroom with a toothbrush. 

I realized how much Michael loved Joachim, but didn’t know how to deal with, help, or save him. I knew that struggle and it made me sad. Michael told me a story I hadn’t heard before:

Joachim was about 17 and got busted for drug possession. In the 1980s teenage boys with a first offense had two choices: jail or the military. Being as good looking as Joachim was, jail was probably not a good idea. He was sent to army boot camp in Germany.

Six months in and one night, after lights out, he realized he lent his Walkman to another enlisted kid in the dorm room next to his. Joachim climbed out of his window, scaled the ledge to reach the kid’s room, lost his footing, and fell two stories straight down, landing on his head. He was in a coma for several weeks after that. After he recovered, the army sent him back home to the Bay.

In his 20s he experienced another head injury during a fight in jail. Michael thought that the trauma of those experiences had messed Joachim’s head up; altered its wiring and functioning. I thought about the possibility of that.  He was fearless and rarely thought of consequence. He would just do it, whatever it was. He had poor short-term memory and seemed immune to physical pain. He had scars from wounds he had neglected or let fester before he got them checked.

Maybe a year after the last straw, I crossed paths with Joachim hanging out with friends in an apartment building on 40th Street. He tried to get me to talk to him, but a friend ran interference for me. Exit stage left.

At his memorial I met one of his homies he grew up with. Noah was a nice dude. We thought maybe somewhere out there our old friend was stoked. 

‘ Right on, bro! Do better than I did with the fair lass.’

Joachim would have liked that gathering at Mama’s Royal. I suppose he wanted life to be like that always; good times among friends, without the responsibility of being a man.  He was a master of fun and risk, but struggled at navigating other aspects of life. He gave no consideration to routine, work, or order. He functioned differently, oblivious to reality and time, which seemed to get in the way of his whims. That’s why he liked the punk scene and shows so much; no rules, no order; just straight up fun and freedom.

Joachim, the vivid, out of control spirit, would have been 51 this past October.

Joey

notes during a pandemic

These are notes and Facebook posts I wrote between 2020 and 2022.

February 2020 Marin Landing

I've been home just two months and found a sublet / pet sit in Novato closer to the old man. He was in crisis ( again ) getting fleeced by an IHSS provider who skimmed his SSDI money. The Old Man's rent was late, eviction notice to pay or quit, and his account overdrawn. I had been trying to resolve the situation while I was in Miami, to no avail. This had been going on for awhile and no one ( Social Services or family ) intervened. Eventually I had to come back home.

The sublet isn't ideal, but it was close to the Old Man and it was cheap. I also got a contract position with the county working for elections.

March 2020 The End is Nigh

Shit! There's an actual pandemic and shelter in place order. Everything has suddenly stopped. The streets are empty and people are panicked.
People are hoarding making it harder to get basic things.

I tried going into Petaluma and it was hopeless there too - people freaking out like it's the apocalypse.

' Ma'am, stay back!' an older white dude said to me.

Marin keeps putting out alerts and restrictions. We lost a group of staff at elections who panicked because they were in a high risk age group. The crew keeps dwindling, but some of us stick around. We need to keep a routine and each other's company, to retain a sense of normalcy.

April 25 Marinian Boomer Hell

When the world ends I'm breaking up with Marinians. It's a hippie fascist state. In my life I've only visited the Old Man, hiked or day tripped out to the coast here, not actually lived. That's a whole other trip. There's one music venue called Terrapin Station. That's it? One music spot in the entire county named after a fucking Grateful Dead song? I can't believe how dull the conversations are (taxes, meds, Next Door, Zoom Zumba. Kill me now!). I like old time music, but that's all Marinians seem to play with their Facebook Live jam bands ( Compost Mary loves the jam bands ). Eclecticism is not something people possess here. There's no hip hop and no punk. Everyone has a dream catcher, which makes no sense to me.

Most folks here are descendants of pioneers or depression era migrants that came west. Wouldn't fiddles, framed needlepoints, of biblical verse make more sense as decor? I remember a theology student in Berkeley who showed me photos of her Texas migrant relatives who had settled in Bakersfield. She had a series of vintage photos custom restored and framed. I was certain one of those relatives was in the klan. How could someone not be? What else was going on in Texas in the 1930s? The klan was poppin then.

Marin is beautiful, but culturally drab. Berkeley has always been scholarly, yet a weird, small urban town. Berkeley and Oakland meshed into an ultra vivid, diverse scene. Hip hop and punk bands came out of the East Bay. Marin was for Phish fans who baked carrot cake in tree houses. Who even fucks with carrot cake anymore? It's like the hippie casserole of desserts. I'm not going to a dance circle at sunset. Why would I deliberately join a dance circle with old ass hippies who can't dance? They know they can't dance, but they still act a fool trying. You're standing there stoically like 'I'm not dancing like a fool to this shit.' But they bug you to join in to deflect their foolishness on to you. It's an inclusion set-up.

May 2020 The CSA

There's a CSA that comes thru the neighborhood a few times a week. This is a big social scene with the boomers. I'm sitting here writing and listening the worst acoustic cover of Guantanamera in my life. Every woman here sounds like the spawn of Judy Collins when she sings. I can't. This is why I keep a low profile with Los Marinians. I feel like a raisin from a different generation in a bowl of oat milk or whatever nut milk they're into.

May 2020 I Had to Run

I'd been stuck in homogenous Marin somewhere between sexual harassment and white privilege because covid fucked my shit much as it did everyone else. Compost Mary had a tenant who I met before committing to the sublet-pet sit for her while she was traveling.

Willy Wonka had the bulging, weary eyes of someone lost in an internal void. I know people exist in the world in different ways. As long as they're cool, I'm cool. Well, he wasn't cool. He thought it was appropriate to talk to me about his past ecstatic dance and swinger sex life 25 years ago. He walked around without his shirt on and had the emotional intelligence of a 15 year old masturbator.

Willy Wonka had been a Huntington Beach volley ball champ between the 1980s - 90s. If you know CA culture, that meant he was a jock and jock boys at that time were raised to be insufferable assholes. They did a lot of raping and pillaging with impunity. If they were denied a thing, they just simply took a thing.

I told Willy Wonka to knock it off, but he persisted - walking around shirtless. Finally I went off on him to leave me the fuck alone and he did.

Then covid escalated and in a panic, Compost Mary returned from her trip to Brazil.

' There's two sides to every story.' she said when she returned. 

' Well, he was never inappropriate towards me. Maybe he was just being friendly.' she said.

