PR, Personal Brands, and Self Presentation

"Why do we hate this place so?"

Peter OConnor/

and that reminds me of a question my cousin asked of his aunt and me last night at three o'clock in the morning...coming home from pan, about the energy of a place, and does it in fact affect what is experienced there..like pan in laventille on the streets, why do people say it is so different and better best than pan on the avenue

my cousin answered about three levels up from the core of the truth of the answer, when it was all just foundation, and focused on spiritual orisa stuff. but it was plain and simple the energy of the land, the hill, its life, and story beyond, before and apart from any of its inhabitants. and what all that gave birth to and since. that folk would experience even when and if they do not know and cant language, name it.

12:12

is the time post meridian when i take up my phone to view our threesome last night. i had such an interesting day into evening last night. i had epiphanies and revelations, heard deep abiding lessons from the sharings of others. got sad. had fun. came home way too late. wake up cool, with lines writing in my head, cute comments about how being smart is a curse and being educated just trolls life, and how i wanted to write a book about detoxing a life, and start a new journal. i realize to an extent how much I have let life affect who i am, change me, i realize how much trauma I dont process and just pack away so i can continue sailing. living and moving on. I guess that is the strong resilient way/ and i see how far i have strayed from my pod in behavior and utterances. it is like i have some form of turrets. i feel ashamed in their presence, but as everything else, it is complex, cause i hear how i also defy their imputing characterization on who and how my life made me that they have no knowledge nor tools to comprehend, let alone process in any compassionate way, so I get back to square one, gtfoh, at precisely the block i wish to move away from. the speaking and writing of things my folk would never even think of,

but is that true? Cause I wake up this morning and after all those emotional hoops and navel gazing, i realize, I am only beating myself up because I am so different. that i dare not be quiet, that i am so far removed and away from the culture/ and perer's line about us not 'fighting for our independence" there is that issue again..about energy. what energy is given to this place and its people if they never had to fight not even for independence, then encounter a fighter warrior like me. and hear my cousin say, "daddy taught us that how we did not have to fight for everything, anything' that everything is not a battle, and how she downplays conflict" it was deep. all at once I heard both the wisdom and the madness in that approach and way of being/ I recognized it as all too slave, statish and colonial. subjugating and self erasing.

i wake up realizing aint nothing wrong with me , maybe, i am not as twisted, neurotic or damaged as I think. I dont have a life to detox and reconstruct. I just dare to be, and the current MM would write fucking in the midst somewhere, even when she says she has no interest to be nice, it just sometimes jars people for no reason...so who do i want to be with? folk who do or folk who dont? they both doing the same nastiness behind closed doors and in secret, but one pretends. and what is all this about language, i find it such a fuckery, a fraud, pretend to be decent cause you dont curse, but all the while you do other vile and ugly things? how does that work, where? beyond planet earth

i recognize that about me. i have no secrets. what you see is what you get. and folk are recoiling against that level of bold exposure.

 

then they are aghast at my dare to call folk out, and make a record of their deeds, and publicize their ugly. It is okay for them to do as they wish but for me to mirror and promote their PR and brand, fuck them up by their own hand, I become the problematic, how does that work? from what book and manual that tenet? the same slave colonial take what you get and suffer silently procedure?

i need to give myself a break. I need to have these folk back up off from me. and I need to elevate to a different vibration. and create a different life too. I readily admit, my coping mechanism of the last three years have coarsened me past where i would prefer

i pondered it all day and thought how lovely it would be not to engage my many haters, how not to smash my one enemy and archnemesis the turd. i literally think of ways to take her out and believe you me, it would be a national, community, global good deed. I swear. too many people have too many vile stories about that creature. her own son hates her. and i am the pinnacle of everything she wished she was and had, even the love and adoration, untouched and unrequited by me, of her man, so she hates me so. when you are the pinnacle of the form. there are things only you can do, they sent you to do, but who would see that, especially them who even at sixtyfive are struggling and reaching to find and attain legitimacy and status by academic degrees from community colleges or more appropriate, virtual universities...the places you or anyone you can get can write anything and you get a degree conferred. fraud papers.

life is way too complex to clarify and package.

