I started a post the other day, but I didn't write it. I didn't want the sum of my contribution to the information stream to be a series of gripes and bitching about my 'bad fortune', and that's what it would have been. things change, 'the centre cannot hold', and this is the truth. but what a man, what a person of substance rather, does is adapt, take a breath, take the hit and keep moving forward, keep swinging. I am endeavoring to be both a man and a person of substance, and therefore I didn't write. because when my recent crisis came into being, the first thing I did is what I try to always do first: "YOUR will, not mine, be done". turn it over, leave it with Jehovah, do life as best you can until the resolution enacts itself, and remember to say thank you. and it's not easy; but that's where the whole 'ACT AS IF' has much more import than the 'fake it til you make it' nonsense. because you can act your way into a right attitude, but you cannot FAKE your way into it. so, at this point i'm very blessed to be able to say, my medicine issue is resolved at the moment. it's not the greatest, but it is more satisfactory than what I was offered initially. and regardless, my ideal would be to pay nothing, as you shouldn't have to pay to live, but this is Amerikkka, so the resolution is satisfying to me. and I thank God, my counselor, my nurse practitioner, the place I go for my health and those who keep me in my prayers, as I can now urinate with a greater degree of ease than I had been able to for the past week.
so, if i'm not going to bitch, what am I going to do here?
well, I've been going through other things at the same time, and I want to mark them down here. I believe one of my major areas that needs work is my unwillingness to look back. I believe a person has to allow their history to marinate and mature, in order for the lessons to be concrete, to be absolute learning experiences. I admit, by the time I get to that point, that my experiences are ripe, I don't want to look back at them. I want to keep moving forward. I want to do the thing I'm working on, and the next thing if possible. but life, in it's own way, demands introspection and reflection. it demands self-appraisal, self-investigation. because without it, there is no saying 'i'm going HERE, because I can see clearly what life is like THERE'. now, i'm not saying I don't look back at all. but not in a way that allows me to make the major changes that are required. and I think...not certain 100 percent, but I think, my past is trying to make me look at it right now.
last week, I had a clear, remembered dream that my sponsor, Johnnie Copeland, was alive. more to the point, that he had died, but some procedure had brought him back to life, and he was with his wife and happy and his wife was happy. I woke up sweated. I don't know what that meant aside from how much I miss him every day, but it goes deeper than grief. I mean, he was back from the dead, not that he never died. and he was wearing his Philadelphia Eagles baseball cap, which is the one he's wearing in the picture his wife used for his obituary. so it was like, he was resurrected but he was frozen in time. and that made me so sad. it makes me sad as I type it, I guess because maybe I do know what that means and I don't want to admit it. it probably means that i'm frozen in place, and that i'm waiting for my own resurrection. and I hate that I know that is part of what he's telling me.
i'm going to leave that alone for a minute.
the other thing I experienced today. I was looking up David Letterman, for some reason, and I was reminded he has a show on Netflix, 'my next guess needs no introduction', and I decided to check it out since I hadn't. and it defaulted to someone I have no interest in, and I decided to go back to the first season, first episode, which was his interview with Barack Obama after the presidency. and it was funny and informative, and it was one of those things that you realize is a milestone in your memory, seeing Mr. Obama without a tie, without the trappings of the office, but still as intelligent and warm as he was during his tenure as president. but what got me hardest wasn't Obama, it was the time they spent going over John Lewis. David Letterman had walked the Edmund Pettis bridge with Rep. Lewis and talked to him about the civil rights era, his involvement with the Bloody Sunday march and the ramifications of a Trump presidency in his own opinion. and again, I found myself on the verge of tears. I watched a young John Lewis and a group of people who look like me attacked by police, run over by the hooves of both horses and pigs, and tear gassed, beaten with night sticks, pushed back across the bridge to symbolically deny them the right to vote. I watched, and as my people's history has always affected me, it still does. I was angry, I was sad, I was hurt by the realization that these people suffered so much and not a damn thing has actually changed. you gain the right to vote and find out the people you vote for don't give a fuck about you. you gain the right to buy a house in a neighborhood you couldn't even drive through, that they fought to keep you out of, only to find the construction miles away was the building of a suburb all the whites who can afford to will flee to, leaving you still segregated, leaving you with fallen property values and an abandonment of the things needed to make a neighborhood a neighborhood, and then they wonder why you're so angry and so hesitant to buy into the next illusion. this is what runs the gamut of my emotions when I see stuff like this. and I wonder, what the fuck is wrong with us? what the fuck is wrong with humans? and there's nothing I can say.
