Fighting In The Pizza Parlor

WARNING!!

This video is very upsetting. My friend turned it on to me, and I was left extremely troubled and saddened. If you get a chance to look it up on YouTube, please look at the comments that follow this video. I am not sure what disappoints me more: the obvious barbarism of the video, the sadness of our inhumanity towards one another, the zebra mentality of onlookers, or some of the comments I read below the video based on fear and ignorance. I am disgusted by the actions of the two violent individuals in the video, not only as a black man, bat as a citizen of humanity. The perpetrators' reactions are despicable, in spite of race, but no more so than the comments of hatred and nescience that I read following the video.

We have such a long way to grow. We are still infants in our existence. I am bent by it all; and yet, I am not broken. I am hope, and I have hope. I would love to read your comments and reactions, my friends.

Good News! I know many of you have been waiting, and I've been lazy, so I should tell you: It is SARCOIDOSIS, not lymphoma. I'm asymptomatic, and that's a good thing. I'll try to keep you posted on any other developments.

Other good news. I've been writing a lot for my book lately. Unfortunately, this means that I haven't been posting a lot. I want to post stuff, but then what would be the point for you to buy my book. You may laugh now. Seriously. Laugh.

Well, I will give you some teasers soon, but the juiciest parts will have to wait for the book itself. I wouldn't want people to stop booking me because I revealed the ancient secrets of Tykan Chi. Look it up.

By the way, if you are having trouble finding Tykan Chi it's because I made it up. See? I have a lot of juicy things to share with you, and it will be up to you to figure out if they are lies or just plain truths. Good luck on deciphering my ramblings.

Live long and prosper.

“Dokyo wrote his last words while seated in the upright
Zen position. Then he put down his brush, hummed ‘an ancient song’
to himself, suddenly laughed out loud, and died.”
The Death of Dokyo Etan, a Zen Monk, taken from the book,
Japanese Death Poems

Lately, I’ve been thinking about death. A plethora of books and religions have been written on the matters of living and dying, though the overwhelming scholarship dedicates itself to the functions of life. That being stated, it should be of little surprise that even the matter of death is mostly treated as the annoying, younger sibling of life, (e.g., how to live after losing a loved one; the stages of death grief). What is to be said about our own deaths? What advice can be passed along about how to face, (if we are fortunate to recognize it), that brave transition? Death is inevitable, so we are told; or, at the very least, the physical death is inevitable. There is no escaping, my friends, we are condemned to die. All the religions of the world cannot save us from this savagery.

I think about my own demise. How will it approach me? What veil and costume will it choose to cloak its misshapen appearance? Will I know her when she arrives? Believe it or not, I don’t pray to avoid death; I think I want to embrace her when the time comes. When Dokyo Etan died it seems he released his spirit. He laughed out loud and then died. What an eerie, yet amusing, event. What a presence he had about him to choose his final breath. He consciously released his spirit. He wasn’t the first to do this, (Jesus Christ, among others, did likewise: while on the cross, he bowed his head then he died), and he wasn’t the last, but certainly one can applaud with much appreciation the manner in which Dokyo Etan succumbed to the inevitable. He died laughing! What a joy; an ultimate victory: to leave this life laughing.

What of my own death? Recently, in an x-ray, it was discovered that I have several, abnormally large nodules surrounding the Hilar region, (chest and lung area of the body), along with some that have found themselves under my armpits. So today, March 6, 2009, the day before my 38th birthday, I will go in to the hospital to have a biopsy taken from the area of my lungs. The doctor believes that it may be a disease called sarcoidosis. Sarcoidosis is an inflammatory disease, potentially fatal in some carriers, though most people live with the disease unbeknownst to them. I am asymptomatic. I would not have discovered these nodules if it weren’t for an emergency room visit I had concerning a pulled muscle in my lower back. When they x-rayed my body they found nothing concerning my initial complaint, but they found these nodules. It was unrelated to the reason for my hospital visit, but once it was discovered, I followed up, (at the recommendation of the hospital), with a CT scan. I admit I was alarmed at first. When you get an x-ray result that states: you have a prominent silhouette of the hilar region – it fails to bring comfort. I think that my response was something along the lines of: “What the hell does that mean?” And then I felt panic. The CT scan confirmed the initial findings of the x-ray: I have enlarged nodules. I was still at a loss. What did it mean? The panic subsided when I took the follow-up steps of visiting my doctor and then scheduling an appointment with a thoracic surgeon. For me, serenity has often been obtained by having more knowledge and less obscurity. It was after my visits with the doctors that things became clearer. I have sarcoidosis or lymphoma.

Lymphoma is another affair. Briefly stated, lymphoma is cancer, cancer of the lymph nodes. This disease, unlike sarcoidosis, is not just an inflammatory disease. It is The Disease. The Great C. The Beast. The Unknown. The rapist of the body. Death personified. Surprisingly, I have not been overly anxious by this possibility. Technically, I was not meant to discover these nodules at this present time. I hold on to this mystical, yet vaporous, comfort. And with this mixture of tossing emotions, I face today. The biopsy will clear up some questions.

What do I feel? I suppose the overriding emotion that exists is a sense of peace. At the moment, I feel no fear by what may lie ahead. I hesitate to say this because I know that many of my friends rush to bring me hope, albeit, unsecure as it is, these friends seek to alleviate what they perceive would be a natural reaction on my part: panic. They want to bring comfort by telling me that all will be well; that it will not be cancer; that cancer does not happen to someone like me. Their intentions are positive. They want to raze the fear they feel for me or their approaching mortality. What they achieve, however, is more problematic. I shut down, and then I raise an emotional barrier. I feel sadness, not fear. I need no false hope, no cold comfort. Quis ero ero: what will be, will be. If it is sarcoidosis or cancer, I will take the necessary treatment steps to deal with it.

