It's brighter on the inside

Why don't you go out Jay? Why do you live alone? They say.

Because it's brighter on the inside. I say. The smiles are real. Behavior is timeless. The bodies all fit. The conversations are seamless and effective, everything ends well, and nobody smells, nothing breathes, life as a fiction.

My thoughts of me and you are brighter on the inside. The smiles are white. The light is lighter. It never burns out.There are no dependencies because there are no anxieties. All is placid, warm, and immediately satisfied. We are drunk on smiles, ideas, affirmations, loves, promises, brief caresses, and just that still silence of two bodies close together, content. I am not worried. Nothing else exists in this bright interior. It is a burden to fantasy, the slavery of significance, the proximity of love and hate. I live as a puppet that I've carved from crisis, and with it I role play. I've placed it into this diorama of my life as a setting. And there I am with one of you. Together our puppets play, and I have not touched you.

Dream description: January 24, 2018

My dream begins with a Tinder match that I had back in August of 2017. She was a strawberry blonde, a few years older than me, fiercely independent and yet still looking for a date on her terms, her exacting terms. Needless, we hit it off via text, I thought, but it was a trap. The purpose of our chatter was to provide me with enough rope, and hang myself I did. And so after I mentioned a desire to have kids and placed myself in the role of the persecuted in my last relationship (an exaggeration, big time) she quit speaking to me. She quit speaking to me on the very day I had TekSolv training for a power plant job and the same day of a police shooting verdict that acquitted the white officer on all counts in the shooting death of a black youth.

The dream begins with my Tinder match inviting me to a bar. She looks great. She's in a skirt. Wow. She's invited me along to celebrate a new job she just landed. The first person I meet is a guy I've known since high school. He shakes my hand in recognition as do I. Then his face shifts to one of concern as he's felt a bump on my finger. I notice it too. I go to the bathroom and realize it appears to be a whitehead on the side of my pointer finger. I squeeze out the pus. Wash up and return to the barroom celebration. She's flanked by many of her friends, so much that I'm instantly intimidated and remaining standing at a few feet distance. I offer to buy her a second drink, although hers isn't necessarily empty. It is a complicated drink. First I'm given the ingredients. Then I'm told it's a "Boston [forgotten]."

I head to the bar, repeating the name and the ingredients in my head only to be ignored for a bit. The bar opens up to a huge concert scene. The colors are vivid, and the sound is a bit too loud. I think that I must pull out my phone and video a panorama of the scene. I don't. When I am served by the female bartender she gives me just one drink, hers, not mine. I wait for the other and while I am someone has snagged my first drink and so I begin to complain about working ten-hour days in a vain attempt to curry respect. It isn't working. The bar back makes me a weak drink. Then there's a group of men painted in white tribal paints resembling Aboriginals. They're my Greek chorus and they chant 'pig, pig, pig' to me. They reach out with their painted feet and smear white paint on my face.

The dream ends.

Signification begins. 

my problems

My issues are turning into volumes, and they will have a Dewey Decimal number here shortly.

Consciousness

Consciousness is the din of our molecules.

Heritage of hate

Reader, I draw no imaginary pictures of southern homes. I am telling you the plain truth. Yet when victims make their escape from this wild beast of Slavery, northerners consent to act the part of bloodhounds, and hunt the poor fugitive back into his den, "full of dead men's bones, and all uncleanness." Nay, more, they are not only willing, but proud, to give their daughters in marriage to slaveholders. The poor girls have romantic notions of a sunny clime, and of the flowering vines that all the year round shade a happy home. To what disappointments are they destined! The young wife soon learns that the husband in whose hand she has placed her happiness pays no regard to his marriage vows. Children of every shade of complexion play with their own fair babies, and too well she knows that they are born unto him of his own household. Jealousy and hatred enter the flowery home, and it is ravaged of its loveliness.

Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it. They regard such children as property, as marketable as the pigs on the plantation; and it is seldom that they do not make them aware of this by passing them into the slave trader's hands as soon as possible, and thus getting them out of their sight. I am glad to say there are some honorable exceptions.

I have myself known two southern wives who exhorted their husbands to free those slaves towards whom they stood in a "parental relation"; and their request was granted. These husbands blushed before the superior nobleness of their wives' natures. Though they had only counselled them to do that which it was their duty to do, it commanded their respect, and rendered their conduct more exemplary. Concealment was at an end, and confidence took the place of distrust.

Though this bad institution deadens the moral sense, even in white women, to a fearful extent, it is not altogether extinct. I have heard southern ladies say of Mr. Such a one, "He not only thinks it  no disgrace to be the father of those little niggers, but he is not ashamed to call himself their master. I declare, such things ought not to be tolerated in any decent society!" (p. 33)

From Harriet Jacobs' "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"

God-breathing machines

"She possessed but few slaves; and at her death those were all distributed among her relatives. Five of them were my grandmother's children, and had shared the same milk that nourished her mother's children. Nothwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend." (p. 11)

From Harriet Jacobs' "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"

Selfishly using your tools

You're drinking from the hose when you should be using it to water the lawn.