ode to cedric orlando buckley

sick fuck lame dick mfers will have ex wives who want them destroyed. . it goes with the territory, all the pieces fit and link like a rubix cube,
everything become signs unexposed except to the wizened one
the sketchy, jumpy, spotty, marginal academic not a career,
the make believe country hick relief police,
the delusions of grandeur
the lies
the neglected untrained deficit boy children
and potential investors who leave scampering when they realize the pathology of the individual

i mean, the cracked windshield, patched together, trunk brimming dirty filthy junk car encapsulates everything about such a character and their pathetic life.
they are such ignorant dogs they did not know they who they say the could and would save, was actually living the life of sand, sea, palm trees and the lime of riley
when my disgust extends to innocent children you know you are below the septic tank
#dontgoorlando
#thethemeparkoffakebrokendownrides
#flashbackofaclosecall
#uglynigga
#truthandtellcommisssion
i will preach the gospel, and testify since my friend said to me last night, things are finally turning around for you.
you shall not escape quietly into silence
your wet paper of respectability will be destroyed
and you owe charmagne money you louse

 i was and am not that badly off
but you my dear are the big reveal: Pathetic

`
i imagine the family is a replica and expansion of the glass menagerie... a range of wobbly mentally ill sick folk who pretend they are all well/ replete with a niece involved in fraudulent financial arrangements and all remain silent and act as if nothing is happening as shits hit the fan
#classicmadness

Time and Chance

{what will become of me?}
is the thought i had before I awakened, feeling a how, of vulnerability, perhaps shame?, embarrassment for one who does not get embarrassed, whatever the sensation was it was of the idea that I should not have ever had to ask that question in the life I thought of who i was and what i was living.
but i do,
for so many reasons it is unbelievable
even if I did not have to ask for my own independent context and condition of languishing in unemployment, and how long can i do that on a boutique celebrity, leisure life standard> it has been six years now, and ongoing. and i am and have grown tired of the scenes, the faces, the location. how people do the exact same thing, all year round, on a cycle, for their whole life time is beyond my capacity to embrace.
when will my situation breakthrough to a new dispensation, reality and experience, to elevate, evolve, become...more , different and better? "what will become of me?"
but just last night alone,
a woman in my neighborhood who would lime with us from time to time, she is a party hard, older lady, she goes all out on her lonesome, not caring of anything or anyone. seems she was in st. ann's for nerves. she just said hospital to me, I guess i missed the clues, and everyone called her mad prior, but not me, I just thought she was a bit of her own vibration. well she is worse now. she hardly moves her neck and face and lips. she is stiff. she does not smile. she was asking us to buy her food. and said she had to eat it out cause her family will wonder where she got money from, and that struck me. to live so. but what was odd is that she could not open bags, and caps for her self, so see me there are matron, setting out her food, cleaning up after her and when she was leaving she was so grateful and said thank you so many times. and i had to tell the folk around, be compassionate , cause they were screwing up face, asking why she liming and sitting with us. trinidadians always on a scene boy. then an old man looking on said her father long time did not like black people in the area, she is a reds. sigh. so many dynamics people live and labor under. so many stories. and i wonder how she might be paying for the sins of her father. "what will become of me?"
then as I think of the legitimacy of that question, I think of Darron, a post of Ozy from mid july resurfaced and the last person to like it was Darron, so his name is prominent, and i flash back in time to the days and see how he was alive and moving, and then in a matter of days or weeks, who knew he would be no more. that is a peculiar thought to me. to look hindsight and count back the time/
the idea that you are living and vibrant today and may be gone dead cold tomorrow. that. "what will become of me?"
and it is not just him. valerie belgrave . at seventy. so many people are lost to their old age, dont get a chance to have it. I find that is another form of life robbery. just like children who die are robbed of life? then mature people who die too young are robbed of old age and that season, and purpose and role. and it is not just them that are lost, the future and next generation are for a greater deficit for their absence. in the last days chronicles, does it say that people will be lost of their wisdom years, to be crone and old man? "what will become of me?"
liming with people complaining about zika, in the midst height and throes of it, with red eyes, couples who probably have not accepted that it is said to be sexually transmitted.and i wonder what of these people ...to be walking around as living carriers even as they appear healthy and well. is scary as shit. it is the ignorance that i see that stuns me, for its possible unfoldings.."what will become of me?"
what will become of me>
good morning

Truth, Damnation, Reconciliation and Resignation

"you have impressive qualifications, but to be honest you have the wrong color, and you're a female, so expect problems."

