ONE One would grow weary of the list of foods I generally refuse ingesting: I don’t eat beef or pork, peas or boiled peanuts, and, of course, a lot of things in between. Something about being able to decide what one wants on one’s tongue, what flavors one decides to savor, is something I hold in high esteem. And the food we desire is just as much about placement into worlds as it is about feelings of and needs for satiation. There’s this chocolate I had in the back of my parents’ Oldsmobile years and years ago that I loved …Read more »

one. I want to go outside. When i was a kid, my parents would force my brother and I to leave the interior of the house to play in the backyard – whiffle ball, basketball, hide-n-go-seek, freeze tag – or ride bikes in order to give them some relief from our noise. Theirs was a commendable desire: for us to get fresh air, to see the sunlight, to play with other kids, to exhaust ourselves so that we might sleep. But we were crafty and did not necessarily appreciate such desire, existing on the edge between playing outside and ColecoVisions, …Read more »

one.  I was defriended on Facebook this summer after a rather dramatic set of exchanges that took place publicly and I recently began to think about that defriending because I wanted to consider how mishearing and misreading were the grounds through which a purportedly critical analysis of my position was given and how that mishearing and misreading allowed the individual to feel good about himself once he finally clicked “unfriend.” Mishearings and misreadings are often foundational for argumentation, and though one’s argument may or may not, in fact, be correct, because of the straw man against which they contend, incongruity …Read more »

I In august of 2011, I had to call my mother – on a cell phone with not a lot of power left because I had been checking Facebook and texting friends, hoping to be released from a CT Scan clinic at Duke Hospital – to tell her that in less than two hours, I would be under anesthesia and that there was a chance (50 percent, I later discovered) I might not wake up. Things, for me, felt as quick as this opening sentence: no time to think about what was happening: just hazy, blurry, rapid movement. It was …Read more »

she wanted the world to see what they had done to her baby, Emmett. so as we quickly approach the day Emmett was violently violated and killed (August 28), i want to consider again the religious ethics that prompted his mother’s — Mamie Till-Bradley — desire for the world to experience the death of her son. of course, we already know that death is anything but uncommon. it is but a part of what we call life, it is the culmination of such lived experience and behavior. death is not unique of itself, so we must know that Till-Bradley was …Read more »

The reiteration :: we already have what we need in order to form a new world, a new world forged out of the material existence of that which already surrounds us. We have love, we have laughter, we have light. We have desire, we have depth, we have darkness occasioning the possibility of secretive and social movement against the grain of the constant, ongoing, perpetual imposition of the violent force of normalcy, hegemony. I write from the sea cost in South Carolina today. And I write because, having visited an open-air market selling boiled peanuts, peaches, squash and shrimp, an …Read more »

As I ran on the treadmill this morning at Duke University, realizing that I am presently a doctoral student in the English program, preparing for my preliminary exams (some call them “comprehensive”) and teaching a course to a group of first years, I realized that I was literally not supposed to be there…on the treadmill…running…at Duke.  You see, while studying during my undergraduate days, I was horribly unprepared for the rigors of the institution, the culture shock that forced me to reconsider class – I thought I was “middle class” until I realized that my parents were much closer to …Read more »

this is a repost of some things i am thinking through and have been for some time now.  lest we forget that the eddie long “scandal” is far from resolved, that conversation needs to be ongoing and intentional. So this is the weird me. Trying to think about my continual relationship and disavowal of what is called the Black Church and what I call BlackChristianity. Personal in reflection by some more general claims, hoping to get somewhere with this theorizing. So as much as I write against a certain BlackQueer conservatism, I write against myself.  This is a follow-up to …Read more »