: lower black pain.

Each night at our home, in those twilight moments betwixt dinnertime and bedtime, I wash the dishes.

It’s the end of the day, days long and deep and somewhat stressful, but a wholesome meal and bright conversation at the dinner table have soothed me, and all I have to do is make a clean bridge from that delicate balance to well earned slumber…

…so I wash the dishes.

But every so often, there at the sink, my mind would drift back to the stress of the day, and as I turned off the kitchen light I knew that sleep would be elusive, and fitful, and fretful.

So I employed a mollifying strategy - placing my iPad where the water (probably) wouldn’t hit it, I watched re-runs of tv shows I was too young to watch at the time (M*A*S*H), didn’t see all the way through (Gilmore Girls), or wasn’t subscribed to the service they were on (Westworld).

This was Plenty Distracting, but I soon learned that the material had to be very specifically curated - exciting enough to keep me from snoozily dropping a soapy glass, simple enough to follow without staring at the screen, and - most importantly - optimistic enough to provide sufficient emotional buoyancy to float my weary spirit off to bed.

In the years I’ve been doing this, many shows have competed for the crown, but I believe that I now have a winner: the 1977 science-fiction classic: “The Bionic Woman”, starring Lindsay Wagner.

I was only eight years old when The Six Million Dollar Man debuted on ABC - the story of Steve Austin, an astronaut who suffers a terrible spaceship accident, requiring replacement of his eye, both legs, and an arm with robot parts which provide him increased strength, speed and agility.

Somewhere in his third season he got a girlfriend, who, as bad luck would have it, suffered a terrible skydiving accident, requiring replacement of her ear, both legs, and an arm with robot parts which provided her with increased strength, speed and agility.

Lindsey Wagner’s guest starring role as tennis pro turned reluctant superhero Jaime Sommers was supposed to be a limited deal, since her character died at the end of the two episode run. But THOUSANDS of letters were written, so she became the first female lead of a sci-fi tv show in history.

Soon, her worldwide ratings outpaced that of the Bionic Man, because her show, with the exact same premise as his, just felt different. Where Steve ran after a different villain every week (in slow motion), Jaime had a real job as a teacher and did all her adventuring on weekends and bank holidays. Where Steve was all power punches, Jaime was more of a MARVEL hero, with her intelligence, deductive reasoning, and empathy as her true advantages. Even their metal lunchboxes were different - Steve’s had him fighting Bigfoot on the front, and Jamie’s showed her teaching fifth grade history.

She was a bright new story to tell, but it WAS made in the 1970s, so on last night’s episode, Jaime very reluctantly entered a national beauty contest to retrieve a “space age microchip device” (which was the size of a medium apple). There was lots of action, but there was still a swimsuit competition, and for her talent portion she performed the song “Feelings”, North America’s closest ever imitation of a Eurovision entry.

Jaime Sommers has always been one of my favorite characters: she was gifted and talented before her bionics, and her kindness didn’t suffer when she got them. She was smart, and she was nice, and she was hard working - all which I was instructed to strive for.

But I connected most with the fact that she was consistently underestimated by everyone. As a kid of a specific sort, I knew what that felt like.

And one had to admit that while being a he-man hero type was all that Steve Austin really had to do, Ms. Sommers held down a full-time career in primary education and was a superhero on top of all that. Like Jaime, my mother was a fifth grade teacher, plus I had figured out that at least half the things Mom did at home everyday must've traditionally been “Dad” stuff to do, so she was technically triple-booked, and busier than Jaime was.

The Bionic Woman lasted three seasons on two networks for a total of 58 episodes, which for me translates into just under two months of KP duty.

So until mid-July I will stand at the sink, occasionally making that oddly percussive “tschee-tschee-tschee-tschee-tschee-tschee” sound to indicate when I’m using my bionic strength, just like Jaime does. Just like I used to do in fifth grade. And high school. And a few times in college, when I was lifting something heavy.

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I used to have to read the book before I saw the movie.

My prime example is Jack M. Bickham’s “The Apple Dumpling Gang”, a 1975 summer family film that I earned a ticket to upon completion of the paperback. Disney changed a great deal from the original novel (its first line is, “The fact that John Wintle was drunk didn’t matter.”) and I had to discuss, compare, and contrast the two versions of the story with my Mom after seeing the movie.

(We did stuff like that a lot. I’m lucky that my last name wasn’t Tenenbaum).

The deal only worked for screenplays based on pre-existing books: “novelizations” of screenplays were considered cheating. It was important to begin with the original story before any adaptations were considered.

Ok. Tie a ribbon around a finger to remember all that for a minute.

I drove through Brooklyn in the early afternoon on this Spring’s first bright, dry and warm Saturday. Fresh from a triumph at Whole Foods (my Prime Code had discounted eight dollars and thirty-seven cents from my weekly total), I felt that I was at last emerging from both winter’s frozen desert and my last six weeks of dire allergy and illness. The universe and I were in some kind of sync again, moving slowly forward.

