Fathers are wonderful people: caring, providing, and responsible. We
need more of them in governance. Yet we need more than them. As good
as fathers are, responsible and all, they rarely make good political
officers. Fathers, by their nature, are good providers, and rulers,
but are rarely good leaders as they are seldom good talkers: Fathers
direct and guide, but do not see reason to sit you down and explain,
and convince, why what they want for you is really what is best for
you; the very essence of leadership. Hence the paternal gap: Fathers
only demand trust, trust that they rarely give.
Fathers, by nature, know best. Or not quite, since times change; and,
as my people say, Ajá ìwòyí la fíí s’ode ìwòyì, modern times are best
secured by modern measures. So that instead of the politician’s
perpetual plea for blind trust, what Nigerians deserve is uncommon
honesty; instead of rehearsed speeches and recycled manifestos, what
we should have are untainted explanations on why things are as bad as
they are and the way out; instead of the Change! mantra, and the
Transformation Agenda, what we really want is accountability.
We have had enough of paternity stints and stunts, of accusation and
counter-accusation, of paint-him-bad and draw-him-down; now we just
want our sovereignty to be recognised and respected; power, after all,
belongs to the people and is vested in us, since democracy is the
governance of the people, by the people, and for the people, and yet
remains so, even in Nigeria…
All the Way
Asphalt miles vanish beneath ever-thinning treads.
Sometimes a truck passes and the car trembles.
The truck fades, a memory in the rearview mirror,
and in that distance behind us, we see freedom.
In the miles between radio stations, voices crackle
from Mexico from Flagstaff, islands in a static soundtrack.
The lines on the map folded on the dash become
highways through the desert, the smile on your lips.
From pine-shrouded campgrounds to painted ruins,
roadside motels to cars wrecked and rusting in the desert,
and in the night-crashing waves of the western shore,
we learn the meaning of these secret messages:
rhythm of wheels, music of static, your hand on my knee,
the elegant whisper of trucks traveling the other way.
/// Bio
James Brush lives in Austin, TX and posts things online at Coyote Mercury where he keeps a full list of publications. He also edits the online literary journal Gnarled Oak.
1967: If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.
2015: If you’re coming to San Francisco, be sure to bring some dollars for your fare.
Six unforgettable and unforgivable years ago I moved to San Francisco, hoping to flourish in a libertine paradise of limitless self-expression, and ran straight into a wall of disappointment. My naive hopes of hedonistic revelry in a sort of mirror universe where queers ruled and everyone got along were violently shattered. What I found were the glimmering fragments of a fallen utopia usurped by greedy opportunists and conservative reformers, embroiled in a full-scale class and culture war, as various groups of people sharply divided fought for limited resources in a compact space and the cost of rent was outrageous… and rising. I lost my job, house, and direction in life completely, then experienced a radical rebirth, became a squatter and fell in love with life outside the capitalism box, and arrived at a “free living” philosophy that I believe will influence the rest of my life.
Standing presently at a crossroads in my life, I’d like to record my impressions of the City’s disturbing transformation, touch on ways I’ve felt degraded and subhuman due to being homeless, and highlight the consciousness-raising adventures I’ve had here with shout outs to some people and places with whom I feel connected as well as the profound liberation that grew out of my experience of having no fixed home. I’m permanently changed and a little shellshocked by all that’s happened, excited but uncertain about the future, for me and for SF, which is, as Candace Roberts sings in her great new music video that you should definitely find on YouTube (http://youtu.be/-yoRVJzQAe0), “Not my City any more.”
During my first two years in the Bay Area I was violently mugged and assaulted in Fruitvale, got a good job with a global hospitality company but then lost it due to PTSD resulting from the Fruitvale incident, shared a house in the Richmond (my first in SF) with a creepy and perverted older man who terrorized me when I couldn’t make rent, escaped that nightmare to an SRO, worked for the 2010 Census, learned a lot about SF history, moved into a house atop Mt. Davidson (highest elevation in the City) where one of my housemates was a maniacal con artist living under a false identity who tricked me into giving him money, wrote for SF’s main LGBT paper the Bay Area Reporter (now a pale conservative shadow of its radical roots), got a job as a clothing checker at a club called Blow Buddies which had nothing to do with blow dryers, then moved into a flat on Folsom Street with a British witch dominatrix thinking I’d finally found my “Tales of the City” niche, only to lose my job and realize I couldn’t make rent. I was burned out by stress and the fruitless quest for employment, which required me to be passionate about brands and advertising (yawn), knowledgeable about technologies I couldn’t afford, or willing to go the route of human exploitation. I checked “none of the above,” and fell into the abyss.
