I Do It For Brooklyn...

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20)
If things go well, please don't expect them to go worse. The only thing that could possibly stop you now is your own tendency toward negative expectations -- which, thankfully, you've been doing quite well at toning down in recent years. You've learned something about trusting the unknown and the improbable. True, you meet the occasional asshole, but notice how rarely that actually happens. Don't decide for people who they are in advance. Keep your focus and feel the strength of optimism. As the next few weeks unfold, give yourself room to make a series of radical decisions that feed your heart, your soul and your hunger for deep contact.

My girl K always sends me my horoscope at moments when I need it most. This time it was around my recent 36th birthday. I never thought I would make it this far. Not because I was so stuck on this romantic notion of dying young, but because of the vast amounts of energy I have exerted in surviving up to this point. But anyway, I threw a great party surrounded by some amazing friends and to answer Stine's question: Yes, I did leave my own party.

Never to pass up a moment to reflect (cough cough)I ponder the rift between what I do and who I am.

The payment for financial security in this society is exorbitant. For a writer, it often means that you must put your work on the sacrifice board and ask it to stay there calmly while reality sharpens its blade, ready for the execution. Art is for children, it says. Writing is only for rich people (or kept spouses!) it taunts--not for little brown girls from Brooklyn! It kicks your teeth in.
Oh, the laments of the reluctant bourgeois--luckily I don't own any property (yet) so I can't claim full membership to that club (yet).
While soldiers seek out those that dare to declare liberation from the stranglehold of another type of colonialism in Tibet, I sit and whine about a decision that has already been made, a fate that has already been cast.

What is the most important thing I can teach my son?

To live a life of integrity--that is what these protesters have done. They have dared to go out and fight against forces that continue cultural genocide. While I do not in any way condone any deaths on either side: I do wonder about the actions that have taken place.
How many times have this scene taken place, around the globe, centuries old? Bullies come in and take you over. You're not allowed your own beliefs (because that is the very thing that has sustained you; you are forced (legally!) to forget who you are, to assume another culture's survival tools that translate to the burial of your Self in order to serve and perpetuate another's "power".
Would I stand up and fight? Would I dare and put my life on the line? Or would I cower and pretend to be like the very people I despise--under the pretense of survival? Would I say, "well, I've got my family to provide for. I need my apartment. I need a place to live..." (These statements and everything in this piece adheres to the tenet: The personal is political).

Or would I go out and put myself on the front lines, as so many of us have done on slave ships, dockyards, squares--only to crumble at the penetration of a bullet, only to be squashed under the wheels of a tank, only to be gassed into weakness. Would I do that? And what about those who have? Have they died in vain?
One of the things I loved reading about was about the whole May 4th Movement in China. I loved reading the works of Chinese Writers such as Mao Dun, Lao She, Lu Xun and Bing Xin. I loved getting swallowed up in the idealism and hope that these writers embraced: A better, more equal world for all.
I think about one of my favorite movies of all time: Bruce Lee's Fist of Fury, cause in it, every little black kid can identify with that scene when Lee destroys the anti-Chinese sign. Every marginalized person can identify with wanting to destroy those signs, those institutions that insist of crushing your existence.
I think about the Japanese occupation of China, in Korea. I think about the U.S. in the Caribbean and the Middle East. I think about the Danes in Greenland. I think about Israel and Palestine. I think about the music industry and Hip Hop.

How much of myself bleeds into the parallel farce we recognize for reality?

I miss Brooklyn so much with a sorrow so thick it's probably what keeps my insides together.

If I was in Brooklyn right now, I would be:
Locked up in my apartment, listening to Miles and painting yet another bad attempt at a chair, with the smell of oil paint and linseed oil...
I'd be eating roti and remember the go-go boots I once tossed out in haste, so many years ago (sigh).
I'd go up to Washington Heights for some Dominican food. I'd oil the roots of my hair with some coconut oil.
I'd go for a walk in Prospect Park and remember that evening when I returned there, somewhere in my foggy past, with my father's ashes in my tote bag and an odd assortment of friends (thanks Morgan, Stephanie and Jonathan)and I sprinkled my father's ashes along the path that we used to walk when I was child. We'd enter from Ocean Avenue, my little hand in his, walking toward the small, steel swings where I'd be pushed into the sky by the his love. When I get home that evening, my green sneakers are smeared white...

But I'm not in Brooklyn.
I'm in Copenhagen.

And I wonder how fucked up it would be to be caught up in some riot and become cannon fodder for all the international news programs. And I think my fate is fucked up?
--but I don't really think that cause it ain't.

So I'm a keep on trucking on...cause if that horoscope is right, which heck, you damn well never know--I got some radical decisions to make and it involves my integrity and putting my ideas where my mouth is (pocket too--); ain't no thing, as folks say back home, cause I'm in good company (right LD, KG & DB?)

And hopefully by the time I get to that chopping block, the blade of reality would have dulled some and my alter-ego and myself will join, as one, forever in harmony and the whole world will wake up and realize what it's really about--embracing the heroism inherent in being humane.

I'll redirect you now to another site: Guanaguanare, and I dedicate that to YOU.

I'm out...
the lab

P.S. I have personally appointed myself as the Cultural Ambassador for Brooklyn in Denmark. And Debbie Cowell, you the Cultural Ambassador for Brooklyn for the East and welcome back girl! It's been tooooooo long.

I'm gone for real now,
lab