Stuck

I used to have a blog. It was called Ephphatha and I wrote about Black folk, mental health, pop culture, and foolishness. Sometimes I wish I still had it because untreated mental illness is running rampant lately. Miriam Carey, the young mother who rammed her car into barricades and was shot to death; Joseph Constantino, the elderly man who set himself on fire on the National Mall.

I used to wake up every day with something on my mind or something that I saw on the internet and I'd write up a storm, like I knew what the hell I was talking about. Don't get me wrong, it was a good blog; The Plain Dealer asked to link to it and I was labeled a Northeast Ohio blogger. Most of the people I started blogging with are either dead (R.I.P. Undercover Blackman) or they've figured out how to monetize their blogs or they've moved on to grad school across the country.

And here I am. Stuck? Stuck. Stuck? I don't know.  I know, that my life changed irrevocably over the last 16 months. I made a bad decision; I moved; a relationship ended; I went apeshit crazy; the last of my family died (it was just my dad and he was an asshole anyway) and here I am back in Cleveland Heights, back on a blog.

I know I just don't care about stuff the way I used to.

I'm trying to find a poem about being stuck. (Ugh, don't ever go looking for a poem on poemhunter.com. LOL. It full of the kind of poems your emo-niece writes two days before her period.)

I can't find one, but I did come across this poem by Patricia Smith.

They Romp with Wooly Canines

and spy whole lifetimes on the undersides of leaves. Jazz intrudes, stank clogging that neat procession of lush and flutter. His eyes, siphoned and dimming, demand that he accept ardor as it is presented, with its tear-splashed borders and stilted lists, romance that is only on the agenda because hours do not stop. Bless his sliver of soul. He’s nabbed a sizzling matron who grays as we watch, a thick-ankled New England whoop, muscled to suffer his stifling missionary weight. Earth-smudged behind the wheel of her pickup, she hums a tune that rhymes dots of dinner trapped in his beard with twilight. Is it still a collision course if you must lie down to rest? Bless her as she tries on his name for size and plucks hairs from her chin. Bless him as he barrels toward yet another wife who will someday realize, idly, that her only purpose in this dwindling novella of his days is to someday lower his heralded bulk, with little fanfare, into a grave. 

I like that line, "Bless her as she tries on his name for size and plucks hairs from her chin." And the  part about suffering under his "stifling missionary weight."

We read David Hume's Of the Standard of Taste. It talks about how one should be able to discern whether or not something has value. It's wrong in a thousand ways. And right, too. One of the good points was about immersing yourself in a particular field of study so that you can contrast and compare and speak on what's good with some oomph behind it. Maybe that's what I'm doing.

Wouldn't it be cool if I developed some kind of insane passion for poetry and I understood my life's purpose? Hahaha. No.