Has he ever talked to you about ecstatic sex parties? 

' Well who knew the hot mulatta would be such a problem?'  she laughed at her own racist joke. 

Compost Mary wanted me to be 'nice' to Willy Wonka and I refused. Renting to someone who looked like me ( rather than a cat lady  character in a psychedelic fairytale) was a set-up with that dude.  I came to realize they had an odd symbiotic relationship. She needed to be needed and no one else could tolerate him. He had one nonsensical theory about microwaves and used aluminum foil as a deflector shield.

One morning, while making my espresso, Compost Mary came at me sideways. She was anxious about something and too arrogant to be honest about it. She had the tone and entitlement of a woman straight out of the 1950s. Since I had to extend my stay, she demanded more rent money. She was putting the squeeze on me because Willy Wonka had lost his job. I defiantly pushed back. I had been a considerate, respectful person who paid the rent she asked, cared for her cat, her house, tolerated her dysfunctional tenant, and the scrutiny of her neighbors. I had listened to her stories and ignored her petty micro-aggressions. I moved back to the East Bay that day. Later I got a non-apology text, which I deleted.

Fortunately I had secured a place back in South Berkeley and moved in a few days earlier. It was hard getting out of that situation in Marin and into a new place. I realized I was low-key traumatized.

After I got settled, I went to visit Ms. Anita, a caregiver who had helped me with the Old Man. I told her my story and how the experience stressed me out.

' I don't trust white folks, really.' she said. ' I never have. When you get right down to it, they want what they want and they'll throw us under the bus to get it.'

June 2020 The Riots

George Floyd was killed by cops in Minnapolis. The streets blew up again around the country and in Europe. It's like Michael and Trayvon and Aubrey again.  I'm a believer in burning injustice down even if that creates an inconvenience to others. What is it like to a be a black person in this country? It is very hard. 

I think of the of conversations I've had with the youth: 

' Mama Lisa, why can't I get my driver's license until I'm grown?' '

' Mama Lisa, why did they lynch us?'

' Mama Lisa, what can I do to protect myself?'

' Mama Lisa, I don't understand why this is happening.'

Sometimes I would be reduced to tears. Sometimes I didn't know what to say. I learned to just tell them the truth because without it they will not survive. 

It is because of slavery, love and because of slavery we were reduced to being less than human. Because of slavery we had no rights as citizens ( because we were not legal citizens ). We were relegated to Jim Crow segregation, to jobs in servitude, to share-cropping and redlining, to poor education and incarceration, to generation after generation of neglect, poverty, and unnecessary death.

The the only reward ever promised for our suffering, for our freedom was heaven. So, I want you to be aware of who you are and where we come from and protect yourself. If someone is not right or a situation is not right - speak up. If the situation is dangerous - then run. If things get real bad and you're angry and I'm angry, we'll burn it down together. I'm not going to lie to you. It's happened before and it will happen again. Just remember that there is a world beyond where we're at right now. No matter what's going on with America, you are a human being of African descent in the world and you are beautiful.

I tell them all of that.

Good morning, Vietnam! I hear constant helicopters towards downtown Oakland. I was waiting for Wagner's Valkyries to start in the background. Last night, I watched a drone hover in the sky from my window. I wanted it to be a dying star, but it wasn't. I support what's going on and don't fret. I'm not the fretting type. Neglect and abuse a people long enough with a bafoon potus who quotes a Miami-Dade white supremacist from 53 years ago - America is gonna get that smoke.

October 2020 Sugarcane Magazine

I did an interview with Talamieka Brice, an artist from Mississippi. She made a self-portrait of herself burning a MAGA hat as she smokes a cigar that went viral.  It's a good piece that got a lot of attention for Talamieka when it was published. 

I'm working on another feature for Sugarcane about Carlos Martiel, a gay Afro-Cuban performance artist. I'm writing in Spanish and English. I like the way the text looks on the page. It's been a challenge, but I wanted to approach the writing in a different way; to respect his language, translate, and edit.

It improves my comprehension and I get a deeper understanding of his practice. These are my evenings and weekends as my October deadlines approach. During the week, I work 10 hour days navigating an America in shambles. I'm in the eye of the storm of exceptionalism working an election cycle during a pandemic.

I decided in order to maintain objectivity and equity, I don't watch the news or deep dive into the media. A co-worker said, ' Democracy is participatory, not compulsory'.

I lighten things up by telling the team, in my California-ese to' Always bring the good vibes'. I filter what's going on through the people and remember to meet others where they're at, not where I'm at ( which is sometimes confusion ).

I think our egos can get in the way of reason and empathy. I do draw a hard line in the sand if a voter is freaking out because their capacity for critical thought has disintegrated.

Americans always need someone to blame over things we can not control.

' We're not peasants.' I said to the team. 

' Damn right!' Sholeh said. 

Sholeh and I worked the primary together. I begged her to come back even with the pandemic. She was worried because of her age, but the county had strict protocols in place. 

' We will be treated with respect at all times.' I said. ' Calm voters down with accurate information. If they give you a hard time, escalate them to me.'

It's like rad California theater. I can relate to Barbara at the country club in Mill Valley sipping her cocktail or the Sea Lion Whisperer at Pt. Reyes station, distraught as the world ends with its toxic energy. 

September 2020 Trapped

Well, COVID is fucking my life. At least I'm home and not going through the mess of chaos that is Florida.

I went to UC BerkeleyTang Center today. I get an excellent comprehensive eye exam there every few years. Unfortunately with Covid, and to reduce crowding, Tang no longer offers Saturday appointments. I was routed to Minor Hall.

Minor Hall is up in the hills and parking anywhere on Gayley Road, near near the Greek Theater, is a drag. One lot requires a UC permit. Another garage is public, but there's no attendant, just call buttons. The rates are ridiculous, so I made sure to get my validated.

Actually getting into Minor Hall was like a scene from Outbreak or Contagion. They wanted me to do my intake with a QR code ( a cool trick my ghetto ass phone does not do ). That was fun for no reason whatsoever.

I keep resisting new technology until I have no choice.

After my exam I overheard a Google employee get a generous benefit for her prescription: At 1k her co-pay that was less than 200. Well, Google is not playing with the HR perks. 

When I got back to the garage my ticket validation worked (yay!), but the exit did not. At that point I lost my shit. I called errbody and I pressed all the buttons. Dude! Open the gate!

I think part of this was the stress of living in a pandemic. Fifteen minutes later a remote voice opened the gate. 'Thank you so much.' I said. I'm never messing with a Berkeley or Oakland garage without a human on-site again. Straight-up cool with that.