One day I heard on a street of this city –
billionnaire ville of high tech and IT,
cultured pearl of Silicon Valley,
capital of the 21st century,
San Francisco of the crazed and the crazy –
a man laugh out, “Whatever you do,
or think you can do, there’s one thing you can’t do:
you can’t disinvent technology!”
But, darling, what if we could, you and me,
undo the long golden chain of human
marvels and practical disasters, back
to the wild dawn of it all? What if we could
unpave, unpollute, unpoison the world
that we are destroying with our civilized life,
that Frankenstein’s monster of terror and sweat?
—The cell phone suddenly melts in my hand
like a Milky Way left too long in the sun.
The laptop wrinkles like an autumn leaf,
the desktop goes up in a puff of smoke
at the sparrow’s pass of a magician’s wand,
goes up with a smell of burning wood.
Servers curdle like bottles of milk.
GPS goes out like a light.
Monitors line up like dead fish on the sand.
Abruptly vanishes the World Wide Web
like a spider’s cobweb catching humans like flies,
and with it the stranglehold of the internet.
A wind picks up over the empty land:
it blows forests of sky dishes away,
flocks of radios, stereophonic herds,
the clotted brainpans of obsessive nerds,
landfills clogged with wireless TVs,
movie cameras, projectors – not those! – yes, those
too – molten flash drives and CPUs,
busses and rockets and snowboards and skis,
rollerblades, Velcro and nonstick pans,
silicon chips reduced to sand,
rare earth metals melting down with smartphones,
the burnt-out husks of intelligent homes,
trains and steamships and telegraphs and sails
crossing the seas like clouds of white whales,
skyscrapers and skylights, iron alloys and glass,
the first lawnmowers smelling of cut grass,
and the central beast at the heart of the wheel:
the million-headed Hydra, the automobile;
the casket elevator, the pick, the spade,
the tackle and hook of a cable of braid,
the IUD, pill, the condom, bidet,
vaginal rings and penis pumps
(the tech of pleasure isn’t spared its lumps),
Glocks and anklets, in vitro wombs,
water-sealed coffins and virtual tombs,
warheads and nylons and nuclear bombs:
the wind of time in reverse sweeping away
everything we invented: the plough, the clock,
the spectacles on the pimpled nose of a monk,
dreadnaughts, all dreading, at long last sunk,
pencil, parchment, typewriter, quill,
propeller, salt cellar, egg-beater, scythe,
horseshoe nail and dentist drill,
uncool change lane and cool Swiss knife:
everything that fell from the war of life
into our far too-clever brains
that are never satisfied and never tire,
back to the beginning of everything until
we lie down again in the mud of a cave
and, snuggling together, as we know best,
disinvent the one we can blame for the rest:
the two sticks that first rubbed together into flames.
See? All gone! It couldn’t be done?
We’ve done it, you and me, in the course
of a little fantasy and, with apologies, verse.
But then, I never needed any of it.
I have needed you, deep as I am in the mire.
Each time we embrace, we invent fire.
_____
Christopher Bernard is author of A Spy in the Ruins, In the American Night,
and The Rose Shipwreck. He is also co-editor of Caveat Lector.
His poetry can be found at his blog, “The Bog of St. Philinte.”
Image from Fire Fire Fire.
Aphrodite wraps a strand of pearls around her shimmering, pale throat, pulse fluttering wildly at the base of her neck as the precious stones tighten. The rouge on her lips fades as the light drains from her eyes. Once jewels, shimmering emeralds fade to grey, eyes blown black as her breath slows. Asphyxiation is a peaceful way to go, they say. It’s like falling asleep. They don’t mention the fire in your lungs, nor the way your ribs feel like they’ve split apart. Beauty never fades, not even in death, and a princess reincarnates as a goddess, skin as smooth as the pearls that strangled her.
