So, I turn 37 soon and I know many of you geezers will be saying,"You're a BAAAAABY!" but that is cold comfort. It might seem melodramatic but after seeing what I have seen in my life and feeling that life is precariously balanced on the edge of destruction and mayhem (as I type this I hear the maddening blare of sirens converging on my area seemingly from all points)I wonder how much time I have left.
I wonder if Sandra or Laura were really my first best shots of love and if I should have just jumped in when I was young enough not to know any better. I wonder if I should have just sucked it up and sent away those crappy little drawings to comics publishers and set my feet on the path to becoming an illustrator. Could I have stayed in marketing at Hampton? Would I have been terribly different today if I had?
All of this second guessing feels sucky.It feels like regurgitation of meals long since forgotten. By all accounts I've done pretty well. I'm healthy, alive,I have a good job, I'm educated and reasonably likable on most days. I have all my hair and teeth. Never even broken a bone that I know of (my third toe on my right foot is a little suspect and there was that whole sliding down the banister at Park street thing). So why so gloom and doom? As I see it it's because no matter how much I have I want more. Not more in the material sense. I don't really care about trappings and status symbols. I want more of the important things like love and respect and happiness; not for me directly because you see I figured something out a long time ago. When people around you are happy it adds to your own happiness. I want us all to be able to love random people but not in the silly flower-child drug addled way. I want us to see the possibilities and the struggles that are similar and sometimes identical between us. I want us to at least acknowledge them and give each other the chance to bond around them. In this city plagued by ghosts of fabricated hate posterized all around us like propaganda billets or heads on pikes to scare us into our little xenophobic corners we need to be able to see each others humanity.
As drugs and poverty and depression take root in our streets and in our homes and grow like wild fire around the things we hold most precious we fight to hold onto these beautiful parts of us; our cultures, our traditions our families- hard as it might be- because if we lose them we won't have the strength to keep fighting the tendrils that grow around us and pull us deeper into the muck.
So I'm turning 37 soon. What have I done that can really be said to have made a difference? The kids I teach can testify to my heart and soul and to all of the passions that drive me. My friends and colleagues can speak well of me. I have worked hard to be someone whose works will speak for him. It must be my arrogance. Super-Ego. Messiah Complex. Too many comic books. Too many times hearing speeches by Dr. King or by Malik El Haj Shabbazz. Too many days in Sunday school learning the same lessons from the life of Christ. Maybe it was because I grew up with four parents when so few around me had two. Maybe it was the cumulative effect of so many charismatic adults who took an interest in me. Whatever it is this need to do more and more and more and to save the human race from eating itself up is overwhelming me.
Last year at about this time I was fed up with my job. Too many brilliant people in one place is counter productive. We all want what is best for young people but refuse to collectively admit that the problems are too many and by the time we get them the most needy of them have already been imprinted on. I knew this before I went into teaching. In essence I walked into the mouth of the beast willingly. Now I feel as if I am trying to hack my way out before I am lost forever.I still believe in doing all I can and teaching is an "honorable profession" but we need more. We have to counteract the media, the entertainment industry, the street life and the home in some cases. This is what Haven is about, or maybe was about. I let the voices in my head and the Super Ego tell me that I could do more this way. That I could do for the community in this space what I can't do in a classroom or with a painting or drawing sitting in my apartment. The dream and the vision sustained me for a long time. The space looks great and everyone can see the potential. The resources to finish it have dried up just about and I'm sitting here in this funk and malaise even closer to 37 realizing that I ain't no messiah.
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