My First Short Story. Ever

Artwork: Mirlande Jean-Gilles

Sunday Saunters

the very thing she was dreading and thinking about for a whole twenty seven days. it came. it arrived.
since her last period, when babe finished her stocks, and it had been months already, since the beginning of the year that her money ended. so she was wondering what would turn up in the next month or so, and surely the twenty nine days of her current counting cycle to allow her to restock her hygenics.

well, her menses came today. two days early. she was grateful that it came during daylight and early enough in the day to allow her to get to the store. walking.

she wrote her list. just four items. it was more an exercise in prioritizing if the items came out more than the dollars. but it was baking soda, two kinds. one more abrasive, the other, arm and hammer. she dips her toothpasted toothbrush in the powder to keep her =it has been many years, seven actually, since last she saw a dentist= teeth white appearing maintained. the last time was back in 2010 when she was in houston. the rest of the list: her tampons. regular and super.

it was a sunday, the first time in months actually since she has walked her neighborhood. it was different. very quiet. no activity. the streets mostly silent, she counted only five vehicles for the most that passed her. maybe just a few more.

she noticed the buildings, the newly empty lots, the old homes, the closed up homes. the ones that were refurbishing for years. sunday was the day to walk the street.

she gets to the grocery store. the new chinese immigrant stores. they know her face there. she says hello, she regularly asks for things. this was her first time there since the beginning of the year though , and already it was mid march.

she went straight to the personal items aisle. the one with the toothpaste, soaps, showergels, shampoos, female hygiene products, diapers, and on the other side of the aisle, house and home cleaning items. incense and candles. she did not list it but she decided to restock her incense. she burns them daily, in the bath and bedrooms. she buys them by the stacks and handfuls, when there is money, the $100 bills worth. she got five packs: sandal, sandalwood, musk, coconut and satvakk or something indian.

then she mused a long time over the goal of the month, season and cycle. there was a new item in her product line. Finally. super plus in these cheap brand tampons the only one she can afford, and because mainly the store does not stock tampax, cardboard which she stopped using decades ago, or pearls; forget it. she pondered whether to purchase a big pack of super or the big pack of super plus. cause really and truly, these brands, the super are a waste of time. they do not last any longer than the three or four hours of the regular, they dont open up so what is the point. and for that reason, she decided to try the super plus. taking the big 20 tampon pack, and a small ten pack of the super and a twenty pack of the regulars. and she was off.

she had way more items than a $100 bill would procure. so she had to decide at the till what and which items to take and what to leave. besides. she took a pack of protox oatmeal soap. and an expensive toothbrush and a cheap toothbrush. no prices were on the latter.

when she selected the protox, she remembered the new pharmacy closer to her home where she was more of a consistent patron, would open their three pack protox and sell each one separately, a form of raping their customers. three for twenty dollars. and they were selling each one for ten. smh. then citizens feel sorry for them when they are pillaged and robbed by the itinerants.

at the till, she prioritized. big boxes of tampons. incense, the cheap toothbrush. $116. 89. She had $120 for sure and some singles. turned out she was left with eleven dollars.

but here is what happened at the till.

her cashier whom she knows, checks her. she pays. the last three items she was not purchasing were left on the counter. in different spaces, though inches apart.

despite when she arrived at the grocery store, and all the while she stood in line to await her turn, there were many customers. now as she closed out her sale, there was just one gentleman behind her. one who kept looking at her. one who fixed the basket she placed on the stack to settle into the others neatly.

as soon as the cashier gave her change, the cashier looked to the gentleman who though standing in line, had no products. thing was, he was waiting for her to select his item in the glass case behind the counter, where only she can access.

when they walked away from their positions, from the cash register, the chinese lady, from the line, the gentleman customer, and from the door, bagging, the young male chinese attendant. he is at her back, sitting on the other counter, hands folded, staring straight at her back. She did not know it until she turned to exit the store and saw him and his relaxation of boredom out the corner of her left eye.
as she stood there fixing her money into her breaking apart bank card blue folder that they give you for free, she realized she was alone, all other persons evacuated her person, while all her items she could not pay for sat in front of her at her hands. she decided to bag the soap and the ten pack super tampons as well. leaving the expensive toothbrush where she excluded it from her price check. she told her self fix that money some other time. just fold and place back in your sling shoulder purse. and skat. though so said. it was all done at the same elegance, calm and quiet with which she entered, shopped and closed business.

it was the first thing to note. it was as if the universe knew she was struggling for cash, struggling to find work, struggling to find favor, a friend who would secure her with her basic bodily needs.
her friend was visiting from nyc, they went to college together. she actually asked about two weeks ago, "do you want anything?" and the question came as such a surprise, she was stunned. and so she wrote a list of personal care items: deodorant, feminine products for the cycle, her much valued tampax product line. her always. spray perfumes, etc. nothing fancy. just the basics. all the things that she has to play chess to purchase down here. but then the friend arrives with not a single item. promising instead to send a barrel later. but it was for this month's cycle she thought she would be secure. it was for today she venture out with $100 and her transport money to her therapist.

