Why it Matters →

Dear copington,

I love you! I miss you a lot. I hope your babies are doing well and that your girlfriend is A-1. I hope your father bought you all the food you could stand to eat.  I hope you know how to get around the whole city of Copenhagen pretty much on a bike. And that you go sailing, or boating, with your girlfriend, in the sun. Summer is coming! 

And so is gay marriage. I can’t wait. I think the Supreme Court will make it happen in just a few short years is what I think. I know this Supreme Court Sucks but also I just can’t imagine them upholding what is at best a separate-but-equal set of marriage laws, and at worst a separate-and-unequal legal situation for boys who like boys: In almost two-thirds of the states, LGBTQ Americans are constitutionally forbidden from chilling together 4 ever with benefits. Fuck that.

Not to mention the increasingly heated and violent rhetoric towards queer Americans. It seems like we’ve gone from 2005 to 1955 in seven short years. I want to be free and that means I have a responsibility to free others and act with love. Not to promote ignorance and division, violence and oppression.

Which brings me to our President. The effect of his support for civil rights, specifically gay marriage, can not be underemphasized. This is HUGE. Our U.S. President, okay with gay marriage! So that, Copington, is where you mischaracterize my response. I DO think it matters, very much so. As our president is so fond of quoting, “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” (Leave it to the gays to bend it~~!)

But we must also remember the arc of a missile as it bends toward civilians, fired as it was by a boy with a joystick outside of Las Vegas, from a drone, sixty thousand feet over the mountains of Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia. Because where with George Bush we despised, hated even, a president who imprisoned and tortured human beings, now we cheer and talk of justice with a president who, too afraid to face the ugly politics of habeas corpus, murders those he is afraid of. 

copington:

I have to say, I have been a little less (okay a lot less) into politics since I moved to Denmark. For one thing, I live in Denmark, for another, living in Denmark has left me a little bit jaded about American politics. I mean, what can I say about the country I was born in that doesn’t even want…

Isle Grande

Hey Tumblz! I’m about to leave to go to Grand Isle, where Louisiana meets the Gulf. Where America ends. Where Earth meets Sea. A lifelong Louisiana homeboy, I’m amazed I’ve never been there! I can’t wait to:

get my toes in the sand

look out to the horizon and breathe deep

eat seafood

which, as amy goodman is telling me right now, on the second anniversary of the worst environmental disaster in American history, I should be careful about: they caught 400 pounds of shrimp somewheres, and none of them had eyes. Oh BP! So I will be looking out  for oil, which is surely still there. 

God save Louisiana! To the Coast!

thenewinquiry:

No animal escapes the cruel knife in the end…

Read More.

partygirl504:

thenewinquiry:

The Pulitzer-winning
Stenographer
Asks the Poet Laureate
For a dance.

The Composer of the Year’s
Ears are talked off
By the Most Valuable
Player while,

In a darker corner,
The First Violinist’s breasts
Are pressed
By the Professor Emeritus.

The words “Stockholm”
And “Wimbledon”
Ribbon through
The midsummer night’s air.

Lannanites, MacArthurians,
Struggle in vain
To explain
How they did it.

An ancient pair
Of Nobel Prize winners
Suffocate
In each other’s perfume

And in a tiny chair
behind the bandstand,
Last year’s Booker finalist,
Looks ever so lost,

A silk tie in his hand.

“To The Victor,” an unpublished poem by Teju Cole on awards and not awards.

Read More.

