: lower black pain.

For all that we’re about to see I’m ready as I’ll ever be.

I don’t know if I’m really brave but I can face the facts(if we’re still doing that)

I persevere and think I’ve learned to subjugate my fearsomewhat

I’ve tried to save a little here and there just for emergencies and

kept in shape or, in a shape – I walk enough to fill the red ring on my watch most days if not the green one

I can recognize the super blatant crazy lies but who can say what’s really wha beyond that with AI and all

I call my Momcheck in on friendswatch credits when most movies end(they work so hard)

watch what I eatgive random folks my subway seatthat need itkeep good books on handand read a fewand feed the cats I MEAN

CAN webe ready for just…ANYTHING?

what would you wear?what should we bring?and what are we supposed to say?

just greet each other everydaywith

“How’s it goin’?”

“Fine. And you?”

“Just dandy!”

when that isn’t true?

I think I’ll answer honestly. “I’m ready as I’ll ever be!”

‘cause time’s a bum’s rushwe can’t “stay”we have to move ahead some way

I’ll try my best to stay in touchI will doth not protest too much with anger as my social crutch but stand my ground for long enough to take my next step forward

It’s an irony of timeand pacethat we can’twinthe human race

yet there are those who must insist that they’re "ahead”

but they’ve not THOUGHT ahead,because it seems to me that isn’twhere you wantto be

consideringthe finish line

on the roller coasterthere’s this momentgravity seemsto abandon usbut when the ride endsit’s still there

we’ll be just fine

just olderjust adjusted but not brokenjust exhausted and exasperatedjust entirely bewildered

but NO MATTER WHAT still filled with love

and wonder

for we are the blessed lot of us more ready that we’ve ever been and stronger than we probably know. So on marks…ready?(steady)

Go.

Get full access to :lowerblackpain at lowerblackpain.substack.com/subscribe

They didn’t teach my daughter about irregular verbs in school. Neither did she gain significant instruction regarding irregular nouns. When we noticed her speaking of childs, tooths, and mouses we began to gently correct her, which always led to the entirely understandable question of “Why is it like that?”, to which we had no better reply than, “I don’t know.”

When we mentioned this educational deficit at the next parent-teacher conference, we were told directly that yes, irregular parts of speech had been removed from the curriculum. This confused us.

“Why?” we asked.

“I don’t know.” the teachers replied, “Those are things kids should just pick up around the house.”

“Maybe she can watch more TV.” the other teacher added, enthusiastically.

This confused us further.

My daughter did not attend a “bad school” by any means, but the administration had been sold teaching Programs and Modules from several vendors out to prove that math had never been good enough before their fresh approach, and reading may have been fundamental but lacked the panache of their new method. The deal was that these programs must be followed to the letter, with no additions or alterations, to prove their effectiveness and generate robust sales materials for the publisher.

Therefore, the teachers found themselves in the bizarre situation of sneaking lessons which they felt were absolutely necessary into their curriculum…phonics and long division, for instance. No xeroxes could exist as evidence, all of this had to happen at the blackboard or during circle time sitting on the floor…well, the rug. Clandestine whispers of vowel sounds while nervous educators kept an unwavering eye on the glass panel in the classroom door lest the principal happen by to witness this revolution, this “meeting by the docks" on the third floor of a public school, brazenly held beneath the scattershot spotlight of industrial florescent lighting.

We admired their courage, but brought up the situation at the annual mid-year parent gathering, igniting a small revolution of our own as parents complained that their youngest children were receiving an entirely different education than their older ones had gotten at this same school. Thus, 5 year olds could read better than their 8 year old siblings. Words were exchanged with senior staff, a few of which were, indeed, irregular.

Now, we aren’t rebels. Hippies? Perhaps, but we all were gifted new pajamas at Christmas and now look a little more sophisticated than when we all were wearing vintage concert t-shirts. Punks? Definitely, but we’re the ones who don’t “tear it all down” as much as steampunk assemble new stuff: solutions, pathways, bridges… metaphors abound.

We really didn’t mean to “bring up something at a PTA meeting.” Yikes. That is not who we are. We baked them a great deal of cupcakes to sell, but ours were the gluten, soy, and dairy free ones, so… still punk, I guess. (They did include sugar.)

