Bonfire

Late night writing. Hope you enjoy.


The afternoon was hushed, overcast, yet taut with excitement, a struggling prisoner gagged by the events unfolding before it. This was the last afternoon of the summer, the last time Micah would be at this house. He had one thing he wanted to do before he left. He wanted a fire.
   He had seen them before in the canefields, the orange flames tearing a wanton path through the stalks that would blacken and topple, helpless in the heated grip of the oppressor. He had stood at the side of the road, the excited cries of the other children he had come with drifting over his consciousness like leaves on the surface of a pond he had sunk willingly into. He had stood there spellbound by the power that was harnessed every year in the harvest season, and today he wanted to use that power for himself.
   He went out to the backyard, errant chickens scattering before his footsteps as he went barefoot into the grass. At fourteen paces he stopped and examined his tools. Three bundled newspapers and a box of matches. It was no jug of kerosene but it would have to do. All the trash was piled high on the heap, almost above his head, and he shoved pieces of paper into the crevices until he had exhausted his kindling. Finally he sat on his haunches and opened the matchbox. He tried to mimic the way his grandfather did it, with the stick at an acute angle to the side of the box, and failed with the first attempt. The smell of sulphur was in his nose now, and he wrinkled it as he tried again. This time, the flame blossomed and held its shape, a burning teardrop, as he considered what was going to become of this one spot of heat. Then, suddenly impatient, he thrust his hand forward, holding it under the comics page, smiling with satisfaction when the corner of the page curled forward as it started burning.
   He heard a door swing on its hinges, and looked back to see the neighboring house's back door swing slowly open. Their housekeeper peeked out timidly. Everyone on that street thought that she was mentally handicapped, and no one ever thought to step outside the walls of their presumption and verify it. So there she was, cast aside and disregarded at every turn. Maybe that was the reason why she said nothing. Maybe that was the reason she didn't go back inside as she saw the fire, tiny as an idea, begin to feel itself. She stood on the steps, wordless, and watched with the boy.
   The flame came into existence and felt for what it could consume. The newspaper came first, and was set upon with the desperation of a starving animal. The nature of it was simple, burn to survive. Yet, as it felt the sticks and paper under it, supporting it, its nature changed. No longer were the orange licks born of desperation, but now greed began to surface. On it grew, past the jeans and shirts the boy had piled on. He had been a long time getting this all ready, many trips to the house as the day had been born, heralded by the rooster with the bent comb. The flame tasted the cotton and polyester fibers, took them into itself and reduced them to charred tatters. The boy looked on and thought of the times he had seen those clothes come into the house for the first time, expensive apologies for violent incidents that went back to the custody battle. He could feel the flame going over the Jordans and suede boots the same way he felt his emotions over the years. His disappointment when the terms of the custody were explained to him. His father's fits of rage, fueled by tequila and frustration with life that was mostly his own fault. The flame grew bold as it went over the crumpled bills that had been stashed in the mattress, and the notes all went up with a rustling sigh that was almost lost in the low roar that his project had become.
     Micah felt the flame blow against his face and realised that he was very close now to it, and he reluctantly straightened to his feet, stretching upward as far as he could go. He knew he had been here for a while, yet he had to see it through to the finish. The couch cushions, stained by alcohol and laziness, seemed almost eager to surrender to the rage of the flame now. It was full, strong, and determined, and the boy felt something as he looked at it tear through the bedsheets with greedy, almost lustful abandon. Pride? No. Not just that. That was too simple. He thought about it, and eventually decided that he could not pin it down. The word he wanted was cathartic, but he would not know about that word til much later in life, and he forever associated it with this moment in his life. He watched the monster he had created shrug its mane of black smoke and roar at the afternoon skies, and he saw all the rage he had kept inside for all these years given shimmering shape. His eyebrows were long gone, yet he did not flinch from the heat as the wooden chairs crackled and collapsed in a shower of sparks. Why the housekeeper had not told anyone what he was doing was beyond him, and he looked back to see her still there, her mouth pressed into a thin line, refusing to look away as he stared at her. She nodded her head gravely, slowly, then returned her gaze to the fire, as he eventually did himself.
   When it finally went down to the cinders he turned his back on the pile and met her gaze one final time. He shouldered the bag he had packed last night and set his eyes on the road. Halfway down the road he saw the  pickup truck coming down on the other side of the road. He made no attempt to hide, and was not relieved when he was passed with no signal of recognition. He had no particular destination in mind, and yet he was unafraid.
  He had the fire.