This calmed me, because I’m gonna need all the help I can get this summer - New York is gonna be crazy with World Cup games, a potential basketball championship, and the city’s largest ever “Fleet Week” celebration, where record numbers of maritime vehicles and visitors will celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday. Navigation through all of that is going to be particularly challenging, but while the intricacies of international soccer dominate the news, I am personally focused on the sestercentennial.

Which is why it seemed particularly significant when, at a stop light, a man walked past wearing a dull purple t-shirt with thin yellow lettering that read,

AMERICAIS AN IDEA

There was no modifier for the direct object. Not, “America is a great idea” or “cool idea” or even “bad idea”. Thus, the t-shirt was impossible to refute while strangely non-political due to its unique color scheme which plainly avoided every possible hue of red, white, or blue.

At the next stop light I looked up the word “idea” in the OED on my phone:

idea /ʌɪˈdɪə / ▸ noun

1. a thought or suggestion as to a possible course of action 2. an opinion or belief 3. a defined aim or purpose 4. (from the philosopher Kant) a concept of pure reason, not empirically based in experience.

This offered less clarity than I’d hoped, steering my interpretation of the shirt’s message in four different directions:

America is a thought suggesting a possible course of action. America is an opinion or belief. America is a defined aim and purpose. America is a concept not empirically based in experience.

Hmn.

The rest of my drive home was a ponder.

The Bicentennial was bonkers. Every magazine from People to Playboy to Time proudly featured a waving flag on their cover. There were collectible quarters, half dollars, and two dollar bills (and soda cans and jelly jars). There were minute-long historical lessons during prime time TV network commercial breaks. EVERYTHING was red, white and blue (ice cream, t-shirts, gum, bathroom tissue, lighters, sport shoes, breakfast cereals, chainsaws...), and the unofficial yet universal tagline representing the event, which we saw EVERYWHERE, read: “The Spirit of ’76”.

I have not yet noticed the same kind of enthusiasm regarding this July. I thought it was just me, since when I was 10 years old, 200 years was a vast expanse of 20 lifetimes, and now 250 is just a wee bit over four.

Context, perspective, exhaustion - don’t know exactly why, but I just don’t feel the old “Spirit of ’26” (which doesn’t really work because it lacks that self-aware ambiguity of “1776 or 1976?”).

There will be fireworks, but there’s always fireworks. There will be bumper stickers and t-shirts, but the “Spirit” of the holiday seems to have shifted in the last (yikes) 50 years.

You know. The “idea” of it.

So I took into account that full OED definition.

America is a thought, suggesting a possible course of action. America is an opinion, a belief. America is a defined aim and purpose. America is a concept not empirically based in experience.

Thoughts, opinions, and concepts seem flimsy materials to build a nation out of - very “first and second little pig” architectural standards.

Belief, aim, and purpose sound sturdier - solid bricks to form a foundation, and the group of documents known as the Charters of Freedom - the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution - are those bricks for the United States - our original national software.

I have only read the Constitution once, decades ago. And despite the fact that I’ve memorized most of the musical “Hamilton”, I have only read twelve of the Federalist Papers.

I have experienced more of these works through, embarrassingly, other peoples thoughts and opinions of them.

So - The Apple Dumpling Gang.

In the next seven weeks, I am going give all of these original documents a fresh read. First of all, it represents a low-level dedication to the concept of citizenship. Second, I owe my mother an apology for making gentle fun of her a decade ago when she spent an entire weekend painstakingly reading the entire iTunes contract before clicking the “AGREE” button to update it, for that is the kind of logic this undertaking mirrors, and the level of concentration I now must employ.

Before our sestercentennial I will (hopefully) deepen my understanding of the ideas which form this nation, strengthening my position that America is not “a concept not empirically based in experience”, because our experience IS America, all of it, good and not-so-great.

There should be room in these documents to fit those experiences. And once I’ve read the book, this movie should make more sense…

…right?

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This time of year is CRAZY busy, with May Day and Mother’s Day and Star Wars Day and Cinco de Mayo and our anniversary and Eurovision and Beltane and Free Comic Book Day… the days are just packed.

Mixed into this is the birthday of this column, which is technically the second Thursday in May, which means that this is the week we mark the completion of four years of :lowerblackpain, together. Somewhere a medieval Warner Bros. cartoon herald is playing one of those long gold trumpets.

Thank you for your time, and your company.

Let’s review:

I am still actively archiving that box of videotapes:

* https://lowerblackpain.substack.com/p/that-boxful-of-magical-time-ribbons,

with the humbling understanding that No One Cares, Or Ever Will. I am not Barack Obama or Ernest Hemingway and my memories and bric-a-brac will never be stored at the perfect humidity and temperature behind glass under tasteful lighting. It’s…just not that kind of party for me, and I accept that.