Zoe didn’t wait for the school, and began a campaign of “extra credit” at our home, the beginning of her private tutoring career with our daughter, a three-month stretch which conveniently dovetailed into a year and change of Lockdown (and continues to this very day).

I contributed by illustrating various points through demonstration and film references; Lucille Ball clips on YouTube, balloons and magnets, little songs to help memorize things. We hoped to supplement the lessons, find any gaps and fill them in with the necessary base skills that had proven repeatedly useful in our own lives.

We both assumed that school was a road whose most basic path did not significantly change: to your left is addition, and coming up on your right is subtraction. But like all modern landscapes, this one had shifted; we couldn’t find cross-multiplication anywhere… it had been replaced by a beige strip mall of the Impossibly Complicated, so we snuck that knowledge in and told our daughter never to speak of it at school, but use it wisely, and in secret.

Weirdos? Yes. We’re probably weirdos, too.

The reason for all this was to make sure the kid wasn’t missing anything she needed to deal with whatever was going to come her way as she got older. School is just a long moment where we have the luxury of “getting prepared” for later life, to sharpen our minds and gird our loins.

I’ve always loved that phrase, and only recently learned actually where our “loins” are (on each side of the spinal column between the hip bone and the bottom ribs) and what “girding” means. It should have been obvious since it looks like the word “girdle”: in ancient times when folks wore long tunics, it was impossible to fight in them unless one pulled up the slack and tied it tightly around the waist in order to free the legs. That, according to over three dubious online sources, was girding the loins.

When I was in it, school seemed like a period of time before something happened, like the middle step of preparing for a race, the “Get set!” between the “Ready!” and “Go!” To be honest, I never understood why we needed “get set” at all… we were standing on the line looking down the playground because someone had just told us to get “ready”, what was the “get set” for?

I realize now it was supposed to give us time to focus, to “prepare for something difficult or challenging”: the very definition of gird. I guess that’s what school is, a chance to steady oneself before launch, run a few pre-flight checks, ensure that all survival tools are packed away in the rucksack. A chance to practice before “the real thing” happens.

I miss that opportunity to rehearse before performance; adult life seems as improvisational as it is blatantly confrontational. But winter is the perfect time to pull together resources and make certain we have what we need before whatever’s happening next happens, metaphorically tightening our tunics so that we can be ready to dash valiantly forward with both foots.

Get full access to :lowerblackpain at lowerblackpain.substack.com/subscribe

Our former neighbors held a wonderful housewarming party at their new home on New Year’s Day. At this party was our host’s 7 year old niece, who sat very quietly playing a game with her brother in the bedroom until very near the party’s end, when the Chappell Roan album “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” began playing from the bluetooth speaker.

Now when I was seven I was a bit of a ham. Hard to imagine, I’m sure, if you know me, but I had a pretty impressive Ed Sullivan imitation… swinging arms and holding the chin and everything (what a little scamp). I could also belt out the hits of Stevie Wonder and Burt Bacharach (my voice hadn’t changed yet so I could still hit a few notes in Dionne Warwick’s key).

In other words, I imitated what I heard and saw around me, which was three major television networks (and our local PBS channel) and whatever music was played on two radio stations - the one with Mike Murphy (a legendary Kansas City DJ) in the mornings, and KPRS, the oldest black-owned radio station in the US.

Thus I could sing songs from The Carpenters and James Brown, Paul McCartney and Billy Preston, and the entire catalog of Tony Orlando and Dawn. It was quite a range, and it seemed like an endless supply - radio was my main source of music, at home or in the car, as we rarely had the money to buy albums and cassette tapes weren’t quite a thing yet. The world came to me on my orange Radio Shack™ Flavoradio, in glorious mono, the one with the one earphone that was far too large to fit in your ear with the twisty beige cord.

This is about the future, have I mentioned that yet? I know you just endured a ton of reminiscing, but this is not about the past. This is about the future, the immediate future, the one coming up right after we finish up with whatever is happening right now.

See, that 7 year old girl began belting out a song titled “Pink Pony Club”, written by Ms. Roan nearly before the girl was born, about a young person who leaves home to find themselves and be accepted for who they really are – a love song to oneself, as it were.

And she KNEW this song, EVERY word, and she sang it strong and proud with arm movements and knee bends.

She was Tiny Cher.

And she wasn’t actually performing for us, she was just lost in the bliss of the loud loud music coming out of that very-impressive-for-it’s-size bluetooth speaker.

