Total Eclipse

Once upon a time I met a guy at a house party...at my house in Chicago, who happened to be from the state right next door to Tennessee, Arkansas. He also happened to be doing comedy and talked a lot about growing up in the church.We lived in different neighborhoods, far away from each other, but we bumped into each other occasionally at shows or on a bus or something.

He always did this stand-up bit about Sunday school and how he was taught that he had a stash of gold bars that were all his waiting for him in heaven if he could endeavor to live a "good" life. However, if he were to stray, the Lord would take one of his gold bars away, and that would be less gold for him to enjoy when he got to heaven...after he died.

This, I think is a much more blatant way to teach what organized religion has been unwittingly teaching young Americans for a long time now (capitalism). I was told that I would live forever. And holy hell, did I want to live forever...especially at six years old. There was candy and pizza, Libertyland and Showbiz, She-rah, My Little Freaking Pony, Barbie, dirt, trees, sticks, kittens, puppies...who the hell wouldn't want to live forever?

Sure, there was pain.

I liked riding my bike and roller skating around the neighborhood. I LOVED roller skating. I didn't have a Walkman or a boom box, but I would go out into the world after school with my pristine white skates and all of the words to Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart carefully memorized and matched with corresponding moves on my wheels...which were orange. Man, I was adorable. But, and getting back to my original statement, I fell down a lot.

Skating with the neighborhood kids one afternoon along Mendenhall at Knight Arnold, I fell and skinned my knee pretty badly. Through my tears I yelled that I needed a towel or a rag to clean up the blood, and my best bud, Dawn Michelle, came running towards me, grinning and yelling,"yeah! Get her a RAG!"

I don't know if that still works as a joke currently, but that was a term for a "pad" back in the Are You There God? It's Me Margaret days. On the rag. Guh.

My mother was in so much pain emotionally that she asked me to carry a lot of it, especially as she aged, rather than ever trying to heal her own heart.

I have been carrying pain since I was a child.

In any case, there was pain, but there was always a reason to laugh, and that reason rarely had anything to do with gold bars or knowing I was going to live forever. They always had to do with the people in my life.

As I grew up in the church, the message of living forever changed from living forever to living happily. I began to learn a formula for safe and happy living, how to have a passion for Christ while shutting the world out and focusing on the song we were singing...and the formula.

Go to Christian school. Meet Christian Husband. Move to suburb of Christian city with lots of churches. Have babies and take them to church. Buy things, vote republican, and fight the war on Christmas.

This wasn't the only thing I learned in church. I learned about love too. I have studied the Bible in detail. I have read the Bible. I took Bible classes in college. I was REQUIRED to take Bible classes in school. I KNOW what it says and what the Lord is asking of me. I'm just not sure the current state of organized religion does And that is a big problem. HUGE.

Organized religion seeks to organize the people (the actual church) through a central idea or belief. Anthropologically speaking (and I totally took one anthro class just for fun, so I deem myself legit enough to say this), human beings have always sought to organize this way. It's human. There is nothing wrong with this.

Ah, but sin. That's the thorn in your side, the thing you do not want to do, but you do it anyway. This is the tail I chased for far too long. I got so confused by the idea that I wanted to do what I did not want to do because I knew it was "bad," and doing bad things would make it harder for me to "live forever."  Until I realized that I ALWAYS did what I wanted to do, despite knowing that it was bad for me. I usually learn from my mistakes, but I never stop making them. So I dropped the word "sin" from my vocabulary.

Turn around bright eyes.

You and I, we are humans, each of us experiencing life as ourselves for the first and last time. No one has ever lived your life, nor will your life ever be lived again. Life expresses itself in countless ways, living and dying a million times over. You and I are a part of that.

Turn around bright eyes.

And what a precious gift that is. The promise of life. Love. Peace that passes all understanding. The hope in renewal. It is comfort in a storm because there will be storms. It is relief for those in pain because there will be pain. That is the sacrifice.

Every now and then you are going to fall apart.

If you want to live in the love that surrounds you, that is inside of you, you are going to get hurt. You are going to be laughed at. You are going to give and give and give because you feel like if you don't give, you'll explode, especially when you're living in a powder keg and giving off the sparks. That's just dangerous.

You are going to get hurt.

You need you more than ever. Once you realize your capacity to love life, other people, yourself, that's when you begin to be vulnerable, and that's when you start to get hurt. So be gentle with yourself. You are doing this for the first time. You will do things you know are bad for you, heaven knows I have. You will do things you think are the right thing to do only to find yourself lying in a pool of your own tears staring up at the ceiling of your bedroom, unable to stop slowly hitting your head on the floor, methodically.

and I need you now tonight.

When you realize your capacity to love, you begin to understand the responsibility you  have...to do no harm. If what you are doing hurts you or someone else, you gotta stop. Life is too hard, too painful and confusing to make it harder for anyone, least of all yourself.

I need you more than ever.

You may not live forever, but forever is a long time, and it starts tonight. 

Forever's gonna start tonight. Forever's gonna start tonight.

Never gets old. 

