The guns. Fuck, here’s that anxiety building up this morning in West Oakland just like any other. The biggest equal opportunity employer in my town is death himself. And he may be a young man, or he may be an old lady. His fingerprint carries no bias, and his victims are not necessarily chosen, either. Death around here seems non-judgmental. Homicide comes off as almost routine, and almost accidental. Or expected. Systemically proper. But hey, not me, please, I just moved into town although i dont actually have a home. Just staying in a room in a house near a park near the final bart station before San Francisco. I did not come here to kill or to die. But I am asking myself after three incidents in two months when guns were in my atmosphere and that means bullets too flew through the air. If I didn’t learn to duck quicker or just fall on the ground, no one else gonna care. Someone needs to sacrifice into the statistic. Fuck. I knew west chicago humboldt park for the better part of a decade, and never seen and heard so much gun pollution as here. Is this fated for Oakland? Hell, that’s no question to ask. So there are dumb questions. We gotta get our philosophical heads out into our arms and legs and work it out with each other, if we are gonna be a community, that is, a fair place to live….instead, the only bias going around is singular. Or should i say cingular? verizon? cell phones. The most expensive little gadgets around and everyone with a gun who doesnt already have one, is asking can they please snatch yours, sir, ma’am? … Give me your motherfuckin’ phone or get pistol whipped. Wow. Nightmares about the NRA ‘s new breed of hunters who don’t even know what NRA stands for, and who don’t even stand past four foot five. Looking at their atmosphere without much care, wanting to soothe the craving for a tech handheld key to the greater world. Predator stopped dead in its trax with a human hand-eye coordinate to pull it like a jaded sister to face its fate? I don’t think so. I may see a line and line up, but good luck catchin’ me cause its a rare occasion these days. But motherfucking guns on the urban streets in the hands of kids whose communities if not families are and have been for generations the victims of this particular heavy brand of manifest violence.
Fuck yes, I will. Shit, this is written commitment. The easiest and loosest kind, second to vocal harmony consensus. Because I am like this close (imagine i am breathing, and you feel the condensation hit your neck). This close to the panic? No. This close to meeting my maker gettin capped. Where are they coming from the guns? Where? Did the child soldiers of blood diamond thirst fedex them or use the standard rate usps? Everybody knows that none of these public or private entities which handle our package frenzied parcel post and pass and track and gift and get and get by giving and then humbly switch and render oneself the lucky receiver this holiday this wedding this celebration this event created simply to create an event, this business, this profit-centered, left or right of life-centered, Into the hands of junior high schoolers who are too young to not be enticed if not enthralled by the fantastic energy of a glock no matter where it came from. Maybe picked off a lifeless body who picked the wrong mark? See this shit is like hot potato, I think, cause the heat on the street in whatever form, nine mm or glock or magnum whatever, its slippery shit. The bodies that go cold behind it, pass theirs along to the next. The absent-minded adults who have a line on the trade, may subconsciously or consciously drift away from their ownership, cause its alot of energetic push and pull you sign up for when you sign up for such power. Check the psychology of power. The suction. The abuse. The remorse. Its a widely documented thing, the psychology of power.
Okay, back off it. No preaching. No convincing anyone nothing because anything i know today seems to wanna turn me over and waffle me, with butter and syrup, and its not pretty. Its pretty sticky. Alright, I’m a fucking MESS! I’m pounding down my fists like gavels on the ground, my bloody palms clasping shards of gravel in desperation, carving up the floor, the house, the door, anyone, any part, any way to be heard and get a real dedicated kinda response out of Oakland the living breathing city of Oakland, the life of her! Because to get Oaklands attention and to alter her natural course through the rocky ghetto fingers of International and Foothill and MacArthur, Telegraph, Broadway, and Market, means you grow new fingers with reach into the California deep pockets, the state with coffers the envy of many small nations and even large. To have that kinda reach is scary in a good way, like Occupy Oakland maybe felt in the spotlight of the atrocity of a microthinking fresh mayor’s mistaken implementation of violent confrontation sure as visceral as whatever small squabbles preceded the Civil War. You can look awkward and camera shy, but you cannot come off badly really, when you’re a chick just cracked out of its egg, or a fawn just up on its legs. Helpless maybe. Hopeless never. Emotional? For sure. Extant? Absolutely alive on the scene!
