February 4, 2024

But let’s get this straight. Let’s call a spade a— / Poor choice of words.

This year, like most years recently, I made no resolutions. Instead I chose a word and theme: play.

So far that has meant:

• filling up a small sketchbook and working my way through another

• learning monotype through the medium of gel plate printing

• trying out watercolors, which I thought I'd really like

• realizing I'm way less intimidated by acrylic paints

• taking an online collage class (and actually doing assignments)

• reading books and not just buying them

• trying to improve the ratio of travel-for-work vs travel-for-me

Sometimes to do things you have to stop doing other things; sometimes to do things you do other things differently. I am looking for the more enabled by the less; I am finding the path made possible by the diversions.

PS: Thank you for all the suggestions about what to get folks in long-term hospital care. Among the most-recommended: comfy blankets, socks, pyjamas; extra-long mobile-device charging cables; noise-cancelling headphones; showing up.

Attribution

Your folks didn’t explain

I’d take your trinket praise as teeny blade—
a trillionth micro-aggression, against & beneath

my skin. Little buddies, that sore’s on me.
I know what you mean. That I must seem, “safe.”

But let’s get this straight. Let’s call a spade a—
Poor choice of words. Ali, I might not

be. Though, at the very least, a heavyweight
throwback: Nat King Cole singing silky

& subliminal about the unforgettable model
minority. NBC believed N at & his eloquence

could single-handedly defeat Jim Crow.
Fact: They were wrong. Of this I know

& not because they canceled his show
in ’57 after one season, citing insufficient

sponsorship. Or because, in 1948,
the KKK flamed a cross on his LA lawn.

But because yesterday, literally yesterday,
some simple American citizen—throwback

supremacist Straight Outta Birmingham, 1963—
aimed his .45 & emptied the life from nine

black believers at an AME church in Charleston.
Among them a pastor-senator, an elderly tenor,

beloved librarian, a barber with a business degree
who adored his mom & wrote poems about

the same age as me. I’m sorry. No, friends.
None of us is safe.

— from Watch Us Elocute (June 18, 2015) by Marcus Wicker