then her ex who she helped years prior texted her during the week. and she was like yes. he has helped her off and on over the years. so she asked him to take her to buy toiletries. he had done it once before for her. they ended up exchanging words. but it was a blessing in disguise. three into four years after his betrayal, this obnoxious goat, because of his hognorance, writes his indictment on a whatsapp chat. admitting that girlfriend helped him. he gave no refute or reply when she wrote. all the details and said, "you owe me"/ she was in heaven. it is the second written documentation she has now to prove the story she has been telling for the last four years. to prove his beneficial betrayal to her skill and acquisitions. but that option too, for her personal items, fell through. so here she was. her period having arrived and no stocks.

so it was kind of odd how it appeared that the universe was saying, 'Here Sister, take what you need; we know you been trying love" and to do so, evacuated the premises so there would be no witnesses. a wide berth.

so she proceeds out the door. she being some kind of magic woman, her intuition told her the cashier and the gentleman had just turned from their selections to get back to the counter. she exited. proceeded to walk the way she entered. north toward the mountains.

as she walked, she heard the young man attendant calling her. she ignored him. her pace was neither quick nor quickened. not anything different from how she regularly saunters/ nor giving any sign or indication that there was anything untoward or in dissonance in her comportment.

he gets closer. he calls out again. she turns around then. just at the end of a car. in his non english he asks for 'two items' and all she does was get into her sling purse. pulls out her folder. showing to both of them: him and her, the single dollars , the receipt of just sale, and a list of items. the last two connected together by the sticky pad adhesive. he unfurls the receipt, reviews the items. she says not a word. she attempts to explain nor ask nothing. he reviews. he says again, 'two items'. it becomes a question now. he starts to fold the receipt and return it to her hand. all the while her bag of items on the hand with which she has to lift and heave to navigate all the handing, handling and receiving. he gives it back with a sigh of dropped shoulders, resignation and something of an apology in motion. and she turns and continues walking. he returns to the store.

she gets to the corner, where she decides, and is pondering: should she proceed straight, turn right or some other crazy movement as to walk away from her destination. but what does she see?
the family that was in line a few persons ahead of her, in a van, proceeding in her direction. she calls out and asks for a ride, the driver's window is down. she says again, may i, just a few blocks down. he ponders. tells her there are no seats. she says it matters not, i am going short. he considers. decides she can be of no harm. he slows. opens the side door for her to enter. a conversation that takes place in a matter of mere meters, thirty? while the vehicle is moving. and passes her by some paces. is this really happening?

so the universe clears the register, leaves the left items before her, as the attendant neither removed nor stored them from the counter, making it effortless to secure, gave her favor as she was screened on the street with a favorable, pleasant, and kind grocery store operator.' and on top of all of that, provides a vehicle for her to escape? and not a panel van of male drivers and occupants, but of a quiet young docile man, and a woman, and clearly, their toddler child??

the universe /

did that.?
like a chess play
to crown king
secure queen

? Really. Seriously?

she vanishes

Is this magical realism in the flesh? is this woman magicK?
is her favor that palpable?

so there she is squatted down in the panel van. holding on to the back of the driver's seat. recognizing as a driver how annoying that might be to have a tug and a pull of the driver's back, she moves to holding on to the center seat where the beautiful little black girl sat. she pinches her arm lovingly. and in two twos, five blocks down, she arrives at her corner.

she gets let out. says thank you and offers the family and driver benedictions. and blessings. and walking to her house , she asks herself, did she really just... did those pieces really fit and were provided, so tightly, effortlessly and in such a smooth flow?

only as she approached her home with her women household did adrenaline flash a flow/
only the did she consider all the cameras and they may put up her picture. she did not care. she also vowed that she may return and put extra money in the till. that she would not be afraid to return there and act like nothing ever happened. she wondered .

so she washers her shoes in the yard drain under running water as is her custom from walking the road. she enters the house, announces she has returned. drops her bag in the bathroom, and begins unpacking and wiping each item, to put away, store, replace where necessary...like refilling her jar of mixed baking soda/

all that happened.

with this woman of diamonds. one in her ear, the other in a loc atop her head. a magick that has to be her ancestor women making a way for her through their collective cosmos.

do some things get redefined according to who is doing them?
and how they happen?



Writer's Note: I never wrote a short story before. Ever. This is the closest I have gotten

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A Life of Vulnerabilities

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

Good Morning,

My hands could not take the tiny keyboard this morning.

So I am replying to the pics here.

First of all , Sydney IS your MiniMe but what is odd, is when I look at her i see so much of Charlene it is pausing/

If she moved with Charlene everyone would call Sydney, Charlene's MiniMe.

Do you know that? Is that amusing to you? Do you all mention that among yourselves?