July 2020 Police and Thieves

In the early 2ks I dreaded my hair. At the time, I would get stopped regularly by the cops because of random profiling. 

Before the dreads, in the 1990s, I had incident with the cops that was particularly harsh. I was stopped on Telegraph for an unpaid moving violation I couldn’t afford to pay. The cop let my friend Max drive my car home. I went to jail. While I was getting patted down, things quickly went from bad to worse. 

Apparently I fit the description of another Lisa with tattoos who was wanted for attempted murder. The cops would not believe me. I was a black nerd girl from Berkeley, nowhere near hard enough to try to kill another person. I hurt things and objects, not people.

' If you’ve used another alias for any reason tell us right now! ' 

' Dude, why would I lie to you? ' I said. ' I’m in handcuffs! C’mon man….'

I sat in a cell for the night watching MASH reruns, feeling sorry for myself. I was cited out the next morning. I still had to go to court and pay that traffic fine otherwise my license would have been suspended. Ten years later, with dreads, I was stopped again for flicking a cigarette out the car window and another time for a tail light. Yes, I went to court for those trivial ass things, too. I noticed whenever I went to traffic court I rarely saw white people. I do remember one white kid who was cited for skateboarding. His fine was waived. 

June 2020 Berkeley Edible Matter

I tend to have a love-hate relationship with Berkeley. It's love mostly because it's where I grew up since 5th grade. If I love it, I can be critical of it from time to time. I've seen a lot of things change - long before the invasion of tech bros and non-profit poverty pimps 'passionate about social justice'. Here you will find lots of local food with the word 'moon' in the name. Harvest moon. Vegan moon. Goddess moon. The bay loves attaching pagan words to food.

Harvest itself evokes dreamy images of abundant druid grains and legumes. Farm and artisan are also popular. Hand-crafted, Hand-milled, hand-picked, hand-job. Berkeley and the bay in general is a foodie's paradise.

Take for example Soop. That's another thing - the misspelled food word. It's hip and edgy, I guess. I go to Soop in the insufferably named Epicurious Garden in the Gourmet Ghetto (more on that in a moment) because Soop makes really good fresh soups daily. They have everything from spicy tortilla chicken to Thai curry lentil to clam chowder.

Soop has a kiosk in the garden across from the Kirala kiosk (a local Japanese restaurant). So, what is the Gourmet Ghetto? It's a neighborhood in North Berkeley whose name became a contentious issue because 'ghetto' refers to 'under-served' and 'marginalized' communities. Since American history is fucked up, calling it the Gourmet Ghetto is apparently racist. This is the kind of stupid discourse Berkeleyans get into because words are easier to erase than actual racism. People were rounded up into 'ghettos' in 16th century Venice and the Warsaw ghetto at the onset of World War II. The word ghetto has been around a really long time. Gourmet Ghetto is a colloquial nickname that began when Chez Panisse, the Cheese Board Collective, and Saul's delicatessen opened.

Over time the neighborhood became more sophisticated with academics, artists, and writers who were smarter than everyone else. Dorothea Lange and Phillip K. Dick lived in North Berkeley. You can always find an old dude in a beret and expensive walking shoes who knew a guy who knew a guy who got drunk with Picasso or dropped LSD with Timothy Leary, or shut down the man with Huey Newton, or played jazz at Enrico's, or once did a gig at the Fillmore with Tom Petty. Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971, which became one of the most famous fine dining spots in the world. I have the Chez Panisse cafe cookbook, which includes roasting a whole pig over an open fire pit. You know, if I ever find the time to build a fire pit with  sustainable bricks.

That book for me is a bit of Berkeley history, really. I enjoy the way Alice writes about preparing food the way Micheal Pollan writes about eating it. Alice also does cool things like install vegetable gardens for local schools. Growing up here you get a discernible palette. The petit syrah from blah blah Sonoma is just as amazing as the petite syrah from blah blah Provence. Berkeley is quite inter-nation-al. What we don't have is the abundance of Caribbean food I found in Miami, but there is very good Jamaican food here. Folks go hard for Jamaican oxtails, escovitch and ital. Jamaicans love Northern California for its weed and white earth women. The one Jamaican place that black folks are nuts about is Back a Yard in the south bay. 

We have two crabs in this region: dungeness and king from the Pacific Northwest. Atlantic salmon, snapper, lobster, and grouper are expensive to transport to the west. Here's it's about local or regional things ( except when a food is the edible equivalent of an orgasm and one's culinary desire overrides concerns about climate change ). We have plantains, but these come primarily from Mexico and Ecuador. All the western fresh water fish, like trout and salmon, are delicious. Crab is a big deal here in fall / winter because crab season is gumbo season. Roux recipes passed down from generations are mixed into a stew of crab, shrimp, andouille sausage and tomatoes served over rice. It's a deliciously savory dish with cornbread or bread bread. 

Summer is fish fry and BBQ season. The local legend is Everett & Jones, a family business that has spots in Berkeley and Jack London square. KC's BBQ is also really good. They moved to the Gilman district after a fire gutted their old place in South Berkeley. BBQ tradition here comes from families who migrated from Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana. In summer there's lots of marinades, mesquite and applewood smoke going down. It is a cultural and culinary art form. There's a great BBQ fest in Reno and yummy edibles at Berkeley's Juneteenth festival. I'm not sure if the former will happen this year since everything as we knew it fell apart. Hope prevails! Here is a google doc of all the black owned divine gastronomy you can support in the bay. Since when did Hella Juiced, Hella Nuts, and Hella Tea open? I love it!


May 30 2020 If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

- Claude Mckay, Jamaican-American
published 1919 in the socialist magazine The Liberator


May 2020 A Long Line at Whole Foods Parking Lot

Crazy Hippie: It's all climate engineering! The sun has a mirror on it. We're being controlled by grass! The Rockefellers and Carnegies planned everything. Look at that electric car! Electric cars are emitting gamma rays designed to destroy us all!

Me: Yo! Lady, leave these people alone and shut the fuck up! No one wants to hear that shit.

Crazy Boomer: Okay, robot. Okay!

Dude Behind Me: Thank you for doing that.

( I'm inclined to respond passionately to misinformation ).

May 2020  Anonymous Craigslist Post

DO NOT TRY TO SCAM ME. I HAVE A PHD AND AM A RESEARCHER. AND STOP FUCKING WiTH PPL DURING A PANDEMIC. MAKE YR MONEY OTHER WAYS. WE ALL HAVE TO.