The JOY, my friends; the absolute unfiltered confidence displayed by this little human was seen throughout the room and greatly appreciated. But I liked it because it represented an element of the present that I find comforting for the future: Chappell Roan is a queer artist whose songs are rooted in her own culture and tell stories from an LBGTQ+ perspective, songs I would never have heard in my own childhood about perspectives that were not, on the whole, publicly shared.

EVERY word. The kid was incredible; I mean, we were all singing along as best we could, but she had the nuances down. She knew a lot of the rest of the album too, particularly “Hot To Go”, which has its own dance that I’m proud to say my daughter taught me. Well, I don’t think I was supposed to do it outside the house without her permission, but I’m a rebel that way.

Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo, Renee Rapp, Melanie Martinez, Charlie XCX, Billie Eilish - these are the young artists my kid is listening to, all of them unapologetically authentic women with distinct voices that represent for her the power of being who you are. I cannot, in all honesty, say that Tony Orlando did the same for me.

These young alternative women support my daughter’s quest to be herself, to ignore nonsense, and to keep on going. Don’t you wish you had an anthem for that when you were 7?

I am so proud to live in a moment in history when music can inspire young people in this way, support them, particularly young women, and particularly now, when we as a society most need to offer stability against the tsunami of forces ever advancing to subjugate them, body and soul.

The tide of time is ever rising. We have to get ready. We have to store our metaphorical water in bottles and fill our metaphorical sandbags and fortify ourselves with good advice, like

Be yourself. Ignore nonsense. Keep on going.

I think that’s where I’m gonna start this year, and I invite you to join me. Let’s make playlists of our personal anthems and keep the music going. We can all, each day, be Our Own Cher.

And let’s all keep connected.

Just knock three times on the ceiling if you want me.

Get full access to :lowerblackpain at lowerblackpain.substack.com/subscribe

End of the calendar year and I realize thatwe look forward and backward a lot as human beings.

what was the best music this year when is that movie coming out

when did these pants last fit how long will these shoes last

didn’t I used to and how are we ever going to be able to

Around this time, we become, each one of us historians, yet futuristsclassical archeologists and inventor engineers

But what is the term for being now? What's the term for being when we are?In the middle of what-is-to-come and what-has-been? Smack between “What was that??” and “What IS that??” Riding the razor’s edge between carefully analyzing steps taken and squinting into tomorrow’s glare to plot where next to tread?

I’ve always found surfing the best metaphor.

You can’t really plan surfing; the water does whatever it does: what it just did doesn’t matter and you can’t really figure out entirely what it going to do. One must shift to steer. One must balance.

I don’t know why they call it “riding” a surfboard… that’s an impossibly passive verb for the action of not falling off something unstable.

Now there are Red Bull™ sponsorships with quick-cut GoPro™ videos that really make it appear as hard as it must be to do, but in the past, the entire surfing brand image was deceptively mellow for the literally death-defying skill it takes to surf.

The Beach Boys should have been a hardcore punk rock band.

I digress in order to focus: we may, all of us, be standing on ground which increasingly feels both liquid and turbulent, in total oppostition with our natural attraction to equilibrium. The floor is lava and we can’t make it to the couch, we are roller skating on an ice rink, we are juggling chainsaws in the back of a flatbed truck that is rolling down a mountain. It’s hard to plan chaos; and very difficult to know what to wear.

But total uncertainty means freedom, in some aspects, because if we can’t figure out what just happened and we can’t figure what’s going to happen then we simply must live moment to moment, second to second, re-adjusting and shifting weight to navigate because we have absolutely no control over the moving-dangerously-forward part, like in a video game or a conversation with your in-laws.

Surfing.

And so I say Happy New Year.

You know what tomorrow will bring? Tomorrow. And yesterday, no matter what happened, is over. So Happy New Year, honestly.

It has no idea what it’s going to be yet, but at least we know who we are, so if the rules are off, then it’s on. Starting January 1st, I’m gonna do those three and a half weeks of push-ups I do every year and get ready to hang ten. Or 365 or whatever. Not fall off the board or get eaten by sharks. It’s the surfing metaphor.

Sigh.

Thanks for reading, enjoy your Holiday, and I’ll see you there.

Get full access to :lowerblackpain at lowerblackpain.substack.com/subscribe

Many apartments in New York City don’t have shades, curtains, or blinds on their windows, particularly above the third floor.