Now about you ...

I have no idea what belly you talking about

Let me tell you about the protocol cause like no body told you..

If we have a bit of a pouch and we not flat. we dont generally talk of that . and certainly not as a belly/

I dont see what you are talking about. but your busts are bigger than mine, appearing . but i also know

dimensions that are different among people which makes our appearance different can be misleading when we wear the same numbers. I am not sure. only a fitting could finalize that answer.

The `pic of the siblings is a time capsule. you all need to keep that picture. it is seminal somehow..

It is like an artifact for me.

So the big elephant for me, amidst all these varying dynamics is Charlene.

Debbie, it was between sleep when i saw that pic at five this morning and i was shocked.

And can i be honest and tell you what struck me immediately?

I wondered if Charlene is mentally ill? Did something happen to her? Did she snap

Cause Debbie, who walks around like that? That is not even a belly and it is worse than what I thought in terms of appearing like a pregnancy cause it appears lopsided in the pic. But Debbie, that is HUGE>

You know looking at it, with my intuition or third eye  that saw a deep disturbance made me`weaken.

It somehow symbolizes my own mental vulnerability

Talking to you last night struck me internally too

After i got off the phone I was affected and dont know why

Not sure if I was struck to hear how my colleagues of college had moved on in life, were together, in sync, and I was still in a different compartment all together.

An alienation but also an acceptance that I have been living a different path

What is peculiar is that all my coping does expire

And you know you asking me what do i do all day, what is my life,

Triggered for me of how I am tired, how the dispensation is up and over.

How it is time for something new, but I dont know what or where

But like I was home and doing nothing from 2010= 2013

Then tried organic farming and business creation. Got burnt. betrayed.

Was successful, for I saved this family's twelve acres of land, and my access to it was stopped.

I have been so close and wanting to get into mafia to one deal with stuff and people like that as well get a community; but that was a form of craziness. that my life could and was spawning

Then in that hurt I was liming every day. and did that for three years.

Running away from myself and my relatives here.

They have been horrid to me. And that was and has been very traumatic and painful

My aunt after all these years of being horrid to me, in this trauma of my life falling apart,

and complaining of me living off of her, is now paying a whopping $820/ a session for me to go to therapy I started in december. and that is so intriguing. cause all i am learning and getting confirmation on is how everyone around me is sick. how sick trinidad society is, how it is a society of trauma, abuse and ugly. That the colonial post slavery mind is still very close to the surface. it is why people are so violent, uncivil, unkind. it is hard for you to understand what I am saying probably by these words and how this society might be different from others but trust me it is.  Like how my aunt denied me to plant food in the yard and tend garden . this morning I got the revelation that she did that because she has all these false notions of who she is and how land and planting soil and food is beneath her, but this morning I got it clearly that she did not want me in her space of her vision of her self which is horticultural gardening. and that is part of this place. people are so fragile as to be ugly and selfish and resentful against you to deny you what is so sensible that could benefit all just because it is a threat and a toe step to them. and i been dealing with that right through from the beginning but did not know it. as i was ignorant of the culture and the personality of a trini. and the society and nation suffers because of this. Debbie this place is such a unique place and to be so small and so full of damaging dynamics.

That to me is my saving grace. If I could get a chance to publish my writings on this place. The years of my writing. That would end my life of marginalization, non productivity and poverty. I have a lot. been writing since 1990. and never stopped. and i have so much material.

That could be something that would resolve this situation but it needs to be a big international publisher with a hefty multiple project contract who would market and promote me internationally. Then one of my manuscripts i realized from the time I did it is really more of a film script than literature. and it would be magnificent because there is nothing on tv or film like it. a storyline of a black woman who is not fraught with typical tropes but all the unique: traveling the world. phd, family, trinidad, my experiences, legacy, just all odd. the mysticism. It is a story of a self directed self fulfilled black woman the thing the world never sees reflected.

But i am tired of days doing nothing.

My hands are getting affected being on the computer

I dont know if this is what arthritis feels like or because of a life on the computer for eighteen hours continually

But me leaving trinidad and living a publication writing life is not problematic. in the states or outside trinidad, I could use that technology of speaking my books. that translates to words on the screen and paper.

So that is what was triggered last night. I am tired. time for a change

And my life has always been that, even these seven years:

three years sitting.

three years striving business

then at the end of last year i shifted again: self help. closure of pining. a renewed effort to get a job (this year I write them all down rather than just leaving them in the email to get lost or deleted), and it is only three months, four months of a new dispensation, but so much significant has happened already

This new change though that i felt last night is a desire to get off facebook and the computer.

it is like i need to get my hands in rich soil to see if that would reverse the degeneration I am feeling

All that is what i felt briefly last night

As well as recognition of some other things

A boredom for lack of a better word. And loneliness. my life is solitary

There is no one I can or have to talk to. People are so fake and superficial here it is wild

My aunt admitted to me how she and my mom were close but they really did not talk. when she said that I was shocked into silence. that fakeness. and it is not just them. I realize that is the art of this human condition here.