And that was how i felt actually in the wake of my traumatic moment in The Lower Bottoms yesterday, somewhere between Grand and Market Avenues, my hands clasping shards of gravel like yesterday when I was just out to handle my routine. Going to the Lake to collect my PO box mail. Hitting 7-11 for some food and drink. Seeing a couple of friends. Feeling the sun and the wind and I owed this dude eight bucks for a bike i bought off him the day before. The very road bike i was now riding toward his block when it happened. Another make way for spray moment. traveling from my room i rent out on Adeline (part of the bottoms) towards Uptown, on a fast road bicycle that’s right, ya, cause im a white girl and not new to the streets. No I don’t carry heat. I like to afford myself the luxury of flexibility, agility, and downright cooking speed matching up alot of guys simply due to the weight discrepancy. All almost six feet of me and a buck forty here in my thirties, wet with my sweat generous or plentiful like the tears the living gotta drop on the deceased like almost every day, cousin, can you believe it? I was taught something I would never forget on the streets of chicago, yes, something I carry with me, like it or not, thought it was kinda hard lesson to learn… Well, California may look a little more peaceful or easy with its vegetation and sun and almost perfect world conditions for what I consider wonderful, nature meet city, now get along! and they do, they do, it’s not all just surface, no, but wow! wow, now I wonder does oakland really make chicago look soft? Nah, never. I wouldn’t know cause my time under the Lake street tracks of the El was limited. Score and be gone mostly. Burned, scorned, score and be gone . Not alot of hanging about except in the warehouses the Polish kids snatched up at night and made mad music too. Bottles of brandy in the hands of one of two people. The first being the Pollock. Usually. But hey, back to this! Oakland where i have now been for almost a decade, too, so the timeframe becomes my constant and the context framed by my love of the urban aesthetic all over this country. But in two months, I been ducking out of the line of fire atleast three times, two of those three, the last two, being so close to home they had me in tears within the first five minutes post the chosen pull and recoil and run off before the berries show up. If they show up…
Ffuuucckkkkkkk-ing-yay. Can it be this type of shit happens every day? These kids are adolescents, teens, and they run in packs of three for a scout, or two with two handguns so what, they can do without a scout. Scout this motherfucking slug in your backside, bitch. The heat is clearly the way. And its the way of those jackin over here. And the way of those gettin’ jacked, too. And the prize so simple to snatch in this silicone moment clocked in data usage and overages, hotspots and tethers, roots and routes, ways and means toward technological superiority of handheld touchscreen brilliance outdone and done out and out for the love of free enterprise and development by the youth, really, because goddamn, if you line up a bunch of random baby boomers in a bar by age, for instance, you cannot tell me that atleast one of ten of them has never moved past a typewriter or a landline. By choice, by golly. There she goes, good old maid Molly. She’s happy sunk in her own carved valley of techlessness.
She might have been someone I could giggle over tea, just thinking about the holdouts. Cause I gotta laugh at myself for the dependency I have setup. My nexus was that which no one could side between, last year. I was obsessed. This year, it smooths the edges of my human error, or fills the gaps of my memories so nicely. It’s romantic, really. These apps. My phone tells me the beating of my heart. My phone is crickets and frogs and summer rain sending me to sleep at night. My phone is my flashlight. My phone is my compass. My phone fills in my memory gap. My phone only needs some money once a month, asks nothing of me yet from day to day receives more of my steady attention than most sentient life. My phone needs me to locate and make a pilgrimage to Molly, confess and humble myself, then with faith and without hesitation, chuck that nexus monster android addiction into deep still waters far out of reach. The second of three incidents I endured, involved me and my boyfriend ordering some converse shoes off Amazon, steady lost in Amazon on the Amoled screen scene on a bench in a park when two young kids with ageless heartless glocks cut us off on either side and stated their full intention to rob us of our backpacks and bikes. I guess it was the hesitation thereafter that caused us to decide to get up and fumble for one anothers bags and move (somehow, i cant say) away from them.