From Yesterday to Tomorrow

I woke up on Tuesday with a feeling of dull pain. Nothing physical, mind you. And yet it was there. My friend messaged me before nine and I already knew she was feeling it too. We discussed it at length, and a few things about our conversation stood out. One was this quote: "I think I do this every year, just longer this year I suppose....cuz think about it, its been ten years. In that time we went to school, got jobs, found love, you got married, have a son. I'm engaged. And Kyle is like frozen in time."
   Of everything there, only one thing sat in my brain, candle burning away the darkness. Ten years. A long time by anyone's standards. At this point more than a third of my life. However, the phrase 'remember it llike it was yesterday' has never been more applicable.
   Kyle Caesar, or "Tweez" as we called him, was trying to make it back to class at school when his car malfunctioned and slid off the road. He made it to the hospital, but died on May 1. Looking into that coffin was the last time I have ever looked into a coffin, outside of my grandmother, and that took some doing. He had died in the car he had always wanted a scant three months after getting it, and it felt and feels very unfair. One of the more memorable moments was at his parents' house, when my friend Charles looked at me and said, "Why don't we go out and rob banks and beat people up and stuff?" When I asked why, he responded bitterly, "Because, nothing will ever happen to US...".  Yet, I feel that it would be a disservice to his legacy if all that I took from my time with him was how it ended. Today I choose to remember the things about him that made him so memorable all these years later.
   When I first went to secondary school as the poor kid from the small island and the people who would later become my best friends made fun of me, my skin was thin to nonexistent, and I was very upset. Kyle was the one who defused that situation and let me know that there was no need to overreact to good-natured ribbing. From then on, we were in classes together, Sea Scouts, swimming on Saturday. I remember him telling us about adjusting to having glasses, and how he took a shower with them on multiple times. The craving he had to drive that his father would later tell us was in his family. Going fast was in his blood, and his family raced quite often. I remember his father giving him a pickup truck to drive when he so badly wanted the Mazda RX-7. A normal kid craving racing cars would have blown up or sulked or reacted in some negative fashion. He drove it everywhere, making it do 180s on grass. I cannot think of a person quicker to laugh, and he rubbed off on everyone. When it was just us in school and I told him how I was stressing out about my SAT score, he cheerily told me about his lower one and laughed about it. He talked me through my stress, and by the end of that day I had adopted his views on it, and was much more casual.
   Ten years later, so many things have changed. I don't even live in Trinidad anymore. I have matured slightly. Memories don't change, though. I think the most significant thing I have done since then is learn not to dwell on the negatives. I can now use him as inspiration, use the fact that I still have a chance to go on for him as a motivator. I can smile because I know he would want us to, and so I will.






As I return to the heat and squalor of my room
I reflect once again that I am for once
Seriously, blissfully happy to be alive
My stomach hurts from playing with friends
The leather and cloth ball, once soft and friendly
Becomes a screaming meteor, shattering the world that is my ear
Pride surges like a tide, even as I stumble like a newly born bird
I shake off what I can and rejoin the battle
It seems that time stops for those brief moments
When the people I respect and look up to
Have their most cunning efforts thwarted by my actions
Even as I slide in the mud and taste the earth that supports me
Even as my muscles protest their unusual workload
I reflect in idle moments that many I love are under this earth
And would rend the dimensions asunder
To be able to feel a cramp, a bite, a cut
Would weep with happiness to have a scar to touch
So I accept the pain, my body and my place in the world:
A defender, sworn to carry on the hopes of my friends and teammates
As far as my body will let me, and then my soul must push forward...
Yes...today was a good day to be alive.
I wonder and wait for tomorrow....