My mother believes that this is a sign of mass insanity.

“People can see right into their house!” she’ll say.

“No one’s looking into their house, Mom.”

“But if they wanted to they could! Don’t they care about their privacy?’

‘I don’t think they think anybody cares about them enough to spy on them with binoculars from a highway at night going 65 miles per hour. I’d be more suspicious if they had curtains up, actually.”

“Hmn.” she says. That means a lot of things. It means she’s thinking about it, it means she isn’t really convinced, and it means she is a bit confused because we have curtains on all our windows. Blackout ones, to boot.

The curtains are mostly to keep out the sun, not prying eyes. I don’t suppose I’m that concerned about privacy, I was raised to understand that I was being watched 24 hours a day by ethereal beings with whose alignment I could steer my very destiny.

God, of course, but the Devil was also right there, one on each shoulder, if one was to believe the green screen special effects on TV shows. They were tugging and warring with you all the time, but you were never alone… there were no secrets that could be kept, no word spoken low enough to evade their hearing, no thought too small to pass inspection.

But believe it or not, they weren’t my main concern; my true privacy invader was absolutely welcome to spy on me 24/7, anytime, could look at me whenever he wanted, didn’t bother me a bit if he knew when I was sleeping, and when I was awake.

Santa is the king of toys.

Santa rolls deep.

He does the research, he goes the extra mile, always has the hook up.

Sure, Amazon delivers, but their brand is diluted with books and appliances and cleaning supplies.

Santa is artisanal, focused: no olive oil or leisure wear or school supplies.

He manufactures, sources, and custom delivers toys.

Which you don’t have to pay for, by the way… well, not in money.

Currency, is not his currency.

He deals in behavior, which to kids seems a pretty volatile market with little security, but then again he INFLUENCES the market in such a way as to cultivate the highest yield possible.

And how does he do it?

Espionage.

It’s not blackmail. Rarely has a child received a letter from the North Pole warning them to “cut it out”. No, it’s much more insidious… silent, invisible, like auditioning for a Broadway play where you’re standing on an empty stage squinting through spotlights, no sign of whether its “going well” or not, so you plod on, stretching yourself to the limit, trying to leave it all on the stage, not sure they’re even watching.

But, of course, they see everything.

And only when the time is up is there any indication, any word of whether or not you made it, whether they ignored the inevitable little mistakes and marveled at your string of genius moments.

And that’s Christmas Morning, a grade card for your very existence, pass or fail, where the material evidence of your exhausting effort is in the form of the most innocent of objects.

A toy.

Christmas toys feel different. They mean something different. They are not just something you wanted that someone gives you as a gift, they are evidence of a calendar year that went very very well for you.

It’s not luck, it’s skill, discipline - conditional validation from a superior expert on human behavior. Christmas toys are badges of honor that often require batteries and light assembly. And it’s strangely not about the size of the toy - some middling kid gets a bicycle and a perfect angel gets a mini air hockey table, neither of which is a real toy (as one is a vehicle and the other a game strictly speaking) but all of this still qualifies on Christmas morning, a golden hour of too-close-to-sunrise glee for parents and an annual exhale of relief for children around the world.

There is no restaurant, car dealership or nail salon you can go into and say “I’ve been a very good person this year” and have them comp you a meal, or car, or gel manicure. You can’t even go in a toy store and get a toy that way.

But I still breathe a little easier on Christmas morning, and reflect on, if not how well I did, at least how hard I tried. In an age when the naughty list seems unexplainably popular, we’re all still quietly proud to be counted among the nice.

But you know what? You still deserve a toy for that.

Get full access to :lowerblackpain at lowerblackpain.substack.com/subscribe

When I picture a Christmas tree with toys underneath it, I always see a doll, a teddy bear, a ball, and a toy train. Sometimes the train is wooden, hand carved, painted with primary colors. Sometimes it’s a little electric one going around on a track that encircles the base of the tree. Can you see it? It’s traditional, classic… yet that universal scene has never happened for me, because we have cats.

They are, the three of them, wonderful all year round, but their naturally curious nature and endless experimentation regarding the nature of gravity does not allow us the holiday tropes of toy trains, dangling ornaments, fringe on highly reflective clothing, or fancy glasses placed anywhere near the edges of tables. However, this year I am braving it for just one day, setting up track in my daughter’s room, and watching the train go around in a little circle while I make “whoo whoooo” whistle noises for a half hour or so, even if the cats do stalk it like fuzzy Godzillas.

