I can write… really. I can sit down, and under the right conditions, I can write prolifically (if not well LOL). However, I am easily distracted. Any change in my writing ritual, any distraction -- a phone call, for example -- will sidetrack me for hours. So, the move has taken away from the everyday ritual -- the familiarity -- and the back pain (at its worst today), has resulted in zero writing. As I settle in to my new apartment, the ritual will come back, but the back pain (exacerbated by sitting) will definitely put a damper on my blogging…
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(St. Michaels at 4th Ave.)
-=[ Home ]=-
A house is not a home…
My first morning here, a bright sunny Sunday morning, I was awakened by a hushed but insistent, not particularly good mariachi singing right outside my window. Annoyed, I got up to see who it was and to request they take their singing ass somewhere else. When I looked, I saw a short, older Latino, dressed in black, with black cowboy hat and boots. He wore dark wrap-around shades, and with the small accordion he held, he played the same three chords over and over again. He sang songs of heartbreak, of love lost and regained and lost again, in his hushed, not particularly good, but insistent voice.
Next to him, stood a large shopping cart full of roses for sale and young Latino/a families on their way from church occasionally stop and purchase a few. Eventually, I notice he is blind, his cane pressed up against his armpit. He comes here most mornings to sing of love lost in that same hushed, not particularly good, but insistent voice.
I have moved from the largely upscale, yuppie Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope to
I live in a very young neighborhood of families with both parents, something you rarely see outside of a Latino/a neighborhood. My building, a six-family building, has one family from
I see all of this and I am reminded of the
Someone recently wrote me privately, asking why I am so angry about what’s going on in
And make no mistake about it, Arizona using race to demand that people produce “papers” to prove who they are is a police-state tactic diametrically opposed, not just to my personal values, but that shouldn’t be unacceptable in America. If we don’t stop this law now, similar ones will spread across the nation. Already, lawmakers in at least 10 other states have promised to bring similar bills to their legislatures. The land I was born in,
And if you think you’re safe, or rationalize that this is an intelligent solution to the largely fabricated crisis of immigration, you should think again. And if you’re a person of color and think they won’t profile your black or brown ass, think again. And if you’re a light-skinned Latino/a with blue-eyes internally ashamed of your own kind and in your neurotic eagerness to assimilate, support
And if you can bring yourself to hate and dehumanize another human being, regardless of their citizenship status, perhaps what you really hate is a part of yourself.
Love,
Eddie
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