August 2020 CA Housing Co-Ops

I have to move again due the fuck shit pandemic. My landlady needs to move her daughter back home from UCLA. I came across an interesting narrative post for a co-op which included links to a House Google Doc.

I think co-ops are trash. Co-op farms can work well, but these do not work for grown people living together with bikes and dogs. I'm going to choke these kids out with their mindfulness house meeting notes in a Google doc.  I actually read it and it was quite entertaining. They'd been through some shit between other unstable housemates, drug dealing, and aggressive dogs and theft. I think they need to take the co-op to cheaper CA towns like Chico or Turlock. Merced maybe. But they don't because that's where the dreary hicks are. How do these kids even learn yoga? Don't they have yoga in Iowa? Minnesota?

If I read vegan or sustainable lifestyle one more time. I'm going to take all their hoverboards, scooters, and bicycles and set them on fire. Why is it always white posters who use the phrase 'social justice'? Black folks don't use this term. Have I never heard a black person make the statement, 'I'm passionate about social justice'. Because we know these are fake-ass progressive words. In the age of now you have got to be drinking the kool-aid to believe such a thing is even possible in America.

Is it magical thinking to breathe it into existence by writing or saying that? I'll give the word 'community' a pass because we all have that in one form or another. The social constructs people make-up coming to CA are less about community and more about authoritarianism; replacing one power structure with another. Local people are just cool. We assume others are cool until they show us they're not. You can't force anyone to be progressive. That's a critical thought process, not fashionable word rubbish. If you're upset, be upset. Raise your voice. I promise you I will not cry the blues about not allowing my personal space to be safe.  Actual outer space is safer than what we've got going on down here.

I like realness. Be honest, emotional, and respectfully disagree. I know when I see a wolf in sheep's clothing. They are going to save us all from the white patriarchy. How is anyone going to save another from a system they directly benefit from? That's like saying, 'I'm giving up tacos forever because slavery was wrong.' 

Co-ops are just communes for the modern age. That's why I'm cynical about cooperative living paticularly those marketed as a ' luxury lifestyle'. I'm a child of the 1970s who saw death cults go down in flames. All those bitches put their looney toons base right here in the Bay Area. The realm of made-up things wrought a lot of chaos at the time. After that, the most sustainable things I learned for myself were punk rock and black thought. 

I'll be right over there eating a casper's hot dog made with all kinds of non-vegan realness.

February 2021 Sounder

Sounder. Cicely would appreciate it if you watched that again.

Sounder was one of my favorite movies as a kid. Cicely was the upright and dignified lady who never lost her cool. You would not see her with a gun taking down the man like Pam Grier. I watched Sounder again recently, since coming back home. I can be nostalgic about moments with the Old Man and me as a child.

He was from an all black everything generation ( that is, with the exception of my mother ). He and some of his peers, despite their church family roots, loved white women. They would make profane, sexist jokes. They could never join the Nation of Islam. They liked white women and liquor too much, they would say. I wonder if there was an underlying revenge to their desire?

When the Old Man and I would banter, I used to tell him ' Leave those white women alone.'

' I can't help it.' he'd say and crack himself up while my eyeballs rolled out of my skull.  Mind you, this is the elderly version of himself talking shit. 

When my sister and I were kids we used to load up in the station wagon and go to the drive-in to see the blaxsploitation films he loved. He had the soundtracks on vinyl to many of them - Shaft, Superfly, Cotton Comes to Harlem, Sweet Badass, and Cooley High.

' That dude is one bad ass cat.' he'd say to the maximum black dude on the screen. That's where I get the word cat from. 

The word cat goes back to be-bop jazz age slang also known as 'jive'. As kids we were infused with the be bop language of the past. Long before there was the word 'bi-racial' there were the words black power. We all knew who Cicely was. Paul Whitfield, Diahann Carroll, Sidney Poitier, Redd Foxx, Flip Wilson, and Beah Richards. James Earl Jones. The poets and revolutionaries were still alive then.

' The feds took out the SLA safe house this morning.' I remember hearing that during Patty Hearst's situation.

Patty became a symbol of an All American girl gone wrong for the revolution. It was shocking to the status quo for a girl of her background to take up arms with black people. The media created a narrative of her as a victim, not a person of free will and choice. She was kidnapped and brainwashed like any princess would have been. Corrupted by the savages!

If there was a sound I equate with that time it would be Marvin Gaye, Cymande, and the Parlaiment. My little knucklehead self trying to imitate Michael on American Bandstand. ' You're signifyin, Tiks!' and the Old Man would clap like he was in church. We had those moments where we just enjoyed being black together.

There is one memory that didn't catch up to me until years later. When I was about 5 or maybe 6, Grandma made a visit from Detroit. She was an Alabama woman who did everything by hand. She wore black, 1960s horn rimmed glasses and was always orderly and neat. Church neat.

Grandma watched me playing with my Beauty Parlor Barbie. She went out and bought me a Fisher Price black doll in a plaid, tartan dress. Grandma was not having it seeing me play with a white doll. At that time, there were no variations in a doll's skin tone. Non-white dolls were designed by white men and to them black was a single color without any variation of mid- or undertone.

At first I resisted the doll because her hair didn't move and flow like Barbie's. Her hair was like mine. You believe that? What a subversively genius move on Grandma's part.

No, baby. You do not look like no Barbie. You're a black girl.

When the Old Man still had the capacity for memory, I was fascinated by his stories.

In the late 1950s he was in his early 20s. He was training in North Carolina and sentenced to 90 days on a chain gang for refusing to leave a whites only diner.  I suppose his coming to CA some years later was a new kind of freedom. He settled into the Fillmore quite nicely, captivating the ladies with his sharp style and luminous smile. A proper student at USF, the Jesuit university.

The grandson of a moonshiner and a sharecropper. The great-grandson of former slaves.

March 2021

I'm rooting for Judas x the Black Messiah. It was really good. I wrote this after watching it because it brought up memories of my kidhood. I thought it was thoughtful and complex, because revolutionaries can be. My uncle was a Black Panther who joined the BPP chapter in Detroit as a teenager. After having been acquitted for shooting a cop, he came  west to join the Oakland chapter. The Old Man was already here going to USF at the time. One brother, the straight student pursuing a military career path, the younger brother, a revolutionary.

My uncle knew all the BPP cats then. They were his comrades. He was in it - so in it by the mid-1970s he was on the run. Things had fallen apart by a strategic FBI program, COINTELPRO, designed to dismantle the Panthers. My uncle wanted to hide out at our house in SF, but Ma wasn't having it with two small children. Plus things were hot at the time - quite hot.