My grandfather had a model train setup in the basement. I was the oldest grandchild and we lived right down the street, so I got a lot of alone time with it. I was not allowed to run it by myself because it was electric, and to my grandmother electricity was still “on notice”… she’d seen it around, but that didn’t necessarily mean she could trust it.

The model train was a Lionel, with what I think must have been a bakelite body: it generated puffs of smoke via mysterious pellets that Grandpa only used on Christmas. It had a headlight as well. It ran on a little green table that had the beginnings of a tableau; there was a station, and a little white gate that went up and down, and I think a farmhouse or barn of some kind, and of course a tunnel. That was my favorite part, watching the light on the train as it lit up the interior of the tunnel then suddenly rocketed out.

I don’t have the train. It belonged to my uncle, of course, and then he gave it to his son, who sold it a long time ago. I also have never lived anywhere large enough to use table space in such a gratuitous fashion… our only flat surface near that size is the bed.

Trains are magical. The choo-chooing and the chugga-chugging and the clackety-clack of the tracks. Magical.

I have been thinking about this for a long time, this trains thing: I even put a bid in on a Lionel engine like my grandpa’s over on eBay a few days ago. I wondered why the train was such a standard Christmas toy, particularly since model trains have long since been replaced by video game consoles on kids’ Christmas lists.

Besides loads of illustrations in vintage advertising, I found out that after World War II, toy trains beneath the Christmas tree became a national symbol of traveling, simpler times, and a smaller world. For a while in the 1950’s, the Lionel company was the largest and most profitable toy company on the planet. Families would invest in a basic set one year, then purchase stations and tunnels and more lengths of track for years after. The sound of toy trains harmonized with the crackling of fireplaces on Christmas Day, all across the country.

Magical.

Which brings me to right now. I’m still at work three and a half hours after the entire building has emptied because Jay St. Metrotech has a power problem that caused both of the trains I take home every night to be suspended, entirely. My only way home is to take a train 20 minutes in the opposite direction, then double back on another train that stops 14 blocks past where I live. Oh, and it’s raining, buckets. So there’s that.

I fell asleep on a train once, heading from Kansas City to San Francisco. I don’t remember why I took the train and not a plane, but it was an overnight trip: when I woke up train car was entirely empty. Like Twilight Zone empty. Since this was before cellphones, I had no idea where I was, and I remember trying to read signs as they zoomed past.

It ended up that I was somewhere in Arizona. I was afraid to walk to the restroom; I had no idea what the protocol was on a ghost train – should I seek out the spectral conductor up at the front? Then a voice over the loudspeaker announced the next stop - a 30 minute one so we could get something to eat. I felt better (since I knew that ghosts did not need meal breaks, it must have been a human voice).

The train slowed, the airbrakes chuffed, and lots of people started getting off of the train from the car in front of mine and the car behind. Had there been a gas leak in my car?? Why hadn’t they woken me up?

Then I stepped off the train and all the other passengers laughed. Not behind the hand snickers, but good full on point and guffaw kind of laughs.

Apparently, I had fallen asleep in a less than optimal position and began snoring, softly at first, then LOUD ENOUGH to CLEAR the ENTIRE TRAIN CAR. While the giant train was MOVING… clickety clackety SCHNOZZZZZZ.

I asked a train attendant why they hadn’t just woken me up.

“Oh, we tried that,” he said, barely holding in his glee, “but it was easier just to move everybody to other cars.”

It was 5 more hours journey to Los Angeles.

I sat quietly.

Toy trains are magical. Their little wheels turning and headlights beaming nearly universally inspire tiny instances of joy.

Train trains, like subways, are industrial, in the oldest school way - necessary and kind of cocky about it, like

“What are you gonna do? Walk to Brooklyn in the rain? Really? Go ahead…try that…see where it gets you. Yeah, that’s what I thought…now just stand in here with the other 1400 people 3 inches away from your face and wait your turn to shuffle out the door in tiny steps to avoid trampling one another.”