An-Tie-Matter

I hate ties.

    Socks absorb sweat and make a buffer between the shoe material and your (stinky) feet. Underpants protect your rear from rubbing on polyester all day. Cufflinks keep your sleeves together. Hats can protect from wind, dust, sun and rain. Shoes, gloves.....every part of my wardrobe is earning its keep in the workplace of my body. Then we have the guy just there for the ride. The shameless leech who refuses to put in work, hides when the boss is around and takes your food out of the fridge right before lunch. The necktie. 

    Deemed so important in years gone by that there are (albeit satirical) books published about the correct way to fasten them, men have always been judged as soon as they walk out the door wearing a shirt without a tie. I think we can agree that no man in the business world dares leave his bedroom without one of these strangulation facilitators hung around his neck. Even men in such position of power as director of the BBC can't escape judgment. I have done research over the years, and at no point have I found a reason for wearing a necktie outside of "fashion". 

   Well I like practicality, and as such have fought for years against having to wear those things. There are ways to look formal without wearing ties. Suits like these collect dust by the wayside, and I fail to see why.

"Well, Dominic," the GQ gentlemen sneer, "it just looks better. Clearly your fashion sense is nonexistent."

So why is a tie fashionable? Why have we come so far, from having women wearing corsets and metal banded skirts, men wearing white powdered wigs and starched collars so stiff they could kill, to our modern fashions, yet maintain that wrapping cloth around your neck is the only way to appear professional?

"Well, Dominic," the clerk at Men's Wearhouse says wearily, rolling his eyes at me for the fourth time, "it's a way for a man - OR woman - to express their individuality."

   I'm going to have to disagree. You can make that case for body art and piercings. Even barbed wire tattoos around the bicep say something about you. Sites like Suicide Girls celebrate body art, and I'm sure many piercing sites exist where you can go through and not see two people exactly the same. When I look at a picture like this:

I cannot help but see how.......similar all the guys look. I see an amorphous mass of dark hues and cloth around the neck. Is this what the adult world is? Looking alike? Conforming to have a shot at a job? Thankfully, not everyone thinks so. Instead of using Google to look for ties, I looked at what Google thinks of ties. Seems a divisive issue at best. In a letter to the Financial Times which you can't read unless you subscribe, which is why I can't link it here..........Google's privacy chief spoke out against ties. In the quotes I saw, he seemed to think the same ways I do, even saying that ties constrict the flow of blood to the brain.

   Obviously he's trying to be funny, but in the moments of seriousness you can see the points he raises for regular t shirts vs suit and tie in the corporate world. I'm with him.

   This final article discusses clip on ties. I have gone this route a few times. Skimming through the article I kept finding objectionable material. He mentions cops and security personnel wearing clip ons to avoid being strangled. Common sense over fashion, I nodded and continued. Then I got to THIS:

 Similarly, people in factory environments who wear ties are also advised to wear clip-ons – in the unfortunate event that the tie gets caught in a piece of machinery, it will simply clip off, rather than pulling its owner into the machine as well. (Then again, why people in factories would wear ties I have no idea.)

So what are you saying, sir or maam? People in factories don't have to wear ties because what....only professionals wear ties? So factory workers aren't? What, working in a factory takes you off the list of people who can "express themselves as individuals" in such a way? Get out of my internet browser with that.

I hate ties. If you made it to the end of this you no doubt get that. I do not ask that if you like ties you change your mind. I simply ask that you seriously ask yourself why you like them, and if it was ever your choice.

