“Look, if you had one shot or opportunity.
To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment.
Would you capture it or just let it slip?” – Eminem
I’m long past seizing anything, but that’s what brought me here. A stubbornness and unwillingness to quit in the face of rational thinking. The media can shut me out, but they can’t shut me up. I take the greatest joy in seeing subjects I wrote about repeated days later in national publicans. Writer’s earning large salaries while I do it for next to nothing. Way next to nothing. So close, if it were a space heater it would burn me.
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” – Mark Twain
It all makes sense sort of in a crazy way. A little kid at the Kennedy Assassination. Seeing bullet marks on the street which history says, don’t exist. Being in Alabama for the march from Selma to Montgomery. My parents visiting East Berlin during the Cold War. My Father at Trade Mart in Fort Worth. Going from no racial identity to being in the front row of the Civil Rights movement in Montgomery.
My Father never told me about the birds and bees. But instead, he told me about what a scab was and why I shouldn’t ever be one. My mother told me about Woody Guthrie. She was one of the poor and struggling Great Depression victims he was singing about. A political overdose as if I’d been programmed for this job all my life.
My oldest sister got her Kennedy sign broken over her head at a Nixon rally. It’s always fun hanging with the Cox’s. My other sister was a page at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, but never got in due to the police riot outside. I delivered yard signs to our Democratic neighbors.
Where did we go after the Kennedy Assassination? To New Orleans of course, doesn’t everybody?
I was born into a family of overachievers and have always struggled to keep up. My childhood was politically infused. I was watching TV when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, live and in living black and white. I went to tell my parents, but they wouldn’t believe me until they tuned in for themselves. As a family, we talked about politics at dinner. If you want to be included in the conversation, read up.
What sort of kid has their life immersed in politics, like that? There has to be some reason behind it, doesn’t there? It can’t all be for nothing, could it? Could all this be a meaningless series of coincidences in a random uncaring universe? Do you want to know what segregation looked like? Do you know why the old Dairy Queens had two serving windows?
Did you know on the Capitol steps in Montgomery? There is a star placed to commemorate where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as the first President of the Confederacy. If you stand on that star and look 400 hundred yards almost directly ahead on the left. You will see Martin Luther King’s church. The Confederacy started right here on this spot, and Jim Crow ended right over there on that spot. Down the street is the Winter Building where the orders were sent to fire on Fort Sumter. History placing you in the middle of it can be funny that way.
No red-faced angry editors telling me to get with the program or get out. Or making pitches to those who don’t get it anyway and probably will never get it. Concentrating on dollars over content. You can’t say that! We need to edit out a few of those words here and there, okay? Nothing major! It’s simple, if I don’t think it, I don’t write it. I don’t have assignments. I have meandering thoughts of early morning marijuana madness and political obsession.
Money is great, I like money a lot. But it’s not as great as the feeling of saying something and getting it just right. Just on general principle to say what you really think about something, while trying to make others laugh at the inappropriateness of it. Some days, I tickle the shit out of myself. Writing for me is easy, but asking for money is not.
I do this for love, but money is nice too and is accepted by most of your better local retailers.
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I used to subscribe to a website where the operator would put up these urgent banner messages. If we don’t raise $615.92 by four o’clock, some guys are coming to break my thumbs! It was always some dire emergency. His Internet hot water heater blew up and he need $742.69 by three AM or else the pages would go dark. I always thought that kind of a cheesy business model, but he’s still there today. So, what do I know?
I’d rather try it like the art museum. Donate of you can, but if you can’t you’re still always welcome.
“Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.” – Mark Twain
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