[2 April 2011]

don’t lean to your friend next to you on your little green velour couch and tell him how I don’t sound nearly as good as Robert Plant while I’m singing along to Babe I’m Gonna Leave You. Of course I don’t you asshole. Don’t let me smoke you out looking good with your deep pink button-down and wild west teal belt buckle, torn jeans. And then have us for a round of karaoke, right as the sun’s going down on this day that broke winter’s back for good, the day just let out its stresses like an earthquake, fast and heavy snow drops shook the morning walk, like a shedding, and the light and clouds dark and the gold out, it was a wringing day, and he’s pulling this shit. Right after I was thinking how I really just ought to tell him Hey it’s not like I was expecting anything (right?) it’s just why’d you have to pretend like we don’t even hardly know each other or just don’t deny it wasn’t like it was cause it was.
all i do these days is mine the college collection of VHS tapes and bring them back to my apartment by the mill and watch them projected with a yellow tint because the walls are mustard, in my living room, it’s the oldest house in the village they say, 1820, but anyways I just sit and hit the bong and watch Martha Graham videos (1983, she’s old already, she had her young and beautifuls dance her Medea, her Minotaur, O youth O time), Titus Andronicus, a session from Harvard where this creepy lady taught teachers how to use tactics actors use, in the classroom. Finding the Metaphor, Landing the Energy business. I thought having to translate the message back into acting terms unearthed some interesting texture. Probably not.   
and i just got on facebook and ‘seconds ago’ he invited me to “B*BY YR * ST*R: karaoke tonight kids: we got the mic u bring the talent and the ipod        **after the sweetie boys in fels.”
Christ!

I ran out of things for my mouth

Hey

Today I tried drinking

which I have not tried in weeks. It worked until it didn’t and I was headed uptown and realized it’s never worth it, for the seventy-fifth time. Day drinking.

This 
only after I finished the last of my weed. It’s not like you can’t still call me a pothead and get away with telling the truth

because you could. and because I am

But

Whereas in 2008 an eighth of an ounce lasted me
a day and a half

today, I finished an eighth of an ounce

that I bought

a week and a half ago.

So I am less and less on the weed but still  set my time by it, sure. Also I’ve got these nails, ten of them, on my fingers. The two thumbs are near gone. I ate them down. My grandfather said don’t even try to stop it is the hardest habit

But if I don’t try to stop

My fingers be gone real soon. 

So out of weed and with finite fingers

I fight my budded cigarette fetish

Which is disgusting. But every time (it’s true) I see someone smoking on the TV 

I want one

No more nails, no more cigs, and chill on the weed. That’s a goal! I tried a Band-Aid on my right thumb but it got unstuck before I even tried leaving home for the first time. And here between sentences go I picking at the same thumb. 
Oral fixation I’ve got it! Do you have any ideas for how to treat my face now that I am trying not to eat myself or smoke myself?

Joker-in-chief

Yet another piece of evidence that this guy DOES NOT CARE to lead in the fight against homophobia and gender discrimination. What a joker.

Our President Obama, today, refused to prohibit discrimination against queers in the American workplace. Apparently, we need to study the issue a little bit more.

This is like a president in the fifties politely refusing to issue a directive prohibiting racist employment policies, instead kowtowing to the status quo and cowardly waiting for the courts to once again remind us: that all men (and women and transsexuals and lesbians and bisexuals and queers and the intersexed) are created equal. 

Obama told the Human Rights Campaign in 2009 … “Nobody in America should be fired because they’re gay, despite doing a great job and meeting their responsibilities. It’s not fair. It’s not right. We’re going to put a stop to it.”

Well you had a chance to. And you didn’t. So leave.

Fully Beautiful!!

Fantahsea (Shake Yo’ Bones) by Vockah Redu and the Cru - OFFICIAL music video (by FredWildLife)

National Anarchist People Of Color Convergence in New Orleans. →

We hope that participants are looking for dialogues, methods, and theories that resist oppression by understanding the root causes of injustice – while developing strategies for ecologically, politically, socially, and economically sustainable communities. Not everyone coming will be or has to be an anarchist. We just hope that participants will want to build power in ways that are not hierarchical, racist, and heteropatriarchal, but are instead collaborative and horizontal.

Can’t wait!

*UPDATE*: for self-identified people of color only. bummer. maybe I can go as a journalist? 

Coping in Copenhagen: Another beginning (August) →

copington:

I have posted writings I have found from back in the beginning before and I stumbled across this piece while cleaning out some old and newly acquired papers. I think it was written my first week in Copenhagen-during a solo outing to the canals.

I feel at once lost and found. Both infinitely…