Athena twirls the blade between fingertips, carefully tossing ideas in her head. Strategizing. Planning. Plotting. What she does best. A wise commander, young only by her years, wants to feel comfort in her veins, so she splits them open. A tree’s branches being ripped apart, petals of blood like shreds of roses fall from calloused skin. The blood soaks up the fears, it soaks up most feelings, and it soaks up the words that die on her tongue as owl’s wings whisk a spirit from a body.
Hera finds her ring. Purest of metals, brightest of stones. She lays it before her, on a vanity of gold tabling a mirror with a laughable reflection. Her fingernails dig into a palm, slender body tensed and muscles coiled to spring. She lights a candle, watches the wick burn, watches the wax melt and drip and contort into a shape unlike its original form. The feeling is not unfamiliar. She twists the stone of the ring on her finger, pours out the pale dust encased in the brilliant cloak. She breathes in, head swimming and eyes rolling back. She slams down the ring with all of her force, hearing the mirror crack, though the significance of it is lost in translation. She feels her insides tighten, her mind seize. One trembling breath later, blackness. Though her head slams into metal, she is given the cushion of a cloud.
“Tell us who you find most beautiful,” they chorus, Prince Paris below their thrones on bended knee. Exteriors are perfection, crafted by Botticelli on a bed of satin. Interiors are lakes of boiling blood, screaming souls, and spine-chilling pasts. Mortals cannot see turmoil within; mortals only see the most beautiful sin. Goddess of Beauty retains her crown, though porcelain skin can only do so much to cover a soul built on rubble.
Around this time last year, I was owing NEPA some thirty thousand
naira; today, NEPA owes me some twenty-five hundred. Funny, eh? As at
when I was owing thirty grand, my neighbours prided themselves as the
rich ones, and insisted that NEPA cut our light at the meter points
(so they could retain their connections while I lost mine). One even
scorned me the month I paid three out of thirty, she stood in the
street and argued that I mustn’t be spared. I came back to meet me
disconnected. Well, she owes just as much now, a year later.
Truth be told, we all owe at one time or the other; even Dangote.
Sometimes, as in my case, we owe because someone disappoints and we
have to take responsibility. Either way, debts are easier incurred
than settled. In fact, one often pays off one debt with the other; run
in circles, never able to break out of the rat race. Luckily, there is
a way to pay debts and stay afloat. The discourse that follows is not
to make me out as some (arrogant) debt guru, but as someone who has
seen, and conquered…
Perhaps the first step is to stop the increase.
NEPA brought a bill N1 200 more than the previous month’s. I couldn’t
pay the whole bill, but I paid the N1 200. No, I didn’t wait till I
could afford the whole bill. The next month, the bill was N3 000 more,
so I paid the three grand. And was mocked.
What my financially illiterate neighbour didn’t know was that I coulda
paid much more than i did each time, I just didn’t. If I had, I’d have
pushed myself to the brink of indebtedness just to save face. I saw
the bigger picture. And those two months allowed me to prepare for the
tough times ahead: stocked the house with food, planned for farm, be
ready for the derogatory gazes of pseudo-rich classmates.
Last month our own Steve Mathews presented an entire semester of classical and quantum physics to Chabot volunteers and guests during the monthly enrichment lecture. Charting the history of light, he began with Galileo, who attempted to measure the speed of light in 1638. Although Galileo couldn’t determine the figure to a great degree of accuracy, he placed the speed of light at at least ten times the speed of sound. Later that century, Isaac Newton investigated light and determined that it was a compound substance, made of different colors.
Olaus Roemer devised a more complex method of measuring the speed of light that involved comparing observed differences in the orbital period of Jupiter’s moon Io. Roemer figured that the differences were not due to actual changes in the orbital period, but because light takes slightly longer to reach Earth when our planet moves farther from Jupiter. In 1726, James Bradley looked to stellar aberration, slight changes in the stars’ observed positions due to the Earth’s movement through space, to calculate light speed.