In succession there had been the George Jackson trial and shoot out at the Marin County courthouse ( Angela Davis was implicated then acquitted for smuggling guns inside ), the SLA house raid, and Patty Hearst's kidnapping in 1976. The Manson trial, Elvis died, Moscone and Milk were assassinated, and then after that - Jonestown.

I grew up through all of that. The local news was on a continuous cycle of fire, death, and revolution. The old was guard outraged at the young who wanted to change the order of things ( it was still a white order, but with a different vocabulary at the time ). The adults around me, with the exception of my folks, were either hippie clowns ( actual hippie circus clowns ), artists, or radicals that named themselves after colors and animals to sound Native American ( Red Dog, Black Crow, Blue Butterfly, etc ). 

The Bay Area was wacky and surreal between the 1970s and 1980s. Those of use who grew up here during that time are a unique type of people.

Eventually the revolution was replaced with San Francisco funk, gay disco and cocaine. Time had come today and made me feel mighty real. My uncle remained a hardcore socialist even after the BPP was taken down. He was a union organizer and steward for Muni. He read Lenin, Marx, Guevara, Malcolm, and Orwell. Like most revolutionaries, life and time came for him and he became an old man.

We haven't been cool for years because of one disagreement and familial discourse. It can be tough relating to elders of the ' I'm not trying to hear all that  ' age. They really are not trying to hear all that - one's questions, boundaries, or debate. Hearing or thinking usually involves a slide into consideration or regret. I was always fascinated with my uncle's stories and anecdotes. To this day I remember him as a young man dressed in black and committed to black liberation.

March 2021

Over the weekend I watched Coming to America 2, which was hilarious. Generally I'm critical of sequels, except Aliens. Despite myself I was cracking up with the jokes and references to the past. The characters were a riot including Arsenio's voodoo priest. The barbershop cats! Wesley is also awesome at comedy. Somebody pay the dude's taxes and get him to work. It was a nice break from this, an all black everything joy. I suppose I needed that for a little while.

March 2021 The Grammys

I haven't watched an awards show since before the internet. It's such a time saver! I can go right to the fashion and snippets. I watched Megan's modern interpretation of Les Folies-Bergère. Maybe it was Cotton Club? Megan can twerk, but I don't think she's a dancer.

Las mulattas Cardi and Doja Cat did some sort of sexy robot schtick. I was bored, but I give points to Doja for singing live. She's awesome and such a beauty. I'm struck how popular entertainment today is like a Las Vegas revue. Will the Grammys ever become conceptual? Probably not. No one was playing an instrument except the Black Pumas and Harry's band ( fabulous by the way ). Harry must have a 28" waist, which means he can wear anything vintage. The lean and wispy dude.

August 2020 The Sugarcubes

During a heatwave, the air hazy with smoke from wildfires, I was on a mission to replace my Mac Air. I had been given a used one in Miami and the motherboard finally gave out.

I needed a replacement for writing and online treasure hunting. I found Writer Girl selling a Mac Pro on Marketplace. I stopped by her artist collective space to check it out.

Once there, I encountered the trippiest group of people living on E 8th St. between Laney College and Chinatown. They had taken over a maze-like space filled with art, instruments, Thai statutes, stuffed bears in a parachute net hanging from the ceiling, and large scale fabricated LED squares an artist called sugar cubes.

There was a short dude running around wheeling and dealing on the phone. He wore a sarong and nothing else. He talked a lot. The girls talked simultaneously; high-energy cross-cutting from one subject to another. One was a muralist from Portland and the other, Writer Girl, was from New Jersey. She was supposed to return home to start her MFA at NYU, but the pandemic brought her plans to a halt.

When Writer Girl showed me the Mac Pro she had to sell, there was a malfunction with the trackpad. She tried to play it cool.

' That's normal for this model.' she said.

The Muralist had worked in Apple retail, so she was going to do a slick hacker reset. Sure. I enjoy new encounters, but my intuition kicked in with their anarchist-artist and ketamine-saturated conversation. A creative life does not necessarily mean living buried under piles of stuff and recreational drugs.

And there was stuff everywhere - abandoned projects, anarchist literature, and remnants of BLM protests. White silence? Do we need more or less of that? An assortment of teas, vodka, and...ketamine.

 They offered me a hit and I declined.

Listen, if you lived through the 80s and 90s, so would you. It got to point where I could choose to go straight edge or fuck my life. I'm such a square now. The most heavy thing I do is 100mg THC edibles before I go to bed. Even those I had to dial down. My psyche can be a place of dark, residual matter. It's too much!

The ketamine crew were all transplants from the PNW, Midwest and Northeast. Being easy going, I listened to the Little Dude in a Sarong explain his vision of an inclusive electronic festival in the Delta that would bring locals from the Bay and the Central Valley together to ' build community.'

Well, that would be a bold, boundary busting move to throw a party out there. The Delta is not a cosmopolitan region of the state. It's agriculture, fish and game, and industry. A demographic of American yahoos, Latino migrant workers, and Nortenos.

Add drugs and booze to that and conflict is guaranteed. This is where the inclusive idealism of youth culture is not necessarily rooted in reality.  Some folks just don't want to be included in their shiny happy people parties.

While negotiations were on hold resuscitating Writer Girl's Mac Pro, she lent me her own Mac Air in a gesture of false trust. Within 24 hours she blew up my phone like she was losing her shit with a boyfriend.

By 9:30pm during the week I'm not doing much except maybe attend a dinner party I'm already at or watching a movie.

Text: I just want to get rid of this Pro and get my Macbook Air back!

Ger rid of. Get back. She thought I was going to steal her Mac. Wow. Gen X don't steal from the children of the corn unless we're really shitty people without moral compass. The next morning, I returned her Mac Air.

'I'm sorry if I was pushy on the phone.' ' she said. 'Do you still want the Pro?'

' No, thank you.' The clap back side-eye.  Message transmission: You talk all this progressive shit, but you're afraid of black people. 

We parted ways forever.

I circle back to another seller on Marketplace, a tech capitalist from India. His family name in Hindi meant jeweller. He comes down 100 from his asking price.

After work, I drive up into the mansions realm of Skyline Drive in the hills. At the gate of a modern luxury house I was met by Mr. Techjeweller and his daughter.

' I'm teaching her about how to conduct a transaction.' he said. ' She gets 10%.'