Nina Simone is an American and So Am I (the final installment)

Chicago reintroduced me to Nina Simone the summer of 2013. When I found a best of album (The Very Best of Nina Simone: Sugar in My Bowl 1967-1972), I discovered Nina's contribution to the civil rights movement and, subsequently, her slow disappearance into what I would later learn was bipolar disorder.

I waited tables that first year in the Windy City, and I would come home in the middle of the night, put in my headphones, and take Linus for long walks while I listened to music on Spotify.

I introduced myself to lots of artists that year because I had access, like I was getting away with something. To name a few, I explored the likes of Tupac, revisited the 90s, and stumbled upon Nina Simone's To Be Young Gifted and Black.I was growing up older, colder, and so was she.

I recall one evening hearing Mississippi Goddam for the first time.

Picket lines
School boycotts
They try to say it's a communist plot
All I want is equality
for my sister my brother my people and me

In the documentary, What Happened Miss Simone (Netflix 2015), there is footage of Simone asking Dr. Martin Luther King what to do with all her feelings of rage. He, of course, encouraged her to focus energy on the nonviolent protests that would later go down in history as true democracy in action. 

But they killed him. 

So she sang this song, raging in a glorious, vulnerable masterpiece that the time for silent protest was over. That it's taking too long. Moving too slow. 

And they ran her out of the country. She was destroyed politically and publicly. The beautiful black woman with the incredible voice was not singing the songs that everyone wanted to hear. 
She wasn't smiling or trying to be nice.

Today there are so many voices scrambling and screeching to be heard and so many lives lost to alcohol, pills, guns, and violence, corporate violence, that America is not what they told us it would be. Yet, "they," whoever they are, are still trying to tell us that we need to hold on...for freedom? For what America......was?

America enslaved, tortured, raped, and murdered, countless human beings. Take a day and listen to the words to songs like "Strange Fruit," and "Mississippi Goddam." Take a month....take a month that is longer than February, take two months, and listen to the voices of those that have been trying to play by a set of rules that offers them very little.

Just like rage that gets stuffed down for far too long, the urgency of the song builds:

You keep on saying "Go slow!" "Go slow!" But that's just the trouble...

"Do it slow,"
Desegregation
"Do it slow"
Mass participation
"Do it slow"
Reunification
"Do it slow"
Do things gradually
"Do it slow"
But bring more tragedy
"Do it slow"
Why don't you see it
Why don't you feel it
I don't know
I don't know"

The "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality is impossible in a nation controlled by large corporations.

The lies about black crime told to make white girls afraid. The false masculinity of the disillusioned men who rape and take what they have literally been taught is "rightfully" theirs by design. The white boys and girls that scream "all lives matter" who have been told the lie that the Black Lives Matter movement is a personal attack. It is not.

And the churchgoers that voted for our current president and still try to talk to me about love that surpasses all understanding.

We have all been lied to. Why don't you see it? Why don't you feel it?

Nina Simone's family found her years later, drowning in depression. It's hard to see the world for what it is as an artist, as a lover of what human beings can create through expression, and keep going.

When you see the lost, the unloved, the broken, and the hated, all marginalized and demonized so that one group of people can say they are better or stronger, so that someone can claim ultimate power and final say, it's hard not to drown in hopelessness because what's the point?

And that is what is happening to this country. It is ignoring the rage that it is due. Because we have all been lied to, been distracted, been in love. The Bible teaches that only the Truth will set you free.

So we are all in prison. Quietly, comfortably, wasting away in a prison that we don't have to accept.

You cannot live a lie. You can try. You can surely try. But it will eat you up, destroy you from the inside out. You can dress it up, buy all the best treatments for gaping wounds, but it will kill you in the end.

It's too slow. The admitting of our sins. It's time to admit them.

How long can we live in the safe notion that if we keep quiet and pray about it, it will work itself out? We are the answer to our prayers. We are the present and the future. What we do...not say....not pray....but what we DO is the only thing that matters.

It's not time to let go and let God. It's time to stand up, and be counted. And it's time to start paying attention. Those who are living are suffering...including you.

I am a terrible vessel.

History is full of prophets that we've chased away because they did what we were terrified to do: be completely vulnerable. Like Nina Simone.

America wanted Nina Simone to pay for her "sins," while it continued to ignore the sins that would bring it...bring all of us....to this point in history.

Maybe an angry black woman isn't the problem.

"Oh but this whole country is full of lies. You're all going to die and die like flies."

She said in an older interview, used in What Happened Miss Simone (Netflix 2015), that her biggest regret is not getting to play classical piano at Carnegie Hall. The interviewer was astonished. Nina Simone had played Carnegie Hall...but not classical piano. That means something to a musician, the dream of creating something beyond words in a space made for that very creation.

Instead, at Carnegie, she played what audiences wanted a black woman who could play and sing to play, and when they didn't like what she sang, they threw her in the fire, to burn.

And burn she did.

Before the truth can set you free, you need to know what it means to be free, but, more than that, you have to try to imagine what it means not to be.

Creation