Vigilante Injustice

By now, the entire world has heard about the bombings in Boston. I'm not going to use the bombers' names because that kind of martyrdom via social media is not what this blog is about. Neither am I going to get into an in depth discussion of the people saying Syria, Israel etc have blasts every day. What I am going to talk about....is Batman. Stay with me.
   Everyone knows who Batman is, his tragic past and his shadowy brand of justice. Everyone loves the idea of this masked badass going out at night and wrecking evildoers. Everyone snickers when the Gotham police refer to him as a vigilante and outlaw, because hey, he's the hero! Laws don't apply to the good guy! They are for the other pitiable mortals out of the panel. So when Boston runners were caught in the blast and the FBI was hungry for clues and CNN was very clearly not a good source of accurate info , the Internet decided to turn to the one source of information it should have doubted immediately. It turned to itself. Thousands of people on social networking sites like Reddit and 4chan donned their alter egos of "justice" and started scanning photos of the race and monitoring police scanners (which, honestly, I'm kind of surprised is legal). What happened as a result? Sunil Tripathi.
 
A young Indian male, dark skinned, missing since March. One reddit user made the logic leap, and immediately the wolf pack started howling. His name was never said on the scanner, and I have looked for files of the scanner mp3 files which you can listen to for yourself. It's not there. Yet, one person said the name, and in the spirit of "social media is better than policework" this man's name was posted thousands of times in relation to this tragedy. Hours later, the true names would come out, but in the meantime, the torches were lit, and thousands looking for someone to blame had their target. He was slandered to no end, vengeance was sworn. Even after the fact, people refused to apologize. Pulled this from a reddit thread discussing the whole fiasco:

   Even here in this thread I have still seen people today claiming the missing guy is involved - and in one shocking instance, blamed for disappearing. Specifically - kposh said -

"no one owes anyone an apology to this kid he disappeared that makes him real suspicious looking"

So what is left? Where IS this man? No one knows. His family has to deal with his month long disappearance and the fact that he was the most wanted man in the country for a while because of incorrect data offered up by the Internet Justice League. In addition to this, there was a second name being floated around. Mike Mulugeta. How did our brave heroes come up with this name? On scanner at 2:14 AM an official said, "Last name Mulugeta, (spelled out), M as in Mike, Mulugeta." Clearly a small clarification in spelling is a name indication. No one knew what this name was in reference to....a suspect? A house owner in the neighborhood? Some guy with Red Sox tickets? If his name had started with D police might have been told to look for Dog Dulugeta. These are the jumps in logic made latenight online. 

   

With the situation now resolved, no one cares to look back on what the net did or didn't do to contribute to this case, but it showed a staggering lack of professionalism and proved a couple of things to me. One, the public is a bad place to source info from at night. Two, people don't care about who gets run over in the stampede to be right and get a pat on the head. Being first with information is seldom being right.

Meanwhile Sunil's family is still looking for him. Don't try to find him. Last time we didn't let the qualified people do their job, he was identified as a murderer. Just let him be.

First Lap

Well, we made it.
   A year ago, I was sleeping on a hospital couch, wondering what life would have in store. My son had just been born, and after initial worries about low heart rate, they let him into the room with us. I worried extensively about his nose. He has what I suppose would be called a button nose, but days after birth, it was pressed into his face such that he was struggling to breathe every minute. I sat there in the early afternoon and watched his face, thinking that anything could happen at this point. He made it past that.
    When he refused to go to bed, and I realised as I sat on the couch at 4:45 am with him that I was living every cliche joke about parenthood that I had ever heard, I wondered how this was going to work. I am not super dependent on sleep, but I need at least four hours to soldier through the average day. So how was I going to manage this guy waking up every two hours? It took us a long time but we figured out that the secret was counter intuitive. The milk he screamed for after dark made him urinate, which filled his diaper and made him uncomfortable, which woke him up. So we weaned him off of that, and he started sleeping from 8 pm to 6 am. Another hurdle down.
    I realised that I had made it past some invisible hurdle every morning, as I looked down at him, he would look back at me and smile his toothless smile. Some cosmic karma accountant had checked my books over and decided that everything I had done in life qualified me for one more day with this guy. This little man who figured out how to take off his dirty diaper and threw it across the room, who scared the cats every time they came into the room, who still occasionally decides that sleep is for the weak and raises hell at 230 am. He is not easy to deal with sometimes, and I often remembered my old pledges to never have a son and have the karma of my younger self to deal with. Yet, he earns his place in my soul daily. His insistence on saying 'Da Da' even when asked to say mama is amusing and heartwarming. The moments when he would stop crying and start crying when I sang songs to him add up. I find myself constantly thinking of things I can teach him in the future, principles, games, sports, languages. Right now, he resembles a lot to me, but most of all, he is the embodiment of limitless potential, and I find it fascinating. Sure, he's barely twenty pounds and has a grand total of three teeth showing, but I'm looking down the road at the horizon.
   So, every day I think of what could have happened to him, and I count it as a victory. Obviously and hopefully we have a long way to go, and I plan to be running right next to him the entire way. Happy Birthday, Damian Matthew. Welcome to lap two.