[Aneka Nicole

12 hrs ·

"Years ago, when I just graduated from University (undergrad), I worked in the POS city corporation's office as a relief draughtsman, in the city engineer's office.

(well i didn't draw shit, but that is besides the point) One morning while reading books on construction contract law, that i brought with me to pass time in the office, the chief valuator observed my book, came over and asked about my qualifications. needless to say we ended up having very long conversations on a daily basis. I guess he felt he wanted to enlighten me.

one of the things i remember him saying was "you have impressive qualifications, but to be honest you have the wrong color, and you're a female, so expect problems." well...heh.

One of the more interesting conversations I had with him related to property ownership in the CBD of port of spain, and by extension expansion into suburbs of newtown and woodbrook. it was eye opening, and revealed to me the status quo of this country, why it is the way it is, and why it would possibly never ever change.

now i see a whole lot of debates on fb, opinions of all kinds, and guess what? the narrative has not changed one bit. it flows through every single thing. it feels kinda like that scene in the matrix when the morpheus and neo have the red pill, blue pill discussion.

for a oligarchy to exist, there must be a permanent underclass to feed it. give some the illusion of upward mobility and you keep the masses just where you want them."

which spurred me to respond thusly:

{ the cost to country and in personal lives due to this is mindblown, and pisses me off not that it happens but so many of us sit back and watch this shit happen and say and do nothing, often refusing to help when we could}

because i see the hypocrisy of people/ i see people who could help and choose not to. who could stand in and say this is not right, or better yet, when you have the power to change, stop and hire someone so they are not bastardized despite their investments and attempts to being functional in a society

and right after this post, is this...this is what i am talking about.

-------------

[Justin Phelps

16 hrs · San Juan, Trinidad and Tobago ·

"About 15 years ago I lost many friends because I thought, and said, that an anti-crime initiative formed after a murder in Westmoorings was selfish,hypocritical and prejudiced, because the people forming it had been silent about murders occurring everywhere else in the country. I probably lost a client or two as well. I was right then, and I'm right now. God forbid they kill a 9 year old in Westmoorings tonight. I happened to read this this morning: "It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene of sorrow; the evil is not sufficiently brought to their doors to make them feel...." Trinidadians need to start taking everything that affects other Trinidadians personally. Then we will see change. Or just wait until it reaches your door, which it will, rightly."]

----------------

third interesting status in a matter of minutes. all sequentially flowing in my stream

["...so the apocalypse is somewhat bearable. And at least I get to eat chocolate in the process."

Jill Lian Goddard

2 hrs ·

"What made us civilized humans so dumb in the particular flavor of today? What made us swallow, with such enthusiasm, any bull that corporations and politicians and religious leaders hand us? 'Open your mouth' they say. And obediently, without so much as a blink, we chew and gulp plastic, packaged health products, trends, celebrities, branding and a set of stuff which, while it may be fun and the way we adults play, can't really be taken seriously can it? I watch myself incredulously while I purchase byproducts of industries, especially the petroleum industry which will sell us ANYTHING to not have waste that is uncommercialized. I see people, whom I know and love, producing and peddling this snake oil and making sure that the industries run efficiently in their destruction.

How do I step off? Are the zero waste, produce/consume local, chemical free food production systems in which I participate enough? Are the groups that I form, organizations which I lead, visions that I develop, projects that I undertake enough to balance the destructive Great Wall of Civilization that others nonchalantly construct as they go about their day?

I think not. I am resigned to the collapse not because I'm a doomsayer but because I have a small amount of intelligence and logic still at my disposal. But massive crashes are better than crashes that resonate to infinity. (And do I need to include a kitten/dolphin/baby picture so that FB's algorithm allows this post to be seen and some of you bother to read it?)

Off to an exciting day building resilience for all my lovely fellow Caribbean human and non-human beings so the apocalypse is somewhat bearable. And at least I get to eat chocolate in the process."

==============

it is Jillian's last line and few words that give me context to the two previous posts.

I read: the apocalypse is here. one of its indicators are those like me, who spent blood sweat tears and youth to become and make something out of a raw self, only for it to be despised, resented, spit on, maligned and sidelined. almost a life destroyed if you let it, if you dont confer something else, even if that is doing nothing but navel gazing, dreaming, conjuring, liming, interacting, engaging..no productivity that earns you a living or income. no home of your own, no studio to make your creations and innovations... but you do what you can and must to make it bearable"

How does one stream provide this much perfection in sequence?