However, I am still trying to USE all these bits of time, like a magpie trying to build a nest from branches, twine and Starburst™ wrappers. I realize now that I may need to move into the realm of fiction writing in order to gain a more generous canvas. In the province of imagination, my card tricks and science experiments can dance jauntily to the bossa nova soundtrack I’ll make on that tambur I brought back from Istanbul. Where IS that thing? Hold on…

…found it. I have zero idea how it’s supposed to be tuned, but I haven’t approached it in years because I didn’t have time to properly learn how to play it and wanted to show one of the world’s oldest instruments the respect it absolutely deserves. Ah, the stalwart determination of the Young.

Feh. No time for all that nonsense now. I’ve got to get started on my third act. I’ll just make it up.

Ok, maybe I’ll look it up on YouTube.

I enjoyed the singing so much for this year’s Halloween Costume -

* https://lowerblackpain.substack.com/p/life

that I actually finished a song and sang it live for an entire room of classmates at a school reunion earlier this year. It reminded me how much I like to just belt out a tune, and how punishable by local law that is in Brooklyn apartment buildings.

But there’s always the car, where the whole family can join in, and the good folks at Apple™ provide an endless cornucopia of musical choices. While Queens of the Stone Age is the family’s official favorite band, for in-the-car sing-along purposes my daughter develops these dynamic playlists of artists like The Jackson 5, The Cure, Dee-Lite, Stormzy, BTS, Chase and Status and Becky Hill, and David Bowie. It’s fun.

I may have mentioned at some point that The Partridge Family was a seminal influence on my grade school life, and for a fleeting moment as a little kid I dreamed of growing up and singing with my wife and family. But then I saw The Sound of Music, and thought, well, maybe not.

I would like to be able to say “that my kettlebell is going well”, mostly due to the rhyme scheme, https://lowerblackpain.substack.com/p/the-winter-of-this-content, but it hasn’t taken off quite yet. There were various Winter illnesses to contend with and a bit of confusion as to the proper technique. My family pointed out that most of the kettlebell enthusiasts online look like inverted squat isosceles triangles with a little circles on top for heads. I might be able to rock an inverted trapezoid resemblence, but don’t think I can rock that Tolkienesque Dwarf Warrior build.

Maybe if I grow my beard out, like, a lot.

Well, THANK YOU once again for dropping by. You’re always welcome. Next week I’ll be starting the fifth year (yikes) of :lowerblackpain, and for a guy who writes about the past so much, I’m actually really excited about the future.

Meet you there.

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Dorothy Parker is my favorite writer.

She was born in 1893; by the 1920’s she was one of the most famous writers in America, with an unmatched rapier wit and seemingly endless supply of clever verses.

Much of her work was famously collected in “The Portable Dorothy Parker” a rather thick volume covering the majority of her fiction and reviews. I’ve had five copies (I gave two away as gifts).

She moved to Hollywood in the 1930’s, where her work garnered two Oscar™ nominations (including her script for the Judy Garland version of “A Star Is Born”).

Then before WW2 she spoke out against fascism and got blacklisted and no one hired her anymore.

But her books were still steadily being read. Particularly the Portable.

In her will, she left the entirety of her literary rights to Dr. Martin Luther King (whom she had never met) to assist in his national fight for civil rights. Upon the death of Dr. King, again at Ms. Parker’s request, these rights were transferred to the NAACP, who receives royalty checks from her body of work to this very day.

That’s it.

That’s the story of my favorite writer. And I must admit, when I found out about the Dr. King part, I liked her even more, even though someone at school said it was just to get back at Lillian Hellman. If so, sick burn.

My first Parker story was assigned in college, presented as a breezy distraction between the more weighed tomes of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. The way that she depicted people who felt very deeply yet expressed themselves in extremely shallow ways made me very very happy, so I went straight to be bookstore and bought my first “Portable”.

See, I’d always wanted to be a writer. From the age of four it’s what I told everybody: teachers, preachers, other people’s parents, girls I was dating or wasn’t… I had no alternative employment plan or career path narrative, save maybe someday teaching at one of those colleges with old stone buildings.

And I did write. A lot. I had LOADS of extremely very bad writing, and was looking for someone to teach me how to make it better. But when I finally got into an English composition class, I found that many students had already spent summers at “writing camps” with famous author seminars and inspiring lectures, at sunset, down by the lake.

These kids were in that Writer’s WORLD already, and some of them hadn’t even written anything yet. I was late to the game.

I explained all this to a girl who saw me reading my Dorothy Parker in the grass, giant Sears Optical glasses on as my near-fro attempted to waft in the wind. She was intrigued by my choice, but later admitted that she’d assumed I might be what today is called a “performative male”. A bit of conversation convinced her otherwise, and we spoke all evening.

We agreed that the assumed “baseline experience” at a college like this was socio-economically impossible for a vast minority of the students attending, regular kids who “summered” the same place they “wintered” and “falled”. I mean, there were lakes in Kansas City, but all I was gonna get is mosquito bites hanging out there.