Anyway, these days i am very clear upon my vulnerability, so when I see it in others it strikes me

and i see something with charlene, for a good looking vibrant woman like charlene to have accepted that physical deformity, Debbie, ehnt normal. but I know that is what life does to us. Fucks us up. and silently where people could see you ever y day and still not know it. recognize it

IN therapy, i been reading books on my therapist's shelf. And it is like I am in training to be a therapist. and learned this was the norm in the 60s in NYC. one became a therapist by getting your own therapy, and starting your own practice by billing sessions of clients under supervision of others. can you imagine? back then, it was not school. . And something about that appeals to me.

And I realize that i have a natural inclination to therapy and to give counsel, because of so much of life I have lived and experienced. Not sure how I would do it. I think of a text app, Talk Chat . not physical sessions. I dont know

So that is the most of me this morning.

There is so much more but my hands really do bother me

I type a lot of errors And this is already one of those crazy messages

Cheers

GasLighted Trinidad

i read this article and it occurs to me the whole of trinidad are of gaslighters
and it is this story as example that alerted me to this truth. men in trinidad are major gaslighters. women are too but in a different way, or maybe not. this is the way and reason boys and men hate their mothers so much, and this is why these same boys grow to be men and be assholes...this very method of denying and flipping back
[A close friend of hers was always running late. Initially, she pointed this out to him noting that it was not respectful. His response was to tell her she was “too sensitive”. But over time, when this dynamic would continue to happen, it would lead to arguing and when she persisted he would say, “You really have a problem with time, don’t you?” and she in turn ended up thinking he might be right. She began to doubt herself. “I began to think – what’s the problem if someone is late? Maybe I’m not being flexible enough.’” ]

_afraid and cant lose_ > "Because when there is someone in a position of power or authority, someone you idealize, or even as in many co-dependent relationships – when there is someone you are afraid to lose – "
i also realized this is trinidad when someone wrote a post today asking what ministers are hard working and the ministers they cited , i could see it was nothing more than blubbering idiots just caping for their friends and those they look up to when i can see these people are so mediocre if not sub par and really , actually doing nothing in their portfolio. hell. one dont even have a fkg portfolio. so talk about people telling you the unreal is real
i most remember recently though, a guy telling me that i was not flexible, but really what was happening, I was not willing to dance on his selfishness, entitlement' that included zero consideration to me. i was t be on his call. not one minute. no.
"“We are living in a time where a lot of people are having a tough time deciding what’s real and feeling like they are being manipulated,” Stern says. “If they know something is true and somebody tells you it’s not true, holding on to your reality is essential. You can’t be gaslighted if you stay inside your own reality and recognize the manipulation when you see it.”
this article is life for me.
i see all the ways i was able to survive traumas of life and all the ways my abusers and saboteurs tried to cast me as pathological: "I was difficult" i was uncooperative" no. i was just defiant and resistant to being a mat. to being nice to other's attempted manipulation of me
the funny thing about all of this though is that i have never felt confused or crazy; i never doubted myself, my perceptions and sense of self was never eroded. and that is why people have gotten so angry at me. cause I resisted and not only resisted, glowed in my own recognition of truth and self.

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-is-gaslighting-america-heres-how-to-survive-2017-3?utm_content=bufferd695e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer-bi

Love After Love

Queen Returned to Throne

      Artwork: Edward Bowen

Architect of Impossible Physics Series of Drawings.
If you look carefully while thumbnail, you might 

see a king or a queen with crown. it is as if he or she 
in a coat. Jacob's Coat? and their hands are planning 
architecturing tools; if not an edge.

this is what i am trying to do: unravel the mystery of observations and things

what a failed experiment

went to bed at three

up at five

having been to the bathroom and laying here in mental conversations, confrontations and self-cross checks for a half an hour.

truly amazing

and in the midst of that the sleep i was in was deep and stirring

it is like i was at the threshold of great emotional turmoil and like my higherself broke the process, meta, me looking at me, to ask, are we really going there. so it awakened me. and so begun a therapeutic look and inquiry - am i breaksing from truly confronting my trauma?

i then started reviewing how everyone focuses on the childhood and will tell me "i dont think you acknowledge how much it impacts and impacted you" and that is the most hilarious thing, it is absurd actually.

then i get to what has really happened, that i am so mature, centered and right anchored that the shit was processed long ago, even perhaps while i was still young and living it. it was like i was given the gift to thwart it, to unpack it, to deal with it. what my therapist now calls my 'aged wisdom insight'.

but the bigger thing that is laughable to me is that people focus on my childhood as if trauma has not continued unabated through my life and up until last year, perhaps. my trauma never ended. it just ocntinued.

so that go me to itemizing what has happened going backward.

