not sleeping

I'm not sleeping.
I'm not sleeping because I've been concentrating very hard on not worrying the painful zit under my nose. Don't touch it, don't touch it, it will go away faster. A mantra since adolescence.

I'm not sleeping because I'm worried that my cat, Dolce, may have picked up a flea when I had him out on the front porch for six seconds this morning.

I'm not sleeping because I had a long, long nap after a long walk after a big breakfast of avocado omelete and canadian bacon.

I'm not sleeping because the man I went out with last night hasn't called me today.

I'm not sleeping because Obama is meeting with Billy Graham. Why?

I'm not sleeping because I'm watching a PBS program about The Governator's plans to make California energy efficient--the rich, non minority areas, that is. He looks like a ken-doll, all molten facial skin and non-moving forehead.

I'm not sleeping because I saw some pictures of myself from 7 years ago and I looked like Jabba the Hut. Talk about bloat.

I'm not sleeping because the world in the night is scary and fucked, the tea party people are at the door wanting me to redo my census form for my white side only, I will never find a cream to tame my alligator skin, you don't like me anymore, Disney World is too big to fail, and there is no mint left for mint chocolate chip ice cream. It's a lost resource. Really.

I'm not sleeping because I'm thinking of all the books Nicholas Sparks has written and all the books I have not written which will be so much better than what Sparks has written, naturally.

I'm not sleeping because I really really really really really really need a new bra to fight perpetual "uniboob." Unsightly.

I'm not sleeping because a few of you have cancer and I can't stand the thought of you in pain, of you suffering and I wish I could take it all away.

I'm not sleeping because some crazy old racists passed a Nazi-ish anti-immigration law in the state where my beloved mama lives. She's going to have to kick some of her neighbors square in the beeee-hind.

I'm not sleeping because I don't really know what's going on in the Middle East and I really don't want to know but I feel like it's intellectually lazy not to try and find out.

I'm not sleeping because I worked 2 days in the last 2 weeks because my fever wouldn't go away despite a massive amount of anti-inflammatories. Is there a way to be fashionably poor? Is there a free class on how to achieve this?

I'm not sleeping because DIVAS NEVER DOZE!

I'm not sleeping because I'm writing this blog, and my mind is tired so I'm not in the usually censorious place and it feels good to translate thoughts without a filter as my fingers fly across the keys.

I'm not sleeping because every time I think about Jon Stewart saying that Fox News is the "Lupus of news" it makes me laugh so hard I snort.

I'm not sleeping because I'm mad that PBS keeps interrupting the excellent programing that they only show when they are beggin for money with poorly toupeed local public television employees asking me for the $10 I sent in months ago.

I'm not sleeping..zzzzzzzzzz.

Whhooooo Child

I'm watching Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander on Bill Moyers Journal. They are two Black scholars talking about the illusion of race progress after Obama's election. Specifically, they are talking about how the war on drugs, started in the Reagan administration as a way to pacify poor whites who were resentful of civil rights legislation that abolished Jim Crow and segregation. They assert that the Republican party intentionally crafted the war on drugs to focus on Black and Brown peoples in disenfranchised areas, specifically, Black men and Latinos. Dr. Alexander says that if the focus had been on White suburban communities, there would have been just as much drug use and dissemination as there were in the inner cities. The White boy who lives on a rural road in Minnesota is not getting his meth from the homie on the street corner. Use of the politics of fear and anger to disenfranchise people.

And we're right back in it. Witness the tea party and those ignays who spit on the Black Congressman and called Barney Frank a "faggot." Witness the Assinine Alaskan and her brain dead followers. Witness the fog of rage over universal health care to the point where the very people who will benefit the most from it are up in arms to stop it because a Black man is sponsoring it--I truly believe a lot of the protest is racial backlash.

I love people who say to me, "You must be so happy we have a Black president. We're in the post-racial era!" It may look like that from your desk at your job and in your car as you drive to your home in your safe neighborhood, and I'm not faulting you for having those things, but don't ignore all the people who don't have it, Whites as well as Blacks and Latinos, and don't ignore the economic injustices that keep many people from having what we all consider basic rights and don't ignore that we all, as humanitarians, have a job to do to make things as right as they can be.

It is horrifying to me, what I wrote in the first paragraph--could this really be true? Maybe it's an amalgam of intention, political expediency, the projection of hopelessness that we put on poor communities, the hopelessness that the economically disenfranchised learn to internalize. But let's not be fooled by all of the post-Obama rhetoric--we ain't out of it.

I've been talking to a friend who is a probation officer about the discrimination parolees face--they can't get jobs, they can't vote, they are the victims of legally sanctioned type of the discrimination we decry in general. And they are overwhelmingly minorities. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man how to fish and he feeds himself, his family and his community for a lifetime. Wholesale reform is called for.

Lest my blood pressure goes any higher, let's not talk about people of our acquaintance getting stopped and followed because of their skin color. Let's save for another time the fact that women still make less than men for the same job. Let's not even get into the institutionalized discrimination and pseudo-criminalization of the disabled, and the automatic assumption that if you aren't skin and bone or in a wheelchair, you must be fine. Let's not discuss, without alcohol, how women over 40 are marginalized, how people over 60 aren't considered sexual beings, how the Catholic church would rather ruined numbers of young boys lives by keeping things quiet rather than see justice done. Let's not even go there today.

It's the irony of Easter. Let's resurrect our feeling for our fellow human.