Faith Versus Fear: The Dark Side

I want to talk about the flip side of faith versus fear.

I want to talk about those times when faith falters. When you don't win. When you can't save someone. When you can't save yourself.

I want to talk about those times when you try as hard as possible and it isn't enough.

Sometimes you meet someone who is very similar to you, who shares your same strengths and weaknesses. And you love them, because you understand them. You know where they come from. You share the same demons.

And it is so hard not to love someone, almost unconditionally, who shares your demons. Because who knows them better than you? Who knows you better than them? You don't even have to try to communicate in words or descriptions, because you know how it is. You know how hard it gets, and how bad it is. You know in the words of Brand New "all the quiet things that no one ever knows".

And knowing all of this, how can you not want to help them. They are yourself. They are who you are, and who you can be. If they fail, it means you can fail. If they succeed, it means you can succeed. It goes beyond being friends, beyond being brothers, it goes to knowing what it means to look death in the face close enough to discover you have the same cheek bones.

And this is the person who I failed to save. Who I in fact stop trying to help. Because I knew his demons, and knew I wasn't strong enough to save him. Just like most people couldn't save me. I knew that the only person who could save him was him. But how do you tell a person that? How do you get someone to save themselves?

And if you can't convince someone to save themselves have you failed them? Was it a shortcoming of faith? Was it the triumph of fear? Shouldn't have love conquered all - or could I never really love him because he was the walking truth of the dark side of myself.

I wonder if I hate him even now, because I know in my heart of hearts, but for the grace of God go I? I know we are both guilty of doing terrible things. I share his temptations. I share his affliction. I know how it isn't his fault. Not all of it. I know there are some things he can't control. And maybe what I hate most of all is that knowing him so well, maybe as well as I know myself, I still couldn't save him.

And it does hurt. It hurts so much I rarely even think about it. I sometimes forget he even exists. Because I tried to save him. A lot of people tried to save him. For years, we all tried. And it wasn't enough. It was never enough.

Yet, you hope that maybe it was. You hope that maybe your efforts meant something. Maybe you caring meant something. Maybe all of your energy, your life, your time, that you put into helping another person, meant something.

And you pray and you pray and you pray.

But you know that you didn't save them.

You know that almost doesn't count.

That your faith did not win out.

And the only question left at the end, is who to blame?

Poetry Freestyle: Jay-Z Is Not David Ben-Gurion

shakespeares on the corner in wife beaters
standing in front of trap houses, reciting poetry
green and white, dimes and birds,
hands on steel with hamlet dispositions
howl of cats announce the pressing of triggers
thats why ambulances live here
line breaks mean life breaks makes pen pause
wondering what houses writing can build
because words can't replace fathers
semicolons don't hold lonely mothers
so we hide behind dumpsters
because getting caught means cold summers
so i lied for my brothers
pass the can, spraying names, poetry games
ain't nothing glamorous about walking
streets, don't come equipped with rap beats
because the radio doesn't tell your story
never had a platinum necklace only rubberbands
34 white tees, 5 pair of blue jeans, can't confess
what I did for a fresh pair of kicks
on nights deranged, my hand insane
walking around holding a blade
sharing a cell with bukowski
turning tricks for jars of ink
it's so easy to make girl's trick
we all gotta pimp
swappin hand me down dreams
for usb drives filled with bootleg movies
being broke makes your peanut butter
appreciate jelly. makes you want to rewrite
dante's inferno, blocks have cantos
people forgot jews lived in the ghetto
jay-z is not david ben gurion
so the block stays devoured
dim echos of silent holocausts
of darfur's and rawandas
so gunplay only brings few tears
what's a driveby in the greater scheme of things?
what can a poem hope to mean?

She loved me with her entire 16 year old being, and it was enough

Sometimes it is necessary to share stories.

I often feel that those stories that are most hurtful and scary are the ones that are most important to share.

Because sharing a story helps one lose the feeling of being alone.

Sometimes it is so easy to suffocate in our own uniqueness.

Yet, it is our ability to be touched by other people that saves our lives.

My life has been saved many a time.

When I was 13 or 14, I had an incurable desire to experience emotional extremes. I wanted to see how happy I could become. I wanted to see how sad I could become.

I thought that having a larger emotional range than most would make me a better person.

So, one day I decided to write a suicide note.

Just to see what goes through the head of a suicidal person.

The process of writing the note made me so sad that I couldn't even finish because I was crying so hard.

Sometimes I wonder if I was manic even then.

There would be times I would be inexplicably happy. So excited just to be part of this world. I would jump up and let out yelps of joy. That joy would surge through my body as I went outside and watch the green grass blow like clouds in my backyard on a sunny day.

All it took to make me happy was long grass blowing in the wind.

So, maybe it shouldn't have been so surprising that a few years later I wanted to kill myself.

As it always does, it started with feeling alone. Feeling alone turns into feeling worthless. Feeling worthless turns into despair. Despair turns into nothing. And nothing turns into death.

However, the first time wasn't so simple. There was a story behind it. A definite trigger. And I am thankful that my first time is memorable like that.

