"Take my hand. We'll make it, I swear..."

Today (Friday, July 8th, 2016), I saw in my Facebook feed the above photograph of a child's note-and-drawing, captioned, "A student left this note outside the school where Philandro Castile worked."

I see this note and I think of all the notes written and pictures drawn by my goddaughter for her Papa. Some have been sweet. Some have been hilariously and transparently manipulative as she does that thing 5ish - 8ish year-olds do. Some have been comprehensible to only her brilliant mind.

He and I have deconstructed, laughed over, and shaken our heads at these pictures and notes. While we sit on my porch or stand on his deck. While we talk on the phone during the day as we both work on projects at our respective homes. There is a special thread of our friendship, our brotherhood, our familyness that is these shared moments. It is one of innumerable threads.

When I imagine her having to write a note like this one to his *memory*...I AM READY TO BURN IT ALL TO THE GROUND.

*And*, of course, he and I have these conversations, and we always have. The thought of him being gone...I "just can't," as people say, but I do. This is where we live. This is how we love each other. We tell the truth. He laughs and says, "Maybe I should just hashtag my name now in preparation." I laugh and shake my head and sad-smile at him through the phone. And our hearts are exploding and there is screaming in our heads. And there always is. We still have to get supper. Look, none of this is new.

#PatchAvery

Look, none of this is new. If you didn't know that, if you are only learning about it now because of the intersection of our time that includes the #BlackLivesMatter movement specifically and the existence of social media, I would *like* to ask, how can that possibly be? Then again, that's the insidiousness of the construction of whiteness, isn't it? I have spent my entire adult life actively working on learning how it operates in me and building skills for smashing it, undermining it, tricking it...for accessing my own humanity and connection to interdependent life rather than luxuriating ignorantly in the whiteness that crushes my soul and kills Black and Brown people I love. Still, whiteness wants to own me at every turn. It is a continuous process of loving and working my way out of its clutches, over and over again. I will be doing it every day for the rest of my life. That is the truth. I am thrilled that it is, because WHAT'S THE ALTERNATIVE?

So, look, none of this is new. And if it seems impossibly horrible, that is because it is. And if it seems unimaginable unjust, that is because it is. And if it seems incomprehensible that this has been the state of things for hundreds upon hundreds of years, that is because it is.

So, whiteys, let's not turn away. Be in truth. Tell the truth. Act with truth. And know this: you can still find love in yourself, find hope, find laughter, and more. You can find all those things *and* be in righteous truth-telling fury. Just look at Black and Brown people in this country; they have been doing it for centuries.

Watch. Listen. Follow. Learn. Love.

#BlackLivesMatter #PhilandoCastile #BeautifulBlackHumansStolenFromTheirCommunities #StopMurderingBlackPeople

"Take this job and shove it. I ain't a-workin' here no more."

This pretty much encapsulates my attitude this week.  I'm sure I'll get over it shortly.  For now, though, that's it.

"Sing the rain on the roof on a summer night..."

Do you think it's a sign that I should be living somewhere else when changes in the weather that even hint toward seasonal shifts make me so homesick I think seriously about taking I-5 south to I-90 east out of the city, rather than to work?

I miss big weather. I miss blizzards, thunderstorms, tornadoes, winds I can barely walk against, and all the rest of it. Big weather's not always a picnic. Sometimes it's devastating. With nothing but loneliness for it as context though, I even miss worrying about big weather. I miss the collective bargaining Plains people do with big weather. It's conversation with God, negotiation with The Fates, and often even strategy based on hard data and/or experience. Regardless, at some point, you gotta just sit back and watch the show. Watch. The. Show. Here's the thing about big weather: it's not about you yet it encompasses you. It connects you to the people to whom you belong over generations of stories, all of which are seated in the context of big weather. "That was the year it was so hot the corn burned up before we even hit August." "The drift was right up to the eaves of the barn on south side, and we were sliding down from the peak." "My main memory of that storm was coming up out of the basement in the morning to find the willow tree out back of the house was coming in through the back door."

I miss openness. Nothing pisses me off like someone referring to my home as "the middle of nowhere." The Plains are not easy to get to know and I get that. (Being from there, I don't feel that in my chest, but I understand that it's true for many people.) I think I first understood that after reading Willa Cather for the third or fourth time. Cather was a transplant, and it took her some time to come to love the region, but she did come to love it. I rarely hear others speak of the Plains at all. When they do, it's usually to bemoan the "lack of" something. When I drive home and roll through the Badlands, Sandhills, and family farms of north central and northeastern Nebraska, all I feel is openness. There are so many stories there...of family and love and tyranny and oppression and steadfastness and manipulation and peace and persistence and violence and community and genocide and resilience and hopefulness and...so many stories, and if the people of the Plains seem tight-lipped and wary of outsiders, sometimes it might be that they think everyone can see what truly only they witness, that all those stories are stretched out and exposed, as part of a landscape of pure openness that offers nothing to hide behind or under.