And as i hug the line a couple feet out from the parked cars on the side of a straight avenue parallel to grande so around 19th or so, i dunno, but I know where I am headed. Back to the dude sold me this nice light Japanese bike with alex rims and continental schwinns heavy on the spokes and hybrid rubber, reflecting whitewalls, old school shifting done on the drop bar with the goddamn bullets screamin out of them black steel barrels… i wouldn’t mind i’m just like you like them like us like all of us, just on my bicycle one day long after my old Impala protested our forward momentum or rather challenged this single track philosophy with a transmission ‘problem’ i could not address given my limited knowledge, connexions, cash on hand. My mechanic in jail serving half-time on some narcotics charge. Again…
So what? I got the electric koolaid acid test all over again, and yes im living here in california, so it synchs up nice, fits the cultural heritage aspect alright. Use it or lose it. Take the puppy in reverse all the way back east, to wake everyone up a little, you know, against the grain of go west, young man. go east, girl, go east in reverse. Cause reverse is all she got left in her, damn Chevy long gone now. Fuck. Only waking up i’m gonna do is waking up to more citations handed politely to my correspondents. The same ones who squegee the windshield to save my life in the rain. Wouldn’t be much use in reverse, except to see our T-boned ass handed to us on some midwest run of highway. Nah, ain’t any good.
those kids those young kids those young black white native latin equatorial tribal kids those kids got the guns with the guns… oh no on no oh no…. poor part of town here i know we know but that kind of dressdown of human life cut down of life so easy so clean for a bright little kid who one day got with friends old friends he know from way back like elementary like elemental like all know all and at least think so until the changes go so fast some cannot keep up and its okay…. but its not the guns the kids, the streets of west oakland, twenty twelve, under a black president the country and made in that shade, i knew we could do it! I don’t wanna look, no, i shield my eyes from the numbers in oakland this year. wow. because east oaklands been bad enough to generate protest and stop the violence marches up and down foothill and international boulevard. Well if there’s one sign of courage and redemption in Mayor Quan, it would be her willingness to stroll up and down the bloodbath avenues of east oakland to show a grassroots support for oakland in her entirety, all the neighborhoods get a walk through, not just fucking Piedmont, come on, this was what got her elected. But what a disappointment with the violent reactive immaturity she signed off on during the occupy movement’s movement. What a disappointment that these confrontations which became territorial only resulted in the lazy seceding of the land back to the occupiers who were not simply paid to walk the streets but actually lived on the streets, whether intentionally or via abject kind of recession into american homelessness. Anyway what i need to talk about today after my month of silence here on this fresh b-log which is evolving with me with you into something which wants my voice calls to me for my voice, has orchestrated some home for me here as i honestly am and in a style which comes straight from my heart at best and headtrips and skips back east and out west, like the ribbon curve of sound in an atmospheric song, reminiscing back to nature then kicked in the kidney with a bass boom and a cymbal sliding across a city sidewalk scraping by kinda jukejoint stirfry, diverse and diversified, quick and demanding with the high and low #5. gotta know how to count in order to survive. Or steal. Or talk your way in and out of your drama surrounds you. Or learn to walk around the potholes. Or learn to preach. Or to listen real carefully so they want you around. The ones who think they must be heard. Or it gets them off. Or mimes without an act. Doing talk therapy behind the mime troupe’s back. Calling it nothing, because they are mimes and reduced to silence. Some mimes are forced into the life, you know, and the survivors speak of this silence….as some sort of hanging violence that keeps them from disbanding. For fear they might get dusted. Or tested and busted. Not a mime in this time can turn up clean, you know, cause they keep all that toxic dirt inside their heads. By failing to vent it, they inevitably succumb to fiendish kinda lives. Coughing up curse words in the bloody mary morning. Boxing themselves in to boxes so invisible to us yet so tangibly blocking them from any kinda connection with us. Other than the giggle. The spectacle. The amazement. The taunting hatred. The reluctant toss of a coin into the hat… the