“Well, you should just consider Dorothy your personal teacher.” my new friend told me. “She never took any of these people seriously - neither should you. Just keep them all in your head, and write about them later.”

To follow Dorothy Parker’s footsteps, I later visited the The Algonquin, the famed Manhattan hotel where most every weekday of the 1920’s, one could find the New York’s premier literati surrounding their Round Table, enjoying another long and somewhat boozy lunch. Dorothy Parker was a key member of this group, I had learned.

It was also the hotel that my grandfather stayed in when visiting New York as a young county commissioner from Kansas City. I appreciated the gentle luxury, as well as the fact that my grandparents had been welcome here in the early ‘50s.

The concierge asked me if he could help me. I told him I was a student studying -

“- the Round Table? Of course. Would you like to see it?”

“Um, sure?”

It was between meal services: the man walked me into the dining room just off the main lobby. A large round table was in the center.

“This isn’t the actual table” he told me. “It was that one.” he pointed to the slightly smaller round table in the corner by the door to the kitchen. “People want to take a photo of the Round Table, but that one is 80 years old, so we keep this one…” he again indicated the table in the middle, “polished for pictures. I bet you actually want to sit over there.”

“I feel I should tell you now that I can’t afford to buy anything.” I told him.

“Don’t worry about it… do you want some coffee? Water?”

“Water would be awesome.”

I sat and drank a glass of ice water where my new literary hero enjoyed many hundreds of liquid lunches.

Technically, that’s what I was doing too.

Due to an incredible true story, Dorothy Parker has been buried two and a half times. Her (final) resting place is now in a plot with her family in New York City, under a memorial inscribed with cleverly appropriate lines from one of her poems. I haven’t visited: for me she either lives in her work or at that table in the back of the Algonquin dining room.

I would love to pay the inspiration I have received from Mrs. Parker forward. I’m not quite there yet, but I feel lucky to have the opportunity to keep working at it.

I’m a little bit more optimistic than she, but she paid close attention to the human condition, and I am grateful to carry her torch of polysyllabic empathy (if not sympathy) a bit further through time, because Dorothy Parker is my favorite author.

Yes, I am a fan. But I want to be the kind that feeds a flame.

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The CORIOLIS EFFECT is a scientific principle describing how one object on Earth can be accurately propelled to meet another object on Earth while both objects, the air around them, and the Earth itself spins at 1000 miles an hour.

The coriolis effect also explains why, even though the Earth is in constant motion beneath us, we can’t just hover in helicopters to travel long distances or jump in the air and land half a mile away. It’s a science of moving objects, similar to the prediction magic involved in shooting a rocket into the sky toward where the moon WILL EVENTUALLY BE.

In practice, the coriolis effect is chiefly important to those whose professions involve ballistic trajectory: cannons, missiles, etc. But I have found this a terrific theory to philosophically explain “What I’m Doing” to my mother, wife, and daughter, reframing what may seem to the untrained eye as “Warner Bros. cartoon madness” into a unique example of logistic strategy.

Or to quote Pee-Wee Herman, “I meant to do that.”

It started at a picnic just after high school graduation. I had an interesting conversation with a kid that I knew that was also heading off to college: he wanted very much to study something called “computers”.

It was 1984. We weren’t even a decade past the pocket calculator and most people still had a TV set with a physical knob that changed the channel. But this kid was SO EXCITED; he had a natural affinity for computers, and loved working with them so much that his science teacher had strongly encouraged him to study “programming”.

But, the young gentleman had been firmly steered away from this field by his family, as computer science was (at the time) a somewhat obscure career choice with no obvious path to employment.

Now, today, perched atop the summit of Hindsight Mountain, one might assume that if the young man had pursued this interest and moved to where his teacher told him all this was happening (California), he would have been on the absolute cutting edge of a worldwide cultural evolution, with the opportunity to buy first round Apple stock from a happy bearded fellow in a San Jose garage.

But back then? This was all crazy-talk. Computers? Bru-ha-ha. Programming? Balderdash. California? Ballyhoo.

A future where all that made sense was pure science fiction. So this young man soberly aimed his life directly at targets well within range. Measured choices. Smart decisions. Good sense. Birds in hands. From here to right over there.

In contrast, my personal trajectory from high school was seen as random, ill-conceived, naive, and somewhat feckless: I was rocketing myself toward a future I couldn’t see, that no-one could see, well understanding that it hadn’t been created yet, since my personal goals were not as clearly defined:

I wanted to be Jerry Lewis in The Bellboy,I wanted to be an orchestral composer for film,I wanted to be an author, and a college professor,and most of all I wanted to be a guest on the TV show Match Game, but I just couldn’t figure out a clear line from completing my math homework with a Bic™ pen on a little bedroom desk in Kansas City to scribbling clever quips on printed blue cards with Sharpie markers, sitting next to Charo™ in L.A..

There wasn’t any major for all that, at any college. My mother was confused but incredibly supportive: she didn’t want me to waste my time or money, so she advised me to cover the basics:

* be empathetic and polite -

* always keep working really hard -

* and learn how to learn.