And we not done yet. Aneka still writing

The Truth of my life in Trinidad. The statement of the malaise by the privileged. And it is funny to me, cause i read the commentary and the posts and I wonder if people are aware enough to integrate and include aspects that are so easily overlooked. Like would Justin realize part of his post concerns the professionally skilled yet unemployed, or is it as I have experienced, folk only know and notice about that after it happens to them, never seeing it before. and like i said, I pass through many who could have done or said or offered something and chose not to, silence instead.

Very interesting

And then the statement of the truth of my coping.

i love moments of integration

Eddie Maven and Art Studio Dreams

Maven Huggins

5 hrs ·

feel like i am standing on the edge, literal edge of a precipice, by my twinkle toes, and reaching out into the vastness beyond me, and just right after my fingertips is my breakthrough...of and for everything I want
but. but . but...

Edward Bowen: " too much energy now spent in the minutae cognitive analyses of that "precipice of possibility", go get a studio and in that breakthrough creative disciplined space, jump the fuck off the precipice into the vastness - lock down that intelligence and bring that energy into concentrated disciplined thinking mind mapping creating, painting, planning publishing writing connecting , "making", it is office laboratory kitchen one room one small house - go get that space and do not look back"

Maven Huggins pay for it with my good looks

Edward Bowen: " no excuses, plan, visualize it, go get it, the money comes as the vision is brought ever stronger into focus - if it's a combination of looks, charm, lock down a space for a couple years, make a body or two or work and sell that individuality, as it is made and as you plan it so"

Edward Bowen this is what artists do

Maven Huggins i do thank you for keeping pushing me though. I do. love you for it!@

Edward Bowen: " you're an artist, get to work, the thinking never stops, link it to processes to produce "things" of art, "stuff" - plan it - many a lesser able mortal has done it, lock down an apartment at a reasonable rent, turn the whole place into a studio with bed in a corner, small eating cooking facilities, lights water, fill it up with what you make, invite your people, network that interior buzz. You have analyzed this environment, this life, for nigh thirty years, now turn all this into art and creative product, sell it, and as Kwesi Powers Juice Stewart and I used to remind each other, "make a million"! Why the fuck not, got anything else to do? All that altruism of sincere thought, bring that home into the laboratory and fuse it, compress it, boil it the fuk down, squeeze it together and see what comes out"

Maven Huggins i did see an apt i want. it is $8500.lol

i wish i could print this page

 Edward Bowen: " nah, too expensive, get a large two bed or small three bedroom house/apartment in your area or around PoS general area for 6000 if you look in papers hard enuff"

Maven Huggins: " do you know, I think it was this morning or yesterday I woke up with the idea to sell everything I have: my estate as it were, my trove of writings: poetry, essays, journals, recipe books, the art on the walls, the unframed ones, my ancestry jewelry, my memoir, my collection of photos, my travelogues...for a few million as it is all raw material for films, books, essays, giving raw content to be made into something, brands, products

and using that money to do just this: studio and to fly...

but of course that was a dream. cause what person will presume value of that material, unless they are so zeitgeist and magical to see what as yet does not exist?"Edward Bowen: " save that 2 grand for utitlities water lights transport communications"

Edward Bowen : "sift thru all that stuff and have a sale at your new studio, generate some cash - most of that stuff you have/describe above, cannot be sold realistically or in a hurry to kickstart"

Maven Huggins: "that 8500 was to live on a mountain side and look over the ocean\/ but yeah $ for utilities would be better if delusional me wasnt dreaming of fantasies if the car would sell that would be a start"



Edward Bowen: " not a ? of "if", count your losses, sell the fucking thing as is, get the money flowing, don't analyze, don't look back"



FUND ME?