What cool parenting, I thought. She had just started 5th grade at a private school nearby. Mr. Techjeweller was nice and friendly. I left with an unused 2019 Macbook Air. I named her Mac the Myrtle after Mack the Knife.

November 2021 A Visit from Mama Obeah

There’s drama bubbling in the background as I've been in process taking over the lease from the sis I sublet from.  She's an orisha as is her mother ( the voodoo tradition is matrilineal in that way. Obeahs are women, hogans are men). I knew the young sis was an orisha when I first moved in and saw her alter and offerings set-up around the townhouse. I've been to ceremony, read a lot about the Ifa, and used to visit Marguerite, a black obeah from Puerto Rico, who'd counsel me with her cards and cowrie shells while she puffed on a cigar.

In Haiti voodoo is a part of everyday life, particularly in rural villages like Labadee. I loved listening to the drums and chants there. 

The Mama Obeah showed up at the door trying to flex on me. This was an extension of her daughter, who had moved to New York, scrambling to fix messy ends and broken promises she'd left behind, (with me and others).  I had been dealing with all that for months.

By email I tried the whole elder thing of redirecting the young sis’ drama into humility and honesty. There is no conflict or drama coming from me. I said. I will not compete or get into a clap back shouting match with you. Tell me the truth and we can work it out. I'll take care of the rent for November and treat it like a sublet.

Crickets. She would not budge because she was too proud to admit any type of failure. She was about that hustle, level-up life, and keeping it all under control. She knew all the conscious rhetoric without any self-awareness needed to apply it.

The only thing I’d done to vex her was not give her control. No, I’m not paying the rent through an app that sounds like a DJ in Ibiza. I’ve been paying the rent like a church lady since you were born. A process that still works and the rent had been paid without any issue.

She tried all kinds of rigamarole which didn't work with me. Finally I was given a demand via text and I ignored that. That affront brought Mama Obeah to my door with her daughter on the phone at the same time. They were looking for a confrontation. 

An obeah can't enter without your permission, so I invited her in. She walks in and starts calling on the Ifa and the names those she claims.

I thought, well, we could go round and round with this, but I had a hard day and I was tired. It occurred to me at the root of all of it was fear that I'll leave this girl holding the bag. She didn't trust me to mail the rent check and would bring drama to get it in her hand.

For a moment I felt like I was in Haiti again; the way we get down in situations between power and powerlessness. I’ve seen it - a woman in a rage with a taxi driver not being given her correct change ( she wailed on that dude ), a woman falling apart screaming out into the world, getting myself into trouble that brought out the whole block, and a woman with her head on fire for me.

Obeah translates to ‘head’ meaning that the Ifa work through the mind.

' I need that rent check.’ Mama Obeah said, juggling her phone and car keys in her hands. ‘ Do you have the money?'

Do you have the money? Assuming that I'm broke, playing games, and being shady. Baby girl was the one who didn't have the money.

I see. All the theatrics over a check. I was relatively quiet, but Mama Obeah said I was coming with the funny vibe. I thought, as in a looney toons funny vibe or who do you think you're fucking with to show up like this funny vibe?

 I came to the realization that they were both trippin. I give Mama Obeah a check. That was all that was needed to diffuse the situation. Despite their intention to intimidate me, I still respect the tradition and our ancestors. Before she left, my name comes out of Mama Obeah's mouth (sigh). She caught me though.

That energy came from being married at one time years ago. When her daughter was in town, I had mentioned it in conversation. In the orisha tradition a married woman is more powerful than an unmarried one. This is based on African principle, not a Christian one. The circle of life and creation. A god can be both sexes or hermaphroditic such as Mawu-Lisa. Shango, for example, can not fight without his wife Oya clearing a path.

Maybe I am powerful, maybe I'm just chill. I was disappointed that they used their practice to intimidate. That's not how voodoo is intended to be used, but in the hands of the petty it can be. 

'Baby girl, we good. Okay, I got her check. She wasn't afraid of me. She an orisha too? Who is she?'

November 2021 Remembering Miss Papoose

I was once a program coordinator at an East Oakland school for one academic year. I came out of that position disillusioned. Parents would get into brawls in the parking lot over gas money or shared childcare. One brother would lament to me about trying to do his best and show up for his son after getting out of prison. The school regularly went into lockdown after a drive-by and the administration gave more attention to funding and attendance metrics than actual learning. This is the shit that every day people in the hood have to cope with. Kids weren’t learning at that school. They and their parents existed within the margins. Natural born citizens of this country.

One of the few people who was real with me was Ms. Papoose, a hood minister and local legend who had worked in the community for years. She could do anything it seemed: break up a fight, manage a group of 25 kids, mediate between parents, lead a food drive, visit former students in jail, and hold those grieving or going through it. She was not playing and as a person, her expression of love was fierce.

‘ I understand the whole Africa thing,’ she said to one instructor. ‘But what about the kids I’ve buried here? They’re not going to Africa or anywhere else.'

' Mama Lisa, all you need to do is make sure the kids get their homework done and don’t come home busted up. ‘

( Mama Lisa is my street and mentor name in Oakland. I also joke that it's my drag name ). 

‘ Ms. Papoose, that’s just basic. That’s not preparing them for college or the real world.’

‘ They don’t care about that and most of their parents don’t care. They’re just trying to get through day by day and we’re here to help them. Some will make it out, most will not.’

She reminded me of when I was a kid and the gentler time I grew up in. I had been in a private hippie school from preschool until 3rd grade. I could tell you a thing or two about friendship circles, wildflowers, and milking goats on a farm.

I started 5th grade in Berkeley, after 2 years of public school in the Bayview. My school there looked like an asylum, which in the 1970s was quite drab - all icy institutional colors and windows cross-hatched with security metal lattice; a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest learning institutional environment.

Burnett was a majority black, Mexican, and Filipino school ( vatos and flips were the slang at the time). I got jumped regularly by mean girls, fought back, failed, and was tagged unruly and sassy. My reward was to be exiled to a Hippies for Jesus summer camp.

 Jesus hippies were boring to me. I blame Godspell. I didn’t particularly care for hippies ( except those in Pickle Family Circus ) because I’d experienced strung out flower children when we lived in the Haight and the Mission ( one dude nearly burned the building down with his Wiccan ritual gone wrong on a LCD-induced bad trip where he hallucinated rats invading his apartment ).