“Facts change.” she told me, “Every so often we need new globes, new schoolbooks… people keep ‘discovering’ history and inventing incredible new machines. But when you learn how to learn, you’ll be able to add anything new to what you already know and keep up with whatever’s going on.”

Three. Two. One. And liftoff.

How are any of us supposed to have clear paths to the future?

I was launched from the social instability of the 1960’s toward the bullseye-in-a-whirlwind present. From J. Edgar Hoover to Obama. From 8-track tapes to streaming. From pen-pals to FaceTime. Where’s the clear path?

Thus my affinity toward the coriolis effect. Aiming is not as vital as momentum. I’ve always felt that I’ve been headed somewhere (if not exactly somewhere more specific than that), but after a while I realized that who I was became more important than where I was going.

And after decades moving at breakneck speed, I still don’t feel that I’ve arrived at the future yet. It’s such a lovely trip, I’ve taken tons of pictures, but I’d appreciate a chance to clean out the cupholders and top off the wiper fluid.

And now there’s a new generation; how best to pass on the maps we’re plotted and the cautionary tales we’ve survived? What would we have studied in college if we knew that laptops were coming? the internet was coming? cell phones were coming? Can I offer ANY valid advice to a teenager growing up in a world of posts, stories, and edits? What is she supposed to wear if I can’t predict the weather?

I’ve given up on predictions. She’ll just have to make do with

be empathetic and polite, work hard, and learn how to learn.

That way, no matter where she flies, she’ll be the steadiest arrow in the sky.

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Coming from a family of diabetics, I never really ate a lot of sugar, but sometimes my mother would buy Thompson seedless grapes and put them in the fruit bin in the refrigerator. Since they were a little bit expensive, we would very carefully ration them.

But grapes have a bit of a half-life (though not quite as severe as avocados, which seemingly are able to morph from solid to liquid as fast as ice cubes), and after an undetermined number of days, one would blindly place their hand inside the cello bag for a frosty treat – only to be greeted by a slimy cacophony of decomposition.

So even though we didn’t want to be gluttons, we had to carpe diem and gather our rosebuds and make hay and whatnot before the grapes’ nutritious, delicious promise could no longer be kept.

This spawned the family metaphor: “Don’t save your grapes.”, meaning don’t hide away that which is important to you for too long or you might miss the moment that it intersects with opportunity.

This week my daughter discovered about 40 pages of old ideas written in the “notes” app on her computer. She reviewed them, saving only the few that she thought she could write about later.

“It’s so weird to see all this stuff I wrote when I was young!” she told me.

I am not generally known for understatement - I mean, I can do it – but it’s usually not all that impressive. But here, in response, I subtly smiled and slowly nodded in agreement as I said, “Yeah. I know exactly what that’s like.”

That, was an understatement. My own “notes” app has roughly 800 pages in it, and I just thinned them out THREE MONTHS AGO. In comparison to me, my daughter is a precise and focused laser, while I am a rotating disco ball, flinging ideas hither and yon with no clear path at all.

And these ideas are now my Thompson grapes - a once fresh collection, gone to mushy seed.

Of course emails would have been the best place to start a springtime computer clean-up, but I do that every year, and I don’t actually care about the emails.

But every one of these notes evokes a place and time and artistic intention that I actually (embarrassingly) thought was important enough to jot down at some point.

The reason I mention this is that they go back 15 years.

It was a different world, 15 years ago. A younger world, one that skipped through a lush field in short pants, holding aloft a pinwheel in one hand and one of those lollipops that looks like a spiral in the other. A world that could never imagine the world we currently live in, much like Maria Von Trapp from The Sound of Music cannot fathom the roar of Godzilla.

My old ideas were from that world, that time. Jaunty tales of stalwart heroes and female presidents. I would extrapolate, but to be honest the majority of what I wrote then as wild fiction seems naive enough for my daughter to have written at nine years old.

You know, back when she was young.

Thus my notes app has become a cello bag of grapes past their prime: tales that missed their time, where most of the denouements depended on people in power felled by their keen senses of shame, embarrassment, or empathy.

Aw. That’s precious. Now, I suppose I could complete them as science fiction.

I am more careful with ideas now. I try to collect them less and use them more, grateful for the opportunity to create, to imagine. I am metaphorically eating my metaphorical grapes.

But haven’t deleted the old notes yet. They’re little pencil sketches of myself as an enthusiastic quadragenarian ingenue, gleefully typing into my iPhone 4 with a sense of adventure, a lush head of hair, and a bloodstream entirely free of COVID antibodies.

Look at that little fella. No idea Godzilla is coming.

Precious.

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Fisher Price makes toys for small children. An American institution since 1930, the company is most famous for their line of “Little People”: colorful, nearly indestructible 2 inch tall figures depicting different occupations.

