Half A Day In The Life
. . . in which the owner sets to one side his long-established rule against diaristic ramblings in an struggle to answer the troublesome question: “What do I do all day, anyway?”
6AM: roused from unusually reaching far down sleep by the beat of drum. First question of the day: When you be awake up with a song already playing in your noddle–for me, late, Springsteen’s “The Promised Soil”–was it playing in your head-piece while you were still sleeping, or did it lawful start up when your soul switched to Daytime Programming? If a canzonet is playing in an insensible mind, is it playing? One of Vitality’s Tiny Unknowables, I judge with uncertainty.
6:15: During bathroom call upon, remember that I have some new New Yorker covers to put on wall. Started that a pair years back, bored with vanilla wallpaper. Only a few spaces left now.
Put on coffee, let dog out, awe how mundane is that? Thermal already and looks of a piece rain. Get written instrument from yard, today’s tiny bundle of bad word about earthquakes, cyclones, martial juntas, tornardos, speculations about worsening pass between the wind and patterns spawned by global warming. Two mid- advanced in life columnists in DMN captivating in dialogue about family this week. One ebon, one white. Struck by the oneness of the conversation; why don’t blacks cleanly up their act and quit having unlawfully begotten kids vs. why don’t whites set free making one loudmouthed preacher rest on the feet for an entire breed. Been there, said that. From Gatsby: ”He was aye nibbling at the edges of sour ideas.”
Much more excellent was yesterday’s fragment from syncol Leonard Pitts about how civil correctness originally meant to cover minorities and women positively stifles pressing out and makes us all use less of our exemption from restraint. Reminded me how PC fears kept me from pushing two ideas I had last year, fearing that PC meisters at DMN, KERA, sundry mags would ponder I was racist if I pursued them.
Exemplar One: During the massive coverage of last year’s Jena, LA asseverate marches, in which thousands of overturn blacks descended on this diminutive town to assert alleged injustices, one front serving-boy pic showed three hugely fat atramentous people, two women and a man, each going about 300 lbs, holding signs and dazzling at a skinny, dried-up hoary redneck from Central Casting. I be undetermined the photog meant any remark, but I couldn’t succor but notice that in one faculty of perception at least, these black nation were living, hulking test of American advancement. In the race for caloric mastery, for sheer intake of corporeal wealth, they had far outstripped the bony Hoary Master they had advance to confront.
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