like my father disinheriting me/robbing me a black woman of what was not his to begin with but his mother and grandmother, also black women, to give to an indian woman harlot, who manipulated and seduced him. she told me so herself.

then i pondered how to deal with that. should i write him a letter basically asking him one thing: are you really going to impoverish me to make some indian women rich? or write it in a card. one of my artpost trinidad original blank cards.

then i thought before he dies, ic an write this in the paper, have a series or long story done about me and let the world know. then i wondered how many black women have been robbed of their inheritance in this small land? of black men their fathers, to other women, non-africans? then i was struck how men make transfers of what they really do not own. how amazing

then that got me to thinking of other women i have reached for. like dennise demming, ingrid jahra and asha javeed. the last i knew the least. but that was weeks ago when i was thinking how to break my cycle and what if i put my life story in the papers to have the public help me break this code that is my life, a riddle.

then i thought of how she tried to take the conversation to whatsapp, which i did not stop to process at the time but now that strikes me as ood, and i wonder what that is about. then i remember these people and their chat logs and copies.

but i got down to how it is I have only one weapon. my story. and my truth. and the only way to wield it is to tell my story. to tell my truth. let it be public record what my eyes have been made to see, store and carry.

then i thought to make this a national story. how many black women have been robbed by their fathers? seem to me it is far better than any legal suit. then i thought about how my personal story might unfold. and telling the nation that my father's wife, nine years my junior, the indian woman who seduced him to steal .from my mother, from me. from the heritage of ruth and analiza, did so under a marriage of bigamy. and lay the best mapped plan to waste, long before anyone hits the grave so that they are made to contend with their deeds.

all this because folk want me to confront my trauma.

they talk of trauma of when i was seven, but none see the trauma t forty seven, how peculiar. and that is the thing i see. these people are peculiar. they are black but want to charge the whitest one , tar. color politics aside.

so here i am at a failed experiment for sleep.

in the inner upper room contending with the other experiment of what am i going to do with all of this. these stories. these truths. sigh

what makes it all worse. in the midst of all these squares, i ponder how there has never been a soul throughout my long journey, all my ports and travels, sojourns and stops, to tell any one or part of this grist, never.

The Universe Reinforces

The Universe Reinforces
Cosmic Idea 03/21/2017
Wombyn Her Own Home
Mirlande and Melise
I would dedicate this work to Marjore Baptiste


Maven Huggins shared Mirlande Jean-Gilles's photo. @ 3:24 it is now 5:24pm

you know
i think one of my books of poems i would like to produce would match Mirlande's collage art with my selections. piece to piece.
and just title it...well i like our names, but something better.
Us Black Wombmyn Agents

or some such. or even the title of this piece. would be perfect. and it is already written
Mirlande Jean-Gilles, do you agree?
do you like the idea? do you think we have a publisher between the two of us to make it happen? should we set up crowdfunding accounts on multiple platforms to fund it? I will do the work if you supply me the art.
Art|Prosem : each leaf
I can put together a chapbook. and you can review
And if you are not fully wowed, I can supply you my work and you can select. matters not to be except to your wish for the work. But i am willing to make it happen if you agree. I would need you to do the crowdplatforms because I am outside the US. but yeah.
Let me know.
<3 span="">
this would be the cover though. ;) and the title of the collection:
Wombmyn Her Own Home

 -------------------------


wow.
when the universe reinforces you.
your ideas. your plans. your push.
your vision

if this is not the dedication in words to my idea for a mirlande art and melise prose publication production under the title

[Wombyn Her Own Home]

Love After Love 

                                            by Derek Walcott (who died today)

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

-------------------------------those words completely inhabit the purpose of this project!!!

the project comes complete/replete with a ritual courtesy, Gerelle Forbes

then this will be the ritual to every woman before she continues to read and imbibe the book:

* a sea salt and baking soda scrub

* a bath tub filled with coconut oil .

* candle light . dim setting. soft music .

* wine, red

you are about to fix you and your life

(thanks and courtesy Gerelle Forbes)

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

recognition. revelation.
then a second message to mirlande

{If i could, i would call you on the phone.

If i could, i would get on a plan e and arrive on your doorstep to beg you to say yes.

I just wrote a blog about this

and realized at its close, that I would dedicate this to my aunt mother...who turned 75 two days ago

She has suffered a lot for me. The mother I had before and beyond the one that birth me. Her sister, my birth mother, made me, to deliver to marjorie to save me.

I am 52, been unemployed for the last seven years. And marjorie has been keeping me.