Long before hoards of mega-achieving Barbie™s dominated toy store shelves, these Little People represented “real jobs”, and as a child, these career options seemed very feasible – particularly since pocket sized toys had been able to accomplish them.

Fireman? Check.

Policeman, Doctor? Obviously.

Builder, Cowboy, Ballet Dancer? Uh…guess so, yeah.

Ok, we weren’t so sure about the ballet dancer…we could all turn around really fast on the playground, but we knew it was much harder to do well. Also, we already knew ranchers and farmers because we lived in Kansas, so cowboys weren’t really all that exotic. And, I mean, we COULD be a doctor, if we HAD to…

…but the one that EVERYONE wanted to be was the astronaut.

The longest I’ve spent in a space vehicle was three days.

My grand-aunt enjoyed buying me random items at her local thrift store and giving them to me after church on Sundays. My mother gently questioned the congruity of these items with the interests of an eight year old boy, utilizing polite statements like,

“He really doesn’t need a (broken) 8mm movie camera.” or

“I don’t know where he’s going to use a (broken) electric blanket in the summertime.”

My grand-aunt would aloofly flip one hand in the air while shoving the item into my arms with the other and declare,

“Oh, he’ll find something he can do with it…”

adding a direct stare into my eyes and the somewhat threatening question,

“…WON’T you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I always said, then set my mind to imagining what I could do with the thing.

One summer Sunday, the item was a HOOVER™ Portable Cleaning Center Canister Vacuum, a turquoise blue 2 ft. tall suitcase containing a long flexible hose and an assortment of attachments. Surprisingly, it was NOT broken, and as luck would have it, we had just gotten a new washing machine, which had been delivered in a rather auspiciously sized cardboard box.

Kismet.

A rocket went to The Moon this week, carrying the same amount of people I usually ride the elevator with every day – in approximately the same amount of space – for a 10 day cruise at unimaginable speeds. No warp drive, no hyperspace, just gravity and math (and science and lots and lots of money).

Following the takeoff, as the line of cloudy exhaust reached miles and miles higher into the sky, I had to ask myself “Could I do that?”

Well sure! with enough training: I’m a quick learner, and have proven willing to endure just about anything for work. But I did not go to flight school, or the Air Force, and they really didn’t need a poet / magician on that particular mission.

Perhaps, on a long-haul flight to Mars, some haikus and mildly astounding card tricks would be just the thing to lift spirits and while away the quiet hours.

I could also bring my banjo (it weighs less than my saxophone).

Ok, I may not have the exact Right Stuff, but I do believe that NASA would have been proud of that homemade HOOVER rocket ship.

I used the hose of the vacuum for air (of course), the cord for “power” (since I wasn’t allowed to turn the unit ON), the wide attachment as an antenna on top, and the smaller ones for various necessities. Ever the engineer, my mother cut a round hole on the side, through which I could view the Earth and stars and she could tell me it was time to eat dinner (and make certain I could breathe in there).

I brought a couple of books, and a light blanket and pillow, and the (broken) film camera to get good shots of everything. Our dog was alternately my co-pilot and a mysterious alien creature on an uncharted planet. At night my mother gave me a flashlight to read with, and even got in for a while to join in the mission and play a few games of Chinese checkers.

I was even allowed to camp in there a few nights; Mom slept nearby on the couch as Mission Control while I drifted through the cosmos, safe in my corrugated capsule.

Anyone can go into space now, but that doesn’t make them an astronaut. I understand that they paid a great deal of money, and were weightless for a minute, saw the curvature of the Earth, and took a couple of iPhone selfies, but that’s just a fortunate tourist, not an astronaut.

An astronaut is a scientist that goes to outer space and does research and experiments there that can’t be done on Earth. Their spacesuits are actually fancy lab coats. Those Fisher Price characters included a teacher and a clown and a king and a train engineer, but not a clear SCIENTIST – except for the ASTRONAUT.

I remember my teachers telling us what we would have to study to be considered for that job. Again, there seemed a clear path, a straight line, from being a kid to being ANYTHING back then - just Hard Work and Good Grades and maybe some vitamins and exercise and BOOM, you were the best of the best, just like those Little People.

I would never give up on a dream, but in the spirit of Spring Cleaning, I’ll finally let myself off the hook of maybe someday being a fireman, train engineer, ballet dancer…

…or astronaut.

But hey, I’ve already had my turn.

Though maybe I could still be a cowboy.

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So I went through my closet and drawers for spring cleaning, but there isn’t all that much there that I don’t wear… save one specific category I realize I may have legitimately grown beyond.

I had three years of wearing slacks and now I’m kind of done

I bought them all online, on sale

They weren’t all that much fun.

Up ’til then, trousers were a breeze

my grown-up job required easy-fitting

newish dungarees

and ties just for emergencies

when clients happened by. You see,

I’d been an artist, more or less

in companies that let you dress

the way you wanted, and I guess

(although I never looked a mess)

my individuality

was (on my outside) what you’d see -

I’d feel a skosh of true self-loathing

wrapped in carbon copy clothing…

…back in grade school, as a kid

we all wore uniforms

bright light blue shirts and navy pants

for eight years was the norm.

