Author Archive

Sometimes I Feel Like Kanye, Sometimes It’s Brautigan

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Sometimes I Feel Like Kanye, Sometimes It’s Brautigan

If you have the opportunity to play this game of life, you need to appreciate every moment. A lot of people don’t appreciate the moment until it’s passed. – Kanye West Sometimes I feel like Kanye, sometimes I don’t. First couple lines of a poem I didn’t write. Wrote those lines back when I could…

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You May Be An Old Man

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You May Be An Old Man

There’s something vulnerable about the human condition, where people can transmute into something so astonishingly altered that whatever is left is wholly unrecognizable. – Craig D. Lounsbrough You may be an old man… If two cashiers are available, and you choose the funny black guy instead of the hot young blonde… If the hair on your…

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Critical Football Theory

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Critical Football Theory

Despite the fact that there were a lot of African-Americans playing in the National Football League in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, there was a stereotype that we weren’t capable of succeeding at certain positions. If you played those positions in college and you got drafted, you knew you were probably going to get moved…

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2022 Will be ‘The Good Old Days’ Soon

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2022 Will be ‘The Good Old Days’ Soon

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning. – Albert Einstein 2022. It was the best of times and the most absurd of times: A war in Ukraine;  a fight for democracy;  the end of Roe; ketchup on the walls at Mar-a-Lago;  fantastically awful candidates,  and…

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Save Our Schools From Books

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Save Our Schools From Books

A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They’d rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book. – Ursula K. Le Guin DeSantis Gala Red Hat Ladies Night Suspected drag queens read books. He arrests them all. Bachelor Auction @ The Villages…

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Why Fascists Cancel African-American History

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Why Fascists Cancel African-American History

I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me. – Muhammad Ali We’re living  in a dumbed-down culture  because the education  of most people  in America  is sad  and not…

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Art Class #43 (Joseph E. Yoakum)

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Art Class #43 (Joseph E. Yoakum)

“Wherever my mind led me, I would go.” Joseph Elmer Yoakum was an American self-taught painter. He was of African-American and possibly of Native American–descent, and was known for his landscape paintings in the outsider art-style.  He was seventy-six (76) – dates vary, but going with that – when he started to record his memories in the…

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Dad And I, We Didn’t Talk On The Phone

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Dad And I, We Didn’t Talk On The Phone

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower…

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The Eternal Last Laugh Is Always On Us

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The Eternal Last Laugh Is Always On Us

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. – David Foster Wallace This Day In History Infinite Jest is published (February 1,1996) Wallace wrote about television…

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The House Majority (It’s Not Me)

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The House Majority (It’s Not Me)

I’m assiduously critical of people who want to start their American Dream and that journey and want to start it the wrong way. I think like this: the United States was created on immigration, it was created on immigration, on diversity. I strongly encourage people who want to come here to do it. But I…

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