some years a go a company which sells a receipts-management suite of software and services posted a blog entry which semi-trashed my receipts project. it was not outright ridicule, but more SEO/keyword baiting (and pretty piss-poor execution, i‘d say) using me as an example and trying to make me look like an asshole. i attempted to post a perfectly polite retort to their weirdly off-base blog posting but they never published my comments. i posted something to my site but took it down, not for lack of conviction but for lack of interest in confrontation.
today i got an e-mail from that same company asking if i‘d place links to them and be part of their affiliate program! i responded first by saying wtf, you guys semi-trashed my receipts project a few years ago and now you‘re back? i knew as i wrote back that the person who contacted me almost certainly had nothing to do with that little incident, but it gave me a chance to directly relate to that company how irritated i was by that stupid bit of back and forth, and however strangely contorted their blog posting was it was entirely inappropriate to censor/not-publish my reply. regardless of all that our projects have nothing in common aside from keyword search engine proximity, and that arbitrary confluence of things is, as often, irrelevent. it‘s a tiny little incident in my fascinating, fascinating life, but it was funny to see a “kick me“ sign appear in my e-mail, ripe for the kickin‘.
…..
i just told someone about the japanese balloon bombs that sailed from japan to the west coast of the united states during world war II, killing 6 in oregon, accounting for the only WWII casualties on north american soil. i delivered this buzzkill retort in reply to a story about al-qaida training monkeys and babboons to shoot rifles, a prospecti find not in the least bit surprising. 10,000 monkeys with howitzers dumpedinto times sqaure would do some damage, corrolary to the other monkey analogy i always hated. that one which claims that x number of monkeys with pen and paper would eventuallyproduce the complete works of shakespeare. i never liked that conceit because it is utterly untrue. there is no way that could ever happen. billions of monkeys in a room would almost certainly nevercompose a single coherent line of meaningful prose. now monkeys with guns,well, that‘s another story.
the story about monkeys with guns was in today‘s NY post, and if you imagine racism is dead then know that someone cut and taped the face of a black man onto the head of the monkey used in the image for that story.
i talked with an 83-year-old friendabout racism in new york. he said that this delusion people had that northern states were more enlightened or tolerant was a bunch of bullshit. in his experience it was routine for a bartender to destroy the glasses from which “colored“ patrons drank. “you just couldn‘t believe it, mark, the fucking hate from people. and this was the upper east side of manhattan! what made anyone think racists were all in the south?“ my mother made comments, muted, regarding martin luther king, jr., and his relatively obscure ventures into themidwest. on a television program MLK was intereviewed describing the racisim in chicago and other areas as “complex“ and as we watched this on TV my mother responded “you‘re damn right“ but she never let go with her thoughts on those matters. she was perennially mystified and dismissive of my high regard for MLK‘s oratory, which i first heard from the floor of room 317 at the Parc Lincoln hotel and which saved me. i had heard the better-known excerpts but on that floor i first heard the full sermons and the fuller allusions to the “ugly voice“s that rose up from his telephone and the “reality of evil“ caricatured by these individuals. i remember dropping to the floor like a boneless chicken, the operatic sound of his voice perhaps filling me more than the content of his sermons, or perhaps elegizing his words where they fell weakest. soon after that i found the Mahalia Jackson CDs, which i bought in a heartbeat on account of seeing the sticker on the CD with the quote by MLK that “a voice like this comes along not once in a lifetime but once in a century“ or something along those lines. if MLK‘s voice drowned me then Mahalia Jackson‘s lifted me.
oh, God, i remember those days.
i don‘t remember racism, though. somehow, for all the stereotypes hupped at me i can‘t think of any that stuck. i see comments in my high school yearbooks about “angry Arabs“ but i‘ve never met an Arab who seemed particularly angry, nor have i assumed as much (to the best of my self-serving memory). i think, regretfully, of the opportunity i had on 9/11. i entered a corner bodega for some beers and chips and when i got to the checkout counter the men behind the counter were bug-eyed, terrified, arab-looking men who had likely received torrents of fearful american hate that day. i saw them and thought little of them, self-aware and self-absorbed as always, but i later felt i should have extended my hand to them, just a handshake, just an “i‘m not afraid of you“ greeting.
i knew a girl that day whose family business was torched, and her family was not even Arab. they were from India. but the foreign name provoked fear.
not so long ago i was walking on the street i liv e on when the man walking ahead of me turned around and, seeing me, asked if i remembered him. i remembered his face but could not place from where i knew it. we talked about the street, the people who have come and gone, the houses and the changes, and then he reminded me that he used to work at that corner bodega, and i remembered him sitting behind the counter, arms crossed, eyes wide open, not knowing me from the next angry white male.
he said he had moved to virginia, for “a better life“, but i did not connect that with 9/11 or anything else, just a movement. i remembered driving from Florida to New York and meeting a man who, after i told him i was driving to New York, said he had had “a good life“ there and “you can have a good life there.“ he had lived in New York for some time but turned to a job at a gas station somewhere between Florida and New York ( i can‘t remember where). “new york,“ he said, pointing at me, “you can have a good life there.“