The hippie camp was in the Santa Cruz mountains. We couldn’t do anything except pray, hike, or study the bible. There was no getting into trouble or shenanigans in the woods. No profane rock n roll or funk music was allowed ( that meant no KISS, no Sabbath, no Donna Summer or Parliament ). We had bible study and hiked while a counselor shared some apostle’s story. At night we gathered around the campfire listening to horrible covers of ‘My Sweet Lord’ or ‘ Time in a Bottle’. I couldn’t take it. It was like a niceness cult trying to deprogram the ‘ inner city’ out of me into something golden like Joni Mitchell. Having a fluffy afro at the time, I looked like a mini mixed version of Janis Ian.

It didn’t work and, through tears and tantrums, I refused to do another summer with the Hippies for Jesus ever again. A year later it was YMCA all the way with the homies from Bernal heights and the Mission. We were a gang of unrefined knuckleheads terrorizing one another. Death Star storm troopers raiding cabins in the dark of night by flashlight.  Gazing in adoration at Dennis with his long lashes. He once jumped through a window to the girls cabin, landing like Spiderman on a bunk bed. He scared the shit out of us, but the cute boy could fly! Dreamboat.

Those summers to me were all sunshine and freedom. The lord of the flies, boys and girls, in a disco wilderness.

April 2021 If humanity is ending, tell me now, because I have a few things to wrap up.

It hit me the other day, the depression. I checked out and went home early. I'm so burned out with the pandemic. I have no control over it or the uncertainty of things.

‘When we get back to normal.’ What does that mean - normal? Recently a friend sent me a series of funny Lily Tomlin quotes:

What is reality anyway? Just a collective hunch.

I loathed getting another booster, but it’s for the greater good, which is more important than me as one individual. I had that approach working the election: Get that motherfucker out for the greater good! I couldn’t take how chaotic things had become. American democracy was turning into an authoritarian regime run by a sociopath clown with an administration that looked like a cast of Batman villains.

I worked 10 - 15 hour days then for the duration of my contract during the election. 2020 was one of the hardest years of my adult life. I had only been back home a little over a month and by February I was working the primary. Then the pandemic hit. I returned for the General Election as a supervisor, navigating the most misinformed, outraged, exceptionalist, xenophobic, and straight-up racist mayhem in an election cycle you could imagine. Everyone was in a state of some sort, but everyone needed to get it together and vote. Period.

I scheduled and tracked setting up each polling station in Marin for wifi. We worked in teams, each zipping around the county with a technician, testing the signal at each center, and taking set-up reference shots that I inserted into an excel spreadsheet.

We also had to keep up with voters who had fled abroad when the pandemic hit.

‘ Yes, you can vote at the embassy in Jakarta. Oh, it’s a few hours away and there's a checkpoint? You’ve barricaded yourself in the jungle from humanity? Gotcha.' 

Everyone was at it: Neighbor vs. Neighbor, USPS vs. Next Door. Next Door itself became a propaganda machine rotten with bitter snitches. Then it was Inverness vs. Bolinas. The post office between the two towns was limited to drop-box and pick-up only. No one on-site. The boomer hippy residents ( which I called interchangeably Team Butterfly or Team Crusty the Clown ) were squabbling so much that the postmaster fled. It was like dark comedy.

‘ I don’t think the non-violent communication thing is working out.’
I said.

I supervised 5 people at the time. If a voter was a bit off the rails or became aggressive, they were escalated to me.

‘ Lisa, can you talk to this person? She thinks USPS is tampering with her mail. She’s from Marin, but she’s living in Tuolumne now.

‘ That’s a great story! wait…. Is she registered in Tuolumne?’

‘ Well, yes and no. Her mail was supposed to be forwarded, but she hasn’t received her ballot. ' 

‘ Ballots can’t be forwarded. Okay, let me talk to her. ‘

It turned out the lady was struggling and a bit paranoid at the state of things. I was patient, listened, and gave her several options. Some voters had become isolated and just needed someone to talk to.

I listened to all sorts of rants: There was a democrat conspiracy to steal the election. The pandemic was the Russian, Chinese, and Koreans in collusion to destroy the ‘American way of life’ ( As in reality or an imaginary one like in a Norman Rockwell painting? ). My favorite neo-fascist remark: ‘ No one should be voting who doesn’t belong here.’

Such a comment would get me a bit worked up. 

‘ Excuse me, (Mr. Charlie) sir. Anyone in this country belongs here and has a right to vote. That's called democracy.' 

My favorite voter was the Mill Valley Sign Lady. She was outraged that Yosemite Sam signs had been set-up at a median in the town center, home to the easy street elite and one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country.

After giving up with the Mill Valley city council, she tried every county office to see who would do her bidding and take the signs down. By the time she got to me, I told her the truth.

‘You can take them down yourself.’ I said.

‘ Well, I don’t have the authority to do that.’ she said.

‘Of course you do! You have the same rights as the person who put them up.  I'm a black woman in America. If someone puts a burning cross at my door, don’t I have the right to take it down? ‘

Crickets. That was my intent because it got her to take a chill and think. If you’re outraged at a thing, take responsibility for what you’re feeling and confront the thing. That's it. 

Since the election, I apply the same logic to operations. As the end of the world rages on; circumstances and protocols become one thing, then another. People are working remotely again or super anxious. I show up every day because it’s my job to help steer the skiff through this. At times I have to make hard decisions, but I always consider others first. 

Shit. I need the whole crew on-site this weekend. Move the piano outside? C'mon!

Shit. I have to ask someone else to pitch in more because so and so is freaked out and working remotely.

Shit. Yoga in a pandemic?! Shouldn’t we not be doing that since it involves breathing? Berkeley can be too much with its wellness before human survival.

Shit. KN95s are on backorder. Rapid test kits are on backorder.

Okay wait. Think. There’s a federally funded program for workplace PCR testing sites. How would that work? I read and read some more. Rats! That will impact those already strapped and create a logistical nightmare for me. Nope. I’m not going down that road unless the city mandates it.

‘ The city of Berkeley has its own department of health?' someone asked me.

‘ Oh yeah. Berkeley does not play.' I said. ' The public health phd squad. the DOH will even challenge the state. everybody hikes! the vegan burger is now mandatory! tax soda! ‘

I tell myself to take this seriously and do it now for the greater good.  Lead by example, sister. Stay frosty, good humored, and kind. I imagine I'm like Apone in Aliens:

All right, sweethearts, you're a team and there's nothin' to worry about. We come here, and we gonna conquer, and we gonna kick some ass, is that understood? That's what we gonna do, sweethearts. We are going to go and get some. All right, people, on the ready line!

everyone knows it's wendy

Wendy and her son Kyle, 1994.