If i could give her this before she dies, i would be exonerated. and i need to be exonerated}

SeventyFive Saviors

seventy five year celebration last night

and it was poignant and telling and revealing

i new marjorie was nervous upon reaching sixty nine as that was the age her mother, my grandmother, mama maria passed. but i heard she was nervous upon hitting seventy as it was called time up on the bible.

and i write that and realize i am stuck in a twilight zone among people who say one thing but the reality is another and far deeper. i was just recalled to how blithely and regularly marjorie will talk about dying and how it is her time for a good ten years now. and we all thought it absurd, i in particular, for she is a sterling aged woman. in shape. she walks every morning, gardens regularly, several times a week most times and is the primary caregiver to her two teen aged grandaughters, thirteen and eleven, soon to be a year older in a matter of weeks. but only to realize while she casually called death she was actually nervous if not scared? wow

but it reminds me as the day before her birthday , she and i were in conversation, and she shared with me that "me and your mom were close but we really did not know each other's intimates; we did not share a lot, and the one time i bared my soul to her was to tell her she was not standing up for family, and their nephew, my cousin, kurtis, when my father refused him from eating in our house...i was hearing for the first time. now that was a bomb revelation where i shared no response. not to hear that she has turned and done the same thing she complained to my mother about. or to hear of the dynamic with my father. i just focused on the internal shock i felt , like a clock stopping, to hear as close as they have always pretended, they really were not. it floored me. and it is not just these two, it is the lot of the five siblings in family. leroy, pat, marjorie, marina and mona, and the additional two outside the family: sylvia and carlton. shock of all shocks. 

 

 

 

 

 

but i am the one in therapy. this is a culture of lies, pretense. and those who bear and betray the truth are the ones who will be excoriated. but i dont want to go off track, which I already did. I was really wanting to write none of that stuff but something else.

I was not posting any of these pics but they are so beautiful. our home, the way we do things mostly, even though last night was a comedy of errors and poor behaviors. the flowers were magnificent, huge and fragrant.

but i wake up this morning with a revelation.

 

if it were not for marjorie , this seventy five year old woman, those two young girls would have seen trouble. they would have been functionally abandoned and neglected. i am given pause to admit that. from the time they left the family house at maya age three, they were dumped at various caregivers, nannies and babysitters, and the people these were, and the constant change there started to be early behavioral problems. it is why marjorie stepped in to correct it. to avoid the path that was being mapped. there have been times when maya will remember and state or refer to how things were off back then at the babysitters. i am seriously touched by that cause you see up close and personal what a child or children would have been left to if it werent for one person. one solitary person. and you see the different expeerience another child is having, kaylah, under the abandonment of her mother, and the checked out into catatonia, her grandmother inez. where she is raging and exploding on her mother. from going to a placid quiet, reflective child. with the leaving of her sister to jamaica, for medical school and being left alone most times with that grandmother in a scary big house, the child as started to explode and unravel her mother;s tales.

what is the story of these two young mothers? both vanessa and michelle are what would be called big time middle management professionals. yet. their home life and children are in a mess and suffering.

but i am the black sheep. cause i have no work.

and no one seems to see these balances

 

 but give praise for functional relevant working elders who keep children on clear paths of safety, for god knows what would have been the story otherwise. sigh

New Days Dispensations

9:07am

hI pAUL, Just checking in with you to see if everything is okay... see you not present posting . Maven

 

Hi Maven
Yes ...i am doing ok...
Things are quite different now...
Before, the posts came to me...they had a life of their own...they spoke to me,they spoke to others..
Now, i feel that my time on social media is coming to an end...
There's this inner pulling...that takes my attention..directs it inwards...bringing about a total change in my "game" so to speak...
There is just way much more to life..a life that crosses boundaries ..a life that many would think unbelievable ...a life of "seeing" a life filled with "other" experiences and the development of hidden abilities..
and you lose your taste for what everyone else wants, is interested in,is doing as a result..
It's like i look at socail media now and i feel no pull towards it...
There are a lot of changes...
I can no longer eat the foods i used to eat.go the places i udes to go,be around the people i used to be around or like alot of the stuff i used to like...
Thats been happening for some time...but there seems to be a quickening with each leap.
How have things been with you?

 

 

fascinating.
i did not see your answer as I was embroiled in writing a post. If you can, read it.
I wish you had been reading me all along, but no social media. but I been writing what you just said. I /we are in the same place, for me, since december.

same thing. stopped cold turkey doing so many things I did for the last three years. stopped being around certain people,. even blood family who were enemies. effortlessly stopped eating meat, and i am a meat mouth, but that has to do with what is available where i am.

And social media.

I deleted 2600 people between december and january. to 87, and then I would delete the rest but then i would get no information.

that post i just wrote is like the cherry on that cake. seeing the thing that kills you as your saving grace.. who among us will have that mindset.

the other big thing i am doing is therapy and wanting to set up a national advice call in app or system.. people need support and there is none.. answers and there are no corners/

lol
Kind of wild we end up in the same place
And yes, I too feeling as if fb has run its course in my life.