All this to say that the representation of a thing by another thing does not mean we feel the same about one as the other. A toy bear isn’t an actual bear, in any sense. And while I love trains, and I do hope that I win that eBay one, this long day’s journey even further into night forces me to admit that, at least for me, the train part is not the magical part.

It is the TOY part that’s magical. I believe that our cats will agree.

Get full access to :lowerblackpain at lowerblackpain.substack.com/subscribe

my daughter tried to throw awaymy Hot Wheels™ track the other daybecause she didn’t understandthe joy of seeing a little car landso far from where it used to bethrough wobbly ramps and gravity

my wife is under the impressionthat ‘cause I’m past 57I don’t need a Lite Brite™ nowbecause she hasn’t experienced howthe thrill of pushpin pointillismfulls the heart with wonder. It’s ananalog art-form that occuredbefore I knew what pixels were

Of yo-yos I’ve quite the selectionhalf a century of collectionstill I only know one trickand it’s not great. but I can pickone up and have just as much funas when I played with my first oneStress reduction. Nothing drastic.Piece of string and spinning plastic.

I remember George Shaw saying“we get old when we stop playing”

That is nowhere near my storyI’m not in that categorywooden boats and Tonka diggersdolls that I call “action figures”If a toy is all it takesWho needs more for goodness sakes?

youth is something we createwhen we seek to recreatea good toy brings a quick vacation honest simple meditationwhen overwhelmed by the electronicPlay is my enduring tonic

This holiday, beneath the treemy daughter will receive from mea Hot Wheels™ car: and then, it’s onour living room’s the autobahnmy wife’s gift will be really neatsome black construction paper sheets.might even get my family toattempt a yo-yo trick or two

for even in the coldest weathertoys can bring us all together

Get full access to :lowerblackpain at lowerblackpain.substack.com/subscribe

This time of year used to be a bit more challenging, if you think about it. Family and friends getting together used to be an annual chance to catch up, hear stories, look at pictures, silently judge and relentlessly compare while eating our feelings and perhaps a few of theirs.

“What’s happened” or as we used to call it “History” is now a constant flow of unsolicited communication through smartphones. Yes, I did see your new puppy, he’s darling. Your vacation was such an adventure! We saw that she lost her first tooth…yes, and the second one too.

History is losing its mystery - the present is so overwhelming that we barely have time to put it away before more things happen. Like Lucille Ball at her chocolate factory job, we wrap our mind around what we can, then gobble down the rest. Yet today, Thanksgiving Day, is when we are put on the spot to employ perspective to relative chaos, to consider the last year and tell the world (or the dinner table) what we are thankful for.

I am grateful for TIME.

Civilization has built countless monuments to the sun, moon, and stars, but not so many to TIME, which is (besides the weather) the only truly ubiquitous reality we all share. Some of our key sociologists and philosophers have written sage words of wisdom concerning Time; elegant truths of eloquence, with loads to unpack. These are my four favorites.

Time, keeps on slipping, into the future.- Steve Miller

We are, all of us, in the very blossom of youth, as we will never be as young again as we are this very moment. Ah.

Personally, I think of this everyday climbing the six flights of stairs up to our fourth floor walk-up, steps I used to take two at a time, then one at a time, and now a few at a time with little breaks in between.

My gentle decreptitude is barely noticable if you look me right in the eyes, but in the corners and just below them lie solid evidence of time evolving me from a dewy sapling to a mighty tree: noble, resplendent, and covered in a deep brown bark. Humans are dynamic, always becoming something, but we’ve no control of the pace - time is our personal Disney™ dark ride where we’re just hanging on and trying to enjoy it, |because there’s nothing more to do do do do.

Time is waiting in the wings.- David Bowie

I wait for subway trains every day. I wait for the water to boil for tea, for the turkey bacon to be done on one side so I can flip it over, for my phone to charge, for the virtual meeting to start. Payday is always both in a week or so and a week or so ago.

Like water is to Atlantis or the Bubble Guppies, time is everywhere. I can’t see it because I’m in it, but I never get lost because there is always some benevolent neighbor behind my car honking their horn in anger 12 microseconds after the traffic light has turned green. As they impatiently shoot past me (only to be stopped mere yards ahead at the following light), I wonder whether they are the true riders of time - jetting forward inch by inch, or I am more in line with its true nature, my lackadaisical gas pedal foot easing into what rational people call “the flow of traffic”? Who can say?