closest any mime might get to a man or woman like you or me? is when the chalked palm slips invisibly unfelt into our hanger outers, and fucking pick us a pocket or two. Now try to sketch that white smooth face for the sketch artist and realize how you almost got felt up by a mime. Instead you only got taken for some odd dollars or coins or whatever. Well, that mimes gonna be sittin pretty on the redline tonight, passing over the bridge to the next bricked up college square where he or she can do it all again…. ah. despair. usually americans disappoint en masse, i think, but four years ago americans slapped real butter on homemade seven grain and served that shit up to my ears was my joyfulness, my tears i even shed to see Chicago my love for ten years of excruciating wonderful kind of suffering she was to me, very discernable though and always lights me up despite the darkness tore me up back then and there… well… ya, i cry all the time im a girl and all, but still this was tears of silver tears of platinum tears of telling the world fuck that racism lie we used so well with our triangle trade support of slaves on ships to be bought and sold and lorded over and made dependent upon and divisively disallowed into the very fruits of their labor on our lands… which were not even our lands just shook out another native tribe, often as easy as our terrible tribes ailments decimating whole villages of people so pure in some way they were unduly susceptible. Or if they showed a tougher brand, well, take them out with our muskets and shit. May be an advantage, but you’d want one too if you saw a tomahawk scalp some bitch or an arrowhead pierce the very heart of the man next to you eyeballs swimming like fish round the yolk of the eye before the sunset of life dawns upon them and recesses them back into the body, the spirit, the soul where they rest like a seal in the sand. Like a sculpture like a rock colored redwood to plum, with the sand like brown sugar stuck to the sides and melting into the porcelain to the touch hide of the seal seeking enough light energy to absorb so the solar powered swim to the cove would produce a half dozen five pound fresh shiners or catfish for to feed his family. Kids darting and diving and tricking one another like blind man bluff the way it was meant to be played. top notch by some of the most revered swimmers in the world. god if only there was a showcase 4 born swimmers? god if only there was a god. god if only there was someone so courageous enough to believe there was a god. god if only there was a technogeeked out of this world former dj current alien wondering aloud can anybody hear him. Him, her, Her… what it is it will be and never forgotten it were. endure endure my son. be a mountain strong like a mountain. yes. flow like a river. flow like the water you dynamic solo. you made of some kind of somethin or are you hollow? Will we witness you lead us, or even follow? do you subscribe to the society and make yourself dedicated to its maintenance? Do you secretly yearn to tear it all up like the asphalt and the concrete jungle drops your ankle to a twist, you hit the pavement after the fist? will you be that kind of warrior, or will we know the truth? We think upon you and pray. You gotta choose! It won’t be the ones you come upon, not the ones you left behind. You ride the trains and ride the rails, and choices will appear. Yourself you will find. May take a little or may take more than time you have kinda time. this is always fine. sad perhaps but sadness is compassion, sometimes i believe, empathic felt sense of where anyones potential joyfulness got reduced to something less. Happiness if you’re lucky to stop the bleeding. No tourniquet and you may see isolation and impoverishment come along. They love to grab your arms and sing a noisy song. Rattling of cans on the shoulder of some autobahn. Black forest. German origins. I feel my people in my obstinate strength. My endless tossing thoughts around the space in my head. My sexual lust for a fresh idea or anykind of communal enlightening towards something we all feel coursing through our veins, a new way to dance, a new expressed harmony with sun shadow space and the black and white rendering of every child’s face. Theirs thoughts that drift in every home of leather oil and cologne, thoughts of strong german men like boris becker, locating my very sweet spot with his pulsing pecker. Shit, thats about as erotic as my german inclination gets. Better back off back back dive down and come up california, with my french side intact, the huguenot in me is gonna exodus, thats right! i can go somewhere and may never come back. escape the persecution. do not tolerate shit. or only as long as it means more than shit, but when theres nothing left to grasp, hit the highway….hit the highway FAST!
K IS SILENT 