Right after that I quietly swore

not to wear navy anymore:

thus, in the four-plus decades hence

black 501s just made more sense

until three years ago when I set out to do some good

in places where a well-established dress code said I should

pipe down, fit in, and not offend

head low, eyes high, discreetly blend

and wear the pants we tell you to

(which didn’t seem that hard to do)

so I dut-i-fully secured

a pair for every weekday

and paired them with a collared shirt

for grown-up business cosplay

as Dockers™ mean security

and represent maturity

in roles with deep obscurity

but they did not “spark joy” in me

and slowly as the time went by

their fit became much tighter

because I’d set the dryer on high

(large load / all cotton / extra dry).

Then one by one they lost their sheen

and sported dark grey tones

as each leg sleeve shrunk farther up

above my anklebones

until one day they didn’t fit.

I can’t imagine how, but

I could barely fasten them.

My daughter wears them now.

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It’s Spring Cleaning time, which must be like Black Friday for the famed home organizer Marie Kondo. Her books fly off the shelves at this time of year as hoards of us peek out of the dusty doorways of our winter shelters, squint at the newly blue skies, and resolve to simplify our closets, basements and garages.

Her “Konmari” organization method, where one throws out any object that does not “spark joy” within them, is the most hardcore decision-making strategy imaginable, yet her hit television shows and social media numbers serve as proof that many are brave enough to give it a try.

I see the appeal: the desired result would be a home with clean sight lines and an open appearance – with all rugs visible to the very edges (sans shoes, socks, and corrected homework papers folded in half) – where all books are VERTICAL on every shelf – and every well-positioned noun reflects a blissful tale of warm sentiment. Room upon room exquisitely representing the proverb that there really is a place for everything.

So, Spring Cleaning. Throw open the windows before all the pollen starts blowing and get some fresh air in: wash the curtains and wax the table and fluff the cushions.

Those are all the the fun verbs, but the one that lurks behind them, the one that’s much less fun to say yet always implied this time of year, is purge - a word so dreadful that it’s now the title of a series of scary horror movies and somewhat-less-scary television shows.

Purge: the dark, grim circumstance of NOT SPARKING JOY.

I have never met Marie Kondo, but I do know an artist whose wife is her friend. When I asked him if their house was always tidy – just in case she came over – he said “no… I mean, we try, but there’s only so much you can do.”I do not imagine Ms. Kondo would like me very much. I feel that I would be the Maria from Sound of Music to her Mother Superior of Feng Shui as I am of those flibbertigibbet to whom nearly EVERYTHING can “spark joy”.

But I’ll try. I will, earnestly, try.

My approach to Spring Cleaning this year is a bit less draconian than the Konmari method, but wider in scope.

I am not merely choosing a weekend to clean, but approaching the entire season as an opportunity to sift, trim, refine, and distill. Not only objects, but habits, beliefs, philosophies, styles, memories, worries, and unread e-mails. Twelve weeks to clear a wilderness and uncover fields to plant with new ideas, new plans, new goals. Week One:

* I began with the desktop of my computer. Shift. Click. Sort.

* Moved on to the floor of my little office. Toss. Dust. Stack.

* Found a load of procrastination, right over there. Made some calls. Wrote some letters. Sent in some forms.

* Had an entire unopened box of irrational optimism in the pantry that was way past its date. It’s a shame to waste it, but you know how it is when you get things in bulk.

* And the malaise! Where’d all THAT come from. Yikes!(If you know don’t know this, it grows like wild ivy.)

I discovered that I, at what I’m going to very generously call the beginning of my third act, have amassed a great deal of potential joy .

For instance, I collected a selection of books that I was convinced my daughter would absolutely love: the thought of her feverishly poring through these with a flashlight under the covers brought me joy. However, these books did NOT spark joy in her because they are largely about children in the 1930’s solving petty crimes in upper class suburbs with no telephones or comfortable clothing. These can probably go now.There is another new category of very useful items that I am not very likely to use. This is a more surgical delineation, as all the circuits and diodes in my Radio Shack carrying cases aren’t easily replaceable, and the full spectrum chemistry sets (obtained by subscription during the COVID lockdown) may be relevant through the end of my daughter’s junior year of high school science.

However, I do have TWO Lite-Brites. TWO. My wife, a bastion of both patience and aesthetic, has drawn the line not at the cases of electronic components extensive enough to build my own C-3PO or the cardboard boxes of sulfur, ammonium nitrate and heavens knows what else stacked about the house - but here, at the Lite-Brites.

She admits that they are fascinating. We have enjoyed playing with them in the dark, creating fascinating artwork, together as a family. She GETS the Lite-Brite, as a concept and a light entertainment. But I purchased a vintage one on eBay before I realized that my mother had kept my old one saved in its original box… thus, TWO – with BOTH boxes displaying different painted illustrations of fascinated children, their eerily frozen smiles and raised eyebrows expressing the glee of incandescent illumination.