I lived far away from high school and didn't have a car. I was in student council and it was homecoming. We were having an after party after the game. My ride had left me so I asked the other student council representative from my class if he could give me a ride. He was a remarkably decent human being and said yes.

On the way home it started to rain. He dropped me off and I thanked him and said good night. The next day we were supposed to be finishing up the final homecoming decorations. He wasn't there. A couple hours past and finally he came in. I asked him what was wrong and he said that he had hydroplaned into a concrete ramp and totaled his mother's brand new car on the way from my house.

I felt bad, but there was much work to be done. It wasn't until I was at the dance that it sunk in what had happened. That this marvelous human being could have died last night. And I blamed myself. If he had never been on that road, he would not have had an accident. I felt responsible. And for the first time, instantly, miraculously, slowly unwrapping itself in layers upon layers, I felt suicidal.

On the way home that night I kept imagining getting into a car wreck and flying through the windshield. I kept longing for the car to slam into the concrete barrier. Luckily I didn't have license and my Dad was driving. But I had never wanted to meet death so badly.

I later started fantasizing about taking pill after pill. Wondering how many do you have to take to kill yourself. I thought briefly of slitting my wrists, but decided it was too bloody. Too unseemly.

I called this girl who I loved, who had moved away. And she reminded me why I should live. She loved me with her entire 16 year old being, and it was enough.

But that was my first time, and first times are forever.

It was the start of a period of time where I genuinely did not care whether I lived or died. There would be times later, times involving cars, times involving pills, times involving knives, where the death impulse got the better of me.

I would be intentionally suicidal at least twice more before I graduated from high school, but I constantly did things to put my life at risk. And upon reflection I am certain that not caring whether I lived or died was more dangerous than those moments of suicide.

However, those are their own stories and will get told in their due time.

What is most important is that you realize, in those moments of loneliness and desperation, that you are not the first to feel that way, that there is probably someone who loves you with all of their being, and that you are never alone.

Continue striving upward.

Power Relationship Building

Marshall Howard offered the four fundamentals of "power" relationship building:

1. Reach out. To create high emotional-impact time with prospective donors, consider how you communicate with them. "I don't email. Emails create the lowest impact of anything - one notch below letters." Having figured out through relationship building what his clients enjoy, Howard, for example, takes one client shopping, and another wine-tasting - high emotional-impact time.

2. Be more curious. "Why in the world do you keep your curiosity under wraps?" asked Howard. He then cited the "law of reciprocity," which, when loosely defined, suggests that when you share, there's an urgent need to share back. "Share, and ask questions. They will share back -- they can't help themselves."

3. Put the "person" first. Get to know the prospective donor as a person first, prospective donor (or board member, volunteer, etc.) second. Collectively create mosaics about the prospective donor -- and do it as a team, both organizationally and through high emotional-impact time with the prospect.

4. Uncover values, goals and interests, mutual and individual. The ability to connect is controlled by emotions, feelings and beliefs, said Howard. Every human being seeks to connect, and the stronger that connection, the more emotional energy that exists. The law of emotional reciprocity, loosely defined, suggests that when one gives, there's a need and a desire by the recipient to give back. "People decide emotionally; they justify logically. That said, why when we go see a donor do we plow them with facts?," asked Howard, who said that 88 percent of decisions are based on gut feeling, not fact.

Read the full article here

Continue to strive upward.

Wynton Marsalis Rocks The Colbert Report

Sometimes its nice to see a glimpse of that truth on the mountaintop.

Until next time continue striving upward.

What We Would Be God Over

I recently asked my friends the question : If you could be god of anything, what would you be god over?

Here are the responses I received.

Goddess of Passion
Goddess of Books
Goddess of Trampolines
God of Love
God of Music
Goddess of Sex
Goddess of Knowledge
Goddess of Wisdom
God of Hearts
God of Feelings
God of Childhood
Goddess of Lions
Goddess of Water
God of Opportunity
Goddess of Light
Goddess of The Night
God of Organs
Goddess of Dance
God of Flesh
God of Serendipity
God of Literary Ideas
Goddess of the Ocean
Goddess of the Dawning of the New Age
God of Killer Dance Moves
Goddess of Penguins
Goddess of Cupcakes
God of the Female Orgasm
Goddess of Weather
Goddess of Words
God of Magic
Goddess of the Hunt

and I would be the God of Small Things

What you be god over?

Continue to keep striving upward

Screams

Sometimes the cry for attention is an eighteen wheeler
jack knifing during rush hour.

Sometimes the steel cylinder bursts open leaking chemicals
that etch cries for help into the pavement.

Sometimes the pavement is a red leaf
blending into the earth as silent as a razor cuts skin.

Sometimes the razor has feelings and auburn hair,
and wonders why ripping flesh could be as simple
as breaking a pencil in half.

Sometimes the halves of pencils pretend to be broken birds.
Tumbling down three flights of stairs
praying to transform into body and bread.

Sometimes bread cries 6 times a day
and birds fly 85 miles per hour with tears in their eyes
thinking that a lightening storm would be safer than nesting

Sometimes lightening storms hiss dirges that echo
on the chilled tips of fading visitors
and keen them back to life.