Time isn’t holding up. Time isn’t after us.- David Byrne

I always found this a comforting statement: time not rushing us or slowing us down because it is consistent.

I have recently realized that this idea ignores the fact that fact that time, like ships, airplanes, and other heavy machinery, requires steering. I’ve recently discovered that it does not automatically move forward.

I’m a bit embarrassed not to have come upon this earlier, particularly since I am so familiar with the extensive research conducted by Dr. Emmet Brown and his lab assistant, Martin McFly.

Time is on our side. (Yes, It is.)- Jerry Ragovoy ( I know: I thought it was Mick Jagger too.)

They keep reinventing the food pyramid. And math, and the toothbrush, and smartphone operating systems. It’s a bit much.

Yet I find all that an encouraging sign of Time’s true wisdom.

The best example is MUSIC; old songs constantly showing up in new songs through sampling and cover versions, and not just those block rocking beats from the biggest hits: I caught my daughter singing a soft rock ballad from 1982 the other day: she told me was trending as a background track on TikTok. something that Air Supply could never have anticipated.

The old made new. That’s time’s greatest gift - perspective. I mean, Time as a straight line always seemed kind of awful to me, a road with no end, and Time as a circle was also pretty bad, the infinite loop with no progress at all. But Time is a spiral, what with the seasons and the moon phases and movie reboots and the way that jeans are worn this year.

Time allows us to revisit the familiar, but every time it’s different, because we are in a different place. Time can be a bit much, but it’s our most constant companion. There really should be more things dedicated to it, though I guess the thousands of hours developing the Apple Watch do count… tiny little cathedrals dedicated to time on millions of wrists around the world. That’s a good as a pyramid, really, if you think about it.

I hope your Thanksgiving Day was wonderful; satisfying and warm, a time you cannot wait to remember.

Get full access to :lowerblackpain at lowerblackpain.substack.com/subscribe

I don’t look useful.

I think I look tousled most of the time, a style most often seen on wild brunettes wearing long white men’s shirts walking barefoot into kitchens to get a cup of morning coffee in someone else’s apartment in 1980’s films. In contrast, I am more the “tousled” of a 4 year old boy getting his hair affectionately ruffled by someone calling him “pal” in a 1940’s black and white movie.

It is not that my hair is anywhere near tousleable really - my wife calls my entire sense of style “hobo chic” - severely jostled, thrown together and a bit worn at the collars, cuffs, and elbows like there’s a photoshop filter lightly blurring every edge.(I, of course, think I look like a time traveling science hero.)

In any case, I don’t look USEFUL. Perhaps a tool belt would help. (Or a screwdriver.)

I try to be useful, actually. My own daughter was surprised that I could caulk. I had to take out the kitchen sink to replace the p-trap pipe beneath it; she respectfully asked, “Are you ok?”…presumably because I wasn’t reading a comic book or playing instruments to myself like a madman like normal.

“Yeah, I’m good. I should be done in a little bit.”

To her credit she did not ask me if I “knew what I was doing” as she rightfully assumed that I didn’t, but would figure it out eventually.

“Ok.” she said, walking away. But after it was repaired, she admitted that she had not been entirely convinced that I could put it all back together again.

“Did you think we were gonna have to call a plumber?” I asked her.

“No. Mom would figure it out.”

Hera is right. Zoe looks more than useful, she appears industrious. Approaching tasks with a steely eye, whether designing, driving, or cutting bokchoi, Zoe is the train you should know better than to stand in front of.

I am unapologetically grateful to be able to do things, to have things to do, to make things and learn things everyday.

I’ve always been taught to leave every place better than I found it.  Straighten that book, pick up that scrap of paper, wipe down the sink, leave no trace, like a careful camper or a cat burglar.

Engaging my mother in the common childhood family exchange of:

* Parent: What are you doing?Child: Ugh! There’s nothing to do!

would have shortened my lifespan by eons. “There’s always something to do” was the figurative “Bless this house “ sign above our front door. If you can’t clean something, repair something. Nothing broken, then make something or learn something. Down time meant doing something while sitting down. Quiet time meant doing something, quietly.

So one of my favorite books was the “Fix it Yourself” manual by Reader’s Digest. Read it cover to cover (reading was doing something). So now I can replace the flush float in the bathroom, and swap out the car battery, and install a light system in a bookcase. That book is probably the reason that I dont enjoy having things done for me so much. I never wait for repairmen and I like to cook more than I like to eat at restaurants.

