TRYIN TO DO THE RIGHT THING

My dear mother was a very spiritual person. Her father was a minister.  Her brother later became a minister.  I was named after them but my younger brother not me was called to the ministry.  My father grew up in a sanctified household that required that he go to church every Sunday and sometimes during the week.  I grew up attending Peoples Community Church but ery now and then we spent the entire day at a small church on Russell or in churches in Inkster or Ecorse.  In any event, at this point in my life, I cannot ignore the values that my family force fed me as a child.

I am not the only black person to have lived in a household with religiosity and strong family values.  I have to wonder out loud why people seem to loose sight of those value, at some point then later try to reclaim them as the reality of death and aging slaps them in the face.

Closer To GOD                                       

My mother became more and more committed to religion, as she aged.  I am starting to realize that most smart people do.  I am coming to that point in life.  There are few other opportunities that work for most folks for the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Recent stories in the media have put the issue of peace versus violence on my mind. I live in southeastern Michigan.  A man that lives here dismembered his wife and attempted to play it off like she might have run off with a lover.  All the while pieces of her body were stashed in their garage and we found out that the fool had been banging the 19-year-old au pair that took care of his children who now have no mommy and no daddy.

Men killing their wives, occurs on average, about every six months in southeastern Michigan.  At least once a year, the national media reports that some woman has murdered her spouse.  These morbid facts astound me.  It makes no sense when you can simply walk away.

Flight Before Destruction

I left Dracula, at the point that I got so angry at her that I wanted to do something to her.  Leaving my wife before harming her was a commitment that I made as a man, very early in life.   I stopped my own father from attempting to kill my own mother one Friday night when the fool thought no one but he and her was home.

At age 12, I did not have the physical strength to subdue my father’s 6’3” ignorant ass but I weighed as much as he did and was able to wrestle him away from my mother.  I pulled him backwards and we fell.  He came back to his senses when he realized that he was crushing his favorite child to death!  Me, my mother and two brothers left our family home that night. That incident and the agony that followed, as I watched my mother struggle to take care of us, from that point forward, shaped my adult views on romance and inexorably my interactions with women.  And kept me from being in a committed relationship for a very long time.

Curse Of The World Wide Web

I live on the internet.  When I’m not working, I’m surfing.  I do take some breaks to have sex but I’ve got that down to about 3 minutes.  I’m eating as I type.  I am certain that the world wide web is inherently evil but it’s also the ultimate source for information.

Surfing on the world wide web has revealed that there are a great deal of unhappy women and an incredible amount of fucked up men under 40.  The former is tragic.  The latter is incomprehensible.  Despite my father and men of his generation’s shortcomings they were real men.  They were more fucked up than today’s men but they were far more confident about themselves and their abilities and that gave them the courage to have children and try and raise them the “right way“.

Men today have a confidence deficit.  I blame men of the generation before mine and the two generations that followed.  We let American families and particularly the men down by not providing good examples as fathers, as husbands, as siblings or as friends.  We left no cultural road map for younger men.  We gave them no rights of passage.  We did create gangs, generations of dope fiends and miscreants but that occurred inadvertently as we attempted to dodge our culturally predetermined legacy.  We sat them in front of televisions and computers, instead of spending time with them.  Instead of being able to rely on us men for information they relied on MTV, BET, The Box, The Cartoon Network, Doom and Dungeons and Dragons.

Rites Versus Privileges  

I get accused of being arrogant.  In my mind, I see myself as quite the opposite.  I am a very confidant man and if other people get that confused with something else, I don‘t feel that it‘s necessarily my problem.

I was raised by an Alpha male and an Alpha female.  My parents came from a generation that understood the need for humility and they beat it into me and my brothers.  To no one's surprise, yours truly received the most beatings.  They understood that I had the ability to potentially be the most out of control.  By the time I was 18, I had tried to go to hell and jail.  When I went away to college and had to fend for myself, I finally figured out what my parents had wanted for me.

Toward the end of my senior year, at the university, I made a silent pledge to never let my parents-and the effort that they put into getting me out of harms way-down.  I still try to live up to that pledge.

I take nothing for granted.  Those beating I received as a child never allowed me to feel important or take anyone or anything for granted, not even my life.  The pound of flesh that my parents extracted from me was hubris and arrogance.  They served to humble me in the best way they knew how. The beat my mischievous ass.

Gemeinschaft Versus Gesellschaft

After I left home, I never feared getting my ass kicked.  I did however fear embarrassing my parents or engaging in behavior which might cause them shame. That feeling has not gone away.  I am a victim of my working class upbringing.

My mother and father always said I would be a lawyer because I loved to run my mouth and never seemed to be at a loss for words.  My momma named me after her father and her brother, both men of the cloth.  Her secret hope was that I get the calling.  I landed some where in between devil (lawyer) and angel (preacher).

I’m a poet/writer/social commentator.  I have a social conscience tainted by blatant capitalistic yearning.  I want stocks and corporate dividends for me and health care for the lumpen proletariat.

I still wish to make my parents proud of me because I know they're watching and waiting.  I wish more men and women would honor the wishes of their parents or grandparents as opposed to acting out their media fueled fantasies.  The jails might not be SRO.