The Language of Immortality

   Today the dawn brought with it dark news. Chinua Achebe was dead.
    When I was young, I prided myself on reading books adjudged to be too mature for my reading. I read Doris Lessing's Nine African Stories just as often as I read Samuel Selvon's A Brighter Sun. The people I hung around with, as well as older family members of similar mind, suggested I read the work of Chinua Achebe. I neglected to do so. Again, in secondary school. In 1999, while watching BET, I saw the Roots had released an album called Things Fall Apart. Again, I neglected to read. Finally, in university, I had no choice. We had to read it for class. I took it home and felt regret soaking through my brain. This work was excellent. So too his other books, Arrow of God etc. Today, he is dead. Yet, I would argue, he is not lost to us.
    He remains with us because of the questions he posed with his work. The eternal conflicts of old traditions and principles meeting with the new. The positive and negative effects exposed at such meetings, and a person's willingness to adapt or hold firm formed the basis of a lot of his work. We dare ask questions now about communication between races, between religions, between ethnicities. This man did it at a most unfriendly time.Africa in the 1960's was not the safest time for an intelligent Black man to be writing thought provoking literature that hit so close to home. In doing so, he became a banner under which intellectuals and the average man could both draw inspiration and knowledge from.
    Today, you will hear the names of countless prominent Black artisans and academics. You will hear them all praise the name of Chinua. The man who mentally shuddered in disdain at references to Africa as the "Dark Continent" and went to intellectual war with any and all who would refer to his people as savages. When no one else would, he went to very public war with the images presented in Joseph Conrad's Heart of  Darkness book. A direct (If lengthy) quote:


Irrational love and irrational hate jostling together in the heart of that talented, tormented man. But whereas irrational love may at worst engender foolish acts of indiscretion, irrational hate can endanger the life of the community. Naturally Conrad is a dream for psychoanalytic critics. Perhaps the most detailed study of him in this direction is by Bernard C. Meyer, M.D. In his lengthy book Dr. Meyer follows every conceivable lead (and sometimes inconceivable ones) to explain Conrad. As an example he gives us long disquisitions on the significance of hair and hair-cutting in Conrad. And yet not even one word is spared for his attitude to black people. Not even the discussion of Conrad's antisemitism was enough to spark off in Dr. Meyer's mind those other dark and explosive thoughts. Which only leads one to surmise that Western psychoanalysts must regard the kind of racism displayed by Conrad absolutely normal despite the profoundly important work done by Frantz Fanon in the psychiatric hospitals of French Algeria.
Whatever Conrad's problems were, you might say he is now safely dead. Quite true. Unfortunately his heart of darkness plagues us still. Which is why an offensive and deplorable book can be described by a serious scholar as "among the half dozen greatest short novels in the English language." And why it is today the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses in English Departments of American universities.
   
     Today, you will hear many people laud this man. You will probably read about Maya Angelou praising him. Nelson Mandela once said that when he was imprisoned, he read Achebe and "...the prison walls seemed to fall away." You may not hear about the opposition he met when he published his books in English and was at first reviled by his peers for using the "language of the oppressors". Though he recognized the argument, an issue for non English literary figures worldwide, he persevered, and the widespread appeal of his work bore out his decision.