I am not trying to put on a brave face. I will be fairly expressive about all my emotions along the process. I’ve never been adept at forgoing public announcements concerning my private life. I just don’t think denial of any possibility is my best comrade. I will suffice it to say that I don’t believe that this current process is how I will die, though it is a test of how I choose to live. Please do not misconstrue what I am saying. I hope that it is sarcoidosis over cancer, but I have no fallacies concerning my mortality. I will one day depart this life. It may be soon or it may be years from now, but I shall drink the same poison found in apples, within foreign gardens, of long ago. It is heartbreaking that I will not be a part of the carnival ride forever.

But what of my sadness; from where does it spring? My sadness is the byproduct of the sadness my death will create for others, primarily that of my daughter. What if my time is now? My daughter, Saskia, not yet five, is hooked to me, as I am to her. I shudder when I envision the turbulence from which her young life would quake with such a loss. And I am stuck with this enigma: I am ready for my own death, but I am not ready to die now.

Life is queer. We are here but for the moment, moving towards our death the moment we are born. We fall in love, establish friendships, and fret over our pets; we hate one another, inserting our vitality into the hips of greed and disparagement. We are immortal spirits trapped inside mortal vessels. Oh, how beautiful and terrible is this gift of life, this commonality of death. I am thinking about all these things today. My death is tracking me; she is timing her approach. If my time is not now, make no mistake, death has already begun to hum my tune. I hope to laugh when she sings her song, bowing my head, delivering a final joke, and then taking her hand.

am i afraid? you ask.
i've spent 30 years walking with morbidity
whispering in cemeteries
drinking liquid candy of melancholy
flirting with silence as if it were melody
and you ask, am i afraid?
no, i don't think so;
i've earned the right to simply smile,
nodding at this carnival man
who now seeks to disturb me.

Read the essay below.

When Others Are Oppressed

There he was, Sean Penn, masterfully playing Harvey Milk in the current and timely film, MILK. I sat there for two hours completely absorbed, humored, impassioned, and ultimately, deeply saddened and grieved. I couldn’t help but to think about a line from a Greg Brown song: “why does good change take so long?” Why do we, as human beings, take so much joy in seeing others oppressed, others suffer?

MILK is a movie about Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay supervisor who was assassinated by fellow supervisor, Dan White. It unfolds as an intriguing, emotionally provoking, yet terrifying, depiction of what fear can do. One can replace the struggle of the gay community with the struggle of any group that has been oppressed. I contemplated the advancement we could make as human sojourners if we stood together, if we recognized that their fight IS our fight, thus, removing the silly categories of group that limit us.

I thought about the suicides of Bill B. and the thousands of gay, lesbian, and transgender youth and adults who were hated, tortured, teased, ostracized, and/or judged by a world built out of sands of fear. I thought about parents who reject their children because they believe being gay is a choice. I thought about Jesus and how it would grieve him to see his children suffer at the hands of those who claim to know him. I thought about myself, and how my struggle as a black, heterosexual male is defeated if I can’t speak out and up for my brothers and sisters who are gay, Hispanic/Latino, Asians, women, transgender, physically challenged, elderly, Muslim, Jewish, raped, abused, hungry, or voiceless. Is not my cause their cause? Can any of us truly be free when others are oppressed?

I thought about California’s Proposition 8. I thought about how 70% of the African-American vote in California voted to uphold Proposition 8, overturning legalized, gay marriages. I thought about the forward steps in the civil rights movement when Barack Obama was elected, and then I thought about the stumble backwards on that same day. How could the African-American community, the same community who wept, wailed and bled for their equal existence to be acknowledged by the masses, be the identical group who would support a proposition that, in short, sealed the shackles of tyranny for another group? How could this possibly be?

I thought about the tears Harvey Milk, had he not been assassinated, would be weeping on this past election day. I thought about my family and loved ones who are gay/lesbian/transgender. I thought about shackles and yellow stars and closets. I thought about bombs falling and government lists and associations and accusations. I thought about my daughter, and the world we are passing on to her. And I cried. And I thought about my tears, and how I weep for the gay community, and how I stand with them because my struggle is their struggle. And their struggle is my struggle. “We are all in this together. We are all in this alone.” – Pierce Pettis

“And you’ve got to elect gay people, so that child and the thousands and thousands like that child know that there’s hope for a better world; there’s hope for a better tomorrow. Without hope, not only gays, but those blacks, those Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the Us’s . . . without hope, the Us’s give up. I know you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. You, you, and you got to give them hope.” – Harvey Milk

Tearful Republican reverses his stance against gay marriage

I was deeply moved by this Mayor's speech. I, too, felt disheartened by Proposition 8 in California. Why? It was the irony of it all. Our country saw the first multi-racial president elected, in part, due to the record turnout of African-Americans at the voting poll. Proposition 8 was passed in California, in large part, because 85% of African-Americans who voted supported Proposition 8.

For those of you who do not know about Proposition 8, allow me to summarize. Proposition 8 was a voting point to ban gay marriages. However, gay marriages were already made legal in the state of California several months ago. Why was this important to people, who are not gay, to ban? Could not the African-American community see that we as a country made leaps in civil rights with our presidential choice, but stepped backwards with the support of Proposition 8? I need to ask the African-American community: could you imagine a proposition for re-instituting segregation on the voting blocks every two or four years? How safe would you feel? And don't you realize that no one is free when others are oppressed?
Do you not see that the civil rights movement was not just a "black thing", but a human thing? And do you not comprehend that by setting back another group, you set your cause back?

Thank you, Mayor, for following your heart, regardless of this setback. I stand at your side. I speak for all who have been oppressed. All. Not. Just. Me!