I am actually at the very beginning block of rebranding, remaking myself...and that would mean at least a different social media identity than the past seven years.

oh jah
well i am glad you are okay

Where and What Is Your Cotton #GetOut

"Psychologically, I think I always seen black women as an enemy because of the relationship I had with my mother. Many black men have dysfunctional relationships with their mother, she’s our first teacher, so if we don’t see value in her, we will never see value in any black woman, because we don’t see value in ourselves. 1 + 1=2"

the thing that used to kill you might be the thing that saves you

#cotton.

- go back to your roots; = go back to your demise; = go back to your original demon?

i'm playing new flavors in my ear. hear come some new flavas in my ear. i'm putting new cotton in mah ear (sung to that....) = block out negativity, brain washing , anti-life conditioning, destruction. peele gave y'all a message on survival and y;all still aint get it yet.

maybe by next month. however you were programmed. block the stimulus. cotton in the ear, momentary deafness against the tinkling of the hypnotic silver spoon in tea of china

{use the value of what is in front of you} is so deep to me. juxtapose that with/to black folk who eschew anything to do with planting, land, agriculture, food cropping, because of slavery, when that is the thing that can make you rich in this modern day. scorn nothing , not even what struggle and death you escaped and came out of

stop being tapped and controlled/ outsmart them, your enemies

get out of your slave mentality..."cotton picking mind"

Tupac Chopra‏ @GUMPnATLien Feb 28

#GetOut the part where he took the cotton out his ears represented him getting out of his "cotton picking mind " (slave mentality)

when the symbol of oppression becomes your freedom

 

 

 

[writing this assessment ..i just had a memory...it triggered a revelation...of how arrogant i have been my whole life. from a young child even. ,all into graduate school-- when a management consultant offered me a job in his firm, J. Edgar Riley, worked primarily in Malaysia. It is striking me now in this meditation because that is what i did, what i am writing the lesson of what not to do: i eschewed things that i thought was my destruction, my oppression, dead end. In my child case, I accepted the extreme of my father's lessons and applied it to my uncle, when he tried to give me money on a visit. i must have been ten, and i refused it, saying, daddy say not to take money from anybody. smh. wow. i was not smart enough to know not to do that, but smart enough to remember the incident??? it is why the unforgiving bastard lent no help when i was in trouble in 2003. i tied and fucked myself up in a lot of ways none of which any of the bitches who charge me with now are aware of, and wrong about by their examples. i know i was afraid of riley. it was fear that made me spurn him cause i was clear that he was offering me a job because he wanted to consume me. he had poked me in my stomach in the international center at the time of a representation. a from of sexual harassment. the arrogance though was that i felt i was worth and could earn more than $40K coming out with my phd. what was 40K in nyc anyway, in 2000? but then again, i might have been there in 9=11 reminds me of how uchenna said that batie saved me in 1996. perhaps i saved myself from sitting on a perch high.

the quote above on black men and their relationships with their mothers and thus women is shared mutually exclusive from the cotton statement

#wheres_your_cotton?

https://twitter.com/search?q=cotton%20%23getout&src=typd

Matter of Fact....

 

here is what this monday marh 13 at 1:57pm

i know that felix and maria lived in a house on land that they acquired, even if by long term generational lease.

i know that you, marjorie purchased that land for a song, as was is well known of parcels to this estate, especially given the decades ago arrangement.

i know that you built this house with loans from your daughter. you did not do it by yourself.

i know that as much as I regaled you about this house being beautiful, that it is my mother who took an interior design course from parsons in the early eighties if not before

i know i remember all those fashion architecture and home beautiful magazines i used to see in the house long ago that wehen i returned to trinidad, were still in magazine racks. you throwing them away not even knowing them now for its age, would be archival materials.

i know this house is filled with furniture and furnishings that was bought in the americas, mirrored our brownstone home and has much of many of the same in the house in tortuga

i know, my dear marjorie, you did not build this house by yourself. you did not even come by this house by yourself. it was generational building.

i know now, today, that you have actually stopped me from contributing my part to this generational development, which must be some kind of ugly denial that you are now paying for.

in fact

i know now that you seem to be paying in pennies and pounds a high exchange on every dollar i offered that you rebuffed.

i know now that life is a hell of a thing. i have lessons that I wonder if i will ever get the chance to share and pass on to a pikney.

so much for the myths, and narratives of personal success. such a damn lie., we need to change the question when we speak and interview others on their success... "tell me about all the people who made your success possible

tell me about all the people....