I miss people being quiet for awhile.

Giddy Up Oom Poppa Omm Poppa Mow Mow

I'm thinking about my Grandpa Dean tonight.

"Hearts are torn between what's wrong and ain't..."

I've been neglecting this blog. Rather, I've been neglecting my desire to blog, I guess.

This week, I've been thinking about how I spend my time or prioritize my time, focus, etc. Mostly, I am driven by habits --habits resulting from messages I've internalized. Here's one. I work. That's what I'm most comfortable doing. I can make just about anything into work, it seems. When I remember that humanity is important to me, I am ashamed of this. Most often though, I'm not remembering that. Instead, I am letting myself off the hook, because working hard means I'm not lazy.

I think I have learned some stuff in the past fifteen or so years that has challenged me to examine my worldview. That's an understatement really. Sometimes I feel like challenging my worldview is the main thing I'm doing...intellectually. That does not mean I'm challenging it in other ways, however. I guess I can consider it a nod to the persistence of my cultural heritage that, in this country, my make-up has not been completely obliterated and replaced with only an attachment to the emptiness of white power and privilege. This is not to say that my ingrained attachment to the emptiness of white power and privilege hasn't obliterated most of my cultural heritage (or even that it doesn't connect to my make-up), just that I suspect I'm "working out" (pun intended) my fear of laziness along some kind of fourth dimensional line touching class, gender, geographic, and ethnic histories in addition to whiteness.

This has fucked with my ability to engage for my entire life. That's more apparent to me with each passing day. When hopeful, I find this apparency liberating. I'm not much hopeful though. Mostly, this apparency is terrifying, and I've been wondering if, throughout my life, I've been not terrified of some shit that by all reason should have terrified me (and that, when other people have reported similar shit, I've even gotten that it was terrifying and rolled with that) exactly because I've been saving every drop of terror for this extended moment of understanding that I am primarily driven by the fear of laziness-derived worthlessness. After all, what's my skill set to break that habit? Maybe I should work. on. it.

Now I have wasted ten minutes on this self-indulgent and whiny blog post when I could have been getting some shit done.

I know that writing this down is a step on the 2300 mile walk home to be fully terrified. So that's a good thing. I just wonder if when I'll prioritize it.

"Yeah, don't you figure, he's got bigger fish to fry..."

In brief and still in frustration:

When will adults bent on involving youth in an endeavor figure out that "youth empowerment" doesn't mean designing something and then taking it to youth through traditional, normative structures and systems and expecting youth to engage with it passionately?

Does this ever work?

More pointedly, does it ever work for youth who are already burnt out on...kicked out of...completely unseen within...unengaged by...or unsafe within those traditional, normative structures and systems?

I haven't seen evidence that it does.

Yes, this is a rhetorical question. Yes, I am actively engaged in combating this through advocacy efforts informed by actual youth. Right now, though, this very minute, I just want to be pissed off about it.

"Out of all the flags I've flown, one flies high and stands alone..."

Tomorrow, November 20th, is the eleventh annual International Transgender Day of Remembrance. More information about it can be found at http://www.transgenderdor.org.

Since 1999, I've attempted to spend TDOR away from public events held to mark it. I spend much of my time and consciousness on community organizing, advocacy, popular education, social justice work, etc. The few TDOR events I've attended over the years, while certainly memorializing in tone, included a How-can-we-turn-tragedy-and-pain-into-action? capstone. I don't condemn this, but it doesn't work for me. The only focus, the only emotion, I can summon on this day is love...love for sentience, I guess...and also grief, for the destruction of it. It is a difficult and willful act for me to maintain that focus, actually. The call to action is so tempting...because it is a turning away from loss.

So, I take a day off from action and am simply in love and in grief. In some ways, it's an annual reminder of my daily disassociation. It takes this day --and a couple others like it during the year-- to knock me into...what...I'm not sure...that particular layer of vulnerability that is an ache for the triumph of kindness, of collective access to awe of knowledge, existence, connection - of being. To stay there, hopeful in that vulnerability, it helps for me to be alone.

Clocking out now...see you soon...