Sell Everything Disney Stories

I wake up as if i had not slept for days prior. serious slumber

and feeling as if i can go back to sleep/ but as soon as I wake, the thought occurs to me that i should sell everything i own, but not like a normal sale...a sale to some one monied, a patron, an agent of some kind, connected to other talent and institutions that can make something with it. it was all my legacy jewelry. and the more i think about it now, the more i really feel a lot needs to be broken, ended/ let these new beings go on into the lives they wish to build, but let them do it with not a sliver of who came before them./ they have no knowledge of them anyway, and their every being is against the value systems of the earlier generations.

though in recent weeks margaret has taken to tell me how my mother broke the "pristineness" of our family by having a child out of wedlock, and her father, the literal overbearing, all controlling throne and patriarch of the family, went against his own mythology, his own iron fist, his own sternness as the big police serious man that he was and accepted her, it , me and told her she dont need to bother about my father, he dont need to be part of this family (my father was on shit i believe. i dont know. i was not there, he did tell me he waited for me to be born to know if i was his though. told me that in my teens and of course he proved to me to be on prime shit)...and so margaret says after marina, there were others, marjorie, merle. and now mandy has reached the pinnacle of two children, two fathers, two different names...all the things unheard of in this family, and i heard how margaret was just imposing and widening her sense of what she was taught. and likewise me, grew up knowing that was not possible or the things to do though my own mother did the exact same. all weird actually. cause if i could go back and change my life, I would have two children, two different fathers, but i am also glad, standing here, i dont. its like i want the children, and would wish to change that, but dont prefer to have the conditions under wish they were presented. that too is weird and complicated.

but just as i pine for children now at this stage,

I have some kind of feelings about my lineage, and the blessings of theirs i have now in my possession, I see it need not be passed on or distributed to anyone. i am making the call that would be a further negation of truths that I hold dear. and indicate all the things that have died in these last sixteen or so years, or even longer.

but the sale and money.

i at first thought of a million for my writings and like $500K for the jewelry. but I realize that is way too cheap. if it was produced.

my one book, Ant Bites alone, its memoir. then turned into a movie.

Then my decades long of journals from 1990 and my travelogue.

Then my books, chaps, and compilations of poetry, there are nine volumes. My UNPost.org blog and all my other professional essays published. Then my dissertation. Someone else can rewrite that right now and do damn good by integrating all the revolutions these intervening years. published book for sure that would do well internationally. Then there is my art and all that can be done with it, via ArtPost. school, paper and stationery products. Then my cache of photographs. OMG> I even underestimated the trove

This has got to be a good $5-$7 million TT

it is just raw material. like gold, ore and oil

and what it can be turned into is where the money is at.

How about that?

the world has gotten to the point of buying genius, creativity, brand and competence in raw form, 

and i think to sell these things as It has been on my mind for many years: what to do with my life works. Things arent happening for me. I do not have children to pass them on to and even then, they might be trifling despite all i tell and teach them and be like all others and frivol away what they are given, i think even just like me. I frivoled away a lot of money in my youth. thinking I would always have and surely generate.

it was an idea to just dispense with it now and not after i am gone.

to make and find use of it now even if it is dollars to continue living

and now i think, if i was able to do that in any way at all, it would be the money to go on, live quietly, even have a child if i so choose, living very modestly, we being bush people, nature people, builders, nothing spectacular, no scenes, just survivalist mode and function...my child growing their own food, knowing how to build homes, running electricity, building sewage systems.  making valuable the sun and the wind. simple

 it is how i emerge from sleep with answers

whether they manifest among the lessers, that is an entirely different question

Laws, Attraction and Vacuity

i rolled my eyes all through reading this but the truth is several of the points are true for me., right now

i have found money twice this past week

you know i see 11:11 and 1:11 all the time

like i just had to adjust my time and the correct time according to cable was 11:11

my intuition is on fire: i look at people in scenarios and situations and can read a silent dynamic or the backdrop story, or can see the end of an engagement. like i did friday, watching a female friend of mine and her new beau. they not gonna last long. i also read a storyline that a mutual friend later confirmed.

i remember too an incident when i first met mark. I had gone down south to deliver an original prayer I wrote for a book reading and signing at sapa. and after I was done, opened my phone precisely looking for a call from mark, and in that instant , phone in hand, he called, but i was so deranged and confused, I thought i pressed the call button and immediately hung up. it was one of the incidents that started our sever...he thought i hung up on him and i never got a chance to tell him what really happened. how odd is that. this weekend before this article, I was thinking if this was another proof that i am being spiritually blocked, if i do in fact have a spirit attachment that blocks my life in various ways. this scenario and experience with this particular person is one such point in the scheme of that theory.

my totems appear all the time:

my owl flew by afar off from me at dusk on friday, i was able to point to it, i thought it was a hawk, but my friend said, that is the owl. now i need glasses eh. then tonight at my cousin's house, his wife bought their toddler daughter, Reagan, a turtle!

