My Hands Are Shaking A Little Bit.

moar funny pictures

I Can Has Cheezeburgers?

moar funny pictures

I made the words! I found the pic online somewhere and it is my work laptop.

These are the things I'm doing on Inaugural Day. Why not? The implecations are just too immense for me right now. I've got paperwork to finish, a journey up into some mountains to accomplish, and a client to see tonight. I Can Has Cheezeburger? is a welcome distraction from Worst Case Scenario all up in my grill, taunting me with the phrase, "Obama's going to be like Martin Luther King in more ways than one today!"

I'm like, oh God oh God oh God PLEASE let there be some Jack Bauer x10000-like Federal security up in that bitch today. Oh GOD please. Because there's way too many (meaning more than 1) Ignorant Bastards out there who know no other way to solve their conflicts. I'm looking at YOU Mason Dixon.

So I'm distracting myself through the cute route. I'm working instead of watching. I'll have a CD in the car stereo instead of tuning in. At 12:01, just tell me that he's our President and that he's safely away from the center of 50-eleven billion people.

O Crap! How'd I Miss Yesterday?!?

Reflections from November 9th, 2008

Well dammit. It's not as though I didn't have time to blog, because I very much did. I spent yesterday lazing around and producing audio of the adventurous kind. And then things turned melancholic for some reason or another, I'm not quite sure what.

I started out the day with a walk over the Broadway bridge into the Bronx where a Starbucks lay. I've seen it often enough but never drove to it. Yesterday, today and tomorrow I took off from work so yesterdy was my foray into "vacation," thus the walk. And perhaps after I'd ordered the latte is when things began getting a little less sunny. Even though the weather was beautiful.

I continue to roll the fact of the first black United States President around in my head, and I marvel that it's so historic and that it's happening in my lifetime. It's like one of those theories like "The First Martian Colony"--something that seems far off, but possible now. When it happens you realize someday is today.

In the same sense that "someday when I'm in my forties" is actually "today I'm in my forties." I started blogging when I was 38 or 39. I was moving to NYC for the first time and I was unmedicated. Worst Case Scenario Man was kicking my ass all over midJersey and I had just turned away a girl I was in love with, but was a catalyst to losing my confidence in my hetereosexuality. Yeah, that's what it was. She told me to stop talking about getting engaged until I could prove we'd be compatible sexually. I blogged about it, but I never did add in the last components of this. That 1) I was a virgin, which she didn't know, and so therefore pretty much terrified of the idea and 2) I was occasionally attracted to hot guys. I believed, perhaps naively, that since I loved this girl, and that I acknowledged within myself fully that she had the greatest rack I would likely be able to get my hands on in this life, and that her beauty otherwise was Ebony magazine-worthy, that I would be able to consummate my relationship with her should we be wed. And then all the church stuff that I'd been aspiring to also set me up to wait until marriage. So if she only could've waited with me, and wasn't as blunt as she could usually be, then she could've had me and I'd be married now with children. I probably wouldn't have been a blogger though. Yeah, life would have been pretty different. But would it have been happier?

And now, I'm 44. History is unfolding all around me. We have a black President-elect and pray God eventually President. (The forty-fourth President in the year that I turned 44.)

And life continues to plod on.

And I'm still waiting.

I Pledge Allegiance To The Flag...

(borrowed from Manhattan's Peak)

An article detailing a lot of reaction from around the country. Yet here's what I wanted to quote here--

Surveying the scene, Mattie Bridgewater whispered from her seat, "I just can't believe it. Not in my lifetime."

Bridgewater said she went to the same elementary school as Emmett Till, the boy from Chicago whose murder in Mississippi was one of the catalysts of the civil rights movement. Both she and her 92-year-old mother voted for Obama.

"I'm sitting here in awe," she said. "This is a moment in history that I just thank my God I was allowed to live long enough to see. Now, when I tell my students they can be anything they want to be, that includes president of the United States."

Weep. Can't you just see the 92-yr old woman making her way to the voting machine? Behind her, in memory, plays the scenes of the March on Washington, the loosed dogs attacking black people in the streets, the burning churches and flaming crosses, the blocked school steps to hassle the little black girls as they entered the school in Little Rock--all events that played out in her lifetime. and she lived to cast her vote for the first black President of the United States.

A black President. THE black President.

And see as well, behind her, the spirits of all her friends who didn't make it this far, supporting her from the other side. She cast her vote for them too. Did she whisper "We made it, girls."

And fully, as Eliel asked in the comments, it's clear to me how the country itself prepared its citizens for this day through the media. Yes, through the idiot box.

The series "24" cast two black actors to be the President for how many seasons, Eliel? 3? The movie Deep Impact cast America's favorite black actor (Morgan Freeman) as the President. These images were accepted and helped people in the comfort of their homes and bedrooms that it should be possible. That nothing is wrong with the idea. That it's no aesthetic violation to have a brown-skinned President. Even Dave Chapelle made it okay to laugh at the idea that a black President could be a homeboy and funny as hell. Softened the concept for the country.

Also, Eliel has a fantastic post quoting his homeboy in media, that Coates guy. I urge a read. In essence, it's also about the white people of America who really did this. The white women marrying black men and raising black children. The white parents who supported these white daughters, such as Barack's grandmother, who passed away day before yesterday. And then there are the white casting directors. White scriptwriters, white directors, white white white white white.

This didn't happen alone. White people in power and influence were ready for this. White votes for Barack flooded the ballot boxes. White delegates and superdelegates. White news media picked the slant they wanted to give (Yes, I have to acknowledge this too. I hate that it's true, but the media is a total bitch most of the time). White Tina Fey and white Darrel Hammond sending up the Republicans in massive lampoon. White writers. White SNL producers. White viewers loving it.

I'm okay with this. I'm really, really okay with it.

Oh My Dear Sweet Lord. WOW. wow....

It happened. IT happened.


Oh my God oh my God.


I'm alive to see it.


It happened in my lifetime.


And your lifetime.


The President of the United States is a black man with an African name.


The President looks like me.


They're shooting fireworks in Inwood...