139th & Lenox Ave

I don’t feel right, with myself or with God. Clearly, I’ve been of the transgressors. But I’m doing what I can. I’m taking it one day, cliché as it is to say. Astaghfirullah wa atuubu ilayh.

I don’t have much to say other than somehow I made it into this space. It’s a miracle to write. I remember last year how crappy I felt yet still forced myself to write. There is pain and there is complain. You can work with one. The other takes you to an unproductive place.

I used to wonder what the rest of today would bring. Now I take it moment by moment. I’ve learned to detach. But my entire life has been about detachment, lack of attachment; to reality, to others, to myself. 

I’m second guessing my trip to Africa, saying it’s not worth the hassle. Well, one month might not seem like a long time in America, but it definitely is overseas. And how sweet would it be to return to Hanan Guest House, victorious?

To eat brown chapo with organic honey. Sip Somali tea with camel milk. Wake up every morning thanking God for the sound of the birds. Or, I mean, the sound of the Athan. And then the sound of the birds as I have my breakfast. And then the sound of my keyboard as I have my coffee. And then just work and work and work.

I owe it to myself to take a vacation. Expenses be damned. I owe it to myself to go and do everything that makes me happy. Namely – writing and reading and revising and secluding and coffee coffee coffee and a whole lotta prayer. I’m lying. I hate revision, but I love writing, and, if you love something, you very often also have to love the things which you hate because they come with that thing you love. There can be no love without hate.

So. I deserve / require / need to get the hell out of dodge. I’m investing in my/self/worth. I need to get some energy back in my soul. Cuz I don’t feel real no moe. I don’t feel whole. I don’t feel like an actual being with actual feelings. I happy am, going through the motions. A robot on automode.

I looked at myself in the rearview mirror on the freeway this morning. My eyes were defeated. Low and red. Maintaining. Just trying to get through the day before the day started. Just trying to make it one more day without getting fired. Without getting written up. Without getting passive-aggressed by shady coworkers. Life is crazy. You gotta eat to pray; pray to eat. You pray to stay sane. 

In Africa the sun never sets. At night it reappears in your dreams. In Africa the smiles never end.

Did I ever tell you the story of that young guy back home who always smiled? Whenever I saw him, he had nothing but the clothes he wore. And that smile. We’d sit and talk about nothing and also life. And he never stopped smiling. At first it was endearing. Then disconcerting. Then it became an oddity. But it was from a good place. And when he finally saw me smiling, he said, “farxadaadaad baratay.” You have become acquainted with your happiness.

I believe my happiness lies anywhere but here. I can see the fallacious thinking behind that sentence, but I still believe it. I know that I’m destined to be here, for as long as I need to be, and all I really have control over is how I survive this place. How I keep a smile on my face. And if I can’t manage a smile, how to keep from frowning. And if that’s too much, how to keep from telling people how I really feel – about them, about hostile work environments, about the color of their skin and what it does to me and mine.

If I can’t manage even that, I’ll resort to writing. Which sounds like an opposite series of events; writing should be what I start with. But writing is, more than anything, a means of coping for me. Because I’m an upside down guy with a right-side up frown turned upside down. Call me sunny side up. Call me Bisquick. Catch me in the kitchen making my wrist flip. Brick, brick.