i see rainbows all the time, but I would like to see so do other people, even stevie

my sleep is largely restful. but last night i had one crazy ass horror of a dream, and could not figure out why. i and a whole bunch of people saw my close girlfriend get her throat slit by a man in a park like adam smith square but a bit bigger. she was fussing for something, and people were trying to tell her to hush and one of the people in the crowd, who was known to her and us, just moved next to her, threatened her wtihout saying a word, holding an open old fashioned huge shaving blade close to her face, and before she could comply, he calmly moved the blade across her neck and everyone scattered. even me. started running, but i saw the slit as clear as day though i was fairly far away. i immediately woke and tried to figure out what the fucking hell was that. I have and had no answer. i dont usually have scary dreams, never anything this graphic. it was crazy. i tried to think if it was all that lamb I ate at dinner at 8:30 but that was not that late.

now what has not happened and does not happen is the synchronicity. I dont meet people who are in my vibe, and certainly not any who can do anything for or with me, and if you cue the post i wrote 40 mins ago, on "I have no understanding...", you will see how it fits perfectly into this dilemma.

if i am so powerful, and in tune, and I am, why is my life in such disarray , so far out and off from my highest vibration and appearing/functioning/self fulfillment, getting all my desires, even if just a few of them. but for me, none comes, except I seem to be this perfect specimen of complexity getting ever fat is all

http://sarahprout.com/7-signs-that-the-law-of-attraction-is-working-for-you

Family Clan OUTING

i have no understanding of why or the worth to be wise, develop wisdom, have a keen sense of observation, seeing human nature after I lived in a bubble of ignorance and naivete.

none at all.

but i see things

what goes around does indeed come around

people do and dont do for others cause they just dont care . dont care about the person, dont care about right, wrong or morality

i see the silence and participation of others out of cowardice

i see people standing for nothing and if you have the balls to state what is wrong, folk will rage at you.

i see how twisted people are, and they make assertions on others not based on the person at all, but on their madness. projection

it is like folk create a scenario in their head, singularly, and act on it, thereupon building conflict and confrontation, when the person they project onto is oblivious and clueless

and life is nothing but politics and dynamics based on the above and how much they lack pedigree, character or bravery

all that i saw today, and more

and i had nothing to do with any part, i was a mere observer,

in some cases i was the one projected on, but i was oblivious

only heard of the dynamics after the fact.

i read something today, i think it was a horoscope or a message from the day's star's alignment. oh. i remember what it was: it was one of those tarot cards gif that shuffle and when you press the button that is your reading, and i got cambio perspectiva. -= change your perspective..and i see the lesson all through my life. dramas are neither mine nor mine to mind. all life is like a stage, just like valentino sang and folk have their character to play, and by character i mean their soul, their behaviors, their dysfunction, their ugly, or their beauty of attentiveness and conscience. that I dont have to keep thinking i am on the outside, cause i am not. i am getting my ass kicked cause i am the god damn sent center. my light shines so bright...and it was only this weekend i reflected on how i grew up with an attitude and chip on my shoulder cause all my life, where ever i went folk would stare at me. and that shit used to piss me off, If i only knew, I would have smiled more, been in the world different, but that too, they sent me to live, so it is what it is.. so yeah, changed perspectives. the shit people drop at your door, aint yours. it not even your door, It was their way out that they locked and shut. It was that proverbial - their shit sent to the fan., spewing back onto themselves. it is so amusing, it would be a comedy if we did not take it so seriously, so perhaps that is my larger lesson. this life is a comedy of human disproportions. nothing grand happening here. no journey. no purpose. no function. just utter futility. but folk think, they , their stuff, their shit matters, and it dont. mine neither. nothing matters. the only thing is choice.

#familyclanouting

Olympians of Our Own (Events)

there are so many great Caribbean stories at the Olympics this Rio 2016. And no one is covering it. A show would have been possible highlighting all the Caribbean Olympians, telling their stories. So many of them are first appearing for their countries. So many did not and will not make medals, but the story makes their appearance there all the more valiant. There are so many things we as a people could be doing, and among so many islands none of us are doing any of it. bereft we are. i find it so unbelievably pitiful and pathetic

Asange from Haiti made me realize that. reminded me of another young man from Suriname, a mere twenty one years old yet full of comportment.