I do cook about 36.5% of the time at home: the meals are always filling, if not spectacular. That’s useful, I suppose. Utility implies necessity. Something needs doing and the something just floats in spacetime, suspended until accomplished. Sometimes that something is a sink filled with dishes. Sometimes it’s somebody’s 5th grade math homework. I’m appreciative of the fact that things need to be done, which is even better when, quite obviously, there is a great deal to be done.

But am I useful? I don’t know. Maybe I’m handy…

…ah, well. Baby steps.

Get full access to :lowerblackpain at lowerblackpain.substack.com/subscribe

It is impossible to list all of one’s experience on one’s resume. For instance:

* For a while I was on a dessert isle with a professor, a millionaire and his wife, and a movie star.Key takeaway: Problem Solving Skills.

* I frequented a MASH unit for a few years.Key takeaways: Focus, Crisis Management.

* I learned diligence in two diners (Thanks Alice & Angie), patience on a tour bus with Shirley Partridge and her family band, and customer service aboard a Princess Cruise ship.

I really loved that boat.

As a kid, every year about this time my Mom and I would go to the grocery store, same as always, but something magical would happen. After a trip through aisles filled with displays of Stove Top Stuffing and cans of jellied cranberry sauce, we’d gleefully find the Fall Preview edition of the TV Guide magazine waiting for us at the checkout line.

This was the only issue we bought all year, since a free tv schedule came in the Sunday paper every week. But the Fall Preview TV Guide was double thick, with little articles about every new show. Most importantly to us, there was a master schedule showing what was on all three networks for the entire week in the middle.

Back at home, we sat at the kitchen table and read every description, then my mother used a ballpoint pen to circle our choices to watch each night - which shows we wanted to try and the favorites that we didn’t want to miss.

It is difficult to convey how exciting a Fall TV Season was in this current age where new shows (full seasons, no less) appear each month.

I was absolutely not one of those kids allowed to just sit in front of the TV set, even on weekends. For a couple of years we didn’t even have a television; we read books and listened to music at night. So TV time was a treat - well planned in advance, and this autumn ritual set the stage for the specific stories I was allowed to follow throughout the year.

It was very important to choose which pilot to see, because often new shows would premiere at the same time, so I’d stand by the set and we’d switch from one to the other to see which we liked the best.

(I dreamed of the future, when it would be perfectly natural to rush home from work in my flying car and watch multiple shows at the same time on a TV that had three screens.  Alas, technology went in a different direction.)

While it is now a teeming metropolis, 1970’s Kansas City seemed a bit isolated to me as a tween-ager, so it was incredibly exciting to see what life was like in other people’s lives. I owe much of my sense of empathy to Norman Lear, who brought authentic emotions of folks from other communities into my house, let me see the choices they made, the way they survived, the lessons they learned. His shows were little three act plays.

I understood that I would never have been invited into Archie Bunker’s house, but there I was, week after week, watching the world of a person whose opinions didn’t match our own, seeing that character interact with others, as the storyline evolved to reveal why he was the way he was.

James L. Brooks produced “Mary Tyler Moore”. She was on her own, but that wasn’t what her story was about - she had a job that she loved and a boss that believed in her and she didn’t want to be anyone else or fit in, she just wanted to do what she did with integrity.

There was “Julia”, who was a single black woman with a son: we watched that, sure, but we also watched “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father”… my mother thought that if she was missing some kind of “dad” messaging she might pick it up from Bill Bixby. We watched Good Times, but we also watched “Happy Days” (like everyone else): neither show directly reflected our lives or experience, but the love these families had for one another absolutely did.

These were light hearted emotional stories about “us”- created for viewers to sympathize with, rather than today’s modern cautionary tales of “others” observed voyeristically from Above. It all seemed a bit kinder and smarter than it is today (well, at least until Ted Lasso happened). The TV of that age didn’t lead so much with deficits: it wasn’t all about fears and flaws, just the common struggles of moving forward.

Maybe that’s not exciting enough for today. Maybe my experience working on a Starfleet space vessel isn’t applicable in today’s competitive market, but I do know a lot being diplomatic with hostile warlike creatures, which may prove to be incredibly useful.

Get full access to :lowerblackpain at lowerblackpain.substack.com/subscribe