Sometimes life rushes back crying
and screaming into the earth.

Sometimes the earth is warm with blood.

Sometimes it is nothing at all.

The End Of Race As We Know It

The End of Race As We Know It is an essay by Gerald Early.

I often feel disconnected when I read essays by older African Americans. Their obsession with black victimization, black place, black pride, and just blackness in general is beyond me.

I feel like a black man when I am sitting - when I am standing still. I feel black when I am idly talking to my friends, when I am at church, when I am in my fraternity, when I go to the movies, to a gallery opening, to an open mic, to a nice restaurant, to a university or school.

However, when I am moving - when I am doing things, I just feel like a man. When I am accomplishing whatever goals I want to accomplish I don't define my achievements in terms of my "blackness" but in terms of whether I am the best.

For me being the best is far more important than being black, or male, or even American.

Although never discounting my race, there is a joy in doing something that gets to the ideal of "you are just as good as anyone."

It is a joy discovered abruptly because we all know that "you are just as good as anyone" is a lie. You are not just as good as anyone until you start to actually do something. Then you will probably be worse than someone, and better than someone else.

However, that is why I am always seduced by the idea of "bestness". That in somethings I can really be "just as good as anyone" - that I can reach a level where no one is actually better than me.

And it is in this pursuit that I don't feel my blackness hanging around my neck like an anchor, or propelling me upward like a pair of wings.

I feel free, like every other man who has ever chased what made his heart flutter.

And for those moments, I am always thankful.

Keep striving upward.

Emotional Pathos - Joe Biden

There will probably be many moments on this blog when I talk about emotional connection.

Those moments when we transcend the different tribes that limit us and touch on something profoundly human, vulnerable, and beautiful.

As a male, I identified very strongly with this Joe Biden statement during the vice presidential debate:



"But the notion that somehow because I am a man I don't know what it's like to raise two kids alone, I don't know what its like to have a child you're not sure is going to make it, I understand, I understand."

Sometimes a man's entire life can be summed up in one moment.

Joe Biden did just that by reaching back to his childhood, and then commenting on the great success he has had as an adult and realizing that he has in many ways achieved beyond his wildest dreams - achieved by working hard and serving others - but even in that moment of achievement going deeper down to the underlying realness of "I understand" as Langston Hughes would say "life ain't been no crystal stair".

That just because he is a man doesn't mean he doesn't know what its like to raise two kids alone.

I think that sharing this story in a culture that routinely ignores and marginalizes fathers as fathers - was very powerful.

Being a good father is one of those things I aspire to be, if I ever have children. And I can't even imagine how hard it must be to be a single father, because frankly no one talks about the single father's - no one shares their stories.

It is always about single mothers (and for good reason!) but having Joe Biden up there almost in tears at the height of his career, his entire life up to this point, saying just because I am a man doesn't mean I don't understand, was a moment of emotional pathos.

Until next time, continue striving upward.

Charles Bukowski

When I was a teenager, Bukowski affirmed my idea that poetry can be real.

By real, I mean rooted in real things - in what is earthy, ordinary, momentary, and pathetic.

He appealed to my sense of values: swagger, confident, totally himself.

He admitted publicly many of our private fears, "where is the specialness of war and peace...i read the great poets...all i get is goddam headache and boredom...there is some trick going on here."

He wanted poetry to be more than what it was/what it is.

He said there is still room for people to come into this world and do something great.

And for me - that was and is very affirming and very hopeful.

These sentiments gave me the freedom to write poems about pissing outside, or rants about freshman girls, or driving down the highway, or the small stories that make up my life.

He made it okay to get that dirty, that plebeian, that indulgent.

In 2009, I have several opportunities to lead some creative writing workshops for young people, and I hope to be able to inspire in them what Bukowski inspired in me.

A great love and faith in the poetry of bars, bonfires, and frat houses.

Enjoy this clip and remember to keep striving upward.

Esquire's 75 Books Every Man Should Read

A friend sent me a link to Esquire's 75 Books Every Man Should Read

I went over the books and realized one of the things I aspire to come across a list like this and have read a majority of the books.

I think that reading, the reflective life, is essential to making us become more perfect people. It is one of the important ways that we learn about things that aren't readily comprehensible.

The books that I have read from the list thus far are:

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor

The Call Of The Wild by Jack London

For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

The Autobiography of Malcom X by Alex Haley

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Some of these books have helped shape my life - most notably The Autobiography of Malcom X, War and Peace, All The King's Men, and The Brother's Karamazov.

"I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there." - The Brother's Karamazov

Continue to strive upward.

A New Blog By Smart Black Boy

So I decided to start on this side project called "Aspiration"

I will be the only writer for this blog unlike my blog "Art Star" which is built on a different model.

I don't expect for this blog to become as big as Art Star because it is much more personal.

I do think that there will be a lot of good stuff for any readers of this blog.

The name says it all - this blog is all about Aspiration.

It is about those things, people, places, ideas, etc that we aspire towards.

It will also be about the journey to get there.

So, basically it is pretty open but I think it will be a cool deal.

Aight I'm out.