------

Then i wake up and switch on the tv, see some commercial, dont know for what, I was just taken with the shiny white images of the people. pristine, in light glare resistant expensive glasses, and crispy shirts, and it just reminded me of my former life, mainly in michigan. and reminded me of the lives we led in michigan, how it was my hey day heights, and i thought i was just getting started, but that was the end. then i thought of how others thought they too were in a life, and perhaps going to take off, but only put putted, the engine stuttering, and plummeting. twice, and now a third time, but this time it taking long. no longer in money to fix windshields, windows in cars, to organize a house in a matter of days, after you failed to do so for a month despite talks and promises and lies. and my life just to live, nothing spectacular., sans so much; the glasses I need, medicals I have not had in years, sneakers to exercise in if i chose to do that,

and life has changed so much< i dont see much rise from this downslide we are living in our separate lives, cause of our ages at this time and when opportunities come round again, they might be for others far younger. it is indeed an interesting time

listening in the news yesterday of energy companies "struggling to pay their bills" because of the downturn in energy prices to $48US$ a barrel, and i thought well what were you doing in the hey day of high prices. I have no sympathy. if it is one thing to teach your children is how to manage money, not for what you have but for conditions you dont see, so you shall always have. and not to take any debt unless you have mapped out to the very end and last payment how you will manage it stress free. without that, dont do it..

but the very thing i am saying not to do is the very way the world spins

i also realize trinidad had made me coarse, aggressive and with even more attitude. it is not a place where refinement survives.

morning thoughts.

last night on my way home i looked up at the moon, smelled the frangipani scenting the night, and remembered the last time I walked the full moon in trinidad, I thought it would be my last one for a long while. not knowing i was journeying along with its hide, just like it and me in my life, so much was to be revealed by the next time, yesterday, it appeared.

good morning

Channels Open/ Opening/ Opened.

Ruth Melise and Olu

I wake up this morning feeling the doldrums

reeling from my previous arrogance to be freed of a godforsaken spiteful place, but having to return to just that place. as if it is written somewhere that i am to save it, that i am to plant something here. that i am to take something still buried here, as if this place still has grand things for me. the grand and great that everybody reports seeing but none can tell me where to look, how to get it. that place.

what to do now what are the next steps. and now to contrive that having sworn off everything i have done and been, environments and locales.

but before i can settle into wakefulness

and before i could use or clear my voice, drink tea or coffee

i get a call

tribeswoman

calling to put a date in my ear

calling to send me messages and remind me of things i know and have learned: " That every one should have their own song" and that most folk, certainly not me, "dont feel enough" i actually feel entirely too much, too deeply. Then the recognition that it is Oshun moving, teaching, carrying, reminding. That i would be called to be availed of such, it is here telling me to keep the sun up. keep the flow going women of water. bearers. and did i not use that metaphor when I pondered of conjuring the what next...saying nothing my materialize, but how to keep the flow on. water.. I need to be around water. Perhaps that is why i am stuck here. I need to be on a small island surrounded by water, and still i am not close enough. I got to get thee hence, to the ocean's edge the river's mouth.

so the conversation ends with plans of gathering.the mutual upliftment of messages. only for me to see an inbox message waiting for me.

Tribeswoman

one that emerges the more that I write?

And as I pondered to day, what next universe, is this the answer here: me and Olu and Treasures. me and Ruth and Singing/Healing, writing songs and prayers specific to and for people and situations, and blessing them with natural handmade reclaimed gifts and spiritual blessings, by Olu>

So i tell product maker that they sent her for me. to keep me shored up. for she keeps making products for me for a life i cannot see, cant seem to reach fast enough, seems lagged and lagging. She keeps making me products that I want to live in and around, though I havent the money to pay her, and cant seem to find the walls to put them up on, or own the chairs for her cushions, or have the windows to hang her curtains woven of fabric, complete with valence. but , they sent her for me. to minister unto me. to prepare for what is coming.

 

 she knew not that i come from a musical family; two are internationally famous, the other to a lesser extent, but still. that i have dreams of being a folksongstress like nina and lauryn. she doesnt know that the likes of Ella considered my poetry and prose for lyrics. And yet, here she is making me quilts of pianos in my national colors

the tide just rose real high
to me: tribeswoman be patient. sit tight. sit longer

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