                                                

I was born in Los Angeles and we lived in Whittier. My dad was a high school teacher and my mom was a preschool teacher. My dad was originally from Dallas and my mom grew up in New York. They met at UCLA in the 1940s and got married in 1948. They were members of the Communist Party. By the 1950s, my dad refused to sign the loyalty oath and he was black listed from teaching for a long time. He worked in a slaughterhouse for awhile and did other odd jobs.

We moved to South Massachusetts where my dad was a teaching at Mount Holyoke. He had an affair with a student. That was a big scandal in 1965 in that small town! After that my parents got divorced. One of the memories I have of my dad is going to a protest with him and singing We Shall Overcome. By then he had moved to New York and was teaching at Hunter College. He was always on the side of the students and fought the administration. He was very active in the professors' union at Hunter. Eventually he got his phD at USC. My dad wasn’t a good husband, but he was a good human being. 

Well, I can see a person's character beyond the worst thing they’ve ever done. 

In 1967 my mom remarried and we moved to Berkeley. She got a job running a child study center at UC Berkeley. I was in the first integrated class at Oxford Elementary in 1968. By the 4th grade, kids were being bussed from the hills to the flats, as a part of school integration. I went to Berkeley High, class of 1978. 

In high school I was into performing arts and played in a band. I hung out on the steps of the Community Theater. The weed was so lightweight in those days. I got good grades and did my homework, even though I was stoned most of the time. Back then, black kids and white kids didn’t hang out together. I was in a chamber wind ensemble and took private lessons. I was really into my music, which is kind of what saved me. I was overwhelmed by the size of the school and a lot of other things. I was afraid to use the bathroom because there were no doors on the stalls and graffiti everywhere. I would go use the bathroom at Hink's department store.

I was on the Model School A college prep track program. In 9th grade, i wrote a paper about Che Guevara. who else? Oh, i love Bell Hooks! I've read a lot of stuff and certain things that resonated with me. I like reading about the Harlem Renaissance. I love James Baldwin. I think he’s an American treasure. 

After high school I went to Mills. It was nice because there were no men trying to dominate the conversation. I first majored in music then I switched to European history. After graduation, i worked in retail management and I hated that. I went back to school and got my master’s in ECE. 

I loved Edy’s! my favorite thing there was the Dutch Girl. I used to score my weed from a dude outside Arinell’s pizza. I would laugh because it was cheap and full of stems. I know I must sound like such a geezer….well, back in my day….haha! 

Back then,  I was in a band called Bay Area Wind Symphony. We did a lot of shows around the bay. 

I got married in 1990 and I had a baby in 1992. I finished my master’s in 1993. Then we had another baby. We lived in Oregon for a few years, then we moved to a shitty suburb of Chicago. My husband got a job in Orange County, so we moved back to California. 

BY that time, I worked as a teacher at a Montessori school. WE separated in 1999 when the kids were…3 and 5 years old. HE was a very attractive, charming man. He became addicted to meth and got into dealing. THen he got sick with AIDS and died. He was only 49 at the time and the kids were in high school. One day he had gone to the emergency room with an eye infection. That's when he got tested and he had full blown AiDS. It all happened so fast and within two weeks he was gone. Yeah, I took care of him. His parents were doing this tough love thing and I couldn’t stand that. 

I tried to feed him, I shaved him. I sat on his bed, held his hand, and talked to him. No one told me he was dying, but i figured it out. Yes, he was prescribed dilaudid because he was in a lot of pain. I learned a lot about forgiveness through that experience, even though it was very hard. 

Well, I think holding on to resentment is like letting someone live rent free in your head. I’m pretty good at loving people unconditionally. When my dad died in 1999, he said the same thing -  that he had regrets. My mom didn’t like my ex, so she wasn’t very helpful as I was going through that.

It wasn’t easy. My daughter went to a progressive, small boarding school in Massachusetts. She came back for her dad’s memorial service and went to college in Vermont. She's a ceramicist now and she lives in Oakland. My son lives with me. He’s on the spectrum, but he’s high functioning. 

I think my appreciation of black people and culture was nurtured in me through my dad. I would visit my dad in New York and he’d take me to see all these jazz luminaries. He was also very political. Once he was back in California, he lived in Turlock for a short time. He took me on a farm worker’s march in Delano. I think my sense of social justice came from him. My father was a speech professor. He told me about the Last Poets and Gil Scott Heron. His specialty was expression in speech pathology. He designed and taught a Duke Ellington course at the Frahm Institute in San Francisco. He was incredibly well-versed in the language of jazz. 

America is complicated. I don’t want to give up hope, but at the same time why is this shit still happening? Why don’t white people listen and shut up? We don’t listen, we just want to take over the conversation. I don’t think this is anything new. I don’t know about wokeness. It can be misguided, yes. If people listen, that can be the most effective thing. I think white people feel guilty, feel blamed, and that’s not the point. 

I remember being aware of that. I was in a feminist collective at Mills for awhile. There was a lot of pettiness between the straight and queer women. No, there were no women of color in that group. Back then, Mills didn’t do much to make it accessible to other women. 

I feel a glimmer of hope even though I also expect to be disappointed. I definitely feel less gloomy now than i was 2 years ago. I just read today that Oklahoma banned abortion. What the fuck is going on?! 

What is wrong with an America where you have to be some kind of phenom if you’re not white to be taken seriously? Yes, I think standardized tests should be eliminated. They're totally biased. There's one question about being on a sailboat. What if you’ve never been on a sailboat? I once did a social science experiment in school where I was asked questions that only black people could answer. What is mojo? I wrote ‘black magic’.  What is greezin? I remember that because i didn’t know those words. I learned greezin means ‘eating’. 

I love kids and i love music. I love my rats. Chili is cuddling with me right now. She's my favorite, but don’t tell the others. I'm in a place in my life where I'm done with men. It took me a long to get there. I'm lonely, but it doesn’t scare me like it used to. There's a difference between loneliness and being lonely. 

As fucked over as i have been, I still believe in the redemptive power of love. I only knew how to relate to men by flirting. I started to deprogram myself of that around 40 and now, I don’t do it at all. Even if i think a dude is cute, I won’t do that anymore. My mom’s values were that it was important to her to be pretty and flirtatious. By the time she was 60 she said. ‘ I’m no longer the prettiest girl at the party.’ I had a hard time with that. Growing up, i felt like her love was conditional - I had to look a certain way and be accomplished a certain way. One thing I did differently was to see my children for who they are. Whoever you are is okay. I’m happy that my daughter is an artist. To me, that’s a good choice.