   The man was filled with golden quotes. Asked about the fact that he never won a Nobel prize among his many accolades, he responded "My position is that the Nobel Prize is important. But it is a European prize, not an African prize..." The one that stays with me the most is this. "The man that would hold his brother down in the mud, in order to achieve this, has to stay in the mud himself."

   Today, Chinua Achebe is dead. His work, his tireless spirit, his philosopher's attitude to life and its inner workings....these things may never die. So long as his teachings, his trailblazing for literary figures in Nigeria and worldwide live on, his legacy cannot fall apart.

The Art of Terror

First, let me say that I am terrible with horror movies. Really bad. My mother would routinely laugh every time I left the room and went to bed rather than watch X Files with her and my cousin. The one time I let my friends take me to the movies for my birthday, they chose The Grudge. That was the last time my friends took me to the movies for my birthday. I watched "It" through a crack between couches. Yet I have read probably 90% of Stephen King's books. Yes, that Stephen King. "From A Buick 8" peeks at me from the shelf as I speak. So why am I a fan of these and not the movies?
   The stuff I am drawn to is not shock. After all these years, stuff jumping out in your face is still effective. Annoying, and effective to the point of feeling cheap, but effective. If I know that throwing something in your face is the easiest way to get you to jerk, why would I do anything but that? It has led to some of the most successful Halloween movies being simply a guy creeping in a dark hallway, a shape moving quickly, a deadly attack and a scream. That's fine, and if you make those movies, keep raking in that money. What I am drawn to is suspense. We must refer to one A. Hitchcock on this subject. He believed in the art of keeping one drawn into the scene emotionally with his stories rather than just scared. It was more of an emotional spectrum. This interview is one of the best ways to explain how his creative process worked, where he explains how he would set up a scene. In another interview, he explains that, to him, the actual facts of the movie are meaningless. What is important, he says, is how the story is told.
   Which brings us to Stephen King. What he manages to do with his books is, bluntly, genius. He melds the otherworldly with the mundane at such a level that it becomes less scary and more fascinating. Concepts that would otherwise die pretty quickly in anyone else's hands become magic. I think part of it is because he works in so much day to day life that one cares about the individual in general, and not just how grisly of a kill they will make. It is a fine line to walk without losing the edge of the story or becoming cheesy, yet he pulls it off time and again. Put a person you meet for five minutes in danger, yes, your instinct would be to be concerned. Put someone you have known for a year in the same danger and it becomes way more crucial.
   Even in games, some companies are able to generate this emotional response. Mass Effect 2, for example, universally regarded as one of the best games of our time, if not all time, earns such platitudes by taking a page from Hitchcock. In the face of death on the horizon, day to day activities take on new meaning and are soaked in suspense. ME2 works this by telling you at the start that at the end of the game, you will be going on a suicide mission that no one expects you to come back from. You have to build a team of agents that will work with you, and sorting out their personal troubles before the end feels very ominous, like the prisoner on death row clearing his conscience before death. By the end, when people start falling, it becomes much more significant that these people are dying.
   However, death is not the only tool of the artist who wishes to create suspense. The Twilight Zone is one of my favorite TV shows, and while they tend away from Hitchcock style techniques, their ability to create tension without death is a testament to their skill. Probably the most well known episode is Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. Young William Shatner sits at the window seat of his plane and watches as a gremlin tears at the wing, yet disappears whenever he tries to point it out to anyone else. If the gremlin were on the loose in the plane biting people, I would have lost interest rapidly, as would most people. However, it is done far better than that and by the end you are wondering if it was a nightmare or reality. I won't spoil the end itself for you but it is a fine piece of fiction.
      So, going to watch a movie? Pause for a while and check out some Twilight Zone, or some old Hitchcock movies. More than one way to get the blood pumping.