the last thing, for now, is something that I have to wonder about all the way around. I've been pondering the whole 'Prince Harry/Megan Markle' thing. I've been watching, and I've been studying a bit. I have seen the articles speaking on the racism and completely unequal coverage Megan has gotten compared to her counterpart, Kate Middleton. that is not surprising. you are the black that has integrated an entirely (at least overtly) white institution, and you're going to get shit on. ask Mr. Obama (see the tie in?) or ask Doug Williams or Hank Aaron or Mayor Carl Stokes. you've seen it over and over. but that's not where my head was at. I felt some sympathy for her, though she has been termed a 'mixed race' individual, when in the eyes of the world she is black, or a nigger, or a mulatto or quadroon, whatever the ancient terms for someone with black blood is in England. but what got me is all the press that they're getting over this, and the sympathetic black perspective. black people on Facebook are looking at Prince Harry as if he is a hero, the epitome of a real man. and perhaps he is, in Great Britain and current North Amerikkka. because if you go back some years, back to when he was 20 years old, you find Harry in attendance at a party in a Nazi Youth costume, complete with swastika armband. now, there is nothing that should possess anyone with a soul of dressing as a Nazi anything in the 21st century, not even neo-nazis. but there you go. he said it was 'poor judgment' and he apologized, but the press was on his ass like wet shit. and rightly so, but apparently not for real, I mean, he's a prince, after all. and now, all these years later...
so, you, Megan, marry a man who in his youth at least partially embraced the vestiges of Nazism. you marry this man, and then you are subjected to being smeared and besmirched by the press, who have allowed this young man's apology to be enough when it comes to adorning himself in the garb of vicious killers, genociders, tortures, racists extraordinaire. and now, he withdraws from the Royal circle, but he won't stop being a prince. he did not abdicate, he took a step back. and maybe, maybe when it's revealed that this is just an exotic stop along the way (much as Diana was for Charles, when he obviously preferred horse-faced matrons like Camille) you will wonder if this was all just a charade (ha ha, charade you are, to paraphrase Pink Floyd). a conundrum to be sure, but since Harry has no direct path to the throne, neither does his son, so there's no great worry about that. but it will be great for the baby's life in America. black royalty from a family that never really wanted him in the first place, right? and again, I wonder, why has no one else thought back to when Harry was 20? it's not about not forgiving or not being willing to forget. there's no point in forgetting. there are umpteen million Jewish people who won't forget. there are umpteen million black people who shouldn't feel any better, because Hitler was not the monster here in Amerikkka that he should have been to many people, because the hatred of Jews ran just as deep here as it did in Germany; it just had more places to hide. and now, you've got black people attacking synagogues and black elected people questioning the actions of the Jewish community in the past of denying black people a place in societies just as mainstream white Amerikkka did, and it's one more line of battle that shouldn't exist. it should be remembered that African Americans and the Jewish culture and heritage of people have both suffered holocausts at the hands of supremists, and at some point there should be a gathering of people to face the common foe, rather than keeping these walls of separation between us. but, I remain pensive, because usually things like this just get worse, they don't get better, and i'm tired of living in the shadow of bullshit and pain.
so, there's more to all this than just not being able to pee, when the world is full of shit. and yes, i'm still grateful to Jehovah, my Father, for discernment that guides my actions. that's enough for today.
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