Harvard Law School

it is interesting to me that immigrants and or someone who is sympathetic and professional to their plight has not forged a push back against their mass deportation.
and a clear validation against such and for such would be illegal immigrants who pay taxes. I would love to create a database of such persons. and calculate he value over the last twenty or more years. and those at least have a stop order/cease and desist until we figure this out. you cant take their money , toil and sweat and then kick them out. cause guess what, that would be like slavery all over again. and is it that only a black person of slave heritage can figure this out?

very interesting since too. i am the one who envisioned and creatively structured this US National Social Intersectional Justice Foundation over a year ago. that is now just as relevant in the time of Trump as it is and was in the time of Police Murder Brutality and Coon Hunt against black people.
Why do i keep coming up with these ground breaking innovative ideas??
Harvard Law School

 http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2017/03/trumps_bad_hombre_a_taxpaying_grandpa_from_nj_edit.html?utm_content=buffer3552c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

2:22 Rebellions

2:22

i still see time, but i rarely write it down anymore.

recognizing how effortless so many men are assholes and some, not a few women. someone writes a plea or his friend who has lost his job, some big web designer, who also had a really bad accident and not mobile anymore, writing to ask for his support, jobs and opportunities. he was just given a first name. and a cell. so knowing I am looking for an expert web designer, software and app creator , i texted him and asked him to send me his CV. that was last night late. at 8:54am the asshole texts me back and says, I sent what you asked but i am not in the business of communicating with people whose name i do not know. i scrolled back up to my original message and hoping i was not remiss to sign my name. i was not. there it is. the last nine letters, a signature. i wrote him and repeated and said this which you see above is a name. not a code. patience for me to get to email and respond appropriately would have been a virtue. I told him the message written for him merely listed a sean as if there is not another 10K in the country. and told him have a great day. you think i am going to deal with that cunt? and know what i know. I scanned my message , know what he responding to, besides being an inherent ass, my address. that has lady in it. it is no joke and not a blithe how males, broken, respond to women. how dare me be in a position to screen he. but it gives me a bigger lesson: try my best and not be a jackass. carry no chips on my shoulder.

the other thing I was going to write about was a personal recognition of how much people in general,all around the globe, not just in trinidad, are very content to stay where they are. they are not bothered to pursue anything beyond what is necessary, what is comfortable. they are good in the spot they sit or stand in. no need to reach. it is one of the very seminal differences between them and me, where as, because I have no comfort, I am constantly reaching , stretching.

when i woke up, it was from a dream . i was in my home. white tiles on the floor, so it is like i was renting an apartment or house. and there was a snake on the floor. running about. one who bit, trying to bite me but in its mouth was art of its tail and body. and i too could not stamp it out, i kept trying to mash it and hit it but kept missing. i wonder and am bemused by this. me and an opponent and neither of us winning, just having to contend with mutual resignation to the presence of the other. formidable.

the other thing I wake up to. recognizing a dynamic in my family.

i stopped talking and bitching about them. i have gotten over them. just minding my business and doing the work every day to escape my current life and conditions. but it hit me. these bunch of all women really. just one male cousin who tries to come for me. but they all decry me in one way or another but from over a decade ago, know what i realize? they have children who grow and come to challenge the ugly they tell themselves about me. my first niece, came as a tyrant, having serious violent for us, tantrums. and i thought then it was her rebelling again the weak mother and absent father she had. it is like a righteous indignation of children who neither have words or power to express in any other way. and now, after a family meeting to talk about me, the eldest cousin, the eldest daughter of this generation, the one who has accomplished more than the whole lot of them, to decide to send me to therapy. and i am enjoying it. pissing my therapist off when I alert her from material on her shelf, that I can follow the nyc jewis 60s tradition of/to offer said services, the qualifications back then was the enrollment to one's own therapy. kind of like your own sessions are your training and apprenticeship. she was not happy. she threw shade and it showed me again how fragile and territorial the trinidad brokenness of person, yes, even your therapist . who we are as humans are never escaped/ and how we look down on women. for she would have never acted like that if i was male. she from this society would have given me that privilege and entitlement to choose for myself. but the point i am making, I now have a niece, the last of her generation. at seven I think, giving her mother thunder. all of a sudden at the new year, started going off on her. yelling and carrying on, bawling. and i was struck. it is like sister girl is losing it. enraged. and what is happening? rebelling again against a mother who has abandoned her. who feels she wants to live a life and my child or anything else be damned. the older sister has gone off to college which was the shield to the mother's abandonment of the home and children. so now this little seven or eight year old is left in a huge house with a catatonic grandmother who on the edge of sanity and of zero usefulness, not even for company of a lonely child, tells her along with the housekeeper, a kind of grooming attempted, of how to wine. all this the mother told me and my sister. the only good thing is that the mother recognized this was critical and she needed to act. so child going to therapist. I am sure the mother gave no thought, pause or research to find out who to send child to, proper therapist for case and a child. adult therapying is not children's therapying. even after we agreed to exchange information she has not responded. more dismissal again.

it reminds me of something I wrote last night about black women from black men. ignore a black woman at your own peril. on this storyline it is like i am seeing , my family dismiss and mistreat me, and they reap it back in their children, in circumstances and stories we never before experienced. dyslexia, illiteracy, internal rebellions. even the adults, in alcoholism, stress, hidden lives. but they all have time to judge and make me the topic of conversations. how poetic. they have me as a pathology and a problem but it is their children, and wives who rebel against them

 

yeah