“You can only keep one. Both are disturbing. Please choose the one that’s least disturbing.”

She was right - one the boxes had an image a bit more off-putting than the other. It was unsettling to look at, like a black velvet painting of dogs playing poker. It did not fit in with the rest of our home, somehow.

It most certainly did not spark joy. So now we have ONE vintage Lite-Brite on display, and one that I am listing again on eBay, hoping that it will spark joy in some other family, and not be eventually passed along like a cursed monkey’s paw in a year or so once the illustration begins to disturb them too.

What is most interesting is that it wasn’t the object itself, but the LACK of it, that sparked joy in my wife…

…I find that a fortunate encouragement to continue, and perhaps, a cautionary tale.

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For the last two hundred weeks, I’ve written an original American humor column in what seems some of the grimmest times in the history of this great nation.

It was to be a salve, a balm, an analgesic to relieve the legacy pressure of undeniable, inescapable, and unavoidable identity. It was to stand as proof to the next generation of those considered exceptional yet disposable that history, though quite often written in blood, may also be captured in tears of joy.

This has not been accomplished.

That is the achievement of a novelist, a scholar, a person with less action figures displayed on their desk, walls, and bookshelves. Someone with pajama tops that match their pajama bottoms, with a full Mahler symphony occupying the brainspace I use for theme songs to classic television programs and old commercial jingles.

I have not, in the last 200 weeks, created a comprehensive argument guaranteeing All People perpetual basic dignity in every circle, community and circumstance. I have, instead, told stories about my childhood, observations from my youth, and the revelations of advanced age from my perspective as an African American living a lifetime straddling two quite volatile centuries. So much fun! Honestly!

But if you are a reader, I hope that you interpret :lowerblackpain as a consistent and intentional rhythm of appreciation; a lift, a pause, a bit of time-space where you can relax every seven days. I hope that Thursdays at 3:00 PM [EST] mean something new, and you feel I’ve approached your attention with respect and humility.

I appreciate that the world is ever faster, attentions and patience grow swiftly shorter, and there is SO much on Netflix to catch up on with those new Korean soap operas that look so incredibly soothing and all those back seasons of Gilmore Girls. So thank you, for your time. This is the longest I’ve ever done anything that is not a metabolic function.

It’s almost time for Spring Cleaning, and this year I am not just tackling physical objects, but tidying up memory, habit, and sentiment. It makes me kind of nervous how I can find something that was at first a miracle which is now obsolete - our original iPod for instance. Of course, I’m never throwing that away because it’s in the only thing in our house that is also in the Museum of Modern Art.

There’s a IKEA cube filled with all of the cords used to connect old technology to even older technology. Every year this collection degrades a bit more. Surely some of those little metal ends must fit into something I still have plugged in somewhere. Alas.

But I already know where I’m going to get stuck this year, and that is the piggy bank. It is filled with pennies, and for those of you reading this in the distant future, this is the When where the American one-cent piece was discontinued from production after 232 years. The chief complaint is that the coin costs more to produce than the materials it is made of are worth. Considering that, one couldn’t buy a penny with a penny.

It is fair to say that the entire currently living population of the USA grew up with pennies. I collected pennies, learned to flip and use them as tiddlywinks, and for most of my early childhood was paid with a handful or so for the completion of my household chores. That was, to be fair, back when one could purchase a delicious candy bar for 15 of them, or a comic book for 25.

Pennies are heavy. My numismatic wistfulness will not justify a fifty pound barrel of copper-plated discs. I’ll keep some made before 1982 (when they weren’t made of zinc) but then turn the rest in, just to hear that crazy casino sound of the coin counter at the bank, one more time.

What I am most worried about are the phrases. I won’t give those up.

Back when I didn’t have two cents to rub together, and I didn’t have a penny to my name, I had to become a penny pincher… because believe me, living in New York costs a pretty penny, but if I was in for a penny - I was in for a pound, and since a penny saved is a penny earned I pushed ahead, relying on two bits of advice: don’t be penny wise and pound foolish, and if you see a penny, pick it up (but not if it’s tails).

There aren’t that many great expressions about dimes.

The American penny has become part of our culture and language. People have combined pennies with resin to make interesting flooring and tables. The artist Shay Rose made a chain mail cocktail dress out of pennies. For some reason, Batman has a giant one in his cave. The idea that they are worth less than they are worth is mind twisting because finance has never the best way to valuate anything.

I want to keep enough pennies to be able to reach in and pull out a handful. That will never feel worthless to me, because I remember when my hands were much smaller and I could only grab maybe 35 at a time and I felt rich. I was proud to have earned them, and proud to have saved them, and everything purchased with them took on a special significance, because it was mine, bought with these tokens of hard work accomplished.

And I still remember that feeling, and I want to be able to keep it, because it’s worth way more than just a handful of pennies.

But that’s just my two cents.

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